Grieving, Healing : He’s back at their store, back where his wife died. Working will help--he hopes.

Mike Sleiman sits still, as if frozen, behind his desk in the Lake Forest jewelry shop where he watched his wife die by a robber’s bullet, and where he was shot in the face. It’s been 1 1/2 years, but for him, little has changed.

A bullet hole remains in the carpet. His wife’s makeup still is in the bathroom, and he’s reliving the agony of that one day, but now, he says, he does it by the minute.

The Lebanese immigrant has been back at work at the Jewel Garden about a few weeks, a return he thought he’d never make--emotionally or physically--after two robbers entered on July 30, 1998, and blew away everything he called life.

Sleiman, 54, says he returned for a mix of reasons: because he needed to make a living, because his customers are some of the few remnants of his past, and because the only way his life will “be better is for me to work again.”

“It is very bad here, of course,” he says, returning from the back room where his wife died and nodding at the spot where he was shot. “But what else can I do?” He doesn’t have money to remodel. And if he works among it all, he says, it might help him gradually to see past what happened and “have life again.”

Two men pretending to be customers killed Nancy Sleiman and shot Mike Sleiman, destroying his right eye and causing mild paralysis. According to Sleiman, they asked to see jewelry, then tried to grab a tray of diamonds. They shot Sleiman and his wife as she tried to call police; Sleiman’s wife crawled to the bathroom, where she died. Sleiman collapsed on the floor.

Two suspects were arrested a month later. A Jan. 3 preliminary hearing is scheduled for Jordan Priel, 22, a Canadian national, and David Berrera Valladeres, 24, of Dana Point. A trial could follow a few months later, and prosecutors could seek the death penalty.

For Sleiman, who expects to be called as a witness, nothing less than convictions and sentences of death or life in prison will do. Otherwise, he said, he surely will close his store, pack his suitcases and drive as far as his Lincoln will take him.

“I would have to go,” he says in a tired voice.

During the time since he returned to the store in a strip mall along El Toro Road, the days have been a cascade of painful realizations. Every day, in everyday objects, there are unexpected stings: a bottle of perfume, his wife’s dusty mirror, the gray cloth chair in which she used to sit. It is difficult for him to find a safe place to sob. The police drive slowly by his shop every half-hour. That offers some sense of safety, he says, so he waves hello with a partially paralyzed right hand.

Sometimes, he says, even the police cars are difficult to bear: If he hadn’t buzzed the robbers through the store’s security door, the police wouldn’t feel as if they need to visit so often.

“Everything in the store looks the same, but everything has changed,” says Al Soueidan, Sleiman’s brother-in-law.

Soueidan, who gave up his job as a gemologist in Los Angeles to help rebuild the business, says Sleiman is grieving in slow motion, perhaps because he feels that’s the surest way to heal, but perhaps also because he is punishing himself for surviving the robbery and is surrounding himself with reminders.

His store clerk, a sweet woman with soft eyes who recently was mistaken for his wife by a customer, says he cries all the time. It is all but impossible to get him to talk about Nancy, the mother of their three now-grown children.

“I try to distract him,” Soueidan says. “I ask him questions. . . . ‘Hey, how many carats is that tennis bracelet?’ I will do anything to keep him busy so he stops thinking . . . so much.”

Customers have helped. Since Sleiman has returned, the customers--many of whom had been calling Sleiman at home, pleading for him to return, and not to let the robbers “beat you”--have come back with Christmas wishes and cards and sympathetic faces. They thank him and ask for a good deal on holiday Christmas jewels, carefully avoiding the subject of the robbery as they stand on the bullet hole in the floor.

The support of his customers surprised him, and it made him think. “I’m 54 years old. I’m a wise man now. Why should I go somewhere else? I said, ‘Let me give it a try.’ Hopefully I will stay.”

Customers also have helped him exercise his memory. After the robbery, Sleiman lay in a coma for 10 weeks because a bullet had carved a tunnel through his brain. He suffered short-term memory loss, but things are coming back in increasingly frequent flits of clarity. To suddenly remember a customer’s name at the sight of his face is a simple accomplishment that, a year ago, he wasn’t sure he’d ever do again.

Sometimes it is difficult to remember simple things, as if a searchlight in his head had been turned off to where he placed his pen or what he had planned to do next.

But even that can be good, because before his mind drifts, he is distracted again by his brother-in-law. He looks at an old customer and smiles, a lovely smile that isn’t complicated by much in the way of old thoughts.