Pink, cream, sand, beige. The floral pattern on the chairs matched the pillows on the sofas which matched the wallpaper which matched the shawl of the overweight woman who reminded Sarah of her mother when she licked her forefinger with her cracked tongue and flipped the page of a Time Magazine. Hanging above her head was a photo-print of a birch forest that matched the plastic fern in the corner that matched the trees outside the revolving door. William would hate the generic nature shots hanging in a perfect row with light-pink frames and off-white mattes. A humming bird. A lighthouse. Rocks. The birch forest.

“Masturbation,” William would say. No... she was wrong; it was abstract art that he called masturbation. “Lifeless,” would be the word for these prints. “If you want to create art, you need to disturb the soul,” he would say. But Sarah liked them. With a darker frame, the lighthouse picture would go well in their bedroom.

Sarah never got to see her husband. The cop outside their house explained that they received a 911 call about an injury at the Carmel Theater. Before she and Kayla could climb the hill to meet the ambulance, William was tossed in the back and carried away. Hyde drove Will’s truck to the ER while Kay and Sarah followed. By the time they arrived, William was getting x-rays.

Now they sat side-by-side in floral chairs with oak arm rests. Hyde tried to apologize, but Sarah couldn’t listen. She needed to think in peace.

Kayla said something about Janie; something about picking her up from her sleep-over.

“Yeah,” Sarah replied. “Sure.” She closed her eyes. There was a fountain or a waterfall somewhere in the building. It couldn’t be in the emergency waiting room, but the halls that connected the various wings were open and barren. The sound, though distant, took the edge off the ringing phones, chatting orderlies and Kayla’s exit.

Hyde whispered her name, but she ignored him. This was all their fault.

“Sarah,” he said again and she opened her eyes. “The doctor’s here.”

*  *  *

“The x-rays aren’t good.” Of course, the doctor prefaced this statement with positive news, assuring Sarah and Hyde that William was otherwise healthy, that he was no longer in pain, and that he lost less than a pint of blood.

Hyde stayed a step behind Sarah as she nodded and shook her head at the doctor’s ramblings. She was barely able to made eye-contact, so the doctor often looked to Hyde for visual indications of comprehension.

“What do you mean they’re not good?” Hyde asked when Sarah didn’t. “What do they show?”

“The weights fractured four metacarpals and three phalanges. Other than a nasty bruise and popped blood vessels, his thumb and forefinger should be fine. Two of his carpals are fractured, and it appears three of them have been dislocated. The skin split in several places, which accounts for the blood loss, but we cleaned him up.”

“I don’t understand,” Hyde said. “All that from a hundred-and-fifty pounds? That’s less than I weigh.”

“From what I understand these steel weights dropped...”

“About twenty feet.”

“The weight of the steel may have only been one-sixty. But ‘apparent weight’ also takes the height of the drop into consideration. By the time the steel reached his hand, the pressure could have been anywhere between two and three-thousand pounds, though his injuries suggest it wasn’t quite that extreme.”

“So, what next?”

“Immediate open reduction surgery on the carpals in his lower hand, then splints to the fingertips, a cast, and frequent trips to an orthopedic.” The doctor refocused on Sarah. “We’ll begin surgery within the next two hours. He’s a little out of it from the morphine, but if you’d like to stay with your husband beforehand, I’ll walk you back.”

Sarah’s gaze ran straight into the back corner of the waiting room. She rubbed her thumb against her teeth. “I’ll see him when he’s out.”

“Of course, Mrs. Carmel. We’ll let you know how it goes.”

The doctor thinned his lips, nodded to Hyde, and the men shared a moment of mutual understanding; Sarah needed help.

“I need a cigarette,” Hyde said before she could sit. “Join me?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“I know.”

Outside the revolving doors, the overhead awning was lit by a green neon sign. The evening was warmer than Hyde expected, but Sarah asked for his coat so he took it off and wrapped it around her shoulders. He looked at the theater; two miles away but as bright and prominent as a Vegas billboard. He struck the wheel of his lighter, held the end of the cigarette over the flame, and sucked the filter until smoke filled his lungs.

“You’re too close to the door,” Sarah said, “New smoking law.”

Hyde exhaled a thick bout of smoke and the breeze carried it away. “You should see him.”

“I can’t right now.”

“It’s not his fault, Sarah. Don’t be angry with him.”

“Did he lie to me?”

“What?”

“Is there any way he knew about the voice and lied to me anyway?”

“No. Everything he says is genuine.”

“Then I’m not angry with him.” Sarah rubbed her shoe against a tiny stuffed bear; a lost trinket from the hospital gift shop. It was already missing an arm, but Sarah’s soul mangled the synthetic flesh into the concrete sidewalk. “He told you about the vision? The ghost-theater? That was part of his piano-bar rant, right?”

“We’ve been asking ourselves the same questions. Obviously we couldn’t have had anything to do with that. Maybe God--”

“God didn’t decide to give William a vision at the exact moment you played a prank on him.”

“Then what happened? He wasn’t lying.”

“No. He wasn’t. But you sparked something, Hyde. You may be good friends with my husband, but you don’t know half his story.”

“What does his story have to do with the vision?”

“You gave him an excuse to start again. Your joke may have been an accident, but it unleashed the very thing I spent years bottling up.” The bear’s pink fur detached from the back of his head and mashed into the cement. Sarah looked up from the teddy-massacre with wet eyes. “I thought it was different this time. I thought that maybe--because this was from God--it was okay to let him do it. I thought God was talking to me through this miracle. I thought he was saying, ‘You can let go of your fear. It’s safe to let him create again.’ I thought this project had a divine blessing when the others didn’t. But without God, this is just another failed endeavor.”

Hyde took another drag. He meant to say something encouraging--

“My only hope lies in the fact that William still thinks his theater is divine. If he continues to have faith in that lie, he’ll stay clean. He’ll stay a father to Janie and a husband to me. If he still thinks his work is somehow transcendent, he won’t fall into old habits.”

“I don’t understand.”

Sarah stepped toward Hyde leaving the tattered toy in the dust. “If William finds out that he’s alone in this project... if he finds out he’s been talking to himself in an empty shed, he’ll find something physical that actually works. He’ll start with amphetamine; Ritalin or Adderall because it lets him revel in his creative bubble. He’ll block me out. He’ll block Janie out. And when the meds don’t work quick enough, he’ll crush them and snort them so they go to the head faster. He’ll work harder and he’ll stop sleeping. Then he’ll lie. He’ll tell me everything’s fine, then I’ll find coke in his toiletry drawer. He’ll tell me it’s a one-time thing. He’ll tell me he’s almost finished, just one more book or movie or song or play and he’ll make it big. You didn’t know William when I found him. Hell, you weren’t even born yet. You haven’t heard the stories of what his life was like before me; how close he came to dying from his creative insanities.”

Hyde dropped the butt and heeled it.

“And now I’m left with three options. Only three. I can destroy my husband. Or I can live with this lie. If I live with the lie, I watch the same production that you and Kayla did. I watch him preach what he doesn’t understand. I watch him make foolish decisions because he thinks God told him to. And if he finds out the truth? Then what? Then I suppose he’ll know that I’m a liar too. He’ll know we all lied.” Sarah put her hands in the pockets of the borrowed coat, then looked at the theater. “Why won’t I see my husband before surgery? Because I’ll have to comfort him with the first lie I’ve ever told. And I haven’t prepared myself for that.”

Hyde was afraid to ask. “What’s the third option?”

Sarah looked away from the stage and back to Hyde. “I leave my husband.”

“No. It won’t come to that. I promise you Sarah, it will never come to that.”

“Don’t make me promises you can’t keep.”