CHAPTER TWELVE
Alex
Now
A tube protruded from the base of Joshua’s throat. Wires ran from him to the monitors mounted above the bed. What wasn’t covered in gauze of his face had gone the color of a bruise days past its worst.
The room smelled like antiseptic and something underneath the antiseptic that no amount of it could fully cover.
A machine beside the bed drew his breath in and pushed it back out again in a rhythm that had nothing to do with him.
A small mechanical mercy, keeping time in a room where nothing else did.
Someone had left a get-well balloon tied to the radiator from a different patient, a different room, a mistake nobody had corrected yet.
It bobbed faintly every time the door opened, cheerful and completely wrong.
I stood at the foot of the bed for a long time before I made myself walk to the chair beside it. His hand, when I finally made myself look at it instead of the machines, was the one part of him that looked like his own hand still. I did not take it.
I knew what it said about me, sitting there dry-eyed while a doctor read off the odds of my husband surviving the night.
I didn’t examine it too closely. I was afraid of what I’d find if I did.
Some clarity that had been waiting years for permission to arrive, one that might not let me function once it did.
I pictured him in a wheelchair. Pictured myself pushing it, widening doorways, installing a ramp where the porch steps used to be. I was still arranging the furniture of that imagined life when the doctor started talking.
“As with any trauma like this, there are things we know and things we don’t.
” He gestured at Joshua as he went, cataloguing him.
“Ruptured spleen. Punctured lung. Broken ribs. Compound fractures in both femurs. The right humerus, radius, and ulna, and the left ulna as well. Those are certain. The spine may be swelling rather than damaged; it’s too early to say.
There are open wounds to the skull that may have caused bleeding we can’t fully assess yet.
If the brain was deprived of oxygen for any length of time, the damage from that can be permanent.
We’re early. I want you prepared for that. ”
“I’m prepared,” I said. As much as anyone could be.
“If it turns out the brain is incapable of—”
“I’m prepared.”
He glanced at the clock. “I need to—”
“I’ll be in the waiting room.”
“Someone will find you if there’s anything to report.”
I made myself smile and turned to go.
“Missus MacAfee?”
“Yes.” I didn’t turn around.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
A hand touched my shoulder and I opened my eyes. Martina stood over me in caramel slacks and a blue cashmere cardigan, dressed like it was any other fall afternoon, her face doing something I’d rarely seen it do. Worry didn’t belong on her. She sat down beside me anyway, wearing it.
I pressed my cheek to the back of her hand. “Hey.”
“I came as soon as I could.”
I hated, a little, how much of what I felt about all of this had nothing to do with anyone but me.
“He looks like hell, Martina.”
“I’m sure he does. That’s not the same as not improving.”
“They said he might be paralyzed. Completely.”
I put my elbows on my knees and looked at the floor. “Do you think this is karma? Catching up with him?”
“I think when people do bad things, their life becomes the punishment,” she said. “This is what came of the life he chose.”
“Atonement.”
“If you want to call it that.”
My mind went, unbidden, to the coat closet off the country club’s east ballroom, eleven hours into being Joshua’s wife.
I could still find that closet with my eyes shut.
The give of the door when it wasn’t latched all the way.
The smell of it. Wet wool and cedar blocks, and underneath that, a woman’s perfume I didn’t recognize and would smell again, unexpectedly, in department stores for years afterward, each time with the same lurch in my stomach.
I’d gone looking for my wrap, nothing more sinister than that.
I was still in my wedding dress, still faintly drunk on champagne and the high of having survived a four-hundred-person ceremony without crying in front of my father.
I remembered the sound before I understood it. A belt buckle. A woman’s voice, low, saying a name that wasn’t mine.
I remembered opening the door anyway, because some part of me already knew and needed the rest of me to catch up.
I remembered Joshua’s face when he turned around. Not shame, not right away. Something closer to irritation, the annoyance of a man interrupted mid-task, as though I were the one committing an offense by opening a door at my own reception.
I remembered walking back into the ballroom in my wedding dress with my wrap still missing and a smile arranged on my face, because four hundred people were watching. I had already learned, in eleven hours of marriage, that whatever else happened, the smile came first.
I’d told no one. Not Martina, not that night.
I’d stood at the head table and cut a five-tier cake and let people toast to my happiness while some new, cold, competent part of me quietly filed the whole evening away under things I would deal with later.
That part of me would go on filing for the next ten years, until there was nothing left in me that hadn’t, at some point, been filed.
Most women would have walked away that night, still in the dress, and never looked back.
A belief that Joshua could and would change, combined with the unique circumstances surrounding our wedding, and a version of myself that badly needed to believe leaving my father’s plans a second time wasn’t possible.
That let me walk back into that reception instead and keep smiling.
I hadn’t known, cutting that cake, that the coat closet was only the first of what would be ten years of rooms like it.
Martina’s word was atonement. I turned it over and couldn’t make it fit. Not after ten years, not as a single accounting settled all at once in a hospital hallway. If there was a ledger being balanced tonight, I didn’t think this was it.
I thought about calling my parents. I got as far as pulling my phone out and scrolling to my mother’s name before I put it away again.
They were in Geneva, or Singapore, or wherever the calendar currently had them.
I already knew how the call would go: my mother’s voice going carefully soft the way it always did when she was performing concern rather than feeling it, a promise to have my father call when he landed, a follow-up that would arrive two days later as a fruit basket instead of a phone call.
I didn’t have the strength that night to be disappointed in real time.
I put the phone back in my bag and let Martina be the only family in the room, because she was the only one who had ever actually shown up.
A nurse found us not long after. No improvement to report, nothing new, only the promise that someone would update me the moment there was. It was enough to know the waiting had a shape to it now. Hours, not minutes. And that Martina wasn’t going anywhere in the meantime.
“You should go home and rest,” I said. “I’ll call you.”