Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

  Besides, Gary loved Molly. Any fool could see that. The way she sometimes caught him staring at Molly’s photo, his face so soft and sad, it was all she could do not to run over to him and throw her arms about him. Every time she walked into Molly’s hospital room, there was another gift from him. He couldn’t afford anything, but what he bought was always simple and beautiful. So perfect, it got her in the gut to see it. Butter-yellow cashmere socks. A sea-blue vial of lotion. Such kindness, such thought, made her just love Gary even more. And she wasn’t the only one.

  The nurses couldn’t stop talking about him, singing his praises. “Your brother-in-law’s a jewel,” one nurse told Suzanne. “Lots of men would just leave. I’ve seen it more times than I care to comment on. The wife gets sick and the husband starts visiting less and less, and then one, two, three, you see him in town with a tootsie on his arm.” The nurse shook her head with approval. “Gary’s a good guy. A really good guy.”

  “I know,” said Suzanne.

  One day, Suzanne was coming out of the shower, when she realized all she had with her was her towel. She was freezing. An old blue flannel shirt was hanging on the hook by the door. Gary’s. As soon as she touched it, she smelled Gary’s pine aftershave. She grabbed the shirt. She put it on. Buttoned it tight against her.

  Gary was having his own problems. He looked everywhere for work. Every morning, he spent hours on the phone, calling his friends, his business contacts, always insisting to everyone he spoke with that no job was too mundane, too beneath him or too boring, as long as he could do it at home, and on his own time. He made blind phone calls to agencies he culled from the Yellow Pages, but without much luck, and every day, on his way to the hospital, he stopped at the gift shop and bought four different newspapers, one from New Jersey, one from Connecticut, two from New York. He sent off resumes and he even called a few headhunters. His resume was impressive enough that people called him back, but after that, he was in trouble, because as soon as anyone heard that all he was looking for was part-time, off-site work, the atmosphere turned suddenly cool. “That’s not what we’re really looking for,” people told him. “We’re looking for someone who can be part of a team. Someone more committed.”

  It made Gary feel hysterical. Committed. Jesus. What was more committed than going to the hospital every day to see the woman you loved most in the world not recognize you, and not letting yourself give up hope? What was more committed than being a single father?

  Gary sat in his kitchen and stared at the telephone. Don’t give up, he told himself, just as the phone suddenly rang, startling him so that he dropped his pen, rolling it across the floor.

  “Gary.”

  “Ada!” He scooped over, grabbing up the pen.

  “Guess what? I’ve got something for you.”

  “Oh, thank God, thank God. I really need the work.”

  There was a clip of silence. “Gary, it’s not work.” Her voice brightened. “It’s for Molly.”

  “For Molly?”

  “I was in the bookstore the other day, and I picked up this absolutely amazing book. The Magic Healing Power of Mushrooms. It’s all about how the mushrooms help the body release this special chemical and how it affects immunity—”

  “Ada—” Gary cut her off. He felt suddenly exhausted. “Molly can’t eat.”

  “Well, I know that, but you could boil up the mushrooms and give her the liquid—”

  “In her IV?” His voice tightened. “She’s comatose. She can’t eat.” Ada was quiet. “I was just trying to help.”

  “I know you were.”

  “Well, if I hear of anything, I’ll call you.”

  Gary hung up, feeling sick.

  He could hear Suzanne in the kitchen noisily washing dishes. At least she was cleaning up. He heard the mail slapping in through the slot and he crouched to leaf through it. Bills. Junk mail. Cards he never had the heart to open because they always made him feel worse. They reminded him too much. He usually just threw them away. He was almost finished with the mail when he found something addressed from the hospital, and he tore it open.

  Five pages of pale blue paper with deep blue ink. Columns and explanations and a total on the very bottom. Eight hundred thousand. He stared at the pages again as if there were some mistake, an extra zero, a wrong comma or decimal, a misprint. Operations. Procedures. CAT scans and MRIs and nuclear medicine. A single blood test was two thousand alone. Gary started to laugh. Eight hundred thousand! He looked at the service dates. These were all for last month! The bill didn’t even cover the last three weeks! He was laughing so hard he was crying, snuffling his tears, hitting the table, making so much noise, Suzanne ran in, her hands still damp. He flapped the bill in the air and handed it to her.

  “This is a joke?” she asked, and he shook his head. “Insurance will cover this, right?”

  He leaned along the wall. “What am I going to do?”

  Every day now, another bill came, and the totals were always so astronomical, they took his breath away. He didn’t recognize the names of the doctors billing them, the procedures all seemed to be in a foreign language, and after a while, he simply stopped looking at the bills altogether, but stuffed them into clean envelopes, stamped and addressed them and sent them off to insurance and tried not to think about them at all.

  As soon as he mailed a bill off, another one arrived, and with them began to come the insurance denials. A twenty-thousand-dollar procedure was above what insurance usually paid and so insurance would only pay fifteen thousand of it. His insurance wouldn’t cover Molly’s hospital stay because they said that it was beyond the normal stay after a C-section, which was only three days. Astounded, Gary called the insurance company. “What can you mean talking to me about normal stay? How can you do this? This isn’t a normal C-section! Surely, if you look at her file, you’ll see the blood work, the tests, the diagnosis—”

  “Hold on,” the voice on the other end said. “My computer just went down.”

  He had to call back five minutes later, waiting through the tinny Muzak rendition of the Beatles’ “Got to Get You Into My Life” before a real person got on the line, and even then it was a new person, and he had to tell his story all over again. “Reapply then,” the woman told him. “Contest. Tell the doctors to send supporting information.”

  “What if I don’t know exactly who the doctor is or what sort of supporting information you might need?”

  “Well, if you don’t know, sir, then we certainly don’t.”

  Gary leafed through another bill, denied because Molly had not gotten precertification. “Precertification! What do you mean asking about precertification? My wife was comatose!” Gary shouted into the phone. “How could she precertify anything? Was I supposed to stop the doctors, to say, ‘Wait, don’t try to save my wife yet, let me call insurance first, make sure it’s all right for you to do whatever the hell you’re going to do’?”

  “I know you’re upset, but you don’t have to shout at me.”

  “No? Who do I shout at then?”

  “Sir, I don’t have to take this call.”

  “No! Don’t hang up. You’re right, you’re right, I’m sorry.” But what was he supposed to do? The people he spoke to on the phone were just clerks. They weren’t responsible, they didn’t know him, they needed to look up the information and his wife’s file was so large, it might take them a while. “Can you call back?” the clerks kept asking. He called back three times in half an hour and each time he got a different person, and none of them knew what exactly was the problem, why the bill hadn’t been paid to the hospital by insurance. “Send it in again,” they kept telling him.

  Gary tried. He kept track of the bills as best he could, but nothing seemed to make sense. He bought two big file envelopes and stuffed the bills into them. He called the doctors, desperate.

  The doctors, thank God, were sympathetic. Dr. Price waved his hand in annoyance. “Insurance companies practicing medicine. What a world. As if you don
’t have enough to think about. I’ll have my office call them.”

  Dr. Kane, the surgeon, told Gary he’d put a note in his file that payment might be delayed. “Pay when you can,” he said. “We’ll work it out.”

  And to his astonishment, Karen told him not to pay at all.

  “Let’s just say that if, when, and whatever insurance pays me is enough,” Karen said. “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t ever have to worry about it.”

  Gary blinked at her and she slowly smiled. He was so grateful he could have wept.

  But the bills kept coming. From more and more doctors he didn’t know. From the hospital and the labs, who weren’t so understanding as the individual doctors, so willing to be a little flexible and wait for him to fight with the insurance company. Collection agencies began to call. “Wouldn’t you like to pay and get this taken care of?” a smooth voice always asked him. “Why don’t we just do it over the phone by credit card?”

  “Which tapped-out credit card would you like?” Gary said wearily.

  “Sir,” the voice said, cooling, “you don’t want to let this go too far.”

  Gary stepped up his search for work, clipping ads from the paper about nighttime proofing, calling, and to his dismay, everyone he called asked about his last job, and then they didn’t want to see him. Next time, he told himself, he’d lie.

  He had the want ads spread on the floor when Suzanne came into the room. She was wearing a green dress, her arms and legs bare. She was watching him as if she expected him to say something. “You look nice,” he said.

  She smiled and then sat down, watching him again. “No luck?” she said, and he shrugged.

  “You know, I could work. I wouldn’t even have to leave the house.”

  “You work already. You take care of Otis.”

  She waved her hand. “The baby runs like a little clock. I could do hair right in a corner of the kitchen. It wouldn’t be any trouble. I’ll schedule people when he sleeps. Or he can sit in the playpen and watch. Learn a little something.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “I need to work,” she blurted. “I need something to take my mind off—things.”

  She looked away from him.

  Who was Gary not to understand something like that? “Sure. Go ahead,” he said. “The money will come in handy.”

  A CUT ABOVE.

  SUZANNE GOLDMAN: LICENSED BEAUTICIAN.

  COLOR, CUTS, STYLINGS. IN THE COMFORT OF MY HOME. THE LOOKS YOU WANT AT PRICES YOU’LL LOVE!

  With the baby in the stroller, Wood You, the unpainted furniture store, was Suzanne’s last stop of the day. The store was cool and smelled like cedar, filled with soft pine shelves and tables and chairs, some of them stained and stenciled so you could see how beautiful they could become with just a little loving care. Wood You had a big community bulletin board by the front. The store was crowded with people, running their hands over the furniture, peering at the shelves of stains. A good sign. Every one of these people could be a potential haircut.

  She had already set up a little work corner for herself in the kitchen. She took the mirror from the hallway and hung it on the wall. She moved a swivel chair from Gary’s office in front of it, and put a smock on a hook by the basement door. She set up a small shelf full of supplies, the special shampoos and conditioners she made herself, some vials of color, and small gleaming bowls with scented candles. To give the place atmosphere.

  She lifted a flier out from the bottom of the stroller and tried to find a good place on the board to tack it.

  “Here, let me help you.”

  Suzanne turned around. A man in a flannel shirt, a leather apron about his jeans, leaned up and helped position Suzanne’s sign on the bulletin board. “Nice-looking sign.”

  Suzanne looked at him to see if he were making fun of her. He was about her age, with a face like a soup dumpling. Receding brown hair, belly folding over his belt. But his smile was friendly enough.

  “Anyone comes in here with raggedy hair, you point them to my sign,” she said.

  He laughed, and then she felt embarrassed because just look at his hair, flying off in every direction. But he didn’t seem to take offense. “Bob Tillman,” he said. He waggled his fingers at the baby and then squinted up at the sign again. “Suzanne Goldman. Wait a minute here. You’re not related to Molly Goldman, are you?”

  “You know Molly?”

  “I know of her. A few of my customers were talking about her.” He shook his head. “Terrible thing.”

  Suzanne stiffened a little. “She’s my sister. I’m staying with my brother-in-law helping out. Taking care of the baby.”

  “I’m so very sorry.” He gave her a considering look and then, abruptly, he took down her sign.

  Suzanne’s hand flew up to stop him. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”

  He dug into his pocket and pulled out some tape, and then he took Suzanne’s sign and taped it to the front window. Then he turned back to her, smiling. “That’s better.”

  Suzanne smiled back at him. God, she thought. This guy was nice with a capital N. Why didn’t guys like that ever look like anything?

  “Come back. I’ll give you a good deal on some furniture. I’ll show you how you can make an unpainted chair look like an expensive antique.”

  “You got any pickled stains?” A woman tapped Bob Tillman on the arm.

  “Come back,” Bob Tillman repeated to Suzanne and turned his attention to the pickle stain lady.

  Suzanne wheeled Otis out into the sunny street. She felt a little better seeing her sign posted in front like that. She took a moment to admire it.

  “He looks just like you. The very image.”

  Suzanne looked startled. A woman was standing beside her. She looked like Bob Tillman?

  “He does. Look at those eyes. That mouth. That coloring. Is he your first?”

  Suzanne followed the woman’s eyes down to the baby. “Yes,” Suzanne said.

  “Lucky you.” The other woman fretted her hands through her hair. She leaned forward and drew out a pen and began copying the number on Suzanne’s sign.

  Two breadwinners without bread, Gary thought. No one had called for Suzanne. No one had called for him. Gary tried to stay optimistic, but he felt worn down. He stopped dressing in a shirt and tie and wore only his jeans, his battered leather jacket. He stopped carrying his briefcase, his portfolio. He told himself he was saving wear and tear on his good things, that if he got an interview, he’d shave, he’d have Suzanne trim his hair. He’d spruce up and make his step have spring. He’d make himself look like he knew what hope was.

  That evening, when he was coming home from the hospital, he saw Bill sitting on his front porch. It was an odd sight, since it was neighborhood policy not to sit on the stoops until it was good and hot outside, until you could parade out plastic chairs and refreshments and one of those small portable radios. Bill waved one hand in greeting, which surprised Gary even more. He stopped, hesitating.

  “How’s Molly?”

  Gary shrugged. “The same.”

  Bill took out a cigarette and lighted it. “And how are you managing?”

  “You know. As good as can be expected.”

  Bill drew on his cigarette. He tapped the ashes onto his porch. “I see you around the house a lot more.”

  Gary nodded. He looked at Bill, who was looking quietly down at the ground. Giving him room. “I got fired,” Gary said.

  Bill nodded, shaking his head. It was a little disconcerting to Gary that Bill didn’t seem the least surprised. If anything, he looked as if he had known already. “What kind of bastard fires someone when his wife is ill?” Bill said finally.

  “A bastard who wants you there nine to five, I suppose.”

  “I know that kind.” Bill flung his cigarette away and dug for another in his shirt pocket. He lit it and then looked back at the street, considering. “You know, my cousin Larry runs a warehouse over in Newark. Plumbing supplies. He never t
rusted those automated security systems. He needs a night watchman. Midnight to six.” He looked past Gary, at the cars. “You interested? All you have to do is be there. You can sleep, read magazines, do nothing. It’s peace of mind for Larry. I mean, who’s really going to break into a plumbing supply place?” Bill stubbed out his cigarette. For the first time, he looked straight at Gary. His face was even, breathing, his eyes a deep, bright blue. “It’s money under the table. One hundred a night.”

  Gary felt a strange light shining from the sky. His mouth was dry. “When can I start?”

  Larry’s Plumbing Supply Warehouse was on a dark side street in Newark. Larry was a lean, horse-faced man in his fifties with a shelf of sandy hair and straight white teeth and an odd resemblance to Bill. He pumped Gary’s hand. “Bill told me all about you,” he said. “Good people, Bill and Emma.”

  “They sure are.”

  Larry gave Gary a quick tour, down the gray hallways, into the storage rooms, and back to the front desk where Gary would sit. “Every few hours just walk the halls,” Larry told him. “Phone’s right here. Any trouble, just call the cops. That’s your defense.” He patted Gary on the back. “You’re welcome to bring in a radio, if you want. The last watchman had a portable TV. And you’re not totally alone here. We’ve got a cleaning man who comes here nights, too. A college kid. Son of a friend of mine, so you’ll have a little company, if you want it. At six sharp, the day security man comes in. You punch in and out. And every Friday, I’ll come here and pay you.”

  Even though Gary wouldn’t be seeing anyone, he still had to wear a uniform. “Makes it more official,” Larry said. The uniform was a longsleeved shirt and pants, both in stiff, dull brown, with a gold insignia that said TOP SECURITY. “I made up the name,” Larry confided with a grin. There was a cap, too, with a plastic brim, that Larry popped onto Gary’s head.

  The first time Gary put on the uniform, he stared at himself in the mirror. He looked ridiculous. An image flashed into his mind: another kind of uniform, the scrubs he had put on to watch his son being born, the exuberant way he had tied on the mask, the gown, how he had loved the whole green starchy smell. He remembered, too, Molly’s face, shining in pleasure at the sight of him. He saw her. He felt her joy. And then he saw Molly, swollen, gray, and sick, a johnny gown tied on. Molly not seeing him at all. He shut his eyes and opened them. He adjusted the hat. It nicked at the back of his ears. The shirt collar itched. It was money. It was one hundred tax-free dollars a night, and taking such a job required no more thought than that.