Chapter 2
They gave her four days, and she used every one of them.
Nobody meant to give her anything. It was simply how it went: you do not come up out of six weeks and walk out of a building. You come up in stages, and each stage has people attached to it, and all of them want something small from you that you cannot yet do.
Squeeze my fingers. Follow the light. Push against my hand. What year is it.
She gave them everything they asked for and nothing else.
It turned out to be easy. Her voice was a ruin anyway — the tube had left her a whisper full of gravel — and everyone in that room had already decided she was fragile, so a woman who lay still and did what she was told read as a success story rather than a problem.
“She’s doing beautifully,” the young man in scrubs told Jason on the second day.
“She’s not talking much.”
“That’s normal. Let her come back at her own speed.”
Yes, Mila thought. Let me.
* * *
Her left hand was fine. Her right hand shook when she was tired, and she was tired constantly, so mostly it shook.
Her legs were a rumor. When they sat her on the edge of the bed on the second afternoon, the floor came up at her like the deck of a boat and two people caught her, and she heard herself make a sound she had never made before.
She could not stand alone. She could stand between the bars with someone’s hand under her arm, for about as long as it takes to boil a kettle, and then the world grayed at the edges.
They said six weeks flat on your back takes a year off a person. They said it cheerfully.
She did the math anyway, because math was one of the few things that still worked at full speed. A month at least before she could cross a room. Longer before stairs. Longer than that before a horse.
She was thirty-eight years old and she could not carry a glass of water.
That was the fact she kept picking up and setting down. Not the other thing. Not yet. She was not able to look straight at the other thing and also run her own body, so she put it in a box and set the box down and worked on her legs.
* * *
The physical therapist was a small round woman named Yvonne who had clearly been doing this for thirty years and had run out of patience for exactly one kind of patient.
“You’re going to hate me,” she said, on the first morning. “Everybody does by Thursday.”
She put the belt around Mila’s waist and got her up between the bars and counted out loud. Eight seconds. Then down, and the room swimming, and the awful animal shame of a body that would not take an order.
“Good,” Yvonne said.
“It was eight seconds.”
“It was eight more than Tuesday.”
They did it again. Six seconds. They did it again, and Mila got nothing at all, and her right hand went off like a bird on the bar, and she heard herself say a word she did not say in front of strangers.
Yvonne laughed, delighted. “There she is.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, be angry. Angry walks. I’ve had men in here with half your damage lying down and waiting for the insurance.” She let the belt out a notch. “You want to know what I tell people? It’s boring. It’s two hundred boring days. That’s the whole trick. Nobody wants that to be the trick.”
Two hundred days, Mila thought.
She looked at the bars and did the arithmetic, and somewhere under the exhaustion something in her sat up and took an interest for the first time since October.
“Again,” she said.
* * *
Jason was there every day and he was wonderful.
That was the part no one would ever believe.
He was patient with the nurses and he learned all their names.
He brought her a good pillow from the house because the hospital ones were bricks.
He read out the cards that had come, and there were hundreds, and he made it funny — he did a voice for the ones from the club.
He held the cup and let her take it slow.
He put his hand flat on her sternum one afternoon when she was trying to breathe past a coughing fit and said, “I’ve got you. Take your time. I’ve got you.”
Twice she caught herself about to smile.
That was the danger. She had been married to this man for eight years and her body did not know yet. Her body still thought he was the one who got her through things.
On the third night she woke at two and he was asleep in the chair with his coat still on, and she lay in the dark and looked at his face and felt the whole weight of her marriage roll over on top of her.
Then a phone lit up in his pocket, once, and went dark. He did not wake.
She went back to work on her legs.
* * *
Bethany did not come back after the morning she woke.
That was information too. Mila filed it.
Five weeks in the chair by the window, and the day the wife opened her eyes, gone.
Nobody said her name. Nobody mentioned the foundation at all, which was strange in that family, and which meant somebody had decided what would and would not be discussed in front of her.
Christina came on the third day with a bag of clementines and sat on the end of the bed.
“You look like hell,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“I mean it as a compliment. You looked worse.”
Christina peeled a clementine and ate it herself and talked for twenty minutes about a dispute over a fence line, and then stopped, and said, “He hasn’t slept, you know. Since October. He’s been a disaster.”
Mila looked at the ceiling.
“Not that you asked,” Christina said.
“I didn’t.”
Christina glanced at her. Something moved behind her face — not suspicion exactly, more the look of a woman hearing a note slightly off in a familiar song.
“No,” she said slowly. “You didn’t.”
* * *
On the fourth night Mila lay awake and took the box out and opened it.
She had been putting this off in the belief that it would be terrible.
It was terrible, but not in the shape she had braced for.
She had expected to want to scream. What she wanted was to leave — a want so simple and so total that it felt less like a decision than a direction, the way water wants down.
She went through it one more time to be sure.
She had a trained memory and she had used it on that room for six weeks, and it gave her back everything: the shoes, the chair, the three seconds in the hallway, I said more in this room than I said in the last two years of my marriage, and I don’t know if I ever loved her, and the forty minutes afterward, and the laugh.
Not the affair. She turned that over and found, to her surprise, that the word did not quite fit and that its not fitting made it worse.
He had not touched that woman. She would have bet the house on it. He had done something she had no word for, which was take the part of himself she had spent eight years knocking on the door of, and hand it over the bed to somebody else, and then look at her in the morning and call her restful.
She did the arithmetic on it too, lying there, because arithmetic was the one thing that still worked at speed.
Bethany Wilkes had been in that room from the second week, and before that there had been three weeks of September when Mila had come home to a husband who was already somewhere else, and had put it down to the campaign, and had been wrong.
Three weeks before the fall, and six weeks under.
Nine weeks. That was the whole of it. Nine weeks against ten years, and it had been enough, and that was the part she could not get past.
The affair would have been a thing that happened to their marriage.
This was the marriage.
She lay there until the light changed, and by the time the shift ended she knew two things with total clarity. She was not going to spend a year learning to walk inside that man’s kindness. And she was going to say it once, cleanly, and never explain it again.
* * *
Discharge was set for eleven.
They had it all arranged. Of course they did. Jason arrived at nine with a bag from the house — her own clothes, folded by somebody else’s hands — and a list, and the specific bright energy of a man running an operation he is good at.
“Okay, so,” he said. “Car’s downstairs, I’ve got Sandy coming out to the house three days a week to start, Paulson’s got us in for Monday, and I talked to a guy in Philadelphia who everybody says is the best in the country for this, so if Monday’s no good we go to him instead.”
“Jason.”
“And I had them do the downstairs room. The one off the back hall. It’s got the bathroom right there, so you’re not doing stairs for a while.” He was pulling things out of the bag. He was not looking at her. “It’s nice, actually. Christina did the curtains, so, you know. Brace yourself.”
The night nurse was at the door with a clipboard, waiting, politely pretending to be somewhere else.
“Jason,” Mila said again.
He stopped. He turned around with her cardigan in his hand and finally looked at her properly, and whatever he saw made him set the cardigan down on the bed.
“Okay,” he said.
Her voice was still a whisper. She had thought about that. In the end she had decided it did not matter, and it turned out she was right, because the room went so quiet that a whisper was plenty.
“You sat in that chair for six weeks,” she said, “and I heard every word.”
He did not move.
“I heard you tell her about the terminal. The nine nights. The parking lot before the bank.” She kept her eyes on his. “I heard you tell her you never wanted the company. I heard you tell her you’re afraid of turning into your father. I asked you about your father for eight years.”
“Mila —”
“I heard a nurse call her your sister in the hall and I heard you say nothing.” She breathed.
It cost her more than she wanted it to. “And I heard you say, the night before they brought me up, that you’d said more in that room in six weeks than you said to me in two years.
And then I heard you say you didn’t know if you ever loved me.
And she said you didn’t mean it, and you said, don’t I. ”
His face had gone the color of the wall behind him.
“You were in there,” he said.
“I was in there the whole time.”