Here I Go Again: A Novel (31 page)

I tab back to Twitter.

@TheNewMrsMurphy—I think you were worth the wait, too.

No. No, no.

That’s not from his wife.

That’s from his sister-in-law.

Or his mom. Or his aunt. Because Brian did not just get married.

Karma can’t possibly be that much of a bitch.

I click over to the New Mrs. Murphy’s feed and I find the link to her Facebook page.

Unless someone is very skilled at Photoshop, it would appear that Brian and Joy were married on the weekend of our twentieth class reunion. I guess that’s why he couldn’t come.

Joy.

Her name is Joy.

I do a search on the
Chicago Tribune
Web site and I find the following announcement:

Grant/Murphy

Warren and Beatrice Grant, of Western Springs, IL, are happy to announce the marriage of their daughter, Joy Marie, of Chicago, IL, to Brian John Murphy, also of Chicago, IL.

Mr. Murphy’s parents are William and Priscilla Murphy, of La Grange, IL. The wedding took place on October 20, 2012, at the Bond Chapel, University of Chicago, with Deacon Rolf Gustavson officiating. Dinner and dancing followed at the Metropolitan Club.

Miss Grant is a 1995 graduate of Lyons Township High School, La Grange, IL, and University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, IL, where she obtained her bachelor of science and master’s in computer science. She is currently employed at Google in Chicago, IL.

Mr. Murphy is a 1992 graduate of Lyons Township High School. He also obtained a bachelor of science degree in computer science from University of Illinois, and a master’s in computer science at University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. He is currently employed as president and CEO of I Don’t Have Time for Coupon
^TM
in Chicago, IL.

The couple honeymooned in Fiji following the wedding.

I feel very detached as I toggle back to her Facebook page. I’m not sure the magnitude of this has hit me yet. Until it does, I plan to glean every tidbit I can about her life, starting with her photographs.

First, it has to be said that she’s cute. I’m not being critical when I say she’s not beautiful (okay, maybe a little), but she is cute in a girl-next-door kind of way. She has a pointy chin and round blue eyes and a bunch of corkscrew curls. She reminds me of Meg Ryan before All the Unpleasantness. She’s not particularly tall or thin but her wedding gown fits impeccably.

I wonder if
her
mom didn’t let her eat for a month before the ceremony.

Looks like she owns a cocker spaniel named Cerberus. Really? Like the hound from hell? She’s funny, too?

Here’s a photo of her at LT with the caption,
Scene of the crime!
Further investigation reveals that she and Brian met while working a computer science booth at Career Day shortly after she finished grad school.

Hey, how about a volunteer outing with her little sister, LaTonya?

Damn it, Joy, I’m having a very hard time finding reasons to dislike you.

Of course
she dressed as Princess Leia for Halloween last year. At least she’s in the white robe and not the stupid gold bikini.

And here’s the happy couple at the Guns N’ Roses show at the Allstate Arena in 2011. She’s throwing the horns in the photo.

This really happened.

Brian’s with her. And she’s exactly like him.

Game over.

I lose.

I can barely even begin to feel sorry for myself when the house phone rings. Who calls a landline? I’m in no mood for a conversation, so I ignore it. But it continues to ring, so I finally pick up on its millionth ring.

“What?”

I don’t say this nicely, either.

I’m having a crisis, okay? I think I’m allowed to be curt.

“Hello? Who is this?” The static on the other end of the line is so intense I can barely hear anything.

Right before I’m about to hang up, I hear my mother’s voice. “Lissy, come to Methodist General Hospital right now. There’s been an accident.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Empty

“This is all my fault.”

My mother has aged forty years in the course of three days. Sitting huddled on one of the unyielding chairs in the ICU waiting room, she’s fragile in a way I’ve never seen before. The shadows below her eyes are deep and dark, and her hair is matted and lank, as she’s yet to leave the hospital.

After all the time travel and alternate realities I experienced in the last month, being here is the most surreal experience of all. We’re the only family in this artificially sterile place, with its stiff, upright chairs and silk plants. The area is almost eerily silent, save for the occasional muffled squeak of the nurses efficiently whisking past us in their rubber-soled Danskos. There’s a television in here, and when I arrived this morning
The Price is Right
was playing. Hearing the audience cheer and Drew Carey cackle seemed almost obscene, so I yanked the cord. No one’s been by to plug it back in. So we’re waiting in the quiet until eleven a.m., when we’re permitted in to see Daddy.

“Mamma, this is not your fault,” I try to reassure her, holding on to her hand.

And yet I’m not entirely sure that’s the truth.

From what I’ve pieced together from eyewitness accounts, the police, and my mother’s own words, my parents were on I-55 on their way back from brunch with friends in Burr Ridge. They were arguing about the possibility of retirement and suddenly my father began to experience severe chest pains. Yet he wasn’t having a heart attack so much as terrible indigestion from too many horseradish-covered oysters from the raw bar.

However, when he took his hands off the wheel for a moment, my mother freaked out, grabbed it herself, completely overcorrected, and clipped the car next to them, which caused them to veer left and plow into an embankment on the driver’s side.

The great irony here is that Daddy would be in much better shape had the incident proven to be a heart attack and had Mamma kept her hands from the wheel.

As it stands, he’s in a medically induced coma to reduce the swelling around his brain, as he hasn’t responded to other treatments. He suffered severe head trauma and he’s covered in lacerations. His left arm and collarbone were broken and his pelvis and femur were shattered when his side-curtain air bag didn’t deploy. His firm partners are already poised to take action against the car’s manufacturer, but that’s of little comfort at a time like this. If my father recovers—and that is a big “if” at this point—his road to recovery will be difficult and he’ll likely not be mobile without assistance.

My mother doesn’t have a scratch on her.

I didn’t even recognize Daddy when I saw him yesterday, with all the cuts and bruising and bandages. He’s hooked up to a dozen machines and all of them ping and beep at different times. If he were awake, he’d never be able to rest with the noise of the machines that are keeping him alive.

“Why’d I have to start after him again?” my mother asks no one in particular. “Why couldn’t I just let him be? All he wanted was to quit working so hard, maybe travel or buy a boat, and definitely spend some more time with me. Why couldn’t I have accepted that? Now that dear, sweet man has spent his whole adult life givin’ to us and what does he have in return?”

In the past forty-eight hours, my mother has fallen desperately in love with my father. Or maybe she always was and is just now figuring it out. She hasn’t eaten or slept since the accident, and she refuses to leave the hospital, even for the briefest shower or nap. Daddy would be so overwhelmed with this show of emotion. Actually, he might even doubt its veracity. “What are you angling for, Ginny?” he’d likely ask.

My mother wraps her arms around herself tightly, as though she were freezing, even though it’s warm to the point of suffocating in here. I always wondered if people wouldn’t feel a little better in hospitals if they could just catch a breath or two of fresh air.

“Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made, Lissy. Don’t let Duke go without a fight. Tell him how much you love him and show him every day.”

I can’t argue with her right now. This is neither the time nor the place to explain to her that Duke—I mean
Martin
—is head over heels for someone else. He actually called me after his parents told him about the accident and tried to come and lend his support. I urged him not to, explaining that would only complicate matters. And when he sounded relieved, I didn’t hold it against him.

“I have so many regrets,” my mother laments. “Why couldn’t I appreciate all the little moments? Why was I so obsessed with havin’ the biggest and the best of everything? We could have been happy with less. But I drove him and drove him to do more and more and more and now what? I’ll be able to wear all my diamonds to his funeral?” She begins to sob.

“Don’t talk like that, Mamma—we don’t know anything yet.” Then I hold her until she stops.

At eleven o’clock on the dot, Rosa, my favorite nurse on staff, comes to tell us that one of us can see him now. “You go first, Mamma.”

Without even looking back, she races down the hallway to the ICU.

When she’s gone, I rush outside to check my phone. I’ve always tacitly ignored places with cell phone bans, assuming those rules didn’t apply to me. Yet now, knowing there’s an off chance that the radio waves could somehow interfere with the machines helping my father breathe? I am all about following the rules, and woe be to anyone who doesn’t. There was a pharmaceutical rep in here yesterday who made a motion toward the BlackBerry clipped to his belt, and when he saw the daggers I was staring at him, he apologized before hurrying off.

I’ve been sending Deva dozens of 911 texts since she’s been away on the hope that she may have reception. I’m not sure what she might be able to do, exactly, but for crying out loud, she can bend the space-time continuum. Stands to reason there’s some way she might help fix a critically injured old man. But I don’t hear back from her, much as I feared.

I head back to the waiting area and thumb through a decorating magazine, looking at but never actually seeing any of the brightly colored couches or funky knickknacks on the pages.

When my mother finally comes out to tag me in, she’s even paler and more gaunt than when she went in. All she can say is “No change.”

So I take my turn with my dad. I walk into his room, which is a shock each time I see it. Dad’s bed is on the end of the row, curtained off from the others in the unit, which means he has a solid wall on one side where a hopeful painting of a rainbow hangs. If my mother were in her right mind, that thing would have been placed on a gurney and wheeled out of her line of sight in the first five minutes.

Daddy’s propped in his bed at a thirty-five-degree angle. He’s covered with wires monitoring his vital signs, and there’s a ventilator doing his breathing for him. All I want to do when I see him is cry, but on the chance that he can hear me, I opt to deliver a message he’ll want to hear.

“Daddy, hi, it’s Liss. I hope you’re not too uncomfortable. The doctors are taking great care of you and they tell us you’re doing so well!” That’s a bald-faced lie, but it’s best he not understand how grave his condition is. I place my hand on his unbroken shin, as it’s one of the only areas that’s not hooked up to something or another.

“Hey, I was in your library yesterday. I found your notes for your manuscript! I can’t believe you don’t have arthritis from writing everything out longhand. You really are old-school, aren’t you? So I have a little surprise for you once you recover. I’ve been putting everything into a Word document for you; that way you’ll have an easier time when you’re ready to edit. And, Daddy? Your story is really good.”

That? Not a lie at all. His book is a legal thriller in the same vein as Steve Martini or John Grisham, but there’s a certain underlying sweetness to his long-suffering protagonist that’s uniquely Daddy. I felt like I’d won the lottery when I ran across the big box of yellow lined legal paper, covered in Daddy’s tidy handwriting. I guess he must have been taking notes for years in down moments between meetings and trials. He wasn’t going to write his book when he retired so much as simply type up what he’d already penned.

“Anyway, I also found your recipe for that special Bolognese sauce that you love. I stopped by the market last night on my way home and I’m going to teach myself to cook by making it and freezing some for you.”

I continue with my cheerful monologue for half an hour. After I’ve talked myself out, I sit with him for a while and watch the rise and fall of his chest. I wish there were something else I could do for him. I wish he could understand how both Mamma and I have come around to being on Team Daddy and, when he pulls out of this, everything’s going to change for the better.

When it’s time to switch again, I see that Mamma’s not alone in the waiting area. I recognize the people who are with her, but not in this context. One of them has dark hair and the other is slight and blond. As I come closer, I almost feel like I can’t believe my eyes.

“Nicole?”

She springs up when she sees me and wraps herself around me. “Oh, Liss, we came as soon as we heard about George.” Normally I’d be none too pleased about Charlotte’s presence, but just spotting her here in this waiting room wearing a loose pair of cargo pants and a T-shirt that’s neither tight nor covered in obscene language is one of the greatest gifts that I could receive. Nicole’s life is truly back as it should be, and that brings me tremendous comfort.