And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  Linda nods, suddenly eager to please. “I do. I have questions.”

  We all wait for her to continue, and when she doesn’t, Connie prods her again. “What’s the biggest one you’ve got? Let’s see if the doc here can answer it.”

  Linda sits for a moment, chewing on her bottom lip, considering. Then she turns to Dr. Bernard.

  “I want to know if my family still loves me,” she says.

  David

  “Congress votes on the FDA’s budget right?”

  A woman’s voice stops me on my way to the coffee cart. There was no coffee at the support group meeting, which seems like an error of the highest order to me. If it were AA, there would have been a coup d’état if people didn’t have Styrofoam cups to cradle when they needed something to do with their hands. How did anyone expect us to talk without something to stir, something to sip, something to blow on? How do they expect us to sit like good patients and cooperate? It’s how you get a bunch of volunteers organized and knocking on doors and making phone calls. You give them free coffee, as much as they want. Even the worst gas station rotgut imaginable will do. You could run an entire army off of coffee.

  The voice catches me off guard. I didn’t realize anyone had followed me off the elevator, and when I turn it’s Hannah, the brunette, the one who looks like she’s young enough to be jailbait. It’s difficult not to be disappointed that it isn’t the blonde following me into the lobby. I have to remind myself that I’m not like that anymore.

  “What?”

  “Congress,” she says. “They’re the ones who fund the FDA.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And in a year the FDA is going to decide whether or not to approve SUBlife.”

  “If that’s what the doctors said,” I reply, half-turning away from her to resume my progress toward the hiss and bubble of the steel carafes.

  “So what are you doing in the pilot program?” she asks, not following. She doesn’t move. She knows her question will make me turn back toward her, the clever little thing. And it does.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I say, trying to maintain a note of calm disinterest in my voice, but it’s not quite genuine enough. She’s got me on my heels, and she knows it.

  “Well, you’re the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, if I’m not mistaken. That seems like a hell of a conflict of interest to me.”

  “Well, apparently the good people at SUBlife disagree with you,” I reply. The girl carries herself as if she isn’t very pretty. Perhaps she wasn’t, before the transfer. Add a few pounds, maybe uneven those teeth a bit, dim the luminousness of her skin, and she could be plenty plain. But it’s there now; she looks like the androgynous women staring out of Beth’s fashion magazines. Women with mismatched features, huge lips and jutting cheekbones, large, thick eyebrows, and gaps between their front teeth. Women you’d think were almost ugly, if they weren’t so fascinating. “What are you, a reporter?” I ask, letting a bite into my tone.

  “No, just a concerned citizen, I guess.”

  “Concerned about what?”

  “How on earth you were chosen for SUBlife. It was supposed to be a lottery system, right? From what I heard there were a few hundred qualifying patients in the Chicago area. So I’m wondering how a congressman was lucky enough to get on the short list.” She’s flushed a bit; blood is seeping into her skin the way a drop of wine blooms outward on a white tablecloth. She’s angry.

  “I qualified. Brain tumor,” I say, tapping my temple to demonstrate. “Size of a golf ball. But listen, sweetie, before you start slinging around accusations, I’d suggest you consult the confidentiality agreement you signed when you got that new body of yours.” I draw closer to her, lowering my voice, until I’m nearly whispering in her ear. “Because if I ever hear anything like what you just said coming from the mouth of a reporter, or if I read it in a newspaper, or on a blog, or even in the fucking Red Eye, you’ll be paying my rent for the rest of your life. Understand?”

  I step back. Her jaw is tense, and there’s an angry sheen in her eyes. I wonder if she’s cried yet, in this new body of hers. The thought bothers me a little, that I might be the first person to make her cry. But what bothers me even more is that something, maybe our proximity, or the tension of our little exchange, or the way this girl looks in her sad little hospital robe, something makes me feel an immediate spark of adrenaline in my blood. The first flicked switch in that cascade of neurotransmitters and churning internal chemistry that accompanies attraction.

  It’s amazing how physically aware I am, as if every vein and hair follicle and muscle fiber is suddenly dense with nerve endings that had never existed in my former body. As if my subconscious knows that this body is something foreign and new, something that must be monitored and measured and experienced fully. Whatever the case, my physical response to this woman makes it difficult to remember my former resolve, the desire to be faithful to my wife. I do my best to ignore the feeling, to chalk it up to the way winning an argument has always turned me on a little, no matter who it’s with. After all, I’m a better man now.

  She nods, a terse movement.

  “Good. Now how about I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “You’re getting coffee?”

  “You heard the doctor; we’re going to be spending quite a bit of time together this year. I don’t want us to start off on the wrong foot, do you?” It’s the way I talk to my opponents during debates, with a bit too much folksy charm, just enough so they know that it’s an act, and underneath is something much more dangerous.

  But she smiles, all traces of her momentary weakness gone. She’s found her footing again. “You go ahead. I’ll take a pass on this one.”

  “Suit yourself.” I head toward the coffee cart, eager to put distance between us.

  “And Congressman,” she says, not loud, but enough to stop me in my tracks for the second time today. Maybe it’s this girl who is more formidable than she appears. She is still smiling when I turn. “You call me sweetie again, and I’ll make you miss that tumor.”

  Linda

  I haven’t told Tom yet, that Connie wandered into my room last week. Until I saw her again in the support group today, I’d almost convinced myself that I imagined it. Stranger things have happened to me, I guess. Tom looks exhausted in the blue flicker of the television. It’s late, and he’s been here most of the day, though I’m not sure why he bothers. It’s not like we’ve said much to each other. You’d think, after eight years of not being able to say a word, I’d want to tell him things, spill every thought that’s been pent up inside me, like the pop and gush of opening a bottle of champagne. But that’s what happens when your world gets small. You can’t remember what you used to say to people, because you’re so out of practice. You realize you don’t have much to say anymore. One for no. Two for yes.

  I used to wonder about the lengths I’d go to in order to stay alive. If I would be the type of woman to survive a shipwreck, or being stranded out in the wilderness somewhere alone. You read about things like that sometimes, or watch reality TV specials on the Discovery Channel, about stranded scuba divers who grip on to buoys for days at a time, or mountain climbers who crawl their way back to base camp with two broken legs. I always wondered if that would be me, if I had the kind of mettle that could withstand the most harrowing of circumstances. If I could tie a tourniquet on one of my own limbs, if I could saw off my own arm to escape a desert canyon. But, as it turned out, my canyon was my own body. And I was powerless to fight my way out of it.

  It took me a long time to accept all of those hard truths that accompany a traumatic brain injury, especially one as severe as mine. There was the respirator and the feeding tubes and the catheters. The paralysis, that crushing feeling of being trapped in a body that would no longer listen when I told it to move. Those were terrible lessons to learn.

  But for the first four years, at least I was at home. With Tom, and our babies, and a home-care nurse named Cora. Tom c
onverted the office at the front of the house into a bedroom for me, and it got sun in the afternoons and a western breeze. I could look out the window and watch storms roll in over the roofs of the houses on our block. And Cora was not such bad company. I worried at first, when she leaned over me and I caught sight of the tightness of her scalp between the braids in her hair and the long sharpness of her fingernails and the rose tattoo peeking out from under the neckline of her scrubs. I wondered what she thought of me, the Chinese woman with the white husband, the expensive house, a life so charmed and so cursed at once. But when we were alone she talked, sometimes for hours on end, telling me about her twin sons who had just left for the army and the mother who could no longer remember her name. She told me stories that would have made me laugh, or would have made me cry, if I still had the ability.

  My eyes would fill sometimes, and tears would leak down my cheeks, and I would lie there and feel the droplets disappear into the fuzz of numbness below my nose. There was no rhyme or reason to when that would happen. Something about faulty tear ducts. My brain and body were almost fully separate by then. Cora knew that, and she would just dab my cheeks with a tissue and keep talking. Tom never understood, no matter how many times Cora explained that it was a reflex more than anything. He would shake his head and cover his mouth with his hands, and his own eyes would fill. And Cora would ease him out of the room and wink at me when she returned. We were good friends, I think, Cora and me.

  “What are the others like?” Tom asks, talking over the sound of the TV on the wall. And, for a moment, I don’t realize that he’s actually waiting for an answer. It shocking, really, how out of practice I am at this. I try hard to figure out what sort of answer he wants. Their names? Their occupations, or their diseases? If they’re nice or arrogant or disinterested? An appropriate answer seems too heavy to conjure, too broad for me to process. I panic a little. The air in the room feels thin, and I wonder if I’m allowed to open the window. But no, I have to say something to Tom, because he asked a question and he’s waiting for an answer. I try and get out a few words without showing him that I’m short of breath.

  “One man, two women. One of them is very pretty. An actress.” I don’t elaborate. It feels good to have a secret from Tom, something that is just mine. I remember Cora’s winks, the secrets we kept from him.

  Cora was the one who turned me on to Stratford Pines in the first place. I used to silently scoff at the other mothers at the playground when they talked about their soap operas, the endless cycle of inane story lines and the stock characters who change partners more quickly than in a square dance. I was already a bit of an outsider with them, that group of blonde North Shore mothers, a clique that came together with the same pettiness and backhanded cruelty as a high school cheerleading squad. It felt good to be the smart one, the mother with a five-year plan, a half-finished master’s in English Literature from Northwestern and dreams of a doctorate. I’d palm one of the books I carried in the basket of Katie’s stroller and feel the quiet heat of my own superiority.

  But when your world shrinks with the speed and ferocity that mine did, when you can no longer escape into books, you begin to understand the allure of slipping into someone else’s life for a while. And if it’s a made-up life of intrigue, of kidnappings and long lost children and lovers separated by the manipulations of others, all the better. During the eight years of my stasis, of my conscious coma, of being locked inside my own body, those characters became as dear to me as any of the friends I’d had before my accident. They became residents of a secret world, one that existed within the useless, hollow body in which I was trapped. And, as shameful as it is to admit, those characters became the one source of comfort that I carried from my family’s house to the cold isolation of the nursing home. Not my husband. Not my children. When I was scared or sad or lonely, I thought of Stratford Pines.

  “Did you tell them you were a runner?” Tom asks. It seems a stupid question. I was many things before I was paralyzed. None of them seem particularly important anymore. When you are one thing, only one thing, for eight years, everything that came before it begins to feel less substantial. Sure, I was a runner. I was also a toddler, once, and no one cares to hear about that either.

  “No,” I reply, because it’s an answer I’m used to. One blink.

  “Well, why not?”

  It’s agonizing, sometimes, having Tom around so much. Tom and his questions, always waiting for me to answer with a look of expectation that makes me feel like a moth tacked on a wall, his gaze intrusive as a pushpin. I liked it better when he came once a week, a new bouquet of fresh flowers tucked into his armpit, his meager, persistent attempt to liven up the dinginess of the nursing home. I liked it when he did all the talking and never expected an answer.

  Before the accident, I always imagined myself to be an ordinary sort of person. A kind person, someone with a large heart and certain perseverance. Maybe not enough to cling to a buoy or saw off one of my arms. But a good wife, a good mother. And then the settlement money from the accident ran out. Suddenly Cora’s services were too expensive. Suddenly, Tom began to talk about finding me a place where I could be cared for around the clock.

  Within my first month at the nursing home, my world shrank so small that it siphoned every bit of kindness or perseverance right out of me. The cage of my body took on a terrible, crushing weight. Like being buried alive. I didn’t have four walls and a window. I had one wall, and a bit of ceiling, and a TV that was mounted there. Gone were the clouds and sunshine. Gone were Cora’s stories, and the sounds of my children running down the upstairs hallway, and the smells of garlic bread and tomato sauce wafting up from our kitchen.

  The four years I spent at Shady Glen Nursing Home felt like fifty. I read once that all anyone ever truly wants out of life is more time, that the search for immortality is the basis for all human achievement. And I knew I was the exception to that rule. Time was my enemy. Time was a slow drip of agony in my IV. I prayed for infections, for fluid in my lungs, for bubbles of air in syringes. But, as neglectful as the nursing home staff was when it came to just about everything worthwhile in a life, they were uncannily good at keeping me alive. If I could have told Tom one thing during his weekly visits, just one, it would not have been that I loved him, or our children. It would not have been that I missed my life, even the scraps of it that I had in those first years after the accident. If I got a single message in a bottle, floating up from the ocean of my isolation, I would have told him to cut off my oxygen and leave me there. My world had grown so small that the only thing left to do was to leave it.

  So, there it was. I was the type of person who would let go, swallow mouthfuls of seawater and sink below the surface. I would stop moving and let myself freeze to death on the side of a mountain. I would find the highest cliff on my desert island and throw myself off. And because I could do none of those things, because I was utterly powerless to change the terrible current of my pulse or rid myself of the machine that kept me breathing, I lost myself in the lives of the characters on TV. I lived for those afternoon hours, more than I ever lived for Tom’s visits, or even my own children. I drank those stories up, letting it anesthetize me like an opiate flooding into my bloodstream. I could ride for hours on that high, sometimes. I could close my eyes and write myself into their stories, touch their lovers, relish the sweet pain of their tragedies. And I understood it, finally, for what it was. It was a secret world. It was my window.

  And then. And then. Two blinks.

  “What did you talk about?” Tom asks, maybe because I still haven’t answered him. It’s hard to focus for too long, especially with the TV on in the background.

  “I mostly just listened.”

  “Well, what did the rest of the group talk about then?” Tom has a mousy quality to him now. His hair has gone thin and gray in the past few years, which makes him look like he’s in his late forties instead of thirty-five. He looks decades older, instead of three months younger
than me. He looks so tired, and I wish he would go. It’s the feeling I’ve had on so many occasions, when he’d come to visit me with the kids, when the day was bright and sunny and I knew they were missing out on it because of me. I wish he would go, instead of sitting here trying to talk to me. It seems like a waste of an evening.

  “I’m not supposed to tell,” I finally say, hoping that will be enough to send him out, on his way. I wonder what he would be doing on a normal Thursday, if he weren’t here.

  “The kids want to see you,” he says then. I nod, because I don’t know how to answer. “Jack thinks you’re like Han Solo. That’s the only way I could think of explaining it to them. Where Han gets frozen and then thawed out? It’s the best kid-friendly analogy I could come up with.”

  “Snow White,” I say, not looking at him. “Sleeping Beauty.”

  “Oh, right,” he says, and he sounds so abashed that I force myself to look at him and smile, which takes some effort. It takes my eyes away from the TV. I’ve been working on smiling in the mirror when I stumble across the room to use the bathroom. It’s as if I’ve forgotten that I can smile and laugh and frown, and I’m so out of practice that I have to make the decision to smile before I do it. Nothing feels natural anymore. Nothing, that is, except lying in my hospital bed, staring at the TV that’s mounted on the wall, and wiggling my toes. Everything else feels too massive, and too terrifying. One for no. Two for yes. Things were so much simpler before.

  Hannah

  David walks into the meeting five minutes late. Connie, Linda, and I glance up when he bangs his way through the door, his stride measured and unhurried. He pauses at Dr. Bernard’s still-empty chair.

  “Good. I’m not holding things up today,” he says, to no one in particular. Connie rolls her eyes.