43
This time, there was no tent.
Instead of bowers of hydrangeas, there would be laurel garlands and Christmas trees and fires in the fireplaces.
There would be no calligraphed place cards, because at an almost-elopement, Kate knew exactly who everyone was and where she wanted them to sit.
Besides, she wouldn’t mind if she never saw calligraphed anything ever again.
There would definitely not be a rehearsal dinner.
She had been in a medically induced coma for part of her hospital stay, enough so that she remembered almost nothing of the first two months.
Doctors told her that she had been close to death, flown by helicopter from Maynard-King to Rhode Island Hospital.
They said that she had had surgery immediately upon arrival and several other operations in quick succession.
They told her that she had been repeatedly stabbed and that she was very lucky that the knife had nicked her heart but missed a direct hit.
Visitors were limited in the ICU. She’d been told that Sam, Hadley, Tom, Jackie, Mike, Anne, and Tallulah had visited her; that even though CeCe was officially too young, she had been allowed one quick visit so she could leave Star with Kate.
Star was the last fragment of CeCe’s baby blanket, a four-inch square of threadbare flannel, and even though CeCe was now seven, she kept it close at all times—until tucking it into Kate’s hand while Kate slept.
Kate remembered none of those visits from the people she loved so much.
Doctors told her that Conor had stayed with her almost twenty-four seven since she was admitted. They told her that he had taken indefinite leave from his detective job at the Connecticut State Police and been with her night and day.
The nurses told her that he had learned how to do many of the things they did: check her IVs, watch her O2 level and call them if he was alarmed, put salve on her bedsores and turn her body to relieve pressure on the worst ones, massage her legs to make sure she was getting good circulation, check her catheter and the color of urine flowing into the bag to make sure there wasn’t blood in there.
Mostly he had just sat there, in a chair pulled close to Kate’s bed, looking at her.
He always had a book with him, but the nurses said he hardly ever seemed to read it.
Sometimes he held Kate’s hand. The nurses said that patients who stay in the hospital for a long time often get “helmet head”—where the hair gets so matted from having their head flat against the pillow.
But Kate never did have that issue. Conor brushed her hair every day, and he made sure it never got tangled.
Even though Kate was in a coma and didn’t remember her friends’ and family’s visits, she knew that Conor had been there every minute.
She had felt him with her, as if he had been lying in the bed with her.
She remembered all the words he said to her—how much he loved her, how when she got better they would go to Baffin Island and see narwhals and the northern lights, how he would learn the guitar so he could write her songs, how they would elope.
Every single day, she heard him ask the same question: Kate, will you marry me?
And every single day, she answered: Yes, Conor. I love you, I will marry you.
The problem was, she was in a coma and couldn’t form words or make her voice heard. But she believed that he knew what she was saying. Of course he did.
The day Kate woke up, she was completely disoriented.
She could see that she was in a hospital room.
When she’d been in the coma, she had traveled all kinds of places with Conor by her side—the Tower Suite at the Ocean House; the produce aisle in the Big Y; in her plane on the way to Block Island; in their bed at the Welcome Hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer; in the Cocteau chapel, just down the quai.
Conor was the first to see her open her eyes.
The funny thing was, she saw him open his too.
When she first woke up, she saw him in a chair beside her bed.
His eyes were closed, and he was asleep, making the little snoring sounds he always made when the sleep was deep.
She stared at him for a long time. He must have felt it, because suddenly his eyes flew open and he stood up and leaned over her.
“Kate,” he said. He grabbed her hand. He was both smiling and crying at the same time.
“Yes,” Kate said. “I will.”
For a moment, he looked confused.
She wondered whether he didn’t know what she was talking about; that would be strange, because she was just answering the question he had been asking every day since she’d gotten here, during all their dream travels, during all the hushed hospital nights.
But then he knew exactly what she meant; she could tell because of the way his eyes softened.
“Can I ask you again, now that you’re awake?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Will you marry me?”
And, for the second time since she’d opened her eyes, she said, “Yes. I will.”
Then Kate said, “Why not do it here? We’ll get the hospital chaplain to marry us. Our favorite nurses can be our witnesses.”
Conor had been surprised and even a little leery that she was so ready to get married right away.
After all they had gone through—the way their would-be summer wedding had been destroyed, how Kate’s trust in him had been shattered, the hurt he’d felt when she’d turned against him, all the pangs of doubt about each other—he wasn’t sure she would ever want to go through it again.
So, a few days after the hospital proposal, when the doctor had told her that getting out of bed was key to recovery, that walking a few steps each day was a goal, he asked her about it. They walked ten steps from the bed to the door of her room, where he had a wheelchair waiting.
Conor wheeled her to the family lounge at the end of the corridor.
It had two separate seating areas. A group of grown children were clustered at one end of the room, speaking in low tones with a doctor while a talk show blared from a large TV.
Conor pushed Kate’s chair to the quieter part of the lounge.
“This is nice, getting out of the room,” she said, taking in the surroundings—generic seascapes on the mint-green walls, a patterned sofa and matching chairs, and painted wooden signs with sayings like Live Love Laugh; Life’s a Beach; There is Always Hope.
“I only take you to the best places,” Conor said.
“You do, indeed,” she said.
“You went through a nightmare,” Conor said.
“Let’s not talk about that,” she said.
“We don’t have to,” he said. “But you really want to marry me, after everything?”
She looked into Conor’s blue eyes, and her own vision clouded up with tears.
Her stab wounds were covered with bandages—the doctors hadn’t stitched them up, because that could trap bacteria inside and cause more infection.
When she closed her eyes, she sometimes had visions of them—she didn’t want to say their names or even think of them—the people of 1740, the girl who had stabbed her.
“I do,” she said. “I want to marry you. And what about you? Do you still want to marry me, after what I did?”
“What did you do?” he asked, looking confused.
“I wrecked it the first time. I doubted you. I believed her just long enough . . .”
“Her?”
“I don’t want to say her name,” Kate said, shaking her head.
“Love means that you never have to,” Conor said, and they both laughed.
Conor held her hand. The worried look had returned to his face. Their time in the family lounge had taken a lot out of Kate. He sensed that without her having to tell him, and he wheeled her back to her room and lifted her into bed.
Then it was October.
A few days before Halloween, Kate was well enough to leave the hospital but still not ready to go home, so Conor hired a private ambulance to drive her to a nursing facility in Westerly.
Sam had gotten her room ready for her—with her favorite blanket, a pile of books, the kai body cream she loved, and some paintings from the gallery.
The nursing home’s halls were decorated with jack-o’-lanterns and cutouts of witches and ghosts.
On Halloween, the residents gathered in the dining hall, and volunteers wearing costumes passed out Snickers bars and Reese’s Cups.
Thanksgiving came. Conor had hoped to take Kate home for a big dinner with the family, but the doctors advised she give it another few weeks.
She still needed wound care to make sure the infections didn’t recur, and she needed more physical therapy to get her strong enough to move with more confidence and return to her regular activities.
Kate worked as hard as hell. She not only did PT, she also continued the exercises after the therapist left for the day.
She stopped calling for help getting to the bathroom and did it all on her own—including showers.
Instead of picking at the food, she ate full meals.
She knew she needed to gain weight—she had lost twenty-five pounds when she was in the coma—so she concentrated on building up her muscle mass with healthy food and exercise.
Her mental health was precarious—she kept having nightmares, and for the first time in her life, she had panic attacks.
She had almost died; her heart had stopped more than once.
She hadn’t felt pain at the moment of being stabbed—she’d felt numb.
The pain came later; she’d felt it even when she was in the coma, writhing in her body, beneath the sea of morphine.
Conor protected her from the news the best he could.
He wouldn’t let anyone bring up what had happened.
It was up to Kate, if and when she wanted to talk about it.
Slowly, she began to ask him questions. Conor told her just as much as she could take at a time.
And every time she absorbed a detail, she’d get incredibly tired and have to go to sleep.
And then she had a visitor.