Beauty in the Broken Places

by Allison Pataki

  “Why not?” I asked, but I already knew. I offered him the answer: “Do you think it would make you sad to see it?”

  He nodded his head, yes.

  “OK. Then we will wait and watch that one together at home.”

  Dave fatigued easily and was usually ready for bed by seven. I would wait until he was asleep, sitting beside his bed, typing out my letter journal entry, and then drive home. Returning to our apartment at the end of each day was painful.

  By day, I was the stalwart spouse, the hopeful wife who put on a happy face for the doctors and nurses and therapists, for my in-laws and the endless stream of family and friends who visited and, most important, for Dave. I was optimistic and strong and earned compliments like, “I can’t believe how well you’re holding up.”

  But at night, once I was alone and the armor was shed, I was sad. I was sad and lonely and so terribly frightened. Exhausted as I was, I had a hard time sleeping. I missed Dave’s physical presence at home and in bed, yes, but more so I missed the part of him that was utterly absent, even when I sat beside him in his room at rehab; I missed the intangibles that made him Dave. I missed the life we had built together. Everything at home reminded me of how far removed our former life suddenly was, perhaps irretrievably so. The Blue Italian dishes we had received as wedding gifts and had eaten off of together countless times. Photos of us: on a boat ride during our honeymoon in Australia, on a ski trip to Vermont during Dave’s medical school, in the basement of a college fraternity house dressed in tie-dyed aerobics outfits. Little handwritten notes that we had written each other that were tucked in random places around our apartment. The doctor’s white coat hanging in the closet, on it clipped the hospital employee ID card in which Dave smiled, so handsome. So strong and healthy, Dr. David Levy.

  One of the most painful things was Dave’s Hawaii suitcase. When I first brought it home, Penny sniffed it, tail wagging, presuming that this item that smelled so full of Dave was a precursor to the real thing returning. She ran around the apartment, seeking him out, but he did not appear.

  I let the suitcase sit there, unopened, for several weeks. I did not want to look through it and think of the Tuesday afternoon when Dave had packed it. I did not want to see his familiar clothes, an iPod that he would have listened to while he worked out. Flip-flops he would have worn to the beach. His passport for our day trip from Seattle to Vancouver. The sunglasses we had picked out together before his laser eye surgery. Shirts of his that—yes, I did this, I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I did—still smelled like him. Artifacts of a trip never taken, a life now gone, snatched from us so suddenly.

  I put it off as long as I could, but eventually I needed some of the items in that suitcase for Dave at rehab. I sat down on the floor with the dreaded thing. I girded myself to open it up and confront the items that had belonged to the old Dave, back when Dave would have known how to pack a suitcase. But when I went to unzip it, I discovered that it was locked. A four-digit passcode was required to open the lock.

  Dave usually used the same four-digit passcode any time one was required. In fact, it had been one of the most interesting moments on our honeymoon, when he had let me in on his four-digit passcode while locking the safe in our hotel room in Port Douglas. What about my four-digit passcode, the one I always like to use? I’d thought. It dawned on me in that moment: I was married. Life would be different, being part of a duo, having to negotiate who got to choose the four-digit hotel safe passcode. I take thee, David, with your four-digit passcode, forsaking all others….So this was marriage.

  But to my surprise, Dave’s suitcase was not opening with that now-familiar four-digit combination. Stumped, I sat back. Asking Dave would have been impossible; he could not remember what a suitcase was, let alone that he had packed one for Hawaii, let alone what its security combination might be. I tried various configurations including birthdays and addresses and other significant dates. God, how I missed him, how I wished he could have been there to tell me the code. Or better yet, to unpack the suitcase himself. Or, even better still, to have unpacked the suitcase after getting to have that trip, that babymoon, in that other life that we had planned.

  One night when I was feeling particularly desperate and maudlin, I considered calling Dave’s cellphone. I knew it was turned off—it was sitting in our bedroom on our bedside table, off since that horrible June 9 flight—but that was precisely the idea. I would get his voicemail and I could listen to the sound of his voice, his real voice. Since waking up, Dave was speaking in this voice and this cadence that was just not him; his voicemail would give me ten seconds of that old Dave voice. But I realized that that was completely mawkish and would facilitate a spiral of self-pity that would probably result in me weeping in the fetal position. Not productive. So I forced myself not to call his cellphone.

  * * *

  —

  The thing that nearly broke me was that, several weeks into RIC, I had to move apartments. Our lease was up, and the plan had always been to move a week after our babymoon, at the end of June; we just hadn’t planned on the stroke. The logistics of any move are tough, but when you are spending twelve hours a day in the hospital and you are forbidden by your doctor from lifting heavy objects at six months pregnant, it becomes even more problematic. I did not know how I could possibly make it happen. Not to mention that packing would mean reckoning with item after item from Dave’s and my former life, pouring saltwater into a fresh wound with each one.

  All I can say is this: thank God for women. Women show up. And the women in my life showed up for me at that time, in every way. My friend Marya flew out to help me pack up our old place. Marya was exactly the right person to arrive in that moment because she, more so than any other friend, has known Dave since the earliest days of our courtship. She first introduced me to him, on that night when he asked me where I went to college at a Yale bar. She was in that same art history class. She witnessed me sliding in next to Dave to learn about Gothic cathedrals. She stood beside us at the altar when we got married. I could be entirely raw and vulnerable—broken—in front of her. And Marya missed Dave, too. Not just for me, but because of her own long friendship with him.

  When I answered the door, I saw Marya and immediately collapsed into her outstretched arms. She held me and wept with me. This was no small mercy, to have someone simply allow me to cry. She did not look for a positive piece of loving wisdom. She did not try to cheer me up. She just held me and she let me cry, and she cried with me.

  “I just miss him so much,” I said, as we drove together one morning to see Dave in rehab. Tears in her eyes, she nodded. “I know you do,” she said. “But he’s still here,” she offered. I knew her point was: He’s not dead. It was true. He very well might have been dead. In spite of the hideousness of the current situation, there was still reason to give thanks.

  “It’s a cruel, sick joke,” she agreed with me. “You couldn’t have made it up: you were on your way to your babymoon and your husband almost dies from a stroke.”

  Marya was there with me that weekend, overseeing the logistics of our life going into boxes. Our friends Peter and Russell came over and spackled the walls, took the TV screens out of their mounts, helped with packing, canceled our cable subscription.

  Also during that time, Marya walked Penny over to RIC, and Dave and I went down to the street so he could see our dog for the first time since the stroke. It was not the reunion I had hoped for—Dave did not recognize our dog, and, even more strangely, Penny did not recognize Dave. Ordinarily she would have been beside herself, pouncing on him, yelping, running circles around his legs in her excitement at such a long-overdue reunion (she had not seen him all month, since the afternoon we had left for Hawaii). But now, rather than euphoric, Penny was scared; she shied away from him and cowered behind my legs. Was Dave really so changed that he had become unrecognizable to our family pet?

  “You
probably just smell like the hospital; she can’t find your familiar scent,” I said, trying to hide how heartbreaking I found it. In reality, I wanted to cry. Dave and Penny had always been so bonded that at times we had joked that I was the third wheel. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be the third wheel in the midst of their happy reunion. I wanted them to know and love each other, just as they always had, instead of meeting as distant and distrustful strangers.

  Looking on, watching this tepid reunion, was Marya. She, too, was unrecognizable to Dave, and that broke her heart, both as a friend to me but also as a friend to Dave of more than a decade. Marya—or as Dave had always called her, Mar Mar—kept it together on the surface; she forced a smile even as, inside, she wanted to cry.

  Marya returned to the hospital the next day, without Penny, to visit Dave one more time. As she walked down the hallway, she felt nervous and sad, dreading another visit with this replacement-Dave, a stranger who did not know her, had no recollection of their eleven years of friendship and the easy, playful banter that they had always enjoyed.

  As Marya rounded the corner and entered the hospital room, our friend Russell, who was also visiting, turned to Dave. “Hey, hey, recognize who just walked in?” Russell asked.

  Dave, with a mischievous smirk on his face, a faint twinkle in his eye, nodded.

  “Oh, yeah?” Russell prodded. “Who is she?”

  Dave shrugged, turning his glance sideways. “Some bitch named Marya.”

  It was only at that point that Marya finally burst into the tears she had been holding back for the past couple of days. “Dave,” she said, beaming through her tears, “those are the most beautiful words I have ever heard come out of your mouth!”

  We all laughed—relieved at Marya’s unruffled reaction, startled by Dave’s off-color remark. It is not uncommon for stroke patients to speak with socially unacceptable bluntness or vulgarity, but this particular moment was funny because it was vestigial of the teasing, playful sparring that Dave and his Mar Mar had always shared. He was trying to make a joke. In its own odd and embarrassing way, we took it as a good sign.

  The day Marya left, the day of the actual move, my in-laws were covering the early part of the day with Dave at rehab so that I could oversee the movers as they transferred our life from the old place to the new one. But just as I arrived at our new, empty apartment to await the moving truck, our new building’s manager told me that Dave needed to sign the lease before we could occupy the apartment. Dave had planned to go into the leasing office and sign when we returned from Hawaii—clearly that had never happened. I hurried up to the rehabilitation facility, tracked down the social worker a second before she had to leave for a meeting, begged her to write a note explaining the situation on the requisite official RIC letterhead, and hurried back downtown to offer the letter and plead with the leasing office. The building allowed us to proceed with the move, given the circumstances. We were back on.

  Then I heard from the movers, telling me that there was some delay with the moving truck. They were running a couple of hours behind. This was not good. Since the elevator in the new building was only available to us for the next two hours, our window was tight. The new building rented out the elevator in specific two-hour time blocks, and thus they could only honor the couple of hours for which I’d reserved it—after that, someone else had use of the elevator for their move. What the heck was I going to do with a moving truck full of boxes if I could not get it all from the truck into the new apartment? And where would I sleep? I pleaded with the movers to get there as fast as was humanly possible, in order to try to make our move-in window.

  As I awaited the moving truck, nervously watching the clock tick forward, I decided to walk around the new neighborhood. It was the middle of the day, and I was starving. I scoped out the unfamiliar terrain. There was a sushi place, but I was not allowed to eat raw fish. There was a deli, but they only had cold sandwich meats—I was not supposed to eat those, either. “Do you have anything other than cold cuts?” I asked. “Cheese,” they countered. So I ordered my cheese sandwich and headed back to the apartment. As I was crossing the street, the skies opened up. I had not known it was going to rain, and, besides, all my umbrellas were in a box somewhere, hopefully on their way to me in a moving truck. The rain pounded me, and within minutes I was soaked. I had no change of clothes, or dry shoes—those were packed. I felt like raising my cheese-sandwich-laden fist to the heavens and shouting out the question foremost on my mind: “Why, God? Why? What more do you plan to throw at me?”

  I returned to my apartment with my soggy sandwich. As I stood there in the bare surroundings, standing at the kitchen counter, shivering in the air-conditioning because my clothes were doused, my dad called to see how the move was going. I could barely answer, “Not good,” before bursting into tears. It was interesting, being able to reflect on the day I was having and to think, This just might be one of the worst days of my entire life.

  The movers arrived, finally, and we raced to unload everything in time. I disregarded the fact that I was not supposed to lift heavy things—we needed all hands on deck. At one point, as we were frantically hauling boxes into the apartment, one of the movers looked at me with a concerned expression and asked if I was going to go into labor early because of all the stress, and I just sat down on top of a cardboard box, unsure how to answer the question. I forced myself to do some deep breathing. My swollen, wet feet hurt; my lower back ached. I was freezing—my clothes and hair and skin still damp from the downpour, my body shivering from the stress and the chilly blasts of sterile air being blown by the air conditioner.

  Once the movers left, I looked around: this new apartment smelled like cardboard and paint and wet carpet. The rooms were a mess of boxes and furniture too heavy for me to arrange. This place, this apartment that Dave and I had been so thrilled to find, so excited to begin our new chapter in (“This will be the baby’s room!” “This will be the guest room so Mom can come and help with the baby!”), felt nothing like home; it was unfamiliar and bare and all wrong. “It’s good that you are moving now; it’ll be a fresh start,” my parents had reasoned. But the start of what? And fresh, well, the only thing that felt fresh in that moment was my pain and my loneliness and my fear. “Raw” might have been the more appropriate word.

  I could not even begin to think about unpacking, about setting up a home; I had to get to rehab and to Dave. I had explained to him the night before that I would be late the following day because I had to oversee the movers in the morning, but there was no way he would have remembered. Was he sad at rehab, wondering where I was? Was he scared? The thought broke my heart.

  * * *

  —

  Again, thank God for girlfriends. My friends Margaret and Charlotte flew out to help unpack and settle me in. Two more of the world’s all-time great people, Margaret and Charlotte are my oldest friends. I have known Margaret since we were toddlers, and Charlotte was my ever-present best friend from middle school onward. While there with me, Margaret built bookshelves and unpacked clothes and gave me prenatal yoga classes and prayed beside me in bed. Charlotte, only one month less pregnant than I was at the time, unpacked box after box and hung photos on the walls and arranged our dishes and told me optimistic stories and got her husband to do the heavy lifting for us.

  These special, selfless friends gave me a home; they gave me a physical space in which to feel settled in the midst of the most unsettling experience of my entire life. They allowed me to spend all day with Dave at rehab and not be distracted with the move. On countless trips to Target, they stocked me with toilet paper and groceries and lightbulbs and coat hangers. In fact, they went to Target so many times that the employees there got to know them, even lending them a Target cart to shuttle their goods back to my place. One of my favorite stories from their Target trips was when a woman in the checkout line took a look at their haul and asked the natural ques
tion: “Did you ladies just move in?”

  Not wanting to get into the whole complicated explanation, Charlotte and Margaret just smiled and nodded, yes, they were moving in. It was true—they were moving me in.

  “Where are you from?” this fellow customer asked.

  Again, Charlotte and Margaret went with the simple, easy answer. “We’re from New York.” Again, it was true.

  The woman grinned, then glanced at Charlotte’s baby bump. “Your first baby?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “How nice!” she said, a big smile on her face as she looked from Charlotte to Margaret. “Well, welcome to the neighborhood.” It was then that Charlotte and Margaret realized that this woman presumed them to be a couple, moving in and preparing for their first baby. We had a good laugh that night over takeout on the roof of my new building.

  I could not believe how much these girls, and so many others, were willing to do for Dave and me. My brother’s wife, Emled, called her mother in from out of town to help my brother watch their two little ones so that she could fly out and keep me company for a week, showing me how to set up baby gear and unpacking our final boxes. My sister, Emily, at home awaiting a new baby, checked in constantly. My sister-in-law Marie brought me lunch at RIC. Friends sent food and baby gifts and flowers and so much love. One friend sent me a gift certificate for a prenatal massage and a note reminding me to take care of myself.

  I was suddenly in the position where I had to take; I had to draw on my tribe for support and strength. I did not feel comfortable with that; it felt one-sided. I felt—no, I worried—that I was putting people out, inconveniencing them. I referred to myself as “the high-needs friend,” and I hated that. I bristled at the idea of needing that much. When I confessed this fear to Margaret, she looked me in the eyes and said, “Alli, we want to do this for you. Don’t you see? It gives us joy to feel that we can carry just a little bit of your burden for you. We are God’s hands for you.”