by Anita Shreve
She shakes her head. “He’d want to know how I was paying for it.”
“You have more jewelry,” he says in a lower voice.
“I don’t know. He’s very sharp.”
“I noticed that.”
“I’m sorry about not being able to work for you. I loved the job.”
“And I was happy to have you there. Truly.”
—
As they head for the back door, he collects his hat and pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. “This is the phone at the farm. Call me anytime. If I can’t get here myself, I’ll send someone. Below that is the number of the ambulance service. An emergency would be pain terrible enough that he can’t keep from crying out for, say, fifteen minutes; excessive oozing from the wounds; any sign of blood from the wounds; and fever. I can’t do anything for his headache today because I don’t yet understand what’s causing it. It might just be dehydration.”
“Thank you for coming. You’ve been a good friend to me.”
“I hope we’ll continue to be good friends.” He puts his hand on her shoulder before he turns the doorknob. “I want to feel sorry for the man.”
—
The doctor has left a glass with a bent straw on the mahogany dresser so that Gene, in new navy silk pajamas, can drink water without sitting up. She notices that he has given himself a sponge bath in the bathroom nearby. The good part of his face looks shinier, and his nails are clean.
“Was someone here?” he asks.
At first she thinks his brain is addled. “The doctor was here.”
“No, I mean before.”
“I don’t understand.” She sets a small blue plate with pieces of deviled ham sandwich and apple on it by the bedside table.
“I saw a razor blade on the floor of the bathroom, half hidden by the claw foot of the tub. I couldn’t bend to pick it up. Someone could cut a foot on it.”
“I’ll get it later,” she says.
“But who left it there?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, some man was here. My father’s been dead for years.”
“Gene, honestly, how would I know?”
She pulls a chair closer to the bed. Her husband doesn’t smell as bad as he did before the doctor came. “Do you need a toothbrush?” she asks.
“I need it all.”
She holds the straw to his lips.
—
After Grace has played cowboys and Indians at Claire’s request, she returns to Gene’s room and sees him struggling to get out of bed.
“Here, let me help,” she says. She lifts the blanket and sheet away from him. He pushes himself off the bed with his right hand. There are stains on the sheets.
“What do you want?” she asks.
“What do I want?” he says when standing. “I want to be a normal human being again. I want to go back to work. I’d like to take a shit in a toilet. I’d like to sit at a table and eat a bowl of soup. I’d like to not have to worry about moving in a certain way and causing pain. I’d like my face back. That enough?”
Gene’s bitterness, however well earned, could eat through walls.
—
He says he wants to walk into the parlor because he’s sure he left something there. Again he moves ahead, and Grace obediently follows.
“There!” he says. “I knew something was wrong.”
“What is it?”
“Why’s the piano in here?” he asks.
She glances at the piano, gathering dust. Grace has no choice but to lie and lie and lie. “I thought it was always in here.”
“No, no, no, no! It was on the second floor. In the turret. Just off my mother’s bedroom.”
“Are you sure? Who would put a piano on the second floor?” she asks.
“For crying out loud, I should know. I took lessons on it for years. I know this house a lot better than you do.”
“Of course,” she says.
—
The business with the bedpan is awful. He tells her how to prop him up with pillows under his head and back and knees and to put the pan under him and to go away and close the door. Grace does as asked and wants to walk straight out the front door and not stop until she falls down.
—
The sight of her children as she puts them to bed is a flicker of joy in a dim cave. She gathers them around her on the floor and sings a dozen verses of “Hush, Little Baby,” making up the lyrics as she goes along. From the corner of her eye, she sees her mother scurry about folding laundry and picking up toys. Grace sings until the children feel heavier in her lap, and with her mother’s help, she carries them to their beds. She would like to lie down on the floor between the children and have her mother float a blanket over her.
—
Amy arrives at the house with an enormous green suitcase full of supplies. For the first time, Grace sees the extent of Gene’s burns along his torso and hip and upper thigh. Her gorge rises. Keeping up a constant chatter, the nurse instructs Grace how to clean the burns, let them air-dry, apply iodine or Vaseline where necessary, take his temperature and his blood pressure, examine the skin, bathe the back of his body, and help him dress himself. She leaves a list of instructions next to the supplies.
“Now the hard part,” Amy says. “He has to stay as flexible as he can without cracking the protective layer of skin he’s building up. That’s why I’ve put the Vaseline on so heavily. Later, we’ll dab it off.”
She turns and addresses Gene. “Do you want to be able to sit on a chair?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to be able to get down onto the floor and play with your children?”
“Oh, come on,” he says, “what’s with the interrogation?”
“I need to know how badly you want these things, Mr. Holland, because if you really, truly want them, you’re going to have to work hard.”
Grace watches as Amy lays Gene flat on his back in the bed, which already causes him some pain as his left side comes in contact with the sheet. She takes hold of his left leg with one hand on his calf and one on his knee. She bends the knee and pushes it toward his face, in and out, in and out. Gene grits his teeth. Whatever Amy does to one side of Gene’s body, she does to the other. She has Gene scoot down on the bed. After he has done so, she climbs onto the bed up by the headboard and asks him to lift his head and shoulders as high as he can. As soon as he rises off the sheet, she gets her arms and her full weight under him and slowly angles him higher and higher until he is nearly at thirty degrees from the flat surface. He cries out and tries to turn and hop off the bed.
“Grace, hold his legs down by the ankles.”
Grace leans over the footboard and pins her husband’s feet to the bedspread.
When Gene’s cries reach a certain pitch, Amy lets him rest. Grace hopes her mother is on the third floor with the children and the door shut.
“Good work, Mr. Holland,” she says. “We’ll rest a minute and give that another try.”
“The hell you will.”
“Do you want to be able to sit on a toilet one day and get rid of the bedpan, because really, that is what this is all about. You getting back your independence. So do you want that?”
“I guess so.”
“No, I’m serious, Mr. Holland. Do you really want that to happen?”
“Jesus Christ,” he says in a louder voice.
“Then bend your head and shoulders as far up as they will go, and we’ll give this another try.”
Without being told to, Grace grabs her husband’s ankles while Amy repeats the process. Grace knows she’ll never be able to do this therapy for Gene, both because she can’t hold his feet and push from behind at the same time and because she doesn’t have Amy’s strength. After the third exercise, Gene says to Grace, “Get that bitch out of here.”
—
“You’re going to have to toughen up.”
“I don’t have your strength.”
“You’re afraid of him,” Amy says
as she puts on her heavy wool coat.
“I’ve always been afraid of him,” Grace confesses.
“Do you want him on a bedpan the rest of his life? Because if he remains as he is for much longer, he won’t be able to sit up ever. It’s been way too long as it is.”
Grace wraps her arms over her head.
“Listen,” Amy says, “you’re going to have to find something within you that can do this. It’ll take a solid month of misery, and if all goes well, each day will get better and better. Be a drill sergeant now, and later you can love him.”
But I won’t, Grace wants to say. I won’t love him.
—
Grace becomes an unwilling nurse during a string of days that in themselves seem endless. A routine is established. Grace wakes early to prepare Gene’s breakfast before he makes his way into the kitchen and eats it standing up. Hard-boiled eggs and toast pieces serve him well. Her mother knows to keep the children upstairs until seven-thirty, when Grace spirits Gene back into his room or to the sofa in the sitting room. Mindful of his pain and boredom, she tries to carve the day into three separate sections: mornings, during which she sometimes reads the newspaper to him or lets him lie by himself in the sitting room; afternoons, which are devoted to physical therapy (for the first several days until she could convince Gene to cooperate, Grace had to call in her mother to hold his feet down, episodes that made her mother cry after she left the room); and evenings, which he spends back in the sitting room with a plate of finger food beside him. Often, Grace joins him. They remain silent while she knits or sews, or he asks her questions. She can hardly comprehend that the room in which she unwillingly sits with her damaged husband is the same place in which she came to love Aidan Berne. Such utter happiness then, and now such despair.
—
Grace’s duties as her husband’s nurse and her sense of having lost whatever freedom she once had cause her to be exhausted nearly every evening. When she climbs up to her bedroom (her bedroom now, not Merle’s; Grace has at least earned that), she clings to the banister. Her mother’s comments that she needs to take better care of herself, that she is letting herself go, that sometimes her clothes aren’t even clean, haven’t helped. More and more, Marjorie remains on the third floor with the children, descending only to cook lunch and dinner. It has not escaped Grace’s notice that her mother is a prisoner, too.
—
Winter hints at spring, not by temperature, but by the quality of the light. The stolen minutes Grace sits huddled in her winter coat on the back steps give her hope. Is she really any worse off than the dispossessed women of Hunts Beach, or than the women who had to nurse injured loved ones back from the war and transform them into husbands?
—
“We thought if we dug a trench wide enough, we could stop the fire in its tracks,” Gene explains, and Grace nods. “We were stupid. None of us had ever had any experience with fire. We were just following orders from the fire department. The idea was to keep the blaze from reaching town.” He opens his eye. “Can you prop me up again?”
Grace lifts his right side so that he is straight up against the back of the sofa but at a forty-five-degree angle with pillows behind his shoulders and back. They have to achieve ninety degrees for him to sit in a chair, beyond that if he is to get up and out of a chair. The progress is slow and often there are setbacks.
“We’d been digging all day and into the night when we felt an east wind, so we stopped for a break. We thought we were saved. We didn’t leave our post though because we’d been told to stay put. Can you put that extra pillow there behind my neck?”
Grace stands and maneuvers the pillow until he nods.
“We were pretty sure a truck would be coming for us with food and coffee if not a lift back to our homes. And one by one, we began to sit on rocks or against tree stumps, and I remember that I dozed off. I woke to shouting.”
As Grace had, with Claire’s cries.
“When I stood, the fire had crested Merserve Hill and was roaring its way down to us. Balls of fire tumbled down the hill, hitting trees, missing others, and the wind behind the fire was ferocious. I remember thinking that fire was really pink and red, not orange. Within minutes we could feel the heat and see animals running around us for safety. Two of the men ran with the animals, the others stayed with me. Then I felt Jack dragging on my sleeve and shouting at me to go with him, to get out. I shook my head. I had another idea. I could see that behind the wall of fire the earth was black—the fire traveled that fast. Tim and Jack dug holes in the ground knowing they couldn’t outrun the blaze. When it got too close to bear, I saw a space about the length of a truck and ran through it as fast as I could. My mistake was not having something to cover my head. I felt intense heat and knew my sleeve and hair had caught fire. I panicked and stumbled and tried to put out the flames by slapping them. I fell onto my left side, the ground so hot I couldn’t bear the pain. And then I fainted.”
“I’m so sorry,” Grace says. No other words will do.
—
The crocuses emerge, purple and white, and are soon joined by the bright yellow of daffodils and forsythia. As she explores the gardens, Grace’s spirits are buoyed by the greening lawn, the buds on the fruit trees, and the stalks of tulips breaking the soil. After the winter months, the soil will produce a bounty of surprises with flowers blooming every day or every week, small gifts for Grace. She will see the buds, but won’t know their color until days later. She wonders if the lilacs are deep purple or lavender or white. She has no idea what shapes and hues the roses will have. Soon she’ll be able to bring in bouquets to freshen the house’s stale smell—an odor worse than stale that she suspects emanates from Gene, no matter how much she launders his sheets and clothes.
—
Gene has remembered the name of the insurance company and even the salesman’s name. Grace calls and explains their situation, which is near destitute. But when the claims adjuster comes to the house and looks around, he’s reluctant to discuss benefits. Grace points out that the house is not theirs, they have no money for food or clothes, that Gene can’t work, and the enormous tank of fuel oil is empty. Should they have a series of cold days, she doesn’t know what they would do. In addition, she says in a strong, clear voice, her husband who was burned in the fire needs medical attention they can’t pay for. When the salesman has the nerve to suggest that she sell some of the obviously expensive pieces of furniture, she raises her voice. Does the adjuster have the paperwork? Yes, he does. Did Gene Holland ever miss a payment? No, he did not. Fine, says Grace, they need the money to build a house, to which they are entitled, and they need additional sums in order to be able to eat and clothe themselves. She is firm, she will not be moved. But it’s only when Grace brings the adjuster in to see Gene during a moment when he isn’t wearing his eye patch that the adjuster writes her a check for seventy-five dollars to bridge the gap until another man from the insurance company arrives with a much larger check.
—
One morning, after Grace has made her bed, she stares at the smooth covers, the sheets taut beneath them. She kneels on all fours and pounds her fists into the coverlet. She bangs and slaps until her hands hurt. She stops and looks at her fingers. She tries hard to remember what she felt when she and Gene were courting—there is no other word to describe the decorous study dates and walks into the hills, where occasionally they lay down together. She can’t now recall a single word of love. One of them must have said something. On the day they married?
—
Gene grows oddly querulous, as if he, too, were filled with barely concealed rage. One might imagine his anger a result of having met such an odious fate, but Grace suspects his rage has something to do with hers. Gene is as much a prisoner as anyone in the house, more so because of his disabilities. His only outlet is his wife, who cannot take on the burden of his constant pain, his helplessness. One day, when she starts the physical therapy, telling him to raise his head, he refuses.
“No,” he says.
“What do you mean, no?” Grace asks.
“I’m not going to do it.”
“Just today or forever?”
“Forever.”
“If you stop now, you’ll undo all the good that therapy has done you. A year from now, you won’t be able to accomplish the simplest thing.”
“Maybe not, but you can do it for me, can’t you?” he points out.
“You want me to wipe your ass for the rest of your life?”
Grace snaps away from Gene, at least as horrified as he by her own revolting question, her cynicism, her anger. But she won’t tell him she is sorry. She leaves the room with the realization that her statements to him will get uglier and uglier, that they could so easily spiral out of control. And who would get hurt? The children. Pretty soon, they’ll be able to hear what goes on in the library, the sitting room, the kitchen. She puts her forehead to the wall. She doesn’t want that for Claire and Tom, for them to have to hunch their shoulders at a raised voice, to have to pretend not to hear an obscenity, to want to absent themselves from their parents, which in time will mean not wanting to be in the house. She has done a good job with the children so far, especially with her mother’s help, but she doesn’t know if she has the self-discipline to keep it up.
—
Grace thinks of hiring a day nurse, which would free at least eight hours to be with the kids. If she could manage it, she’d hire a live-in nurse so that she would see her husband in the way the children do—during lighthearted visits. And though she can afford to hire such people, Gene will want to know where the money has come from. Since they have received only seventy-five dollars from the claims adjuster, he will quickly figure out that she is selling items from the house to pay for the nurses. She doubts he knows about the jewelry, unless Merle often wore it in his presence. Still, he would needle Grace, and life would become even more impossible than it is. She might one day hit him, a thought that appalls her. Or simply let him fall to the floor. So easy to do. She has had to catch him when he lost his balance at least a dozen times since he arrived.