by Susan Conley
He said we were lucky the boat hadn’t sunk.
Then he put the glasses back on and nodded at me and left.
When Kit woke up the next time, it was almost noon and I was sitting in the reclining chair covered in green synthetic material. I slept in this chair, and sometimes I read in this chair, or stared at my husband in the blue light of the machinery. But I was crying a little this time, and I tried to wipe away the tears before he saw them. He’d caught me by surprise.
He looked thin and gray in the bed, as if all the life had been sucked out of him. I tried not to show it on my face, but it was the most extraordinary thing. My husband, who could take up a room.
“Jilly.” He really stared at me for what felt like the first time since I’d gotten to the hospital.
It felt good to finally be seen like this.
But then he said, “Please don’t get heavy on me. I can’t do this if you get heavy.”
And I didn’t feel seen at all. I thought maybe he and I had grown apart while he’d been gone. Or that he really was a different person since the accident. That he’d changed, like Linda had warned me.
THE DAY BEFORE KIT left for Nova Scotia, he took us to the Sedgewick cliffs, which only the locals know about. You have to steer The Duchess through a narrow gut in the rocks, then anchor and swim in, and these cliffs always make me nervous. They’re high and steep and you need to jump as far out as you can to clear them.
Charlie went first. I remember the ocean was so clear that day that I could see his body really well underneath the water, and I watched it rise to the surface.
Kit whooped on his way down and smacked the water with his hand when he came up.
Then Sam was alone on the cliff.
“No wimps!” Charlie yelled to him.
I leaned over the side of the boat and told Charlie that I’d kill him if he made Sam jump. I will kill you.
“God, Mom, chill!” He tried to splash me with water.
“No, you chill. Do you want your brother to get hurt?”
It was a big deal for Sam to jump. If he jumped, maybe it would mean he’d overcome his worst fears about Liam.
Kit climbed into the boat and put his arms around me in the stern, so now I was soaking wet too. “Jilly, please stop protecting him.”
He’d been telling me this for years. I could not hear him. I did not want to.
“You’re good, right?” he whispered. “You’re going to be good.”
He meant while he was away on Dyer’s boat, but I wanted him to name it. That he was really going. Because all of us, Sam and Charlie and I, know too much about being left behind by Kit. He says he fishes for us, but I wonder.
I could never tell Kit these things. If I did, he’d completely disagree. He likes to hug us and to pick the boys up off the floor. He’s really physical in this way. He likes to pound his chest when he gets emotional and say, “In here. I feel it in here!” Like we know what he’s feeling. But we don’t really know, because he doesn’t say.
I think we understand the love he has for us, and the need he has to believe he’s protecting us. But a lot of the time the boys and I are protecting ourselves, because he’s gone.
I don’t know what he’d do if he didn’t fish. This is not hypothetical. What if you take Kit off his boat and take him off the ocean? I don’t know if he can change like that. I don’t know if any of the fishermen I’ve talked to can. Or what the price will be.
His plan was to go to Georges Bank for weeks at a time, then back to port to stay at Dyer’s house. Then out again. The season is relentless. I’d thought of driving the boys up in August, but Sam was already working hard for Shorty, and Charlie was hoping for an internship at a hospital lab in Portland. So I didn’t see how I could make it happen.
I had the urge to ask Kit to stay home and sell the Jillian Lynne and go to community college with the money the state was offering fishermen willing to start over. But I didn’t dare.
While we waited for Sam to jump, he told me again how much he wanted us to come up and that if the boys were too busy, I should come on my own. “Could you please do that?” he said. “Please come.”
I knew he would feel alone in Nova Scotia each time the boat went back into port and that he wouldn’t do well up there without us. I really knew that.
Charlie said that his legs were getting numb in the water, waiting. Then he harassed Sam again.
Sam just stared down at the water.
“Sam,” I yelled up to him. “I’ve changed my mind! You’re not allowed to jump! Do you get it? Not allowed.”
I was worried that he’d hit his head. But I was also worried about Kit leaving us, and I projected this worry onto Sam, though I couldn’t see this then.
“So we’re formally not allowed to jump, Mom?” he yelled.
“It’s formal. No jumping!”
Then he climbed down the side of the cliff and had to hold on to the roots of the wild rosebushes and anything else he could put his hands on. I almost couldn’t watch. It looked scarier than jumping.
When he got to the water, he swam out to Charlie and they floated away. I devoured them with my eyes, until all I could see was the tops of their shoulders and their furred hair.
* * *
—
ON THE WAY HOME, none of us mentioned how Sam hadn’t jumped. He was still in the habit of letting himself feel inferior, and it was better not to say anything.
We played Scrabble at the table by the window after dinner, and Kit spelled ass.
The word was too easy, and I thought the boys would never fall for it.
But they almost convulsed, they laughed so hard. They could not get over how funny Kit was.
He told them that he’d miss them while he was gone.
I’d asked him earlier to say this. He was going to be away so long.
Then he pounded on his chest, as if that would do the rest of the talking for him.
Later, after the boys had climbed up to the loft, Kit and I stood by the window and looked at the shape of the trawler in the dark. It was the first time he was going to leave his boat and fish off someone else’s. I think he was trying to see it as anything but a defeat.
He put his arm around me and said he was going to Canada just this once, so he never had to leave the Jillian Lynne again.
I saw how hopeful he was. This is what I chose to call it. And that if he lost the trawler, it would be such a dispossession he might never recover.
“You can’t not come see me,” he said. “I won’t make it if you don’t come.”
We kissed once, and I felt the warmth start in my stomach and move between my legs. I leaned in to him and kissed him harder and was hungry for him then.
He took a step back and said, “I’m not sure how I’m going to do it.”
I had my hand on his shoulder. “Do what, Kit?”
“Leave for three months.”
I looked at his face in the light, and his ruddy skin, and angular cheekbones that tapered down to his jaw, and the hair wavier and wilder from swimming.
He kissed me again and put his hand inside my jeans to the place he always found there.
I think I moaned a little. Then I laughed. I don’t know why really.
“What?” He looked at me.
He always took our sex seriously, maybe even more that night because he was leaving. I think he was nervous and sad. But he couldn’t say this. He was not the kind of person who could confide in anyone, really. Or maybe our sex was how he confided.
“Nothing.” I smiled.
Maybe I’d laughed because I couldn’t get my mind around the three months either. It seemed impossible. I knew he needed to go, but that I’d resent him for leaving. I already did and he hadn’t left yet.
I took his hand and led him to our bed and sat him down and p
ulled his jeans off. I took off his T-shirt and kissed his stomach and his neck and his mouth.
Then I took all my clothes off.
He watched me the whole time, and I smiled but didn’t let myself laugh.
I sat on top of him then, and he put his arms around me and we moved together. I came slowly at first. Then we moved faster. Afterward, he pulled me down on the bed next to him and we held hands, and it felt like something so good had been sealed between us. Neither of us said anything about him leaving. We were tired, and he only had a few hours to sleep before he had to go.
HE BECAME MORE HIMSELF after the surgery but also sadder in the hospital. His blood pressure fluctuated, and there were hours of silence and moods.
After the first week, Linda made me go to the Halifax Best Western for one night, even though I didn’t want to.
She said my exhaustion was catching up with me and that Kit needed me rested, and she knew I wasn’t really sleeping in the chair by his bed.
So I left the hospital and went to the hotel, and it wasn’t good and I didn’t sleep at all. I worried about the boys and if they were okay without me, and I worried about Kit and if he was in too much pain and had no one in the room to help him.
I drove back to the hospital in the morning and sat in the chair by his bed again, and I think he liked it. That I was there.
He kept saying he wanted to go home.
The bifocal surgeon came in the afternoon and told us the rehabilitation would take at least another week, and that then they would decide if they’d let him do the rest of the rehab in Maine. But it could be months, the surgeon told us, before Kit was really walking again.
I remember Kit asked me things about my film after the surgeon left, and if I had enough footage and whether I was pleased with it. I was happy that he asked. It was a good sign, even if he was just pretending to be interested.
I told him that I had hours and hours of his people talking and laughing and working in the village, and that his past had become my preoccupation while he’d been gone and that I needed to distill it down to sixty minutes. I said sixty minutes could be the most consequential hour of your life. Or the whirring of 3,600 faceless seconds. We’ve gotten so good at erasing time with mindless technology.
I heard a dog bark in the hall then, and this was surprising. I hadn’t heard an animal the whole time I’d been in the hospital.
Then a woman opened the door and peered in.
She had long, black, wavy hair, feathered in front, and a serious face. And when she shoved the door all the way open with her shoulder, my first thought was, Here we go again. Another of Kit’s followers.
She had a black duffel bag in her right hand that was only partly zipped, so you could see the top half of a little dog in the bag, maybe some kind of terrier. She put the bag on the floor and took the dog out and held it up to her face and told it to be quiet. “Or we’ll get kicked out of here, Maxwell.”
Then she waved at me and said her name was Marsh.
Kit said, “Jill, please meet the woman who called the Coast Guard after the boat caught on fire.” He didn’t look at me while he talked. He looked at her, so it was the strangest feeling.
Marsh said she’d been a fish cutter on the boat and the cook, and that Kit had chosen the dog for her at the shelter, so she was forever grateful to him.
She talked very loudly.
I wanted her to leave. We’d been quiet in the room for days.
I got up from the chair and stood by the bathroom door and stared at the tattoo on her right wrist. Three intricate black roses all woven together. I couldn’t believe the time the tattoo must have required.
Kit smiled at her. “Don’t pretend you hadn’t been thinking on a dog just like him.”
I thought I’d suffocate when he smiled at her. I almost could not breathe. I could tell she looked up to him, but that he also got something from her.
She kissed the dog’s little head. “After Kit pointed him out to me, I was a goner.”
I think I said something about how Kit was a dog whisperer in another life. But what I was really thinking was that they needed to stop flirting. I wouldn’t be able to breathe again until they stopped.
Charlie called on my cell phone then, and my heart leapt.
“How’s Dad?” he said.
“He’s okay today. He’s pretty good.” But my heart was loud in my ears because of the woman with the dog and the way Kit kept smiling at her.
I walked out into the hallway, where the connection was better. “Can you hear me, Charlie? It’s still going to take some time before Dad can really walk.” I leaned my head back against the cinder blocks. “But tell me you’re okay?”
“Well, there’s no privacy here, and Sam keeps trying to hurt me.”
Charlie had started demanding more privacy after he’d met Lucy, and I understood it. But he and Sam were also wrestling more, so it was confusing. It seemed like Charlie was regressing, but I didn’t know you could move forward and backward when you were a teenager, almost simultaneously.
When they wrestle, Sam’s more like Kit. Deeply into it and almost taking pleasure in the pain. Sometimes it seems like Sam’s getting his vengeance for being the second born.
Charlie isn’t a natural fighter. I think he’s more like me. But he wants the physical contact, and he likes solving problems with his body. I can’t stop the boys from wrestling. I try. But sometimes it gets almost violent and then it’s scary. I think the boys feel it too, and that it has had to do with Kit not being in the house with us.
I hadn’t wanted to leave the boys at Jimmy’s. I knew Jimmy wouldn’t stop the wrestling. He might even think it was a good thing. But Candy was down in Wells helping her daughter Lisa with her new baby, and my mother, who still lives up in Harwich, couldn’t come because she’s on an oxygen machine. The boys would undo her with their energy without her even knowing it.
Sam got on the phone then and told me Charlie was lying and hurting him.
I knew Sam was suffering, but I can’t always tell if it’s a big suffering with him or a small suffering. The only way for me to really know was to go home.
“When are you guys coming back?” he said.
I told him that it would just be me. There was no way Dad could come.
“Please just come home. I really think you should come.”
I walked back into Kit’s room, and the clock on the wall above his IV pole said 10 a.m. It takes seven hours to get to Sewall from the hospital on a good day. Kit put his hand out to pet the dog, and Marsh moved closer to the bed so Kit could reach the dog’s head.
I felt like I was losing the boys then. It was a feeling inside my body that they needed me then more than Kit did. Why I thought the boys needed me more, I still don’t understand. But Sam had asked me to come, and this was not like him. I thought if Kit really needed me, he would have said.
I sat down in the green chair and packed up my laptop and books and took the few clothes I’d brought and put them in my canvas bag.
Marsh stood by the bed with the dog in her arms, and Kit talked to the dog and told him that he was a good boy and he’d see him again soon.
I couldn’t leave until Marsh left. That was one rule I made for myself. The other rule was to make sure that after I was gone, Kit would think of our time together in the hospital as a kind time. A time without recrimination. He’d been my great love for so long.
I went into the bathroom and gathered my things in there and when I came out, Marsh had put the dog back in the bag and was standing by Kit’s bed again. They were both quiet, and she was watching him scratch the top of the dog’s head.
He looked like he was doing it without thinking, and I felt a little crushed by this but there was nothing really to point to.
Then Marsh said, “Maxwell and I are out of here,” and she
smiled this smile at me. It was the conspiratorial smile between women that I’ve never understood. Like we’re in on a joke. But I didn’t know what the joke was.
After she left, Kit looked at me. “Do you like her?”
I thought the Dilaudid must have been working well, because he seemed much younger to me then and not like himself.
“She has a really sweet dog.” It was all I could think of to say.
“The best,” he said.
Then I told him that I had to go.
“Go where?”
“We have children, Kit. Remember them? I’ve got to go home.”
“Not today. No way. I can’t imagine it here without you.”
“Something’s off at your dad’s. They’re wrestling too much. One of them’s going to get hurt.”
He closed his eyes. “They’re playing you. You know that, right? They’re fine.”
I put my hand on his forehead and studied the creases around his eyes and the age lines down the sides of his face. This face in the hospital was a different face but still the face I loved. Softer now. The jaw less prominent somehow.
I think I was angry about Marsh and the dog, and I couldn’t sort it out. I didn’t know what it meant or why she’d come. But I would have stayed if he’d asked me again.
I leaned down and kissed his lips.
“Mmmm,” he said. “More, please.”
I stayed with him thirty more minutes or so, holding his hand and talking. But if I’m honest, the whole time I stood there, I kept thinking about the boys and when I could get in my car and leave.
I GOT TO JIMMY’S around five-thirty on that Saturday, and the boys were basically high from a computer shooting game called Halo. I knew they’d stopped playing right before I walked in because of how sweaty and dazed they looked on the couch.
Jimmy told me that he’d tried to get them to stop and go outside, but they wouldn’t listen. Then he shook his head and went back into the kitchen, where he was frying a steak.
All the euphoria I’d had on the drive down about rescuing the boys evaporated. Sam acted offended when we got in the car and I told him the video game did things to his brain.
