Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

  He walked past Suzanne, who was feeding Otis. Her face changed. “Don’t you dare laugh,” Gary said.

  “I think you look great,” she said.

  The day security man, tall and thin and pale, met Gary at the door. “Nothing going on tonight,” he said, and tipped his hat, walking past Gary. “It’s all yours.”

  Gary’s first night, he sat at the desk, a magazine in front of him. He leafed through the pages so roughly, he tore a few. He couldn’t see the bright gleam of photos, he couldn’t read a line of copy. He couldn’t focus. He looked up at the clock. Only a half hour had passed. The night swung out before him.

  Larry was right. With this job, he didn’t have to concentrate on anything, but in a way, that was part of the problem. Freed, his mind flooded with Molly. It replayed his days at the hospital, the way her face looked. He kept thinking about the moment she had gotten pregnant, if there had been something about her he had missed, something that might have warded this off, something he could have done, and it all made him so crazy, he got up and stormed down the halls, just to have something to do. He checked doors to make sure they were locked. He checked windows and shone the flashlight they gave him into every dark corner. He felt an odd satisfaction, a kind of dull joy in making the building secure.

  He was making a circle back to his desk when he heard the hum of a vacuum. He turned a corner. There was a young man, his black hair in a ponytail, in jeans and a white T-shirt, running the machine over the floor. He grinned when he saw Gary and clicked off the vacuum. “Well hot dog! Company!” he called. He wiped his hand on the back of his jeans and thrust it out at Gary.

  The man’s name was Marty. Marty was twenty-two and in college at Rutgers, paying his way by a variety of jobs. He wanted to be a movie director and he had all these ideas. “Night job,” Marty said, making his hands into a frame. “That’s the title of my movie. It’s about a janitor at night and how he begins to suspect the building he’s in is somehow alive and haunted and out to get him and what he does about it. It’s sort of like that great Danish film about the hospital, The Kingdom, you ever see that?”

  “I haven’t seen any hospital movies lately.”

  “Well,” Marty said, considering, “you should.”

  Marty went off to finish his vacuuming and Gary wound his way back to his desk. The building had a kind of music, a low, steady hum, a vibration maybe. He had read once where everything had a soul, even machines, even concrete and steel. He tried to keep himself still, to listen deeper to the building, to try to feel what its soul might be like. Benevolent, he decided.

  The time passed and then Gary punched out and came home. The morning light seemed unnaturally bright, the air too still. He went inside the house, which was quiet, and the first thing he did, before he got out of his uniform and into his jeans, was look in on Otis, who was sleeping.

  He should sleep, too, but he wasn’t tired. He didn’t want to risk sleeping through a minute he might share with his son, so he kept awake.

  He stayed awake so he could check with Suzanne about what kind of a night Otis had had. He stayed awake until Otis cried and then he dressed his son and strolled him to the park and back. He stayed awake on the drive to the hospital and beside Molly’s bed. “I’m here.” He would have gotten up on the bed with her, if there weren’t so many tubes, if his jostling might not harm her. He looked at her and felt himself coming undone. He would have taken her illness into himself. You live, I live. It was as simple as that. He took her hand. Her skin was warm. Her pulse beat up against his. You die, I die. His lids floated shut. He slept, deep and dreamless, his mind closed tight as a building.

  At the end of his first week of work, Larry showed up. He slapped Gary on the back. “You’re doing real good,” he said seriously, though for the life of him, Gary couldn’t figure out how someone did badly at a job like this. He could walk the halls or not walk the halls, he could fall asleep the whole night at his desk and no one would notice, except for maybe Marty, and he was too absorbed in his own future to notice anyone else’s. Larry handed Gary an envelope, thick with bills. “I put something extra in there for you,” he said, lowering his voice. “Bill told me how things are for you.” Larry patted Gary’s shoulder.

  Suzanne tried to gauge her sister’s progress by the way the nurses acted. If they stopped to talk to Suzanne, it was a good sign. If they breezed by, it meant Molly was getting worse. She could tell, too, how her sister was doing by the number of times Gary called the hospital to check on Molly’s status. By the number of photos he left on her table. But she didn’t begin to be really terrified until Gary stopped calling the hospital altogether, until one Saturday morning she woke up at five and found him sitting in the living room, staring at the window, not moving.

  She was afraid to call out to him, to ask what was wrong. She was suddenly terrified Molly might not make it. She turned around and went back to her bed. She bundled herself up in the sheets and stared into the darkness.

  She began to be more and more afraid in Molly’s house. At night, when Gary was at his night manager’s job, she couldn’t sleep. She didn’t know what she was afraid of. Gary had installed new locks, even on the windows. He had an alarm system.

  Now she took a shower with the door wide open, and halfway through, she stepped out of the tub, dripping wet, and locked the door, and even then, she felt uneasy. She knew money was tight, but still, she switched on lights as she moved from room to room. She turned on the television and the radio and the baby’s monitor so it buzzed. She sat in the living room half hoping Otis would wake just so she would have company.

  She went to the phone and called the hospital. “Molly Goldman,” she said and waited.

  “Critical. The same,” the voice said, and Suzanne hung up. Critical was still alive, she reminded herself. So why then did she see razoredged dominoes, falling, all pointed toward her?

  One day, Suzanne was putting the baby to bed when the bell rang. She raced down and there was a woman standing there, a kerchief about her hair. Suzanne opened the door. “Theresa. From next door,” the woman said. She waited and then sighed as if Suzanne were being rude. “Carl’s wife.”

  “Oh, yes,” Suzanne said doubtfully. “Theresa.” She tried to think why Theresa was here, what had happened, but she felt blank.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked and Theresa drew off her kerchief.

  “You take walk-ins?” she said.

  She gave Theresa a smock. Theresa fingered the material and put it on. “Tea? Coffee?”

  Theresa considered. “I like Sanka.”

  Suzanne sat Theresa in the plastic chair she used and touched Theresa’s hair. It didn’t feel real. Stiff with spray, dry from bad coloring, and the wrong kind of perm.

  “It’s still keeping its shape, but I thought a touch-up, a trim, couldn’t hurt,” Theresa said.

  Suzanne lifted her hands from Theresa’s hair and nodded.

  Usually when Suzanne worked, she filled up the silences with patter, making jokes, asking her clients questions, but there was something about Theresa that made her keep her mouth shut. Every time Suzanne looked in the mirror she saw Theresa watching her, like she was about to have her appendix taken out without anesthesia. When Suzanne touched Theresa’s hair, Theresa winced, and all Suzanne could think was: She’s afraid of me.

  She washed Theresa’s hair with the good shampoo. “Smells nice,” Theresa said. “What’s that green stuff floating in it?”

  “Fresh mint. It gives the smell.”

  “Fresh mint. Who’d have thought?” said Theresa doubtfully.

  Suzanne combed color through Theresa’s hair and set it the way she knew Theresa would like it, a stiff brassy muffin about her head, and popped her under a dryer. It killed her to ruin hair like that, but she was desperate, she needed the money, Gary needed the money, and she wanted to be working, even if it was working badly. Theresa could have told her she wanted hair like a topiary, and Suzanne would have done i
t.

  She let Theresa’s hair fry under the dryer, and then took her out, carefully removing the hard pink curlers one by one. Theresa blinked and as Suzanne worked, Theresa’s face began to change. Her mouth loosened up. You could see her lips now. Her eyes widened. By the time Suzanne was spraying her hair, making it hard and shiny as a beetle shell, Theresa was smiling. “You did a great job,” she said.

  “You’re surprised, right?” Suzanne didn’t tell her that she knew exactly how to do hair like this from her days at Beauty Culture School, when the only people fool enough to let her work on them were all the little old ladies coming in for the five-dollar student cuts.

  Theresa beamed and touched her bright helmet of hair. “You know, I decided to do this for Gary. It was the only way I could think that he might accept money from me.” She swiveled in the chair, studying the back of her hair. “Isn’t it funny, it turns out I did this for me.” She smiled at Suzanne. “I have many friends,” she said.

  Suzanne began to get more and more clients. Many were from her signs, but a lot were from Theresa, too. She was nerved up about how it was going to work with the baby, but to her surprise he put on his best behavior. Not only was he quiet, but he began to look especially cute, even to her. And just seeing him seemed to relax her clients. “Oh, a baby!” they said, as if it were the biggest surprise in the world.

  It was strange, but Otis relaxed her, too. It made her feel good to see him. Sometimes she swore he was courting her. She walked into his room mornings and his whole face lit up. “It’s just me, Otis,” she said, but he couldn’t stop wriggling, and she couldn’t help feeling pleased. He made cooing sounds when she picked him up, making her laugh, and as soon as she did, he cooed some more.

  It killed her the way his eyes followed her around the room now, the way he’d get all nervous if she so much as stepped away for a minute. Some nights, when he was asleep, when she didn’t have clients, she told herself she was just checking on him while he slept. She stood by his crib watching him, and some nights it was almost impossible to tear herself away from him. Every night, before she went to sleep, she read two whole chapters of Molly’s baby book. She kept a notebook handy. She jotted down things that seemed useful.

  She started buying Otis things, too. A pacifier shaped like a pair of big red lips. A terry-cloth lamb. And when she noticed him scrunching his face when she smoked, she suddenly made a decision. She stubbed out the cigarette. She threw out the pack. “Cold turkey,” she told Otis.

  Her favorite times were sometimes the quietest ones. Midday. She sat in Angela’s rocker and rocked Otis, listening to the quiet of the house, the calm. She thought about what she might cook for dinner. She thought about Gary coming home soon. She sighed. Sometimes she couldn’t help imagining that this was her life.

  Gary left work and stopped at the all-night supermarket to pick up milk and bread and wipes with protective aloe and diapers size two. Seven in the morning. Too early for the Muzak, a syrupy rendition of a Frank Sinatra song he used to like before he heard this version. “The Summer Wind.” There were only two cashiers, young women with too much makeup, their eyelids frosted blue, their scratchy hair pulled back into ponytails, yawning, propping themselves up against the registers to lazily gossip back and forth, punctuating the air with their long lacquered nails. There were a few stock boys in bright red aprons swinging metal pricers. He glanced around. Who else beside him would shop this early? A ragged-looking woman in a blue dress shuffled down an aisle. Two teenaged kids giggled by the ice cream, holding up frosty pints and pressing them against each other’s heated skin. Losers and outlaws, all of us, Gary thought. The disenfranchised. He scratched at his arms through his uniform. He still had his hat on, out of habit. He was wheeling the cart, staring sleepily at the fresh fruits, when someone said, “Gary?” He looked up. Brian was standing there, staring at Gary’s uniform, at his cap, in pure astonishment. Gary felt hot with new shame, defiant with rage.

  “Hi, Brian.”

  Brian leaned on his cart. Canned puddings, doughnuts, instant coffee, and paper cups. Work food. Single man food. “How’s Molly?”

  “The same.”

  “So. You got a job, I see.” Brian’s gaze slid up and down Gary, stopping at the cap. His mouth moved and he suddenly snorted. “Sorry to laugh, but that cap—that insignia! You gotta admit it’s kind of funny.”

  “It’s not funny, Brian. It’s a job.”

  Brian nodded again. He waited for Gary to say something, but Gary was resolutely silent. “Well, that’s good,” Brian said lamely. “I guess.” He looked at Gary’s uniform again and shook his head, grinning.

  Gary wanted to shove Brian, he wanted to scream at him that everyone knew his girlfriend Candy was made-up, that she probably was a man masquerading to get some free things that only a complete idiot would give her, that no one liked Brian, least of all his made-up girlfriend, but instead, Gary said nothing. He turned, wheeling his cart so roughly into the next aisle, he toppled a display of diaper wipes, clattering them onto the floor.

  He was so furious, he drove for a while. By the time he got home, it was nearly nine. He came into the house to hear music playing, an opera aria. The house was clean, and not too warm, and fragrant with mint. Then he heard a woman laughing and he followed the sound into the kitchen. Suzanne was washing a strange woman’s hair in his sink. Suzanne wore red rubbery gloves. Suzanne had on a short black smock, the same one the woman was wearing, her legs were long and pale, her feet bare. She smiled at him and kept talking to the woman. The air was tangy with lemon. In a rocker on the floor was Otis, happily batting a plastic toy. Suzanne beamed at Gary. “Two more coming today,” she mouthed. She flushed and watching her, for a moment, he felt suddenly stricken. She looked glowing, content. Her hands, long and delicate, moved like pale, exotic flowers. He felt a pull in his stomach, a yearning. The woman getting her hair washed waved. “Hi there,” she said.

  Gary changed and left the house to go to the hospital. Suzanne was noisily blowing the woman’s hair dry, so intent, she didn’t see him leave.

  At the hospital, Molly lay motionless, her face turned from him. He lifted up her hand. The skin was starting to bruise. He gently put it down again and stroked her fingers. “Come back,” he said.

  Someone came to take blood twice. A nurse came and bathed Molly. Two orderlies lifted her up into a rubber stretcher to weigh her and lowered her again. He stroked her hands and sang her two songs. The entire time Molly didn’t move.

  He didn’t know what to do. Sometimes he thought he wanted to talk, but he didn’t know whom to talk to. He couldn’t afford a shrink. Everyone at the hospital was too busy. His friends just tried to make him feel better, to give him hope, or they got so upset, he ended up comforting them. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.

  He read the newspaper by Molly’s bed, scanning the ads, leafing through the pages. FREE HELP LINE, he saw. He looked back at Molly. Her lids fluttered and didn’t open. She didn’t move. It was ridiculous, but he found himself getting up, walking over to the bank of pay phones, and dialing.

  “Help line.” It was a woman’s voice, soft and soothing and very young.

  Gary cleared his throat. He couldn’t speak.

  “Help line. Take your time. I’m here for you.”

  Here for you. Gary felt his throat expanding. “Three days after my wife gave birth, she went into a coma.”

  The woman was silent.

  “They don’t know if she’s going to make it.”

  “That must be so hard for you,” the woman whispered.

  “I feel like I can’t do this.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  Gary suddenly felt a buzz of frustration. “You can’t help me, can you?” Gary said sadly. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

  “Of course I can help you. I can listen.”

  “Have you been in anything like this yourself? Do you know how it feels?”

 
“Don’t you think I can know how something might feel without feeling it myself?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s just not true. I—”

  “Can you make my wife well?” he interrupted.

  “I can be here for you. I can listen.”

  Gary hung up.

  Stay calm, he told himself. Believe things will turn out all right. But how could he believe in anything? How could he not worry? It suddenly seemed to him that phobics were the true seers, that even the craziest phobia might be a perfectly rational response to a terrifyingly irrational world. And when everything was so upside down, there was nothing left to do but look for miracles.

  He bought a fake fur rabbit’s foot and kept it in his coat pocket. Once, when he was looking through the want ads for jobs, he saw a Saint Jude’s prayer. Say the prayer nine times in nine days and then thank Saint Jude publicly and whatever you want to happen will. He did it, he learned it. He asked for Molly to be instantly healed, and when it didn’t work, he told himself, well, maybe it would work later, maybe something still might happen.

  He couldn’t afford to hire a psychic healer, but he began to buy books. He remembered the crazy mushroom title Ada had suggested; he vaguely remembered other titles she had suggesteded; when he couldn’t find any of her books, he found others. The Mind Can Heal the Body. Heavenly Healing. Mysticism and Health. He was vaguely embarrassed buying the books, but as soon as the cashier looked up at him, he turned defiant. He slammed his money down onto the counter.