The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  I lifted the lid of his laptop, and held my breath as I clicked into his email.

  And there she was.

  Tucked in among the subscription emails and receipt emails and spam, a personal email with a title beginning “re: re: re: re:” A long thread. No salutation in any of the individual messages, and the email address did not contain a name. Nothing sexual in the message body, but there didn’t need to be. The intimacy breathed out from the words; I could hear his warm voice in them. That the content was so humdrum made it obscene. The small details of his day, the things he used to say to me. I steeled myself, then scrolled to read her reply.

  I’d read only one line of it—you’re definately right about that, I never thought about it that way—when my phone vibrated with his text:

  On my way home

  I shut the computer, stood up from the desk chair, went to the closet, and pulled down my overnight bag from the top shelf. Like a game show contestant with the prize clock ticking down, I ran around the apartment filling up the bag with the things I would need immediately, the white coats and socks and underwear and scrubs, phone charger and toothbrush. I burst through the door, not pausing to lock it behind me, running down the steps and out to my car. More desperate to be gone before he returned than I had been desperate for his return, throwing the bag into the backseat and driving away fast. That was six weeks ago; I haven’t been back until now.

  Perhaps in that blur of exodus I had scooped the notes into my bag, or maybe I’d moved them somewhere else—a different drawer or a box—sometime before that? I can’t remember the last time I opened the drawer to add a note to the collection. This is a new thought. I pull the drawer all the way out now, and like a fool pull out the drawer below it too, as if the notes had come to life and one by one shimmied through the crack at the back. Nothing, of course. Under the nightstand, nothing; the space behind the nightstand, nothing.

  I know I didn’t move them; I’m increasingly sure that I left them behind.

  In the weeks since I left, he hasn’t gotten rid of anything else. I’ve just been through the whole apartment and found it all—my shampoo, my clothing, my tampons, everything I left—still in their places. But he chose to move this. They’re just notes, just paper, but the loss of them, not knowing where they are or what happened to them, makes me breathless. They are the landing lights for my past, until so recently my present.

  I recall the email I read, and make the belated connection: those are what he’s writing now. His love notes have been upgraded, from analog to digital, from an old, too-familiar recipient to a new one. Probably younger, less judgmental, less tired and cranky. Someone who smiles admiringly up into his face. Someone who misspells definitely. Someone totally unlike me.

  Abruptly I am brimming with rage. I turn over the shopping bags I’ve been carrying and drop everything out, my scarves and my shoes and my shampoo. The beloved letterman jacket and the volume of collected Dorothy Parker. I shake the bags hard and things fall out messily, the shampoo cap cracking open against the stainless steel travel mug and sighing a blond ribbon out over everything. I step over the mess and am out of the apartment empty-handed, locking the door behind me, and before I can change my mind I twist the key off the ring and push it through the crack under the door. With a defiance I don’t completely feel: keep it, keep all of it, keep our past and my memories. They don’t mean anything now.

  Nowhere to go but back to the hospital; halfway there, I pull over on a side street and take out my phone. I could call Nicole, a friend from medical school who’s an abdicated surgeon, home full-time with her first infant in upstate New York. I’d talked to her right after the split, and she was gratifyingly horrified. I know she’ll be enthralled by the latest installment and I hover my finger over her name on my phone screen, marshalling the story, anticipating the warm unstiffening, like bands breaking across my chest, of sharing it. There’s nothing like talking to a friend, the feeling of being known and understood. Nicole will get it, she’ll vilify him for me, she’ll say the terrible things I’ve been thinking, and it will make them less terrible somehow, being brought into the open air.

  I hesitate: it’s nine o’clock on a Monday morning. She’s not at work, but maybe her husband’s taken the day off and the two of them are sleeping in, the baby between them. Or maybe he is at work but she’s gone back to bed after a difficult night with a fussy infant. No way to know. I scroll down the contacts screen in my phone. Mike, a high school friend who now lives in Hawaii; it’s only 4 a.m. there. My stepmother will be home and she’s been very kind, but I know it frustrates and baffles her that Joe and I are frozen in this limbo, that we haven’t spoken at all since I left; I need someone to hear me, not argue with me. Emma, my best friend from college. It’s been so long since we’ve talked, though; how awkward to make this bomb our first contact in years. I keep scrolling—at work, at work, triplets—until I reach the Zs and realize there’s no one to call.

  * * *

  IF YOU’D ASKED me two years ago, I would have said that a person can live happily alone, that one doesn’t need to be partnered to be complete. But now I feel the lie in it. Haven’t I always felt dimly sorry for the patients who come to the ER alone, no one at home, no one by the bedside and no one to call? Last year, when taking the history from a patient, an old woman widowed and without children, I’d been blindsided by the thought surging up from my unconscious: What was the point of your life then? Why would I think that? I’d never wanted children. Had I changed my mind subconsciously?

  It seemed like a message from the universe when a few days after that, Joe came home and showed me photos on his phone of a coworker’s new baby. We have to have one of these, he’d said, and for the first time I had not recoiled at the suggestion. Yes, I’d breathed, looking at the tiny feet, the rosebud mouth. Yes, okay, we will.

  And just like that, at thirty-two, I’d re-formed my life course, changed the arc of my ambition to enfold a child. Not Harvard then; not department chair or residency director. Although I’d always planned to go into academic medicine, I began to cut down my hours at the lab and tidy up my projects there. Making just a few degrees of adjustment now that would result in a large correction a few years hence. When residency was done I’d be thirty-three, with a family-friendly schedule ready to deploy, eleven or twelve shifts a month and a stay-at-home husband. We’d have enough with my salary alone for a modest but privileged life, freedom for Joe to pursue his music, good schools, and a couple of exotic vacations a year; as much as we needed, and better than either of us had known growing up.

  My definition of happily ever after had turned on a dime. I’d thought Joe was turning with me, but we’d never actually had a discussion about it. For me that single harmonic moment looking at the photos had had the strength of a mandate. I’d thought we’d been pulling together toward a common goal, but apparently while I was going to work and back and we were meeting in the shreds of time between my shifts, he was brooding. How had I missed that?

  I’d had a glimpse of it, one night last November, as I’d slung the stethoscope around my neck and taken my keys up from the table in the entry hall, preparing to leave for a 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift. I’d turned to say good-bye and seen him impossibly far away, his expression impenetrable. Are you okay? I’d said. He’d brought cold eyes to mine and said, I can’t live like this anymore.

  Would it have changed anything if I’d dropped the keys back on the table and walked to him then, if I’d braved that space between us? If I’d reached out and made my voice soft and nonurgent and loving, if I’d sat down and taken the stethoscope off? If I had done anything that night but what I did do, which was check my watch and say I have to go? Like a damaged robot unable to adapt to the situation, already halfway to work in my mind, I went through the door and left him there, our dissonant words hanging in the air. I’ll never know what might have happened if I’d stayed that night.

  But of course that simply had not been possible. Med
ical residency doesn’t have personal days. There’s no slack to the roster; staffing is skeletal on late shifts and a missing doctor means the ER will spin out, patients in the urgent area waiting longer and longer to be evaluated while traumas roll in. Delay under those circumstances can be fatal. Staying with Joe that night would have meant abandoning those patients. Walking out the door had been my only possible choice. Perhaps to Joe it had been a test. One I’d utterly failed, demonstrating that my real loyalty was to strangers, not my husband, that their needs came before his, even before I’d laid eyes on them.

  I left that night, I failed Joe’s test, if that’s what it was, and we never talked about it afterward. I intended to, but that resolve evaporated when Joe had seemed his normal self the next day. I said nothing. Partly denial, partly selfishness: I didn’t want to open a can of nasty worms. I put it off, put it on a list like the ones I used to make as an intern on the wards (recheck potassium—draw Vanco peak and trough—review post-op X ray), to keep from forgetting a critical task. To do: have children, have a social life, talk to husband about his unhappiness.

  And something occurs to me now, sitting in my car pulled over with no destination and no home, a saying I heard first as a medical student. You have to love medicine—it won’t love you back. Back then, it had seemed to be a challenge: Do you love this job enough to do it well? Now I hear it differently, with the emphasis on the second part: as a warning. It seems so obvious now.

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  Leo

  DURING SCHOOLTIME ON FRIDAY, A new man appears in my doorway.

  “I’m Dr. Jellicoe. May we talk for a while?”

  I close the workbook and get down from the chair. I don’t know why they pretend everything is a choice here. May we talk means we’re going to talk.

  Dr. Jellicoe is tall, with white hair and eyebrows like caterpillars. Instead of a doctor coat, he wears a dark-green sweater that buttons, with twisted panels crawling up the front. He takes me into the playroom, draws two chairs up across from each other, sits down on one, and leans across to pat the seat of the other; I climb up.

  “Miss Meredith tells me you don’t remember anything about the day you came here.” There’s a sticker on the toe of my sneaker; I scrape at it with the other heel, but it’s stuck down very flat. “And you may have even forgotten some other things.” I’m peeling the paper up with my fingers; I notice he’s paused, so I nod. “She also says you want to be called Leo.” I’ve gotten the whole thing up now, a creased purple flower on my fingertip. “So you’re Leo. Who’s Ben?”

  “I don’t know.” The name is dull, meaningless. It doesn’t even sound like a name. I crumple the flower into a tiny sticky ball and smear it off my finger onto the seat of the chair.

  “Miss Meredith also tells me you’re having bad dreams,” he says.

  There are lights in the soles of these shoes; they flash when I walk. They flash when I tap them together too. I realize that Dr. Jellicoe isn’t saying anything, and I look up to see him watching me.

  “Sometimes,” I say.

  “Can you tell me about them? Your dreams?”

  “They’re all different.” They drain out of me quickly after I wake, vanishing all day until just a little bit remains, single sand grains left by the tide. “Sometimes I’m walking.” Telling this, I feel the breath of the jungle in my face, my painful boots.

  Mm-hmm, he says, mm-hmm. When I don’t say any more, he leans forward, rests his elbows on his thighs, and clasps his hands together.

  “Sometimes we have scary dreams when we’re trying to remember things,” he says. “There may be a way to remember that isn’t as scary. Would you like that?”

  I would.

  * * *

  I HAVE TO go downstairs for a scan, what Dr. Jellicoe called a picture of your brain. I lie in a loud clanging tube while a voice tells me to hold your breath—don’t move—now breathe, and when it’s done no one shows me the picture. Then I’m wheeled to a different part of the hospital and a thin perfumey woman glues a lot of wires to my head and I have to hold very still again. There’s also a blood test, which doesn’t hurt because they put numbing cream on my arm an hour before. The man who does the blood test has little gold butterfly earrings in both earlobes. Just look at the butterflies, he says. Keep an eye on them. All done, he says, pressing a sticky bandage across a cotton ball in the crook of my elbow. You were super brave.

  I don’t see Miss Meredith anymore. Instead I see Dr. Jellicoe every day in his office, and we work on feelings. He shows me a line of faces, from smiling all the way on the left to frowning with tears all the way to the right. I have to choose one of the faces after looking at a cartoon, after a story, after playing a game. The face with the line straight across is the one I choose most.

  “It’s okay to feel sad, or scared,” he says. “Everyone has those feelings sometimes.” It’s hard to imagine what would make a grown-up like Dr. Jellicoe sad or scared.

  He gives me a poster for my room, with three stripes of cartoon faces for each day. The poster goes on the inside of my door, and in the morning and again after lunch and then at bedtime, I am supposed to put an X over as many feelings as I’m having, confused or silly or happy or angry, sad or surprised or worried or scared. I use a squeaky black marker; the X’d-over faces remind me of Missy, who’s gone home from the hospital now. My marks get wiped off sometime during the night; every morning the poster is clean again.

  After a week of the Xs and cartoon faces, Dr. Jellicoe says we’re ready to try the new thing he talked about, the way to remember that isn’t scary. I thought the faces were the thing, so I’m a little surprised.

  “It’s a relaxation technique,” he says. “Do you know that word? Relaxation? It means making yourself calm.” He presses one of the light switches on the wall, so the only lights left on are the ones around the edges of the room, and I get into the blue squishy chair. “Are you comfortable?” I nod. “It’s okay if you go to sleep.”

  He puts a fingertip against my forehead, right above the space between my eyebrows, then takes it away and tells me to look at that spot. Of course I can’t see it, you can’t look at your own forehead, but he says to look up at the place and I try. He talks slowly; he keeps talking. When my eyes close, he says that’s okay, that’s good. And he keeps on, the words collapsing into one another until his voice becomes a long drone you’rebackhomewithyourmomhomewithyourmom

  * * *

  GETTING SALLY READY for school, coaxing Tad out of bed and to the breakfast table. Sally has such yellow hair, the color Mama says hers used to be when she was young. I hold each soft tangle in my hand and pull the teeth of the comb through in short yanks.

  “Ouch,” says Sally. She is whiny these days, quick to cry; her way of testing love.

  “Hush.” I draw the comb over the crown of her head, divide it into a gold double waterfall and braid each half, behind her ears like she likes. She puts her hands up to make sure I did it right.

  “Look.” I take two lengths of ribbon from my pocket. They’re new; I bought them last week with money a neighbor gave me for helping her carry groceries home. “Don’t let your dad see.” I tie them onto the ends of her pigtails. He’ll want to know where they came from, and if he knows I held back pocket money he’ll be mad. Not that he’ll be awake anytime soon.

  She nods, feeling the ribbon ends with her fingers, then jumps down from the chair and runs off to see herself in the mirror.

  I harass Tad through his eggs. He’s always slow in the mornings, and he’s purposely delaying today. He’s started to hate me already.

  “You’re not the boss of me,” he says.

  “I’m older than you.” I almost said I’m bigger. I shouldn’t teach him to value that. Plus I won’t have that card to play for much longer. He’ll soon be as tall as I am. His father, Clyde, is tall. Clyde calls me The Runt.

  I hate being late to school. It’s embarrassing walking in when everyone else is s
eated already. If I get another tardy I may have to stay after. Who knows what consequences that might bring.

  “Stop fooling with them,” I tell Sally, who can’t keep her fingers off her bows. She’s pulled one of the loops small already, and I retie it. Tad finally finishes his breakfast and I put his dishes into the sink. No time to wash them now.

  Mama comes in then, surprising me. She isn’t usually up when we leave for school, but today she’s fully dressed.

  “There are some dishes in the sink,” I tell her, buttoning up Sally’s coat. I open the front door. “Come on, we’re going to be late.”

  “Look,” says Sally, pulling her braids forward. “Mama, look.”

  “Leo, wait,” Mama says. She looks tired, and she has the low gargly morning voice she gets sometimes. “I’ll take them. You’re not going to school today.”

  “I’m all right,” I say quickly. It’s true. Last night wasn’t so bad.

  She shakes her head.

  “You wait here. Answer the door if someone comes.”

  “Why?” I say, but she doesn’t answer. She herds Tad and Sally out. I watch through the window as they walk down the path. Sally is chattering up at Mama, Tad is kicking stones with his new shoes. None of them looks back.

  I go into the kitchen. Who might be coming to the door? Maybe a doctor. Maybe Clyde’s sick. I push down the leap of hope. Or maybe last night was the last straw and she’s called the police to take Clyde away. Although I wish for it, I suspect that would be a bad idea; men with guns might get him out of here, but he’d come back. And he’d come back angry.

  I have washed the dishes and put them away, and am wiping down the table, when the knock comes at the door.

  * * *

  I DON’T HESITATE to get into the van with them; they are monks, after all, men of God. I recognize the vehicle as one I have seen before, making deliveries in Waite. There’s a boy in the back when I climb in.