Chapter 7 #2
Mila stood in the corridor of the Shepard Wing and felt the whole thing coming toward her from a long way off, unhurried, the way you watch a gate swing shut when you are too far away to get to it.
“There’s one ground-floor room in that family with a bathroom on it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It was built in six weeks in October.”
“Yes,” Christina said.
* * *
She told Nikki that night, standing in the tack room while Nikki soaped a saddle.
“So that’s it,” Nikki said. “You’re going back in the house.”
“On Sundays. In one room.”
“Mm.”
“Say it.”
“I’m not saying anything. I’m doing a saddle.” Nikki worked the sponge around the cantle. “I’ll say this much. Three months ago you couldn’t cross this yard, and now you’re driving forty minutes to hold the hand of a man who never once got out of his chair when you walked into a room.”
“That’s not why.”
“I know it’s not why.” Nikki looked up. “That’s what I’m saying. You’re not doing it for him. You’re doing it because you know what that room is, and you can’t leave somebody in there. Which is the single best thing about you and has also never once cost you nothing.”
Mila leaned on the door frame.
“He can hear everything,” she said. “Everything, Nik. Every word anyone says over that bed, and he can’t answer, and he’s going to be in there for months.”
Nikki stopped soaping.
She looked at Mila for a long moment with an expression that was slowly, terribly, arriving somewhere.
“Mila,” she said.
“Don’t.”
“That’s not a thing you know about people in comas,” Nikki said. “That’s a thing you know.”
Mila picked up a spare girth off the hook and hung it back up on the same hook.
“Sunday,” she said. “Nine o’clock. I’ll be back for the two o’clock feed.”
* * *
They moved Larry into Greenspring on the fourteenth of February.
Mila did not go that day. She stood in the barn doorway at four in the afternoon and watched the light going and thought about a room she had never seen, with curtains Christina had chosen, at the back of a house she had told her husband she was never coming back to.
She thought about it for two days.
Then on the sixteenth she got in the truck at nine in the morning, and drove the valley road with her hands steady on the wheel, and turned in at the gate.
The lane was the lane. The fences were the fences. Somebody had clipped the hedge by the barn and it was wrong, too hard, the way a man does it who has never done it.
She parked in front of her own house and sat there for a minute.
Then she went up the steps and in through the front door without knocking, because she had never once knocked at that door and was not going to start, and she stood in the hall.
The clock. The stairs. The smell of the place, which no house ever loses and which went through her like a hand.
And on the third hook along, exactly where she had left it on the sixth of October, her old brown barn coat, with her gloves still in the pocket.
She stood and looked at it for a while.
Then she walked down the back hall, past the kitchen, to the door of a room she had never been inside, and knocked on the frame, and went in.
Larry’s eyes came across the room to her.
“Hello, Larry,” Mila said. “It’s Mila. It’s Sunday the sixteenth, it’s just gone nine in the morning, and I’m going to come at nine on Sundays from now on.”
Behind her, out in the back hall, something stopped moving.
She did not turn around. She pulled the chair over to the bed and sat down in it and put her cane against the wall, in her husband’s house, with her husband standing in the doorway behind her, and she did not turn around.
It was a long time before she did.
He was thinner than he had been in the corridor two weeks ago, which she would not have thought possible. He had a dish towel over his shoulder. Somewhere behind him a kettle was going.
Neither of them said anything for a while. In the room, the pump on the air mattress cycled and sighed.
“There’s coffee,” Jason said at last.
“I’m all right.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not here for you.”
“I know that.” His voice was perfectly even. “I heard what you told him. Sundays at nine.” A pause. “Do you want me out of the house on Sundays at nine?”
Mila looked at the wall above Larry’s bed.
It was, she thought, the first question her husband had asked her about her own life in eight years to which he did not already have the answer prepared.
“No,” she said. “But don’t come in this room while I’m in it.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t cook me anything.”
Something moved in his face, briefly, in the vicinity of a laugh, and was gone before it got anywhere.
“Okay,” he said, and went away down the hall.
* * *
She stayed two hours.
She told Larry about the hedge by the barn being cut wrong, and about the mare herd coming in over frozen ground, and about a man named Vern at a clinic in Cockeysville who had gotten a whole word out in January.
She did not tell him about her husband, and he did not ask, because he could not, and she was aware the whole time of how convenient that was for her.
When she left, her brown barn coat was still on the third hook.
She took it.