Chapter 13 #2
She wailed, and shook her head, and her husband sat despondently beside her, patting her hand.
I could see for a moment the enormous depths of their pain.
Their daughter was dead, and now they were left to wander the world, wondering what might have been.
Why had she refused to re-create their lives?
Had her childhood been flawed in some way?
How was it not a judgment on them, her not wanting a family?
The questions would be endless and unanswerable.
In that moment, I saw I had the power to heal them a little.
I could have told them that Sarah had indeed changed her mind.
She’d wanted a child after all, and she and I had been on the verge of delivering one.
She might even have been carrying one at the moment of her death.
But I didn’t say anything. It would’ve been too bizarre, too complicated.
They barely understood why I was in the room.
I didn’t see how the news would do anything but confuse them.
So I sat there silently, watching them weep, telling myself that if I’d been able to release them from their pain without causing a larger pain, I would have, but that I simply didn’t see how.
It was three weeks after the accident that Phil was discharged from the hospital, and I was the one who took him home.
A few other caretakers had offered, but I’d won the draw, having emerged as his main caretaker in the wake of the accident.
I was the one who’d installed the handrails in the bathroom.
I was the one who’d found the cheap hospital bed on Craigslist. I’d earned the right to ferry him from the hospital back into his life.
He didn’t have a cast when he got out, only a stiff brace, though the bolts in his femur made him almost immobile.
We used a wheelchair to transport him to the car and somehow laid him across the back seat.
I folded the wheelchair into the trunk, which I couldn’t close all the way, and then, without any particular instructions or guidance, we departed.
A nurse would be visiting Phil on a regular schedule, and he’d be going to the hospital for daily physical therapy appointments, but for many hours every day, he’d be alone, sitting in a chair.
I helped him up the stairs of the house and maneuvered him inside the front door.
We’d done our best to prepare the main floor by taking away the throw rugs, putting new, bright lights in the sockets, and rearranging the furniture, but I could tell he barely noticed the improvements.
He just stood there in the foyer for a long time, staring into the living room and dining room, unsure where to go.
The house fairly vibrated with Sarah’s memory.
The smell of the wood floor, the arrangement of the fossils on the hearth, practically shouted her name.
Most of all, Phil seemed disturbed by the piles of her mail. Her bills were still unpaid.
“I don’t know if I was prepared for this,” he said.
I helped him into the living room, where he could sit on the recliner we’d borrowed from the university.
Once I got him installed, I brought him some water and his computer.
I asked him if he wanted any food, but he said no.
He seemed to be in shock. The nurse would be visiting in a matter of hours, but it didn’t seem right to leave him alone, so I fabricated a chore and started watering the plants.
I filled a Mason jar and went around the rooms, plant to plant, talking to Phil as if this were a normal visit.
But in this case, the only topic of conversation was our dead lover, Sarah.
“She really had a way with plants, didn’t she?” I said, drizzling water onto a wild-looking plant with burgundy leaves rimmed in bright green ruffles. “What’s this? I don’t know this one.”
“That’s a coleus,” he said. “That was a real stretch for her. Usually, she only liked the simple, cheap plants at the big-box stores. She didn’t like going to the fancy nursery. She was cheap that way. But that coleus. She couldn’t resist. It’s so outrageous. She loved it.”
“And she grew vegetables, too, didn’t she?
” I said, moving on to a philodendron. I knew the answer to the question, but I was serving him easy topics to keep his mind occupied.
If we could just talk about Sarah in the most innocuous ways, I thought, it might offer some kind of consolation for both of us.
“She grew a lot of vegetables,” he said. “But mostly tomatoes. She loved a tomato. They blew her mind every time. ‘Oh my God, what a tomato.’ I don’t know how many times she said that.”
“And eggs,” I said.
“She did,” he said. “It’s true. She loved an egg. A perfect fried egg.”
“Is it true she used to not like cilantro?” I said. “She mentioned that once.”
“When we first met, she hated cilantro,” he said. “But she came around. She became one of the great lovers of cilantro. She couldn’t believe she’d been so wrong.”
I ended up staying with Phil for hours, listening to his stories about Sarah.
I’d heard most of them before, but I pretended they were all new.
He told me about her childhood obsession with typewriters, and the time she broke her arm doing gymnastics.
He told me about her church youth group and the secret sexual liaisons among all the teens.
He told me about the tragic death of her dog, Maria. All classics.
He told me some things I’d never heard, too, like the story of their honeymoon in Puerto Rico.
They’d rented scooters and motored all over the island of Vieques, he said, but they’d never been able to get to the far shore because of the naval base in the middle.
The amount of ordnance the US had blown up there in the twentieth century was obscene.
It was a beautiful vacation, though, he said, wheeling around on those scooters in the humid air, passing all those tropical flowers.
I guessed that Sarah had avoided telling me about their early romance out of kindness.
But she’d said she liked mopeds, and now I knew why.
“I haven’t thought about that trip in a long time,” he said. “I’ve been thinking lately about a lot of things I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I thought we had all the time in the world, you know? But no. It turns out we didn’t.”
“You guys had a lot of good times,” I said. “You’re lucky for that.”
“I am lucky,” he said. “I’ve been thinking that, too. I’m lucky for all the time we had. What else is there? She really liked you, you know.”
“It was mutual,” I said.
“She’d be glad to know you’re helping me out, I think,” he said. “That would make her really happy.”
“I hope so,” I said.
“I know it would,” he said.
The nurse came. After dinner, I helped clean the dishes and ended up falling asleep on the couch in the library. I could see that Phil and I had been able to help each other in some way. Maybe we could help each other more if we tried. And that was when I basically started living with Phil.