Chapter 11
THE MIRROR
She's too good at this.
That's the thought that keeps circling. She handed me coffee this morning: perfectly timed, correct temperature, the mug placed at the exact point on the side table where I can reach it without twisting.
She said "Morning" — light, easy, the tone of a person who slept well and woke up fine and has no residual damage from anything, least of all the kitchen floor.
It's been three days since the smoke alarm.
Three days since she sat on my floor and cried and laughed and tried to tell my cat things she couldn't tell me.
Three days since I sat next to her and didn't say the thing I should have said, and now three days of watching her rebuild the wall I almost saw behind, and this version — this post-crash version — is better than before. More seamless. Funnier.
Yesterday she organized my fridge. Labels. Hand-written, in her neat lettering, on two of the shelves. I have never, in my life, organized a fridge.
She's getting ready to leave. She just hasn't said it yet.
The morning goes how mornings go now.
She brings me my pills with a glass of water. The pills are already sorted into the correct doses — two white, one blue, the painkiller she broke in half because the full dose makes me nauseous and she noticed this before I mentioned it. She sets the glass down. She doesn't sit.
"I'm going to work on the bistro stuff for a bit," she says. She walks to the kitchen table, opens her laptop, and starts typing.
I watch her from the couch.
She could be anywhere right now. She could be in a coffee shop, at her own desk, in her own apartment with her own fridge that doesn't need someone else's labels.
The typing is steady. Fast. Focused. She's leaning into the screen how she leans into things that matter to her — slightly forward, shoulders engaged, the rest of the room ceasing to exist.
She's dying to get back to her life.
I try to reach the glass of water without groaning. I groan.
"Nailed it," I mutter.
"You okay?"
"Fine." I take a sip. I set it down. The motion sends a dull burn through my left side — not the sharp kind, not anymore, but the deep ache that means the bone is healing and is very unhappy about it. "Just — yeah. Fine."
She looks at me for one second. Then she goes back to typing.
I should be glad she's working. I should be glad she has a life outside of this — outside of me and my crutches and the unfiled insurance forms and the slow-motion project of getting a grown man to the bathroom and back without incident.
I'm not glad.
I'm whatever the opposite of glad is, and it has the exact shape of her sitting six meters away looking like she already left.
The bandage change happens after lunch.
We've done this before — three times now, since the home care nurse only comes twice a week and the incision site needs attention in between. It should be routine. Remove old dressing, clean the area, apply new gauze, tape the edges, done. Five minutes. Maybe seven.
I tried to do it myself the first time. Twenty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, a roll of tape in one hand, a death-grip on the counter with the other, trying to find an angle that didn't involve twisting my pelvis into something the physiotherapist would call inadvisable.
I couldn't see half the incision. I couldn't reach the other half. I failed.
So now she does it. And it is not routine.
It is seven minutes of her being close enough that I can smell her shampoo and feel the warmth of her hands through the nitrile gloves she bought from the pharmacy, and every second of those seven minutes is something I survive rather than experience.
"Okay," she says. "Shirt up."
This is the part neither of us talks about.
The incision is on my left side, low, where they went in to set the fixation.
Getting to it means pulling my shirt up past my ribs and pushing the waistband of my sweats down, and we both pretend this is a medical procedure and not two people who have never been undressed around each other navigating a situation that a nurse should be handling.
The first time, her ears went red. The second time, she wore her hair down, which I think was to hide the ears.
Today her hair is up and she's not hiding anything, which is somehow worse.
She kneels next to the couch. Her knees are on the carpet.
She's wearing those wool socks — the grey ones with holes in the heels that she thinks I haven't noticed.
She didn't pack enough clothes when she moved in.
There's a whole list of things she didn't pack, and the socks are the only ones she can't fix by being more organized.
She peels off the old dressing. Her fingers are careful. Clinical. I watch her face — she's not looking at me. She's looking at the wound. Gauze, skin, tape, gauze, skin, tape. That's all she sees. That's all she's letting herself see.
She cleans the site. The antiseptic is cold and I flinch — just barely, a twitch in my abdomen that I catch and kill — and she pauses. Her hand hovers. For one instant her eyes flick up to mine and then immediately back down, like she touched something hot.
"Sorry," she says.
"S'fine."
She cuts a new piece of gauze. She places it on the incision.
The gauze is perfectly aligned — she does this every time, lines up the edges with the focus of someone defusing a wire, not a hair out of place.
She smooths the tape. Left side first, then right.
Her thumb presses the adhesive flat. Her thumb is on my skin.
And then it hits.
Not a thought. A flash. A body thing. The specific texture of a woman's hands on the worst part of you — the broken part, the part that can't hold weight or carry anything or do the one job you've spent your entire adult life training for — and the way that being touched there is nothing like being touched anywhere else.
It's not intimate. It's worse than intimate.
It's being seen at the place where you're least, and watching her be efficient about it.
Last time I said I needed someone, she was gone in three months.
The sentence isn't a memory. It's a scar that activates when you move a certain way, and right now the certain way is a woman's hands on your healing body and her eyes not meeting yours.
Nora presses the last strip of tape flat. She sits back on her heels. She looks at her work — one final check, like checking a door is locked before leaving.
"There."
She stands. She takes one step back. She pulls off the gloves. She puts everything in the small plastic bag she designated for medical waste — because of course she did — and she's already turning toward the kitchen when I say it.
"I can do it myself next time."
She stops. Her back is to me. I see her shoulders do a thing — a small adjustment, a quarter-inch lift and drop.
"It's fine," she says. "I don't mind."
"I know you don't mind. I'm saying I can do it."
The silence after that is the wrong kind. No comfortable faking. A silence where a line just got drawn and both of us know it.
She turns. Her face is the smooth version, the handled version, the one I've been watching her construct for three days.
"Okay," she says. "If you want."
She goes to the kitchen. I hear the tap run. She's washing her hands. I'm staring at the ceiling.
The ceiling has a crack I've never noticed before.
It runs from the light fixture to the corner near the window, thin and jagged — the kind that happens in old Montreal buildings when the foundation shifts with the freeze-thaw cycle.
Cosmetic. Structural integrity is fine. You just have to look at it and know it's there and decide whether to fix it or live with it.
She goes to bed early.
Or goes to the guest room early — I should stop calling it bed, because her bed is a fold-out couch with a bar across the middle that she never complains about, in a room that still has my weights and a '93 Habs poster.
She says goodnight. She closes the door.
The click hangs in the air for a moment and then settles.
Poutine is on the bookshelf. Bagel is on my lap, purring — not because he cares about my emotional state but because my body is warm and stationary, which is everything a cat needs from a relationship.
The apartment is quiet.
I think about her hands. How she didn't look at my eyes. How she said "There" and stood up and took one step back, exactly one, like the distance had been measured.
I think about her at the laptop. The typing. The lean toward the screen.
I think about the fridge labels.
And I think about the fact that my body still has the temperature of her thumb on the skin above my hip, and I can feel it right now, the exact spot, like a contact burn that won't cool.
I don't want to feel this.
The last time I felt this — the last time I let myself need someone enough that her hands left temperature on my skin — it lasted three months after I said the words.
Three months between I need you and I think we should talk.
And then it was gone, and the place where it had been was worse than if it had never been there at all.
Nora is not her. I know this. The way she folds gauze and organizes refrigerators and cries on kitchen floors is not a pattern that belongs to anyone else.
My body doesn't care what I know.
Bagel shifts on my lap. He stretches, claws flexing against my thigh, then resettles into a tighter circle. His purr changes pitch — lower, slower. He is fully committed to staying exactly where he is.
I can't do this.
Not the bandage changes or the coffee or the fridge labels or the sound of her typing six meters away or how her voice sounds when she says my name — not like anything special, just my name, except no one says it the way she does because no one is her.
I can't keep letting this happen. Every day she's here, her leaving gets worse. And she is going to leave — I am a man who just told the person changing his bandages that he doesn't need help.
So I can't.
Bagel purrs.
Outside, the snow is falling again — the particular density of February snow in Montreal, the kind that falls straight down because there's no wind, just gravity and cold and the patience of a city that has done this ten thousand times before.
I reach for my phone. I look at the lock screen — two cats, one black, one orange, the only photograph I trust to stay exactly where I put it.
I put the phone down.
The spot on my hip where her thumb was is still warm.
I decide it has to be gone by morning.