CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Alex
Now
Joshua woke up on a Wednesday.
Not fully. Not the way it happens in movies. It was slower than that. More ambiguous. A response to stimulation. A squeeze of the hand when prompted. Dr. Patel called it emerging.
I stood in the hallway outside his room and absorbed the word.
Emerging.
Like something working its way out of the ground.
Arthur was at school when it happened. I didn’t tell him immediately. I drove to the hospital and stood in the hallway and looked through the glass at Joshua and tried to sort out what I felt.
I tried for a long time.
What I felt was tired. Deeply and specifically tired in the way that only arrives after you’ve been holding something heavy for too long.
Dr. Patel found me in the hall.
“Have you gone in?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
He stood beside me. We both looked through the glass. “He’s not fully conscious,” he said. “But he’s responsive. That’s a significant change from where we were two weeks ago.”
“What does this mean for his prognosis?”
“It’s encouraging,” he said. “Genuinely. But I want to be careful about how much we read into early responsiveness.” He glanced at me. “We’ll know more in the coming days.”
I managed a breath instead of an answer.
“You can go in,” he said. “If you’re ready.”
I wasn’t ready.
I went in anyway.
He looked smaller than I remembered.
That was the first thing. Joshua had always taken up space in a room. Not physically. He wasn’t a large man. But he’d always had a quality of presence. The kind that rearranged the air around it.
There was none of that now.
He was just a man in a bed. Pale. Still.
I sat in the chair beside him.
I looked at his hand on the blanket. I didn’t touch it.
“Hey,” I said.
Nothing.
“The doctors say you’re coming back,” I said.
“I don’t know if you can hear me. They say maybe you can.
” I looked at his face. “Arthur is okay. He’s been at school every day.
He did a project on the solar system last week.
He got an A.” I paused. “He used your old drafting compass for the circles. The one you keep in the desk drawer. I hope that’s okay. ”
The monitors beeped.
I sat back.
“I don’t know what we do,” I said. “When you come back. I don’t know what that looks like or how we get from here to anything resembling normal.” I pressed my lips together. “But Arthur needs his father. Whatever we are to each other, he needs that. So I need you to come back for him.”
I didn’t say for me.
I thought about whether that was something he’d notice.
I thought it probably was.
I sat with him a while longer, in the silence of a hospital room where the only sound was mechanical.
I let myself remember, without meaning to, small useless fragments of who he’d been before he was who he became.
The way he used to hum tunelessly while he shaved.
The one time, early on, before the country club and the affairs and the cruelty he’d perfected over a decade, when he’d driven forty minutes in the rain to bring me soup because I’d mentioned, once, in passing, that I felt sick.
I didn’t know what to do with those fragments.
They didn’t cancel anything out. They just sat there, small and stubborn, refusing to be entirely untrue.
A nurse came in to check his vitals and I stood to give her room, and she glanced at me with the professional kindness of someone who had seen every version of this scene there was to see.
“He’s lucky to have someone sitting with him,” she said.
I didn’t correct her. It seemed unkind, and also beside the point. It was also, if I was honest, standing there in that overbright room, not exactly false either. I was still sitting there. Whatever that meant about me, it meant something.
Martina had dinner on the table when I got home.
Arthur was already seated. He looked up when I came in. “How is he?”
“Better,” I said. “He’s waking up.”
Arthur absorbed this the way he absorbed most things. Quietly. With a stillness behind his eyes that I’d been looking at his whole life and still couldn’t fully read.
“Can I see him?” he asked.
“Soon,” I said. “When he’s a little more awake.”
He nodded. He picked up his fork.
I sat down across from him and watched him eat for a moment.
“Arthur,” I said.
He looked up.
I said nothing more.
We ate.
He told me about a kid at school who could solve a Rubik’s cube without looking.
I told him that was impressive.
He shrugged. “It’s just patterns.”
He went back to his plate.
In a moment, he rinsed his plate and went down the hall.
After he was in bed I sat in the kitchen and thought about the machines. About why the house felt the same as it had on any other night Joshua was gone for work. I did not give the feeling a name.