The First Husband (26 page)

Which is when I stood up.

“Melinda, thank you so much for this opportunity,” I said. “It is so generous, and I can’t tell you how much it means to me.”

She gave me her smile, beaming it right up at me.

“But I quit.”

“What?”
she said. I thought she was going to fall right out of her ballet slippers.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You deserve a better explanation than this, but I can’t give it to you right now.”

I started picking up my things as fast as I possibly could. Because that was the other thing. When you saw where the truth was, you wanted to get there as quickly as you could, before you lost sight of it again.

“Annie, do you know what you’re giving up?” she said. “If we move forward, by this time next year you’ll be a household name. Who wouldn’t love that?”

Only the person who doesn’t want this anymore, I thought. That person. That person was perhaps the only one who wouldn’t see this as the next step forward. Toward wherever forward was.

“A crazy person, I would guess,” I said. Then I shrugged, apologetically. “ I have to go.”

Five minutes later I was outside, running toward Regent Street—my phone to my ear—as I tried to make my way closer to the one person I had to tell: what I’d figured out, what I wanted most.

In the meantime, I was making a phone call. I was making a call that needed to be made. But I was relegated to voice mail. I was relegated to the voice mail of the one person I most needed to reach first.

“Hey Nick,” I said, after the beep came on. “Can you give me a call when you get this? I need to talk to you. I think I should talk to you in person, probably, but either way I need to ask you something. . . .” I started to hang up. “Oh, and it’s Annie, by the way.”

Then I went to hail a cab—to get me to my flat, and then to Heathrow Airport, to fly to Logan Airport and get myself to western Massachusetts, exactly where I needed to go—but before I could, the phone rang.

The phone rang and the number I couldn’t believe I was seeing right then—a number I was so happy to be seeing right then—came up, and then a voice I couldn’t believe I was hearing was there, talking to me, too fast.

“Annie, you need to come here, okay?” he said. “You need to get on a plane and come home.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Then, as time stopped, Jesse told me.

I
f my life depended on it, I don’t think I could tell you how I managed to get to the airport (I assume a taxicab), or onto the plane at Heathrow (I must have shown my passport, but did I have it with me? I don’t recall having it with me), or how I got from Logan Airport in Boston to the emergency waiting room at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. I probably couldn’t tell you, and wouldn’t want to see a video of the evidence.

But somehow I ended up there, in the cold, badly lit emergency waiting room, looking around until I spotted Jesse slumped in the corner with a woman I’d never seen before. A woman I’d never seen before with bright red hair I had seen twice before—on Sammy and on Dexter.
Cheryl.

They jumped up out of their chairs, out of their stupor, Jesse throwing his arms around me, seemingly relieved to have something to do, even if it was as useless as letting me know what was going on.

“It’s called status asthmaticus,” Jesse said.

My heart was pounding—I could actually feel how hard—now that I had stopped moving.

Cheryl turned toward Jesse. “Jess, don’t scare her,” she said. “Talking like that is going to scare her.”

I almost folded right there, at such a small and necessary kindness.

“Basically,” she said, keeping her voice soft and low, “it’s a serious asthma attack.”

“How serious?” I said.

“We don’t know yet,” Jesse said.

I looked down and away, as if not looking at Jesse would manage to make that part less true.

“His chest closed down,” Jesse said. “He was out cold when someone found him, in the back of the kitchen.”

“At the restaurant?”

Jesse nodded. “And the question is how long he was like that before we got to him,” he said. “We don’t know for how long. He’s been working all the time, and he just forgot his inhaler. If he’d had it . . .”

“I get it,” I said.

“He hasn’t done that since he was a kid,” he said.

“They’ve got him on a mechanical ventilator,” Cheryl said. “And he has tubes and a mask on. You should know that too. Before you go in . . .”

Then she touched my arm gently, like we knew each other. And I guess, in a way, we did.

“Is that your way of telling me it looks worse than it is?”

“That’s my way of telling you it still
is
worse than it is,” she said. “The doctor said we almost lost him. We don’t know the repercussions yet.”

This was when I noticed her. Coming into the waiting room—coming back into the waiting room—holding a tray of insipid cafeteria food. And looking worried in the way only a mother could when her child was in danger.

She drilled me with a look. She drilled me with such a look of consternation that when she remembered herself enough to give me a small smile, I knew that not only wasn’t everything forgiven between us, maybe none of it was.

And still, she cleared her throat. “We’ll be here when you come out,” she said.

It was all I could do not to rush her right then, and collapse into the tears that I refused to let come.

“I appreciate that,” I said. Then I turned back to Cheryl and Jesse. “Which way?”

Jesse pointed, and I went.

Griffin woke up slowly, and I moved from the chair where I had been sleeping to the side of the hospital bed.

He opened his eyes, trying to focus. Until he was looking at me, confused. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey . . .”

I bent down—half kneeling, half standing—an awkward half position, so we were exactly at eye level.

“They called you?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, talking low, matching his voice, trying not to look too hard at him. It felt like its own betrayal to look too hard, especially this close, at how he looked lying there. More than the tubes or the other tubes or the oxygen mask. More than the heartbeat of a machine, connected to him. His skin so pale, his green eyes weak and wrong. And I started to understand it then—what made Griffin, Griffin. That light coming off of him. What happened when it went missing.

He closed his eyes again. “I told them not to call you,” he said.

I felt that in my chest, like a punch. I got it, of course. He didn’t want this to be the reason I was back. He didn’t want this to be how I decided anything. Was this the right time to tell him it wasn’t? That I’d already decided? I didn’t think so. Because it wasn’t just about that. Maybe he’d already decided he wanted something else himself.

“Do I still get to get in?”

His nodded. “Sure.”

I slipped into bed beside him, lying down, holding closely there, my face against his chest. Listening to his heart, which seemed slow to me. But what was my basis of comparison? Why hadn’t I paid attention before, so I’d have one? This seemed, suddenly, like the most brutal thing of all.

“Do you remember what happened?” I asked.

“Some of it,” he said. “Like . . . I do remember the best and the worst thing.”

I looked up toward him, my chin still resting right there—resting on his chest again. “Really?” I said.

He nodded. “I went to the restaurant early Monday morning. A little before seven A.M. To try to do some inventory.”

“So that’s the worst?”

“That’s the worst,” he said.

“And what’s the best?”

“I didn’t have to do inventory.”

I felt myself start to smile, turning so my cheek was resting against his chest.
Almost lost him.
Cheryl’s words echoing in my head, loudly, making it hard not to turn the smile into tears. Right there. But I wasn’t going to let that happen. I wasn’t going to let myself cry.

“That is a good thing,” I said.

“I definitely thought so.”

Then, I could feel Griffin drifting—and I wrapped my arms around his chest, covering as much of him as I could.

“You look different,” he said.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Not so much.”

He paused, not saying anything for a minute. Neither of us saying anything.

“You’ll be here when I wake up?” Griffin said, finally.

“I’ll be here when you wake up,” I said.

Then, as he started to fall back to sleep, he moved in closer to me, just a fraction, just until I felt his hand on the small of my back, holding us there.

I lay there next to my husband, listening to him breathe, as if my life depended on it. And, in the ways it mattered most, it did.

I
felt someone shake me awake a few hours later—was it a few hours later? I had no clue. All I knew was that Jesse was before me again, two enormous cups of coffee in his hands. My eyes went to the clock, which read 5:08. But was it A.M. or P.M.? I had no idea, the dark hospital room casinolike, only low light coming in through the closed shades.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I have to show you something,” Jesse said.

I blinked hard, still trying to acclimate, still trying to believe this was where I was, Griffin breathing softly and soundly—thankfully—beside me, beneath me.

I shook my head, adamant. “No,” I said. “I told him I’d be here when he wakes up again.”

“He’s already woken up again,” Jesse whispered. “You’re way behind the times.”

“I am?” I blinked a few more times. “Is it morning or night?” I asked.

Jesse reached out his hand for me to take. “Come and see,” he said.

It was night. And ten minutes later, we were pulling out of the hospital parking lot and driving out into it, down Route 9 in Jesse’s beat-up car, coffees in hand, the Avett Brothers singing to us from the radio.

I turned toward him, watching him tap on the steering wheel, to the music’s slow beat.

“So,” I said. “No chance you’re going to tell me where we’re headed?”

Jesse shrugged. “What, you new here or something?”

I shook my head, smiling. “I guess not,” I said.

Then I turned back to face the road, and whatever was in front of us.

“You must have been surprised to see Cheryl in the waiting room earlier?” he said.

“I’m trying not to be surprised by anything these days,” I said.

“Too risky?” he said.

“Exactly.” Then, biting on my coffee cup’s lid, I peeked at him out of the corner of my eye. “You feel like talking about it?” I asked.

“What’s there to say, really?” Jesse shrugged. “We’re having two more.”

“Twins.” He smiled, shaking his head. “Yep, twins.”

My jaw must have been on the floor, must have actually made it all the way down there.

“What is even the statistical probability of that?”

He stopped smiling, his eyes getting thoughtful as he considered.

“Well, actually . . .” he said, “
statistically,
once you have one set of twins, I believe you are twice as likely to have a second set in another pregnancy.”

I looked at him in disbelief. “It’s amazing, because you look like a normal person,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “You’d almost believe I was just offered the associate professor position in the Department of Physics and Applied Physics at UMass.”

“UMass, here?”

He nodded. “UMass, right here.”

I shook my head. “I mean, a girl goes away for a few weeks . . .” I said.

“It’s amazing what the desire to provide for three more babies will do to your motivation level,” he said. And he was smiling so big—so proud—that I almost didn’t want to ask him about baby
three
.