by Alix Ohlin
She’d kept the news of the accident from Steve at first, because she was afraid of what might happen to his recovery if he were shaken too badly. The twelve steps were his only navigational tool through the world, and she didn’t entirely believe they’d keep him on course. And indeed, when he came, he was a mess—red eyed, ashen. He was six foot four and two hundred pounds, her son, yet still managed to be the most fragile human being Kathleen had ever known. No wonder he’d been drawn to turtles; he too should’ve been born with a shell. Overly sensitive to the world, he had had to swathe himself with drugs so as not to feel it too much. Now, sober, he was unsheltered, exposed. One look at his father and he burst into tears, shuddering against Kathleen, his spine curling. If he could feasibly have crawled into her lap, she knew he would’ve done so. Cradling his huge shoulders in her arms, Kathleen cried too. His grief was the knife that sliced through her own numb skin.
“It’s going to be okay,” she murmured to him, over and over.
“It is?” Steve said wildly. “How? When?”
“We just have to wait,” she said. “It’s a waiting game.”
He wanted to know if he should put off his move to California, to the better zoo with more kinds of turtles. She forbade it. She told him Terry would want him to go. Which, if he had any brain activity inside the sleeping carapace of his body, he did.
The car was recovered in a wooded area off the interstate. Its windows had been left open, and the interior was colonized by raccoons—Terry had thought that patronizing McDonald’s made him a man of the people—and soaked by rain. As a crime scene, it was less than pristine. Because the pterodactyl-seeing man had been wearing a ski mask; because the sole witness, the guy at the hospital, had been drinking; and because even violent crimes are just passing deeds in a world overflowing with them, the carjacking case did not get solved. At first the police called Kathleen regularly; she went to the station, reports were filed. Gradually she found herself calling them; eventually they stopped returning her calls. At night she sometimes dreamed of the hallucinating carjacker, and he was always riding the pterodactyl, hanging on to its leathery neck, laughing as it flew him up and away.
Steve loaded his possessions into a U-Haul and drove west, calling every day, then every other day, to report on his progress and new life. Her departmental colleagues, initially so solicitous, stopped visiting, and then their calls dropped off too. “End of the semester,” they said apologetically. “You know how crazy it gets.”
She was left alone with the breathing, silent body of her at-one-time-soon-to-be-ex-husband.
Only one person, of everyone she knew in the world, didn’t seem to forget her, and this, horrifyingly, was Fleur Mason. She’d been part of the first departmental visit, and in that flurry of conversation Kathleen had been able to ignore her, though she suspected her of having left behind the white teddy bear holding a mug that read Get well soon! But she was unavoidable when she came alone, a week later, with a box of chocolates and basket of specialty teas. She stood next to the bed and said cheerfully, “He doesn’t look so bad, does he? I think he looks better than last week.”
Kathleen missed her job, her students, her son, and, most of all, the sense of a future without constant irritation opening up before her, a future that—like Tantalus and his grapes—seemed to have been ripped away just as she was about to grab it. But of everything she’d gone through, being alone with Fleur Mason in a hospital seemed the most intolerable. And while she’d realized that her irritation was merely a substitute for other hatreds, that didn’t mean she liked the woman any better. She still found her presence, her clothing, her voice, her manner—in short, her—as intensely aggravating as before.
So she didn’t say much when Fleur showed up, just glared—figuring it was her prerogative to be rude. And she also figured that it was better to discourage Fleur now, based on the same principle she used as a strict, even harsh grader on the first paper of the semester, so the students would know she wasn’t a pushover.
If Fleur got the message, she didn’t show it. She cocked her head and spoke in a high, chirping voice apparently meant to be sympathetic. “You’ll get through this, Kathleen,” she said. “I know you will. You’re a very strong woman, and you’ll prevail.”
Kathleen said, “Whatever happened to that bird of yours? Did anybody ever figure out who took it?”
“Um, no,” Fleur said, clearly rattled. She looked down at the ground and fiddled with the fringed edges of her beaded, ruffled scarf.
“Maybe no one took it,” Kathleen said. “Maybe it just escaped.”
Fleur was looking at Terence now, at the cage of his body. If Kathleen wasn’t mistaken, there were tears in her eyes. “Stranger things have happened,” she said.
Each week, Fleur came back. Sometimes she came to the hospital, during visiting hours, but more often, as time dragged on, she came to the house, dropping in on Kathleen on Thursday afternoons after classes were over. She brought a book, or brownies, or departmental gossip, and also, sadly, she brought the annoying gift of her personality and her chortling, exasperating laugh.
Kathleen made no attempt to be polite; she never offered coffee or tea, or even thanked her for coming by. Fleur took to bringing coffee with her, in a thermos, and separately packed containers of milk and sugar, along with cookies that she arranged on a floral plate. Which she also brought. She was a portable concession, a coffee-shop-mobile.
She rarely asked about Terry, seeming to assume that if there was news on that front, Kathleen would tell her. Rather, she asked about Kathleen’s week, what she’d been doing, as if she had a life. And because Kathleen was proud, she found herself anticipating this question throughout the week and then developing a life in order to have an answer. She read books, knitted a scarf, watched a documentary film about turtles so that she could understand her son’s job better. These things weren’t much, but they were better than nothing, and in Fleur’s presence she offered them to herself.
Fleur days, as she thought of them, gave her weeks their only shape. Otherwise she separated the days into mornings, which she spent at home, afternoons, spent with Terry, and evenings, with a bottle of wine. Each day was distinguished from the next only by the shift rotations of the hospital staff, all of whom she came to know by name. She asked after their kids and helped them celebrate their birthdays by eating sheet cake in the lounge.
Alone with Terry every afternoon, she played Shakespeare for him and read. She rarely spoke to him. The doctors had told her that the sound of her voice might help, but reading to him would have felt too much like pretending. She sat with him. She watched as they changed his catheter, his bandages. His skin was healing, and day by day he looked less like bruised fruit and more like supermarket poultry, naked and trussed up.
Inside the hard container of his skull, his brain was also trying to heal, she imagined, pulsing gently as it rifled through useless things—childhood memories, sports scores, Marxist theory—in search of some pure cells that would bring him back to life.
It was entirely possible, the doctors said, that he might never wake up. They spoke in measured tones of percentages and possibilities. She needed, they said, to be prepared for every eventuality. But when she pressed them for details—When do I decide? To do what? And how will I know?—they shook their heads and counseled patience.
To say that what she felt, sitting next to him, was complicated would be more than understatement. She believed, with all her heart, that Terry didn’t want her there; that he had long hated her just as she had hated him; that her presence had grown to be a burden, even the sound of her chewing, or the rhythm of her steps, inconsequential things that only married people can hate. It was as a gesture of kindness that she didn’t read to him, because surely being in a coma doesn’t erase the irritation caused by your wife’s voice. With all the troubled intimacy of their twenty-six years together she knew this. And this same knowledge also bound them, making her come back every single day
to visit this trussed chicken who had been her lover and her companion and her enemy. Because she was all he had left.
At home that night, a little tipsy, she called Dave. “It’s Kathleen,” she said.
There was a pause.
“Terry’s wife,” she said.
“Oh, right,” he said. It was ten o’clock, and he also sounded drunk. “Everything okay? I mean, how’s Terry?”
“He’s the same. Why haven’t you been to see him? You’re his best friend.”
There was another pause. “I am?” he said.
“Jesus,” she said. “Listen, I have to ask you something and I need you to be honest. For Terry’s sake.”
She had a memory of Dave, back when she and Terry still had parties, slipping a bottle of vodka to their son and shrugging afterward, saying that the longer you kept it away, the worse kids wanted it. They found poor Steve at three in the morning, puking in the park, and he swore he’d never again touch alcohol. Which was true, actually, he’d only snorted drugs, so maybe Dave wasn’t completely off base.
“Sure, anything,” he was saying now.
“Was Terry having an affair?”
“Oh, Kathy,” he said. “No.”
“I’m not asking for the reason you think I am,” she said. “I’m not mad. I just thought that if he was, he’d probably want her in the room, do you know what I mean? Instead of me? So I thought it would be nice to invite her or whatever. As a …” She stumbled to find the right word, then her mind seized it, brilliantly: “A mitzvah.”
Dave, like Terry, was Jewish; Kathleen was Irish Catholic, though the question of religion was one they had always resolutely ignored. But Dave, right now, didn’t sound pleased to hear her use the word mitzvah. In fact, he sounded sober and annoyed. “There’s no girl, Kathy. Get some sleep.”
She told him not to call her Kathy, but he’d already hung up.
The notion of an affair preoccupied her for some time. In truth she suspected Fleur—nothing else, she thought, could explain her relentless visitation—yet there wasn’t anything in their conversations to support it; Fleur gave no indication of knowing anything more about Terry’s life than Kathleen did, and she had little curiosity about him, either. She only wanted to talk about Kathleen, her interests and opinions, her mental and physical health. She kept insisting that Kathleen had a life, against all evidence to the contrary. It was, frankly, more than a little weird.
Summer came, and Fleur left town for two weeks to visit her family in Wisconsin. Kathleen had been looking forward to this Fleur-less time for ages. Finally she would have some peace. She wouldn’t watch any DVDs or read the newspaper or knit. She would sit around in her pajamas and be miserable without interruption or witness.
It was an unpleasant surprise, then, to discover that she missed Fleur. She felt like she was going out of her mind, in fact. The days were formless, chaotic. Her visits to Terry seemed hollow because there was no one to report to about them. Her evenings collapsed into drinking and endless crappy television—she was appalled by how much of it Terry used to watch; it was such an obvious cry for help—and she woke up at three a.m. sobbing with loneliness and despair.
Dear God, she thought. Fleur Mason, whom I hate, is my best friend.
When Fleur got back to town, she came over the next day. Kathleen had cleaned the house, baked muffins, and brewed coffee. Fleur took it all in stride. She described her vacation, then asked Kathleen about her family.
Instead of answering, Kathleen said, “I have to tell you something.”
Fleur set her muffin down. “Shoot,” she said.
“I was the one who took your bird out of its cage,” Kathleen said. Even as she said it she wasn’t sure why she was confessing. To kill the friendship or strengthen it: both urges commingled in her mind, her heart.
“I know,” Fleur said.
“You do?”
“You’re the only one with a key to the office. Except the custodian, and he loves birds. He keeps pigeons at home, did you know that? I also know you didn’t want to hire me in the first place, and then tried to terminate my contract in the second year.” This was true, though Kathleen had thought it was a secret. “And I know you told people my teaching was terrible and that you didn’t want me to get tenure.”
“If you know all that,” Kathleen said slowly, “why are you here?”
She steeled herself for what she was about to hear, the words like grit that would rub her skin raw. Because I get to pity you. And that is my revenge.
Fleur laughed her too-long laugh. “Just because you don’t like me,” she said, “doesn’t mean I don’t get to like you.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Kathleen said grumpily.
“You’re smart and sensible. I look up to you. I figured whatever issues you had with me, eventually you’d get over them, if I didn’t let myself get distracted by the other stuff.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Kathleen said.
“And anyway, the custodian found Harry, so no harm done.”
“Harry?”
“My parakeet. He found Harry in the men’s room and trapped him for me. As I said, he has pigeons and knows about birds. So he called me and I brought Harry home. He’s fine.”
“Everybody thought he was gone. They said you were heartbroken.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Fleur said mildly, “to let people feel sorry for you every once in a while.”
The next day, at the hospital, Kathleen didn’t play any Shakespeare. She opened the blinds—Terry loved the sun and wanted to retire to Florida and play golf all day, after the motorcycle trip to South America—and sat next to the bed. The view was of the parking lot, where a few spindly trees played host to crows and sparrows, but at least the light was bright. She looked at her husband. The bandages had been removed, and his skin was perversely healthy, even pink. On his hands were scabs, raised like tattoos on his knuckles. His beard had grown but the nurses kept it trimmed, so if anything he looked more professorial than ever. She put a hand on the coarse crinkle of hair on his head.
“Oh, Terry,” she found herself saying. She’d known him for so long that this familiarity, however abrasive it had become, was inextricable from love. She felt so badly for him, for everything he’d been through—a Niagara Falls of sorry that crashed through her in a torrent, flooding her voice with tears. “My heart, my love.” She touched his cheek, his shoulder, the pale skin beneath his papery gown. “Come back to me, love. Come back, please, please, come back, please, please, please.”
She spent the night at the hospital, in the chair by his bed, and when she woke up in the morning, the crows cawing outside, she saw that his eyes were open and he was looking at her expectantly, as if she were the one who had just spent so much time asleep.
It had been three months, but to Terry it was as if no time had passed. He said he felt like he’d woken up from a particularly long nap. Of the accident itself he had no memory whatsoever; the last thing he could remember was buying lunch at McDonald’s and eating french fries as he drove home. Within three days of awakening he was released from the hospital, though Kathleen drove him back every day for physical therapy for his atrophied muscles and cognitive therapy for his atrophied mind.
She had no idea whether her voice had finally woken him up, hating to think that if she’d only spoken sooner, instead of delegating all the responsibility to Shakespeare, she might have shortened his ordeal. And she was astonished to think that in spite of the bad years and all of the misery, he still needed to hear her voice. The intensity of the grievous emotion she’d felt that night in the hospital had thinned in the morning, but she couldn’t help wondering if all the divorce talk had been a mistake, if maybe, just possibly, they still loved each other after all.
But she didn’t talk to him about any of this, just helped him get through the days. She fed him and led him to the bathroom, his shrunken body leaning sharply against hers, more connected than they’d been in years. He sl
ept almost fifteen hours a day, and the house was very quiet. When awake, he said little and asked for nothing. He seemed tranquilized. In the mornings he sat out in the backyard, a blanket covering his knees, and listened to the birds. Kathleen had strung up feeders and houses, something he had always discouraged, claiming the house would be swamped with bird feces and noise, but he wasn’t complaining now. He was peaceful in his recovery, though it was unclear if this peace was spiritual, related to his near-death experience, or material, a symptom of brain damage. The waiting game was still going on.
It was a still, humid day in July when she brought him outside and left him to sit there in the sunlight. She was almost back inside when she heard him say something. Turning, she saw the tears streaming down his face. She could remember the exact last time she’d seen him cry, at his mother’s funeral, ten years earlier. Now he was crying quietly, letting the tears come, his skinny arms resting by his sides. He was looking up at the sky, where she saw, following his gaze, a red-tailed hawk circling high above them. It soared and swung, strong and heavy winged, eyeing whatever prey it had spotted below.
Through his tears Terry spoke again. “Pterodactyl,” he said. “Fucking lunatic.”
· · ·
