The Man She Married

by Cathy Lamb

  They hug me, hug my dad and Zack, and they hug each other.

  My dad leads them in song, his voice echoing down the hallways like the Deschutes River, thundering and full. The lyrics might not have exactly matched my situation, but he has them all singing “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor and “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees and “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton. My dad has taken the time to write down the lyrics and make copies so, as he says, “she can hear all of us clearly. Now sing loud, friends.”

  Oh, they sing loud. Loud enough to wake the dead.

  It feels like a family reunion sometimes in my hospital room.

  I grew up in eastern Oregon in a small home on a hill with a full ceiling of sparkling stars and views of towering blue mountains and a lake in the distance. I loved boating, hunting, bonfires, canoeing, tractor driving competitions, hiking, and country living.

  I left because Lake Joseph was too small. I was the girl whose mother had run off, the “motherless child, poor dear. You know how Jocelyn was. . . .” Cluck, cluck, cluck. My mother left me and that made me feel “not good enough.”

  I was the girl who had a reputation, along with Chick and Justine, of being wild. Our pranks were famous, as were our arrests by Justine’s father, the police chief. My dad and I struggled for years financially in that town when disaster struck.

  I wanted to leave that part of my life behind. I wanted to live in the city, I wanted an education, and my own business. I wanted to put my mother behind me.

  But maybe I have gotten too far from myself living in the city, working all the time, concrete and traffic and noise. Maybe I need to return to people I’ve known all my life, who obviously thought I was “good enough,” because, look, here they are, in my hospital room, hours away from home.

  Some friends here in Portland who I thought would come and see me have not. Where are they? Is it even a friendship if you don’t show up when someone’s life is in pieces? I don’t think it is.

  Lake Joseph is a town where your business is their business. Even if you move to the big city, your business is still their business, and right now my business is that I’m in a coma so they come and make it their business.

  It’s very touching, their company. Inside, I tear up.

  And this is what I realize: I have missed them. All of them.

  * * *

  My poems continue, as I cannot hold numbers in my head.

  Natalie has a skeleton face.

  There is nothing nice about this place.

  She lies in bed attached to tubes.

  Look out, world, she has no boobs.

  Her face is pale, like a ghost.

  Her breathing is bad, worse than most.

  She’s alive in here, to all she screams.

  But what she does is have bad dreams.

  Oh, heck, no. It’s my mother again. She comes a couple of times a week. I call it Mother Monster Time.

  She cries a little. Sniffles. She’s upset. I feel my heart soften a tiny bit. She is my mother. It would be horrifying to see your daughter in a coma.

  “Hello?” She leans in close to me, her voice loud, as if she’s trying to wake my brain up with volume. “Hello in there, Natalie? Can you hear me? It’s your mother.”

  Oh, I could hear her. Like a foghorn.

  “It’s. Your. Mother.”

  She sighs.

  “This is very upsetting for me. Very. Upsetting.”

  She sighs again. A groan sigh.

  “Dell is here, Natalie. Say hello, Dell.”

  Dell, my mother’s fifth husband, says hello. He’s older than my mother by ten years. Rich rancher. Working the land his great-grandfather worked. He doesn’t deserve my mother, as in, he’s a good man and doesn’t deserve the hell I’m sure she puts him through and will put him through in the future when she strips him of his money in the divorce.

  He says he’s so sorry this happened, they’ll help me. I can come and live with them, he’ll do anything for me—

  “That’s enough, Dell. Why don’t you go to the cafeteria and get me some white wine. Zinfandel. Do you mind?”

  No, he didn’t mind. I doubt he’ll find wine in the cafeteria. I wish they would give me white wine through my IV to get me through this visit, though.

  I hear the door shut. My mother dismisses people when they irritate her.

  “Dell has a lot of money, Natalie, so I had to overlook a few things. Like his weight and his face.”

  Dell does not have a bad face. Poor Dell.

  “And I had to overlook his obnoxious son, who doesn’t like me at all. I mean, his son told his father, in front of me, not to marry me. The nerve of that boy.”

  Dell’s son is not a boy. Dell’s son, Ryan, is nearing forty. I met him. He has four kids, one adopted from Africa, and a cool wife, and he runs the ranch with his father. Ryan and Mattie have a home on the property. I can totally understand why Ryan didn’t want my mother to marry his father. He knew how this was all going to go down. The marriage would end in divorce. My mother would ask for a lot of money; she might well ask for part of the family’s land.

  Or, way worse for Ryan, he would work the ranch and my mother would be married to his father when his father died and she would decide to stay in that beautiful home Dell built and he, Ryan, would have to deal with my mother and share with her information about the ranch, the financial statements, employee stuff, etc., as an heir to his father’s estate.

  I get ya, Ryan. I get ya.

  “Ryan said I was only after Dell’s money,” my mother huffs. “I told him a thing or two. But I do think that Dell is going to buy me a Mercedes. I put a picture of a Mercedes on his desk. I’m hoping he’ll get the hint.

  “I am mad about something, though, Natalie, and I didn’t talk to you about it before because you will rarely return my calls and because I did not need you telling me that I didn’t need to get married again. But, here it is: Dell made me sign a prenup!”

  She is outraged. Inside, I’m laughing. If laughter could make you wake up from a coma, I’d be awake.

  Dell is a smart man then, and not blinded by love or my mother’s manipulations. My mother is a multimarried tarantula on the lookout for easy money and he knew he had to protect his great-grandfather’s land for his son.

  “I get nothing if Dell dies except for one hundred thousand dollars. Nothing! But Dell said if I didn’t sign it that we wouldn’t get married. He said a whole bunch of lame drivel about this being his great-grandfather’s land. It was to go to his son and his son’s kids. He said that his son, Ryan, that cow herder, that tractor-driving potato, was instructed in the will to buy me a home off the ranch after he died. Honestly, I was so furious I broke up with Dell!”

  I laugh again. Breaking up was simply a manipulation tactic.

  “I only got back together with him two weeks later because of my love for him,” she declares, so irritated. “My love for him. Dell. My husband.”

  Translation: Dell had called her bluff and she’d crawled back to him.

  She sigh-groans again. I hear her sniffle. “Whatever, Natalie. I’m just talking here. The doctors told me to talk to you, that you might be able to hear. But the truth is, I’m filling up the space between us.” She sniffles again. “We had space between us before this happened but now the space is so . . . so wide. So awful. Natalie . . .” Her voice cracks. “I have missed you. Every day.”

  I’m touched. I can’t help it. She is my mother.

  I feel her lean in and touch my hair. “But, my God, Natalie. Your hair looks awful. I’ll tell the nurses to wash it. We’re not white trash.”

  She’s appalling, she is.

  She makes a small gaspy noise. “And this is hard on your father, too. You know he’s still in love with me. Never gotten over my leaving him.”

  She is dense and clueless.

  “I do love you, Natalie, and I want you to wake up. I have yelled at all the doctors to make you wake up. They damn well better do it, too, or I will
sue them from here to next Tuesday and they’ll end up living in tin trailers or sheds or their rat-trap cars and they’ll drive banged-up trucks that don’t work and they’ll have to raise chickens to eat and they’ll freeze in winter and pick berries for money when I’m done with them.”

  Wow.

  I hear the doctors talking later about my parents. “The father is reasonable, rational. The mother . . .”

  “Definitely a personality disorder there . . .”

  Yes. I would agree.

  I try to choke back my fear that the man who dropped off the twisted Barbie will come back. I have enough to be worried about right now. But who is after me? And how deranged do you have to be to carve someone’s initials into Barbie’s too-skinny stomach?

  That’s the worst part, right there.

  I wonder if I will ever go home. I wonder if I will ever return to the home Zack bought and remodeled in the hills above Portland before I married him. I want to hold my grandma’s ornate perfume bottles, my china teacups with the pink flowers, and make sure my plants haven’t died. I want to see the hummingbirds my dad made me out of metal hanging in a corner of our family room and all my embroidered pillows and my books and the oak tree in our backyard.

  I don’t miss the neighborhood—it was too ritzy for me—and I do not want to see one neighbor, Melinda, who hit on Zack, ever again, but I miss the love in our home between Zack and me. I miss our bed, soft and warm and piled with comforters and pillows.

  Suddenly I have a vision of lying naked on top of Zack and smiling at him. I smiled at the memory and then . . . what? That couldn’t be. Zack wasn’t smiling back and he said something . . . upsetting. Was it upsetting? What was it?

  I can feel myself being pulled into sleep inside my coma. Either that or I’m being pulled into death. I never know which one until I wake up again.

  It’s rather unnerving.

  * * *

  “Mr. Shelton, Mr. Fox, I know this is very painful for you.” It’s Dr. Tarasawa talking.

  “ ‘Painful’ is not the word for it, doctor.” That’s my dad talking.

  Dr. Tarasawa, Dr. Hopeless, and Dr. Doom tell my husband and my dad what I have heard before when they are not in the room: They don’t know why I haven’t woken up. There may be irreversible damage. They can’t guarantee I’ll wake up. Something is wrong and they don’t know what it is.

  “We need to talk to you about Mrs. Shelton’s prognosis now and what her life will be like in the future if she wakes up.”

  “You are not to let her die.” That implacable statement comes from my husband, Mr. Shelton. No one specifically said, ‘Let her die,’ but we all hear it spoken implicitly.

  “Sir, can we talk to you again about the scans. . . .”

  “I said no.”

  My sexy husband again!

  “Mr. Shelton—”

  “I know my wife. She’s a fighter. She will not give up and die. She’ll battle this out.”

  Sexy husband has a lot of confidence in me. I wish I had it in myself.

  “Hell no,” my dad says. “Double hell no. You are not to pull any plugs anywhere at any time or do anything with your fancy-dancy medicine that will bring on the death of my daughter. I will get some donkey-kicking, bone-crunching attorney in here to sue your asses. If I have to stand next to my daughter with my. 45 every hour of every day to protect her life, I will. Do ya get what I’m sayin’?”

  I hear the silence from Dr. Tarasawa, Dr. Doom, and Dr. Hopeless. I know what the silence says: The husband and father are in denial about this situation. We see it all the time. No one wants someone they love to die. They gently throw out some more medical information, and Zack says, his voice ringing with fury, “That’s enough. Get out.”

  The doctors get out.

  So, my life has been spared. At least for a little while.

  My poems continue:

  Natalie cannot walk.

  She cannot talk.

  She cannot sing.

  She cannot ding.

  Natalie cannot dance.

  She cannot prance.

  She cannot fart.

  She cannot throw darts.

  The fart part of the poem ended up being untrue. I did fart that night. I heard it. Inside, I laughed at my own fart. This is how pathetic my life is. I waited to see if I farted again. When it didn’t happen, I found that sad.

  Sad, about my farts.

  PART II

  Chapter 6

  I opened my eyes early the next morning.

  No one was in my hospital room. I studied the place I had lived in during my Coma Coffin. How long exactly, I didn’t know. The days and nights ran together, confusing and blending, a spiral of fear and loneliness.

  It was a typical hospital room with light mellow-yellow walls. I studied the machines I was hooked up to.

  I didn’t want to see a mirror, so it was fortunate that they didn’t have one near me. I was afraid that if I caught a glimpse at my undoubtedly pasty and deathly face I might fall back into a coma.

  But then I laughed. It was raspy, hoarse. It sounded like a frog’s screech. But I heard it. I could hear and I could see. I was not blind, as I’d feared.

  I was awake. I was no longer in my Coma Coffin.

  I breathed in, then out, then in again. I blinked. I moved my mouth open and shut. I tried to wiggle my nose, and I did it. I told my fingers to move, and they did. I told my toes to move, and they did, too; then I gave the same orders to my legs and arms.

  I could move and wiggle.

  I paused on that for one immensely grateful moment.

  I was alive. I am alive. And I could move.

  I laughed again. It sounded more croaky than before. But, to me, I sounded like a symphony.

  The door opened, and Zack walked in. I was stunned. He was a muscled, tight, tall man. Not fat, but the man was built like an oak tree. He had lost a ton of weight, his clothes hanging on him. His face was grayish, his light green eyes sporting bluish circles underneath them, his mouth drawn. He looked as if he’d aged ten years.

  I was a semi-corpse/coma-stricken woman who had come back to life, and my husband had beat Father Time by aging rapidly. We were quite a pair.

  He came and sat down heavily beside my bed in a chair and took my hand. “Hello, baby,” he said, his voice rife with hopelessness and grief. I watched him check the machines, check me, then those green exhausted eyes caught mine.

  I blinked at him through a film of hot tears. I tried to smile. My lips worked a tiny bit, but they became stuck on my dry teeth. I tried to talk, but I couldn’t. There was something wrong with my throat; it felt stricken and clogged with tears.

  Zack was completely, utterly shocked. His face froze, and I blinked again. I tried to smile more, a real smile, less like an odd reptile and more like a woman, like a wife.

  “Natalie?” His voice broke, and a desperate, raw sound emanated from him. “Baby.”

  His face crumbled in relief, a ragged moan left his lips, and the tears rolled out. I wanted to say, “Zack, I love you. Thank you for being with me every day, during every horrible moment. You are my life, you are my heart,” but there was no way I could talk that much.

  “Oh, my God. Natalie, honey.” And he cried, my tough husband cried as he leaned in and gathered me to him. He was so warm. I leaned my cheek against his and tried to lift my arms to hug him. Surprisingly, as my brain had clearly been on a long nap, they worked somewhat. My hands rested on his back.

  “I can’t believe this. Finally. I have missed you so much, Natalie. So much.”

  I swallowed hard but was determined to say what I needed to say, “I love you, Zack.” My voice sounded rough, the words coming out slow, as if they were stuck in my brain and only one word would be let out at a time with space between.

  He pulled back, and I saw all of his love in those shimmering green eyes. He did not bother to hide a broken sob, and rocked me close to him. I laughed, that frog screech, which made me laugh again.
>
  What happened in this hospital was Zack’s love for me in action. He was there for me during the fun times before the accident, and he was there for me when things were relentlessly, hopelessly awful. He fought for me, for my life, for us.

  “I love you, too, Natalie.”

  Zack and I kissed and hugged and laughed.

  Our laughter became the second symphony of the day.

  * * *

  My dad rushed in. Zack had called him straight away. I heard his feet thundering down the corridor. I heard him bellowing in that deep voice, “Clear the way, clear the way, my hummingbird’s awake!” The door flew open and banged against the wall.

  He saw me in bed, eyes open, propped up on pillows, and I smiled at him, my heart growing in my chest, like the Grinch’s. He stood and stared, panting, for long seconds, the tears streaming down his face. He, too, had aged, but I say that with all my love. What a toll this had taken on all of us.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said, my voice gravelly, each syllable slowly uttered, and then I started to cry. I love my big dad. He was wearing his University of Oregon green pajama bottoms with the yellow ducks that I gave him years ago and a white T-shirt. Yes, my dad was so excited that his daughter was awake and talking, he rushed to the hospital in his pajamas.

  He leaned against the wall for support, and Zack moved toward him, as did Dr. Doom and Dr. Hopeless, both smiling, their faces lit up because I was awake and they were so relieved. We’d already said hello to each other.

  “Is this real?” my dad asked, in disbelief, in hope. “Is this real? Is she awake, or am I dead?”

  “Yes, Scott,” Zack said, grinning. “It’s real. Natalie opened her eyes. She can even talk.”