Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  What I remember with such high-pitched clarity is not so much the bandages and casts coming off one by one, or the pea-green walls of the P.T. room, or the physical therapists palpating the tender spots and apologizing in soft voices, or my record-breaking graduation from walker to crutches to cane to my old shoes, which no longer fit. No. The memories that stuck—crystalline in detail, though temporally obscure—happened in the between-time, in that magical space between the big Before and After, in those softly falling forty-three hours. My head seemed like a room I lived inside.

  At the hospital I did nothing but listen. This one’s not going to make it. That’s how they referred to me: This one. Maybe they said it out loud, though I cannot imagine such a thing. One of them was plain tired. Another had just discovered a lump in his little girl’s neck. Another was ready to quit her residency and didn’t care whether I lived or died.

  I didn’t mind. I understood. These things I heard in my between-time did not feel burdensome, they merely existed. People’s desires have a way of curling into a room like smoke, and there I was, breathing in.

  They scanned my head. They removed my spleen. They rummaged amongst the bones in my back. I had no idea how many bones made up a back. They put a plate in my knee, screws and pins and a powder made of other people’s bones. They stitched a thigh muscle that had split down the middle. They did not do these things all at once, on the same day. But they might as well have. Time felt long, and short.

  They picked sequins of asphalt out of my face with tweezers, and later with lasers. Tick, tick, tick went the sound, like stones being tapped underwater, like time being lost.

  They buckled me into a rig that turned like a barbecue spit. Someone came in and rotated me every couple of hours. Or minutes. Time did not seat right. Light and dark did not match day and night.

  Later, in the recovery room, or in the room where they clamped me into the spit, I discovered how much Mariette depended on me. I had never known this about my friend, how critical to her was my existing; how, if it looked as though I were going to die first, she would offer to trade places—despite her husband, her little son—if only to escape another loss. These thoughts flew like frightened birds from the friend I thought I knew, and I was surprised.

  I heard Drew, too, imagining himself over the long haul failing the test of devotion. That he had already failed the test of devotion in the short haul weighed hard upon him. There was a woman somewhere; he was sorry. I have seen the northern lights twice, and one time I heard them as well, and that’s what my husband’s thoughts sounded like. Like the northern lights. Sad and unreachable.

  I had been “out”—unconscious but not gone. I had arrowed through the mist and landed on the road. I’d been moved by a stranger, a bystander, my witness. My witness fled, gunned his engine, and raced back to the corporeal world, leaving me stranded. But I did not feel alone. A gate had opened, and my head filled beautifully with memory.

  Then, in the cool, humming, middle-of-the-night hospital quiet, came an alteration in the air. A slow warming. My uncle—Father Mike, twenty-one years gone—stepped through that open gate.

  After a long struggle, hours or minutes, I opened my eyes. An angel’s wing. Threads of silver and gold. The frayed black cuff of my uncle’s jacket. A crescent-shaped hole where he’d lost a button. An amber flash of his tiger’s-eye ring. His voice sounded like poured cream, exactly as I once knew it.

  I was so happy to see him, so unutterably happy. Finally, I thought again, and fell asleep, moving mercifully back in time.

  Hours later, or minutes, I told Mariette, Father Mike was here. In her face I saw relief and tears. Drew, Mariette cried, Drew, get over here, she’s awake.

  Hallucination. Morphine. Trauma.

  No, I insisted.

  You’re awake now. Look around.

  I woke preoccupied by a life I had not lived since I was nine years old. My explanation—that my long-dead uncle had spoken to me from the great beyond—was not something the people around me were willing to countenance.

  So, I was awake. Awake, but still gone. And I would not come back without him.

  LAUDS

  FOUR

  I returned home after rehab in mid-August, having missed most of two seasons. My garden, a tangle of daylilies and crabgrass and clumps of unwatered coreopsis, appeared to have fallen over dead in a fit of despair. I could hardly believe how the physical world had changed in my absence.

  What the garden lacked, the florist had made up for. On my porch was gathered a robust delivery of tagged bouquets—from Mariette, from the across-the-street neighbors, from my colleagues in the Hinton-Stanton Regional High School Teachers’ Association. I hobbled up the steps and flipped open the cards. Everett Whittier, the school principal, had sent a centerpiece with candles; next to that bloomed a perky spray of daisies from the cafeteria ladies, and a funereal raft of gladioli from the student council. I plucked a single bloom from the rest and held it, admiring its bend and curl, shutting out the world. This is how I was in the aftermath—I’d lost my sense of time as a current, and instead moved stop-motion from one discrete moment to the next. This new acquaintance with the present tense was partly a function of my injuries. I had to think so much about each motion simply as a way to avoid physical pain. But it was more than that. My skin felt thinner and vaguely scorched, as if the barrier between it and the pressing-in of the daily world—its stench and heat and racket—had vanished.

  Drew was watching me, gauging my face. We had talked little since the accident, though he had driven to the Portland rehab center every day, fifty-eight miles one way. “Come on, Lizzy,” he said. “Let’s get you inside.”

  “Wait.” I made a slow circuit along the porch, leaning intermittently on my cane, looking down at my dead garden.

  “I meant to keep it up,” Drew said. He rattled the doorknob, trying to coax me inside.

  “I’m not blaming you.”

  “I know you’re not.”

  “I’m just looking at everything,” I told him. “Looking at how everything changes.”

  “Probation,” Drew said. “Spoiled little brat half kills a person and what does she get? Three months, suspended. We could sue her ass, Lizzy.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to be the type of person who sues.”

  “I want somebody to suffer.”

  What he meant was that he wanted somebody to suffer more than us. Instead of us.

  “They should’ve strung her up by her pink toenails,” he said. His jaw pulsed, and I could see that he was using his entire body not to cry. As part of her sentence, my joyrider had composed a handwritten apology—a yarn-ball of mangled syntax, all the i’s dotted with empty circles.

  “Drew,” I said. “You’ve been a champ. Don’t beat yourself up.”

  His brow creased. “Why would I beat myself up? I’m not the one who stole a car and tried to kill somebody with it.” The conversation we had been not having all summer was still going on. It was the same conversation we had been not having the night of my accident, when I tore out of the house in anger, in the rain, in the dark.

  “That’s not what’s bothering you,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You can’t hear my thoughts, Lizzy.” We stared at each other over the ripple of flowers left by people who wanted my homecoming to look festive. That moment is so clear to me still, the way he burned with rage for the kid behind the wheel, a stranger who had created the circumstance under which Drew Mitchell bumped into the limits of his willingness. I knew this much about my husband of five years: wherever he had been before the accident, he had worked his way back to me since; but he would prefer to have made the journey of his own volition. There was no way now to prove to himself that he would not have left his wife if an Act of God hadn’t forced him to be faithful.

  We said nothing for a long while, the fact of his emotional infidelity floating between us. Drew looked diminished, worn out, less like the boy I’d known in college
and more like the man our marriage had turned him into.

  I plucked a flower from one of the bunches and handed it to him.

  “It was your own thoughts you heard,” he said patiently. “All those drugs made them seem like somebody else’s.” He rattled the door again, probably thinking that if only he could get me inside our house and reacquaint me with our cluttered rooms, then we could forget the ways in which we had both been altered.

  The accident had changed my face. A grayish crescent, like a man’s five o’clock shadow, cupped one side of my jaw, and a notched scar folded across my eyebrow like a permanent expression of doubt. I’d been told the scar would whiten and the shadow fade, but at the time these alterations seemed emergent and necessary, as if some long-hidden part of me were struggling to reappear. The way Drew stared made me wonder if I looked freshly harmed in the world outside the hospital, unloosed from the consolation of other patients and their mangled pieces.

  “Lizzy. Honey.” He urged me toward the door. “Come in.”

  I wanted to be home, and I was home. But I was remembering a place I hadn’t lived in for over twenty years. It was still there, just across town, now inhabited by a priest who had retooled the sign and had the driveway graded. All summer long I’d been on the verge of panic, all through the circus act I’d been practicing like a dutiful child, wearing knee braces and back girdles and ugly shoes, doing squats and wall slides and press-ups and step-downs, all the literal and figurative hoops I jumped through because I believed that jumping through them would deliver me from panic and lead me home. If only my body could remember how to do this and this and this, I would be home. That’s what I kept saying, adrift in that feeling: Once I can bend my leg, I’ll be home. Once I can lift my arm, I’ll be home. Once I can turn my head without a bolt of pain, I’ll be home.

  Well, now I was home. And it wasn’t home.

  Before Harry Griggs had a name, when he was still the unidentified voice at the other end of a 9-1-1 call reporting a body in the road, Drew and Mariette referred to him as the “bad Samaritan.” A guy who met the barest minimum requirement of human decency before taking off—to a party? to a meeting that couldn’t wait?

  We were sitting on our porch, Drew and I, a humid Friday evening two weeks after my homecoming. Mariette was there, too, adding to our quiet. Paulie, her son, was toddling after a neighbor cat crossing the lawn.

  “I wonder what it looked like,” I said.

  Drew raised his head, alerted. It had always been my habit to think out loud, but now my husband took my habit as “faulty thinking” or “lack of concentration,” symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

  “Death,” I said. “What exactly did the bad Samaritan see? What does death look like, I wonder.”

  Mariette eyed me carefully. “Pretty gruesome, I’m guessing, which is why the guy decided to slink off like a scared dog. Paulie! Leave that poor creature alone!”

  “No white light,” Drew said. “No heavenly hosts singing about the river Jordan.” Which, as he knew, was exactly what I was wondering, and he wasn’t going to discuss it. Over the summer we’d built a house of cards that we’d learned to live in without breathing, and this kind of gentle, preemptive strike had become our normal mode of communication.

  Mariette said, “I hold him just as responsible as that ponytailed sociopath who hit you in the first place. Paulie! Quit that!”

  “Besides,” Drew said. “You weren’t dead. Sitting around wondering what death looked like is pretty much beside the point.”

  Drew and Mariette exchanged a look. They were sitting together on the porch swing, a united front. Clearly, they had made a pact to stop humoring me, no longer pretending to believe that my accident had opened a misty portal through which stepped my long-dead uncle. Since my return home they’d been treating me like a mental patient on furlough, and now I was inching toward the one subject deemed “unproductive” by the harried in-house rehab counselor with sixty-five other patients. According to him, the circumstances of my accident—gross physical injury, plus the emotional toll of two separate parties leaving me on the road like a squashed frog—had compelled me to substitute an earlier, insufficiently “processed” trauma in order to dodge the one at hand. Hence, my dead, beloved uncle speaking to me from the celestial reach. The sorrow you know being preferable to the sorrow you don’t.

  How Jungian of you, I said to this guy when he floated his theory, and that was pretty much the end of our rapport. I far preferred conversing with the night janitor, a three-hundred-pound Samoan with a complicated love life and seven dogs.

  “Daddy’s here!” Paulie said, pitching himself toward Charlie, who was just getting out of his car. Big and bearish, Mariette’s throwback husband emitted an aura of durability that his customers found reassuring. He owned a McDonald’s franchise in Stanton, and in his starched shirt and razor-creased pants looked like a man who loved his work. We liked to tease him for his obliging ways, his antique manners—but in truth he reassured us, too. “Who wants beer?” he said, swinging a six-pack out of the backseat and tucking Paulie under his free arm.

  Mariette raised her hand. “I’ll take one.”

  He set Paulie down and began to pass the bottles around, but when my turn came his ease deserted him. He held the bottle to his meaty chest as if protecting me from harm.

  “It wasn’t that kind of rehab, Charlie,” I said. “A beer won’t kill me.”

  He blushed, averting his eyes. “I’ll get you a glass,” he said, ducking into the house.

  “He’s a little nervous,” Mariette said kindly. “People don’t know what to do.”

  “You make this sound like a wake,” I said. “You’re the one insisting that I didn’t die.”

  They swiveled their heads toward me.

  Mariette said, “We miss you.”

  Looking at her made me lonely. My accident had occasioned a paradox of loneliness: I felt most bereft around those who loved me best.

  “Just for the record,” I said, “the bad Samaritan didn’t slink off. I heard his shoes”

  Charlie reappeared in time to catch the whiff of tension. He offered me the glass, then decamped to the other end of the porch, where he settled into a metal rocker, unwilling to take sides.

  “You still set on going back, Lizzy?” Mariette asked. I would be heading back to school on Monday to resume my duties as guidance counselor to the student body of Hinton-Stanton Regional High School. Mariette, whose science classroom was just down the hall from the guidance office, considered me unprepared for active duty.

  Drew, of course, agreed. “She could wait another month and nobody would fault her,” he said.

  Over the summer they’d become accustomed to speaking of me in the third person. The two of them were watching me intensely but trying to disguise their focus, looking all around me as if I just happened to emit an aura they found mildly interesting. off in the distance I could hear the intermittent traffic on Random Road, a steady whine of cars on their way to someplace else.

  “Why should I wait?” I said.

  Too much crying, went the unspoken argument. Too many moments of “lack of concentration.” Too much appearing to be in a place other than the place my body happened to occupy.

  “I hardly even need my cane,” I said. “I’m a medical miracle.”

  “Rick screwed up all the sophomore schedules over the summer,” Mariette said. “You’ll have nothing but a mess to clean up.” She moved to the porch railing now, the better to gauge my reaction. “You could stay out till Thanksgiving,” she said. “Even the minor snags will be sorted out by then.”

  “I miss the kids.”

  “They miss you too, kiddo. They’ll live.”

  I got up, hobbled off the porch, and began a round of step-ups, using the ground and the bottom step, up and back, over and over, barefoot and without my cane. My knee throbbed, but it felt good to feel something.

  “As your husband,” Drew said, “I forbid you to go back.”


  He was joking, of course, but nobody laughed. There was a tinge of alarm in his voice that reminded me of the days early in our marriage when our every interaction burned with significance. You can’t live that way indefinitely, though; eventually we had to relax and become the same kind of married as everybody else. I climbed back up the steps, leading with my good leg. I sat on the top step, my back to them. Paulie scrambled up to join me, digging his hard shoes against my shins.

  “Give Auntie Lizzy a kiss, Paulie,” Charlie said. “Auntie Lizzy needs a big fat kiss.” A gentleman like his father, Paulie obliged, squashing his pink, drooly lips against mine. Then he left me, swooning into Mariette’s lap.

  In the ensuing silence we listened to the sounds of a summer already tainted with the specter of fall: the occasional drop of an acorn, spent lilies rattling with seed pods. I put up my hand. “Listen.” We all heard it, a flock of geese barking like sled dogs, high above our heads and hidden in a great smudge of dusk.

  “What, Auntie?” Paulie asked.

  “Geese.” I closed my eyes and tried to conjure the muscular beat of their wings.

  Drew came to sit next to me on the step, taking a long pull on his beer. Everybody scanned the sky.

  “On nights like this,” Drew said, “you feel like nothing has ever happened. It’s just now, breathing in and breathing out.”

  I turned to him. “That’s exactly how I feel,” I said. He smiled at me, and I put my hand on his. Such moments were fleeting and often ambiguous, sufficing over the long haul only for people who didn’t need much. But they reminded us that we’d been in love once, could be again.