She could see a young man and a young woman. They were running, hand in hand. Where were they going? She wondered if it was to that place where they would first know they were in love. Would it be a place with lady slippers, like the pine grove on the old farm? It was there that Herb first loved her, on a blanket spread on pine needles warm from the June sunshine slanting through the trees. They coupled slowly at first then faster, the afternoon warmth multiplying their own. Afterward, he took her hand, told her he loved her and asked her to marry him. Yes, she had answered him, yes. She would marry him. She…

The mantel clock struck three.

As if the strike had been a tocsin, Herb stirred. Hadn’t he? She studied the hospice-provided bed, but there was no sign of movement… her imagination… She settled in the chair and resumed her knitting coaxing back her fled composure.

The clock’s strike had roused Roly Poly. The cat yawned and stretching tickled her ankle. She leaned to stroke him but he was again a tiny Sphinx drowsing at her feet, waiting, as she and Herb waited.

Quiet seeped back, between the ticks of the clock and the clicks of the needles. She studied Herb’s form again, more carefully. His still-dark hair was a period, punctuating the pillowcase. His face was still a faint pink from the unfelt shave. His arms, protruding from the pajama sleeves, ended where his hands floated like tiny islands on the bedcover.

“Herb?” But no finger beckoned to her. No whisper summoned her. As if filtered by the gauzy sheet whiter than the November snow crusted thinly across the back lawn, her husband remained still and silent.

Her eyes shifted to the chromed IV stand and its bag, a plastic heart with a plastic aorta curving morphine to Herb’s wrist. It made the physical pain bearable she was sure. She did not know about the other. Nothing eased that pain for her.

The accident had scissored apart the happy times of their early days. Was it the same for Herb, too? She couldn’t tell. He was drifting away in his white and chrome boat and almost beyond her reach.

Her gaze turned from the bed to the sky. The cloud had moved, blurring the picture. Would they remember their happy times even if the saddest thing of all happened to them? She hoped so.

Her eyes roved from cloud to cloud. There, that other one, there! It looked like a child. A boy perhaps, playing with a ball? Would he attend the university, at Orono? Would he play baseball as his father had done?

They wouldn’t have missed the final game of his senior year for the world. It was in Lewiston a scoreless game until the ninth inning. Then Herb, Jr. came to the plate and hit the second pitch with that quick snap of his wrists that made him such a good batter. She and Herb had jumped to their feet as the ground ball lanced toward left field. The third baseman lunged, full-length, at the ball… and missed it. Safe on second, Herb, Jr. waved his cap at them. Two pitches later, a teammate hit a long, high fly ball to deep right field. He waited for the catch and then sped around the bases (could anyone run as fast, she wondered) and scored what would be the winning run.

He graduated a week later. They thought that he would accept the offer from the Red Sox and sign to play with their Triple A team in Pawtucket. Military service never crossed their minds. Two nights after graduation over dinner he told them that he had enlisted in the Army. Herb was against it. Wait until they draft you, he kept saying, once slapping the palm of his hand on the table. But their son had made up his mind. He would get his military service done and over with, and he would do it his way. Then he would get on with things. His basic training would be at Fort Ord, in California. Why did he have to go so far away, she wondered, gripping his father’s arm so tightly he winced? Don’t worry, he told them. It’s only nine weeks.

Only nine weeks, only nine weeks, but it was just so… sudden, she thought. Her son just kissed her on the cheek when he left and told them, as if, somehow, it was possible, not to worry about him.

He wrote often. Training was going well. And he had met a girl, Elizabeth. He thought, perhaps, he might bring her east to meet them. That was sudden, too, and she hoped not unwise. He was only twenty-two and Elizabeth was probably younger. Wasn’t it better to take some time?

When the two of them stepped off the plane in Boston, she and Herb thought that she was what everyone in New England imagined a California girl looked like: tall, tanned, blonde and pretty. As soon as they met her, they knew that she was more than that: she was in love with their son and he was in love with her.

They were married in San Diego the day after he finished his A.I.T. That was what he always called it. She didn’t know for a month afterwards that it stood for Advanced Infantry Training. Two months later, Liz was at her parent’s home in San Diego and pregnant. Herb, Jr. was in Georgia, training at the jump school at Fort Benning. He was going to be paratrooper. He had volunteered for that? Why, they didn’t know! She worried but tried not to let on. Herb was very proud.

The letters had come regularly from each of them she remembered. The news from San Diego was about the part-time job Liz had, “just to keep busy” and that she was feeling fine. Herb, Jr. reported only that the training was, “just routine stuff.” Good equipment, good weather, good instructors. Don’t worry about him. He told anecdotes about the men in his jump “stick” — where they were from, how much nerve they had and what good friends they had all become. He liked the sergeants and his platoon and company commanders and thought them fine leaders. Be finished in a few weeks and he always finished his letters, home soon…

There was another picture. A little boy, or was it a girl — a grandchild. She had looked forward to it so. She was sure Herb had, too. But afterward they never spoke of it.

It was such an ordinary thing. The kind of accident you read about every day, almost. That was what was so strange, after the dangerous part — the jump training — was over. He was on leave and driving east with Liz from San Diego to Portland for a visit.

The letter from his company commander had been both solicitous and complimentary. They could be very proud of their son. He was a fine soldier and had been nominated for and accepted at Officer Candidate School. (He hadn’t told them that. But it wasn’t important.) The letter was upstairs still in its envelope, under his picture on their bureau in the bedroom.

One of his Army uniforms was still in the closet in his room with his baseball mitts, spikes, and bats. They always had been proud of him. But what did she care about pride? He would never again ask his father if he could borrow the car or ask her if she had seen his sweater or skim his baseball hat through the doorway when he got home from school. And she would never hug him again.

It bewildered her, but Herb just couldn’t grasp it… couldn’t seem to understand that his son wasn’t coming back. Slowly, day by day, he spoke to her less and less.

The Army had required a will and funeral directions. Herb, Jr. and Liz and the unborn grandchild were cremated, the ashes scattered along Big Sur. But she had a third stone placed in the family plot in Portland, hers between them.

The sun broke from behind the clouds and hovered above the tree line. The late-afternoon sunlight flooded through the distant firs and suffused the pasture, the grounds and the room. She rose and went to the bed, to her husband. With both of her hands, she took one of his. She thought of the two of them again in the pine grove, at their beginning. In the sky, the cloud pictures, although elongated and tattered, were recognizable; the couple was still holding hands and the child was playing with the ball. There, edged with gold by the westering sun, they were still together.

Pressing her husband’s hand, she began to describe the cloud pictures to him. There was nothing and then she felt a pressure in response. The first picture was very faint now, but the firmness of Herb’s grip increased as she continued, her voice still soft but confident as, smiling, she squeezed his hand.