I closed my bloodstained hand around the pendant, clutching it so tightly that, by the time we reached the hospital, my palm ached as if a nail had been driven through it.

Lorrie was already in surgery.

A nurse insisted on taking me to the ER. The bullet Beezo had fired at me in the living room had ripped the cartilage of my right ear. She cleaned the ear and flushed the clotted blood out of the eustachian tube. I refused to submit to anything more than a local anesthetic while a young doctor stitched me up as best he could.

For the rest of my life, that ear would give me the look of a battered boxer who had spent too many years in the ring.

As we were not permitted to stand watch in the hallway outside the operating room where they had taken Lorrie, and as she would be transferred to intensive care when the surgeon had finished, Dad and I waited in the I.C.U lounge.

The lounge was cheerless. That suited me fine. I didn't want to be coddled by bright colors, soft chairs, and inspiring art.

I wanted to hurt.

Crazily, I worried that if a numbness of mind or heart or body overcame me, if I admitted any kind or degree of exhaustion, Lorrie would die. I felt that only by the sharpness of my wretched anguish could I keep God's attention and be sure that He heard my petitions.

Yet I must not cry, because to cry would be to acknowledge that I expected the worst. By such an acknowledgment, I would be inviting Death to take what he wanted.

For a while that night, I had more superstitious rules than those obsessive-compulsives whose daily lives are governed by elaborate domestic rituals and codes of conduct devised with the intention of magically warding off bad fortune.

For a while Dad and I shared the I.C.U lounge with other haunted people. Then we were alone.

Lorrie had been admitted at 8:12. At half past nine, Dr. Wayne Cornell, the surgeon tending to her, sent a nurse to speak with us.

First, she told us that Dr. Cornell-qualified for general surgery with a specialty in gastrointestinal work-was an excellent surgeon. She said the team with him was "awesome."

I didn't need this soft-spoken sales pitch. To stay sane, I had already convinced myself that Dr. Cornell was a genius with hands as sensitive as those of the greatest concert pianist, a nonpareil.

According to the nurse, although Lorrie remained in critical condition, the surgery was going well. But it would be a long night. Dr.

Cornell's best estimate was that he would not be finished until sometime between midnight and one o'clock.

She had taken two bullets. They had done much damage.

Just then I didn't want more details. Couldn't bear them.

The nurse left.

With just me and Dad in it, the small I.C.U lounge seemed as big as an airplane hangar.

"She'll be fine," he told me. "Good as new."

I couldn't remain seated. Had to move, burn off nervous energy.

This was Sunday, December 22, not one of the five dates on the back of the circus pass. At midnight, the third day on Grandpa Josef's list would begin.

What could happen after midnight that would be worse than what had happened this evening?

I pretended not to know the answer. I pressed from my mind the dangerous question itself.

Although I had gotten up to pace, I found myself at one of the two windows. I didn't know how long I'd been standing there.

I tried to focus on the view beyond the glass, but there didn't seem to be one. Just blackness. A bottomless void.

I was holding tightly to the window frame. Vertigo had overcome me. I felt I would fall through the window, into a dark whirlpool.

Behind me, Dad said, "Jimmy?"

When I didn't answer, he put a hand on my shoulder.

"Son," he said.

I turned to him. Then I did what I had not done since I was a little child: I wept in my father's arms.

Near midnight, my mother arrived with a large tin of homemade cookies: lemon snaps, madeleines, Scotch shortbread, and Chinese sesame bars.

Weena followed close behind her in a yellow snowsuit. She carried two big thermoses of our favorite Colombian blend.

The hospital provided snacks and coffee from vending machines. Even in a crisis, however, we were not a family that ate from vending machines.

Annie, Lucy, and Andy had been moved to my parents' house. They were in the care and under the protection of a phalanx of trusted neighbors.

Mom had also brought a change of clothes for me. My shoes, pants, and shirt were stiff with dried blood.

"Honey, clean up in the men's room down the hall," she said. "You'll feel better."

Leaving the lounge long enough to wash up and change seemed to be breaking the vigil, an abandonment of Lorrie. I didn't want to go.

Before leaving home, Mom had found her favorite snapshot of Lorrie and had inserted it into a small frame. She sat now with it in on her lap, studying it as if it were a talisman that would ensure her daughter-in-law's full recovery.

My father sat beside my mother, took her hand, held it fast. He murmured something to her. She nodded. She stroked the photo with one finger, as if smoothing Lorrie's hair.

Gently, Weena took the cameo pendant from my hand, clasped it in both of hers, warming it between her palms, and whispered, "Go, Jimmy. Make yourself presentable for Lorrie."

I decided that the vigil would not-could not-be broken with these three remaining in attendance.

In the men's room, I hesitated to wash my hands, for fear that I would be washing Lorrie away with her blood.

We don't fear our own deaths as much as the deaths of those we love. On the cusp of such a loss, we go a little crazy with denial.

When I returned to the I.C.U lounge, the four of us drank coffee and ate cookies with such solemnity that we might have been taking Communion.

At 12:30, the surgical nurse returned to inform us that Dr. Cornell would need more time than originally projected. He now expected to speak with us at about 1:30.

Lorrie had already been in surgery over four hours. The cookies and coffee soured in my stomach. Still wearing his greens and cap, the surgeon arrived with our internist, Mello Melodeon, at 1:33. Dr.

Cornell was in his forties, looked younger, yet had a comforting air of experience and authority.

"Considering how terrible her injuries were," Dr. Cornell said, "everything went as well as I could have hoped."

He had removed her damaged spleen, which she could live without. More troubling, he removed a badly ravaged kidney; but, God willing, she would be able to enjoy a full life with the one that remained.

Damage to the gastroepiploic and mesenteric veins required much careful work. He had employed grafts using lengths of another vein taken from her leg.

Punctured in two places, the small intestine had been repaired. And a two-inch torn section of the descending colon had been excised.

"She'll be on the critical list for at least twenty-four hours,"

Cornell told us.

With the intestinal damage, she faced some possibility of peritonitis, in which case he would have to operate on her again. She would be put on blood thinners to minimize the risk of stroke from clots forming where vein walls had been stitched.

"Lorrie's not out of the woods yet," he cautioned, "but I'm a lot more confident about her now than when I first opened her up. I suspect she's a fighter, isn't she?"

"She's tough," Mello Melodeon said.

And I said, "Tougher than me."

After they brought her to the I.C.U and settled her, I was allowed to visit in her cubicle for five minutes.

She remained sedated. Even with her features relaxed in sleep, I could see how much she had suffered.

I touched her hand. Her skin felt warm but perhaps because my hands were icy.

Her face was pale but nevertheless radiant, like the face of a saint in a painting from a century in which most people believed in saints, artists more than anyone.

She was on an IV, hooked up to a heart monitor, with an oxygen feed in her nostrils. I looked away from her face only to watch the steady spiking of the light that traced her heartbeat across a graph.

Mom and Grandma spent a couple minutes with Lorrie, then went home to reassure the kids.

I told Dad to go home, too, but he remained. "There's still some cookies need eating in that tin."

In those pre-dawn hours, we would have been at work if we'd not been at the hospital, so I didn't grow sleepy. I lived for the brief visits that the I.C.U staff allowed.

At dawn, a nurse came to the lounge to tell me that Lorrie had awakened. The first thing she'd said to anyone was "Gimme Jimmy."

When I saw her awake, I would have cried but for the realization that tears would blur my vision. I was starving for the sight of her.

"Andy?" she asked.

"He's safe. He's fine."

"Annie, Lucy?"

"They're all okay. Safe."

"True?"

"Absolutely."

"Beezo?"

"Dead."

"Good," she said, and closed her eyes. "Good."

Later, she said, "What's the date?"

I almost didn't tell her the truth, but then I did. "December twenty-third."

"The day," she said.

"Obviously, Grandpa missed it by a few hours. He should have warned us about the twenty-second."

"Maybe."

"The worst is passed."

"For me," she said.

"For all of us."

"Maybe not for you."

"I'm fine."

"Don't let your guard down, Jimmy."

"Don't worry about me."

"Don't let your guard down for a minute."

My father went home to take a three-hour nap, promising to return with thick roast-beef sandwiches, olive salad, and an entire pistachio-almond polenta cake.

Later in the morning, when Dr. Cornell made his rounds, he pronounced himself pleased with Lorrie's progress. Those woods she hadn't been out of the previous night were still around her, but hour by hour there were fewer trees.

People with tragedies of their own had come and gone from the I.C.U lounge. The two of us were alone when Cornell sat down and asked me to take a seat, as well.

At once I knew that he had something to tell me that might explain why my grandfather had identified the twenty-third as the day to dread.

I thought of bullets puncturing intestines, ripping up kidneys, tearing through blood vessels, and I wondered what other damage might have been done. Suddenly I thought spine.

"Oh, God, no. She's paralyzed from the waist down, isn't she?"

Startled, Dr, Cornell said, "Good heavens, no. Anything like that I would have told you last night."

I would not allow myself to feel relief, because clearly he had something to tell me that wasn't news you celebrated with fine champagne.

"I understand that you and Lorrie have three children."