A Stranger in the Mirror By Sidney Sheldon

Only Toby.

It was as though Jill were possessed. Her clothes hung loosely on her, but she had no idea of how much weight she had lost or how she looked. Her face was thin and drawn, her eyes hollow. Her once beautiful shiny hair was lusterless and stringy. She did not know, nor would she have cared.

One day Jill found a telegram under the door asking her to phone Dr. Kaplan. No time. The routine must be kept.

The days and nights became a Kafkaesque blur of bathing Toby and exercising him and changing him and shaving him and feeding him.

And then starting all over again.

She got a walker for Toby and fastened his fingers around it and moved his legs, holding him up, trying to show him the motions, walking him back and forth across the room until she was asleep on her feet, not knowing any longer where or who she was, or what she was doing.

Then, one day, Jill knew that it had all come to an end.

 

She had been up with Toby half the night and had finally gone into her own bedroom, where she had fallen into a dazed slumber just before dawn. When Jill awakened, the sun was high in the sky. She had slept long past noon. Toby had not been fed or bathed or changed. He was lying in his bed, helpless, waiting for her, probably panicky. Jill started to rise and found that she could not move. She was filled with such a bottomless, bone-deep weariness that her exhausted body would no longer obey her. She lay there, helpless, knowing that she had lost, that it had all been wasted, all the days and nights of hell, the months of agony, none of it had meant anything. Her body had betrayed her, as Toby’s had betrayed him. Jill had no strength left to give him anymore, and it made her want to weep. It was finished.

She heard a sound at her bedroom door and she raised her eyes. Toby was standing in the doorway, by himself, his trembling arms clutching his walker, his mouth making unintelligible slobbering noises, working to say something.

“Jiiiiiiigh…Jiiiiiigh…”

He was trying to say “Jill.” She began to sob uncontrollably and she could not stop.

 

From that day on, Toby’s progress was spectacular. For the first time, he knew he was going to get well. He no longer objected when Jill pushed him beyond the limits of his endurance. He welcomed it. He wanted to get well for her. Jill had become his goddess; if he had loved her before, he worshiped her now.

And something had happened to Jill. Before, it had been her own life she was fighting for; Toby was merely the instrument she was forced to use. But somehow, that had changed. It was as though Toby had become a part of her. They were one body and one mind and one soul, obsessed with the same purpose. They had gone through a purging crucible. His life had been in her hands, and she had nurtured it and strengthened it, and saved it, and out of that had grown a kind of love. Toby belonged to her, just as she belonged to him.

 

Jill changed Toby’s diet, so that he began to regain the weight he had lost. He spent time in the sun every day and took long walks around the grounds, using the walker, then a cane, building up his strength. When the day came that Toby could walk by himself, the two of them celebrated by having a candlelight dinner in the dining room.

Finally, Jill felt that Toby was ready to be seen. She telephoned Dr. Kaplan, and his nurse put him on the phone immediately.

“Jill! I’ve been terribly worried. I’ve tried to telephone you and there was never any answer. I sent a telegram, and when I didn’t hear, I assumed you had taken Toby away somewhere. Is he—has he—”

“Come and see for yourself, Eli.”

 

Dr. Kaplan could not conceal his astonishment. “It’s unbelievable,” he told Jill. “It’s—it’s like a miracle.”

“It is a miracle,” Jill said. Only in this life you made your own miracles, because God was busy elsewhere.