And Again (7 page)

Cora was the one who turned me on to
Stratford Pines
in the first place. I used to silently scoff at the other mothers at the playground when they talked about their soap operas, the endless cycle of inane story lines and the stock characters who change partners more quickly than in a square dance. I was already a bit of an outsider with them, that group of blonde North Shore mothers, a clique that came together with the same pettiness and backhanded cruelty as a high school cheerleading squad. It felt good to be the smart one, the mother with a five-year plan, a half-finished master’s in English Literature from Northwestern and dreams of a doctorate. I’d palm one of the books I carried in the basket of Katie’s stroller and feel the quiet heat of my own superiority.

But when your world shrinks with the speed and ferocity that mine did, when you can no longer escape into books, you begin to understand the allure of slipping into someone else’s life for a while. And if it’s a made-up life of intrigue, of kidnappings and long lost children and lovers separated by the manipulations of others, all the better. During the eight years of my stasis, of my conscious coma, of being locked inside my own body, those characters became as dear to me as any of the friends I’d had before my accident. They became residents of a secret world, one that existed within the useless, hollow body in which I was trapped. And, as shameful as it is to admit,
those characters became the one source of comfort that I carried from my family’s house to the cold isolation of the nursing home. Not my husband. Not my children. When I was scared or sad or lonely, I thought of
Stratford Pines
.

“Did you tell them you were a runner?” Tom asks. It seems a stupid question. I was many things before I was paralyzed. None of them seem particularly important anymore. When you are one thing, only one thing, for eight years, everything that came before it begins to feel less substantial. Sure, I was a runner. I was also a toddler, once, and no one cares to hear about that either.

“No,” I reply, because it’s an answer I’m used to. One blink.

“Well, why not?”

It’s agonizing, sometimes, having Tom around so much. Tom and his questions, always waiting for me to answer with a look of expectation that makes me feel like a moth tacked on a wall, his gaze intrusive as a pushpin. I liked it better when he came once a week, a new bouquet of fresh flowers tucked into his armpit, his meager, persistent attempt to liven up the dinginess of the nursing home. I liked it when he did all the talking and never expected an answer.

Before the accident, I always imagined myself to be an ordinary sort of person. A kind person, someone with a large heart and certain perseverance. Maybe not enough to cling to a buoy or saw off one of my arms. But a good wife, a good mother. And then the settlement money from the accident ran out. Suddenly Cora’s services were too expensive. Suddenly, Tom began to talk about finding me a place where I could be cared for around the clock.

Within my first month at the nursing home, my world shrank so small that it siphoned every bit of kindness or perseverance right out of me. The cage of my body took on a terrible, crushing weight. Like being buried alive. I didn’t have four walls and a window. I had one wall, and a bit of ceiling, and a TV that was mounted there. Gone were the clouds and sunshine. Gone were Cora’s stories, and the sounds of my children running down the upstairs hallway, and the smells of garlic bread and tomato sauce wafting up from our kitchen.

The four years I spent at Shady Glen Nursing Home felt like fifty. I read once that all anyone ever truly wants out of life is more time, that the search for immortality is the basis for all human achievement. And I knew I was the exception to that rule. Time was my enemy. Time was a slow drip of agony in my IV. I prayed for infections, for fluid in my lungs, for bubbles of air in syringes. But, as neglectful as the nursing home staff was when it came to just about everything worthwhile in a life, they were uncannily good at keeping me alive. If I could have told Tom one thing during his weekly visits, just one, it would not have been that I loved him, or our children. It would not have been that I missed my life, even the scraps of it that I had in those first years after the accident. If I got a single message in a bottle, floating up from the ocean of my isolation, I would have told him to cut off my oxygen and leave me there. My world had grown so small that the only thing left to do was to leave it.

So, there it was. I was the type of person who would let go, swallow mouthfuls of seawater and sink below the surface. I would stop moving and let myself freeze to death on the side of a mountain. I would find the highest cliff on my desert island and throw myself off. And because I could do none of those things, because I was utterly powerless to change the terrible current of my pulse or rid myself of the machine that kept me breathing, I lost myself in the lives of the characters on TV. I lived for those afternoon hours, more than I ever lived for Tom’s visits, or even my own children. I drank those stories up, letting it anesthetize me like an opiate flooding into my bloodstream. I could ride for hours on that high, sometimes. I could close my eyes and write myself into their stories, touch their lovers, relish the sweet pain of their tragedies. And I understood it, finally, for what it was. It was a secret world. It was my window.

And then. And then. Two blinks.

“What did you talk about?” Tom asks, maybe because I still haven’t answered him. It’s hard to focus for too long, especially with the TV on in the background.

“I mostly just listened.”

“Well, what did the rest of the group talk about then?” Tom has a mousy quality to him now. His hair has gone thin and gray in the past few years, which makes him look like he’s in his late forties instead of thirty-five. He looks decades older, instead of three months younger than me. He looks so tired, and I wish he would go. It’s the feeling I’ve had on so many occasions, when he’d come to visit me with the kids, when the day was bright and sunny and I knew they were missing out on it because of me. I wish he would go, instead of sitting here trying to talk to me. It seems like a waste of an evening.

“I’m not supposed to tell,” I finally say, hoping that will be enough to send him out, on his way. I wonder what he would be doing on a normal Thursday, if he weren’t here.

“The kids want to see you,” he says then. I nod, because I don’t know how to answer. “Jack thinks you’re like Han Solo. That’s the only way I could think of explaining it to them. Where Han gets frozen and then thawed out? It’s the best kid-friendly analogy I could come up with.”

“Snow White,” I say, not looking at him. “Sleeping Beauty.”

“Oh, right,” he says, and he sounds so abashed that I force myself to look at him and smile, which takes some effort. It takes my eyes away from the TV. I’ve been working on smiling in the mirror when I stumble across the room to use the bathroom. It’s as if I’ve forgotten that I can smile and laugh and frown, and I’m so out of practice that I have to make the decision to smile before I do it. Nothing feels natural anymore. Nothing, that is, except lying in my hospital bed, staring at the TV that’s mounted on the wall, and wiggling my toes. Everything else feels too massive, and too terrifying. One for no. Two for yes. Things were so much simpler before.

David walks into the meeting five minutes late. Connie, Linda, and I glance up when he bangs his way through the door, his stride measured and unhurried. He pauses at Dr. Bernard’s still-empty chair.

“Good. I’m not holding things up today,” he says, to no one in particular. Connie rolls her eyes.

“Looks like you’re only the second most important person in the room this week,” I say, giving him my best faux campaign-ad smile.

“Thanks for warning me about the coffee,” David replies, his voice gruff in my ear as he passes my chair. He takes the seat next to me. “That first sip ended up down the front of my shirt.”

I stifle a laugh with my hand, and my stomach hurts at the effort. I wonder if I’ve laughed before this moment, since the transfer. I can’t remember. But the image of David spewing coffee all over himself is too good to keep a straight face. He scowls at me.

“I really appreciated that. I thought we were supposed to be in this together.”

“And I really appreciated you voting to cut funding for the NEA,” I reply.

“Ah,” he says, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms. Triumphant. “I see you Googled me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I know a few people who lost their grants after that vote. Really talented people, ones who are better than having to work at Starbucks to pay their rent.”

“Maybe they should have gone into something more useful to society.”

I feel young and whitewashed under his gaze, stripped of the
signs and markers of my roughness, the hard edges I’d chosen and cultivated so specifically. I think of Sam, the way he looked at me when we met again in college, with my dyed hair and my nose ring and my tattoos. He looked at me like I’d been melted down from the girl he knew and forged of something harder and more brilliant. Some shining metal. Now I feel like clay, barely formed.

“Like garbage collection. Or politics,” I quip.

Dr. Bernard enters before David can say anything else. The good doctor is a full eight minutes late, all apologies, waving his hand in the air as if batting away all of the obligations that have trailed him into the conference room. Connie winks at me.

“So to begin this week, I think we should explain a little about what brought each of you into the program,” Dr. Bernard says, clicking his pen and preparing to write on the legal pad that’s balanced on his knee. “David,” he says, turning toward the other man, “would you like to start us off?”

David seems less than pleased at Dr. Bernard’s little show of authority. “I can give it to you in five words or less. Metastatic brain cancer.”

“And a little about yourself, please,” Dr. Bernard replies, coaxing him like a professor in a room full of bashful freshmen.

“Well, I work for Uncle Sam. I have a wife, Beth, and a son who will be eleven in October.”

“And how are they coping with what you’re going through?” Dr. Bernard asks. David pauses, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, and then shakes his head.

“They’re fine. Beth is, well, she’s used to handling chaos. She’s excellent at it. And she knew I wasn’t going to die. She knew, one way or another, that I wouldn’t let something like that take me down.”

“And your son?”

David is silent for longer this time. “He’s fine. He’s a strong little kid. Takes after his old man that way. Right now he’s in Wisconsin with his grandparents. Beth, she thinks it’s better to keep him away from the hospital, you know?”

“And what do you think?” Dr. Bernard asks.

“I think a kid has to grow up sometime. I was never protected from anything as a child, and I don’t think my son should be either,” he says, all hard authoritarian bluster, but then something shifts in him. I can almost see the set of his shoulders soften. “Anyway, I’m his father. He shouldn’t need to be protected from me.”

I want to tell him that he’s wrong, that we are capable of such great damage, that it’s only by the grace of God or modern medicine that we haven’t ruined the lives of the people who love us. But he looks so angry, and so vulnerable in his anger, that I’m sure he already knows. It’s a startling feeling, to look at David Jenkins and see something familiar.

“That enough?” he asks. “Did I sing enough to earn my supper this week?”

“I appreciate your willingness to share with us,” Dr. Bernard replies, and I’m still too distracted by David to realize that I’m on deck. “How about you, Hannah?” Dr. Bernard says. I straighten in my chair, fumbling with all of the things that I no longer know about myself.

“I’m a graduate student at the Art Institute. A painter. I live with my boyfriend, Sam.” I falter, thinking of Lucy’s visit. “Well, I guess he’s my fiancé, now. Since I didn’t die.”

“Congratulations,” Dr. Bernard says. “What was it that brought you here?”

“Lung cancer,” I reply, trying to keep my face impassive, even as the words still feel so dense with agony that their shape is strange in my mouth. “Not the kind you get from smoking cigarettes. The kind you get from a really bad roll of the genetic dice.”

“What was that like? To be diagnosed and be chosen for the program so suddenly?”

“One minute I was dying, and then I wasn’t,” I reply, as if it is a trifle. In truth, I’ve been thinking a lot about the beginning, as if pinpointing the genesis of my illness will hold the key to how everything went so wrong so quickly. It was spring, and it was windy. I
was heading home from a class at the Art Institute as dust and dead leaves skidded along Michigan Avenue in a series of wild gusts. Hurrying, I think. Late for dinner with Sam. My large canvas portfolio was catching the wind and propelling me at odd angles as I struggled down Harrison, heading for our apartment. I ran across the street during a gap in the rush-hour traffic, the pressing itch accumulating in my chest, gaining in heaviness as I fished my keys out of my pocket. I coughed hard, breathless, doubling over. Trying to force the feeling out of my lungs. Trying to clear them of whatever had taken root there. It was the first time I wondered if it was not a lingering cold that was keeping me up at night, soaking me with sweat. It was the first time my body became a source of fear.

“I’m fine.” I smile at him, the fake smile, my first new trick in this new body. Thinking of riding the L home after the diagnosis, the SUBlife brochure in my hands, trying to read the pages through the glassy swell of my tears. And later, crouched on my bathroom floor, making the profound mistake of hyperventilating while having lung cancer, when Sam came home and found me. “I’m dealing with it fine,” I repeat, so Dr. Bernard will move on to someone else.

Dr. Bernard nods. “All right. And you?” He motions to Connie.

The bombshell fixes him with a slightly weary look. “What’s there to say, doc? I was an actress with a hell of a promising career when I shot up with the wrong people. Spent the last five years living off my Social Security checks in a rat hole of an apartment in Uptown.”