CHAPTER 4
LAYNE
I stop going home at night.
Nobody asks me to stay. Renn doesn’t suggest it, Jonas doesn’t want it, and the look on the charge nurse’s face when I request the recliner in the corner of his room is a whole sermon in itself.
But the day nurse mentioned, casually, charting, that he sleeps badly.
That he wakes hard. That twice now he’s sat up gasping and couldn’t say why.
So I stay. I sit in the recliner with a hospital blanket over the bump and I read feasibility studies on my phone until the words swim, and when his breathing changes I look up, and when it steadies I look down, and this is marriage now.
Vigil from a distance. Loving someone with the lights low so you don’t scare him.
The nurses get used to me fast. Stay in a room long enough and you become equipment.
Dana brings a second blanket without being asked, sets it on the chair arm, says nothing.
A night nurse named Priya slips me Jell-O cups meant for patients and I eat them at three in the morning, lime, the worst flavor, the only one they ever have left, and it becomes a ritual so fast that by the third night there’s a lime Jell-O waiting on the tray table and neither of us mentions it.
Hospitals run on these small smuggled kindnesses. Nobody writes them in a chart.
“You don’t have to do that,” Jonas says on the first night, when the nurses turn the lights down. He’s polite about it. He’s always polite now. Politeness is what he’s built where the marriage used to be.
“I know.”
“It can’t be comfortable.”
“It’s a recliner, not a rack. Sleep, Jonas.”
He studies me, and I know what he sees. A woman he was told about, enormous with his child, installed in his room like furniture.
He doesn’t fight it. He turns his face to the ceiling and eventually he sleeps, and I watch the bandage at his temple rise and fall, and I miss him so much it’s a physical altitude, something with pressure and thin air.
The second night he talks in his sleep, and I go rigid in the recliner, pen stopped over a lighting schedule, because Jonas has always talked in his sleep.
It’s how I learned he loved me, actually, months before either of us said it.
Asleep, slack-jawed, unguarded, he turned into my hair and said, clear as a bell, there you are.
Tonight he says, “Tell them to move the curb cut.”
I wait, barely breathing.
“Wheelchairs,” he murmurs, dead asleep. “She’s right. Move it.”
And I sit in the dark with my hand over my mouth, because two years ago I made him move a curb cut at the Asheville site, we argued about it on-site in the rain, wheelchairs and strollers and the dignity of a front entrance, and somewhere in the blue-shaded ruins of his memory, a curb cut survived.
It’s nothing. It’s everything. I don’t sleep for another hour.
The third day I bring sketching pencils, and while he sleeps in the afternoon I redraw the nursery at a small desk by the window, and when he wakes he watches me for a moment before I notice.
“You draw fast,” he says.
“Occupational hazard.”
“What is it?”
“Your daughter’s room.” I turn the pad around. “The crib is currently winning the war. You were coming home to fix it, the night of the crash. You’d promised to fix it badly.”
He looks at the sketch a long time. The crib, the rocker, the dresser, the window with its wrong light.
“Move the crib to the east wall,” he says finally. “That room gets western sun. She’ll never nap with the light in her eyes.”
I drew the crib on the east wall. It’s on the east wall in every sketch I’ve made for weeks, including the ones in my sketchbook at the hospital three days ago, which he saw over my shoulder and doesn’t remember seeing.
“That’s the plan,” I say, and write nothing down, and say nothing more, and my heart pounds the whole rest of the afternoon.
That night, I fall asleep sometime after two, slumped sideways in the recliner, my neck at an angle I’ll pay for tomorrow.
I wake to a sound I have never heard from my husband in three years of sharing a bed.
It’s a gasp, violent, dragged in through his teeth, and then he’s thrashing, tangled in the lines, and he’s saying no, no, no, and the heart monitor is shrieking, and I’m up before I’m awake, across the room, and I do it without thinking, three years of muscle memory, I put my hand on his shoulder and say his name.
He comes up out of the nightmare swinging.
Not at me. Not aimed. Just a body fighting its way out of a wreck, and his forearm catches my shoulder and knocks me back a step, and I catch the IV stand to keep my feet because my balance belongs to the baby now, and the door bangs open, lights, Dana, another nurse, and Jonas is sitting bolt upright, wild-eyed, drenched, and he looks at me and there is nothing there.
Nothing. Worse than nothing, because there’s fear.
“Who is she?” He’s fighting the oxygen line, voice cracked and loud. “Who is she? What is she doing in here? Somebody—”
“Mr. Palmer.” Dana, calm, firm, hands up. “You’re at St. Catherine’s. You’re safe. It’s a dream.”
“There’s a woman in my room.” He’s staring at me like I’ve crawled out of the wreck myself, and his hand is groping for the call button, for anything. “I don’t— I don’t know her. Get security. Get her out.”
“Jonas.” I say it steady. I say it soft. I have said his name a hundred thousand times and I say it now with everything I have left, because names are ropes, and I’m throwing him the only one I have. “Jonas. It’s me.”
He flinches from it. From my voice, from my hand, from the huge impossible fact of my body, and I see it happen in real time: the fear is real, and I am the cause of it, and every instinct I have says touch him, hold him, ride it out, and every one of those instincts will make it worse.
I put my hands up. I step back.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I’m going.”
Security comes because he demanded it, two men I know by name, Ray and Tom, who’ve driven me to galas, who carried my gift bags, and now they stand in my husband’s doorway in the terrible posture of men being paid to remove a pregnant woman from a hospital room.
“Mrs. Palmer.” Ray can’t look at me. “Let’s get you some air.”
Behind them, in the doorway of the family suite across the hall, a figure in silk. Helena arranged the suite. And the suite has an occupant, because Helena thinks three moves ahead and always has.
Estelle takes in the scene in one sweep. The thrashed bedding, Jonas’s face, me with my hands up and my coat half on. And she crosses the hall and goes to him, uninvited, unhesitating, and sits on the edge of his bed, and puts her hand over his.
“Hey,” she murmurs. “Hey. You’re safe. It’s a dream. You’re safe.”
And Jonas, my Jonas, who used to reach for me in his sleep without waking, who once told me my heartbeat was the only sound that could shut his brain off, grabs her hand with both of his and holds on hard, and his breathing starts to slow, and his eyes close.
I stand in the corridor and watch another woman bring my husband down from the ledge.
Ray shifts beside me, dying inside. “Mrs. Palmer. Please.”
I go. What else is there. I walk down the corridor with my coat over my arm and my belly leading, escorted, and the corridor is very long and very bright, and I make it almost to the elevator before my face breaks.
I don’t sob. I learned young not to give a building that satisfaction. I stand at the elevator with tears running straight down, silent, and Ray pretends to study the elevator indicator like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen.
Downstairs, eventually, I sit in the car in the hospital pickup lane and don’t start it, because the driver went home hours ago and it’s just me, my hands at ten and two, the city doing its late-shift glitter through the windshield.
The baby kicks. High, under my ribs, the spot that’s bruised from her heels. She’s on her own schedule these days, which is to say mine means nothing, she dances at one a.m. and sleeps through board calls.
“I know,” I tell her. “He didn’t mean it.”
And it’s true, that’s the hell of it, he didn’t mean any of it, and it doesn’t help at all. There’s no one to be angry at. There’s just a nightmare, and a wreck, and a stranger wearing my husband’s face, and a woman in silk holding his hand in the dark.
I drive home with the windows down, cold air on my wet face, and the whole way I’m rehearsing going back tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, because I made vows in a church to a man who cried before I was halfway down the aisle.
Nobody warns you that for better or worse can arrive in the same week. Nobody warns you it can mean both men in the same body.
The next morning Dana finds me in the cafeteria line and buys my coffee against about six hospital rules, stirring sugar with a pen because they’re out of stirrers.
“He settled,” she says. “Ms. Larson left around one. He slept.” She says it carefully, no allegiance in it, just a nurse handing me facts.
Then, quieter: “After you went down, I gave it to him straight. Told him I’ve been on this floor since before the crash.
That you two came in for every appointment.
That he brought you decaf from the good place and sat in the hallway working so you wouldn’t be alone five minutes. ”
The coffee stops halfway to my mouth.
“I told him: from what I saw before the crash, sir, you adored her. Whatever you feel right now, you should know that.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. Looked at the ceiling a long time.” She hesitates, and her eyes are kind, and I brace. “Then, at the door, he asked me about Ms. Larson. Did he love her. Before.”
The cafeteria hums. Somebody’s tray clatters.
“And?”
“I told him the truth.” Dana shrugs. “You married the other one, I said. Then I left, before my license got involved.”
I sit with that for a minute, both hands around the cup.
Somewhere upstairs is a man asking nurses whether he loved someone else, and it hurts, God, it hurts, and under the hurt, small and stubborn and probably stupid, there’s this: he asked.
He stood at the door and asked. The man who pulled his hand away from me is now pulling at the edges of the story everyone handed him.
“Thank you,” I say. “For the coffee. For the truth.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Dana crumples her cup, dead on, into the bin across the room. “He’s being discharged Friday. Word is he won’t go to your house. It’s all unfamiliar, he says. He’s asking for the old penthouse.”
The old penthouse. The bachelor place on Fifth that he kept for the gym and the view and then kept out of habit. The penthouse where, I happen to know, because Mrs. Doyle once threatened to quit over it, there are boxes in the storage room that no one has ever thrown out.
Boxes from before me.
“He can’t be alone,” I say. “Renn won’t release him alone.”
“No.” Dana watches me. “So whoever he asks for is who he gets.”