by Alix Ohlin
Gradually, he recovered his brain, his words, and was able to walk around the house, then around the block. Still, they never talked about what was going to happen between them, if their future was shared or separate. Kathleen wasn’t even sure how she felt about it anymore. Their shared project, for now, was his recovery, just as for years their son’s well-being had been their shared project, one so hulking and important that it had overshadowed everything else.
As soon as he could, Steve flew home to visit. Next to his father he seemed gigantic and healthy. He was loving California and told them all about the turtle habitat, his apartment close to the beach, what seemed to be a promising relationship with a girl who worked in the reptile house.
Across the table, Terry gave him a benevolent, post-coma smile. “That’s wonderful, kid,” he said. “Now listen. Your mother and I are getting divorced.”
Steve laughed, thinking it was a joke.
Kathleen stared at her husband. This was typical, pre-accident Terry, not to consult or even consider Steve’s reaction, or her own.
“Sorry,” he said to her. “It just came out.”
“What the hell?” Steve said, and turned to Kathleen. “Is this for real? Are you seriously leaving him right after his accident?”
“It’s not like that,” she said faintly. She felt dizzy, as if she were floating disassociated above the scene.
“Or you?” Steve said to his father. “Is this some midlife crisis thing after the coma? You’re going to date twenty-year-olds now, to prove you’re alive?”
Terry refused to be rattled. “We planned this long before the accident. It just set us back a little, that’s all. We know you want us both to be happy, and we think we’ll be happier living separately. It’s amicable. We’ll both always be here for you. Just in two houses instead of one.”
“Two houses. That’s all you think it is?” Steve said. The veneer of adulthood chipped off, leaving him an angry teenager, explosive and bereft. His chair scraped as he pushed it away from the table and stormed out of the house. Terry and Kathleen sat looking at each other across the table. She opened her mouth and found she had nothing, not one single thing, to say.
The following morning, Steve sat by himself in the backyard muttering angrily, an old habit Kathleen had hoped he’d outgrown. Terry was in the living room, reading and listening to music. He hadn’t turned on the television since he came home from the hospital. It was strange, but no more so than anything else, she supposed.
The doorbell rang, and it was Fleur. Since Terry was released she hadn’t visited, and Kathleen was pleased to see her. She actually hugged her, garnering a certain amount of satisfaction from Terry’s silent but unmistakable surprise. Fleur waved to him, and if Kathleen still had any lingering doubts about an affair, her casual, uncomplicated friendliness dispelled them.
“Welcome back, miracle man!” Fleur said cheerily. “You are arisen.”
“Uh,” Terry said.
“I’ve missed you,” Kathleen said to Fleur. “Thanks for coming by.”
Fleur smiled, as unruffled by this as she’d been by Kathleen’s rudeness in previous months, and allowed herself to be led into the kitchen. Kathleen gestured to where her son sat outside. The windows were open, and they could hear his mutterings.
“God grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change,” he was saying. “But still, I mean, come on, what the hell?”
“Don’t you think that’s weird?” she said. “He’s twenty-five years old.”
Fleur shrugged. “Maybe I should go talk to him.”
“You? Why?”
“Why not?” Fleur said.
She walked outside without waiting for permission. She was wearing a flowery yellow shirtdress, like a housewife from a previous generation, and her wavy brown hair fluttered in the summer breeze. She sat down next to Steve and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Do you want to pray with me?” Fleur said, as Kathleen watched.
Her son nodded and bowed his head. So far as Kathleen could remember he’d never met Fleur, but he didn’t ask who she was or why she was there. The two of them held hands in the brilliant sunshine, bird-lover and turtle-keeper. She heard Fleur say, “Dear God,” and the rest of it was lost in the wind.
Dear God, Kathleen thought. Is this the game we’re playing now? The accident, the coma, Fleur’s visits, the pterodactyl? Are these signs and wonders? And if so, what do they mean? She couldn’t decipher them; she couldn’t read her life that way. Over the months to come, as her misery, so long-nurtured, ebbed; as the divorce was filed; as Steve announced he was marrying the reptile girl in California; as she and Fleur remained best friends; as Terry fell in love with a student and almost lost his job before recovering himself and his sanity; as she started to date her real estate agent, Bob, and eventually invited him to move in with her in the condo he’d helped her buy—she still didn’t learn the answers to these questions. But she could feel them all around her, the questions of her life, at times beating like wings, at times soaring cleanly through the air, and she could only wonder how it was that she had never felt them before.
Forks
Alan was lying facedown in Center Square, a squiggle of vomit on the pavement beside him, his one good leg folded sideways. He looked bad and smelled worse, and if he’d been anybody else I would’ve kept walking. But he was Stephanie’s brother, so we both bent down and I shook his shoulder. The classical music the city played to discourage loitering trilled around us, and on the other side of the square two homeless guys smoked their cigarettes and watched.
“Hey, kiddo,” Stephanie said, crouching next to him and feeling for his pulse, her curly blond hair spilling over her shoulders. Together, we dragged him to a sitting position, against a stone memorial to the Civil War dead. Alan’s head lolled to the side. Having seen the family photos, I knew that at one time he’d been a good-looking teenager, green-eyed, with a dimple in his cheek. It was hard to imagine girls going for him now. During his second tour in Afghanistan, an IED took off his left foot, and since he came back, Stephanie said, he’d been struggling. That looked like an understatement.
We hoisted him up and anchored him on our shoulders. His eyes were closed, but I could feel him trying to steady himself, to help us out. It took fifteen minutes to get him across the street and into the backseat of Stephanie’s Civic. She wanted to sit back there with him, so I drove us up the hill to Forks Township. Her condo was in a subdivision that had sprung up too fast, and half the houses were empty. With all those carless driveways and skinny, seedling trees, the neighborhood had a creepy feel. As I drove, I glanced at them in the rearview mirror. Her arm was around him, his head leaning against her neck. His eyelids fluttered. He was smiling.
I met Stephanie my first week at the clinic, which was also my first week in the Lehigh Valley. I was a brand-new doctor, and newly single. Robin, my girlfriend since medical school, had said she’d come with me to Pennsylvania but then, at the last minute, took a job in San Francisco instead. She’d barely even apologized. “San Francisco, Tom,” she’d said, spreading her palms, the difference between California and eastern Pennsylvania too manifest to require explanation. So I moved alone. The job was at a large practice with a staff of young doctors, including me, who rotated through before pushing on to bigger hospitals in other cities. I myself didn’t plan on being here long. What I hoped was to set up my own practice in a nice suburb of Philly, maybe Cherry Hill, where I’d grown up; this place was just a stopover.
Stephanie was the head nurse on my first shift. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that fought to contain it; it frizzed around her forehead, and she kept lifting her hand to smooth it down. She showed me around the place, introduced me to everyone, and from the offhand way she said my name I understood that she had my number and didn’t count on my staying long either. She was a good nurse, unflappable and smart. Two weeks after we met, I was walking to my car when I noticed her leaving at the same time.
“Hey,” I said.
“Doctor.”
“Call me Tom, please.”
“Okay, Tom,” she said. Her tone was not inviting. She was wearing a lumpy brown cardigan over pink scrubs and Crocs, as unattractive an outfit as I’d ever seen, but somehow I still kept straining at its outlines, wondering just what it disguised.
“Buy you a drink? I don’t really know where to go around here, but maybe you can tell me.”
She cocked her head to one side, not smiling. I was expecting her to shake her head, but instead she said, “Let’s go.”
She took me to a sports bar, and over drinks she was quiet. At one point, I caught her looking at her watch. But then she leaned over to me in the booth and suddenly we were making out. She tasted like chicken wings and rum.
She never sought me out at work, and we didn’t flirt there, but whenever I’d ask her if she wanted to grab a bite or a drink, she said yes. Stephanie was a local, born and raised in Macungie; her father had worked at Bethlehem Steel until it closed, her mother as a secretary for the school district. They didn’t have a lot of money, and she’d put herself through nursing school working as a waitress. As soon as she told me that, I felt like I could picture her no-nonsense way of taking orders, a change belt wrapped around her thin hips.
“I bet you got great tips,” I said.
She looked at me, her mouth in a straight line. She had these deadpan expressions that took me a while to figure out, and I liked her for that.
“Enough for school,” she said. “And a car. And a couple trips to Mexico.”
We’d been dating for around a month when she called and asked me to help her with her brother. She hadn’t said much about him, just that he’d been injured while serving and she wasn’t sure what he’d do now. He was younger than her by a few years, and I had the feeling she’d always looked out for him. They’d gone to high school with a guy who was now on the police force, and he’d called her when Alan passed out in the square.
On the short drive back to her place, we didn’t say much. I could hear her talking to him in the backseat, just simple things. “You don’t look good, Alan. We’re going to take you home and get you cleaned up. I’ll make you some grilled cheese. Or whatever you want.” As if she were his mother. Her arm was around his, their blond heads clustered together, and I felt like their chauffeur, some hired hand. When we got there, she guided him into the bathroom. His clothes stank, and his arms and chest were crowded with tattoos and bruises. He looked tough, but he was pliant while we stripped him.
Together we bathed him, as if he were a dirty overgrown child, and he started to come around a little. He didn’t seem upset that we were manhandling him. He was very polite. “Thanks,” he kept saying, and “I’m sorry.” When he was more or less clean, we helped him out of the bathtub and Stephanie asked me to get him some fresh clothes from a dresser in her bedroom. Apparently they were his own clothes, because they fit just fine.
“This is Tom,” Stephanie told him, once he was dressed.
“I’m sorry we met like this,” Alan said. He held out his hand and we shook. His blond hair was lank, and his green eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with exhaustion. I’d have given him a B12 shot and locked him in rehab for a month, but he wasn’t my brother.
“No problem,” I said.
She fed him a grilled cheese sandwich, as promised, and put him in her spare room. Then she and I went to bed.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“It’s not the first time,” she said, shrugging helplessly. “His leg kills him.”
“What’s he on, medication-wise?”
“He’s been on everything. He always says it doesn’t help.”
She was undressed for bed, and her back was covered in tiny freckles. I set myself to tracing them with my index finger, making constellations out of them, a triangle, a star. I loosed her hair from its ponytail, and it sprang to life, a million curls clouding her shoulders. She lay down and folded herself against me, pulling my arm across her stomach. I wondered if she was crying. But she turned, and kissed me, then moved down my stomach and took me in her mouth, and I closed my eyes, not thinking about anything else at all.
After that night, I was deep into Stephanie’s life, and I liked it there. We started spending most weekends together, and I met her parents, who were sweet, tired people, too impressed that I was a doctor for me to be comfortable around them. She showed me around Bethlehem: the shuttered factory they’d turned into a casino, the quaint cobblestoned Main Street, the shambling towpath along the Delaware canal. Sometimes we went hiking in the Poconos, the mountains’ dazzling green bisected by the truck-heavy rumble of I-80. The whole place seemed hardscrabble to me, gritty and rural, and as much as I liked Stephanie, I had a hard time imagining staying there for long.
As I got to know her, I realized how closely her life and Alan’s were intertwined. She was constantly bailing him out, helping him get job interviews, putting him up for the night when another in his series of housing arrangements—he’d get a new roommate or a new girlfriend, then argue with them and move out—crumbled.
I answered the door one night in December to find him standing on the doorstep, swaying a little. Over one shoulder was a blue backpack he always had with him, and sometimes I wondered if it contained all his worldly possessions.
“Yo,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“We have, actually. More than once.”
“It was a joke, Doctor Tom.”
“Oh,” I said. He was just as deadpan as his sister. “Come on in. Steph’s cooking.”
When she saw him coming into the kitchen her face lit up, nothing deadpan about that. She was always happy when he came, no matter what condition he was in. For the first few minutes, we were so distracted by the commotion of cooking and getting all the food on the table that we didn’t notice how high he was. But then I realized he wasn’t eating, just holding up his fork and looking at it, as if inspecting it for cleanliness. He seemed transfixed. After a while the two of us watched in silence.
Finally he noticed, and put it down. “It’s beautiful, you know?” he said.
“It’s Mom and Dad’s old set,” Stephanie said. She passed me some garlic bread, nudging me to hand the basket to Alan. She wanted him to get something into his stomach.
“No, I mean forks in general,” Alan said musingly. “There’s this perfection to them. You know what word I’ve always liked? Tines. The tines of a fork. It sounds so perfect, like little chimes. Like a trinity. Like a trinity of chimes.”
“Oh, kiddo,” Stephanie said. “What did you take?”
Alan smiled at her. He was the most affable addict I’d ever met. “I feel good,” he said. “I got a little help from Ludo.”
This was a guy from Allentown who’d served in Alan’s unit. They hung around together a lot, though they often fought, Ludo driving off and leaving him stranded at a bar, or a McDonald’s at midnight, or a truck stop in Ohio, halfway through some road trip they’d cooked up and then abandoned.
I could see he wasn’t going to eat anything, and Stephanie’s eagerness for him to be there like a normal person was tearing at my heart. “How about you lie down for a bit?” I said.
He smiled at me, his green eyes warm. “That’s not a terrible idea, sir,” he said. He settled himself on the couch, and in a couple minutes we could hear him snoring. At first Stephanie just sat there, staring down at her spaghetti, tears glimmering in her eyes. But I reminded her she didn’t want to get sick, that she had to keep her strength up, and she nodded and lifted her fork. She was sensible like that.
After dinner, I did the dishes while Stephanie made up the spare room for Alan, then crashed in front of the TV. To my surprise, when I went back there to check on him, he was awake. The bedside lamp was on and he was reading one of her Cosmos.
“Guess what?” he said when he saw me. “The female body has a hundred pleasure receptors.”
“Mus
t be nice,” I said.
“Seriously,” he said. “I know maybe three.”
“Yeah.” This wasn’t a topic I was interested in pursuing. “You need anything?”
“Where’s Steph?”
“Sleeping. She’s had a long day.”
“I hear you,” he said. “I hear you.” He was sitting propped up against the pillows, his legs straight out in front of him. With his shoes still on you couldn’t tell which one was the prosthetic foot. He saw me looking.
“You’re a doctor. Tell me why it’s the one that’s gone that hurts.”
“The nerve endings,” I said. “They call it ghost pain. The OxyContin should help.”
He snorted. “I’m not going to lie to you, OxyContin’s like baby aspirin to me at this point.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. “How’s the physical therapy going?”
“How do you think?” He closed his eyes, and a small smile played across his face. “I was in this tank once, me and Ludo,” he said. “We were going through this patch of desert when we heard all this artillery, it sounded real heavy. And then it just stopped. Ludo tells me to stick my head out and see what’s going on. I say no way, I’m gonna get killed. We argue about it for a while. Finally I say okay and stick my head out the top. I look around and I can’t see a damn thing. Not one single person for miles. All I see is this brown desert. After a while, none of it makes sense to me. You know how if you look at a word too long, you can’t tell if it’s a real word? I couldn’t even tell the difference between the sand and the sky. Finally Ludo pulls me back down. The weird thing is, we never did hear anything about combat engagement that day. Nobody ever said one word about it.”
“Was that where you got hurt?” I said.
“No,” he said. “That was somewhere else.”
He was so quiet after that I figured he’d fallen asleep. I was about to switch off the light when he finally spoke. “You got anything on you, Doctor Tom?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t hold out on me,” he said. He opened his eyes and there was no affability there, no sweetness at all. “Don’t you fucking hold out.”
