‘Are you sure?’ I asked. Dryly. ‘Because I have to tell you, Carolyn, that’s pretty much entirely what it’s about for me.’
‘A divorce is bound to bring up all kinds of bad feelings on all sides, obviously, but what happened last night has nothing to do with any of that,’ she argued in the same rational, calm manner. I watched her take a deeper breath. A longer one. Her gaze was glued to mine, her eyes wide now, and the same hazel colour I knew I shared with her. I’d always hated that we had even that much in common. And I knew her tone of voice was all for show. I could see the panic lurking there, just beneath the skin, making her face seem tight. ‘We have to concentrate on Tim now. On what
he
needs and what
he
would want if he could sit up and tell us himself.’
She sounded so reasonable. So calm and
adult
. If she had been talking about someone else’s husband, who knows what I might have done? But she was talking about
Tim, and he was still mine. Legally, anyway. No matter how much she wanted that to be otherwise. No matter how much
he
might want it otherwise. She had no standing here, and he wasn’t awake to argue about
the unpleasantness
any longer.
For once, in all of this mess, I was the one who got to make the decisions. I couldn’t pretend that didn’t make me happy.
‘That was a pretty little speech,’ I said, my voice soft in the quiet of the corridor. Almost kind. ‘But I can’t help but notice that you can’t even bring yourself to apologize.’ I lifted my shoulders and then dropped them. ‘Saying that you
understand
why I might feel how I feel is really just a convoluted way of
not
apologizing for having made me feel that way in the first place.’
I shrugged again, as if I were done caring about any of this, and turned around. I thought maybe I’d head down to the cafeteria, which had to be serving breakfast any time now, surely. I could see light through the windows, indicating that morning had finally come, and instantly felt all the exhaustion I’d been holding at bay throughout the night slam into me. If not food, there had to be coffee …
‘Sarah.’
I was tired of the way she said my name and I didn’t stop, didn’t turn back again. I didn’t want to deal with her any more and I didn’t see why I should have to. Another decision I got to make, and it felt just as good as the first.
‘Sarah! You don’t understand!’ she cried out, as if the words were ripped from deep inside of her. She made a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a scream, and it made my stomach flip over in reaction. Or possibly foreboding. ‘For God’s sake,’ she gritted out, her voice heavy with something I couldn’t identify. ‘I’m pregnant.’
And that was when it hit me, for the very first time, right there in the sterile corridor of the Rivermark hospital with my whole family looking on, that my marriage might really be over, after all.
The days passed, becoming a week of wholly interchangeable mornings, noons and nights. November gave way to December. It snowed, twice, and there were more and more holiday ornaments festooning the corners of things. There were happy blinking lights and relentless carols. Wherever I turned, there was the insistence of Christmas cheer when
cheerful
was the very last thing I felt.
Tim was better, the doctors said.
They said it every day, with varying degrees of qualification. He had been taken off the drugs that were keeping him in a medically induced coma a few days after the accident, but he hadn’t woken up then as they’d expected him to do. He was now in a coma of his own making, the doctors told me, because there was so much healing he had yet to do inside, and because sometimes that’s just how it was with patients with his kind of injuries. He would wake up in his own time, they said. They hoped.
And I sat there with him after they left each day, the
dutiful wife, while my head spun wildly and I wondered why I couldn’t seem to feel anything but this great heaviness. It wasn’t sharp enough to be grief, or not entirely, but nor was it flattening enough to be full-on depression. It simply sat on me, thick and suffocating, allowing me to move and breathe but never, ever escape its weight.
They were having a baby.
They might even have
planned
to have a baby. That meant they had a future together – that there would be no way to pretend otherwise.
They had a future
. And I had …? I didn’t know.
I hadn’t wanted any further details that first night, when she’d told me. When, I supposed, I’d made her feel she had no choice but to tell me. I’d run in the opposite direction, in fact – had run so far through the slippery, antiseptic corridors and the dingy, forgotten stairwells that I’d found myself in the bowels of the hospital in some dim, forgotten radiology centre or other before I’d allowed myself to stop. There had been no one there to watch me collapse on the ground, bury my face in my hands, and sob. And sob. I could almost pretend it hadn’t happened. That she hadn’t said those words that changed everything, irrevocably.
I’d returned to the ICU waiting room when I could breathe again and the redness had gone down around my eyes. The baby Carolyn carried, the one that made all of the things I’d been thinking and hoping and holding onto so irretrievably, humiliatingly foolish, became one more
thing we didn’t discuss. Like my plan to bar her from Tim’s room. That just … disappeared. I might have been on fire with pettiness, but even I could see that banning the mother of a man’s child from his hospital room while he was balanced somewhere between life and death was not the right thing to do.
Even if he did still happen to be married to me.
And because I was still his legal wife, his official next of kin, I had to sit in his little hospital cubicle when his team of doctors appeared every morning and involve myself in his care. I had to ask the right questions and make sure I absorbed and understood the answers, especially after Carolyn announced that she was too fragile to do so. I had to be strong for her and her child, too, no matter how nauseous the idea of either of those things made me. I had to sign all the forms, and give all the necessary permissions. I had to hold his hand when the nurses were watching, because I worried what they would say about me if I didn’t, and then I hated myself for caring about something like that, something so small and vain. I had to act as if I hadn’t finally noticed that everything that had ever mattered to me was gone, after all.
Had been gone, in fact. I just hadn’t known it. Which, of course, made it that much worse.
But even worse than that was the part of me that liked the fact that I was the one who was Tim’s caretaker. He might have slept with my sister, impregnated her. The two of them might have been planning a glorious, romantic
future steeped in happy domesticity and a pack of kids. But I was his wife, and I was a good wife to him. Deep inside, I took a surprisingly fierce measure of pride in that. Perhaps because I knew that in the tending to his needs, in the navigation of the legalities and choices necessary to shepherd him through the tragedy that had befallen him, I got to spend long hours in that hospital pretending that he was still mine. The way he was supposed to be.
I lost track, somewhere in the whirl of endless days cooped up in the waiting room or in Tim’s cubicle, back and forth between the two without end, of what I wanted. Of who I was, certainly. Of what had been happening before the accident and what was likely to happen on the other side of this, should we all make it through. It was as if, in the face of such a crisis, everything else that seemed so important when things were normal just melted away and allowed for the delicate act of crisis management to occur. Not that there was anything
delicate
about all of this sitting and waiting and
being there
in the brief stretches of visitation permitted under ICU regulations. It was a grim and exhausting act of endurance, complicated by worry and tension and, of course, Carolyn.
Who hovered. And cried.
And cried
. And who clearly felt better, now that she’d confessed her pregnancy to all of us and half the hospital. Or more secure in her position, anyway. She might not have been capable of subjecting herself to the messy medical details of Tim’s care, but she
took to her role as the soon-to-be mother of his child far too easily for my taste – a fact that alternately made me pity her and want to smack her.
‘I feel much too pregnant,’ she said one morning, shifting in her chair and holding her stomach, just to illustrate the point. ‘Just … nauseous. And
thick
.’
It was clear to me that this statement was for my benefit, even though she was pretending to address my ever-frowning father. I glared down at the novel I’d been toting around as if I planned to get some reading done while my life shattered all around me, and pretended the sentences before me made some sense. In case I missed her reference, she clutched at her still-flat belly and let out a little moan. Next to her, my father looked disapproving, but, as always, remained silent.
‘I haven’t actually thrown up,’ Carolyn confided to the stale air in the waiting room, polluted with the scent of old coffee and despair. The latter undoubtedly mine. ‘But I feel like I might. Even though I’m
starving
. All the time.’
Was she labouring under the impression that her child – the one she’d made on my bed, with my husband – was an appropriately neutral topic? Knowing my sister, she probably did. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I found myself, for the first time in my adult life, actually taking my mother’s advice. I got up, left the room without further comment, and walked.
In whatever direction I could go, as long as it was
away
from the pregnancy narrative I’d rather claw off my ears
than listen to for a second more. Away from Carolyn and her inability to just stay quiet despite the fact that her very presence felt like an affront to me. Just –
away
.
I walked with no clear intention or direction. I loitered aimlessly in the gift shop, fingering the listless, insultingly bland gifts on display. I did a few laps around the glossy main lobby. Eventually I found myself heading towards one of the many glass entrances to the hospital. I wandered outside, and found the clear, shockingly cold December day crisp and bright and exactly what I needed. It was horribly, numbingly cold. But beautiful, even so. A hard sort of beauty, icy and inhospitable. Light bounced up from the hard-packed mounds of ploughed snow in the parking lot and along the walkways and danced from the ice left behind on the bare tree branches. I walked to the edge of the shovelled walkway and stood there, just breathing out clouds into the cold, staring out over one of the parking lots and into the glittering trees of the next block.
I had absolutely no idea what the hell I was doing here.
I was clinging so hard to my position as Tim’s wife … for what? To what end? So I could deliver the remains of my marriage into Carolyn’s hands the moment Tim woke up? What was my plan, exactly?
The baby thing killed me. It actually … ached. It hurt in ways that surprised me anew with each harsh breath. Because you don’t know how much you want things until they’re taken from you, do you? Until someone else takes them from you.
Tim and I had had a plan. We had always had plans. We’d made up a checklist for our life together and we’d taken great pleasure in ticking things off, one by one. Our own house –
check
. Our own practice –
check
. We’d planned to start trying for a baby in the next year or so, now that the practice was on its feet and doing well. It was the next chapter in our beautiful life, the one we’d plotted out together all those years ago in New York. I’d thought we were still on the same page. I’d thought we still wanted the same things.
I’d wanted his babies, if only in the abstract, and now I understood that would never happen. Not the way we’d planned it. Carolyn hadn’t just stolen my man. She’d stolen my future children, too.
It was one thing to try to accept that he’d had the affair. Another to try to get past the fact that he’d had it with Carolyn, of all people. I thought I’d been doing a fairly good job with that – though Lianne had claimed only yesterday on the phone that I was in denial. But I’d been prepared to take him back when the infatuation passed. I’d been more than prepared. Then, that long first night here in the hospital, I’d assumed that the accident would serve as a wake-up call to him, as these things often did, according to myth and legend. I’d assumed that it would wrench him –
us
– back from this particular cliff.
But all the things I’d thought were based on the assumption that once he came back, everything would be as it
was. That we could just … erase these past months. Pretend they’d never happened. Carry on as before.
A baby made that impossible, now and forever. Even if he and Carolyn were over. Even if he came back to me. There would always be
that child
. The physical manifestation of everything he’d thrown away, everything he’d done.
That poor kid
, a voice inside me whispered.
And I had no idea what to do with that. What it meant. I only knew that I was cold straight down into my bones, in ways that had nothing to do with the December weather, and there was no hope, now, that I was ever going to thaw.
The waiting room was, happily, empty when I returned.
I took the opportunity to claim the most comfortable seat on the small sofa near the anaemic-looking potted plant in the corner. I had just settled into it and was trying to rub heat back into my hands when Carolyn walked in.
Alone.
It occurred to me that this was the first time we’d been alone since That Day.
I didn’t have any idea how I should feel about that, and from the looks of it neither did Carolyn.
‘Oh,’ she said. She blinked as if seeing me threw her for a loop. Did she think I’d finally given up and gone home? Who knew what stories she told herself? I was sure they were epic. ‘Dad just left. We didn’t know where you were.’