Samantha stood up from the wooden bench, her knees catching the edge of the heavy table we had just carried out. The yellow light from the projector cut across her collarbone, throwing a sharp shadow of her shoulder against the white sheet on the fence. She pulled her grey wool cardigan tight around her chest, overlapping the lapels as if the October air had suddenly dropped ten degrees.
“Harry, turn it off,” she said.
I reached for the toggle switch on the side of the steel projector housing, the metal warm against my thumb. The fan died with a low whirr, leaving only the quiet hum of our old refrigerator drifting through the open kitchen window. The backyard went dark, save for the amber glow of the porch light sixty-four inches above the concrete step.
“I have to tell you something, and you need to just listen,” she said. Her voice dropped to a level tone that she usually reserved for archiving fragile nineteenth-century maps.
She began twisting the silver band on her right middle finger, rotating it three times before her hand went still.
“I went to the clinic in Grand Rapids last month,” she said. “And the month before that.”
My hand went instinctively to my wire-rimmed glasses, pushing the bridge up my nose by a fraction of an inch. “Is it your thyroid again? We can get the records from the university hospital.”
“It is my heart, Harry,” she said, her eyes fixed on the dry grass near her shoes. “It is a cardiomyopathy. They call it hypertrophic. The left ventricle wall is thicker than it should be, by nearly six millimeters.”
I stared at her, my mind immediately trying to calculate the dimensions of a human heart, trying to draw the cross-section in my head like an elevation plan.
“They put me on a beta-blocker,” she said, her voice steady but incredibly thin. “Dr. Matthews told me that my heart cannot handle the volume change of a pregnancy. She said it is a maternal mortality risk. A high one.”
The word mortality hung between us, flat and heavy as a structural beam. The velvet box in my right coat pocket felt suddenly massive, an off-center weight that pulled at the seam of my wool jacket.
“We can find another doctor,” I said, my voice rising. “A specialist at the university in Ann Arbor. They have departments specifically for high-risk cases.”
