Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
Six weeks, you have to spend at home. A recovery period which you repurpose as an indoor honeymoon, hibernating in the house.
Breakfast in bed and shared bathwater and twisted sheets.
Soup, because you love soup. Croissants, of course, seeing as Henry who runs the bakery down the road hears what happened and plies you with pastry because you are his best customers and karma is a freshly baked pain au chocolat handed over, warm, in a brown paper bag.
Get-well cards and bouquets of flowers pour through the door.
Niche animated movies play on repeat except when you’re sitting in the May-June sunlight in the yard; the day you sign the official marriage paperwork you watch Song of the Sea with takeaway noodles and fall asleep by nine, wake to your wife, still sleeping, beside you, in one of your old T-shirts she’s stolen without asking.
And throughout this period, you print photographs, because it’s you: and you itch to work, to preserve, to capture what’s occurred.
Task your brother with finding a leather-bound album with the perfect page thickness.
Tack in the engagement party invite which Nora inked at her craft desk, three months ago.
Photographs of the pair of you at various parties and on nights out and nights in, at graduation, when she opened her café with Shay, when she first met Horace who looks like a baby horse, not a dog, when you went to God’s Own Junkyard with Freya.
And amid the photos, Nora also Sellotapes in two receipts.
One for the pizza order from the party, and one for the bagels the day you did not propose but she said yes yes yes, by the river.
You remember all of that, before the fall.
Before the long, low-level headaches and fatigue.
Before you stopped recognising familiar things, your keys, her face – a symptom, you’ve since learned, of the fluid that built against your brain – before you lost the you in your emotions – became forthright or argumentative or else disorientated, unable to fathom what was wrong.
Things had blurred, for a while, but are now, thank the universe, the luckiest stars, back in focus.
You turn a page while she makes lunch. While Motown music plays from the speaker.
Your hospital bracelets are here, too, tacked in beside a selfie taken outside the hospital chapel.
No flowers. No bow tie. No champagne flutes or big hats but a shaved head and a walking miracle and Nora’s eyes, half closed in a smile.
A redhead behind the camera, taking the picture.
Say subdural haematoma, he’d said. And you’d both laughed.
Like the first time you saw her. She was laughing at something someone had said, and you did not know what she was laughing at; did not know what was coming.
Just as you do not, now.
Which leaves space for a new photograph, in the album.
Which is lucky, again. Or miraculous. Synonyms, really, for the same thing, and if you were a songwriter or a poet you’d write something down about that, but you’re just a photographer, just a normal guy, just a husband with a brain that didn’t bleed out and a heart that wouldn’t give up on what it knew, and that certainty alongside all the unknowns is the real luck, you think. The real lasting miracle, here.