Nightmare startled Isaac awake. If he turned, confusing dream with reality, he would see Emma’s bloodied head on the pillow. Isaac sat up, throwing off the duvet and waited until the images vanished and the beating of his heart returned to normal before he stood up. The floor of the familiar bedroom, patterned with shifting shadows, seemed to rise towards the window at one end. Too hasty a move and his head would whirl in dizziness.

A fitful sleeper at best since the accident, some nights were worse than others. Counting the intakes of breath and listening to his heart for a few minutes helped. He then switched on the lamp on the bedside table and picked up the volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets which he read throughout the year. He read where his eyes happened to fall. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/ But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

The last word sounded loud in his mind and he strained to hear it again. A noise, a thud, downstairs? It sounded like Emma clopping on the floor with her crutches, the rubber tips at the end squeaking from the pressure. Rubbery, soft: perhaps it was Emma hobbling to the downstairs washroom. Distrustful of her balance on crutches, he advised her not to use them and resort to the wheelchair when he wasn’t available. If she should fall – it didn’t bear thinking about.

When he watched Emma haul her body around with the aid of crutches to fetch something, or try to grasp things in the kitchen too awkward to reach from her position, he just wanted to tell her stop, don’t move, let me do it for you. No one said she had to hop, skip and jump like Cleopatra in the marketplace. How steady could she be in the middle of the night, her body half asleep?

Marking the page in the book with a ribbon, Isaac got out of bed, the planking of the floor cool to the touch. He shivered in the chilly room until he wrapped himself in a white terrycloth bathrobe. The moon was full. From the windows in the solarium downstairs they enjoyed an unobstructed view of gardens and copse of birch trees. January already and still no snow had fallen to cover the dead brown of the frozen land. Without switching on the light, he held on to the banister as he walked barefoot downstairs.

At the bottom of the steps, he paused. The noise originated in the basement. Of course, the sump pump. Without a sump pump, the basement would flood, especially in a winter of excessive rain. He had lowered the thermostat before retiring so the furnace had not yet kicked in.

Visible through the windows, the moon was so bright he was surprised Emma could sleep without shades or draperies. Isaac stood by a window, his white robe untied, and his nakedness fully exposed. The moon was huge behind branches of a tree, and all the clichés about a giant pearl in the sky struck him as true, although more like a yellow pearl than white.

He turned and ran his eyes over the wall of books, the Vermont casting stove, the cushiony sofa covered in a plaid throw, the sheen of the wood floor brightened by moonlight, and Emma’s easel over which she had placed a blue cloth. Emma preferred a cool room for sleeping despite her sensitivity to cold this past year.

His knees cracked as he knelt beside her bed and slowly pulled back the duvet, the sound of crisp cotton ruffling in the cool air. Emma’s blue silk nightgown had rolled up to her hips. The moonlight spread over her body as pale as bone, and she looked like a soft broken statue sculpted out of chalk. He ran a finger over the operation scars, his touch delicate like warm lips brushing skin.

From her navel down, nothing spared: the os coxae, on both sides, fractured in several places and now wired and screwed together; the femurs crunched and splintered by the car’s engine propelled into her body, now reconstructed and screwed to rods; the patella of her left leg exploded upon impact, now replaced; the tibia and fibulae shattered, slivers of bone digging into muscles, slicing through fat and flesh, bone grafts required; all seven bones of her left ankle split, the scaphoid cracked, all five metatarsals snapped, and her toes, her poor, elegant toes, her beautiful toes, all the perfect phalanges, each one mangled beyond repair.

Emma stirred and shifted a leg. If touch could heal, there’d be no end of his touching. Once taut and smooth over her strong legs, the skin, stretches of it discoloured by incisions, puckered and sagged over her ravaged flesh and muscle. He passed both his hands over the lower half of Emma’s body and closed his eyes, visualizing the one-time perfection of her toes, her once muscular legs dancing as they were wont to do, the pain sucked out of her extremities by his desire to make her whole, fatigue lifted from her flesh and absorbed into his own.

And her left arm: the elbow exploded to dust and now rebuilt, the arm incapable of straightening, still too weak to push open a door, excruciating when she attempted the crutches. Shaking on his knees, his fingers caressing the scars on Emma’s thigh, Isaac inhaled deeply as if for a moment he had lost his breath and became aware of the sweet smell of berries, raspberries. Emma didn’t let him bathe her any more.

Her head: it, too, had split in the accident and blood had drained out of her body to the point of near depletion. Emma, his beloved wife, had almost died on the operating table, he had later learned from the surgeons, her heart struggling to recover from the dangerous loss of blood despite repeated transfusions. He lowered his lips to her thigh and kissed the sunken and wrinkled flesh.

Worse things happened to people all the time. What piddling comfort to know that Emma could have suffered more. True, her spine hadn’t been broken. True, she would walk again. Many acquaintances and friends wanted him to know they prayed for her. Isaac studied the pattern of tree branches against the face of the moon, like scars crisscrossing white flesh. She had been protected by her guardian angel, someone straining after absurdity had said in the hospital; therefore Emma had not been permanently paralysed.

Her injuries, the consequence of the law of averages or the ineffable arbitrariness of the universe, or the stupidity of a human being, would have been even more severe without the active intercession of an invisible, winged figure. Miracle had played a role, friends announced as if stating an incontrovertible fact. Her body splayed and splattered against the back of the car seat, the steering wheel embedded in her chest, he had asked exactly where said angel would have been situated? Perched on the roof? Always hovering like a helicopter overhead? Parting the clouds and seeing her human pet in dire need, said angel apparently had acted with the speed of divine urgency to prevent total catastrophe.

Then the wind blew the branches into the shape of a gallows hastily cobbled together in the moonlight. Isaac could just make out a kind of rough staircase and crossbeam. On the makeshift gallows, the wind picking up and rattling the branches, reshaping them into new patterns, an angel dangled from the crossbeam, its wings limp and furled around its gossamer clad body, strangled in a rope until the spinal cord snapped its neck.

He wrapped his robe tightly around his body, then lay his head by Emma’s side. Sometimes he didn’t think he would ever sleep through an entire night again, but it was comforting to listen to Emma’s breathing, smell the raspberry fragrance of her bathed and wounded body slumbering in the cool of the night.

Emma’s legs would not resume their former shape, the left foot now frozen in an awkward angle which would make walking difficult. The future promised more operations. Well, people without legs kicked balls and ran races on prostheses and climbed mountains. Men and women in wheelchairs ran Olympic races. Emma worked hard to recover.

If not shattered, his own bones were bending and weakening with age. “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.” he whispered, fingering the edge of the duvet, she must be cold. He pulled it over her legs, whispering as his lips kissed her thigh.

His knees cracked again when he stood. In two hours the sun would rise and flood the room. He tucked the duvet around her body. He should try to sleep some more. At the bottom of the staircase, he paused. The bone-white light of the winter moon shone through the window on the landing. Isaac counted each stair as he climbed.