The cold sudden feeling that spreads itself through one's body when they suddenly realize something horrible was all that Jack felt for a second after he heard the gunshot. It was like someone had injected horror into him as tangibly as an addict shoots himself with heroin. It traveled up his spine and numbed him to where he couldn't move. The first few seconds after the sound seemed like several dozen eons. He looked at the tattered rug in front of the dancing orange fire and the old faded photographs mounted on the wooden walls. He memorized the little rips in the emerald curtains that framed the windows. He observed the pattern of the grain in the wood of the rocking chair that had been there since he could remember. He saw the snow falling outside, masking all noise from reaching him, separating him from the rest of the world and from all of the truth.

Then the security of the snow faded and reality slammed into him at a million miles an hour.

He was running before he had completely comprehended what was happening. Peter hadn't moved yet, but Jack wasn't thinking about that. He didn't even know there was a Peter. The world had completely narrowed and encompassed nothing but that sound. He recognized it and he knew what it was, but he didn't connect the sound with an action. It was impossible for him to do so. There are times when the human brain absolutely refuses to take in horror of a certain degree, and that was what was happening to Jack.

In the unreal and dizzying quality of a dream, he made it to the door that was open to the left and led to a bedroom. The surroundings in front of him visibly blurred as if the entire scene before him was just in his mind, and not really here at all. One of the two windows in the bedroom was thrown open. Icy air seeped into the house. A candle was burning on a table in the hallway and, horrified, he watched as a particularly strong gust of wind blew it out like the breath of a ghost. The image of the smoldering, lonely wick embedded itself in his mind; it would return in his nightmares again and again throughout his life.

Then he turned his head back to the left.

The moment he crossed the threshold, he knew there was something terribly wrong. A tangible darkness, almost like an invisible demon, weighed on him and ate at his soul. It was too silent and too still. The temperature continued to dive. Sheer drapes flapped in the winter breeze.

Slowly, detached from himself, he swiveled on the spot to where the bed was. It didn't click, at first, when he saw May lying in a pool of blood with a gun in her limp hand. The beautiful white dress she wore was stained crimson. Her lovely black hair was matted with red, and her eyes were open and boldly staring at the ceiling. One of her feet dangled over the edge of the bed, while the other had been drawn up next to her. Suddenly her free hand, which lay peacefully on her chest, clenched.

The guttural breath that she then drew made him scream. He screamed and screamed and screamed, and didn't stop until he felt two hands on his shoulders yanking him outside the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. Then he fell into the snow and wept.

Jack had confronted God more times than he would ever admit to. How many black nights had he laid in bed, tormented with nightmares, screaming to his Creator? Sometimes, every once and awhile, he heard a response. They came in the soft voice of a breeze or the beautiful promise of dawn, in the gleaming eye of a child or the lofty magnificence of a cathedral, in things that struck him suddenly and heavily with God's infinite power. More often than not, though, all that he heard was the heavy silence. Maybe his heart just wasn't listening hard enough. Maybe he was too consumed in himself, too selfish, to hear the voice of the One who loved him, even as he cursed and struggled. Whatever the reason, as he begged and pleaded and cried on that winter day in Wisconsin, there was no answer.

The cold was something he didn't feel. He stood outside the hospital in Eau Claire, and there was nothing. No ache, no prickling sensation. He was nothing but a ghost, hardly there at all, in another world, in another time. His pain even dulled as the minutes continued to tick by. There was just the most terrifying emptiness in his soul. This emptiness crept through his very bloodstream, until if someone had asked him his name, he wouldn't have been able to remember it. He was on another plane of reality entirely. There are people who, like May, appear to be no longer flesh and bone, just spirit. There are also people who appear to no longer have a spirit, who are just flesh and bone, like Jack.

A hearse, drawn by two mules, was sitting in wait in front of the hospital. The mules stomped their feet and shook their manes to keep warm as their silvery breaths entwined in a cloud around their heads. Snowflakes dotted their brown coats like a few grains of salt thrown onto a pile of pepper. The driver was buried in a thick wool coat up to his ears and had a ragged fur hat crammed onto his head. His boots came up to his knees. He covered his face with his collar and blew furiously into his gloved hands. It was probably one of the most furiously cold days that Wisconsin had endured for several years. The temperature had been driven below zero, and a breeze made staying outside deadly, at least without the proper garments. It hadn't started out this cold, not even in the morning, but the air had gotten continuously icier as the day progressed. Even the trees shivered with the blast of the wind. The very hearse itself seemed to chatter on its old, rickety wagon wheels.

How long Jack had been standing in this murderous weather he didn't know. He wasn't thinking anything. There was a lifelessness about him that made him hard to distinguish from the corpse that two men carried out from the hospital on a stretcher, limp underneath a white sheet. A woman followed them, dressed in a stiff skirt and a starched grey jacket. Her hair was swept up and an emblem of the medical community was visible on her collar, sewn just above the seam. With the cold indifference of a scientist, Jack watched as the stretcher was loaded into the back of the hearse and the driver asked the woman a few questions as he made some notes on a piece of paper. Then he cracked his whip and the hearse pulled away. The woman turned around to re-enter the building, and the two men followed her. There was a moment when she saw the lone man in the courtyard standing up to his shins in snow and looked at him with disbelief, almost seeming to wonder if he were real. Then she stopped.

"What are you doing out here?" Her voice was rough and husky and low, not matching her sweet, young face. "Are you out of your mind? You're going to die! Look how blue your lips are! Are you lost? Come with me." All of these questions and commands were strung together so quickly that Jack didn't even have time to register what she was saying, so he stubbornly refused to. He looked at her with dull eyes coated in a glaze of so much hurt that they were unable to see. A few moments later, he was in the hospital. He hadn't felt her wheeling him around and pushing him in front of her through the door. A huge furnace in the center of the waiting room spread heat through the building as tangibly as long, warm fingers, and all of the sudden Jack's body was on fire from the unforeseen, drastic change in temperatures. He tried to scream, but no sound was emitted from his throat. It was almost like he wasn't inside of himself anymore. The woman had disappeared. All of the sudden a crowd of nurses surrounded him, feeling him, touching his forehead, obviously thinking he had hypothermia. He was too confused to fight them off, and instead his breathing became shallow and rapid with claustrophobia. One lone, big tear rolled down his smooth cheek and splashed onto the tile even as he stumbled from the hands that were everywhere on him. No one came to help him.

The door was thrown open so quickly that it banged against the wall with enough force and sound to make everyone within earshot look up, including Jack. The person he saw standing in the doorway brought him back to Earth with such gravity that he felt like he had literally been thrown to the ground. Rose was next to him in less than half a second, and then he was in her arms and his face was buried in her hair and it seemed like maybe he could think again. He felt her shake when he touched her because his skin was icy, but he needed her so terribly that he was too selfish to let her go. All at once, he began to convulse with great, gasping sobs, but they were dry. No more tears would fall.

"I heard," she said quietly again and again, like it was too much effort to raise her voice to anything above a whisper. "Oh my God, Jack, I'm so sorry . . . I came as soon as I found out . . . Oh my God, oh my God . . ." He crushed her to him and they stood in the middle of the room, both dripping wet with melting snow. Everyone stayed back from them with a kind of religious awe, as if they were afraid to step in the aura of something so powerful and so tragically beautiful.

"I don't know what happened," he whispered painfully. "She was lying in blood . . . and by the time they got her here she had stopped breathing . . . I don't know if the doctors can save her . . ." That was all he was able to make himself say. He leaned on her like a dying man, trying to drink everything that was her like she was the only thing that could save him. Perhaps she was. They held onto each other, their hurt filling up the hospital like water, the hearts broken and weeping even when their eyes couldn't anymore.

Peter could not be made to leave the operating room. It didn't matter how much the staff berated him or how severely he was threatened. His feet might as well have been hewn out of stone into the tile. There was no way he could leave. They even tried to physically push him out, but he was as solid as granite. His skin had lost all healthy color and hovered on that hue that is somewhere between white and green. He kept a hand firmly clasped over his mouth, as if he were afraid that if it were removed he would vomit.

There aren't words that are adequate enough to describe the torment going on in his anguished soul. There was a blackness there that would leave its mark eternally and never completely fade away, thereby staining his life forever. There was a hate bubbling up within him that would plague him until he died, and maybe after. There was a hurt being born there, somewhere deep within the folds of his insides, that would continue to sting him for years and years. But most of all, there was desperation.

May was all he had left. His parents were gone; they had moved years ago and he had given up ever seeing them again. Grace was not his. He had been stupid to think she ever had been or that she ever would be. Jack was someone he didn't even know anymore. No, he knew that May was it. He loved her like he would never be able to love anyone else. Had he showed it all the time? Of course not. But that love which he had so long ignored or underplayed suddenly reared its head now, in this dark hour, and it was awakened in the form of guilt. What had happened in his bedroom before that gunshot went off would always remain a mystery to him. He did not understand anything, and in the first initial moments he refused to believe that May had done herself any harm at all. It seemed impossible to him that she could want to hurt something as lovely and pure as herself. It was like trying to kill a doe trying to kill a gazelle or a dove trying to kill a swan. Unthinkable.

His eyes weren't really transmitting what he was seeing to his brain. Vaguely, he made out a man in a white coat cutting open the right side of May's head, just above her ear. That side happened to be turning away from him, so he couldn't clearly get the picture of what was happening. He heard the panic in the doctor's voice and the fear in the voice of his assistants. How long this went on, Peter could not say. He tore his stare away from the operation, but he could not tear it away from May's face.

She might as well have already passed on into another world. Her lips were the color of paper. She could not close her eyes, even though it had once appeared that she was trying to. Now, absolutely unconscious, there was no more effort. Those beautiful blue eyes the color of the lake or the sky right before the end of dusk threw him into a chasm of pain. He started to remember things he hadn't thought of in a decade. There she was as a two-year-old, giggling and stumbling across the green lawn with heavy, awkward steps. Then she was five, and her eyes were the size of tennis balls when Peter showed her a butterfly that had just come out of its cocoon. When she was nine she had gotten lost in the woods, and Peter had searched for her for hours. He remembered the bile that had built up in the back of his throat that had tasted bitter with fear. He remembered how he, a mere eleven years old, had been willing to venture any danger he encountered just to find her safe. He probably would have died to protect her. At fifteen, when an older man had come onto her, he almost had. For her whole life, he had been watching out for her and fighting anything that threatened her happiness or wellbeing, even if she hadn't seen it. The one thing though, the one thing that he had so stupidly neglected to shield her against, was the one thing that had the most access to her – herself.

He didn't cry. In all the years he had left on Earth, Peter Filner would never cry again.

"Paralyzed."

The first word to be released from Jack's mouth for the past several hours was said in the tone of a croak. It was hardly distinguishable as a word at all, yet everyone is his vicinity understood it. It was the same exact word that was running through their minds, the same one imprinted on the folds of their brain. What was it, really, except a slightly longer death sentence? How would it feel to be trapped in a body that you did not control anymore, that was just as equally a prison as a tomb is?

The bullet had been removed from May's head. It was somewhere in this very hospital. It was only about an inch long. It had altered a countless number of lives forever. Peter had been asked if he wanted it, and his disgust had choked out the angry curses that he had wanted to reply with. Instead, he had glared at the doctor in contempt. That had been enough; the bullet would never resurface again.

May was hanging onto life by a very delicate thread. Had she known anything about the human body, she would have altered her aim to guarantee her death. Instead, she had shot herself just so that the piece of metal discharged from the weapon had lodged itself right above her ear. It had destroyed a part of her brain that controlled her lower body movement, and she would be paralyzed from the waist down until she died, be it in five minutes or fifty years. Her hearing was permanently damaged. She was probably completely deaf in the ear that had suffered the direct hit.

This verdict was given in the detached way that all hospitals are subject to. The "I'm sorry" from the doctor wasn't nearly sufficient, so it was ignored. When he left, three people stood stunned in the corner of the room. The healthy girl that they had been to church earlier that morning was now an invalid that had one foot in the grave. It had all happened so quickly and with such an impossible quality that it might still be a dream. For all Rose knew, this entire thing could all be a dream, and she could wake up in two seconds back in her stateroom on the Titanic. She felt as if she were lost in an indescribably thick haze, so that she couldn't see where she was putting her feet. The very next step might be a plunge into an abyss.

"That's it then," Peter said, gruffly. He turned and tromped down the hallway, off into the maze of rooms that was the hospital. Undoubtedly, he did not know where he was going. Undoubtedly, he did not care. Rose looked tenderly after his retreating back, all of his earlier and hideous discretions gone. She knew how vicious his turmoil had become, and she knew how bottomless the pit of his pain was. Even in her own confusion, she recognized that there was no way he could bear this alone. His soul would not survive.

"Wait," she called out after him, so softly that she didn't think he would hear her. He stopped, but he didn't turn to face her. His hands were shoved in the pockets of his coat, and his brown hair was matted from how he had raked his fingers through it. When she went to him, she was startled by how dull and barren his eyes were. She bit her lip with fear and compassion and a horrible sorrow that all mixed together to form a haunting grief. For a few moments, the two of them stood staring at each other in silence. Peter's desolate gaze suddenly turned harsh and defensive, as if he were afraid that she was going to slap him or even worse, blame him. He looked like a dog that had been backed into a corner and was ready to kill to escape.

The way that she looked back at him transcended the need for words. Her eyes conveyed such an ethereal and otherworldly sadness that he didn't understand it at first. They were the eyes of an angel that was looking upon a tortured spirit, full of a beautifully sincere empathy. His angry resistance fell away to be replaced by brokenness. Then she closed the space between them and lifted her arms around him like a mother would to a child, letting him bend over and bury his face into her hair. His body jerked and he pulled her closer to him until he was holding onto her like she was his life preserver, his hope, his sanctuary. She felt his entire form shake against hers, but not a single tear fell from his eyes.

Oh Peter, she thought sadly, why won't you let yourself cry?