by Alix Ohlin
He discovered the truth about his marriage when he almost slept with a patient. An unhappily married forty-year-old banker whose husband was sick with pancreatic cancer, Marisa was rumpled and bosomy, with a messy tangle of upswept brown hair and lipstick that was always smudged; her perfume was unpleasantly spicy and overpowering. Every time she came in he thought she looked like she’d just gotten laid, although he knew from their sessions that this wasn’t true. Lonely, bereft, she wanted someone to hold her hand; she loved talking to Mitch, and there soon developed an unspoken tension that he allowed to build. He even grew to rely on it, the excitement of it feeling, at times, like the only thing that got him through the week.
At home he and Grace were sleeping in the same bed but on different schedules; she went to bed early and he stayed up well past midnight, so they overlapped as little as possible. Then Marisa’s husband died, and the day after the funeral she came into the office sobbing, dissolving, and admitted that despite her pain she was flooded with relief. Mitch patted her hand, understanding that she had chosen him for this confession instead of a priest, and that to violate her trust would be profane.
Years later he saw her at the Jean-Talon Market, and she looked great. She had lost weight, and her hair and clothes were less rumpled, though she still couldn’t keep her lipstick on. She was standing fifteen feet away, choosing an eggplant, and when she looked up and saw him, the expression on her face was horrified. He nodded noncommittally and drifted away, realizing that she hadn’t looked at all sexual during that terrible time in her life, of which she had just been reminded. She’d just been a mess. Only someone as lonely and narcissistic as Mitch could have interpreted it otherwise. He walked quickly to his car, half his grocery list abandoned, thanking his lucky stars that the damage hadn’t been worse.
A couple of days later, he stopped by Grace’s room again, during visiting hours, showing up empty-handed; bringing flowers to your ex-wife seemed like a weird thing to do, no matter what the circumstances were. There was another patient in the room, the wall-mounted television was blaring a French téléroman, and his heart went out to Grace. She hated television, which gave her headaches when she was tired. Now she was staring up at the ceiling, slack-jawed, her expression vacant, her hands by her sides. When he knocked, her eyes jumped to life, and she looked so happy that he flushed. He should have come back sooner.
“How are you feeling?” he said, pulling up a chair next to her.
“Fantastic.” She smiled, in spite of her evident pain. She had lost the glassy-eyed look, though she was still pale and the planes of her face were shadowed. Somebody had braided her hair. “Azra says you helped out at my place. Thank you.”
“It was nothing.” He had brought back the key to her apartment and set it on the bedside table, on top of what looked like a drawing her daughter had done.
In the other bed, a middle-aged woman moaned, seemingly agitated by the TV as well, so Mitch turned around to look. The soap opera was taking place in a hospital too, where a young woman wearing a lot of makeup was hooked up to a life-support machine while a handsome doctor looked down at her in consternation.
“Mais non, mais non,” the other patient mumbled, though Mitch couldn’t tell what exactly she was objecting to. A detergent commercial came on with a raucous jingle, and Grace winced. Noises carried into the room from the hallway, too: doctors being called to stations, the bright chatter of nurses, the hum and beep of distant machines. He was so used to being in a hospital that he rarely thought about it from the patient’s point of view, how difficult it must be to get well in the midst of the chaos and noise. He wished now that he had brought Grace something, a magazine or a book. “Is there anything else I can do?”
“I don’t know. Tell me what’s new. I haven’t seen you in ages.”
He shrugged, not knowing where to start.
“I heard you were with someone, a lawyer or something.”
This gave him pause. “Where did you hear that?”
Grace’s eyes sparkled at him. “It’s a small city. Somebody met her at a party.” She was right, of course—it was a small city—and it was no big deal. Nonetheless he felt at some obscure disadvantage. “It didn’t work out,” he said.
Grace reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Sorry.”
She was watching him intently, waiting to see if he had anything more to say about it, which was so typical of her, and so different from Martine, who simply would have changed the subject, that he smiled. He realized, now that his initial shock had passed, that Grace still looked good. She had stayed trim, probably still ran and skied. For a second he couldn’t help picturing her in those early months, splayed on their bed and whispering to him urgently, “Come inside.” She never put it any other way, and when he did she’d say his name, as if his identity had been a bit of mystery to her but was now, at this crucial moment, confirmed. This was the Grace he would always think of: young and smart and so fiercely competent that it took him years to discover just how vulnerable she was. She smiled at him now, wistfully, as if she were tracking his thoughts.
“It’s okay,” he finally said. “What about you?”
“Oh, no. Between work and Sarah, I don’t have time to meet anybody.”
“Where’s your practice now, anyway? Are you still on Côte-des-Neiges?”
She shook her head, wincing as if it hurt to do so. “I quit. I’m a teacher now. Grade six, on the West Island.”
“What? Seriously?” He was shocked by this. Plenty of therapists burned out, tired of hearing about intransigent life problems day after day, but Grace’s passion for her work had always seemed inexhaustible, her curiosity about other people such an entrenched part of her personality. She was the one everybody cornered at parties, the recipient of her friends’ troubled late-night phone calls. Strangers poured out their hearts to her in airports and grocery stores, and she never complained or seemed frustrated or bored. Her profession suited her better than anyone he knew, including himself.
“It’s a long story,” she said, clearly not intending to tell it.
Then her eyes shifted behind him, and he turned and saw a little blond girl trooping into the room—scissoring her legs in giant steps, swinging her arms like a tiny soldier—with Azra trailing her. Then she saw Mitch, stopped short, and cocked her head to the side. He guessed she was about nine.
“Come here, you,” Grace said fondly.
Mitch stepped back as the girl approached her mother and gently ran her fingers along her arm, as if afraid she might break.
Grace smiled at her. “That tickles,” she said.
Sarah smiled and kept doing it, her fingers scurrying up and down Grace’s arm like mice.
“Stop, kiddo,” Grace said. “Say hello to my friend Mitch.”
“Hi,” the girl said, without looking at him.
“Hi, Sarah. How are you?” This wasn’t the sort of question you asked children, who didn’t go in for small talk, and the girl ignored it. She didn’t seem bothered by his presence. It was just one more thing that had happened—her mother in this strange place, the doctors, staying with Azra.
“What’s the best thing that happened to you today?” Grace asked her.
“Azra gave me a Snickers,” Sarah said.
Behind her, Azra laughed guiltily. “Sorry, Grace. I know you don’t usually give her chocolate.”
“It’s okay,” Grace said, unconvincingly.
The patient in the other bed seemed to have fallen asleep, and Mitch reached up and turned off the television. In the sudden quiet, Sarah’s high voice rang brightly as she stood at her mother’s bedside and talked about her day. Playtime, a story about elephants, a boy who had pulled her hair, something the teacher said, a bug at recess—he could tell Grace loved hearing all these details, her eyes fixed on Sarah. After a while, the girl ran down like a battery losing its charge. Her attention shifted to the window, and she started over to it, explaining something she’d just learned about Canada g
eese.
Azra took some crayons and paper out of her bag and suggested that she draw a goose for her mother.
“Okay,” Sarah said, then sat down in a chair, balanced the paper on her knees, and started to draw, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth in a caricature of concentration.
Leaning against the wall, Azra let out a long breath, obviously exhausted. Mitch wondered where Grace’s parents were, or the rest of her support network. She had always had plenty of friends.
Azra excused herself to go to the restroom, nodding at Mitch to indicate that he should keep an eye on Sarah.
He returned to Grace’s side and said softly, “She’s really cute.”
“Thanks.”
“She looks like you.”
“No she doesn’t. She looks like her father.”
“Does she?” Mitch said, but Grace didn’t respond. The subject was clearly off-limits. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he said.
Grace looked at him with a small, quick smile, her eyes flickering. He realized—still able to read her after all these years—that she was in enormous pain, and scared, certainly not in any condition to tell him what he could do to help. He had a sudden, intense urge to hold her in his arms or, equally powerful, to walk out the door and never come back. He glanced down, afraid that his face might betray these thoughts, and when he looked up she was still smiling, as if that tight-lipped expression were holding her entire face together. He touched her hand and made his voice strong and calm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
She barely nodded. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said. “Seeing each other again.”
When he was at work, he tried to act as though his confidence hadn’t been shattered. Everything there—his office, his coworkers, the nurses—felt not familiar, as it should have, but strange, his days all out of rhythm. He wondered if his chair had always seemed a little too low for the desk in his office, or if he had called the secretary on the third floor by the right name. He wasn’t sure, in general, of anything. Showing up each morning in his sports jacket and khaki pants, takeout coffee in hand, he felt he was faking it even more than he ever had when, as a student and intern, he actually was. His own voice seemed to stand at a remove. Time passed stickily, each minute clinging to him as though not wanting to let go.
His coworkers had heard about what happened during his rotation in Nunavut, and their response was to avoid him, expressing their sympathy with distant nods and grimacing smiles when passing in the hallways, everyone’s eyes focused on a spot just over his shoulder. Mitch understood this fear of contagion. Failing a patient as he had was every therapist’s worst fear, and it was far better to steer clear of it, even for those whose profession advocated understanding. He only wished that he could steer clear of it himself.
Commencing a new group-therapy session on substance abuse, he tried to pare away self-doubt and cleave to the core of his work. There were ten patients, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty, united by their reek of cigarette smoke. They sat in a circle, downcast, jittery, each one’s chair at a calibrated distance from the next; no one wanted to touch another person, even by accident, in this room of misery and anger. Thank God for other people’s problems, he thought.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s start.”
He laid down the ground rules in a lecture he’d memorized so long ago that he didn’t even mark the words as they left his mouth. Then came the introductions, and he tried to listen carefully and note every detail, but time and again he felt himself drifting away, untethered to the moment, and had to reel himself back in again.
An hour and a half later he was alone, uncomfortably, with his thoughts. The session had gone reasonably well, and they all had left with their “homework” for the next week, nodding as he’d told them what to do. He knew from experience that there would be a serious drop-off in attendance, and he usually made bets with himself about who would stay and who would go. This time, though, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Thomasie’s face kept passing through his mind.
He threw his pencil across his desk, and sighed.
At five o’clock, he left work and headed to Martine’s apartment. He didn’t want to call in advance. He wasn’t sure that what he had to say could be blurted out over the phone, in the few moments her politeness would afford him, and he wouldn’t be able to say it without being able to read her face as he spoke.
He rehearsed a speech over and over in his mind, knowing he had only a few seconds in which to win her over. He was so preoccupied with the wording of his plea that he didn’t even see her coming down the street until she was almost in front of him—her cheeks chafed red by the autumn wind, a blue scarf bunched beneath her chin. She was carrying grocery bags and he reached out to help her with them, but she shook her head. Her hair was twisted into one of her usual chaotic arrangements, strands escaping everywhere. They stood in the street, afternoon traffic inching by, horns blasting. She was beautiful.
“Martine,” he said. “Please.”
Her short, humorless laugh hung between them like smoke. All the lines he had practiced dissolved in the frigid air. Instead he said, “Will you marry me?”
He had no plan, no ring. Martine cocked her head to one side, her expression neutral, examining, as if he were some new piece of evidence brought before her in court. He had no idea what she was thinking.
“So, you’re back,” she said at last.
“I know I should’ve come by earlier. Much earlier. I just—I’m sorry. But please, I love you. I love Mathieu.”
Martine set the grocery bags down, then fished around in her pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and drew on it deeply. Finally she said, “I know you’re attached to him.”
“It’s so much more than that,” he said impatiently. “I should never have gone away. I shouldn’t have let us drift apart. I should have told you how much you mean to me, I should’ve insisted. I never should’ve let you let me go.”
Almost involuntarily, it seemed, she was nodding in agreement. “That’s right,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”
Then she glanced up at her apartment. Since the windows of both Mathieu’s room and the living room faced the street, he thought she was checking to see if her son was watching, to incorporate him into the decision. This gave him the confidence to think that she might invite him in. Five more minutes, and he’d be inside.
He was buoyed by this thought, and by the idea of seeing the child again, playing with him, hearing his high, tinny voice. He had missed those cozy weekends, the family dinners, even the science lectures.
Martine was looking at him steadily, waiting for him to say more.
He wondered why she hadn’t picked up Mathieu from day care, as she usually did, but maybe she had a sitter for him. Surely he wouldn’t be in the apartment alone. This might explain her hesitation, when of course she ought to be inviting Mitch in so they could have this conversation in comfort rather than on the street.
“Martine,” he said.
She threw her cigarette down and stubbed it out with the pointy toe of her boot, rubbing the black stain of ash into the sidewalk. When she finally met his eyes again, she just shrugged. Mitch knew, then, that Mathieu was with a man, not a sitter, and that this man had, in a matter of weeks, already gotten further with her than he ever had.
“That doctor?” he said. “Vendetti?”
“It’s going well,” she said. “Mathieu likes him too. You taught him to be friendlier with people. I’m grateful to you for that.”
She was speaking with grave formality. He felt like he was being presented with a plaque at some awards banquet. It made him angry, and he couldn’t restrain the sad, inevitable sentiments, so stale until you had to inhabit them yourself, when suddenly they glowed freshly with truth. “He’s not the one for you,” he said. “You and I belong together.”
With a distant, constrained smile, Martine picked up her grocery bags, one in ea
ch arm, balanced, self-sufficient. “You should go,” she said, and she walked away up the stairs.
And that was it. He had felt so unmoored the past few weeks that this latest blow hardly sent him into a tailspin, just dropped him deeper down the same dark well. The next morning he was back at work, greeting his coworkers and drinking coffee from his regular mug. He was sitting at his desk, feeling moody and nauseous, when he remembered someone who had it a lot worse. So when he had a break in his schedule, he took the elevator downstairs and knocked gently on Grace’s door.
She was alone, staring at the ceiling, her expression pinched, the braid in her hair loose and tangled. She was still wearing the fuzzy red sock on her foot below the cast.
“Hey there,” he said softly.
She turned her head slowly, as if her neck pained her, but when she saw him her eyes again lit up, giving him the first good feeling of the day and, possibly, the week. “Mitch. I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I hope you don’t mind. I’m on a break.”
“I don’t mind at all. I’m just lying here in a drugged-out fog.” She patted the bed beside her, her hand flopping jerkily in the air, and said, “Come over here.”
He pulled up a chair and sat down.
Over her hospital gown she was wearing a pink bed jacket that looked like it belonged in an old lady’s closet. The other patient had apparently been discharged, so she had the room to herself.
“How are you feeling?”
“Not bad,” she said.
From her stiff posture, her hands quieted at her sides, her head leaning heavily on the thin pillow, he knew she felt a lot worse than she was letting on.
“Can I ask you a favor?” she said.
“Shoot.”
“Can you get me a pen?”
He cocked his head. “You planning to write your memoirs in here?”
Instead of laughing at this admittedly pitiful joke, she was holding out her hand expectantly, her expression dire. He took a pen from his jacket pocket and handed it over. Immediately she stuck it down inside her cast, using the end of it to scratch. She let out a loud, involuntary groan of satisfaction, and Mitch, embarrassed, looked away. She kept digging for a couple minutes, feverishly, then stopped and held the pen out to him. “Thanks.”