Howie was awake. He turned off the heater and blower. He looked over at me and said, “We’d better start wrapping ourselves up in the back seat.”

He picked up the bottle and handed it to me. I was so tired I could not even lift my hand to take it. He took the cap off and put the glass to my mouth. I swallowed some of it but some spilled. Then he took a drink and screwed the top back on.

He told me to go to the back first and when I attempted to, I found it very difficult. My head was telling my body to move and it was not getting the message. I felt extremely exhausted with no power over my body at all. I was numb.

Howie attempted to help me but when he put his left hand under my right arm to lift me, he hesitated, looking sadly at my face and before I knew it he was caressing the side of my face with that hand.

“Sissee….,” he whispered. “What do…..I have to do….to get you back?”

I tried to move my head away but he kissed me more passionately than he had ever done before. My arms were free but they did not work. I could not get them to move. I went totally limp.

In retrospect my mind goes fuzzy when I try to piece together what happened next. In fact, I can not give a real account of what happened at all. What I do remember comes in fragments, not always sequential and nothing was for sure.

I think we must have managed to get to the back seat and he continued to kiss me and I was too out of it to protest. Then somehow I got strong images of Bette and I in bed, making love. I swear she was right there with me. I could not feel him but I could feel her and then what was me feeling her was me strangely sitting down in a theater audience, away from what was happening, watching she and I make love on a movie screen. It was crazy. As a spectator I was smiling and clapping with approval and then, “The End”, flashed on the screen and I became inconsolably bereft. She was gone and I became frantically lost and afraid.