Learning to Stay (8 page)

“I’m probably just tired. Let’s check in. I’ll come back in the morning.”

“Okay,” I say. “But isn’t Antony expecting you?”

“I’ll call and tell him we got a late start out of Madison.” Sondra turns the key and the car’s engine jumps to life, spitting warm air out the vents at us. I don’t know how long we were stopped before I woke, and I don’t realize until the heat hits me how chilled I am.

I just shrug, because what else am I supposed to do? My role here is clearly defined: copilot, banterer, judgment-free support. “Sure,” I say. “Sounds good.”

Sondra and I arrive at the Fisher House and find that the inn is nearly full, and that we’ll need to share a room. It’s homey enough not to feel like a hotel room, but strange enough to leave the impression I’m a guest in someone else’s house. Our room has two full-size beds covered by blue and brown duvets and a brown love seat that folds out into another bed. As I begin to unpack, Sondra collapses onto the one farthest from the door and closes her eyes.

By the time I finish freshening up, my stomach is protesting that it’s been fed only toast, eggs, and coffee all day. The smell of some indiscriminate food is wafting up from downstairs, which increases the insistent grumbling in my midsection.

“Want to go see what’s cooking?” I ask Sondra.

She doesn’t open her eyes. She has one hand laid across them like a 1940s starlet feigning fainting. “You go ahead,” she says. “Scope things out for me. Maybe I’m coming down with something. I’m going to lie down for a bit.”

“Okay,” I say. I prop my suitcase against the end of the bed, pop it open, and since it doesn’t look like we’re venturing far tonight, swap my dress pants for jeans and my heels for slippers. I grab my workbag, turn on the desk light, and turn off the overhead lights on my way out the door.

Fisher House has a full kitchen where people who have better cooking skills than I do can fix their own meals, and where well-wishing volunteers keep the refrigerator stocked with prepared dishes for guests who are too inept, busy, or stressed to fend for themselves. I fall firmly into the second category. A board in the foyer informs me that tonight’s selection is white chicken chili. This sounds as good as anything I could imagine.

The kitchen is illuminated only by under-cabinet lights. In the refrigerator I find a small portion of chili in a Tupperware container on the “free-for-all” shelf. When I put the container directly into the microwave instead of into a bowl, I think of how Brad would say that I’m upping my chances of dying of cancer, but at the moment my hunger exceeds my energy for worrying about future disasters. I want to eat and I want to sleep, and in between those two activities I still have a bit of work to do. If cutting out a step gets me closer to accomplishing all of those things, I’m willing to take the minute increased risk of getting sick down the road.

I eat standing up, like I often do at home. The chili goes down quickly and warms me from the inside out. Then I help myself to a Diet Coke and settle in the library to prepare a research memo one of the partners requested I turn in to him on Monday, as I was walking out the door this afternoon. I suspect it was punishment, made up on the spot, for the fact that I was leaving early on a Friday, but that only inspires me to work harder on it.

When I return to the room, Sondra is fully asleep, though she has changed into pajamas and tied her hair back with a scarf. It’s been a
whirlwind couple of weeks, chock-full of emotion and excitement and readjusting to new-old routines, and despite the nap I had in the car and the caffeine-laced Diet Coke I finished an hour ago, I am asleep, too, almost as soon as I crawl between the sheets.

In the morning, hallway noise and bright light streaming in through our room’s window wake me. I look over, expecting to see Sondra still sleeping, but her bed is empty and the linens hardly look rumpled. She must have slept like the dead.

Apparently, so did I, because it’s quarter to ten.

I assume Sondra has gone to see Antony, and I have plenty of work yet to keep me busy until she returns. I hurry off to the shower so I can get ready and finish my work before she gets back. I’ve never been to the Mall of America, and I’ve been hoping all along that we might go this afternoon. I’m not usually much of a shopper and I haven’t yet asked Sondra, not wanting to be a bother or impose any constraints on her time, but something about that megamall fascinates me. For starters, how did they get a whole amusement park inside? And what kinds of people shop there? I’m intrigued by the potential people-watching.

I’m deep in thought about the feasibility of having whole stores dedicated only to baseball or trains or magnets—in Minnesota, of all places—when I see it: a note, handwritten, and next to it a printout of some sort, like a travel itinerary.

I look at the printout. My flight leaves at five nineteen tonight. It’s not even eleven o’clock yet. I try to call Brad to let him know there’s been a change of plans, and I leave a message when his voice mail picks up. Then I call a cab.

The corridors of the Minneapolis VA Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center all look alike, awash in bland beiges, greens, and grays. The brain injury unit is quiet and many of the soldiers in it look like they don’t have a thing wrong with them. Then I pass people missing limbs, hands, eyes—big chunks of their bodies that should otherwise be there and are now disguised with gauze. Some are in wheelchairs. Some are trying out new prostheses. Some sit and stare absently, off into a future that looks nothing like the one they were supposed to be living.

I walk and walk and walk—past physical therapy rooms as big as basketball courts and occupational therapy rooms with stairways to nowhere, kitchenettes, and brightly colored mats and giant exercise balls; past bustling nurses’ stations; past the gift shop and snack counter; past patient rooms with the ambient sounds of daytime game shows and low moans. The walking feels good, as though I have a purpose.

And then a name on the board outside one of the rooms catches my eye:
A. THOMPSON
.

It could be Alex Thompson, or Andrew, or Austin. It’s a ridiculously
common name. Yet, somehow, even before I look in and see a bald, handsome man missing both his arms at the shoulders, I know this is Sondra’s husband.

He is sitting in a chair by his bed, staring out the window. He turns and looks when I knock on the doorframe. He smiles as he gestures with his chin for me to come in, but his brow is knit.

“Antony?”

He nods.

“It’s nice to meet you. I’m a friend of Sondra’s. I’m Elise.” I go to reach out my hand as I introduce myself. Thankfully, I stop my hand just in time and hook my fingers in my pocket to keep it there.

“Aw, yeah,” Antony says, “of course. She mentioned you. Nice to meet you, too.” He gives a definitive nod of his head—his new handshake.

I can’t tell if he’s telling the truth, or just trying to be nice. But I see instantly that this is the kind of guy Antony is. He wants to put people at ease.

“Come on in and have a seat,” he says. I lower myself into a stiff plastic chair near the foot of his bed. “It’s been boring around here lately. They cancelled my PT today, and I lost my roommate yesterday. It’s nice to have a visitor.”

I smile at Antony. I’m happy to break up his day. But I hadn’t actually thought this through before I knocked on his door. Was that visitor remark a dig at Sondra? Does he know she’s gone? Does he not? What am I supposed to tell him? How much?

But Antony’s a talker, and he’s off and running with conversation. I bet he can work the hell out of a cocktail party. We discuss our childhoods, why he loves the Army and Iraq, what he thinks is going to happen in Afghanistan, how Brad and I met, how Brad is doing, and what our plans are now that he’s home. By the time I look up at the clock, almost two hours have gone by. I feel like I’m
on a first date that’s gone spectacularly well. So well, in fact, that I’ve almost forgotten that Sondra is well on her way to California by now and that I’m sitting here with her husband, whom she has abandoned.

“I should get going,” I say, making a move to get up from my chair, “but thanks for a really nice visit.”

“Thanks for dropping in,” Antony says. “And don’t be a stranger. Come on by again.” He fixes me with a toothy grin.

“I’d like that,” I tell him, though I’m not sure how that would work. If he were in Madison, I’d make sure to drop on by. But I doubt I’ll be making the eight-hour round-trip to see him again.

I linger a moment, wondering whether I should say more, though I’m not sure what.

I’m nearly out the door when Antony calls after me, “If you see Sondra, tell her it’s okay.”

I turn toward him. I get the sense that she never told him she would be coming to visit in the first place. Maybe she knew this was how the trip would end. Maybe she didn’t want to admit it, or hoped that if she just got herself here, inertia would take over and keep her from leaving.

“I’m sure she’ll be by,” I say.

He’s smiling, but his eyes are as sad as a bloodhound’s when he says, “Naw, she won’t. That girl’s as gone as the day is long. They amputate more than your injured parts in here, you know. But it’s okay. You tell her that for me.”

“I will,” I say. I struggle for something to add. “Get well soon,” doesn’t quite do it. Neither does, “Take care.”

“Be well, Antony,” I say, finally. But when I do, his eyes are closed and his head is tipped back. Maybe he would signal or wave if he could. Maybe he wouldn’t.

•  •  •

The sky is dark as my plane descends into Madison, the city spread out below like a fantastic model of itself, sparkling like a million tiny diamonds with the Capitol sitting like a crown jewel among them.

As the plane taxis to the gate, I power up my cell phone and try to call Brad again. I’d like a ride, but I’d also like to have dinner with my husband. There’s a fantastic and affordable little bar–turned–Italian restaurant on the way from the airport to our house that would be the perfect place to reconnect with Brad and tell him about this surreal trip.

But his phone goes to voice mail—again, and again, and again, when I’m at the baggage claim, after I call for a cab, and as I’m on my way home in it. Weaving through the streets of Madison in the back of the cab, I feel like a tourist in the town I’ve called home for the past five years. By the time I hand over a twenty-dollar bill to my driver and tell him to keep the change, I’m fighting mad. I’ve been trying to call Brad since this morning, and he hasn’t answered or returned any of my calls. He hasn’t so much as sent a message in response.

By the time I walk into our darkened house, I’m irate.

Ever since I read Sondra’s note this morning, the one constant thought I’ve had is that I can’t wait to talk things over with Brad. All day, I imagined that he’d pick me up and that we’d stop off for a bite to eat on our way home. I’d tell Brad about Sondra, the note, and Antony, and he’d help me make sense of it all. We’d talk about how glad we were that we had dodged the proverbial bullet of those kinds of troubles. How glad we were to have our lives back to normal.

That’s what we should be doing tonight. Instead, I’m alone, eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich and watching
Jeopardy!
I have just correctly guessed the eight-hundred-dollar question (“This ex-Cowboy joined Keith Jackson and Howard Cosell on the first
Monday Night Football
telecast”—“Who is Don Meredith, Alex?”) when Brad walks in the door. His face is soft and sagging, his eyes
unfocused, and he sways a bit when he takes off his jacket. When he turns back toward me, I see a gauze bandage covering the inside of his forearm.

“My God, Brad! What happened?”

He fixes me with a blank look. “What?”

“Your arm,” I say.

He shrugs. “Got a tattoo.”

He says this as though he is telling me he picked up a pack of gum from the gas station down the street, this man who used to say that a tattoo was an outward sign of a personality flaw. Brad broke up with a serious girlfriend in college, whom he loved, because she got a tiny hummingbird tattoo on the inside of her hip.

He cocks his head like a dog trying hard to understand, and says, “You’re not supposed to be back until tomorrow.”

“Change of plans,” I say. My voice is measured but terse. I’m trying hard not to be as angry as I am. I keep telling myself that Brad didn’t know I was coming home. But I’m tired and emotionally drained, and logic is no match for my emotions.

“Sondra left. She left her husband. She left me in Minneapolis.” Saying those words aloud doesn’t make them any more believable. “Who does something like that?”