The Light Before Us

by Stephanie Vercier

  I begin thinking about leaving town as I drive up to Barbara’s. It wouldn’t have to be for long, maybe just for a few weeks. I could go to California like I’d planned and stay with my friends.

  But what about Jack?

  The idea of being away from him for that long feels worse than it would to open up the cabin door and find my parents and Michael waiting for me.

  I’m falling in love with Jack.

  And I can’t leave.

  I can’t run away.

  Pulling up into Barbara’s driveway, I give Melissa a quick call on her cell to apologize for disappearing and leaving a full plate of food. I get her voicemail, so I leave a message and tell her I felt sick all of a sudden but am fine now, not to worry, and then apologize a couple more times before finally hanging up.

  “Hello!” I call out when I use my spare key to get into Melissa and Barbara’s house, attempting to go about the rest of my day without Camille completely derailing it. “It’s me, Natalie,” I say, going up the stairs, always sure to announce my arrival so as not to startle Barbara.

  “Oh, how I’ve missed you,” she tells me from the couch as I enter the living room. There is a relieved look on her face, and Maxie and Dougie jump from their dog beds and make a mad dash toward me. They don’t bark—they know me too well now. All they want is some attention, and it’s easy enough to give.

  “I’ve missed you too,” I say to Barbara as I kneel down and pet the dogs. I do my best to keep pushing what happened this morning with Camille to the back of my mind so that I can focus on Barbara, focus on getting her one step closer to the woman she was before her stroke. “It looks like you’ve been doing well on that puzzle.” After I’ve given the dogs my undivided attention for a good minute, I walk over to the TV tray in front of her. She’s nearly finished a puzzle of a farmhouse and a barn.

  “Mel helped me with it yesterday,” she confesses, “but I was the one who put the pieces in place.” There is a look of pride on her face, unashamed now that the puzzle is designed for the pre-teen age level. Considering she’d once balked at the idea, that in itself is progress, and that helps to erase what happened mere minutes ago with her granddaughter.

  “That’s great.” I sit down next to her and do my best to relax. “Should we start a new one today? Or would you like to work on crosswords instead?”

  “What I’d like to do is get up and do some damn walking on my own.” There is a surly tone to her voice, but it’s full of determination. “Melissa is so damn scared I’m going to break every bone in my body, but how am I going to do that when the whole damn house is carpeted?”

  “She’s just concerned about you. She doesn’t want for there to be any setbacks.” I know I’m just towing the line in saying that, but it’s true. Melissa is terrified her mother could regress somehow.

  She makes a disgusted sound with her mouth. “I can sit here and do puzzles all day, and that’s all well and good, but I need to walk too!”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “How about we try a walk across the living room later.”

  “On my own?” She looks at me like a child who wants so badly to take the training wheels off of their bicycle, and it breaks my heart.

  I nod. “After I’ve spotted you a couple of times on your walker. Then we’ll try the cane if all goes well.”

  “You better not be lying to me,” she says. “I can still turn a whole dictionary full of expletives in your direction if I need to!”

  “I know you can.” I laugh, the tension flowing out of my muscles, the run-in with Camille this morning seeming less and less horrible.

  The day goes on, and that pride in how much Barbara has accomplished doesn’t go away. Not everyone who has a stroke regains what they’ve lost, but she’s made incredible strides in such a very short time. She still does have moments of word-finding difficulties, and there are times when she zones out for a few seconds, and her walking is still quite wobbly when her brain isn’t communicating proper instructions to her muscles. But she does well when I spot her going across the living room, and she manages it with her cane as well, even though I have to hold my breath with each step she takes.

  I do my best to make her a decent lunch, which today consists of a cheese sandwich, apple slices and a strawberry, banana and spinach smoothie, which even I can’t fuck up in the blender. I set it all on another TV tray in front of her and turn the volume up on the classic movie channel she likes so much. Today, it’s something with Cary Grant, which garners a great deal of interest from Barbara.

  “I’m just going to clean up in the kitchen,” I tell her. “Do you need anything else?”

  “You aren’t going to eat with me?”

  “I’ll join you in a few,” I tell her, my stomach growling since I’d missed breakfast. And yet, the idea of eating right now feels impossible.

  As soon as I’m through the threshold of the kitchen, panic rises in me as if stepping from the carpet to the linoleum has triggered a fight or flight response. My heart is racing again, my throat drying, and I barely make it to the sink where I steady myself, close my eyes and take quick, even breathes to try and calm myself.

  It’s like an anxiety attack, one that must have been building throughout the day. I thought I’d gotten over what had happened with Camille this morning, but it kept niggling at me even though I was doing my best to bury it under the accomplishments Barbara had made. But now I feel a sharp twist in my gut, one brought on by the knowledge that Camille is going to make things difficult for me and Jack. I know it won’t be because she has some huge vendetta against us, but simply because she can. I can see now that she’s pissed off and angry about being rejected by Jack, and she’s just as upset with me because her own family looks more highly upon me than they do her.

  She’s going to fuck things up—I just know it.

  I can’t run out on Barbara and have a meltdown on my own, so I make myself calm down. It takes a few minutes, but I do, and then I put that negative energy into cleaning the kitchen while doing my best to ignore my hunger. As I wash dishes and sanitize countertops, I think about how to deal with Camille, how I’ll have to tell Jack this evening and how we should prepare for the potential that she’ll pull something.

  Melissa and Barbara won’t care about my relationship with Jack—I know that. But I am afraid of having to leave here, of potentially leaving Barbara without seeing her recovery through all the way. I’m so caught up in the barrage of thoughts that I barely register the loud crashing sound coming from inside the house. At first, I think it must be one of the pugs knocking something over, but when I quickly set down the plate I’d just been drying, I rush into the living room and find the couch empty.

  “Barbara!” I do a quick turn into the dining room before rushing down the hall, noting the bathroom door open and the light on.

  Shit!

  “Barbara, are you all—” When I enter the doorway, there she is, her body twisted and lying on the bathroom floor.

  Chapter Seventeen

  JACK

  I’m in the hospital, Jack.

  The first line of her text was all I’d needed to read to get my ass in my truck and race toward town. If she was in the hospital, I needed to be there for her. That’s what you do for someone you care about, someone you’re falling in love with.

  I’d been relieved of course when I dialed her, laws about cell phone use while driving be damned, and found out it was Barbara who’d been injured. But that didn’t do anything to stop my resolve in getting to her, in being able to support her.

  Natalie had explained that Barbara had a nasty fall on her watch, and she felt completely responsible for it. She was near tears when she told me she’d have to hang up because she was accompanying Barbara into radiology. I told her to hang on, that I’d be there soon.

  I’m all about being strong for her until I actually enter the building and get a sick, gut-wrenching sense of déjà vu I don’t want to deal with. I’d raced into a hospital so many
times before to see Marjorie, so many times I couldn’t count. I should be immune to this, considering my line of work. After Marjorie’s death, I’d had to go into the clinic every single day, the white walls and floors, the smell of antiseptic, the beeping of monitors all around me. But while I could barely look at the Seattle hospital she’d spent her last days in, I at least knew that I’d spend my day in the clinic attempting to shape a better life for my patients, not providing them as much comfort as possible as they lay dying.

  I don’t care what kind of doctor you are—all of us want to save people. Death feels like a failure on our part, and, with Marjorie, I felt completely helpless.

  “Can I help you find someone?” An older woman asks. She’s sitting at the reception desk in the lobby of the small hospital. I’m not sure how long I’ve been standing here, my thoughts focused on the past.

  “I…” I clear my throat and run a hand through my hair. “I’m here to see Barbara.” I pause, realizing I don’t know the woman’s last name. “I’m sorry, I don’t know her full name. My girlfriend is her caregiver, and I’m here for moral support.”

  The woman smiles at me and looks at her computer screen. “Well, let’s see, we’ve only had one Barbara admitted in the last couple of hours. Looks like they’ve just finished radiology, and she’s in room 202. Now, that’s on the second floor, just around the corner there and up the elevator.” She points the way and smiles again.

  “Thanks,” I say before following her directions through the small but modern hospital, probably built in the last few years to help serve the growing number of retirees who’ve moved here. It’s so different from the high-rise in Seattle where thousands of people metered in and out all day, where my beautiful wife took her last breath.

  I can’t help but wonder what Marjorie must think of all of this as I near the room Natalie is in. If she can see me, would she support what I’m doing? Would she understand that what I feel for Natalie takes nothing away from what I still feel for her? She’d always liked Natalie, had spoken highly of her. In truth, I’d always been so focused on my wife that I didn’t notice a lot of other people. Looking back, I could register that Lincoln and Sharla’s daughter was growing into a beautiful woman, but that’s as far as it went. I was not a man who had a wandering eye, not a man who had any particular interest in younger women.

  But Natalie has at least changed the last part of that.

  The fact that she’s sixteen years my junior doesn’t seem to matter to me. I don’t care that our pop culture references are polar opposites or that I’ve never heard of half of the bands she’s mentioned to me. I also don’t care that she’s still in college while I’ve already gone through years of school and residency with the expectation I’d never have to look at a textbook again, even if it wasn’t me having to crack it open.

  And when I stand at the open door to room 202 and see her, it just reinforces why all of that stuff is so trivial. Natalie is near the window, the late day sun beaming over her, making her hair more blonde than brown. She has one arm crossed over her stomach, the other raised, two fingers touching her bottom lip as she nervously chews her nails. Even from here, I can see the concern in her beautiful eyes, and I take a tentative step into the room to see an older woman in the hospital bed who must be Barbara. And Melissa, who I know from Al’s, is at her side, standing above her.

  I look back to Natalie before I make any further movement. She is worried, afraid… compassionate. She is stunning on the outside, but I see through to just as much beauty beneath. It’s why I’m falling so deeply in love with her.

  I knock softly at the open door now, then stride toward Natalie. She turns to look at me, and a smile spreads across her face.

  “You came.” She drops the hand from her mouth and unwraps the other from her stomach.

  “Anything for you, babe.” I envelop her with my arm and pull her close to me, kissing the top of her head.

  “Well, look at that.” Barbara rakes her eyes over us while Melissa turns more slightly, dropping fingers from above her nose as if she’d been nursing a headache.

  “Jack?” Melissa looks at me with some confusion. She knows me as one of her customers at the diner, though I’d finally tired of Camille and stopped going—a real shame considering how good the food is.

  “Hey Melissa… Barbara.” I nod at the older woman. “I hope you don’t feel like I’m intruding, but Natalie sounded worried, and I wanted to be here.”

  “No, of course not.” Melissa narrows her eyes at us. “But I didn’t realize you and Natalie knew each other.”

  Natalie looks up at me and smiles, placing her hand on my chest.

  “Well of course they do!” Barbara’s smile is huge now. “That’s her boyfriend, Mel! Isn’t it obvious?”

  Melissa opens her mouth in surprise, then closes it and shakes her head. “Oh… I see. But I thought…” She looks very specifically at Natalie and widens her eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Natalie tells her, seeming to understand the look she’s getting from her. “This isn’t the guy I was running from.”

  Michael.

  She breathes out a sigh. “Well, thank god for that.” Then she turns to me. “Because I like you, Jack, and I’d hate to think I’d have to run you out of town.”

  That makes me grin. I like the idea Natalie has made some friends that will have her back.

  “Jack’s the best.” Natalie gives me another one of her beautiful smiles before turning her attention back to Melissa. “I just hope you won’t run me out of town for letting your mom break her leg.”

  As if on cue, Melissa and her mother roll their eyes in unison.

  “You didn’t let me do anything!” Barbara is the first to pipe in. “I chose all on my own to see if I could make it to the bathroom without your help.”

  “And it’s not like you were out taking a smoke break or something,” Melissa adds. “Jesus, Natalie, Mom says you were cleaning the kitchen. And besides, a leg will heal a lot faster than if it had been her hip. We’ve got to be thankful for small favors here.”

  Natalie nods, but I can tell she’s not entirely convinced.

  “Why don’t you get her on out of here,” Barbara tells me. “She’s just going to keep beating herself up and making the rest of us miserable.”

  “I just want to see this through is all,” Natalie argues. “I’m not trying to be a martyr or anything.”

  I grip Natalie tighter.

  “She’s right,” Melissa says. “You feeling guilty isn’t going to heal her leg any faster, and you’ve already done so much. If you want to come back tomorrow and visit, I won’t argue.”

  “But what about the diner?” Natalie asks, concern continuing to flow out of her.

  “Camille has it covered.”

  Natalie stiffens under my touch at the mere mention of Melissa’s daughter’s name.

  “Okay.” Natalie finally relents, stepping out of my grasp only to say goodbye to Barbara and Melissa. “But call me if you need anything. And I’ll come tomorrow, bright and early.”

  “I’ll drop off some crosswords and word searches,” Melissa says, which causes her mother to roll her eyes yet again.

  Maybe I shouldn’t laugh, but I do.

  After saying our goodbyes and me coaxing Natalie out of the room, I say, “You were great in there. You really care about those women.”

  “I don’t know about great.” She shakes her head. “I should have kept a closer eye on Barbara. She was just trying to prove to me she could do something on her own, and I was in the kitchen with my mind on something else.”

  “What’s the something else?” I ask as we exit the elevator.

  She doesn’t answer, and I let it lie. It’s not until we’re back in my truck when I finally nudge her again.

  “Natalie. You getting all quiet is starting to scare me.”

  She turns to me, hesitantly I think. “I had a run in with Camille this morning.”

  “A run in?”

/>   “Well, Will was there—you know, the mechanic? The guy I went to the roadhouse with.”

  “Yeah, I know who you’re talking about.” My jaw clenches at the mere mention of his name.

  “I promise I tried to completely ignore him, but he came over and sat down at my table anyway. It was kind of uncomfortable, and then once he left, Camille came over and said she knew all about us… about you and me.”

  I’m still trying to clear the jealous burn I feel at knowing Will had been so close to Natalie when I play catch up and ask, “And how’s that?”

  She lets out a labored sigh. “Apparently Will sensed you and I weren’t just friends when you showed up at the roadhouse. He told Camille it was obvious we were having sex.”

  “Which we are,” I say like I’m putting my claim on her.

  Instead of throwing me a look, she reaches out and takes my hand. “I don’t know how, but I ended up admitting you and I are living together. She doesn’t like me—in fact I think she hates me—she seems to think I’m intruding on her family, and of course she likes you… a lot.” She bites at her lip and gives me an expectant look.

  “The feeling isn’t mutual,” I easily reply.

  Natalie briefly closes her eyes and gently nods. “I’m just afraid she’s going to do something.”

  “Like what?” I’m probably missing something major, but I don’t plan on allowing Camille—or anyone—to do a thing that could hurt my girl.

  “I think she might dig. It wouldn’t be hard for her to figure out where I’d come from or that there might be people looking for me. And I’m sure she’d just love to clue them in.”