In the drawer, under the socks, lay a small gray recorder about the size of a pack of playing cards, with a red button on top and a strip of masking tape on the side. On the tape, in the shaky capital letters that Ray used on grocery lists, were three words. Press for help. I had never seen it in fifty one years of marriage. Behind me, Dennis had reached the top of the stairs. The handle of our bedroom door turned, once, twice. Then it rattled hard. I pressed the red button with my thumb.
I will tell you what it did, because I did not know. It howled. A siren of ear splitting shrillness filled our bedroom, rising and falling, so loud that the glass in the window seemed to hum. A bright white light on the end of the device began to flash. Dennis shouted something, and the handle stopped. I put both hands over my ears and watched my husband, on his tank, with his eyes wide above the mask, give me a small and perfectly satisfied nod.
It was the neighbors who came first. Mr. Torrance from across the street, in his bathrobe and his boots, with a flashlight and a baseball bat. His wife behind him, already dialing. Then the county deputies, two cars with lights going, at ten past three in the morning. They found Dennis on our front steps with his hands in the air, as though the siren had shaken the courage out of him. He tried to explain. He said he had come to check on the alarm. The deputy asked him why he was holding a pair of wire cutters.
When the deputies came upstairs, I had moved the dresser and unlocked the door. Ray lay propped on his pillows, breathing steadily on the backup tank. A paramedic checked his oxygen and said, with some astonishment, that he was doing well. I sat on the edge of the bed and held his hand, and he looked at me with a stubborn little smile and whispered through the mask the first words of the night. “Told you,” he said. “Not a fool.”
Love sometimes hides in a sock drawer, in the form of a plan made quietly by a man who hoped never to need it.
He told me the rest in the morning, in pieces, between breaths. He had begun to suspect Dennis in January, when the fishing rods vanished. He did not say so, because he did not want to frighten me. Instead he had gone down to the hardware store himself, leaning on his cane, and bought two things. The personal alarm, which he hid in the nightstand. And a small voice recorder, which he had asked Mr. Torrance, who had come to fix the gutters, to hide in the basement apartment.
The recorder had been running for six weeks. The deputies listened to it in our kitchen at dawn, around the table, with coffee. They heard Dennis talking on his phone to a man in Spokane about the checkbook, the pickup, the sale of the fishing rods. They heard him bragging that the old man was not long for the world and the old woman was easily managed. They heard him one night practicing, over and over, in a low voice, the exact words I had overheard at the cellar window. Old house. Old wiring. Nobody asks questions.
The man in Spokane, it turned out, was a buyer of stolen goods, and the deputies were very glad to hear from him. Dennis was charged with theft, with tampering with medical equipment, and with attempted murder. The prosecutor said it was one of the clearest cases she had ever seen, because the victim himself had gathered the evidence. In April, Dennis pleaded guilty, and the judge sent him to prison for fifteen years. Ray sat in his wheelchair in the second row, in his Sunday suit, with his oxygen tank on the back, and did not look away.
We moved the concentrator to the kitchen for a while, where I could see it from the table. Our son Marcus flew in from Seattle and installed a proper backup battery system and a loud alarm that sounds on three phones. He also put a new breaker box in the basement, with a lock on it, and a sign in red letters. He stood looking at the old breaker panel that Dennis had taped and shook his head. He said, “Dad, you should have told us.” Ray said he had wanted to handle it himself. He said it was the one thing he could still do.
I was angry with Ray for about a day. I said he had risked both our lives, and that he had sat in the dark for six weeks with a secret like a man holding a live wire. He listened to me with his eyes on the ceiling. Then he took my hand and said, “Marge, I could not sleep without knowing. I thought, if something happens to me, she needs something to press.” I put my forehead against his arm and wept. That was the end of my anger.
The summer was kind to us. Ray got stronger than the doctor expected. We drove to the Snake River in June, the two of us, with the portable tank in the back seat, and sat on lawn chairs on the bank while the water slid by green and cold. Mr. Torrance had found the good fishing rods of Ray in a pawn shop in Clarkston and bought them back with his own money, and he handed them over in a brown paper sack. Ray held one up in the sun and turned it, like a man turning a baby.
He caught nothing, of course, as always. We laughed about it all the way home. That night, back in our own bed, with the machine humming and the little siren safe in the drawer under the socks, he reached over in the dark and found my hand. “Marge,” he said, “fifty one years, and you still surprise me.” I said I could say the same of him. And the lights stayed on, all night long, in every room of our house.