Love in the Present Tense

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  It’s like the feeling I was searching for earlier that day, when I first saw the ocean. And I saw it as infinity, though I didn’t have the word to put to it. And I wanted Pearl to hold my hand and take me there so I wouldn’t be left here alone.

  And now here we were in a night that was so risky and exciting it was like death. And I got to go there with her.

  And then just that quickly she scooped me out of there and we were gone. On our way home.

  And yet the whole day was perfect.

  I was also partly relieved to go home.

  Pearl got me two real presents while we were there. One of them I still have. She got me a stuffed giraffe. And she got me a strip of pictures of us together. I think she won the giraffe playing Skee-Ball. My memory is a little hazy about that. Because I remember some guy running after us and catching up with us in the merry-go-round place, and he had that stuffed giraffe with him. So I figured she won it and then forgot to take it along. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.

  So when I woke the following morning my head was full of a day so perfect, so full of a world I’d never even seen before—never knew existed—that I felt it couldn’t possibly have happened. It could only have been a vivid dream.

  But then I woke up all wrapped around this stuffed giraffe that Pearl had won for me, and the pictures were on my pillow, waiting.

  So it was one of those dreams that happened for real.

  I still have the giraffe. Mitch went over to Mrs. Morales’s house and got it for me, pretty early on. But Pearl had taken those pictures, at my request, and put them someplace safe. And I never knew where that was.

  Twice when I got a little older I went over to Mrs. Morales’s house and asked was there anything else Pearl had left behind. She said no, she’d boxed everything up and taken it to Mitch’s house when she re-rented the apartment.

  When you know you’ll never see somebody again, and you lose the only remaining pictures, it feels huge. It feels like you’ve lost everything.

  Maybe the pictures were with her. Maybe she had lost them, but I doubt it. Because she knew how important they were. Maybe I dreamed up the photos and they never existed. But I don’t think so. I remember them pretty well.

  So, now, when I finally see them again, this is how I know that I’m dead.

  Because I have this dream where I open my eyes, and the first things I see are those pictures. I guess dream is the wrong word, but that’s how it feels. They’re on something like a metal bar, and I can vaguely see a white wall behind. Then I have to close my eyes again. Because there’s pain.

  So then I think maybe I’m not dead after all. Because if I’m dead, there wouldn’t be pain. Then again, if I’m alive, there wouldn’t be those pictures. Because they’re long gone.

  It makes sense. It makes good sense to think that the other side is a place where you can open your eyes—figuratively speaking, of course—and see the one thing you lost that you want back the most.

  Like when you play chess, and you get a pawn all the way to the far end of the board and you can ask to get a piece back. A fallen man, restored to the battlefield, just like that. So of course you take the most important one.

  Maybe I’m alive and I’m dreaming.

  I feel somebody take my hand, and I’m hoping it’s Pearl, but I’m spinning back down now and there’s just no way to tell for sure.

  I try to open my eyes again, but they feel heavy, and there’s pain, and I feel like I’m dipping down again, back into the dream.

  And that’s all I know for a really long time.

  MITCH, age 37: while leonard sleeps

  Jake and Mona come and go.

  I stay.

  Jake comes in the early mornings, before work. Before it’s even light. Sits a minute and watches Leonard sleep. But there’s a sense of helplessness in that. So then he goes to work. He comes back around dinnertime, usually with Mona, who has already come at least once, midday.

  I’m here when they come, and when they go. Watching Leonard sleep. If that’s the right thing to call it. Maybe he’s in a coma, but I refuse to think in those terms. As far as I’m concerned, he’s just healing. Resting until his battered body comes around. Which I’m convinced it will.

  Besides, yesterday he opened his eyes.

  His hospital bed has rails on each side, and they’re raised, so he can’t roll out. Why they think he might do that, I’m not sure. But I brought the pictures Mrs. Morales found in her wall, and I folded a little piece of tape on the back of them and stuck them lightly to one of the rails.

  And then yesterday he opened his eyes.

  I thought for a minute he was looking at me, but his eyes seemed unfocused, and then I realized he was looking at the pictures. Or, anyway, in their general direction. Whether he was able to know what he saw I can’t say. Couldn’t even guess. But some of it must at least have registered unconsciously. So maybe some part of him knows they are up here, waiting.

  Which is the idea.

  I’m bribing him to come back to me.

  I grabbed his hand so he would know I was here but his eyes just closed again, and I haven’t seen anything from him since.

  This morning a doctor came in and taped my broken nose. Packed it, and set it with a small plastic brace, and taped it in place. It was beginning to hurt a little less. Now it’s killing me again. But it was nice of him to do it, anyway.

  The nurses tried to get me to leave Leonard’s room to get it taped, but I wouldn’t budge. So they worked it out another way.

  Now I’ve got more of my own pain to deal with, and that makes it harder to just sit here and wait. So I wander down one floor to Pediatric Oncology and I borrow a couple of books. The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham.

  Not for me. For Leonard.

  I bring them upstairs and I read them to him, over and over, my voice sounding weirdly nasal to me.

  And I try not to cry, because the last thing I need is to have to blow my nose.

  Leonard has two big gashes on his head, each with a nasty little track of stitches, each ringed with bruises and swollen out of shape. It’s hard to look at. But I’m getting used to it by now. It’s part of him. Part of the reality of his life right now, along with the taped ribs and the badly broken leg. It’s the whole story, with nothing kept from me. No pleasant little lies. Like, I was the one that started those fights, Mitch. Life has just beat Leonard up bad, and it’s all right there for me to see.

  So I try to be big about it. And I read him Green Eggs and Ham again.

  Then a nurse comes in and smiles, and I ask her if I can get some more books.

  “What kind?” she wants to know. Like she hates to assume that I want kids’ books.

  “The type of thing you’d read to a five-year-old,” I say. And then after she’s left the room I say, “Who’s just lost his mother.”

  A few minutes later she brings me some things I might not have picked out on my own, but they’re fine. One about a troll under a bridge and one about a big clumsy puppy who means well but causes trouble.

  I wish I could remember that song Leonard used to sing when he was trying to get himself to sleep. That would be perfect right now. But it’s a hard thing to remember because it didn’t have any real English words in it. It didn’t make any particular sense.

  It’s getting harder not to cry.

  Sometime in the middle of the night I think I hear his voice, and it wakes me. I’m sleeping in a cot beside his bed, and I think I’m dreaming.

  “Mitch,” he says. “Hey.” His voice sounds whispery and weak.

  I turn on the light but his eyes are closed, so I think again that I dreamed it.

  “Mitch,” he says again. This time I see his lips move.

  “Yeah, Leonard,” I say and take hold of his hand. “Yeah, I’m right here.” I wish he would open his eyes and look at me but he never does.

  “If you died, and you could stay around as long as you wanted and take care of somebod
y, who would you stay for, me or Barb?”

  He’s slurring his words like a drunk.

  The use of her name slices through my gut like blunt, rusty metal. I’ve been trying not to think about that.

  “You,” I say. “Definitely you.”

  Leonard smiles the slightest bit. Which is just the most wonderful thing to see. “You’re really getting this forever love thing, huh?” At least, I think that’s what he said. He’s not forming the words clearly.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think I’m finally paying attention about that.”

  I sit up all night waiting for him to say more. He never does. I sit with him all morning thinking this will be the morning he wakes up. It’s not.

  Later that night, just as I think I’m about to go to sleep, I open my eyes. Leonard’s face is turned slightly in my direction on his pillow. My eyes are fairly well adjusted to the dark. And it looks like his are open. It’s like he was staring at me, and I felt it, so I opened my eyes.

  I turn on the little reading lamp beside the bed and he squints and makes a disapproving noise.

  “Sorry,” I say. “You’re awake.”

  “I think I was dead,” he says. He still sounds a little drunk, but less so. He’s on a morphine drip, so I guess it’s reasonable for him to be less than sharp. But he sounds like he’s fighting it. Trying to be present.

  “When?” I ask. “For how long? Because, you know, you’re definitely alive now.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I know. I hurt like hell.”

  But then I get a sense that he’s tired, that it was a lot of work just to say that much. So I don’t push him to tell me when he thinks he was dead. He just lies there with his eyes flickering open, and then closing again. Then opening. Then fluttering closed.

  A few minutes later he looks at me and says, “You look awful. What happened to you?”

  I smile and say, “Tell you some other time.”

  “You look worse than I feel.”

  I notice that the photos of Leonard and Pearl have gotten knocked down, so I pick them up and stick them onto the railing of his bed again. His eyes flutter open, fix on the photos, and stay that way.

  “Mitch,” he says. It’s a whisper. “Is that really there? How did that get there?”

  “I put it there for you to see.”

  “Where’d you get that, Mitch?”

  “Mrs. Morales found it in the wall. The night before your accident. She gave it to me about a minute before you turned eighteen. It’s almost like a birthday present from Pearl.”

  That and a last name, which I’ll tell him about as soon as I’m sure he’s with me enough to register. To remember.

  He blinks for a minute. I get the sense that he’s resting up to speak. I remind myself I should be elated that he’s awake and talking but, truthfully, I never doubted it. I never thought it would be any other way but this. I wasn’t going to settle for any less. I wasn’t about to lose everything. Everything else, that’s fine. But not Leonard.

  “Well. Pearl took birthdays pretty seriously,” he says.

  Then a strange noise comes out of him, small and whimpery, and I think he must be in a great deal of pain. Some kind of rough spasm brought on by pain.

  I’m reaching to ring for the nurse when I realize he’s crying.

  So I just sit quietly with him instead.

  I want to hold him but I don’t dare. I can’t think of any good, uninjured place to grasp him by. So I just take one of his hands and sit with him while he cries. After a while I get up and bring a box of tissues. Wipe his nose like he was a five-year-old.

  This is the activity that takes up most of our first night.

  I’m not surprised. I’ve been expecting this. Sooner or later he was going to break down and mourn the loss of his missing mother.

  I just never thought he’d be eighteen years old at the time.

  When I finally get to take Leonard home—I’m pleased to say I can honestly call this his home again—he’s still in a wheelchair. Improving, but not ready to haul that cast around on crutches. Not with a slightly impaired sense of balance and all those broken ribs.

  He sits patiently in the middle of the living room while I bring in the mail. I haven’t been home for days.

  “Do I get my old room back?” he asks.

  “Yeah, I cleaned it out for you. Brought a lot of your stuff from…Jake and Mona’s.” I almost said from home, but I have to remind myself. This is home.

  “Check your messages,” he says. “Your message light is blinking. Didn’t you even go home to check your messages?”

  “Not really,” I say.

  “Feed those poor birds. Oh, poor Pebbles. Poor Zonker. Do they even have water?”

  I check, and they do. But it’s low, and it’s filthy, so I replace it. I hate to admit I’d forgotten all about them. I bring them two scoops of the big bird mix, with dried red peppers and whole peanuts and almonds in the shell. And I put a whole apple in there for Pebbles to work on. She takes that opportunity to try to bite me for what I’ve done.

  “What if they’d needed you at the office?” Leonard says.

  “There is no office.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mitch.”

  “There’s no more business. It’s gone. Evaporated.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.” I walk over and hit the play button on the machine. Sort through the mail while I listen.

  The first message I’ve already heard. But, after hearing it, I didn’t hang around to erase it. It’s Mona.

  “Mitch,” she says, her voice already a desperate tumble.

  “We found him. He’s alive. He’s in the hospital in really bad shape but he’s alive. He was drifting over by the boat launch and some guy saw the glider when he put out fishing this morning. Before it even got light. It’s like a miracle, Mitch. He’d managed to pull himself up onto the glider just enough that it kept him floating. And the glider didn’t sink, even though it was all twisted up. You gotta get down here, Mitch. He’s been at the hospital for hours. Long before the glider washed up. But they didn’t know who he—”

  Mona keeps talking, but Leonard interrupts. Talks over her. “That’s kind of weird,” he says.

  “Which part?”

  “I really don’t remember pulling myself up onto that glider. I’m almost sure I was in the water when I passed out.”

  “Maybe you pulled yourself onto it after you passed out.”

  I’m kidding, but not completely. Sometimes you do weird things when you need to badly enough. Things you never thought you could do, that are supposed to be impossible. Pick up a car. That sort of thing.

  The message changes. We hear the click of a new message and we stay silent and we wait. First there’s nothing. No voice. Like it’s going to be a hang-up.

  Then three words. Just three. In a voice so familiar I could cry.

  “I loved you.”

  It makes my scalp tingle in a weird way and I decide it would be a good idea to go sit down on the couch, so I do.

  Leonard says, “That sounded like Barb.”

  “It was.”

  “Why was she saying it in the past tense like that?”

  I breathe deeply. As deeply as I can around this big boulder in my chest.

  I’ve been so focused on Leonard, and that’s been very convenient. A way to cover another crushing loss, but it’s still out there, I know. Waiting for its moment. Waiting to come inside. To insist it be felt.

  Like now.

  “Thing is,” I say, “that sort of evaporated, too.”

  “Just like that?” he asks.

  He looks small in his wheelchair in the center of the room. His huge leg cast is propped straight out. His hair has begun to grow back around the head wounds. Now that he’s sad for me, he looks smaller and more wounded.

  “Just like that.”

  “Poor Mitch,” he says. “After all those years.” Then we sit quietly for a
moment and he says, “Even so, though. I don’t see why the past tense. I mean, she didn’t stop loving you just in the past few days. Did she?”

  “I don’t suppose so,” I say. “I think it’s just a shield she uses. To be able to say a thing like that at all.”

  Leonard nods. I can see him fitting this together in his head, meshing it in with a lot of other information he’s seen with his own eyes and knows to be true.

  “Poor Mitch. You really lost everything, huh?”

  “No,” I say. “Not everything.”

  I wheel him into his room and help him over onto his new bed. It’s hard, because if I hold him tightly I’ll hurt his ribs. And if I don’t he might fall.

  I do the best I can, and he barely makes a noise, but I can tell it’s not a pleasant moment for him.

  “It’s weird,” he says. “I really don’t remember pulling myself onto that glider. I was pretty sure I was in the water when I passed out.”

  “You must have really wanted to survive.”

  “I did,” he says.

  “Obviously,” I say.

  LEONARD, age 18: love in the present tense

  Why do I feel so young right now? I really haven’t figured that out. I don’t even think I’m trying. More giving in to it. Letting it have its way.

  It’s about midnight, but I’m not asleep. Of course, I’ve been sleeping all kinds of crazy hours. Like all day.

  But now it’s night, and it’s dark. And I’m alone. And it makes me just a little bit lonely and scared.

  “Mitch?” I call it out pretty loud. His room is right upstairs from mine. If I could just reach that high I’d knock on the ceiling. Because it’s important. “Mitch?” It hurts my ribs to yell. But I still do.

  It’s amazing how much this already feels like home again.

  A minute later he comes stumbling in, looking at his watch. It’s not on his wrist. He’s just holding it in his hand when he comes through the door. Looking at it. There’s just enough light for me to see him doing that. Not enough for him to see what time it is.