The Last Day Read Online Free Page B

living room. Hastily arranged, the service was attended only by her three brothers, her best friend, their parents, and his uncle, MarkWilson. Gene Duncan, his best friend, who'd been in law school at the time, had flown out from Duke to be his best man.
    Natasha Crossingham had just entered her last year of residency at a children's hospital, and Ward had remained in Seattle until she'd completed her term and, as soon as a group of pedi-atric surgeons at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte made her a partnership offer, they'd moved back to North Carolina. Ward had gone to work for his father's company, Raceway Graphics Incorporated, just in time to find out that his father had lung cancer, which despite the best available medical treatment took his life less than two years later. Ward had taken over as the company's president; he'd worked there during the summers for most of his life and he knew the business and the majority of their clients.
    Natasha was in her eighth month of pregnancy when the McCartys moved into the newly completed house and within a month their son, Ward Crossingham McCarty was born and their lives had settled into a sort of perpetual perfection that had lasted right up to the afternoon of the electrocution.
    When Ward sat down on the edge of thecouch, Natasha opened her eyes slowly and looked dreamily up at him. As the real world came to her, she pulled the robe around to cover herself as she would if he were someone there to wash the windows.
    “What time is it?” she asked.
    “ Eight- fifteen,” he told her.
    “When did you get in?”
    “Just now,” he said. “Oh, an hour ago.”
    Frowning, she said, “I should go to bed. I have rounds at six A.M. Have you eaten?”
    “Not hungry,” he said.
    “There's leftover lasagna in the fridge,” she said, sitting up. “I thought you were supposed to be back this morning.”
    “My original flight was canceled. I took a later flight,” he told her, his heart sinking. “I left a message on the machine.”
    “Did you?” she slurred, exhausted. “I didn't check the machine. Sorry. I had a long day at the hospital. Emergency appendectomy last night and I couldn't sleep. I came in from morning rounds and….”
    “Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. Ward couldn't mask his disappointment that his calls home had been totally unimportant to thewoman he loved more than anybody on earth. He wished he could say that to her, but for some reason the words were stacked away in some mental cubicle he couldn't locate. She had not said “I love you” since Barney's death, and it was possible she no longer did. Perhaps that love was forever gone—a victim of their grief. Perhaps Barney had been such an integral part of their passion for each other that, now that he was gone, there was nothing at all to bind the doctor to the toymaker.
    “I put fresh sheets on your bed yesterday,” she told him.
    “Thank you,” he said, feeling as though someone had turned a rheostat that had increased the gravity in the room. My bed.
    “If it's all right with you, I'm going to order curtains for this room this week.” Natasha stood and looked out the windows into the dark. “I know it's weird, but I feel like I'd like to close them at night.”
    “Whatever you want,” Ward said. Although he hated the idea of curtains covering the windows, if she wanted them, what the hell.
    She yawned and stretched. “I'll see you in the morning.”
    Ward sat back on the couch and watched as Natasha picked up the blister pack containing the sleeping pills and the wine bottle, then bent to retrieve the glass from the floor.
    “I'll get that. Leave the bottle, too,” he told her.
    “You sure?”
    He nodded and watched as his beautiful wife set down the bottle and, moving in a more or less straight line, floated toward the hallway before vanishing into the darkness.
    Like a lone egg in a nest, one of Barney's baseballs sat in the ceramic bowl on the coffee table. He picked it