9. Karlie
— ? —
Karlie
There’s a beeping.
That’s the first thing. A slow, steady beeping, somewhere to my left, patient and electronic. Then a smell, antiseptic and floor cleaner. Then light through my eyelids, white and flat and wrong, nothing like morning.
I open my eyes.
Ceiling tiles. A water stain in the corner of one, shaped like nothing. An IV line taped to the back of my hand, disappearing up into a bag I can’t turn my head far enough to see.
And a man in the chair beside the bed.
For one heartbeat, one stupid, treacherous heartbeat, my chest lifts, because I think it’s William.
It’s my father.
Howard Pembleton is sitting in a hospital visitor’s chair that is too small for him, in a suit with no tie.
No tie. I don’t have a single memory of my father without a tie.
His collar is open and his jaw is gray with stubble and he is watching me with an expression I have no name for, because in twenty-five years I have never once seen it on his face.
“Don’t try to talk,” he says. “You have three broken ribs and a concussion. The doctor said you’re not to exert yourself.”
There he is. Same flat delivery. Instructions instead of a greeting. Some things survive anything, apparently, even this.
“Dad,” I whisper anyway, and it comes out cracked and small, barely a sound at all.
“I said don’t talk.” He leans forward and reaches for the call button hanging at the bed rail. “You need water. And the doctor should know you’re awake.”
He reaches for the button, and that’s when I see it.
His hands are shaking.
My father’s hands. The hands that have signed deals worth more than most countries’ budgets without so much as a twitch.
The hands that carved every holiday roast of my childhood with surgical precision while the rest of him ignored the table.
I have never in my life seen those hands do anything they weren’t told to do.
They’re shaking, and he can’t make them stop.
I stare at them. He follows my stare, and his jaw goes tight, and he pulls his hands back and folds one over the other in his lap like he’s putting away evidence. Neither of us says a word about it.
“You were in an accident,” he says, as if I might not know. “The car left the road and rolled. You’ve been unconscious for two days.”
Two days. The words arrive from very far away. Two days ago I was supposed to check into a bed and breakfast. There was a room booked under our name. There were blueberry muffins. There was his hand turning over under mine on the gearshift.
And then the memory comes back, not in pieces, all of it, all at once. The deer. The rail. The rolling. The window. His shape passing my window.
The monitor beside my bed picks up speed.
I hear it happen before I feel it, the beeping climbing, faster and faster, and then my chest is a vise again and I can’t get a full breath, and the careful shallow breathing I don’t remember learning stops working, and the room tilts.
“Karlie.” My father is on his feet. The chair scrapes back. “Karlie. What’s wrong. What’s happening.”
The beeping climbs. I can’t answer him. I can’t do anything except fail to breathe, and somewhere at the edge of the tilting room my father, my silent, composed, unshakeable father, is wrenching open the door and screaming into the corridor.
“Nurse! I need a nurse in here NOW! Somebody get in here!”
I have never heard my father raise his voice.
Not once. Not at funerals. Not at board meetings.
Not at me, not even the day I told him I’d rather be homeless than take another silent dinner in that house.
And he is screaming into a hospital hallway at the top of his lungs, and his voice cracks in the middle of it, and three people come running.
They flow around me in practiced order. One checks the monitor.
One adjusts the IV. One talks to me in the level, unhurried voice they must teach in nursing school, telling me I’m safe, telling me to breathe with her, in for four, hold, out for four, and slowly, slowly, the beeping comes down the hill it climbed.
The room levels. The vise opens a few teeth.
Through all of it my father stands pressed flat against the wall, out of their way, gray-faced, his shaking hands jammed into his trouser pockets, watching me like I might vanish if he blinks.
Something in me fractures, quietly, looking at him.
He was worried. He is worried. The man who forgot my birthdays, who looked through me across twenty years of dinner tables, who traded me into a marriage like a line item, is standing against a hospital wall looking like he has aged a decade since yesterday, and I don’t know where to put that. There’s no shelf in me built for it.
The nurses finish. One of them tells me to rest, tells my father the doctor will be by within the hour, and they file out.
My father comes back to the chair. He sits. He pours water from the plastic pitcher into a plastic cup, and it takes him two tries, because of his hands, and he doesn’t acknowledge that either. He holds the cup for me, guides the straw to my mouth without being asked.
“Slowly,” he says.
I drink. The water is lukewarm and tastes like the smell of this room, and it’s still the best thing I’ve ever had. When I’ve had enough I turn my face away, and I make myself ask the question I don’t want to ask, because not knowing has teeth.
“William?”
My father’s face closes like a ledger.
“Your husband is fine,” he says, flat, clipped, a stock report on a company he has decided to divest. “Cuts. Bruises. Stitches. Nothing serious.”
Relief comes first, hot and involuntary, flooding through me before I get a vote. He’s fine. He’s alive and fine.
And then, right behind it, the question my father is very carefully watching me not ask.
Then where is he?
I look at the other side of the bed. The empty chair. The little couch under the window with its cushions squared, no jacket thrown over the arm, no coffee cups on the sill, no phone charger, no signs of a husband’s vigil. My father has been living in this room, that much is written all over him.
My father. Alone.
I don’t ask where William is. I already know the answer. I watched the answer carry her away from the wreck while I bled in my seat.
“How long have you been here?” I whisper instead.
“Since they called me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.” He reaches out and straightens the blanket along the edge of the bed, a small, fussing motion with no purpose at all, nothing like him. “Rest. The doctor wants to keep you at least a week. The ribs need to knit, and they want to watch the concussion.”
I close my eyes. The pain medication is a gray tide, patient, pulling. I let it take me partway out, and I’m nearly under when the door opens.
“Oh, thank God. You’re awake.”
My eyes snap open.
Helen.
She’s in a wheelchair being pushed by an orderly, and she has arranged herself the way other people arrange flowers.
A small bandage sits high on her forehead, just below the hairline, photogenic.
Her hair is brushed to a shine. She is wearing a silk robe over the hospital gown, belted at the waist, and full makeup, and she looks like an actress playing a brave patient in a commercial.
“I’ve been praying,” she announces, pitched to carry through the open door to the nurses’ station. “We’ve all been so worried. When they told me you were still unconscious, I just, I couldn’t bear it. I had to come the moment I heard you were awake.”
My father rises. “She needs rest.”
“Of course. Of course she does. I won’t stay long.” Helen’s smile trembles at exactly the right frequency. “I just had to see her with my own eyes. We survived something terrible together. That bonds people, don’t you think?”
My father looks at her for a long moment, one flat, assessing look that would strip paint, and whatever he concludes he keeps to himself.
“I’ll find the doctor,” he says to me, “and get an update.”
He walks out. The orderly catches some signal I don’t see and steps out after him, and the door swings slowly shut on its pneumatic arm, and the click of the latch is very loud.
And Helen’s face changes.
It’s not gradual. The tremble switches off. The warmth switches off. What’s left is smooth and cold and interested, and she puts her hands to the wheels and rolls herself closer to my bed, close enough that nobody passing the window could ever read her lips.
“You look terrible,” she says.
“Three broken ribs will do that.” My voice is a rasp, but it holds. “Your bandage is very small.”
“Isn’t it lucky.” She touches it with one fingertip, delicately. “Barely a scratch on me. Well.” Her mouth curves. “You saw how gently I was handled.”
The monitor beside me ticks upward. I breathe it back down, four in, hold, four out, because I am not giving her a spike on a machine to take home as a souvenir.
“Why are you here, Helen?”
“To see you, of course. To make sure you’re all right.” She tilts her head, studying me the way you’d study a problem you’ve already solved. “And to make sure we understand each other. Now that everything is so much clearer.”
“Clearer.”
“Mmm.” She smooths the silk over her knee, unhurried, making me wait.
“You know, I spent four months being patient. Watching you cling to him. Watching you drag him to anniversaries and weekends away, waving your little marriage certificate around like it meant he was yours.” She looks up. “And then one deer solved everything.”
“You should send it a fruit basket.”
“There she is.” Helen smiles, and it’s almost warm, and that’s the worst version of her smile there is. “I always liked that about you, Karlie. Right up until the end, you’ll be making your little jokes.”
“It’s not the end of anything.”
“No?” She leans in. Her voice goes soft, gentle, almost kind, and every word is placed like an instrument. “He climbed out of that wreck and came for me. You were right there and he chose me.” She lets it sit. “Remember that every time he says sorry.”
The words go in exactly where she aimed them, cold and precise, and she watches my face while they land, and she is enjoying this.
She has been waiting for this, I realize.
Through the sirens and the ambulance ride and the hallway performances, she has been waiting to be alone with me, mask off, so she could deliver that one sentence.
Every word I say back is going to pull at my ribs.
I say it anyway.
“He pulled you out of a car, Helen.” I hold her eyes and I don’t blink. “Logan pulled himself out of your entire life.”
Her face goes white.
It happens all at once, the color simply dropping out of it, and for one unguarded second the mask doesn’t slip, it falls, and what’s underneath isn’t triumph and isn’t hatred. I don’t know what it is. It’s gone too fast to read.
The door handle turns.
By the time the door is open she’s rebuilt, wounded and composed, dabbing at bone-dry eyes with the sleeve of her robe.
“Rest well, Karlie,” she says, wheeling herself backward with perfect grace. “I’m so glad we had this talk.”
The orderly collects her. My father holds the door and watches her roll away down the corridor with an expression that says he heard none of it and suspects every word.
He comes back in. He sits. He picks up the folded newspaper from the side table as if he intends to read it, and then he doesn’t open it. It just sits in his lap under his folded, quiet hands.
“The doctor says the ribs will heal clean,” he says. “Six weeks. No lifting, no driving, no exertion of any kind.”
“Okay.”
“They’ll discharge you in a week. Perhaps less, if the concussion behaves.
” He pauses. The pause goes on long enough that I turn my head on the pillow to look at him.
My father is staring down at the unopened newspaper, and his jaw is working, and whatever he is trying to say is costing him something I can see from here.
He doesn’t get to say it.
The door opens.
And there he is.
William, standing in the doorway. A bandage crosses his left temple and a neat line of stitches runs along his jaw, and his right arm is in a sling.
He’s holding flowers, white roses, and the stems are crushed where his fist has been gripping them, and his eyes find me on the bed and his whole face breaks open.
“Karlie…”
My father rises from his chair, slow and deliberate, and turns to face my husband, and when his voice comes it is quiet and cold enough to frost the window glass.
“You have some nerve.”