It's there in every dusty crack in the floorboards and jamming the question mark on his typewriter keyboard and lingering underneath the bed and creeping in through the chimney and staring down from the chandelier and clinging to him through the soles of his shoes. It's an old familiar scene of hands holding on for love and life as the room fades away and lips calling out for hope and home as the world explodes. It's his companion, constant and steadfast and loyal in the medical textbooks in his mother's shelf and the silent words in her eyes when she sees it's been almost ten years now, in the dark shadows under their eyes and the cries of a baby upstairs, in the medals and plaques and in the larks, still bravely singing, in the letters, signed with an L and a rose petal, in the notation of war widow pensions that he finds in the house's records. It's in the estate, in the money, in the title. It's friend and foe. It's inherited in every step and breath and sigh.
He is by her bedside again, shivering and aching and frightened to the core of his bones, frightened, too, as he can taste mud and guts and blood on his lips and feel the weight and warmth on his body, pushed aside, standing aside as the family cries and he clings to the bedpost, clings to his father's hand, shakes the hand of a broken man who is following his wife and daughter and he stares at the newspaper on the sixteenth of April and he opens the letter and it changes life and death. He is the beneficiary and he survives and stands up and walks away and wakes up the next morning, heir and hero and husband.
And sometimes it grips him and holds him and shakes him awake at night, clammy and clamming and clawing, red spots like poppies dancing before his eyes and in his spine and he dreads, he thinks, he hopes that it's his turn and burden and strength slip away before being lifted and saved by her voice washing soothing phrases over him. He is alive again and home again, marked and condemned and rewarded; death on his fingers and sins on his lips and guilt in every beat of his heart.