Kathleen made no attempt to be polite; she never offered coffee or tea, or even thanked her for coming by. Fleur took to bringing coffee with her, in a thermos, and separately packed containers of milk and sugar, along with cookies that she arranged on a floral plate. Which she also brought. She was a portable concession, a coffee-shop-mobile.
She rarely asked about Terry, seeming to assume that if there was news on that front, Kathleen would tell her. Rather, she asked about Kathleen’s week, what she’d been doing, as if she had a life. And because Kathleen was proud, she found herself anticipating this question throughout the week and then developing a life in order to have an answer. She read books, knitted a scarf, watched a documentary film about turtles so that she could understand her son’s job better. These things weren’t much, but they were better than nothing, and in Fleur’s presence she offered them to herself.
Fleur days, as she thought of them, gave her weeks their only shape. Otherwise she separated the days into mornings, which she spent at home, afternoons, spent with Terry, and evenings, with
a bottle of wine. Each day was distinguished from the next only by the shift rotations of the hospital staff, all of whom she came to know by name. She asked after their kids and helped them celebrate their birthdays by eating sheet cake in the lounge.
Alone with Terry every afternoon, she played Shakespeare for him and read. She rarely spoke to him. The doctors had told her that the sound of her voice might help, but reading to him would have felt too much like pretending. She sat with him. She watched as they changed his catheter, his bandages. His skin was healing, and day by day he looked less like bruised fruit and more like supermarket poultry, naked and trussed up.
Inside the hard container of his skull, his brain was also trying to heal, she imagined, pulsing gently as it rifled through useless things—childhood memories, sports scores, Marxist theory—in search of some pure cells that would bring him back to life.
It was entirely possible, the doctors said, that he might never wake up. They spoke in measured tones of percentages and possibilities. She needed, they said, to be prepared for every eventuality. But when she pressed them for details—When do I decide? To do what? And how will I know?—they shook their heads and counseled patience.
To say that what she felt, sitting next to him, was complicated would be more than understatement. She believed, with all her heart, that Terry didn’t want her there; that he had long hated her just as she had hated him; that her presence had grown to be a burden, even the sound of her chewing, or the rhythm of her steps, inconsequential things that only married people can hate. It was as a gesture of kindness that she didn’t read to him, because surely being in a coma doesn’t erase the irritation caused by your wife’s voice. With all the troubled intimacy of their twenty-six
years together she knew this. And this same knowledge also bound them, making her come back every single day to visit this trussed chicken who had been her lover and her companion and her enemy. Because she was all he had left.
At home that night, a little tipsy, she called Dave. “It’s Kathleen,” she said.
There was a pause.
“Terry’s wife,” she said.
“Oh, right,” he said. It was ten o’clock, and he also sounded drunk. “Everything okay? I mean, how’s Terry?”
“He’s the same. Why haven’t you been to see him? You’re his best friend.”
There was another pause. “I am?” he said.
“Jesus,” she said. “Listen, I have to ask you something and I need you to be honest. For Terry’s sake.”
She had a memory of Dave, back when she and Terry still had parties, slipping a bottle of vodka to their son and shrugging afterward, saying that the longer you kept it away, the worse kids wanted it. They found poor Steve at three in the morning, puking in the park, and he swore he’d never again touch alcohol. Which was true, actually, he’d only snorted drugs, so maybe Dave wasn’t completely off base.
“Sure, anything,” he was saying now.
“Was Terry having an affair?”
“Oh, Kathy,” he said. “No.”
“I’m not asking for the reason you think I am,” she said. “I’m not
mad.
I just thought that if he was, he’d probably want her in the room, do you know what I mean? Instead of me? So I thought
it would be nice to invite her or whatever. As a …” She stumbled to find the right word, then her mind seized it, brilliantly: “A mitzvah.”
Dave, like Terry, was Jewish; Kathleen was Irish Catholic, though the question of religion was one they had always resolutely ignored. But Dave, right now, didn’t sound pleased to hear her use the word
mitzvah.
In fact, he sounded sober and annoyed. “There’s no girl, Kathy. Get some sleep.”
She told him not to call her Kathy, but he’d already hung up.
The notion of an affair preoccupied her for some time. In truth she suspected Fleur—nothing else, she thought, could explain her relentless visitation—yet there wasn’t anything in their conversations to support it; Fleur gave no indication of knowing anything more about Terry’s life than Kathleen did, and she had little curiosity about him, either. She only wanted to talk about Kathleen, her interests and opinions, her mental and physical health. She kept insisting that Kathleen had a life, against all evidence to the contrary. It was, frankly, more than a little weird.
Summer came, and Fleur left town for two weeks to visit her family in Wisconsin. Kathleen had been looking forward to this Fleur-less time for ages. Finally she would have some peace. She wouldn’t watch any DVDs or read the newspaper or knit. She would sit around in her pajamas and be miserable without interruption or witness.
It was an unpleasant surprise, then, to discover that she missed Fleur. She felt like she was going out of her mind, in fact. The days were formless, chaotic. Her visits to Terry seemed hollow because there was no one to report to about them. Her evenings collapsed
into drinking and endless crappy television—she was appalled by how much of it Terry used to watch; it was such an obvious cry for help—and she woke up at three a.m. sobbing with loneliness and despair.
Dear God,
she thought.
Fleur Mason, whom I hate, is my best friend.
When Fleur got back to town, she came over the next day. Kathleen had cleaned the house, baked muffins, and brewed coffee. Fleur took it all in stride. She described her vacation, then asked Kathleen about her family.
Instead of answering, Kathleen said, “I have to tell you something.”
Fleur set her muffin down. “Shoot,” she said.
“I was the one who took your bird out of its cage,” Kathleen said. Even as she said it she wasn’t sure why she was confessing. To kill the friendship or strengthen it: both urges commingled in her mind, her heart.
“I know,” Fleur said.
“You do?”
“You’re the only one with a key to the office. Except the custodian, and he loves birds. He keeps pigeons at home, did you know that? I also know you didn’t want to hire me in the first place, and then tried to terminate my contract in the second year.” This was true, though Kathleen had thought it was a secret. “And I know you told people my teaching was terrible and that you didn’t want me to get tenure.”
“If you know all that,” Kathleen said slowly, “why are you here?”
She steeled herself for what she was about to hear, the words like grit that would rub her skin raw.
Because I get to pity you. And that is my revenge.
Fleur laughed her too-long laugh. “Just because you don’t like me,” she said, “doesn’t mean I don’t get to like you.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Kathleen said grumpily.
“You’re smart and sensible. I look up to you. I figured whatever issues you had with me, eventually you’d get over them, if I didn’t let myself get distracted by the other stuff.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Kathleen said.
“And anyway, the custodian found Harry, so no harm done.”
“Harry?”
“My parakeet. He found Harry in the men’s room and trapped him for me. As I said, he has pigeons and knows about birds. So he called me and I brought Harry home. He’s fine.”
“Everybody thought he was gone. They said you were heartbroken.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Fleur said mildly, “to let people feel sorry for you every once in a while.”
The next day, at the hospital, Kathleen didn’t play any Shakespeare. She opened the blinds—Terry loved the sun and wanted to retire to Florida and play golf all day, after the motorcycle trip to South America—and sat next to the bed. The view was of the parking lot, where a few spindly trees played host to crows and sparrows, but at least the light was bright. She looked at her husband. The bandages had been removed, and his skin was perversely healthy, even pink. On his hands were scabs, raised like tattoos on his knuckles. His beard had grown but the nurses kept
it trimmed, so if anything he looked more professorial than ever. She put a hand on the coarse crinkle of hair on his head.
“Oh, Terry,” she found herself saying. She’d known him for so long that this familiarity, however abrasive it had become, was inextricable from love. She felt so badly for him, for everything he’d been through—a Niagara Falls of sorry that crashed through her in a torrent, flooding her voice with tears. “My heart, my love.” She touched his cheek, his shoulder, the pale skin beneath his papery gown. “Come back to me, love. Come back, please, please, come back, please, please, please.”
She spent the night at the hospital, in the chair by his bed, and when she woke up in the morning, the crows cawing outside, she saw that his eyes were open and he was looking at her expectantly, as if she were the one who had just spent so much time asleep.
It had been three months, but to Terry it was as if no time had passed. He said he felt like he’d woken up from a particularly long nap. Of the accident itself he had no memory whatsoever; the last thing he could remember was buying lunch at McDonald’s and eating french fries as he drove home. Within three days of awakening he was released from the hospital, though Kathleen drove him back every day for physical therapy for his atrophied muscles and cognitive therapy for his atrophied mind.
She had no idea whether her voice had finally woken him up, hating to think that if she’d only spoken sooner, instead of delegating all the responsibility to Shakespeare, she might have shortened his ordeal. And she was astonished to think that in spite of the bad years and all of the misery, he still needed to hear her
voice. The intensity of the grievous emotion she’d felt that night in the hospital had thinned in the morning, but she couldn’t help wondering if all the divorce talk had been a mistake, if maybe, just possibly, they still loved each other after all.
But she didn’t talk to him about any of this, just helped him get through the days. She fed him and led him to the bathroom, his shrunken body leaning sharply against hers, more connected than they’d been in years. He slept almost fifteen hours a day, and the house was very quiet. When awake, he said little and asked for nothing. He seemed tranquilized. In the mornings he sat out in the backyard, a blanket covering his knees, and listened to the birds. Kathleen had strung up feeders and houses, something he had always discouraged, claiming the house would be swamped with bird feces and noise, but he wasn’t complaining now. He was peaceful in his recovery, though it was unclear if this peace was spiritual, related to his near-death experience, or material, a symptom of brain damage. The waiting game was still going on.
It was a still, humid day in July when she brought him outside and left him to sit there in the sunlight. She was almost back inside when she heard him say something. Turning, she saw the tears streaming down his face. She could remember the exact last time she’d seen him cry, at his mother’s funeral, ten years earlier. Now he was crying quietly, letting the tears come, his skinny arms resting by his sides. He was looking up at the sky, where she saw, following his gaze, a red-tailed hawk circling high above them. It soared and swung, strong and heavy winged, eyeing whatever prey it had spotted below.
Through his tears Terry spoke again. “Pterodactyl,” he said. “Fucking lunatic.”
· · ·
Gradually, he recovered his brain, his words, and was able to walk around the house, then around the block. Still, they never talked about what was going to happen between them, if their future was shared or separate. Kathleen wasn’t even sure how she felt about it anymore. Their shared project, for now, was his recovery, just as for years their son’s well-being had been their shared project, one so hulking and important that it had overshadowed everything else.
As soon as he could, Steve flew home to visit. Next to his father he seemed gigantic and healthy. He was loving California and told them all about the turtle habitat, his apartment close to the beach, what seemed to be a promising relationship with a girl who worked in the reptile house.
Across the table, Terry gave him a benevolent, post-coma smile. “That’s wonderful, kid,” he said. “Now listen. Your mother and I are getting divorced.”
Steve laughed, thinking it was a joke.
Kathleen stared at her husband. This was typical, pre-accident Terry, not to consult or even consider Steve’s reaction, or her own.
“Sorry,” he said to her. “It just came out.”
“What the hell?” Steve said, and turned to Kathleen. “Is this for real? Are you seriously leaving him right after his accident?”
“It’s not like that,” she said faintly. She felt dizzy, as if she were floating disassociated above the scene.
“Or you?” Steve said to his father. “Is this some midlife crisis thing after the coma? You’re going to date twenty-year-olds now, to prove you’re alive?”
Terry refused to be rattled. “We planned this long before the
accident. It just set us back a little, that’s all. We know you want us both to be happy, and we think we’ll be happier living separately. It’s amicable. We’ll both always be here for you. Just in two houses instead of one.”
“Two houses. That’s all you think it is?” Steve said. The veneer of adulthood chipped off, leaving him an angry teenager, explosive and bereft. His chair scraped as he pushed it away from the table and stormed out of the house. Terry and Kathleen sat looking at each other across the table. She opened her mouth and found she had nothing, not one single thing, to say.