Once More With Feeling Read online

  Even if he did still happen to be married to me.

  And because I was still his legal wife, his official next of kin, I had to sit in his little hospital cubicle when his team of doctors appeared every morning and involve myself in his care. I had to ask the right questions and make sure I absorbed and understood the answers, especially after Carolyn announced that she was too fragile to do so. I had to be strong for her and her child, too, no matter how nauseous the idea of either of those things made me. I had to sign all the forms, and give all the necessary permissions. I had to hold his hand when the nurses were watching, because I worried what they would say about me if I didn’t, and then I hated myself for caring about something like that, something so small and vain. I had to act as if I hadn’t finally noticed that everything that had ever mattered to me was gone, after all.

  Had been gone, in fact. I just hadn’t known it. Which, of course, made it that much worse.

  But even worse than that was the part of me that liked the fact that I was the one who was Tim’s caretaker. He might have slept with my sister, impregnated her. The two of them might have been planning a glorious, romantic future steeped in happy domesticity and a pack of kids. But I was his wife, and I was a good wife to him. Deep inside, I took a surprisingly fierce measure of pride in that. Perhaps because I knew that in the tending to his needs, in the navigation of the legalities and choices necessary to shepherd him through the tragedy that had befallen him, I got to spend long hours in that hospital pretending that he was still mine. The way he was supposed to be.

  I lost track, somewhere in the whirl of endless days cooped up in the waiting room or in Tim’s cubicle, back and forth between the two without end, of what I wanted. Of who I was, certainly. Of what had been happening before the accident and what was likely to happen on the other side of this, should we all make it through. It was as if, in the face of such a crisis, everything else that seemed so important when things were normal just melted away and allowed for the delicate act of crisis management to occur. Not that there was anything delicate about all of this sitting and waiting and being there in the brief stretches of visitation permitted under ICU regulations. It was a grim and exhausting act of endurance, complicated by worry and tension and, of course, Carolyn.

  Who hovered. And cried. And cried. And who clearly felt better, now that she’d confessed her pregnancy to all of us and half the hospital. Or more secure in her position, anyway. She might not have been capable of subjecting herself to the messy medical details of Tim’s care, but she took to her role as the soon-to-be mother of his child far too easily for my taste – a fact that alternately made me pity her and want to smack her.

  ‘I feel much too pregnant,’ she said one morning, shifting in her chair and holding her stomach, just to illustrate the point. ‘Just … nauseous. And thick.’

  It was clear to me that this statement was for my benefit, even though she was pretending to address my ever-frowning father. I glared down at the novel I’d been toting around as if I planned to get some reading done while my life shattered all around me, and pretended the sentences before me made some sense. In case I missed her reference, she clutched at her still-flat belly and let out a little moan. Next to her, my father looked disapproving, but, as always, remained silent.

  ‘I haven’t actually thrown up,’ Carolyn confided to the stale air in the waiting room, polluted with the scent of old coffee and despair. The latter undoubtedly mine. ‘But I feel like I might. Even though I’m starving. All the time.’

  Was she labouring under the impression that her child – the one she’d made on my bed, with my husband – was an appropriately neutral topic? Knowing my sister, she probably did. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I found myself, for the first time in my adult life, actually taking my mother’s advice. I got up, left the room without further comment, and walked.

  In whatever direction I could go, as long as it was away from the pregnancy narrative I’d rather claw off my ears than listen to for a second more. Away from Carolyn and her inability to just stay quiet despite the fact that her very presence felt like an affront to me. Just – away.

  I walked with no clear intention or direction. I loitered aimlessly in the gift shop, fingering the listless, insultingly bland gifts on display. I did a few laps around the glossy main lobby. Eventually I found myself heading towards one of the many glass entrances to the hospital. I wandered outside, and found the clear, shockingly cold December day crisp and bright and exactly what I needed. It was horribly, numbingly cold. But beautiful, even so. A hard sort of beauty, icy and inhospitable. Light bounced up from the hard-packed mounds of ploughed snow in the parking lot and along the walkways and danced from the ice left behind on the bare tree branches. I walked to the edge of the shovelled walkway and stood there, just breathing out clouds into the cold, staring out over one of the parking lots and into the glittering trees of the next block.

  I had absolutely no idea what the hell I was doing here.

  I was clinging so hard to my position as Tim’s wife … for what? To what end? So I could deliver the remains of my marriage into Carolyn’s hands the moment Tim woke up? What was my plan, exactly?

  The baby thing killed me. It actually … ached. It hurt in ways that surprised me anew with each harsh breath. Because you don’t know how much you want things until they’re taken from you, do you? Until someone else takes them from you.

  Tim and I had had a plan. We had always had plans. We’d made up a checklist for our life together and we’d taken great pleasure in ticking things off, one by one. Our own house – check. Our own practice – check. We’d planned to start trying for a baby in the next year or so, now that the practice was on its feet and doing well. It was the next chapter in our beautiful life, the one we’d plotted out together all those years ago in New York. I’d thought we were still on the same page. I’d thought we still wanted the same things.

  I’d wanted his babies, if only in the abstract, and now I understood that would never happen. Not the way we’d planned it. Carolyn hadn’t just stolen my man. She’d stolen my future children, too.

  It was one thing to try to accept that he’d had the affair. Another to try to get past the fact that he’d had it with Carolyn, of all people. I thought I’d been doing a fairly good job with that – though Lianne had claimed only yesterday on the phone that I was in denial. But I’d been prepared to take him back when the infatuation passed. I’d been more than prepared. Then, that long first night here in the hospital, I’d assumed that the accident would serve as a wake-up call to him, as these things often did, according to myth and legend. I’d assumed that it would wrench him – us – back from this particular cliff.

  But all the things I’d thought were based on the assumption that once he came back, everything would be as it was. That we could just … erase these past months. Pretend they’d never happened. Carry on as before.

  A baby made that impossible, now and forever. Even if he and Carolyn were over. Even if he came back to me. There would always be that child. The physical manifestation of everything he’d thrown away, everything he’d done.

  That poor kid, a voice inside me whispered.

  And I had no idea what to do with that. What it meant. I only knew that I was cold straight down into my bones, in ways that had nothing to do with the December weather, and there was no hope, now, that I was ever going to thaw.

  The waiting room was, happily, empty when I returned.

  I took the opportunity to claim the most comfortable seat on the small sofa near the anaemic-looking potted plant in the corner. I had just settled into it and was trying to rub heat back into my hands when Carolyn walked in.

  Alone.

  It occurred to me that this was the first time we’d been alone since That Day.

  I didn’t have any idea how I should feel about that, and from the looks of it neither did Carolyn.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She blinked as if seeing me threw her for a l
oop. Did she think I’d finally given up and gone home? Who knew what stories she told herself? I was sure they were epic. ‘Dad just left. We didn’t know where you were.’

  I fingered the edge of my book’s paperback cover, feeling it thicken and round slightly. I looked back at her, but I didn’t respond. She settled herself gingerly in one of the ubiquitous blue chairs, and I tried not to let myself concentrate on what seemed like such a deliberate attempt on her part to appear fragile. Maybe early pregnancy did that to you. I wouldn’t know. And, thanks to her, probably never would. She was growing a brand-new life inside of her while my life had hit a wall …

  I ordered myself to ease my death grip on my book, before I hurt myself. Or mangled the book itself into pulp.

  ‘I really appreciate what you’re doing,’ she said in a low, deliberate voice. ‘You’re making this all go smoothly and I know you don’t have to do that. I just want you to know that I’m grateful. I know Tim will be, too.’

  I hated her so much in that moment that if she’d been even an inch closer to me I would have launched myself at her. I almost went ahead and did it anyway. I’d never raised my hand to another person in my life, but I wanted to pummel my sister’s face in. I wanted to make her hurt. I could feel a throbbing sort of violence in me that I’d never suspected existed, flooding through me like wildfire, making my pulse race and my breathing go dangerously shallow.

  ‘I know it doesn’t seem like it now,’ she continued in the same quiet way, clearly meaning every single word, wholly unaware of the danger she was in, ‘but some day, all of this will be behind us and no matter how messy it all seems, I think we’ll all agree that it was for the best. I really do believe that.’

  I hated her so much I thought my head might explode from it. So much that my throat felt like it was on fire, as if I’d ripped it to shreds with all the screams that hadn’t passed my lips. I felt consumed by it. Altered by it. I couldn’t believe she couldn’t see it distorting my face.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, patting her own knees with her hands, as if to congratulate herself on such a good little speech, ‘I wanted to make sure to thank you.’

  I sat there, frozen into impotent, furious immobility, because I knew if I even blinked I would try to choke her to death. With my bare hands, the very ones that shook slightly now. I sat there and watched her settle back against the chair, and pull out some cheerful magazines to wile away the time. She didn’t seem to have any trouble reading. She didn’t seem to have any trouble at all. She was stealing every single thing I loved about my life – she’d done it before I’d even known to look, before I’d had any inkling there was any danger – and now she was thanking me for my witless help in letting her go right ahead and do it.

  And I wasn’t beating the life out of her because I was worried about making a scene. I was pathetic.

  It was clear to me then, as all of that violence and fury sloshed around inside of me, making me feel sick to my stomach, that I knew nothing at all about my life. Not really. It had gone completely off track, and I hadn’t even noticed it was happening. I’d been wandering around in some dream of what it should be for far longer than I wanted to admit. Clearly. Carolyn had been making babies with my husband while I had been … what? Defending horrible, over-entitled rich kids like Benjy Stratton – arguing that they should be allowed to continue driving drunk through the streets? Fantasizing about winning the ongoing war with my office manager? About yoga classes and pastries? What kind of life was that? It seemed to me now, surrounded by the truth of it, of its sad detritus, that I was almost criminal in my own obliviousness.

  How had this happened? How had I become … this?

  ‘I can’t remember why I didn’t go on that backpacking trip,’ I found myself saying out loud as Tim lay there in his cubicle, still so unresponsive, the same machines still surrounding him, their little sounds almost like background music to me now. The beeps and sighs, the scrape and squeak of nursing shoes on the linoleum out in the hall. ‘Do you remember? I was going to take a leave of absence and see the world. Just me and a backpack, and maybe a journal to write in.’

  This was the first time I’d actually talked to him. Out loud.

  I’d felt too self-conscious before – as if it would have been too forced, too much of a performance, too much the sort of dramatic thing I was sure Carolyn would both do and be really into, and what would I say, anyway? The wild need to harm Carolyn physically had faded somewhat, but my horror at how blind I’d been about my own life had only grown more intense as the hours ticked by in this latest endless day. I frowned, not sure why I was talking now, and folded my own hands hard against each other in my lap.

  ‘I wanted to wander,’ I told Tim, all my grand plans coming back to me in a rush, all the nights I’d spent poring over maps and guidebooks, all the websites I’d visited and travel journals I’d spent hours upon hours reading.

  My college room-mate and I had taken a much less ambitious trip the summer after we’d graduated from NYU, before we started at the positions we’d been sure would lead us into our glorious futures – me as a legal assistant in the law firm I hoped would get me into a good law school and Brooke in the publishing house where she dreamed she’d one day be an editor. We’d spent a month wandering in Costa Rica, and it had been life-altering in ways I’d never been able to explain to anyone who hadn’t had the same kind of experience themselves.

  I’d planned my own, much more involved and intrepid journey, all through law school – all over Australia and New Zealand, then up into Africa and India, or maybe Japan and China to start, I could never quite decide – and even after I’d taken a job that no sane person could possibly have turned down in one of New York’s top law firms, I’d told myself I was only putting it off for a little while, not cancelling it altogether. It had been the major defining dream of my twenties, that trip.

  But in the end, I’d never taken it.

  ‘I wanted to go on a safari in Botswana and sleep beneath the sky,’ I said, as much to remind myself as to Tim’s prone figure on the bed before me. ‘I wanted to get lost in Hong Kong and eat foods I couldn’t identify in Budapest. I wanted to drive the Great Ocean Road in Australia. I wanted to spend a Christmas in Prague.’

  Tim’s machines offered the only response, in wheezes and beeps. He stayed still. Silent.

  When had I given up on that particular dream? I couldn’t really remember. I couldn’t recall making any kind of conscious decision to stop working towards my big trip. It was as if, once Tim and I had started dating when I was a brand-new junior associate, I’d just shifted all of that attention and blistering focus to Tim instead, and the trip had sort of stopped being important.

  Not that I’d thought about it that way. Not in so many words. Not at all, really. But the more we’d spent time together, the more it seemed to make sense that I should focus on other things – like the careers we were building, rather than formless dreams of knocking around the planet by myself, for no other reason than I thought it would be fun.

  And Tim and I took our own trips. Together. New England in the fall, to marvel at the autumn leaves. Napa. St Croix. To more on-the-beaten-path places, perhaps, but they were still places worth seeing. It was still travel. And then we’d gotten engaged, some six months after we’d started dating, and I’d thought it all made so much sense. We had plans. We were ambitious in exactly the same ways, for exactly the same things. We made a checklist and we both wanted every single thing on that list.

  And we loved each other, of course. That most of all. We’d gotten married eight months after that, because, like I’d heard all my life, when you knew, you knew. And I knew. Tim was like a key finally turning in just the right lock.

  I’d been so sure.

  I let my eyes travel over Tim then, taking in every detail of his poor, struggling body. He was paler than I’d ever seen him, and the more he lay there, so quiet and so still, the more he seemed to diminish. Sometimes I sat right here, in this
ever more uncomfortable chair, and wondered what would happen if he never woke up at all. Would he just disappear? Would the bed swallow him whole?

  Would I disappear with him?

  The fact that I didn’t know how to answer that last question shook me. Hard.

  ‘I wanted to be a public defender,’ I said then, my voice sounding surprisingly loud in the small, curtained-off area. ‘I can’t remember if I ever told you that.’

  I must have, surely. In the very beginning, if never again. I had never planned to stay at that fancy, high-blooded firm for long. I’d wanted to pay down my school loans, that was all, not surrender myself to the notorious ‘golden handcuffs’ that chained so many young lawyers to the big corporate firms. But it was as if I were reading him a story – as if I were talking about some fictional character, not myself. As if I had no emotional connection to my own memories.

  ‘I wanted to save the world,’ I whispered, and it was true, though it made me feel something too close to embarrassed to say it out loud, after all this time. Now that I was older. In my thirties. Settled. I should know better than to think there was anything one person could do to save the world. I could hardly think up a way to save myself.

  But I remembered that wildness inside me, that feeling that the sky wasn’t big enough to hold me, or all the things I wanted to do. I remembered when it seemed as if all the songs spoke to hidden pieces of my soul, and that deep-down conviction that there was greatness out there, waiting for me, if I could just find it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt that way. Or anything close to it.