Any Bitter Thing (3 page)

What I remember with such high-pitched clarity is not so much the bandages and casts coming off one by one, or the pea-green walls of the P.T. room, or the physical therapists palpating the tender spots and apologizing in soft voices, or my record-breaking graduation from walker to crutches to cane to my old shoes, which no longer fit. No. The memories that stuck—crystalline in detail, though temporally obscure—happened in the between-time, in that magical space between the big Before and After, in those softly falling forty-three hours. My head seemed like a room I lived inside.

At the hospital I did nothing but listen.
This one’s not going to make it.
That’s how they referred to me:
This one.
Maybe they said it out loud, though I cannot imagine such a thing. One of them was plain tired. Another had just discovered a lump in his little girl’s neck. Another was ready to quit her residency and didn’t care whether I lived or died.

I didn’t mind. I understood. These things I heard in my between-time did not feel burdensome, they merely existed. People’s desires have a way of curling into a room like smoke, and there I was, breathing in.

They scanned my head. They removed my spleen. They rummaged amongst the bones in my back. I had no idea how many bones made up a back. They put a plate in my knee, screws and pins and a powder made of other people’s bones. They stitched a thigh muscle that had split down the middle. They did not do these things all at once, on the same day. But they might as well have. Time felt long, and short.

They picked sequins of asphalt out of my face with
tweezers, and later with lasers. Tick, tick, tick went the sound, like stones being tapped underwater, like time being lost.

They buckled me into a rig that turned like a barbecue spit. Someone came in and rotated me every couple of hours. Or minutes. Time did not seat right. Light and dark did not match day and night.

Later, in the recovery room, or in the room where they clamped me into the spit, I discovered how much Mariette depended on me. I had never known this about my friend, how critical to her was my existing; how, if it looked as though I were going to die first, she would offer to trade places—despite her husband, her little son—if only to escape another loss. These thoughts flew like frightened birds from the friend I thought I knew, and I was surprised.

I heard Drew, too, imagining himself over the long haul failing the test of devotion. That he had already failed the test of devotion in the short haul weighed hard upon him. There was a woman somewhere; he was sorry. I have seen the northern lights twice, and one time I heard them as well, and that’s what my husband’s thoughts sounded like. Like the northern lights. Sad and unreachable.

I had been “out”—unconscious but not gone. I had arrowed through the mist and landed on the road. I’d been moved by a stranger, a bystander, my witness. My witness fled, gunned his engine, and raced back to the corporeal world, leaving me stranded. But I did not feel alone. A gate had opened, and my head filled beautifully with memory.

Then, in the cool, humming, middle-of-the-night hospital quiet, came an alteration in the air. A slow warming. My uncle—Father Mike, twenty-one years gone—stepped through that open gate.

After a long struggle, hours or minutes, I opened my eyes. An angel’s wing. Threads of silver and gold. The frayed black cuff of my uncle’s jacket. A crescent-shaped hole where he’d lost a button. An amber flash of his tiger’s-eye ring. His voice sounded like poured cream, exactly as I once knew it.

I was so happy to see him, so unutterably happy.
Finally
, I thought again, and fell asleep, moving mercifully back in time.

Hours later, or minutes, I told Mariette,
Father Mike was here.
In her face I saw relief and tears.
Drew
, Mariette cried,
Drew, get over here, she’s awake.

Hallucination. Morphine. Trauma.

No, I insisted.

You’re awake now. Look around.

I woke preoccupied by a life I had not lived since I was nine years old. My explanation—that my long-dead uncle had spoken to me from the great beyond—was not something the people around me were willing to countenance.

So, I was awake. Awake, but still gone. And I would not come back without him.

LAUDS

FOUR

I returned home after rehab in mid-August, having missed most of two seasons. My garden, a tangle of daylilies and crabgrass and clumps of unwatered coreopsis, appeared to have fallen over dead in a fit of despair. I could hardly believe how the physical world had changed in my absence.

What the garden lacked, the florist had made up for. On my porch was gathered a robust delivery of tagged bouquets—from Mariette, from the across-the-street neighbors, from my colleagues in the Hinton-Stanton Regional High School Teachers’ Association. I hobbled up the steps and flipped open the cards. Everett Whittier, the school principal, had sent a centerpiece with candles; next to that bloomed a perky spray of daisies from the cafeteria ladies, and a funereal raft of gladioli from the student council. I plucked a single bloom from the rest and held it, admiring its bend and curl, shutting out the world. This is how I was in the aftermath—I’d lost my sense of time as a current, and instead moved stop-motion from one discrete moment to the next. This new acquaintance with the present tense was partly a function of my injuries. I had to think so much about each
motion simply as a way to avoid physical pain. But it was more than that. My skin felt thinner and vaguely scorched, as if the barrier between it and the pressing-in of the daily world—its stench and heat and racket—had vanished.

Drew was watching me, gauging my face. We had talked little since the accident, though he had driven to the Portland rehab center every day, fifty-eight miles one way. “Come on, Lizzy,” he said. “Let’s get you inside.”

“Wait.” I made a slow circuit along the porch, leaning intermittently on my cane, looking down at my dead garden.

“I meant to keep it up,” Drew said. He rattled the doorknob, trying to coax me inside.

“I’m not blaming you.”

“I know you’re not.”

“I’m just looking at everything,” I told him. “Looking at how everything changes.”

“Probation,” Drew said. “Spoiled little brat half kills a person and what does she get? Three months, suspended. We could sue her ass, Lizzy.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to be the type of person who sues.”

“I want somebody to suffer.”

What he meant was that he wanted somebody to suffer more than us. Instead of us.

“They should’ve strung her up by her pink toenails,” he said. His jaw pulsed, and I could see that he was using his entire body not to cry. As part of her sentence, my joyrider had composed a handwritten apology—a yarn-ball of mangled syntax, all the
i
’s dotted with empty circles.

“Drew,” I said. “You’ve been a champ. Don’t beat yourself up.”

His brow creased. “Why would I beat myself up? I’m not the one who stole a car and tried to kill somebody with it.”
The conversation we had been not having all summer was still going on. It was the same conversation we had been not having the night of my accident, when I tore out of the house in anger, in the rain, in the dark.

“That’s not what’s bothering you,” I said.

He shook his head. “You can’t hear my thoughts, Lizzy.” We stared at each other over the ripple of flowers left by people who wanted my homecoming to look festive. That moment is so clear to me still, the way he burned with rage for the kid behind the wheel, a stranger who had created the circumstance under which Drew Mitchell bumped into the limits of his willingness. I knew this much about my husband of five years: wherever he had been before the accident, he had worked his way back to me since; but he would prefer to have made the journey of his own volition. There was no way now to prove to himself that he would not have left his wife if an Act of God hadn’t forced him to be faithful.

We said nothing for a long while, the fact of his emotional infidelity floating between us. Drew looked diminished, worn out, less like the boy I’d known in college and more like the man our marriage had turned him into.

I plucked a flower from one of the bunches and handed it to him.

“It was your own thoughts you heard,” he said patiently. “All those drugs made them seem like somebody else’s.” He rattled the door again, probably thinking that if only he could get me inside our house and reacquaint me with our cluttered rooms, then we could forget the ways in which we had both been altered.

The accident had changed my face. A grayish crescent, like a man’s five o’clock shadow, cupped one side of my jaw, and a notched scar folded across my eyebrow like a permanent expression of doubt. I’d been told the scar would whiten and the shadow fade, but at the time these alterations seemed emergent and necessary, as if some long-hidden part of me were struggling
to reappear. The way Drew stared made me wonder if I looked freshly harmed in the world outside the hospital, unloosed from the consolation of other patients and their mangled pieces.

“Lizzy. Honey.” He urged me toward the door. “Come in.”

I wanted to be home, and I was home. But I was remembering a place I hadn’t lived in for over twenty years. It was still there, just across town, now inhabited by a priest who had retooled the sign and had the driveway graded. All summer long I’d been on the verge of panic, all through the circus act I’d been practicing like a dutiful child, wearing knee braces and back girdles and ugly shoes, doing squats and wall slides and press-ups and step-downs, all the literal and figurative hoops I jumped through because I believed that jumping through them would deliver me from panic and lead me home. If only my body could remember how to do this and this and this, I would be home. That’s what I kept saying, adrift in that feeling: Once I can bend my leg, I’ll be home. Once I can lift my arm, I’ll be home. Once I can turn my head without a bolt of pain, I’ll be home.

Well, now I was home. And it wasn’t home.