Chapter 27 Lindy #2
The next day, Lindy, Mrs. Kauffman, and Kate went to the hospital at the appointed hour. At the sight of David, groggy but
awake in the hospital bed, Lindy’s fear was a quick flare that she managed to tamp down as she went to hug and kiss him. Now
she thought she smelled on his skin the old tinny scent of blood and a musty tent, though that didn’t make sense and certainly
couldn’t be true. “Hi, honey,” she said softly as she pulled back, and as he clutched her elbow and looked at her, there was
regret and—she was sure of it—love in his deep, dark eyes.
Kate drove David’s car, and Lindy drove the family station wagon, while Mrs. Kauffman sat in the back with David. They talked
quietly to each other as if Lindy wasn’t in the car at all, or at least as if she couldn’t hear.
“I couldn’t stop seeing it,” David told his mother. “I saw my hand holding a knife and cutting my arms up and down and cutting
my legs and I knew where the femoral artery was, even though I don’t know, and I saw it gushing and thought how satisfying
that would be, and the peace that would come, and the warmth before the cold, and then part of me knew I was just going crazy
and I needed to stop it. I wanted to go home, and then I didn’t know where I was, but then I was driving and I saw the blue
H and I knew I should go there. And I don’t remember what happened next.
I don’t remember arriving there, but obviously I did.
How is it that the mind can divide itself like that?
To know one thing to be true while at the same time another opposite thing is equally true?
To remember things you’d rather forget and forget the things you want to remember? ”
“I don’t know, honey,” said Mrs. Kauffman in a defeated tone, squeezing his hand, while in the driver’s seat Lindy blinked
away tears, because it seemed David was fully back, in a way he hadn’t been in far longer than she had realized.
When they arrived at The Cove, it was late afternoon, and Mrs. Kauffman said she would allow David and Lindy to walk to the
beach, but they had to sit where she could see them from the yellow cottage and be back in thirty minutes. She was going to
make hamburgers, and they would be ready to eat by then. (Last night at the motel, Mrs. Kauffman had talked at length about
how she was afraid David hadn’t been eating properly, he had been studying way too hard, he had taken the weight of fixing
the whole world onto his shoulders. What he needed was red meat and rest and a summer at The Cove, she declared, before flopping
over and going to sleep. Lindy had lain awake a long time, thinking that to help him this time would probably not be that
easy—the fact that his knee prevented him from running was especially worrisome—and she could feel that Kate, beside her in
the bed, was awake, too, but there didn’t seem to be anything to say.)
Now David held Lindy’s hand. It was almost hard to believe he was really there. The misery of his absence was solved, only
to be replaced with a set of circumstances that felt not only insoluble, but mysterious in an unlikable way. They went down
and sat on the rocks, his gait uneven due to his painful knee. The day was cool and overcast but not rainy, and the sight
of the cove, a silvery blue under the gray sky, caused Lindy’s heart to lift, despite everything.
It was impossible to know what to say, though David seemed peaceful, as if his demons had been wrestled down, at least for now.
Also, Lindy reminded herself, he was still under the effects of the medication he had been given in the hospital.
(Upon his discharge, the doctor had handed Mrs. Kauffman a bottle of pills that he said would keep David calm starting right away, along with a written prescription for an antidepressant that should begin to work within a few weeks to make him better for the long term, provided he took it every day.
They had stopped in town to have the prescription filled on their way back.
David said he had not been taking any medication for a while, which none of them had known.)
“I don’t know what happened,” he said now, finally, in a gentle, sorrowful tone, stretching his painful leg out in front of
him, propping his foot on a rock. She waited, hoping he would say more, and after a moment he sighed and looked out at the
water and the boats on their moorings and continued in a slow, contemplative way. “I had this sense of hopelessness. Hollowness.
I was born that way, I guess. It’s tiresome. I hate to think of bothering you with it. Or my family. I thought if I could
get away, I could clear my head. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why it came to this again.”
She studied the familiar contours of his face. She wished more than anything that he would just be all right. She wished she
knew what to do.
She cupped his face in her hand; the unfamiliar beard was surprisingly soft. “Your mother thinks you need to eat more red
meat,” she said, which at least made him laugh a little.
Because of the trip to Blue Hill, Lindy got off track with her birth control pills. She and Kate and Mrs. Kauffman had hopped
into the car so swiftly after the call from the hospital that none of them had brought an overnight bag, nor stopped to think
they might need one. Since Lindy always took her pill in the morning, she didn’t remember that she’d missed one until the
following morning back at The Cove.
The slipup made her nervous, yet it opened up a possibility which stewed at the back of her mind. The front of her mind, as
David liked to say about his own, was very crowded.
She was trying so hard to say the right things to him.
To spend enough time with him, but not too much.
He slept a lot. They went to the beach. They played board games with Kate, and he would watch Kate and Lindy play tennis.
(In the evenings, Kate was always gone, out carousing with friends who drank too much.
Lindy worried about her, but of course couldn’t mention it to David, or even to Mrs. Kauffman, and the truth was she didn’t have a lot of space to worry about Kate.
Nearly her whole mind was taken up by David.)
He iced and rested his knee; he intended to rehabilitate it without surgery. His mother was trying to convince him to postpone
taking the bar, to come back home to Chicago at summer’s end. She would take care of him, she said. He wouldn’t have to worry
about money or a job for a while, and he could see his old doctors again, the ones who had helped him before. There was no
reason to rush anything, she said; he needed time to recover.
So far, all he’d agreed to was stepping back from studying for a few days, but Lindy felt she could see the writing on the
wall, and she didn’t at all like what it said.
Whenever she wasn’t with him, whenever she went home to Innisfree, the guard she didn’t know she was keeping up simply collapsed.
She cried in her bedroom. She was exhausted, went to bed early. Her redecorating projects languished; she was uninspired.
She wandered through rooms, couldn’t focus to read, kept asking her mother if Greta could possibly forego practicing the Tchaikovsky
just now, if she could please turn the stereo down. Lindy craved quiet, the sound of the waves. Her parents cast worried glances
after her like swooping butterfly nets that always missed their target. One night at dinner, her mother said to her, “You
are not going to let this derail your plans,” as a statement, not a question, and Lindy snapped, “Just stop, Mom,” and her
father laid a firm hand over Greta’s with a quiet shake of his head.
Did Lindy know what she was doing? Maybe.
She didn’t take her pill. Once. Twice. A half dozen times.
Maybe the back of her mind had decided—even if the front was too crowded to quite register the decision.
And yet.
It was hard to find any privacy at The Cove, but on the Fourth of July, when everyone was at the SCPA clubhouse for the lobster bake—Lindy’s parents were serving, as usual—Lindy whispered to David after they were done eating that maybe his mother would let them go for a little walk, if his knee felt up to it, and he said it did.
Mrs. Kauffman, who seemed newly on the fence regarding whether Lindy was good or bad for David, consulted with her recently
arrived husband with a glance, then gave a stern nod, cautioning them to meet the family in precisely one hour at the beach
to watch the town fireworks. They promised they would, then got up to dump the contents of their red plastic trays—the broken
lobster shells, the green liquid from the lobster innards, the devastated corn cobs, the empty silver-lined chip bags—into
the giant trashcans. Holding hands, they walked out into the evening, away from the noise of everyone talking and laughing
in the tiny clubhouse, out to the quiet lapping of the water on the shore.
Soon, they were upstairs in David’s small bedroom in the empty, quiet yellow cottage, and quickly they were naked, in between
the scratchy plaid sheets on his twin bed, which smelled musky and inviting like his skin, and quickly he slid inside her,
and soon they both cried out in relief.
Afterward, she lay with her arm over his chest, her leg draped over his. With darkness falling outside, he held her and stroked
her hair as the small fireworks around the neighborhood began to sound off intermittently and the breeze off the cove snaked
in through the open windows. “I love you so much, David,” she whispered, and he said he loved her, too, and she snuggled a
little closer, hoping that now their life would change, that now he’d know for sure he had something to live for.