Love You Hard

by Abby Maslin

  I remember a piece of advice my father once shared with me, passed on from an elderly friend who’d been married to his wife for more than fifty years. She’d just been diagnosed with dementia when Mike shook his head and told my dad, “When we got married, we made a deal. I’d be in charge of all the big decisions, and Maggie would be in charge of all the small ones. Turns out, they’re all small decisions.”

  We all laughed at the underlying wisdom in Mike’s story: that Maggie was the one who’d been charting the course all along. And I returned to those words whenever I stopped to examine the dynamics of my relationship with TC. Which one of us was in charge? Was it me calling the shots, or was it him?

  A commitment as large as marriage can be dissected into ten thousand individual choices. Do we make or break eye contact during that first conversation at the bar? Do we take a deep breath and let our feelings unfold, even with the knowledge that graduate school will keep us apart for two years? When and how do we dip a toe into the water of cohabitation? And whose career, whose desires, win out when one person wants to move forward in a direction the other person is very much trying to resist?

  For TC and me, there were never crystal-clear answers, just little messages from the gut pointing to the next baby step ahead. A series of compromises and the occasional sacrifice. The pendulum would shift in TC’s direction and then back in mine. The sacrifices always seemed to balance each other in the end. And in those rare moments when I had doubts, when staying together required frightening vulnerability, when I worried I was in it deeper than TC and that he might leave me hanging on a ledge, I chose to root my faith in the connection that bound us. I was confident we possessed that rare thing that would allow us to make it through: a relationship grounded in respect, upon which all the other delicious ingredients could stack—physical attraction, shared values, patience for each other’s irksome habits.

  If anyone asked, I imagine TC would affirm that I’m the person in our marriage who just knows. I knew I wanted to be with him the night we met. I knew we’d survive two years of distance when I moved to Philadelphia and he to Durham for graduate school. And after four years of dating, I knew that marriage and a child would delight us, not overwhelm us.

  Ironically, however, it is the little decisions that have always had a tendency to paralyze me, to send my inner compass spinning and fill me with anticipatory regret, as if choosing the pasta over the salad bar might have an irreparable impact that I’d be pondering on my deathbed.

  I wonder if Mike was right, though. Are they all small things? The pixels that make up the greater image? I may have my pulse on the big picture, but it’s TC’s compass I count on to guide me through each of the tiny brushstrokes.

  * * *

  A crime has happened in Capitol Hill, and it has happened to my husband. There are hard, unknown details around whatever transpired last night, but they continue to register only as minimal concerns on my radar. Who hurt TC is far less pressing than the bleeding in his brain right now. However, I am reminded of why we are here when I remove my cell phone from my pocket and observe a long list of missed calls from numbers I do not recognize.

  I press play on the first of the voicemails that await me.

  “Hello, Ms. Maslin, this is your local councilmember. I’m sending you my condolences. . . .”

  “Hello, Ms. Maslin, this is Ashley from your local Fox affiliate. I’m wondering if you might have a few moments to speak with us today. . . .”

  “Hi, Ms. Maslin, I’m calling on behalf of the Washington Teachers’ Union, wishing you prayers for your husband. . . .”

  Who are these people? I shove my phone deep into my pocket, disturbed by the idea that the news of TC’s attack is spreading, making its way into the consciousness of strangers. It is simply too much to process—a life that has exploded and been fed to the masses, all in a single morning. Not only is there nothing within my control anymore, I don’t have the power to rein it back in.

  I’m standing in the hallway with my mom, receiving the latest update about all the friends and relatives who are on their way, when Claire finally steps off the elevator.

  The sight of my best friend sets forth a new wave of tears, and we collide in a giant hug. “Thank God you’re here,” I breathe into her silky, dark hair.

  “Of course I’m here,” she says, as if she’s properly offended, her eyes zigzagging across my face, struggling to read all the emotions it contains.

  Throughout our twelve years of friendship, Claire and I have always said to each other, “It doesn’t feel real until I tell you about it.” This sentiment proves especially true in this moment. Seeing Claire in the flesh casts instant clarity on the situation. This is really happening, I realize with gravity as we stand hugging. TC really might not wake up. I might really become a widow today.

  I clutch Claire’s forearm and let her guide me to the hospital courtyard. The transition from the hospital’s frigid air-conditioning to the natural heat of the sun jolts me into sudden orientation. It is still August, I remind myself. It is still August 18.

  I position myself in a rigid patio chair, my arms curled around my knees. My hands are beginning to shake, and I recognize this as a more elevated state of shock. I’m safely in the company of someone who has seen me crumble before, and now all my defenses are giving way.

  “Oh, God, Claire.” I catch myself sobbing in that breathy way children do when they can no longer talk and cry at the same time. “What if he doesn’t make it? I cannot live without him. This can’t be happening.”

  Claire is quiet but responsive. Her dark brows are furrowed in concentration as I watch her try to make sense of a reality that is unimaginable to us both. Like me, Claire has lived a life of relative privilege and good fortune. We met at age seventeen, both newly transplanted to Southern Maryland. Days before I arrived as a grumpy teenager via Arizona and my dad’s new job as director of a living-history museum, Claire arrived via New Jersey and her dad’s position in the Navy.

  We were fast friends from our first “playdate,” a meeting arranged by our mothers and our younger siblings, who were enrolled in high school together. Both painfully naive and inexperienced at life, Claire and I dove into the trials of adulthood together. At eighteen, we marveled at our newfound rebellion, even when it involved nothing more daring than mixing strawberry daiquiris in the kitchen after her parents went to bed or stealing kisses from the high school lacrosse players.

  For as long as I’ve known her, my best friend has been a dreamer, apt to believe in fairy-tale endings. In college Claire was the starry-eyed English major, the devoted consumer of all the well-loved, highly clichéd love stories—Romeo and Juliet, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. Now she’s a married, stay-at-home mom to two young children, and the glittering vision of domestic life she once fantasized about is far less sparkly up close.

  I am watching as the gears in her brain begin to shift in a different direction. She’s calculating her words carefully, trying to offer support without unsubstantiated promises.

  “I know, honey,” she begins slowly. “It’s really, really bad. But you know TC. You know the kind of man he is. As hard as it is, you just have to trust him.”

  I have to trust a man in a coma? I think I understand what she means, but only because Claire knows TC almost as well as I do. She knows his insides—his gentle, warrior-like spirit. She’s known TC every minute as long as I have.

  I doubt she’s forgotten what I told her that first night. Half skipping through the parking lot of the Tiki Bar, our young bodies alive with the heat and electricity of the night, I paused before climbing into Claire’s red Volvo.

  “That’s the man I’m going to marry,” I asserted happily.

  “Yes.” Her brown eyes smiled back. And then, like a good friend, “I know.”

  If love inspires us to be a better versi
on of ourselves, Claire witnessed this phenomenon firsthand in my courtship with TC. It wasn’t that I had been a bad person before we met. I was, perhaps, pretending to be a small one. It didn’t matter that I’d grown up in a home as loving and supportive and empowering as mine. Adolescence had still managed to imbue me with overwhelming doubt. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to do big things, I began to reason. Perhaps I was meant to be beautiful and compliant and loved.

  But TC did not want someone beautiful and compliant to love. He wanted someone who was awake to the world. Someone with enthusiasm and ideas and mischievous, contagious laughter. Someone who would challenge his thinking, call him on his shit, and come knocking with fresh perspective whenever the occasion called.

  He wanted me, the real me. Not the numbed-out, boy-crazy party girl I was quickly barreling toward. And although, at twenty-two, the real me was partially buried, TC saw right into the heart of who I’d always been.

  And now, in this moment of world-shattering uncertainty, I must offer him something in return: my faith. I must believe in TC and his ability to live through today, even though every ounce of logic, science, and pragmatism points toward the possibility that our journey ends here.

  I’m just not sure I’m capable of a faith that big. I can’t talk to my husband or ask him what happened. I don’t know if he’s in pain or if he could even hear me when I spoke to him at his bedside. I try to recall Dr. Kalhorn’s words from earlier, searching for nuggets of hope, and all I can hear is his utterance about seventy-two hours. We must keep TC alive for seventy-two hours.

  “I mean it, Claire. I can’t do this without him. I don’t know how to live without him anymore. And there’s Jack. My God, Jack.”

  The little person I’ve successfully shoved from my thoughts over the past few hours comes catapulting back into consciousness. My son might actually lose his father. Of every terrible thought that has visited my brain today, this might be the worst one of all. Like a reel of film, each scene from our mundane family life begins to replay in my head: me and TC washing Jack in the baby tub shaped like a whale. TC, with his sunglasses across his face and the dog’s leash in one hand, proudly carrying Jack through the park in the Baby Bjorn. My husband and son laughing and sharing a plate of blueberry pancakes at the breakfast table.

  Suddenly I’m nauseated once more. Waves of emotion cause my stomach to spasm, ferociously grinding the leftover remnants of whatever I last ate. The vision of Jack without a father causes me to hyperventilate. My hands go numb from lack of oxygen.

  Claire coaxes me to keep breathing, but I’m lost in loud, choking sobs. There is nothing she or anyone can say to fix this unbelievable thing. I can only sit and allow the fear to wash over me like water, the first necessary step in accepting this new reality.

  She holds me, and we sit, stunned and scared—our eighteen-year-old selves silenced by the enormity of adult life and this unbelievable moment.

  * * *

  Night falls. With it brings new visitors and the departure of old ones.

  “I have to get your father home,” my mom apologizes, keeping one eye glued to my dad’s increasingly wobbly gait as they prepare to step inside the hospital elevator. Home for them is still St. Mary’s County, a good two-hour drive from here, but I don’t bother to ask if they’ll drive all the way there or crash at Jim and Moira’s house a few miles away.

  Instead, I kiss her tired face and nod when she promises to return in the morning. Then I allow myself a single, logistical thought about Jack. Tonight he will be taken care of by Ruth and Don, who have returned to Capitol Hill to put him to bed in our apartment. Children are not allowed in the ICU, so tomorrow I’ll need to reevaluate and make new plans. Beyond this, I command myself to stop thinking. For now, I must remain tethered to the present moment—disconnected from who I was yesterday and what I might become tomorrow. Not a mother. Not a teacher. Not even a wife. Until further notice, I am just a mass of energy burning through one minute and then the next.

  The waiting room empties with the exception of me, Claire, and a television set to the local ten o’clock news. She pleads with me to turn it off, but I stubbornly ignore her. I’ve been anticipating the story since this afternoon, when I became inundated with calls from all the local news affiliates.

  “Are you willing to be interviewed?” each message asked, a request that struck me as ludicrous given my tearstained cheeks, the yoga clothes I’ve been wearing for what feels like a hundred years, and my total inability to form a coherent sentence at this moment. I ignored most of the calls, giving the sparse information I have to one or two reporters over the phone before sputtering out of energy and calling it quits. I wasn’t up for being interviewed, but I was grateful to Claire for stepping up to the plate. Standing outside the hospital, she made an emotional on-camera plea to the public for help in identifying whoever hurt TC.

  His assault is this evening’s big story, and the coverage begins with an image from Jack’s first birthday, a photo I thoughtlessly agreed to share a few hours earlier and now regret, given how disturbing it now feels to see it on TV. In it, Jack is wearing a striped orange shirt as TC carries him in a backpack through the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

  I bring my hand to cover my mouth and make myself keep watching.

  “Are you sure, Abby?” Claire asks once again. I barely hear her.

  The news story rolls. Interspersed with our family photos are images of yellow crime-scene tape surrounding the sidewalk of Eastern Market, just seven blocks from our home.

  Body found . . . Eastern Market.

  “Well, it looks like he got knocked out over there,” speculates a neighbor who is interviewed. “And then he went door to door begging for help, but no one was home. He passed out over there, on my neighbor’s porch. Too bad they’re away on vacation.”

  I turn to Claire, shock spreading across both of our faces. Until now, I hadn’t known exactly where TC was found, nor that he had struggled trying to get help.

  My mind flashes to TC’s dirty feet. He was so close to home.

  I think of Spencer, who’d driven me crazy all of last night, scratching at the door, hoping to be let out. He’d never behaved with such forcefulness and frequency before, each time impatiently pulling his leash in the direction of Eastern Market. I couldn’t have walked him that far with the baby sleeping inside, so instead I shushed him quiet and marched him back up the stairs to our apartment. His insistence was probably just a coincidence. But maybe it was something more. In either case, I missed it: all the signs TC was in trouble.

  I watch the rest of the report in captivated silence, listening as one newscaster declares it a “brutal, frightening beating.” There is a rehearsed concern to his voice, an inauthenticity that bleeds through his pearly smile and perfectly coiffed hair. Across town in a shiny newsroom, these reporters speak with authority as if they know us, but they can’t possibly understand. They have not sat inside that room with me to observe TC’s broken body for themselves. Nor do they know our families, our history, or the giant bleeding wound that only vaguely resembles my heart at this moment.

  I try to push past a growing sense of violation as I continue to consume the details of my very own life. I’m using this new information to piece together a loose timeline of events. From Ryan and John, I know TC left the bar around midnight. As I was waiting for the police this morning, I checked our online banking and discovered a strange transaction made on our credit card around 12:30 A.M. from a nearby gas station. Almost eight hours later a neighbor out strolling called 911 to report TC seizing on someone’s front porch. He was brought immediately to the hospital, at which point Dr. Kalhorn says TC’s pupils were dilated and he was totally unresponsive. The brain bleeding, which was internal, originating on the left side of his head where they suspect he was hit, had spread nearly to his brain stem. A few minutes more and his internal organs would have begun to shut down.

>   Eight hours. A horrifically long time.

  I can almost see TC now: walking barefoot on the street, yelling for help, and clutching his head. His phone, if he still had it, would have been dead. I’d scolded him just before he left for the baseball game to keep it charged. But in typical TC fashion, he’s almost always without a charged cell phone, his keys, or both. Last night was no exception.

  It’s a hell beyond my wildest imagination, a vision I want so badly to be wrong. I’ve tried to calm myself throughout the day by believing TC wasn’t in any pain. The only thing I feel certain of now is that he was determined to get home to Jack.

  I am thinking all this over as Bethany walks through the door of the waiting room, a backpack slung over her shoulders, her eyes red from the tears she’s shed over the course of her cross-country flight. I stand up to greet her, unable to stop myself from bursting into tears once again. My sister is here.

  It doesn’t fix everything, of course, but Bethany’s presence feels as if a giant piece has been restored in the crumbling foundation of my life. I want her to stay, to roll out a sleeping bag beside me and promise not to leave until this nightmare is over. However, it’s getting late, and apparently I still remember some of my manners. I can’t ask her to live through every moment of this with me.

  “Please go home and get some sleep, you guys,” I insist to her and Claire.

  The two exchange quick glances and shake their heads.

  “Are you kidding me, Abby?” my sister asks, in that same offended tone Claire used earlier. I can hear the sobs welling just behind her words. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  They’ve put an end to the conversation, and secretly, I’m glad they’ve ignored my insistence they go. We return to TC’s dimmed hospital room, where the overhead lights have been switched off, and settle into the plastic armchairs beside his bed. Silently, we sip thimblefuls of red wine out of paper coffee cups—a contraband gift from the friends who picked up Bethany at the airport. In the last five hours, I have acquired several shopping bags of donations, including a change of clothes, a dozen cupcakes, sleeping pills, and a bottle of Xanax. Right now, only the wine appeals to me.