by Abby Maslin
Part II
so I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.
—Pablo Neruda
We are twenty-three now.
On our first trip together. In Puerto Rico. It is late at night, and we are edging our bodies off the side of a small motorboat in the middle of a bioluminescent lagoon. Everywhere around us it is black, the lush rain forest faintly outlined in the distance. The phosphorescent plankton shine dimly under my legs as I begin kicking. I swim close to TC.
This is romantic, I think, waiting for him to scoop me in his arms, waiting to press my body against his, to wrap my legs around his bare waist. I imagine us making love right here, in the water, quiet and discreet, careful not to draw attention from the friends we’re vacationing with or the driver of the boat that has taken us out here.
But TC’s face does not wear romance on it. He is not thinking about sex or magical plankton or the seductive darkness of the water. He is treading it instead. Kicking with more effort than seems natural. Trying to look relaxed when he is unmistakably uncomfortable.
He paddles back to the boat and grips the rail with one hand.
“You OK?” I ask gently, my tone intentionally neutral of the doubt I’m beginning to cast over his swimming capabilities.
“I’m fine,” he says quickly. “Just needed a little break.”
“OK.” I nod, joining him at the side of the boat and putting to rest my water fantasies. It hadn’t occurred to me that TC can’t swim well. We’d been swimming together before, hadn’t we? Or maybe not. Maybe in my observations of all his mastery—soccer, music, math, philosophy, running—I had assumed his expertise in everything else. With the exception of dancing, there couldn’t possibly be something TC was less skilled at than me. But now there was.
I grew up in the water. Even when we lived in upstate New York, we had a swimming pool. When we moved to Arizona, it was essential. During the summers, Bethany and I would spend every day in damp swimsuits, in and out of the water, never fully dried off, soaking our pillowcases at night with wet, chlorinated hair. Swimming was our natural state. It welcomed us like home.
We hang by the boat now, one forearm resting on the side, the other dangling in the water, as the conversation grows quiet. TC says nothing about his swimming skills. And I ask no questions. I simply keep kicking, absorbing the idea that my boyfriend is not a superhero. Just a normal, ordinary person who is good at some things and not at others.
But something in me has been gently disquieted.
I do not like to watch TC struggle.
* * *
—
And now another image.
It is late at night again, and here is TC walking on the north end of the sidewalk, heading east on North Carolina Avenue. He is walking briskly, in his maroon T-shirt and khaki shorts, double the speed he usually walks this path. But he wants to get home. His head is tired and cloudy from one too many beers. He can already see himself tiptoeing on the hardwood floors of the nursery, where he and the baby share one tiny closet, and undressing before he joins his sleeping wife in bed. He is halfway there. One, two, three, four blocks to go. And one diagonal cross through Lincoln Park, when the car pulls up alongside him.
The boys jump out quickly, faster than TC can register what is happening. They’re joking, he thinks. Dumb kids to be ignored. But no one is walking away. And now his brow is furrowed, trying to make sense of their requests.
The youngest one holds up a gun and demands that TC empty his pockets. He hesitates, quickly weighing his options. A moment later, he agrees. But it doesn’t matter. The boy knocks him in the eye with the butt of the gun anyway. TC stumbles. Another one, the leader of the group, does as he’s been taught. He takes his bat, his “Barry Bonds” as he darkly calls it, and lands it cleanly on the left side of TC’s head. Finally, TC falls.
The three young men jump back in the car and speed off. They have TC’s phone and his leather wallet, which is worn and mostly empty, containing little more than the two credit cards he allows himself to carry. They go to a nearby gas station to fill up, but they don’t know the zip code associated with the cards. It is all pointless.
TC picks himself off the ground. He knows he is hurt, but he is singularly focused. He’ll wait to get help before he tries to determine how bad his condition is. He stumbles out of his shoes, holding his head in his hands, and tries to concentrate on crossing the street. He will get home, he tells himself. He pictures the nursery again. Jack’s sleeping face, pressed up against the rail of the crib. His mop of yellow hair. His dimpled hands clutching the hem of his blanket.
He will get home.
CHAPTER 9
August 2012
Just as one day of trauma can contain the ebbs and flows of a lifetime, so too can the endless rhythm of hospital captivity. Time here passes in both a singularly linear fashion but also fluidly, causing my mind to be trapped in the four-legged position in which I imagine tourists posing at the Four Corners Monument in the Southwest.
One foot stuck in the memory of our family vacation to Germany, the image of TC nibbling five-month-old Jack’s toes as we fought jet lag in our Berlin hotel room.
One hand planted firmly in the memory of our fight a few weeks beforehand: TC insistent we didn’t have enough money for the trip, me stewing with irritation at his uncompromising practicality, choosing silence as a punishment for his lack of carpe diem.
Another foot staked in the night of August 17, when twenty minutes after TC left for the ball game, Jack broke out in hives—an allergic reaction to the red dye in his ketchup. “Should I come home?” TC had asked, after I sent him a photo of Jack’s strawberry cheeks. “No, no. I want you to have fun tonight,” I insisted, followed by my text: Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.
Every moment of those hours is now haunted, full of unignorable signs I somehow managed to ignore. Yes, come home, I should have begged. Get in a cab now. Our entire lives can be different if you just sleep in this bed tonight.
And, finally, one hand stuck to this hospital, where time is measured by the twelve-hour shifts of the nursing teams, the intervals between medication, and the precious minutes in which someone does not die.
Grief not only warps time; it makes a pitiable fool of it.
Like Klu predicted, TC did start to come back. In a slow, painful unfolding, he emerged from his coma. But it looked nothing like I expected it to, and certainly nothing like those miraculous moments I’d seen on daytime soap operas, where the character springs suddenly awake and announces, “It was Phillip who tried to kill me! Find him at once!”
When most people use the word coma, they’re referring to the type of motionless sleep that characterized TC’s first week in the hospital. In this state of unresponsive slumber, it is easy to project all your optimism and greatest hopes upon the person sleeping, to fool yourself into believing the person you love is still fully preserved, merely sleeping off the trauma of the injury. In this state, your memories of that person fill the void created by the silence in the room. In this state, your mind alone can keep that person alive.
And then he wakes. And it is no longer a coma well suited for television. You are both wakening. Him, in a way that is slow and unpredictable and highly unglamorous. You, in a way that inflates your belly with fear, increasingly unable to sustain the naivete that has kept you from collapsing in grief all these weeks. He is now raw, agitated, messy, and wild. And you can no longer pretend that he will wake whole. Or that the doctors are wrong. Or that your love is more powerful than the swing of the baseball bat that landed him here.
Here is the new reality. Here is where you both now live. Here is where the days run long and your former life ran short, where the bandages come off and the collateral damage announces itself.
There are questions begging for answers: Will he ever walk again
? Will he be able to talk? But these are not the questions you’re allowed to ask. They’re not even the questions you’re sure you want answers to, because the bargains you’re willing to make in the moment are so desperate, so reckless, you can hardly trust yourself to understand the magnitude of them.
God, if you make it so he wakes up, I don’t care if he ever walks again.
Followed by, God, if you make it so he can talk, it’s OK if he never regains his vision.
It’s a constant, evolving barter with the divine unknown. And the outcome hinges entirely on accepting the law of Wait and See.
As TC reentered consciousness, I worked to adjust my expectations, consoling myself with a two-steps-forward, one-step-back approach. Sometimes getting better means getting worse first, I contended. With resolve, I took in the two deep scars that now travel from his forehead to the back of his skull, flanked by clunky metal staples. On the left side, where the piece of his skull was removed, TC’s head swelled rapidly, causing him to resemble one of the Conehead characters from Saturday Night Live. An ugly but necessary step in the healing process. The brain must swell before it can return to normal.
The next stage was agitation. Within days of TC’s injury, doctors were already at work carefully trying to lift him from his medically induced coma, trying to achieve that delicate balance between sedation and alertness that would allow TC to awaken gradually without completely freaking out. But his distress was severe. He became uninhibited, animal-like.
“Try not to get too worried at this stage,” Mladen had warned me. “And don’t take it personally.”
For weeks, TC’s agitation has continued. While the right side of his body remains flaccid and limp, his left limbs have maintained surprising strength. With one eye open, he thrashes with his left side, kicking so hard he scoots his body almost entirely off the bed. Using his left hand, he grabs at whoever is standing nearby. More than once, he has grabbed me roughly by my wrist and pulled me toward his face. Through his right eye, he stares at me, a wily and unmistakably panicked expression emanating from his pupil.
“I’m sorry, babe,” I apologize, using my free hand to loosen his grip. And then I try to orient him. “You’re at the hospital. But you’re OK. You’re going to be OK.”
My natural instinct is to soothe, to calm TC as I would a colicky baby or a dog in a thunderstorm. But I am forcing confidence into my words. I feel no more assured than he does.
He is so unlike himself in these moments of distress, I have to remind myself it is my husband I am consoling. TC, so perfectly self-controlled all of the time, so unlikely to act in any way that would inconvenience another, now laid out like a toddler mid-tantrum. His moans and kicks are despairing. I can only imagine how terrified he feels.
At the very least, it seems my time inside the classroom is beginning to pay dividends. How many moments have I used my body to block an entryway or conjure my most soothing language in response to an upset child? I have lived this experience in my day job countless times. I just never imagined I’d be living it with my husband.
But there is no time to reflect on my own gutted feelings. My first reaction is searing empathy for TC’s distress, followed immediately by a primal loyalty that insists I must protect his dignity. I cannot allow him to thrash so greatly he exposes his genitals. I cannot allow a single nurse to walk away thinking, This man is a monster.
Instead, I will smile. I will be so delightfully cordial that these nurses will love us. I will calm TC and bring an end to his agitation. I will make the world understand who my real husband is. And, eventually, I will find a way to bring him home.
* * *
Up until Jack was born, we had a Saturday ritual. It went like this: At 8:30 A.M. or so, TC would roll over in bed. He’d touch my hair or rub my back until I groaned lightly and turned to face him. Then he’d put one finger across his lips to signal silence and shake the pointer finger of his opposite hand to motion to the dog. Spencer, the spoiled lapdog he is, would be snoring loudly on his back in that narrow crevice between our two bodies, his furry legs pointing straight toward the ceiling, his body convulsing dramatically with each deafening snore.
“Oh my God.” I’d roll my eyes, yanking on Spencer’s collar to stir him out of sleep. We’d spend the next hour and a half doting on his every distinct feature—Spencer’s furry white belly and moist snout, the curls of his floppy, black ears, and the permanent scowl etched across his face.
“Aw,” we crooned. “How can he be so ridiculously cute?”
For as long as we’d had the dog (I’d adopted him without TC’s input the summer after grad school), he’d been a verifiable baby around the house. Every night he slept in the bed, stretched out horizontally like a regular Queen of Sheba, confidently owning the damn joint, expectant that we’d navigate our bodies around him.
“I love you, but you’re the worst dog trainer ever,” TC stated emphatically on occasion. “How long did you even try the crate for? A week?”
I shrugged sheepishly. I had no defense. The summer I adopted Spencer was the same summer I moved from Philadelphia to Durham, deciding nearly unilaterally that it was time for TC and me to live in the same state. A week before I was to move south, TC packed his things for Boston, where he’d negotiated a competitive summer internship.
Spencer was my solution for keeping busy during the six weeks TC was away. He was also a bit of payback for TC’s decision to leave just as I was moving to be closer. Sometimes it felt as if TC’s ambition was so blinding, it obstructed his entire view of our relationship.
“Are you serious?” I remember asking him, both hurt and annoyed. “I’m moving all the way down to be with you, and you’re going to Boston for the summer?”
He’d been offered a great opportunity. That I couldn’t deny. But I worried that his nonchalance about leaving me foreshadowed bigger things to come. How important should a job be? I wondered. Certainly not more than a relationship, right? Or maybe I had it all backward. Our childhoods had shaped us so differently, affecting the way we prioritized our worlds. He needed financial security. I needed heart security. There were two ways to look at it: our priorities were either completely opposing or entirely complementary.
So I got a little dog, and my boyfriend, who soon became my husband and who’d always wanted a sporty dog like the border collie he’d loved as a kid, had to make do with a dainty, well-groomed spaniel instead. And he did. Spencer wheedled his way into TC’s heart; TC wheedled his way into becoming Spencer’s eventual dog trainer; and, in the process, we all moved forward. An internship was an internship. A dog was a dog. Things worked out the way they should. It was much ado about nothing, as it almost always is.
The Saturday ritual changed after Jack was born. Instead of crooning over Spencer’s white belly, we began crooning over the smiling baby staring up at us from the bed. Jack’s presence was an infusion of magic that bonded us even closer together. But now, with TC in the hospital, there is no Saturday ritual, and I hate going back to our apartment without him. TC is everywhere—in the wrinkled white T-shirt still dirty in the laundry basket, in the brown leather belt hanging across the doorknob, in the bits of dried toothpaste speckled across the bathroom mirror. But, of course, he is not here at all. And it terrifies me to sleep in this apartment without him, seven blocks from the very place he nearly lost his life.
In a very real sense, however, I have to go home. Jack has been passed back and forth between relatives for three weeks now, and I have to be a mom again. It’s time to resume normalcy. But I’d rather just imprison myself in the hospital, where it is easier to pretend I never had a different life, where each square foot is not a feature on the museum tour of What Used to Be.
I ease my way back home gradually, grateful to both sets of our parents for continuing to watch over Jack. Each day requires a revised game plan; Jack travels between his grandparents’ houses, both in Souther
n Maryland, passing the days in Ruth and Don’s giant garden and walking along my parents’ neighborhood beach. It’s better that he’s not here. And because he is only one year old, Jack’s not allowed in the ICU to visit his father anyway.
I am grateful also to my sister. Bethany returned to Portland for only a day, just long enough to pack her bags and exit her work project. Then she got on another plane back to D.C. and unpacked her suitcase next to my bed. She promises not to leave. There is no expiration date to her offer.
It’s funny. There are people you mind inconveniencing, as if you couldn’t possibly ask a favor of them, so great is your desire not to look helpless. I have plenty of those people in my life now. Old friends from Phoenix. Grad school friends from Philly. My best friends from work. Neighbors upon neighbors, most of whom I’ve never met. They offer to do it all: give us money, clean my house, cook our dinners, consult with lawyers. But I am embarrassed—on my behalf, but also on TC’s—constantly trying to brush aside their offers of help.
“You need to get over it,” Vanessa instructs me. She has become my part-time secretary over the past few weeks, fielding each new offer of help from our Capitol Hill neighbors. “It makes people feel good to know they’re doing something helpful.”
And then there are the people you don’t hesitate to make demands of. When Bethany offers to move in, I do not bristle; I beg. I will ask anything of my sister right now, and I very well do. Please return this e-mail to the cousins. Please run a load of underwear through the wash. Please take out the trash. With everyone else, I am vividly self-aware. It feels as if the world is watching. And while I’m deeply thankful for this enormous outpouring of support, I don’t want to make a misstep. But with Bethany, I do not hear myself speak; I simply let the motor of my brain run. If she’s judging me, I don’t even notice. If she’s overwhelmed, she bears it like a champ.