CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Alex
Now
I was in the kitchen with coffee in hand when the call came through. Arthur was at school. Martina was somewhere in the back of the house. The morning was ordinary in the specific way that mornings had been ordinary since Joshua’s accident.
My phone lit up on the counter.
The Hospital.
I set my coffee down and answered.
“Mrs. MacAfee.” His voice was measured. Careful. “I wanted to call you personally. There have been some developments overnight.”
My hand tightened on the phone. “What kind of developments?”
“Positive ones,” he said.
I sat down.
“The intracranial pressure has decreased significantly since yesterday’s readings,” he said. “We’re seeing some brain activity that we weren’t seeing a week ago. It’s not dramatic, but it’s real and it’s measurable.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means there’s hope,” he said. “Real hope. Not the cautious kind I’ve been offering you.”
I stared at the kitchen table.
“I want to caution you,” he continued, “that improvement at this stage doesn’t guarantee full recovery. We don’t know what his cognitive function will look like if and when he regains consciousness.”
“But he might regain consciousness.”
“He might,” the doctor said. “Yes.”
I sat at the kitchen table for a long time after I hung up.
The coffee went cold. Outside, the neighborhood did what it did at nine in the morning on a Thursday. Unremarkable things. A dog somewhere. A leaf blower two houses down.
I should have felt relief.
I examined myself for it. Searched the way you search for something you’ve misplaced.
It wasn’t there.
What was there was more complicated and less flattering. A tightening in the chest that I recognized, after a moment of honest examination, as something close to disappointment.
I sat with that.
I was not a cruel person. I had never wished Joshua dead. Even at his worst.
But I had, in the weeks since his accident, begun to construct a quiet and tentative version of what came next. It had arrived without invitation. Late at night mostly. A future that existed in the conditional tense. If. Maybe. Possibly.
A future that had no shape I was willing to give a name.
I closed my eyes.
I was a terrible person.
I opened them.
I was a human person. That was what Martina had said. The distinction felt important.
I tried, sitting there with the cold coffee, to locate exactly when the conditional future had started.
I couldn’t. That was the unsettling part.
It hadn’t arrived as a decision, the way I kept wanting to frame it, something I could take responsibility for and therefore forgive myself for.
It had arrived the way weather arrives. Gradually, and then all at once, until one day you look up and the whole sky has changed color and you can’t say which cloud did it.
I thought about all the small, private ways I had already begun grieving a man who was still alive.
The side of the closet I’d started leaving empty in my mind.
The sentence I’d caught myself halfway forming to a divorce attorney I’d never called.
The nights I’d lain in bed doing the quiet math of what Arthur and I could build, just the two of us, once the waiting was finally over.
None of it had felt like betrayal while I was doing it. It felt like survival, exactly the word Martina used. It only became betrayal in retrospect, now that the man at the center of all that quiet arithmetic had, against the odds and against my own worst self, started coming back.
Martina appeared in the doorway.
She looked at me. Then at the cold coffee. Then at me again. “What happened?”
“He’s improving,” I said.
She came in and sat down. “That’s good news.”
“Yes,” I said.
She studied me. “Alex.”
“I know,” I said.
“You feel—”
“I know what I feel,” I said. “I’m working through it.”
She was quiet.
“I accepted it,” I said. “His death. I accepted it and started—” I stopped. “I had started to think about what came after.”
“That’s not a sin,” she said.
“It feels like one.”
A month after the wreck the doctor used a different word. Improving. A hand had moved when a light hit it. Not a wave. A twitch.
I looked at her hand over mine.
“God’s will,” I said quietly. “That’s what I told him. I stood in his room and told him I was going to let God decide.”
“And God decided,” Martina said.
“Apparently.”
She squeezed my hand once and then released it. She stood and picked up my coffee cup and poured it down the drain and refilled it from the pot without being asked.
She set it in front of me.
I wrapped my hands around the warm cup and stared at the kitchen table.
In the conditional tense. That was where the other life had lived. Tentative. Unspoken. Just a shape at the edge of things.
I wondered if I was supposed to let it go now.
I wondered if I could.
I drank my coffee and tasted nothing.
And I did not, no matter how reasonable it would have been, stop thinking about it.
That afternoon I picked Arthur up from school, and he climbed into the car with his backpack and the particular gravity he carried, and he looked at me for a second too long before he buckled his seatbelt.
“You look weird,” he said.
“I probably do,” I said.
“Good weird or bad weird?” he asked.
I considered the question more seriously than the way he asked it probably deserved. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Your dad’s doing better. The doctor called this morning.”
Arthur processed this the way he processed most things, in silence, looking out the window at the strip malls going by. “Is that good?” he finally asked.
“It’s good,” I said, and made myself believe it while I said it, because whatever else was true, it needed to be true for him.
“You don’t sound sure.”
“I’m sure it’s good for you,” I said. “I’m still figuring out what it means for me.”
He nodded slowly, like that was a reasonable answer, which from a child who had spent his whole life reading the weather in a house that rarely told him the truth outright, it probably was.
“Okay,” he said, and let it go, and I loved him so much in that moment for letting it go that I had to blink hard at the road for a second before I could see it clearly again.