The Man She Married

by Cathy Lamb

  “We’ll be at the apartment for only a few months. You’re in no shape to hunt for a house now anyhow, and I’m swamped at work.”

  Zack was crushed. He takes being a man seriously, and in his mind he should provide and he felt like he wasn’t providing. His pain stuck in my heart like a sword.

  “Zack?”

  “Yes.”

  “We do have one problem.”

  “What?”

  “You still have your jeans on.”

  He laughed, that booming, attractive laugh that I loved hearing. “I think I can fix that.”

  “Good,” I said, unbuttoning his shirt. “Do it quick.”

  Nature sex is awesome.

  PART III

  Chapter 12

  We were in an apartment. The house was gone. It was an earth-shaker for me. Once more my world had spun, tipped, and careened me off of it and into a wall. But this would be fine. I’d get used to it, I told myself. I would. Buck up, Natalie.

  The kitchen was at least thirty years old, the gray Formica cracked, the white refrigerator dented, the windows not so clean, the beige carpets gross. We were also in a near-to-falling-apart neighborhood. A few blocks over, there was a gang problem.

  There were four two-story apartment buildings that circled a courtyard. In each building there were four apartments. The apartments were all old, probably built in the 1950s. The courtyard had dead grass and a large concrete fountain, but the fountain had obviously been turned off for years. Maybe decades, judging by the weeds.

  We were on the bottom floor. Zack had installed three locks on our door, and all of the windows had metal bars in the grooved area that could be locked for security.

  In the first bedroom was our bed. I loved that bed. Zack bought it before we met. It was king-sized and took up most of the room. My clothes were in the bedroom closet, and he had his in the second bedroom. The second bedroom also held a bunch of our stuff, in boxes and bags, as if everything had been hastily packed, which it had, by Zack and his employees. More of our furniture was in Zack’s warehouse.

  Our L-shaped blue couch took up much of the family room, on top of our blue and white rug. In front of the couch was our ottoman that my dad had made us out of wood from an old church in Lake Joseph that had blown down in a windstorm. Our white wood kitchen table was in the small kitchen nook with our white chairs. He had a vase of white daisies waiting for me.

  Zack hadn’t decorated. I looked around. This was a place owned by a man who clearly had no time. Plus, Zack was not a decorator type. He left that to me.

  I took a deep breath, standing in the middle of the family room after our mini-tour, Zack leaning a shoulder against a wall as if he was having a hard time standing up. We had fallen from one home to the next about as much as you can fall and still have indoor plumbing.

  Everything was gone. My books; my grandma’s perfume bottles; my china teacups with the pink flowers; and my plants, pillows, and paintings by Grenadine Scotch Wild. Where was our Scrabble board? Where was our chess set? Where was my collection of white ceramic vases?

  Then, remarkably, I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was tinged with a bit of hysteria, of loss, of feeling I’d once again been flung off the planet.

  But the truth is that nothing seems that bad after you’ve been in a coma. A coma where you’re alive and trapped and you’re screaming, terrorized that you’re going to die and terrorized even more that you won’t and you’ll be stuck in that body prison forever. Then you wake up from the Coma Coffin and your brain is scrambled and you can’t walk right or think right and you have to live in a hospital and then a Brain Bang rehab center.

  Honestly, when you almost die and you get a second chance at life again, “problems” are no longer problems. Most everything is an “irritant,” or a “minor blip,” or a “hurdle.” Problems are critical illnesses, injury, death, grief, that kind of thing. We had fallen down the economic ladder. We’d taken a tumble. We would climb back up the ladder, that I was sure of.

  “I like it.” It was bright. There were three huge windows in front. The rooms were medium-sized. The family room opened to the nook and kitchen. The walls had recently been sprayed bright white, as had the kitchen cabinets.

  Zack’s head was down, his broad shoulders slumped.

  “Zack.” I put my hands on his face. I could tell he was humiliated. Defeated. “Don’t have a heart attack over this. Listen.” I leaned heavily against him. I kissed him. “I’m alive and so are you. I can walk, and I’m swaying less to the left. I have scars, but I can breathe. My emotions are roller-coastering, but I’m going to get ahold of them. I can talk and you can hear me, even though I still sound like I’m talking way too slow. I’m not trapped in a Coma Coffin.” I kissed him again. “So, we’ve lost the house. But you are still sexy, and we’re here and safe and I’m not in the hospital.”

  He closed his eyes, and I saw that flash again. I couldn’t place it. Couldn’t put my finger on it . . . Was it a flash of fear when I used the word safe? What did I not know?

  “What, Zack? What is it?” Tell me. Tell me what you know.

  “I’m just sorry, baby. I am.”

  That apology was from his gut. “I don’t know why you keep telling me you’re sorry. There’s nothing to be sorry for.” Even when I said that, I knew something was missing, a detail that I couldn’t grip in my befuddled head, but I let it go. “Stud man, this is temporary. It’s fine. You are magic with home building, and we’ll get out of here soon.” He was. He was a magic homebuilder.

  “You are my magic, Natalie.”

  “Homes are nice, but working brains are better. Eating is heaven, and I am craving your spaghetti Bolognese. Can you make that for me?”

  He could. We ate it in bed, the bed I had missed so much.

  I had missed the man so much more.

  * * *

  I woke up in the middle of the night, hugging Zack, his voice, his apology, ringing in my ears like a warning, a premonition.

  But I loved him. I loved Zack so much and I had missed him. I went back to sleep on his chest.

  * * *

  Zack stayed with me the next six days for about half the day. We did drive out to his work sites, he talked to his employees, who were so welcoming to me, asked me how I was doing, and then we went home. Later, when I was settled, he would go back out to his homes for a few hours and he would work on paperwork at night, after I was asleep.

  Despite the loss of our home, it was a romantic, emotional time for us. We did not talk about the morning of the accident, or the headless bird, or the stabbed Barbie, which might seem strange, but I couldn’t handle any more stress. We both knew what was out there: a demented monster.

  But we needed to be us, without a coma or a Brain Bang Unit between us. We needed to be Zack and Natalie. I needed time to enjoy, and get used to, being in the world again. A world without doctors and therapists, hurting people all around me, and the stress of living in a hospital.

  We drove out to the Deschutes and fished off the bank, exactly where we’d met, the air chill but crisp, the hawks diving.

  We went on a drive to the country holding coffee. We watched movies, and he read me a book as we restarted the Deschutes Family Book Club.

  I couldn’t do crosswords or play chess, but we took walks in a park each day so I could regain my strength, and we watched the sunsets, the magic of a kaleidoscope of colors spreading over the horizon.

  I was already in love with that husband of mine, more even after my accident, as he was always by my side, fighting for me, fighting for us. But in this new phase, the love grew yet again, like wild flowers and Italian dinners and Beethoven’s Fifth all mixed together. We laughed more, it seemed, maybe because we were both so grateful that I was up and with the program again. There were tears, too. We talked about everything we used to talk about—his work, my work and how I missed it, the places we wanted to travel to, things we wanted to see and do, the dream house we would build. One day
.

  The passion that had always been there between us fired up again, hotter than before even, because of what we almost lost. I was thinner, weaker, with odd balance issues, but love and lust prevailed.

  We started healing from the trauma of what happened.

  We were, once again, Zack and Natalie.

  * * *

  I was able to start showing off my collection of lace negligees again to Zack. Some have my hippie/bohemian vibe, others are classic, and still others are . . . naughty.

  Zack seemed to like them all. And, for me, wearing the lingerie made me feel like a woman again. A wife. Someone who could be sexy for her husband.

  I wanted that. I had missed it.

  * * *

  On the seventh morning, seeing I was quite capable of taking care of myself, Zack left, the sun barely over the horizon. The night before, he had showed me where two guns were. One was in the kitchen on a shelf, the other in a side table near the door. It made me feel better given the fact that a psycho was after us.

  He kissed me and I went back to sleep, then I sat back in bed drinking coffee, grateful I could do so. I needed a minute to get my head together.

  The house was gone and we were in a rather dreary, but bright, apartment. I was a little nervous to be alone, especially with that bird killer running around, but the door was locked, I had my phone on, there were two guns, and I refused to live in fear. I’d had enough fear.

  I decided I needed to fix the place up. It was making me nervous and anxious. I needed to unpack what we needed and make this apartment pretty. I could not live in ugly. I could not live with clutter. Clutter and ugly in a home make me nervous because of my mother, and it brings me back to a place I don’t want to be. The clutter and ugly had to go.

  I started working.

  * * *

  Our apartment was about one-fourth the size of our home, plain and dull, so my first job was to add color and life.

  Zack had saved my beloved plants. They were all in the second bedroom on one of our dressers near the window. I dragged out a skinny, long glass table and put the plants in front of a window. I said hello to all of them and gave them water and a trim.

  I opened boxes and bags until I found our pillows for our blue couch. The pillows were in bright colors, embroidered, beaded, sequined. They had all been made by Ellie Kozlovsky in Portland, my favorite pillow designer on the planet.

  In another box I found my collection of white ceramic vases, candles, stacks of books, my grandma’s precious perfume bottles, and my china teacups with the pink flowers. Everything went on windowsills and in two bookcases Zack had brought in. I put our chess set and Scrabble board on a side table. I found our tablecloths and put one with red poppies over our kitchen table. Then I put an eighteen-inch-high red vase in the middle.

  I found a hammer and nails in the third drawer in the kitchen, which is where they were in our previous home, and started nailing up our pictures and framed photos. I decided not to care if we weren’t supposed to put nails in the walls. Zack could fix it. On our family room walls I hung collage paintings we’d collected over the years, all by Grenadine Scotch Wild, our favorite artist who lives out in central Oregon.

  We’d commissioned work from her three times. One painting /collage was of the Deschutes River, exactly where we’d met. We had sent her, at her request, branches found on the side of the river, three fishing flies, fishing line, and material from an old, ripped flannel shirt of Zack’s. She had incorporated all of it into the collage. We were wearing matching flannel shirts, our back to the viewer, our lines in the water, our drift boat nearby.

  Another painting/collage was of us on our wedding day. We sent her a photo of us standing under the arch that Zack and his friends made on the Deschutes River covered in flowers, and she made that day come alive. I sent her some of my favorite lace for the wedding dress she created, complete with a gauzy white veil drifting in the wind. She used dried flowers, tiny pinecones, and small wood sticks for the arch and the trees nearby.

  The third painting was commissioned by Zack. It was a picture of the yellow home I grew up in. Zack had sent Grenadine a photo. She used wood to form part of the wraparound deck, chips of brick for the chimney, a rectangular piece of wood for my swing hanging from my favorite tree, and red fabric for the door. She’d also used real black rubber to create the wheels on my favorite pink bike my dad bought me when I was young, and she added my dad’s old blue truck. The license plate said FOX.

  Right there, the apartment was transformed by Grenadine’s art.

  The gray, cracked Formica was particularly ugly, so I put our wide, wooden butcher block cutting board down, made by Zack, to cover it. I put my red teakettle and red teacups in a corner to add cheer. I put a plant in another corner and a stack of cookbooks along a wall, a number of which were my grandma’s mother’s, which my grandma never used. I checked to make sure her apple pie recipe was still tucked into her mother’s favorite cookbook, and it was. I would make it soon, I told myself.

  In our bedroom I washed the sheets, then hung up three pictures of the Deschutes River that Zack had taken, right in the spot where we’d met. I had enlarged them to twelve by eighteen and had them framed. They showed a sunrise, midday, and sunset.

  Our bedspread is white, but Zack hadn’t put out any of Ellie Kozlovsky’s pretty yellow and white pillows we used, so I found those, too, stuffed in black garbage bags in the second bedroom, and threw those on the bed.

  I dragged out a couple of our wooden chairs, with tall, curving backs, and put them between two of our large windows. On the seats of the chairs I stacked up a collection of old books my grandma had given me from her relatives.

  I found our red and yellow flowered rug and wrangled it under the kitchen table. I put a smaller yellow and blue rug in the entry. The more of the yucky carpet that was covered up, the better. I grabbed four of our lights with white shades and funky crystal balls on the stems and put them on two side tables in the family room and on our nightstands in the bedroom.

  The last thing I did? I hung some of my ceramic/metal/glass/ metal hummingbird collection in a corner of the family room and three in front of the windows.

  I felt better already. There was pretty around me and there wasn’t clutter. Clutter meant pain. I needed no more.

  Then I took a nap for three hours, my head swimming, my body aching.

  Before my eyes shut I thought, Now this is looking more like home.

  * * *

  Zack’s eyes widened when he came in the door that night. He gave me a long hug and kiss after he looked around, three candles burning, lights on. “It looks like home, Natalie.” His voice was gruff. Unexpectedly emotional. “I left a boring, plain apartment and I come home to this. It’s . . . it’s . . .” He choked up. “It’s us again, isn’t it?”

  Aw! That was so touching. “Yes, Zack, it’s us again.” I kissed him. “I made a dinner, but then I forgot that the lasagna was in the oven and it burned. So I made another dinner.”

  “What is it?”

  “Scrambled eggs. Have a seat. I’ll try not to burn them.”

  He laughed, pulled me close again, and gave me a long smackeroo. My clothes ended up on the kitchen floor. The scrambled eggs had to wait.

  * * *

  That night I had the same nightmare.

  I sat straight up and sucked in air. That bald, pig-faced man was chasing me again. In a van.

  He was coming after me, faster and faster. I turned to run, but I couldn’t outrun him.

  He was laughing.

  He was trying to kill me.

  Then he was going to kill Zack.

  He crashed right into me.

  I woke up gasping for breath, Zack holding me.

  * * *

  Life was feeling overwhelming: a deliberate hit-and-run, a mangled Barbie, and a dead bird continued to haunt me, especially because I had a gut-level feeling that it wasn’t over yet.

  I sat down at our kitchen table and
made jewelry the next morning, a light rain falling. I lit a couple candles, put on country music for the country girl in me, then played my favorite, Beethoven’s Fifth, and opened a box of chocolates that Zack had bought me.

  The Brain Bang Unit let me bring some supplies home, which was very generous. I also found, after talking to Zack, my own jewelry-making supplies inside black bags in boxes in the corner of the second bedroom. It was like seeing old, inanimate friends I hadn’t seen in too long: my wire cutters and pliers; my memory wire and beading needle; my headpins and eyepins; my measuring tape; and all my beads, gems, broaches, chains, lockets, turquoise, cut glass, and the necklaces I had been working on before I’d been smashed. Under the constant weight of running our accounting firm, my favorite hobby, jewelry making, had definitely been left at the wayside of my too busy life. I would need to change that, too.

  I began to work.

  I used colorful beads, crystals, charms, and even a few rocks I found outside near the dead fountain. Hours flew by. My anxiety over my future, my zinged brain, my career, and the sudden loss of our home disappeared.

  When I was done, I was delighted with the necklaces I’d made. I slept for three hours. I do not have the energy I used to at all.

  * * *

  “This is not where I pictured you living, Natalie. I must tell you that.”

  My mother had “dropped in for a quick visit” the next afternoon. She had not called, as usual. She had arrived. When she saw me, she put her hand to her chest, right over her blue silk flowered dress, and said, “Oh my. Have you been ill?”

  “Yes, Mom, I have. I was in a coma up until recently.” I was in jeans and a white blouse. Plain and simple for a rainy day. “How are you?”

  She raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows at me. “I meant have you been ill recently. Have you had the flu?” She didn’t wait for an answer, simply let herself in and handed me her black designer coat. It was—wait for it—Sapphires Day. Sapphire earrings, necklace, bracelets. Beige four-inch heels.