Chapter 1 #2
“Is she in there?”
“Talk to her,” the doctor said. “Either way, talk to her.”
Mila waited for that to change the room.
It did not change the room.
* * *
October went. She knew by the coats.
She knew a lot by the coats — who had come from outside, who had come from the parking garage, who had been at a dinner first. Christina came on Sundays and read her the racing results in a bored voice and swore at the family. Larry came twice, stood at the end of the bed, said, “Well,” and left.
One Sunday Christina put the paper down mid-sentence and sat there for a while not reading.
“He won’t go out there,” she said. “To the field. Did you know that? Won’t drive the lane past it. Goes the long way around by the church like an idiot.”
Mila waited for more.
“Anyway,” Christina said, and picked the paper back up. “Nobody’s winning anything at Laurel. It’s a disgrace.”
Jason came every night.
And every night, at half past, the flat expensive shoes.
The nurses knew Bethany by name now. One of them called her your sister to Jason in the hallway, easy and friendly, and Jason said nothing at all, and Mila lay there and listened to a silence that lasted three seconds and cost more than any sentence she had ever heard.
Three seconds. She counted them. She had been counting things in that room for a month and a half, and she knew exactly how long three seconds was.
* * *
The last night, they told her, was going to be the last night.
She did not understand at first. They had said it to each other in the hallway — tomorrow, first thing, we’ll bring her up in the morning — and she had heard the whole shape of it through the door before anyone came in and said it to her face. Nobody ever came in and said it to her face.
Then the door. Then the coat and the cold. Then the chair beside her head.
“Big day tomorrow,” Jason said.
He sounded worse than he had in six weeks. That was the thing she would keep coming back to afterward. He sounded like a man on the edge of something, and she had thought — for one last hour of her life she had thought — that it was because of her.
The other chair scraped. The flat shoes. The window side.
“You should go home and sleep,” Bethany said.
“I can’t.”
“No.”
The vent breathed. Somewhere down the hall a phone rang twice and stopped.
“Can I say something terrible?” Jason said.
Mila lay still. Her whole life narrowed down to the size of that question.
“Yes,” Bethany said.
“I’ve been sitting here six weeks.” He stopped. He started again. “Six weeks, and I’ve said more in this room than I said in the last two years of my marriage. And not to her.”
“You’re exhausted.”
“I’m not exhausted, I’m —” The chair shifted. “She’s going to wake up tomorrow. And she’s going to look at me. And I don’t know what I’m going to be looking at.”
“She’s your wife.”
“I know what she is.”
“Jason.”
“I don’t know if I ever loved her,” he said.
The machine took a breath for her. It took another one. It did not ask her whether she wanted it.
“You don’t mean that,” Bethany said. Kind. Patient. Not surprised.
“Don’t I?”
“No.” A pause, exactly the right length. “But I’m glad you said it out loud. You should be able to say things out loud.”
Mila listened to them stay in the room for another forty minutes. She listened to him laugh once, low, at something Bethany said about the campaign. She listened to the coat, and the chair, and the door, and the flat expensive shoes going away down the hall with him, together, at the same speed.
Then the room was empty and she was still in it.
She did not cry. She could not have. Whatever they had her on had taken that too, and she lay in the dark and found that she was not sad yet, only calm and cold, like a woman who has just been handed a diagnosis and is already thinking about the parking meter.
She went back over it. She went back over all of it, six weeks of it, and it came when she called, every word of it, filed and clean.
I said more in this room than I said in the last two years.
She had been in the house for those two years. She had been eight feet away.
Somewhere around four in the morning she understood a small, cold, practical thing, and it was the only thing that got her to the other side of the night.
They did not know she was in here.
Nobody knew she was in here.
* * *
In the morning there were a great many people, and light, and a hand pressing hers.
“Mila. Mila, can you open your eyes for me?”
She could. It took everything, and she could.
The light was terrible. The ceiling was a color that did not exist outside hospitals. A young man in scrubs was leaning over her with his whole face lit up like it was his birthday, saying her name, saying there you are.
Then Jason, shoving in past him, and she saw her husband for the first time in six weeks.
He looked wrecked. He looked thin and gray and eleven years older and his eyes were already going red, and he took her face in both his hands like it was something he had found.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Hey, baby. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
Behind him the room was doing something joyful. Somebody was crying. Somebody called it in to somebody else. She could hear Christina’s voice out in the hall going up at the end, and shoes, and further off, moving toward the door — flat, expensive, unhurried.
Her mouth was not hers yet. Her throat was raw. There was a word sitting ready at the front of her, and she found she had a choice about it, the first choice she had been given since October, and she took it.
“Say something,” Jason said. He was laughing. There were tears on his face. “Mila. Say anything.”
She looked at him.
She looked at him for a long moment, and she let him hold her face, and she did not say anything at all.