15. Corey
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Corey
She’s coming home today, and I have spent three days turning the house inside out.
I moved her into the garden room on the ground floor, ten steps from a bathroom, big windows onto the backyard, far from the stairs and far from our bedroom, because that distance is the point and we both know it.
Blackout curtains, because the doctor said light makes the nausea worse for some women.
A mini fridge stocked with ginger ale. Saltines, the specific brand she used to buy when we were broke, which took three stores to find.
Ginger tea, peppermint tea, the bland crackers, the electrolyte drinks in the flavor that isn’t red, because she has hated red-flavored anything her whole life.
A little brass bell on the nightstand she will never ring.
I can’t fix what I broke with crackers, and I can’t fix it with nurses or ginger tea or blackout curtains either. I know that. But I can’t say I’m sorry in a way she’ll believe yet, so I say it in supplies. In three stores’ worth of saltines. In the flavor that isn’t red.
Mrs. Potts arrived this morning. Sixty-something, built like a fireplug, entirely unimpressed by the house or by me. She toured the garden room, moved the bell two inches closer to the bed, and looked at me the way health professionals look at the reason their patient is in this condition.
“I’ve nursed richer men than you and liked them less,” she informed me, and went to make tea.
Willow comes home at four. I carry her bag. She walks past the living room, past the kitchen, past five years of our life, and into the garden room, and she looks at the curtains and the crackers and the tea, and I watch her put it all together, what it is, what it’s trying to say.
“Thank you.” The words are room temperature. She sets her purse down. “You can go.”
Her ring finger is bare. I noticed it in the hospital and it’s all I can see now, that pale band of skin where twelve years used to sit. I don’t say a word about it. I have no right to say a word about it.
“Dinner’s at six if you…”
“Mrs. Potts will bring it. That’s what she’s for. Condition three, Corey.”
Condition three. Don’t speak unless necessary. I nod and I go, and the door doesn’t slam, it just closes, quiet and final, which is so much worse.
The first days settle into a rhythm built entirely out of avoidance.
She stays in the garden room. Mrs. Potts moves between the kitchen and her door like a border guard.
I work from the study because going to the office feels obscene, and I listen to the sounds of my house being lived in by a woman I’m not allowed to speak to.
Then the third night happens.
It’s 3 a.m. when I hear it, because I don’t really sleep anymore, just lie in the dark doing inventory of my sins. The bathroom door down there. The unmistakable sound of her being sick, going on and on, too long, too violent.
I’m down the stairs before I decide to be. The bathroom door is half open, the nightlight on, and she’s on her knees on the tile in her pajamas, shaking, hair stuck to her face, retching up nothing because there’s nothing left.
She doesn’t have the strength to tell me to get out. That’s the only reason I’m allowed to hold her hair. I gather it back from her face and hold it with one hand and put the other on her back, and she’s trembling under my palm like a bird, and we stay like that until her body finally lets her go.
I wipe her face with a cool cloth. I flush. I fill the cup by the sink and she rinses and spits and doesn’t look at me.
“I can walk,” she says, and then her legs fold when she tries to stand, so that’s settled. I carry her back to bed. She weighs nothing. She weighs less than she did on our wedding day and she’s supposed to be gaining, and the fear of that sits in my throat the whole ten steps.
Her calf cramps as I set her down; I feel the muscle seize.
She makes a small pained sound and grabs for it, and I take her foot in both hands before she can object and work the cramp out of her calf and her foot with my thumbs, the way I used to after her double shifts a lifetime ago, and her body remembers even if the rest of her is on strike, because she stops fighting and lets me.
For a moment the room is just her breathing and my hands and years of muscle memory.
Then she pulls her foot back.
“Don’t be kind to me now. It’s obscene.”
“Willow…”
“Get out.”
I stand. I go to the door. And because I am who I am, I stop in it.
“You laughed at the hospital. Fine. I’ll prove it every day until trust stops being a joke in this house.”
The door clicks shut behind me. Through it, very quietly, I hear her start to cry.
Mrs. Potts appears in the hallway in a tartan robe, arms crossed, having clearly heard everything.
“She’ll allow the help at three in the morning before she allows you. Don’t take it personal, love. Or do. Might speed things up.”
She goes in to Willow. I stand in my own hallway outside a door I’m not allowed to open, and I listen to another person comfort my wife, and I go back upstairs and lie down in the dark and start counting the days I’ll have to earn.