And Again (23 page)

“It’s not your size if it only lasts nine months,” I say, setting the bags down on the bed and sifting through them. It’s a mess of linen pants and oxford shirts and cardigan sweaters, all bright colors and
designer labels. The sort of thing I used to buy because it’s the sort of thing Sam likes. “What is this, the entire J. Crew catalog?”

“Until I have a little girl to shop for, you’re it,” she says, pulling a lavender blouse out of one of the bags and holding it up to my shoulders. “Just try something on, okay? Humor me.”

I take it from her as she selects a pair of tweed pants to match. I drop them on my bed and strip off my sweater and jeans right there. I can feel the heat of her jealousy as I stand momentarily in my underwear. I know what she sees, the body she once had, unaltered by stretch marks and breast-feeding and pregnancy weight gained and lost. A body that has only ever seen cold winter sunlight, a tightly wound bud yet to bloom.

“You don’t have a mark on you, do you?” Lucy asks from behind me.

“Not yet. But I’m expecting the first freckle to show up any day now.” I pull on the blouse, buttoning it halfway up and then step into the pants.

Lucy sighs, buttoning the blouse the rest of the way up and then pulling me in front of the full-length mirror. “You look lovely,” she says, gathering my hair back in one of her fists.

“Come on,” I say, to cover how much my reflection bothers me. Standing before me is the sort of bland-looking, endlessly mediocre creature I endured ink and needles and piercings and countless bottles of hair dye to blot out in my formative years.

“Sam would love you in this,” Lucy says.

“You’re probably right,” I say, stripping back to my underwear. I think of Penny when she turned to Sam in the hospital, when she looked at my unmarked arms.
Better for the country club,
she’d said. Smoothing out those rough edges. “But it’s too much, Luce. I can’t accept all this.”

“Of course you can. It’s the least I can do for you right now. I know it hasn’t been easy, coming home.” She pauses. “You’ve been back to your studio?”

“Did Sam tell you that, too?” I ask.

“He mentioned something. He said you had a fight.”

Of course, he can still talk to Lucy when he can’t talk to me. I laugh a little, a dark sound, handing the clothes back to her. “I’d say we had a disagreement.”

“It’ll get easier,” she says. It’s the sort of thing that people say like a mantra, without any conviction. Because, of course, she doesn’t know that some silences have a core, a root, and, like a weed, the silence cannot be killed until the root is torn out. Or, perhaps, she knows more about the root of Sam’s silence than she is letting on.

“Where did Sam go the weekend before the transfer?” I ask, before I can stop myself. It looks like I’ve startled her, because she steps back a bit, a slight flinch in her otherwise calm demeanor. Her hand goes to her stomach, and I know it then, that she sees this particular question as an attack.

“What do you mean?” she asks, going back to the bags of clothes and refolding them, even the ones that are still untouched and perfect.

“I woke up and Sam was gone,” I say, as if explaining to a child. “He was gone for days. I want to know where he was.” He wouldn’t have stayed away unless it was something terrible, unless the guilt was so huge that he couldn’t face me after. Deception isn’t something that comes easily to Sam. Lucy, however, is a woman accustomed to getting what she wants.

“He had the flu. You know that,” she says.
You know that.
He said it the same way, after I woke up from the transfer. You know I only stayed away because the doctors told me to. You know. I imagine how it might have happened. She cried into his shirt and he held her while I was there in the room. How might they have comforted each other when they were alone? “He was run down, Hannah. Exhausted. It was only a matter of time before it caught up to him. The same thing happened in high school, when his dad was at his worst.” She talks fast. Lucy is itching to leave, to not have to answer any more questions, and she makes a big production of checking her watch, feigning surprise.

“Shit, I’ve gotta run if I’m going to make my prenatal yoga class.
But are you sure you don’t want to hold on to these?” Lucy asks, holding up the shopping bags. How easily I could accept them. Become the woman I imagined, Sam’s perfect wife, vacant and bland as a sheen of dust. A girl with smooth edges, almost as perfect as Lucy, but for all the dark history and desperate impulses that have followed me into this new body. It’s a life I might have chosen, once. But I can’t surrender to it, not now that I’m beginning to understand the nature of Sam’s silence, of Lucy’s evasion. Now that I know what David Jenkins tastes like. There are too many things I would have to choke down, breathe around, to become a perfect wife for Sam.

“No,” I reply, trying to keep the bite out of my tone. “I’m having a hard enough time recognizing myself as it is.”

I don’t tell them about the baby. It is too colossal of a secret, too tectonic. Instead, I tell them about the accident. I want to share something, some secret with them. Because I’m awake, now.

“It was all I could think about,” I say, staring into my cup of hot cocoa, the fluorescent light of the hospital conference room turning it an olive green shade of brown. “After I woke up. Because it felt like it happened a second ago, even though it had actually been weeks by the time I came to. I don’t know if any of you have ever had something like that happen, something you wish you could take back so badly it makes your stomach ache.”

I remember that sick feeling, that swarming acidic bile that was present even though I could no longer feel my arms or my legs or my lungs. The feeling was there, even though there was nothing in my body that could feel it anymore. “I went over and over it in my head. Wishing it away. I was never really religious. I mean, I went to my mother’s church when I was younger, but I never really believed any of it. But I spent weeks asking God to give me that couple of seconds back so I could do it differently.”

David nods, looking solemn, his politician look. “I think people are right when they say he works in mysterious ways.” Connie snorts at this, but David ignores her. “He didn’t abandon you, Linda. The fact that you’re sitting here with us is proof of that.”

“Come on, David,” Hannah says. “Let her talk.”

How few words we have in our language. For instance, there is no word for the looks that Hannah and David share, the knowing antagonism, the intensity, the admonishment, the sort of shared
expectation that sparks in the air between them. It’s the sort of thing that must be observed, the sort of thing I’m good at seeing, from those years when words were of no use to me. One for no. Two for yes.

I spent endless hours in that hospital bed, trying to conjure the prayers I remembered from my childhood. My mother’s church held services in Mandarin, and I could hear strings of phrases in my head, though their meanings were no longer attached. Was I praying to God? To Jesus? To the Blessed Virgin? I didn’t know. I would have prayed to anyone who could have lifted me from that bed. I would have prayed to the devil himself if I’d known the words. But I don’t tell David this.

“I had some letters in my car that I was going to mail, just bills and things, but I decided to stop at the post office on my way home. I kept thinking that I should have stopped there before I got on the highway. But I was so anxious to get on the road, I didn’t want to take the time.”

“Where were you going?” Hannah asks.

That, of course, is the question. The one Tom has forgotten to ask, eight years later. He asked me right after the accident, clutching the rail on the side of my bed, imploring me for an answer I could not give. But by now, the importance of my destination has been diminished by so much time. I try to remember it all. My cell phone ringing. Checking the clock in my kitchen, 3:34 p.m., plenty of time to get to Highland Park and back before Tom got home from work. Dropping the kids at Sarah’s down the street, claiming last-minute errands, a couple of hours tops. Getting on the highway. Changing lanes. Once. Twice. Checking the clock on the dashboard, 3:56 p.m. Looking up to see brake lights. Close. Too close.

“I was going to see a man,” I say, raising my eyes to the room. “Scott. A friend of a friend who played saxophone in a jazz quartet. The man I was going to move in with, once I left Tom.” Something in David’s face twitches. I wonder if its disgust. Or maybe empathy. Hannah looks at her hands. Connie is the only one who meets my
eyes. It’s impossible to shock Connie. Maybe it’s even impossible to surprise her. But maybe she looks a little impressed, like she didn’t think I had it in me. Not the way I am now. “I was a good person. All my life, I did everything a woman like me was supposed to do. Track scholarship. Two kids. On my way to a Ph.D. And the one time . . .” I can’t finish, the anger of it closes my throat. I swallow, hard. “I guess for a long time, I was certain God was punishing me.”

“For committing adultery?” Dr. Bernard asks, and only then do I remember. He’s writing all of this down.

“Maybe,” I reply. “Maybe for once, just once, doing the wrong thing because it was what I wanted.”

“What happened to Scott?” Connie asks.

“After the accident? I don’t know. He never visited me in the hospital. I never saw him again.”

“Bastard,” Connie says, and she seems genuinely angry. I’m flattered she feels so strongly toward someone who would hurt me. “Fucking bastard.”

“Can you blame him?” I ask. “I was as good as dead. It was easier for the people in my life to act as if that’s what happened.”

“Not Tom,” David says. “He didn’t forget you.”

I think of Scott, our stolen hours in the backs of movie theaters and on picnic tables in the middle of the night, the scratch of the wood against the back of my thighs, the wanting so furious it made me forget who I was, made me someone new. And Tom, who came by the nursing home every weekend with flowers for my room. Who kept me as his wife long after our marriage had been ground down to powder and ash. And I wonder how anyone is supposed to understand love when it is always changing forms, each with its own name, in a language that cannot be spoken. One for no. Two for yes. How useless these words are.

I toy with the idea of telling Connie, just Connie, about the baby. Connie, who cannot be shocked. We’re walking south on Michigan
Avenue, and it feels good to be out in the open air after the claustrophobia of the meeting. It’s the time of year when everyone assures each other that this will be the last week of winter, though it never is. The wind is cold, and we’ve both got scarves tied under our chins, our hands thrust into our pockets. We look like mismatched twins, with our straight spines and our even gaits. I think maybe a person could pick a SUB out of a crowd, if he knew what he was looking for. Bodies that show no evidence of the burden of time or effort. How different I will be soon, with stretched skin and backaches and hips pushed wide. How altered, how lived-in this body will be.

“Think they’re fucking?” Connie asks.

“Who?” I say, a particularly strong gust of wind and her question nearly knocking me sideways.

“Hannah and David. All they do is make eyes at each other. They don’t argue anymore,” she says, pulling her scarf a bit tighter. “Maybe they’ve found a new way to direct all of that energy.”

“Oh. I don’t know,” I reply. This sort of gossip has always made me nervous, even back when it was the other mothers on the playground.

In the distance I hear a saxophone playing a stilted rhythm, the sound of it warping in the wind. The winter air tastes crisp and the bridge over the Chicago River shudders a bit under our feet as traffic speeds past. It’s my favorite place in Chicago, that bridge, the place where on a bright, perfect day you can see the glass of the buildings and the water shimmering in a perfect harmony of light and lack of color. It feels like heartache now, looking at it, like driving by your childhood home and finding another family living there.

“Want to stop for some cocoa?” Connie asks, motioning to Café Descartes on the corner, its windows fogging a bit from the heat of cramped bodies and the steam of espresso machines. Yes, I think. Cocoa would be nice.

“What if I had a baby?” I say. It sounds more like a question than I mean it to. Connie halts so suddenly at my words that a man in a wool coat nearly runs into her. I have to pull her forward by her
sleeve as we weave our way through the throngs of shoppers. She looks at me like I’ve said something complimentary about Hitler. All right, I’ve found Connie’s threshold for surprise.

“Why would you want to do that?” she asks, and even the smoky puffs of air escaping her mouth are lovely and delicate. But her words open up a well inside me, like pulling at a loose thread until things begin to unravel.

“We’ve always wanted more kids. We talked about it, way back before the accident,” I reply, but she shakes her head.

“You know, the more you try to convince your husband that you’re the same person as you were before, the worse things are going to be for you.” Her nose is pink and running a little, and she bats at it with the sleeve of her coat. “Christ, Linda, you just said you were going to leave him. You’re not just trying to go back to your old life, you’re trying to go back to a life you didn’t even want in the first place.”