Chapter 7
Christina called at ten past seven on a Tuesday morning at the end of January, and Mila knew before she picked up, because nobody in that family had called that landline at seven in the morning ever.
“It’s Dad,” Christina said.
“Is he alive.”
“Yes. Yes. He’s — they’ve got him. He went down on the stairs at the office. Marva found him.” A ragged breath. “It’s a stroke. A big one, they think. He’s at the wing.”
Mila stood in the cottage with her coat half on and her mouth open and nothing in it.
“Christina.”
“I know.”
“Why are you calling me?”
There was a silence on the line, and then Christina said, in a voice Mila had never heard out of her, “Because I’ve got about four people in the world and three of them are Shepards.”
* * *
She did not go that day, or the next.
She told herself there were reasons and the reasons were even true. She was not family in any way that counted anymore. She had cut contact to zero nearly three weeks ago and the man at the middle of it all was sitting in a corridor in that building.
But mostly it was the building.
She had not been back inside the Shepard Wing since November. She had driven past it twice and both times had felt her hands go on the wheel.
So she stayed at the farm, and did her sessions, and on the Thursday Christina called again with the word Mila had already worked out for herself three days before anybody said it to her.
“He can hear,” Christina said. “That’s the thing they keep saying. He’s in there, he tracks, he knows you. He just can’t — nothing comes out. Nothing at all. Not a word, not his hand, nothing that’s any use.” Her voice cracked in the middle of it. “He looks at me like I’m supposed to do something.”
Mila sat down on the edge of the bed.
“They keep saying it might come back,” Christina said. “Weeks, months, they don’t know. Mila, I don’t know what to do in there. I read him the paper for forty minutes yesterday and I nearly went out of my mind.”
“Christina.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not doing this at you, I know I’m not allowed to —”
“Does he know what’s happening to him?”
A pause. “What?”
“Does he understand where he is and what’s been done to him and what everyone’s saying,” Mila said.
Her voice had gone somewhere very flat and very level and it was frightening even her.
“Has anyone told him? Out loud? Not the doctors doing their rounds at the foot of the bed. Has one single person sat down next to Larry Shepard and told him what has happened to him and what day it is and what’s going to happen next? ”
The silence went on a long time.
“I don’t know,” Christina said.
“No,” Mila said. “Nobody has.”
* * *
She went on the Saturday.
She drove herself, which took forty minutes and hurt for most of them, and was further than she had driven since October, and she parked in the visitor garage and sat in the truck for a while.
Then she went in past the elevators, past the granite with the name cut into it, and she did not look at it, and she took the stairs one at a time with her hand on the rail because the elevator was the elevator and she was not doing that today.
She had thought the smell would be the thing.
It was not the smell. It was the sound: that particular corridor hush, carts and soft shoes and somewhere a monitor doing what monitors do, and the whole of her body understood where it was a second or two before her mind agreed to it, and she had to stand at a window at the end of the hall for a minute and breathe.
A nurse asked if she was all right.
“I’m fine,” Mila said. “I used to be a guest.”
Then she went and found the room.
* * *
Larry Shepard looked smaller than a man that size should be able to look.
His face had come down on one side. His left hand lay on the blanket like something set down. He was propped slightly up, and his eyes were open, and they came across the room to her the instant she stepped into the doorway.
Everything in her went quiet.
There he was. Right there. In there, looking out, the whole of him, awake behind a face that had stopped working — and around him the room was doing what rooms do.
A nurse was writing at the console with her back to him.
A television was on with the sound down.
Two dying arrangements sat on the sill where no one would ever move them.
Mila crossed to the chair beside the bed and sat down in it and put her cane against the wall.
“Hello, Larry,” she said. “It’s Mila. It’s Saturday morning, it’s the first of February, and it’s about ten o’clock.”
His eyes stayed on her.
“You had a stroke on Tuesday at the office,” she said.
“You went down on the stairs and Marva found you and got you here fast, and fast is the thing that matters, so she did well.” She kept her voice completely ordinary.
It cost her a great deal to keep it completely ordinary.
“It’s a bad one. Your right side isn’t working and your speech isn’t working.
They think it may come back, some of it, and they don’t know how much and they don’t know when, and anybody who tells you a number is guessing. ”
Behind her the nurse had stopped writing.
“You are in the wing you paid for,” Mila said. “Which I imagine is not lost on you.”
Something happened in Larry Shepard’s face. Not a smile. Something at the corner of the eye, a shift, the sort of thing you would never see unless you had spent six weeks learning to read a ceiling.
“Jason’s outside,” she said. “Christina’s been here since Tuesday and she’s not sleeping.
People are going to come in here all day and talk about you over the top of your head, and I can’t stop that.
But I’m going to tell you what’s happening as it happens, every time I’m in this room.
That’s the arrangement. You don’t have to do anything for it. ”
His eyes did not leave her.
“The other thing,” she said, “is that you are not on your own in there. I know that’s what it feels like. I know exactly what it feels like, and I’m the only person in this family who does, so you’ll have to take it from me.”
The corner of his eye again.
And then, slowly, with a great deal of effort, the left hand came about an inch across the blanket toward her.
Mila put her hand over it.
She sat there for a long moment with her father-in-law’s hand under hers, a man who had never in a decade asked her a single question about herself, and found that her eyes had gone and that she did not particularly care who saw it.
* * *
Jason was in the corridor when she came out.
He was standing with his back against the wall by the window, in yesterday’s shirt, holding a cup of coffee he was clearly not drinking, and when he saw her he came off the wall fast and then stopped himself, visibly, like a man hauling on a rein.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
Neither of them said anything for a moment. It had been two and a half months since the room with the discharge nurse in the doorway, and she had not been prepared for what it would be like to be in a hallway with him.
He looked terrible. He looked like a man who had been up since Tuesday.
“Christina said you came,” he said. “I didn’t — I want to be clear I didn’t ask her to call you. She told me after.”
“I know.”
“Okay.” He nodded. He was looking at her the way you look at weather. “How are you. That’s not — I’m not doing a thing. I’m asking.”
“I’m all right.”
“You drove.”
“I drove.”
Something moved across his face that he put away fast.
“He squeezed my hand,” Mila said. “Left one. You should tell the neurologist if nobody’s seen it.”
“They said he’s not —” Jason stopped. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “Sorry. Yes. I’ll tell them.”
“Jason.” She waited until he looked up. “Talk to him. Out loud. Tell him what day it is and what’s happened and what’s going to happen. Every time you walk in there.”
“They said he probably can’t —”
“He can,” Mila said.
And then she watched her husband work it out.
It arrived in his face in stages, which took perhaps three seconds and which she would think about for a long time afterward: the sentence, then the sense of it, then the six weeks behind it, then the chair by the window, then the thing he had said into that room the night before they brought her up.
He put his hand over his mouth.
“Oh,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Mila—”
“No,” she said. “Not here. Not now. That’s not why I said it.” She picked her cane up off the wall. “Your father’s the one in the bed. Go and talk to him.”
* * *
She went back on the Monday, and the Wednesday, and the Saturday after that.
She did not examine why. There were things she was not examining that month and she kept them in a neat stack.
Larry got a routine out of her the way the barn had: what day it is, what time it is, what has happened, what is going to happen next, who is in the building.
She read him the racing results, badly, and told him so.
She told him the mud had come and that Nikki’s second field was a disgrace.
She told him the doctors’ names and what each of them did, because nobody had, and by the end of the second week he had begun to look at the door when he heard her cane in the hall.
Jason was always there and always leaving. That was how they managed it: he went down for coffee, or out to the car, or to find someone, and they passed each other in doorways like two people working different shifts on the same job.
It was Christina who said it out loud, on the eleventh of February, standing in the corridor with a vending machine sandwich she was not eating.
“They’re going to send him home this week.”
“Home where?”
Christina looked at her.
“He can’t do Bolton Hill,” she said. “It’s four floors and an elevator from 1928. He needs a ground floor and a bathroom on it and a bed that isn’t up a staircase, and they want a hospital bed in the room and hoists and God knows.”
“So put him in a facility.”
“He begged us not to.” Christina’s chin went. “That’s not a figure of speech. He got his hand up and he begged us. Jason was there. We’re not doing it.”