Comfort and Joy

by Comfort

  The effort takes everything I have. When I’m done, I can hardly breathe. I feel my heartbeat speed up again. The world starts to go fuzzy and out of focus.

  I am fading.

  Fading.

  I reach out for something to hold on to.

  There’s nothing. I close my eyes and scream: No!

  When I open my eyes again, I see bright white lights. A nurse is standing by my bed. It is the woman I “met” at the doctor’s office in my dream.

  “How are we today?” she asks in her completely familiar voice.

  “I’m fine,” I manage, closing my eyes again. I try to find my way back to the rainforest, but, this time, all I see is darkness.

  I want to be on the drugs again.

  Instead, I am fully awake now, and sitting up in bed. There are so many people clustered around me that I can’t see the walls behind them. A sheen of light hugs the ceiling, coming from a window I can’t see.

  I find myself listening for the rain.

  But I am in Bakersfield now; it’s the thirty-first of December, and the sun is shining outside.

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying. Tell me again.”

  The people gathered around me frown. I recognize all of them. There’s Stacey, of course. She hasn’t left the room since I woke up, except to go out for food or—no doubt—to call Thom. And the nurse I saw in my dream. She’s the day nurse who has been taking care of me. The ruddy-faced man from church is the orthopedist who put my right leg back together. Apparently I’m held together by a titanium pin of some kind. This is more than I can say for my mind, which is held together lately by nothing. The gas station guy is my cardiologist; he brought me back to life, though the real credit goes to a man and boy who probably don’t exist.

  “Your right leg was broken just below the knee. And your concussion was quite severe. We worried about swelling of the brain for several days,” says the gas station attendant, whom I now have to start calling Dr. Saunders.

  I want to make a joke about having a bigger brain, but words fail me.

  “With a little physical therapy, you’ll be fine,” my sister says. The council nods in unison like bobbleheads in the backseat of a car.

  “Can I still ice skate?” I ask, although I haven’t ice skated since Melinda Carter’s ninth birthday party.

  Dr. Saunders frowns. This is a question he didn’t anticipate. “In time, certainly, but . . . ”

  “Never mind.” I try to smile. “When can I go home?”

  The head bobbing starts again. This is a question they like. “You’ll have to take it easy for a while,” says Dr. Saunders.

  I look down at my casted right leg. No kidding.

  “But if you’re careful, and barring any unforeseen complications, we think you can go home in a few days.”

  I want to smile for them. I really do. I know how hard they have all worked to help me so that I can go home.

  Alone. “That’s great.”

  I see how Stacey looks at me. She knows what I’m thinking. It is a bond that has been in place a long time, and apparently neither anger nor betrayal can break it.

  “Thanks,” I say, meaning it.

  As a group, they leave, and we are left alone, Stacey and I.

  Neither one of us speaks. We obviously don’t know what to say, how to start.

  It’s up to me; I know that. She has already made her move—she invited me to her wedding. It’s why I’m lying here, hooked up to machines and held together by a metal pin.

  I sit up, reposition the pillows. The minute I’m up here, I know it’s a mistake. There’s no way to avoid seeing Stacey’s stomach. She has gained a few pounds already.

  She notices where I’m looking. “I’m surprised you haven’t thrown me out,” she says, softly. I can hear the longing in her voice, the missing of me, and it reminds me of a dozen memories of our youth.

  “At your current weight, I’d need some kind of catapult.”

  She wants to smile at my lame joke; I can see the desire. But she doesn’t. Probably she can’t. Neither can I. “I haven’t gained that much.”

  “If I had two good legs, I’d kick your ass, though.”

  “Stop,” Stacey says. “You always make jokes when you’re hurting.”

  And there it is: the core of everything. We’re sisters. We know each other intimately. Our pasts, our secrets, our fears. It is a precious gift that we tried to throw away but can’t really let go of.

  Stacey bites her lower lip. It’s what she’s done her whole life when she’s scared. “I’m sorry, Joy. I don’t know how it happened. I didn’t mean . . .”

  I hold up my hand. Of all the things we could say now, the hows and whys of what happened are at the bottom of my list. But I make my move too late; her words get through, make me angry . . . and hurt me. “You make it sound like you slipped on a banana peel and fell on my husband.”

  “So what do we do?”

  The soft tenor of her voice, the trembling of her lip, the regret in her eyes; I see it all, and in seeing it, seeing her, I lose that spark of anger, just let it go. When the plane was going down, it was Stacey whom I thought about. That’s what I need to always remember now. “We find a way to get past it. That’s all.”

  “Who are you and what have you done with my sister?”

  “Now who’s trying to be funny?”

  Stacey stares down at me with a combination of awe and gratitude. “Two weeks ago you hated me.”

  “I never hated you, Stace,” I say the words softly, realizing almost before I’ve finished that they’re not enough. What I want to say, need to say, now before I lose my nerve is what I learned in the rainforest: “We’re sisters.”

  At that, Stacey starts to cry.

  I wait for her to say something, but she remains quiet. Maybe, like me, she’s wondering how exactly we move forward from here. “It won’t be easy,” I say.

  She wipes her eyes. “What is?” Taking a small step closer, she looks down at me, pushes a strand of hair from my eyes. “I am sorry, you know.”

  “I know.” I sigh. “When I was in the rainforest,” I stop abruptly, realizing what I was about to say.

  “What rainforest?”

  I try to smile and fail. “If I told you, you’d think I was brain damaged. Or crazy.”

  “You’re the most level-headed person I know.”

  I look at her closely, trying to gauge how much to say. “On television, I heard you tell the reporters you were hoping I’d come back to you.”

  Stacey frowns. “How—?”

  “Just answer me. Did you say that?”

  “I did. I prayed every day that you’d wake up and come back.”

  Somehow, I saw that real broadcast from a fake world. “And you were wearing the yellow outfit I bought you.”

  Stacey nods slowly, then leans forward, rests her arms on the rail. “You never saw that broadcast. You were in a coma.”

  Who can I tell if not my sister? And I need to tell someone. I’m like the “I see dead people” kid. If I try to handle this all alone, I’ll go nuts. “After the crash, I woke up . . .”

  She shakes her head. “No. You never regained consciousness. The paramedics . . . ”

  “Crazy, remember?”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, I was in this clearing. There was smoke everywhere, and fire, and loud noises, and . . . Mom.”

  Stacey goes very still. “You saw her?”

  I nod.

  “And?”

  “She knelt beside me and told me it wasn’t my time.” I lean forward slightly, desperate to be told I’m not insane, even though I know I must be. “Tell me I’m wacko.”

  “In the field . . . Your heart stopped for almost a minute. You were legally dead.”

  I release a deep breath. There’s a strange sense of peace that comes with the news. “She made me wake up. When I did, I saw how alone I was, how far from the survivors. At first, I was going to go to them and get rescued, the
n I thought of you and I changed my mind. I walked away from the crash and ended up in some little town in Washington.”

  “You know the plane crashed about one hundred miles northeast of here?”

  It shakes me, that new bit of information. “I was never even in Washington State?”

  “No.”

  I’ll think about that later. For now, since I’ve started on my mad story, I want to finish it. “I found a run-down resort called The Comfort Fishing Lodge and got a room. There was a boy there, and a man.”

  Stacey holds up a hand to stop me. “Wait a second.” She runs to the corner of the room, where my purse is on a mustard-yellow plastic seat. Beside it is my camera.

  “My camera,” I whisper. “Did you develop my film?”

  “Huh? No.” Stacey digs through my black leather tote and finally pulls out a magazine, then hurries back to my side. “I read this while you were in surgery.” She opens it to a page, hands it to me.

  It’s the article on The Comfort Fishing Lodge. “I was looking at this in the airport.”

  I feel as if I’m unraveling, coming apart. This is where it began. In my subconscious. I looked at the pictures of this place and longed to go there. And a morphine drip made it possible.

  “This article says the lodge was torn down in 2003, to make way for a corporate retreat.”

  Torn down.

  “Does it mention a Daniel?”

  Stacey scans the pages. “No. The resort was built by Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Hightower. They moved to Arizona when the Zimon Corporation purchased it. The new place hosts corporate shindigs and self-help seminars.”

  There is no Comfort Fishing Lodge.

  I was never there.

  No doubt Daniel is my neurologist and Bobby is some nurse’s son who darted into my room for a second while I was sleeping.

  “Joy, are you okay?”

  I close my eyes so she won’t see my tears. “No.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  I finally look at her. Through my tears, I can see how worried she is. I wish I could reassure her, but I can’t. “Will you develop my film?”

  “Are you sure you want me to?”

  I sigh. “Stace, I’m not sure about anything.”

  ELEVEN

  I am like an autistic with a puzzle. For the rest of my hospital stay, I study the pieces, putting them together in a dozen ways in an attempt to see the whole picture.

  They tell me I didn’t walk away from the crash and I don’t believe they’re lying.

  I’ve seen the newspaper stories—complete with photographs that made me physically ill. Several of the passengers, including Riegert, reported seeing me carried off the plane. As soon as they found my purse and identification, they called Stacey. I may be brain damaged and hallucinatory and drug addled, but I’m not stupid. I can add up the evidence.

  I never walked away from the crash.

  That’s what I know.

  Somehow I have to make it what I believe.

  If I could remember the crash, maybe that would make everything real. But the shrinks who now circle me like sharks in bloody water, think I’ll never remember. “Too traumatic,” they say.

  I tell them “remembering” Daniel and Bobby hurts me more.

  They don’t like that, the brain experts. Whenever I mention my adventure, they make tsk-tsk sounds and shake their heads.

  Only Stacey lets me talk about Bobby and Daniel as if they’re real, and that—the simple act of her silent acceptance—somehow draws us together again. It seems, after all, that I am not the only one who has been changed by my near death. The nurses tell me that Stacey was my champion throughout it all, demanding the best for me, and organizing prayer and candlelight vigils in town.

  Last night, she even slept in my room; this morning, she was up at the crack of dawn, readying my discharge papers.

  “Are you ready to go?”

  Now she is standing by the door. A nurse is next to her, with an empty wheelchair.

  “I’m ready.”

  I could knit a sweater in the time it takes me to get out of bed and into the wheelchair.

  No one seems to notice but me. And then we are off, tooling down the hallway. Everyone I see says: “Good bye, Joy. Good luck.” I mumble thanks and try to look happy about going home.

  Outside, Stacey rolls me over to a brand-new red minivan.

  “New car, huh?”

  “Thom got it for me for Christmas,” she says.

  Thom. It is the first time she’s said his name to me.

  We stare at each other for an uncomfortable moment longer, then she helps me into the passenger seat.

  On the drive home we try to find things to say, but it isn’t easy. Suddenly, it’s as if my ex-husband is in the backseat, scenting the air between us with his aftershave.

  “I got your car from the airport,” Stacey says as she turns onto Mullen Avenue.

  It seems like a year ago that I turned into the long-term parking area. “How was the tree? Did it catch fire on the drive home?”

  “The tree was fine. I donated it to the nursing home on Sunset.”

  That’s right. The tree was only strapped onto my car for a day or so. Not the week I imagined. “Thanks.”

  Stacey pulls into my driveway and parks. “You’re home.”

  There are cars everywhere, and lights are on all up and down the street, but the neighborhood is strangely silent for late afternoon. For almost ten years I have lived in this house, on this street, and yet, just now, looking at it, I wonder if it ever really was my home. Rather, it was where I passed the time between shifts at the high school and tried to make a failing marriage into something it could never be.

  The Comfort Lodge . . .

  (which doesn’t apparently exist)

  . . . now that’s a home.

  Don’t go there, Joy.

  Stacey comes around to my door and helps me out. She gets me situated on my crutches and together, moving slowly, we make our way around the yard.

  We are at the corner, by the huge, winter-dead lilac tree that was our first investment in the yard, when a crowd of people surge out from behind the house, yelling, “Surprise!”

  I stumble to a halt. Stacey places a hand in the small of my back to steady me.

  There must be two hundred people in front of me; most are holding lit candles, several hold up signs that say “Welcome Home, Joy.” The first person to come forward is Gracie Leon—a girl I suspended last semester for defacing all three copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. “We prayed for you, Mrs. Candellaro.”

  A young man comes forward next, stands beside Gracie. Willie Schmidt. Seven years ago, he was my fourth period teacher’s assistant. Now he has students of his own at a local high school. “Welcome back,” he says, handing me a beautiful pink box. Inside it are hundreds of cards.

  Mary Moro is next. She’s a junior this year, and head cheerleader. She holds out a Christmas cactus in a white porcelain bowl. “I bought this with my babysitting money, Mrs. Candellaro. Remember when you said the only plant you could keep alive was a cactus?”

  Then I see Bertie and Rayla from work; they stand pressed together like a pair of salt and pepper shakers. Both of them have left their families to be here.

  My throat is so full I can hardly nod. It’s all I can do to whisper, “Thanks.”

  They surge toward me, all talking at once.

  We stand in the yard, talking and laughing and sharing the surface connections of our lives. No one mentions the plane crash, but I feel their curiosity; unasked questions hang behind other words. I wonder if and when it will become a thing I can talk about.

  By the time they finally start to leave, night is falling on Madrona Lane. The streetlamps are coming on.

  My sister guides me to my front door and unlocks it.

  My house, on my return, is as silent as it was when I left.

  “I put you in the downstairs bedroom,” Stacey says, and our thoughts veer onto an ugly road.
We are both remembering the day I came home to find her in my bed.

  It is not the first time our thoughts have gone here and it won’t be the last. Our recent past is like a speed bump; you slow down and go over it, then drive on your way again.

  “Good thinking,” I say.

  She helps me get settled in the downstairs guest room. When I’m in bed, she brings me several books, a plate of cheese and crackers, a Big Gulp from the local mini mart, the television remote and my wireless laptop. I notice a magazine in with the books. It’s the same Redbook I was reading in the lodge. “That’s pretty old,” I say, pointing to it.

  Stacey glances at the magazine, then shrugs. “I read it to you in the hospital almost every day. There was a great article in it on refurbishing a log cabin that used to be a bed and breakfast. Remember when you wanted to be an innkeeper?”

  “Yeah,” is all I can say. No wonder my Comfort Lodge was in need of repair.

  Stacey props my cast onto a pillow, then steps back. “Will you be okay for the night? I could stay.”

  “No. Your . . . Thom will miss you.”

  “He wants to see you.”

  “Does he? That’s quite a turn around.”

  We stare at each other; neither of us knows where to go after that.

  “It’s like napalm, the way it comes and goes,” Stacey says.

  “Yeah.”

  “I can stay.”

  “Go home to your . . .” Despite my best intentions, I trip up. What do I call him, my ex-husband? Her lover? Boyfriend? What?

  “Fiancé.” She stares at me hard, biting her lip. I know she wants to say just the right thing, as if the perfect words are a bleach that can remove this stain between us.

  The silence lingers, turns awkward. I want to mention her wedding, perhaps even say I’ll be there, but I don’t know if I dare promise such a thing.

  I can see how the quiet between us wounds her. She tries valiantly to smile. “Did you tell Mom about me and Thom, by the way?”

  “You think that’s what was on my mind when I was dying?”

  “You always were a tattletale.”

  I can’t help smiling at that. Her words take us back to a time when there was no silence between us. Suddenly we’re six and seven again, fighting in the smelly backseat of Mom’s VW bus. “You’re right. And, yes, I told her.”