The Wife He Left In A Coma (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #35)

Chapter 1

The first thing that came back was a chair.

Not the idea of a chair. The chair itself, dragged over tile, one leg catching and skipping. Someone sat down in it close to her head and let out a breath like they had been holding it since the parking lot.

“Hey,” Jason said. “Hey. It’s me.”

She could not answer him. She could not open her eyes, or move her hand, or make any part of her body admit she was in the room.

But she heard him. She heard him the way she used to hear a bad edit, every seam in it, and for a while she thought that meant she was awake and only needed a minute to prove it.

She spent a long time trying to prove it.

She tried her right hand first, because her right hand had always been the one that worked. Nothing. She tried her eyes. She tried her jaw. She went down the list of her own body like a woman checking the doors of a house at night, and every door was locked from the other side.

Then a machine sighed and took a breath for her, and she understood that the house was not hers anymore.

* * *

She learned what had happened the way she learned everything that fall. Somebody said it out loud over her.

A woman’s voice, unhurried, the kind of voice that had said the same sentence six hundred times. “Thirty-eight-year-old female, equestrian fall, October sixth.”

October sixth. That was the hunt breakfast at the Ridgely place, and after it the long ride home across the top of the hill field with the fog burning off.

She remembered the fog. She remembered the mare’s ears coming up.

She did not remember anything between the mare’s ears and this room, and she went looking for it the way you go looking for a word, and it was simply gone, and the place where it had been did not even ache.

“Six weeks,” the woman said. “We’re bringing her up slow.”

Six weeks was a strange thing to be handed in the dark. Mila turned it over. Six weeks was the whole of the fall. Six weeks was the leaves down, the hunt season half over, her mother’s birthday, the benefit at the club.

Six weeks was long enough for people to get used to it.

* * *

Jason came every night.

She knew the shape of him before he spoke. The door opened differently for him, faster, like he was still half in the hallway. He brought the outside in on his coat. In the first days he talked without stopping, and she lay under it and let it come.

He told her about the traffic. He told her the mare had been brought in and was being looked at, and then he stopped talking about the mare and never started again, which told her everything and nothing.

He told her he was sorry.

“I keep thinking about the field,” he said. One night, early, his voice thick and close. “I’m going to stop thinking about the field.”

He held her hand. She could feel that. Not the weight of it exactly, but the temperature — the fact that some part of her was warmer than the rest. She worked at that hand for hours after he left. She thought about it until she was sick with thinking. It did nothing.

In the second week she stopped trying while he was in the room, because trying while he was there and failing was worse than failing alone.

That was the first decision she made. It did not feel like the start of anything.

* * *

There were two nurses she liked.

One had a laugh she let out through her nose and shoes that squeaked on the turn by the window.

The other never said a word she did not mean and always, always told Mila what she was about to do before she did it.

I’m going to turn you now. I’m going to be about a minute.

Mila loved her with a purity she had not felt for anyone in years.

Nobody else talked to her. They talked over her, around her, about her. They stood at the foot of the bed and used her last name like a room number.

She had spent her whole working life listening to people who did not know they were being listened to. That was the job. You set the rig down and you stopped moving and eventually the room forgot you and started telling the truth. Six years since she had done it for money. Her hands still knew.

So she listened. There was nothing else to do with herself, and she was good at it, and being good at something was the only thing in that room that still belonged to her.

* * *

Somewhere in the third week she did an inventory.

It was the kind of thing you do after a fire, walking the rooms with a notebook, and she went at it in the same flat way.

Married eight years. The house at Greenspring, which was beautiful and had been his grandmother’s and had never once felt like hers, though she could have said so at any point in eight years and had chosen not to.

The foundation, which she had been the face of for six of them.

She was good at that too. She could work a room of donors until they were writing checks and thanking her for the privilege.

Her recording kit was in the closet in the blue room, in the case, with the cables coiled. Six years. She could have gotten it out on any Tuesday.

She had a mother in Delaware who called on Sundays.

She had Nikki, who had known her since before any of it.

She had a mare she had bought four years ago with her own money out of her own account, for no reason except that she had woken up one morning at thirty-four and understood that nothing in her life was hers.

That was the whole list. It did not take long.

She lay there and looked at it from every side, and the thing she kept landing on was not that the list was short.

It was that she had known it was short. She had known for a while.

She had simply decided that a person could be happy inside a short list, and then she had gone on deciding it every morning, the way you take a pill.

I was happy, she thought, and listened to how it sounded in the dark.

It sounded like a woman reading a statement.

* * *

In the second week she heard a woman’s shoes she did not know.

Flat, expensive, a sound like a door closing politely. They came in behind Jason and stopped about where the window was.

“I can wait outside,” the woman said.

“No,” Jason said. “Stay.”

Bethany Wilkes had run the Shepard Foundation since January. Mila had sat across a table from her a few times. She remembered a handshake, reading glasses, a good coat, and the particular warmth of a person who has decided in advance that you will like her.

The chair by the window scraped. Bethany sat down in it.

“You don’t have to talk,” she said. “I just didn’t want you here on your own.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know.”

Mila lay in the dark and thought, with a clarity that surprised her: no you don’t.

* * *

By the third week there was a rhythm to it.

Jason came at seven. Bethany came at half past. The foundation’s business got done for twenty minutes in low voices, and Mila learned more about the campaign from that room than she had learned in her last two years of chairing its benefit. Then the business ran out, and the two of them stayed.

That was the part she could not have predicted.

They stayed, and he talked, and the talking changed.

He told Bethany about the year the company nearly went under.

Mila knew there had been a year. She had known it the way you know weather in a country you have never visited.

She had not known that he drove to the terminal at two in the morning for nine straight nights and sat in the car looking at the cranes.

She had not known that he threw up in the parking lot before the bank meeting.

She had not known he still dreamed about it.

She had been married to him for four years when that happened. She had been in the house. She had asked him, more than once, if he was all right, and he had said long week, and she had believed him, because believing him was the arrangement.

“You never told anyone that,” Bethany said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

The pause went on. Mila could hear the vent working. A cart went past in the hall.

“Because then it’s real,” Jason said.

Mila lay there with her eyes shut and her mouth full of tube and thought: it was real. It was real in our kitchen. I made you eggs.

* * *

It went on like that, and it got worse by getting gentler.

He told Bethany he had never wanted the company. Not once, not at any point, and that he had known it at twenty-two and taken it anyway because his father had put a hand on the back of his neck at the funeral of a man Mila had never heard of and said, you’re up.

He told her he was afraid of turning into Larry. He said it plainly, without dressing it.

Mila had asked him about his father maybe a hundred times in eight years. She had gotten he’s fine, and he’s a lot, and once, memorably, on a plane, can we not.

And then one night Bethany asked about her.

“What’s she like?” Bethany said. “I’ve only met her at things.”

The pause was not long. That was what made it unbearable. He did not have to think.

“She’s great,” Jason said. “Everybody loves her. She’s — you know. She’s very calm. Nothing rattles her.”

“That’s a good thing to be.”

“It is.” A breath. “It’s restful.”

Restful, Mila thought.

She lay under her own ceiling and turned the word over and found that it was not a lie, which was the problem. She had been restful. She had built it herself, year by year, out of all the things she had decided not to say, and she had handed it to him finished and he had put his feet up on it.

Eight years. And he could not have told that woman one true thing about her if she had paid him.

* * *

She tried once more, that night, after they had both gone.

She put everything she had into her right index finger. She thought about the finger until the thought had edges. She thought about the reins and the latch on the tack room door and her mother’s hand and the one specific thing a finger is for, which is pointing at what you want.

Something happened. She was almost sure something happened.

In the morning a doctor said a word she did not know and then said, “It’s not nothing.”

“Meaning what?” Jason said.

“Meaning we watch it.”