Chapter 33 Susan
Chapter 33
Susan
When Zoe was two years old, she was admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. For three days, Susan had hovered over her daughter’s bedside, watching her chest rise and fall, alert to any changes in her breathing. Susan had trained as a nurse, yet her own baby was ill, and she couldn’t stop blaming herself. Did she not dress her warmly enough for that winter walk the week before? Had she allowed someone with an incubating virus to come too close to her daughter? While other children sailed through infancy with only a few sniffles, Susan’s had landed in a hospital bed, and Zoe’s every wheeze and cough was like an accusation that she’d failed a mother’s most important job: protecting her baby.
Now once again she sat at her daughter’s bedside, watching Zoe’s chest rise and fall with each ventilator whoosh. Once again, she felt as if she’d failed. She should have protected her. She should have kept her safe and fought off the monsters who were always circling young girls. And because she hadn’t been there, one of those monsters had done this to her daughter.
A daughter Susan could scarcely recognize now. The right side of Zoe’s face was grotesquely bloated, and her eye was swollen shut. Half of her beautiful brown hair had been shaved off so the neurosurgeon could drill into her skull and drain the blood pressing on her brain. The doctor had told Susan about all of Zoe’s fractures, and the list was so long that she could scarcely remember them all: the skull, the pelvis. The collarbone, two ribs. The forty-foot plummet into the ravine would have killed almost anyone else. It was a miracle that Zoe had survived not only that fall, but also the days that followed.
“Your girl’s a fighter,” the doctor had said.
Please keep fighting, darling. Please come back to me.
She heard the ICU curtain slide open and turned, expecting to see Ethan returning from the cafeteria. Instead, it was Elizabeth who stepped into the cubicle, holding two cups of coffee. “They only allow two visitors at a time in the ICU,” said Elizabeth. “I told Ethan to go home. I’d like to sit with you for a while.” She handed one of the cups to Susan. “I thought you’d need a pick-me-up.”
“Thank you.” Susan lifted the plastic lid and inhaled the delicious steam rising from the cup of coffee. Sugar and caffeine were exactly what she needed now.
“Do you mind?” said Elizabeth, pointing to the other chair. “May I stay?”
“Of course.” What else could she say? No, I want to be alone with my daughter ? While Elizabeth had always been cordial to her, there was a coolness to the woman, an impenetrable layer of New England stoicism that always seemed to keep Susan at arm’s length. Now they sat side by side, trapped together in the cramped cubicle, and Susan could not think of a single thing to say.
“Has she said anything?” Elizabeth asked.
“No. They gave her barbiturates to put her in a medically induced coma. It’s to protect her brain, give it time to heal while the swelling goes down. Once they taper off the drugs, she should start to wake up, but right now, we don’t know what she remembers. We just have to wait.”
“I’m so sorry, Susan.”
“At least there’s a chance she will wake up.”
“She’s young, strong. We just have to be patient.”
There was another pause as the ventilator cycled, filling Zoe’s lungs. It had been decades since Susan attended nursing school, since she’d worked with endotracheal tubes and ventilators. If something went awry now—a sudden power outage or her daughter’s lung collapsing from a pneumothorax—would she remember how to respond? Just the thought of that responsibility made her hands sweat.
“I wish I’d had the chance to know her better,” Elizabeth said, looking at Zoe. “When you and Ethan got married, I thought that we had all the time in the world to be together. To be a family. But things keep getting in the way.”
Susan sighed. “Life.”
“Yes. Life gets in the way. George’s health. Ethan and that novel he can never seem to finish. And Zoe, always so busy at school. I confess, I’m not good at dealing with teenagers. I never could, even when my boys were young. But I will try harder. Now that I have a grandchild.”
“You have Kit.”
Elizabeth merely shrugged. As the silence stretched on, it seemed more and more weighted with significance.
“Is Kit ... is there something I should know about him?”
“He’s a complicated child.”
“I heard he was sick a lot, as a baby.”
“In and out of hospitals. The pediatricians never could pinpoint why Kit had so many digestive issues. He improved for a bit, after they hired the nanny. But a year later she quit, and the boy seemed to get worse. At one point, he was so thin he looked like a little skeleton. That’s probably why Brooke can’t stop hovering over him. Why she refused to let Colin hire another nanny. She didn’t trust anyone else to take care of him. Now he’s grown so attached to his mother, I don’t know how he’ll manage going to college.” She looked at Zoe. “But your daughter, she’s just so ... normal .”
Or she was.
They sat quietly for a moment, sipping their coffees. Listening to the ventilator.
“Have they told you anything new?” said Elizabeth.
“No. Only what you’ve already heard.” Susan drooped forward, rubbing her temples. “God, I wish I could figure out how this happened. I wish it made sense.”
“That’s their job, not yours. Your job is to stay strong and healthy for your daughter.” Elizabeth stood up. “Come, let me take you home.”
“I need to be here.”
“Just for a few hours. If you want to stay healthy, you need dinner. Maybe a change of clothes.”
And a shower, thought Susan, looking down at her wrinkled shirt. Elizabeth was right; she needed to stay strong, stay healthy, for Zoe.
She nodded, and stood up as well. “Just for a while.”
At home she took a shower, buttoned on a fresh shirt, and packed a bag with the essentials she’d need for a night of sitting at Zoe’s bedside. The ICU allowed only one visitor to stay overnight, and if Zoe woke up tonight, it was her mother’s face she’d want to see at her bedside. So that’s where Susan would be.
She’d have to spend the night sitting in a chair, which meant she’d get little sleep, but she might as well make herself as comfortable as possible. Into her overnight bag went her slippers and socks and a sweatshirt, because hospitals were always chilly. She doubted she’d have the energy to read anything, but she packed a book anyway, a lighthearted novel about three sisters on vacation in Italy. A place she promised herself she would take Zoe someday. She had to hold on to that image: her and Zoe and Ethan lounging on a beach in Italy, everyone healthy and happy and whole. If she couldn’t imagine it, then it couldn’t happen, and she needed some vision of the future. Something to look forward to.
Her phone charger. Mustn’t forget that.
She went to the desk, where she’d left it plugged into the wall socket. That’s when she noticed the pages, covered with Ethan’s handwriting. New pages, ones she hadn’t read before.
She frowned at the last paragraph.
It was summertime when she vanished from the pond, a disappearance so sudden it seemed as if she’d simply stepped off the edge of the earth. The police were called, of course, but no one seemed to know a thing. Then the questions just ... stopped. That was the peculiar part. Had she been found? Was it all a hoax? Nobody would say. Nobody wanted to talk about it. In time, the mystery faded from memory, without answers. Without a body. It’s as if the girl never existed.
Susan sank onto the bed, stunned. A missing girl. A pond. Dear God, was he writing about Zoe? Had he turned their daughter, her daughter, into nothing more than a character in his novel?
She could hear the family talking and setting the table downstairs, could smell the savory aroma of a dinner casserole, but she’d lost any semblance of an appetite. She thought of Ethan, holed away up here, furtively scribbling these sentences. While other men might cheat on their wives with mistresses, Ethan had cheated on Susan by hiding upstairs with this novel. Like a cannibal feeding on his own family, he had used Susan’s anguish to nourish his story.
“Susan?” Ethan called from downstairs. “Dinner’s ready!”
Susan didn’t answer, didn’t move. Even when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Even when Ethan walked into the bedroom.
“Don’t you want to eat?” he said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“But you need to eat, at least something. And you’ve hardly slept these past few days. Why don’t we take turns at the hospital? Let me spend tonight with her.”
“That should be good for another plot twist.”
“What?”
She looked up at him. “How could you write about her, Ethan? Is everything in our lives just material for your novel?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about this .” She held up the page from the desk and shook it at him. “A missing girl? Really?”
He frowned at the page, then at her. “You think that’s about Zoe?”
“Isn’t it? I can’t believe you’d write about this nightmare we’re going through. No, the nightmare I’m going through, because I don’t think you and your family have actually felt any of this. Not when Zoe went missing. Not now, with her fighting for her life. I’m terrified I’m going to lose my baby, and you have the gall to write about it.”
“That’s not true, Susan.”
“It’s right here, in these pages. The girl who goes missing. The family in their summer cottage.”
“It’s not about Zoe.”
“You didn’t even bother to change the name of the house. Moonview. Really?”
“I swear, it isn’t about Zoe.”
“How does that saying go? ‘Good writers borrow, great writers steal’?”
“I keep telling you, this story isn’t about Zoe! Those are just notes I jotted down, about something that happened years ago, before I was even born. It’s about that woman who went missing in 1972, the one in the newspaper article you brought home. Hannah was eight years old, and she remembers the case. I just wrote down what she told me. She remembers the police came to her house and questioned her father.”
“Why her father?”
“Because the missing woman worked for Dr. Greene. She was his secretary or something, and they asked him if he knew where she went. There was talk about sending divers into the pond, but they never did, because Hannah thinks the woman eventually turned up. Susan, I wasn’t writing about Zoe.” He nodded at the page she was holding. “I was writing about her .”
“This mysterious missing woman.”
“I swear, that’s the truth.”
She sagged forward on the bed and ran her hands through her hair, which was still damp and sweet smelling from the shower. “God, I’m so tired. I just want us all to go home. I want everything to be back the way it was.”
“So do I.” He sat down beside her and took her hand. “I love you,” he said. “And I love our daughter. Our daughter. Nothing else matters more than you two, nothing. You believe me, don’t you?”
She said nothing.
“Susan?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Abruptly he stood up, went to the desk, and picked up the page with his notes. To her shock, he ripped it in half, then ripped it again. Now he attacked the other pages with such violence that when he finished, there was nothing left but shreds. He threw it all into the trash can and sagged back, exhausted, against the desk. “I wish we’d never come here,” he said. “To this place. To this fucking house. I didn’t want to come back. Everyone else might have good memories here, but I don’t. It’s where my parents were always fighting. Where Colin lorded it over me. Where I could never match up because he was bigger, faster. More brilliant. Maybe that’s why I became a writer. So I could create endings that turn out happy.” He looked at her. “ You were my happy ending, Susan. Now I think I’ve lost you, and it’s my fault. My fault that Zoe got taken. I should have been here. I should have known exactly where she was, and now ...” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She stood up and went to him. When she touched his shoulder, she could feel anguish rippling through his body. They wrapped their arms around each other and held on tightly, fiercely, as though steadying each other against roaring, battering waves that threatened to drag them under.
“What I wrote had nothing to do with Zoe,” he said. “I need you to believe that. You believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. But what she really thought was: I don’t know.