And Again (14 page)

“We sold some of it. And donated some of it,” Tom says. “But honey, this was years ago. You have to understand, we had no idea.” He doesn’t finish, but I know what he’s going to say. There’s no way he could possibly have known that I would be cured. It would be illogical to keep my things, especially when the closet could so easily be used to store an ironing board and Christmas decorations. Why keep around reminders of a wife who might as well be dead?

“Who is ‘we’?” I ask.

“Me and the kids.”

“Oh.” My family. My traitorous little family, ganging up against me. The question swings back at me again, the one I asked Dr. Bernard at the first support group meeting.

“We didn’t get rid of all of it. Some of your things are up in the attic.” He pauses, waiting for something. Gratitude, maybe? When he doesn’t get it, he continues. “We’ll get you new things, of course. Tomorrow, we can go out and get you a whole closet of new clothes.”

“Sure.” After all, what is the loss of my belongings when I’ve already faced the loss of eight years of my life? I imagine this is what it must be like for families whose houses have burned down, leaving them nothing familiar to call their own. I remember stories of refugees who would not give up their deteriorating shoes because they were the only things remaining from their old lives.
That is what I am,
I think.
A refugee.
A woman who has been so cast out of her life that she will forever be a stranger in it.

“I don’t want,” Tom begins, and then he gets choked up, wipes at his eyes. Tom has always been the one of us who was quickest to cry. It’s amusing in a dark way, how some things never change. “I don’t want you to think we didn’t miss you,” he says, his voice an octave higher than usual because of the strain of his tears. I used to find it endearing, his wealth of emotion and his willingness to display it openly. But I’ve seen him cry one too many times during the past eight years to see it as anything but useless. Pathetic, even. “We missed you every single day. If I had thought there was any chance at all that you could come back, I would have saved every single thing. But baby, they told me there was no chance. Zero. They told me there was no point in believing in miracles.”

“Right,” I say, nodding, shutting the closet door. Is this a miracle, this thing that has happened to me? I don’t know. It feels too clumsy, to fleshy and utilitarian, to be miraculous. But I don’t want to argue with him, so instead I stand there and watch him cry.

The TV is huge. It might be the biggest TV I’ve ever seen, the kind you’d usually find mounted on the walls of sports bars so a person sitting in one of the back tables can still see the game. It takes up half the living room, eclipsing most of the brick fireplace against the back wall. That fireplace was the clincher for us when we were looking at houses; we imagined ourselves wrapped in wool blankets, sitting in front of crackling logs in the middle of winter, and we made an offer on the spot. We’d actually used the fireplace only once or twice, in the years we lived here before my accident. I wonder if it’s been used at all since.

“It’s a little much, I know,” Tom says from the kitchen, when he sees me standing in front of the big black screen of the television. “It was a sort of family Christmas present last year. I might have gone a little overboard.”

It strikes me that we didn’t even have a TV when we first moved in here. Our old apartment was so small that we’d watch movies
on Tom’s desktop computer, and we’d eventually bought an ancient TV at the Brown Elephant when we decided that our kids deserved to grow up on Sesame Street the way we did. But I never imagined anything like this, not for us.

I’m delighted by it. Even the remote is gigantic, nearly as long as a paper-towel roll and twice as wide. It feels like a weapon in my hand when I pick it up. I’m endlessly fascinated by how things feel to the touch, now that I’m more able to discern one sensation from another. It’s gotten easier to filter through the chaos of sights and sounds and movement, and I’ll find myself running my hands over the wood of our kitchen table or the scratchy fibers of a knitted throw or my own skin, and marveling at the texture and temperature inherent in all of these things. My favorite thing is sticking my fingers into the container of uncooked rice Tom keeps on the counter. It’s a shivery feeling, like dipping your hand into water that’s not quite water, and I do it again and again when Tom is in another room, feeling my stomach clench every time at the sensation.

The TV remote is surprisingly heavy, and I point it at the TV with one hand and press the red button at the top with my other. The screen flickers to life, like the start of some great engine. The volume is so loud that it knocks me back and I drop the remote, which hits the floor with a plasticine pop, sending batteries scattering. I clap my hands over my ears as Tom rushes around the kitchen counter and fiddles with one of the black boxes in the cabinet beneath the TV, and the volume quiets to a tolerable level. Whatever Tom is saying is muffled through my hands, so I gingerly remove them from over my ears.

“. . . had his video game plugged in. He cranks the volume up and the whole house sounds like a war zone. I swear, I’m going to get PTSD, but he and Katie are just happy as clams.” He retrieves the remote from the floor. “Where’d the batteries go?”

I don’t really answer, because I’m still recovering from the sudden onslaught of sound. I feel shaken, like all of my nerves have been thoroughly plucked, and my palms are clammy. My heart is charging forward like I’ve had a near-miss on the expressway.

Tom kneels down to fish the batteries out from under the sofa, and then hands the remote back to me. “I’d tell you what’s on, but I figure you probably know better than I do, right?” he says with a too-big grin, as if he’s said something devilishly funny. I nod, but I don’t smile back.

As it turns out, the TV is quite the revelation. I turn it on as soon as Tom bustles the kids off to school in the morning and then departs for his job running his outdoor equipment service. It’s bright, so bright that I could probably sit with the curtains closed and hardly tell the difference. The picture has a clarity that I can barely believe; the characters are three-feet tall and I can see every line on their faces. It convinces me even more that Connie would make a terrific actress now, because even the sharpest of cameras couldn’t pick up a flaw in the skin of her face. It makes me feel proud in a possessive sort of way, as if I’d created Connie myself out of a perfect piece of clay.

More than fascinating, the TV is a comfort. I fall back easily into the pattern of my days at the hospital. First a morning talk show where four D-list celebrities and one unlucky journalist sit around the table and harp on the latest news in pop culture. Then the local news, endless reports of gang shootings and teacher’s strikes and football scores. And then the stories start, inversely ordered by quality, beginning with a half-hour show about a town on the East Coast that’s infiltrated by vampires, and ending at 3 p.m. with
Stratford Pines
, the crown jewel of the network’s daytime lineup. The sheer size of it, on the big screen, is intoxicating. It feels more real, this close up, like if I just sink back into the sofa enough I could let myself drift through the soft membrane of the TV screen into that world. My world, the one I’ve always imagined, even after the show ends and the afternoon game shows begin.

It’s difficult to sleep with Tom next to me, snoring lightly, turning over and adjusting his pillow and occasionally mumbling in his
sleep, while I remain perfectly still. Always, perfectly still. I haven’t slept in the same bed with someone in eight years. And it occurs to me one night, a few weeks after my homecoming, staring at the ceiling and listening to Tom breathe next to me, that I’m not sure if the same is true for him. The thought is short-lived though, because he turns toward me and puts his hand on my stomach. I jump, jerking so violently that I nearly knock him in the chin with my shoulder.

“Jesus,” he mutters, shifting beside me.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—” I stop talking because his hand is back, a bit heavy, brushing its way back and forth over my T-shirt.

“It’s all right.” I can smell his breath, like warm mouthwash. I don’t remember how this works. I shut my eyes and think of the thousands of scenes like this that have played in my head during the last eight years. They always seemed to be lit differently, more like candle-flicker than this darkness, brightened only by the insistent glowing of Tom’s alarm clock and the dots of light on the TV and cable box and Blu-ray player across the room. In my head it was always more passion than practicality, the way it had been so many times with so many characters on
Stratford Pines
. It was never about the fact that two people happen to be lying in bed together. It was rainstorms and torrid affairs and long-lost lovers reuniting for the first time. It occurs to me that Tom and I should belong to the latter category, but my body can’t seem to conjure the same heat or the electric thrill I remember, even from imagining it. I’m surprisingly cold, lying here in our bed, even as Tom seems to creep nearer with every move of his hand.

“I’ve been thinking a lot, these last couple of weeks,” he says, his voice a murmur, his hand testing the boundary of the bottom of my T-shirt.

“Yes,” I reply, because it seems like the correct response. Two blinks.

“Do you remember what we started talking about right before the accident?” His mouth is close to my ear now, his head in the valley between our pillows. I can’t imagine it’s very comfortable.

“Yes.” I say it before I realize that I haven’t bothered remembering much of anything from before the accident. It’s the way I coped for eight years, by not looking back. By pretending my life had begun the day before, that there was no world outside the walls of my room. No world but what I saw on TV. That was the way you stayed sane, in a situation like mine. You made yourself believe you’d forgotten your whole life.

“I’ve been thinking, maybe we should try and pick up where we left off. I mean, we don’t know how this works, this whole SUB thing. If you’re really thirty-five we could only have a few years left to try.”

“Right.”

“So,” he says, his hand sweeping down then, under the waistband of my yoga pants and into my underwear, as he presses the minty heat of his mouth into the side of my neck. I go rigid, my elbows digging into the sides of my ribs. I keep very still, as if I’m being sniffed by a wild animal and maybe I can pass myself off as an inanimate object until it loses interest. As it is, it takes longer than I’d like for Tom to notice that I haven’t moved an inch, haven’t responded to the workings of his hand.

“Am I alone in this?” he asks.

“I . . .” I’m supposed to want this, I know. But I can’t muster it, that want.

He lets out a long breath, extricating his hand from between my legs. I can’t tell if he’s angry or dejected. “I discussed it with your doctors, you know, if that’s what you’re worried about. There’s no danger, medically. I think they’re actually excited about the opportunity to see what happens. The more data the better.”

I’m still not terribly clear on what he’s talking about, but I bristle at the idea that he’s been speaking to my doctors about me. It feels too much like I’m still paralyzed, something to be cleaned and watered and fed and taken care of by others.

“I don’t want you talking to my doctors,” I say, trying to make out the fine webbing of cracks in our ceiling through the darkness.
Those are familiar, even if the rest of the room is not. Even if my body is not.

“What?”

“I don’t want you talking to my doctors without me there. I deserve to know as much as you do about what’s happening to me.”

He’s silent then. I wonder if I’ve upset him. I don’t remember ever speaking to him in such a way, when I was the old me.

“Fine,” he says, raising a hand, miming his innocent frustration to an invisible audience. He’s not a very good actor though. Connie would be appalled. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we wanted more kids. We’ve always wanted more. And now we have a chance.”