by Mary Campisi
“I’ll feel so foolish,” Grace had said, “and what would I buy? If you haven’t noticed, I don’t exactly look like a model.”
“So? Do I? I’ll bet half the women who go in there haven’t been a size four in their entire life.” And then, she’d leaned in close, lowered her voice. “Last year, I bought one of those black lace teddies, see-through. You know what Hank said? Well, actually, we didn’t do a whole lot of talking that night, but the next morning, he asked if I’d wear it around the house sometime, you know, under my sweats.”
“But Grant—”
“…is a guy,” Laura had said. “You’re his wife, the mother of his children, the woman he’s chosen to spend the rest of his life with…and you’ve got a lot less jiggle than I do. But it’s not about that, Grace. It’s about adding a little zip—fantasy, call it, where you’re the star. Trust me, Grant will love whatever you buy and he won’t say it makes your butt look big. And after, when you get home, I’ll bet he’ll find a way to stop working all those late nights, poring over those boring briefs. You just watch, he’ll pick a wife in silk and garters any day.”
Grace thought of the pink teddy folded between layers of pink and white tissue paper. Would Grant think she was a fool? Would he say, Where’s my wife? The one who wears brushed cotton to bed? Where’d she go?
Maybe she needed some of Jenny’s lavender and chamomile concoction. Jenny wouldn’t have this problem; she wouldn’t have the first qualm about marching into a lingerie store and asking the sales clerk to help her find her size in the black garter belt and stockings. Size 6, she’d say, but sometimes I’m a 4. No need to lower her voice and pull the clerk aside, like Grace did. And Jenny would pick black or red, maybe bright blue, no pink, like Grace.
Well, Jenny was different. She’d never had any kids and didn’t have to worry about the extra flab around the middle, or the dimpled flesh under her thighs, or the back of her butt.
If Grace were really honest, she’d just admit the truth. It wasn’t about Jenny’s size or the fact that she was extremely attractive, exotic even, because Jenny didn’t seem to notice or care much about that. In fact, she didn’t care what other people thought about her at all. She did what she wanted, when she wanted, how she wanted, and to hell with everything and everyone else.
Why couldn’t Grace be more like Jenny?
* * *
Clarke, Heath & Jackson was located two towns over in the upscale suburban area of Montcrest. Grant was a senior partner and one of the most well-respected real estate attorneys in the area. This was the life he’d always planned: a partnership in a prestigious law firm, a house in suburbia, a wife, two children, a retirement plan, a hefty stock portfolio…so many grand plans.
Grace pushed the thought away, tried to bury it in the past where it belonged. The present, that’s what they needed to focus on, thinking about today…and tonight. She pulled the van into the parking lot and noticed his reserved spot was empty. All this planning and worry and now he’s not even here? His secretary would know where he was; she knew everything. Grace pulled into a parking spot and went to find her.
Louise Brumbacker was a thin, wiry woman with gray-black hair and a two-hundred-card Rolodex. Grant said she knew all of his clients’ names, spouses too, even some of the children, knew where they lived, what they did, how much money they made. He said Louise belonged on a game show, “Corporate Secretary’s Challenge.”
“Hi, Louise,” Grace said, spotting the top of the woman’s head behind a filing cabinet.
“Grace!” Louise popped out from the back of the cabinet. “What brings you here?”
“I was looking for Grant”—she gestured a hand toward the parking lot—“but his car’s gone.”
“You just missed him.” She tapped a finger against her chin. “Ten minutes at most.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“Sure do. Chantel’s. Business meeting with Foster Realty…foreclosure,” she added. “Was he expecting you? He didn’t say you’d be stopping by.”
“I wanted to surprise him. Tomorrow’s our anniversary. Twelve years.”
Louise nodded, a knowing look on her face. “Yes, I remember. It’s only the closing details on a foreclosure, you should go. I’m sure Grant will be thrilled to see you.”
“But, what about his client?”
“If it’s old man Foster, he’ll look forward to seeing a young, pretty face. Might even speed things along for Grant.”
“You really don’t think they’ll mind?” Grace had spent most of her life surrounded by people under the age of ten; mornings as a teacher in Keystone Elementary School’s kindergarten program and afternoons with her own two, Danielle and Natalie. The corporate world tended to intimidate her; too many serious faces, no room for laughter or compromise.
“Of course not. Go. Surprise them both.”
“Okay,” Grace said, her confidence building. “Okay.”
Chantel’s was on the opposite side of town, nestled among a small copse of trees, evergreens, and maples with tailored shrubs lining a brick drive. Tiny white lights decorated the trees, casting a fairytale look about it in the evening. The structure itself resembled a ski lodge, its wood stained to a deep brown-black with double gold-encrusted front doors. Quaint. Cozy. Romantic. She and Grant had only been here twice since its opening three years ago. The first time had been two years ago, for his thirty-seventh birthday and then last summer, to celebrate his promotion to senior partner.
Grace pulled onto the brick driveway, spotted Grant’s Land Rover at the far end, partially hidden by a flowing oak tree. She parked the van, checked her lipstick, and took a deep breath.
* * *
“I think you should go with the red silk. The fabric drapes your body and falls to the floor in an elegant display of allure and temptation.”
“Stefan, I’m not trying to allure or tempt anybody.” Jenny tossed the dress on the couch. “Maybe I should wear the pantsuit.”
“Red leather?” Stefan tapped his finger against his chin. “That outfit says, ‘I’ll skip dinner and go right for the sex.’”
“It does?” She stared at the red leather pantsuit with the mid-belly zipper. “You talked me into buying it; you said it looked good on me.”
He smiled. “It does, sweetheart, it does.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, now what am I going to wear?” She threw the pantsuit on the couch beside the dress. “Remind me not to take you shopping with me ever again.”
Stefan shook his head, picked a piece of lint from the red dress. “Jenny, have you been using the aromatherapy I gave you?”
She eyed him. “Why?”
“Tense, that’s all. I sense an extreme tenseness in your words, around your mouth, even in the way you carry yourself.”
“I have been using it,” she mumbled. “It just isn’t working very well.”
“So what are you going to do when you go to Italy and meet the pope, eh? What then?”
Just the mention of Italy made her giddy. She’d done it! She’d gotten the assignment that would elevate her career to a whole new level.
“Tell me,” Stefan said again. “What are you going to do?”
The guy could be such a nagger, almost as bad as her mother. “I’ll be fine.” She threw him a look. “As long as he doesn’t make me go to confession.”
That made Stefan laugh. He held up the leather jumpsuit, examined it, then picked up the dress. “Who is this person you’re going to the Photo Finish Awards with, Jenny?”
“Jon Palmer. Acoustical guitar for Flip Side.
“And does this Jon Palmer practice good general hygiene?”
“Of course, he does and I know where this is going.” He was referring to her escort two weeks ago. “Anton wore dreadlocks. His hair was not dirty.” But he had shown up to take her to an awards banquet dressed in ripped jeans, a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the navel, and orange flip flops. Stefan had not been impressed.
“I wasn’t ta
lking about his hair,” he said. “I was talking about his familiarity with a bar of soap.”
“Don’t you have somewhere to go? How much longer until Gerald gets home?”
Stefan glanced at his watch. “Half-hour, give or take. Are you hungry? I can have him whip something up for you. How about an omelet with mushrooms, Swiss cheese, and red pepper?”
She laughed. “You’re like the mother I wish I’d had.”
“You need ten mothers.” His smile was gentle, caring.
Stefan Gunderhaven showed more affection and concern for her than her own mother. How sad was that?
The lacking had always been there, reserved instead for Grace. Jenny was just too different, too confusing, her mother had once said. Maybe what she’d really meant was Jenny was too unlovable. It didn’t matter anymore, hadn’t mattered in a very long time. For the last several years, she’d paid her mother the perfunctory respect that her position required: cards on her birthday and Mother’s Day, a phone call once every two months, and an annual visit. Three days tested Jenny’s tolerance.
Her mother seemed content with the arrangement, telling all her friends that Jenny was the “gypsy” daughter who traveled the world taking pictures of people instead of settling down with some nice man and having his babies. The one and only time Jenny had shared her work with her mother, a photo of Chief Kenotka that had won several awards, Virginia Romano had studied it, frowned, and asked why, with such a fancy camera, Jenny hadn’t touched up the river of wrinkles covering the chieftain’s face. Then she’d pulled out a department store Christmas spread of Danielle and Natalie and proceeded to inform her daughter that those photographers really knew their stuff.
Jenny had inched the photo of Chief Kenotka away from her mother, the hurt spreading like the river of wrinkles on the old chieftain’s face. She’d slipped it inside her portfolio and never showed her mother another piece of her work. That was four years ago, yet still, whenever she looked at the old warrior’s picture hanging on the wall in her office, she remembered that day, remembered her mother’s cruel words.
“So, are you hungry or what?” Stefan asked. “You know Gerald’s food is better than anything you’ll be sampling tonight. I suggest you eat something.” He paused. “Just in case the caveman, uh, I mean your date, doesn’t find the after-party to his liking.”
Jenny’s cell phone rang before she could think of a comeback. It was probably Jon, telling her what time he’d be by to pick her up. “Hello?” Pause. “Yes, this is Jenny Romano. Who? St. Joseph’s Memorial Hospital? In Clairmont?” She gulped in air, sank to the couch, “A car accident? Oh, no.”
* * *
“Is my sister going to die?” Jenny had traveled twenty-four hundred miles to ask that question, and now that she was two seconds away from the answer she almost didn’t want to know. Not knowing had its own insignificant reward, like harboring hope.
The thin, wiry man sat on the caramel-colored sofa in front of her, dressed in surgeon’s green and wearing thick black glasses. He had surgeon’s hands: scrubbed clean, slightly chapped, blunt nails. A few hours ago they’d been fishing instruments inside Grace’s head attempting to remove the clot threatening her life.
“Your sister’s in a coma.”
She tried to suck in air but came up dry. “But you removed the clot. The pressure inside her skull’s gone. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” he agreed, rubbing the back of his neck. “But brain injuries are as individualized as the patient.” He paused. “It’s much too soon to predict the outcome.”
All she wanted was a little reassurance, a gesture, a word, something that would indicate Grace’s recovery was attainable.
“Miss Romano, your sister is in a coma, but she’s young and otherwise healthy. We’re hopeful.”
Hopeful. Ironic, that with today’s modern medicine and multi-billion-dollar research labs, they still couldn’t get past the “hopeful” part. Jenny knew what Dr. Shaffer meant. He’d done all he could, this man with sixteen letters trailing his name. Now, it was in God’s hands, as Virginia Romano always said. That answer brought no comfort. Jenny needed something more concrete than a nebulous hopeful floating around her sister like some mystical aura.
She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. People died in comas, their brains went dead, and they became vegetables, useless bodies that couldn’t even breathe on their own. Had Grant told the children? Where was he anyway, why hadn’t he called to tell her about the accident? Why did she have to hear the news from some clinical voice in the ICU of St. Joseph’s Memorial? Was he with the girls, trying to find a way to tell them why Mommy wasn’t coming home for a while, that she might never come home?
“I want to see her,” Jenny said.
Dr. Shaffer nodded and stood. “You’ll see a lot of tubes and monitors.” There was a brief pause. “And of course, she’s on a respirator.”
Of course. Jenny shifted her bag over her shoulder and stood. “Okay, I’m ready.” What a lie. She would never be ready to see her older sister hooked up to a machine, fighting for her life.
She followed the doctor down a wide corridor, dreading each step. The smell of disinfectant mingled with trays of food under plastic covers turned her stomach. Lighting was either too stark or too dim and everything was beige or faded orange. There was too much noise, too. Buzzes, rings, beeps. She hadn’t been in a hospital since the day her father died on the operating table two years ago. Too little, too late.
Dr. Shaffer turned right and she followed him, straight to the nurses’ station ten feet away. He smiled at the young woman behind the desk and said, “Sally, Miss Romano is here to see her sister, Mrs. Grace Clarke.”
The woman named Sally smiled at Jenny. How could this girl possibly know how to take care of Grace? She was so young with her blonde braid and pink cheeks.
“She’s right in here,” the doctor said, motioning toward one of several glass-enclosed areas. Jenny kept her eyes straight ahead lest someone else’s pain grab her from one of the cubicles and try to suck her in.
Grace.
Jenny’s eyes blurred, focused, and blurred again as she stared at her sister. The tears started, running down Jenny’s face, trickling over her chin. Grace’s head was wrapped with gauze, snug to her skull. Dr. Shaffer had warned Jenny about all the tubes and the respirator with its methodical whooshing sound, but he hadn’t said a word about cutting Grace’s beautiful brown hair, or shaving her head, and wrapping it in white gauze. And that’s what tore at Jenny. Her sister, her friend, was lying in that bed, shorn and helpless, with tubes poking out everywhere, looking centuries older than her scant thirty-six years. Jenny inched closer, needing to touch her. She grasped her sister’s right hand, squeezed her limp fingers.
“Oh, Grace, what happened?” Jenny whispered. What happened? But the only answer she received was the whoosh of the respirator and the tiny beeps from the machines surrounding her bedside. She and Grace were so different, worlds apart and yet, they had always understood each other, even now, they understood each other. Even now...
She jumped at the sound of scraping wheels and urgent chatter. A flurry of white and green rushed into the cubicle next to Grace. Seconds later, a sharp, piercing noise stabbed the air. Jenny held her breath, her gaze flying to Grace’s monitor. She didn’t know how to read it, but she did know that jagged peaks made the monitor beep, and that meant Grace’s heart was pumping, which meant she was alive.
“Miss Romano?” Dr. Shaffer stood in the doorway, his green scrubs ringed under the arms with perspiration marks. “I’d like to have a word with you.”
Jenny squeezed Grace’s hand. “I’ll be back,” she whispered and followed the doctor out of the room. She’d heard that unconscious people could sometimes still hear talking and if that were true, she wanted Grace to know she was coming back.
Dr. Shaffer led her to the waiting room, and she took a seat in the same caramel-colored chair she’d sat in earlier. He removed his blac
k glasses, rubbed a hand over his face, then put them back on. “I have some bad news.”
“About Grace?”
“No, this isn’t about your sister. Well, not directly.”
“Meaning?”
“I wish there were an easier way to tell you, but,” he paused, his expression gentle. “Your sister’s husband was in the car at the time of the accident.”
Jenny sat up straight, clutched the arms of the vinyl chair. “Grant? Where is he? Is he hurt?” She’d assumed Grace was alone when the accident happened.
Dr. Shaffer shook his head. “We couldn’t control the bleeding. It was all internal.” Another pause. “I’m very sorry.”
“He’s...dead?”
“He was in the cubicle next to your sister.”
Grant was the one they’d been trying to resuscitate. Big, strong Grant. Dead. The room started spinning and Jenny tried to breathe, but she couldn’t get air into her lungs. The only man Grace had ever loved was dead. If the accident didn’t kill Grace, a broken heart would. And what about Danielle and Natalie? Who would tell them their mother was in a coma and their father was dead? She couldn’t tell them. She just couldn’t do it. When the dark side of consciousness sunk its claws into her, she welcomed it, tumbling head first into a black sleep.
3
The god-awful smell jolted Jenny awake. Dr. Shaffer stood over her, peering at her through his thick, black glasses. His eyes were brown and small, and he reminded her of a scientist examining some mutant germ under a microscope, she being the germ.
“Miss Romano? Are you all right?”
Jenny rubbed her eyes, squinted. “What happened?”
“You fainted.”
“I’ve never fainted in my life.” Then she remembered. Grant was dead. Grace was in a coma. Fainting had been a welcome respite.
“Is there someone I can call for you?” His voice was kind, his words gentle. “Someone who can be here for you? A husband? Boyfriend? Mother?”
