Goodnight, Elizabeth

One.

John.

It wasn’t the silence of the room, the absence of her breathing, but the coolness of the sheets as his hand found his way to her side of the bed, that alerted him, woke him from a troubled sleep. Thunder clapped outside, drowning out the pounding of his heart, lightning flashed, illuminating the fear in his eyes as his reflection appeared in the mirror adjacent to his bed.
The dread was omnipresent, lying dormant in his gut until a moment such as this. She was gone. It was never a surprise, but a realization, like a tumor you could see, but never acknowledged.
It had been coming for a long time. The upswing had lasted too long. Her gaze had become increasingly distant, her laugh a little too false. Three months of recovering from the last time, three months to re-establish their relationship before she shattered it again with the jack-hammer of her condition.
Bi-polar. Alcoholic. These words had been used in the past to describe her, but they meant nothing to John. It was just Elizabeth. She’d always been that way, before rock bottom, before small padded rooms and long nights of worrying and diagnosis and medications. They’d called it a disease, but John wasn’t convinced. A disease was something you could recover from, but Elizabeth would never change.
Still, he loved her all the same.
The phone interrupted the heavy silence, sounding louder than a tornado in the dark, scaring John as if it were. The dread cemented him to the bed. Was this the night, the moment? He wondered. Was this the night she died? Who would be on the other line? The police? Was she in jail again or in the morgue?
He moved slowly with lead feet. He found the phone beside her un-rumpled pillow. She left it there for him, right next to his keys.
“Hello?” John swallowed hard, bracing himself for the worse.
“It’s been a bad night, John, but she’s alright.”
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?” John asked, the anger taking him by surprise. “You know how she gets, Bear, you know the signs as well as I do.”
“I wasn’t working tonight, Maggie was.”
“Maggie knows better than you.”
“Maggie said she was fine when she came in. She only wanted to talk,” Bear said defensively. His tone softened. “You know how Elizabeth is. She blindsides us. One minute she’s sipping coffee, watching the news at the bar and the next she’s ramming a barstool through my jukebox.”
John grimaced. “How much do I owe you this time?”
Bear laughed once. “Maggie stopped her before she could do any major damage.” Glass broke in the background and Bear suddenly became muffled as his hand covered the receiver. John heard a feral scream in the background. He threw on his coat, his laces untied as he shuffled quickly through the house.
“You better come quick,” Bear said suddenly, “She’s worse than I ever seen her.”