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No. I wasn't there. I was back in Gladstone, Pennsylvania, and I was twelve years old. Two state troopers were in the driveway, with a white car parked . . . and swiftly they were striding to interrupt a birthday party to tell us all that Daddy was dead. Killed in an accident on Greenfield Highway.

"Chris! Chris!" I screamed, terrified he might have gone.

"I'm here. I'm coming. I knew you'd need me."

In that dim and lonely hour that comes before dawn, Chris and I arrived at the hospital. In one of those sterile waiting rooms we sat down to wait and find out if Julian would survive the accident and the surgery. Finally, around noon, after hours in the recovery room, they brought him down.

They had him laid out on what they called a "fracture bed"--a torturous looking device that strung up his right leg which wore a cast from his toes to his hip. His left arm was broken, and in a cast, and strung up in a peculiar way too. His pale face was lacerated and bruised. His lips, usually so full and red, were as pale as his skin. But all of that was nothing compared to his head! I shivered to look! His head had been shaved and small holes drilled for metal calipers to be hooked in to pull his head up and backward! A leather collar lined with fleece was fastened about his neck. A broken neck! Plus a leg fracture, and a compound fracture of his forearm--to say nothing of the internal injuries that had kept him on the operating table three hours!

I cried out, "Will he live?"

"He is on the critical list, Mrs. Marquet," they answered so calmly. "If he has other close relatives, we suggest you contact them."

Chris made the call to Madame Marisha, for I was deathly afraid he'd pass a

way any moment, and I might miss the only chance to tell him I loved him And if that happened, I'd be cursed and haunted all through the rest of my life.

Days passed. Julian flitted in and out of consciousness. He stared at me with eyes lackluster, unfocused. He spoke but his voice came so thick, heavy and unintelligible I couldn't understand. I forgave him for all the little sins, and the big ones too, as you are apt to when death is around the corner. I rented a room in the hospital next to his where I could catch naps, but I never had a full night's rest. I had to be there when he came to, where he could see and know me, so I could plead with him to fight, to live, and, most of all, say all the words I'd so stingily kept from his ears. "Julian," I whispered, my voice hoarse from saying it so often, "please don't die!"

Our dancing friends and musicians flocked to the hospital to offer what consolation they could. His room filled with flowers from hundreds of fans Madame Marisha flew up from South Carolina and stalked into the room wearing a dreary black dress. She gazed down on the unconscious face of her only child without any expression of grief. "Better he die now," she said flatly, "than to wake up and find himself a cripple for life."

"How dare you say that?" I flared, ready to strike her. "He's alive--and he's not doomed. His spinal cord wasn't injured! He'll walk again, and dance again too!"

Then came the pity and disbelief to shimmer her jet eyes--and then she was in tears. She who'd boasted she never cried, never showed grief, wept in my arms. "Say it again, that he'll dance--oh, don't lie, he's got to dance again!"

Five horrible days came and went before Julian could focus his eyes enough to really see. Unable to turn his head, he rolled his eyes my way. "Hi."

"Hello, dreamer. I thought you were never going to wake up," I said.

He smiled, a thin ironic smile. "No such luck, Cathy love." His eyes flicked downward to his strungup leg. "I'd rather be dead than like this."

I got up and went to his fracture bed that was made with two wide strips of rough canvas slipped over strong rods, and a mattress was beneath this that could be lowered enough to allow a bedpan to be placed in position. It was a hard, unyielding bed to lie on, yet I stretched beside him very carefully, and curled my fingers into his tangle of uncombed hair-- what he had left. My free hand stroked his chest. "Jule, you're not paralyzed. Your spinal cord was not severed, crushed, or even bruised. It's just in shock, so to speak."

He had an uninjured arm that could have reached to hold me, but it stayed straight at his side. "You're lying," he said bitterly. "I can't feel one damn thing from my waist down. Not your hand on my chest either. Now get the hell out of here! You don't love me! You wait until you think I'm ready to kick off, and then you come with your sweet words! I don't want or need your pity--so get the hell out, and stay out!"

I left his bed and reached for my purse. Crying, even as he cried and stared at the ceiling. "Damn you for wrecking our apartment!" I stormed when I could talk. "You tore up my clothes!" I rampaged, angry now, and wanting to slap his face that was already bruised and swollen. "Damn you for breaking all our beautiful things! You knew how painstakingly we chose all those lamps, the accessories that cost a fortune. You know we wanted to leave them as heirlooms for our children. Now we've got nothing left to leave anyone!"

He grinned, satisfied. "Yeah, nothing left for nobody." He yawned, as if dismissing me, but I was unwilling to be dismissed. "Got no kids, thank God. Never gonna have any. You can get a divorce. Marry some son of a bitch and make his life miserable too."

"Julian," I said with such heavy sadness. "Have I made your life miserable?"

He blinked, as if not wanting to answer that, but I asked him again, and again, until I forced him to say, "Not altogether miserable--we had a few moments."

"Only a few?"

"Well . . . maybe more than a few. But you don't have to stay on and take care of an invalid. Get the hell out while you can. I'm no good, you know that. I've been unfaithful to you time and again."

"If you are again, I'll cut your heart out!"

"Go 'way, Cathy. I'm tired." He sounded sleepy from the many sedatives they fed into him and shot into him. "Kids are not good for people like us anyway."

"People like us . .

"Yeah, people like us."

"How are we different?"

He mockingly, sleepily laughed, bitterly too. "We're not real. We don't belong to the human race."