Family Man (25 page)

“How are you?” some nameless person asked.

“I’m fine.”

My voice was too loud, shattering the unspoken sanctity of the place. In the room next door, I imagined the women stopping in their prayers, raising their heads toward my voice.

Grief. They’d chalk it up to that.

I bent over and put my head in my hands.

White tiles. Blue flecks.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Vinnie stood up. He took the person out of the room. I didn’t hear what he said. I didn’t care what excuse he made for me.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

At home, her clothes hung in the closet. A stash of empty bottles waited for me to throw them away. I couldn’t dare hope it might be the last time, because that would be wrong. That would be cruel. That would be contrary to what every fucking person who walked through the door expected me to feel. That would make me heartless and ungrateful.

Inhuman.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Those ladies next door brought in some food,” Vinnie said to me quietly. “They said to tell you to help yourself.”

“I will.”

“Trey, honey, maybe you should eat. Maybe you should go outside?”

“I’m fine.”

He sighed. He sat next to me and put his hand on my back, heavy and warm between my shoulder blades. I moved over, curling up against him like a kid. His shirt was soft. His body warm. He smelled so good. So much better than the horrible urine and plastic smell of the hospital. He smelled like shaving lotion, and laundry detergent, and a hint of sweat. A wonderfully comfortable smell that was home. That was
him
. I wrapped my arms around his waist.

He held me close. He didn’t say anything else.

I’d never loved him more than I did in those moments of silence.

Time wore on, but contrary to everything we’d been told, nothing changed. The doctors’ grim expressions began to be replaced by confusion and occasionally outright frustration. She wasn’t getting better. She wasn’t getting worse. They had a hundred theories, but no sooner would they present them than some test would prove them wrong.

I had a hundred questions, and they had no answers. Would she be this way another day? Another week? Another month? As long as a year? They didn’t know. I hadn’t gone to work in nearly two weeks. How long could I continue to live in the confines of the ICU? At what point did one walk out the door and resume their day-to-day life?

“Come on,” Vin said to me. “We’re leaving.”

I looked up at him. “I’m okay here.”

“Rachel’s here now, and your grandmother. They’ll stay tonight. But you need to go home.”

Home.

The word meant nothing to me. He took my arm and led me like a child down the hall, into the elevator, into his car.

I sank into the passenger seat. I leaned back and closed my eyes. Visions of white tiles with their blue flecks and the pulsing red lines of the heart monitors floated behind my lids. I could still hear the beep of it in my ears. Weariness filled me, choked me, made me long to cry, if only I had the energy. The seat of Vinnie’s car was curved and soft, so different from the stiff-backed chairs in the ICU. My eyes began to sting and I swallowed hard, determined not to embarrass myself.

At home, Vinnie took me into the shower. Some part of me knew this could be erotic. It might be distracting, or comforting, but the weight of my exhaustion was too much. He was gentle, and I closed my eyes and let him wash me clean. Afterward, he put me to bed. He tucked me in with a quiet devotion I’d never had from my mom. He brushed my hair back from my forehead.

“Trey, honey, tell me what you need.”

I need it to end.

But I couldn’t say that. Those weren’t words anybody was allowed to say. I closed my eyes and shook my head.

“Sleep then,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

Yes, he’d be there. The idea of asking him to lay with me in my narrow twin bed, to hold me, maybe to make love to me, crossed my mind, but only briefly. I was too tired. Too drained. Too empty.

He held my hand as I fell asleep. But a few seconds later, he shook me gently. “Trey, wake up.”

Was he actually here? Was I still asleep? It felt like I’d barely laid down, and yet my limbs were heavy and unresponsive, as if I’d been asleep for days.

“Trey, we have to go. Come on. Hurry up and get dressed.”

I sat up. I tried to make sense of the world.

The clock on my nightstand said 3:17 a.m.

I was in my own bed. Vinnie was there. “Trey?” There was a frightening note of urgency in his voice.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Rachel called.”

I looked over at him. I saw the tension and confusion in his eyes.
My mother is dead,
I thought. But the thought was small, like a secret locked in a box. I couldn’t let it out yet. I couldn’t face how it looked in the light.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Your mother’s awake.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

He had to hand me clothes, one item at a time. Shirt. Pants. Shoes without socks. Somebody who was not me put them on and followed him out the door into the cold, damp night. In his car, I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window.

“Awake,” I said.

To taste the word. To test its weight.

To see how it felt.

It hurt.

It hurt so much, it stopped my breath. It brought the tension of the last week crashing forward, a pressure in my forehead, a terrible tightness across my back. It felt something like panic. My heart raced. My head spun.

“Trey?” Vinnie asked, his voice cautious and scared.

“I’m fine.”

I thought maybe it was a lie.

Into the hospital. Down halls I knew all too well, into the elevator. I couldn’t look at Vinnie. I stared at the ceiling as the elevator took us up.

Awake.

Outside my mother’s door, a knot of people turned our way. Rachel, Gram, several nurses, two of the doctors. They were all smiling. Gram reached out and took my hand. I couldn’t look at her, either.

“I thought about calling hours ago, but you needed the sleep,” she said.

“What happened?” Vinnie asked.

I stared at the doctor as he attempted to explain the unexplainable. She had started to move and make noises. They’d decided to back off on the meds just a bit, and that had led to her moving more, trying to pull out her breathing tube.

“It’s a miracle,” one of them said. “She shouldn’t be awake. Not under such a heavy dose, but once it became apparent that she was fighting the sedation, we decided it was best to back it off.”

“She’s off the ventilator,” the other doctor added. “She’s breathing on her own.”

“What about the seizures?” I asked.

“We haven’t seen any sign of recurrence.”

Gram looked happy. I wondered if I was supposed to look happy too. “You should go in, Trey,” she told me. “She’s talking, although she doesn’t make much sense.”

“After being comatose so long, disorientation is somewhat normal,” the first doctor assured me, “but we did an MRI, and the results are encouraging. Given how quickly she’s progressing…” He shrugged, smiling.

“What are you saying?” I asked. My voice seemed too loud. Were they all staring at me, or was I imagining that? “What does this mean? Are you telling me that’s the end of it? She was in a coma all this time, but now she’s awake, and that’s it?”

“Well, there are more tests to be run. Between the coma and the medication, there’s a chance that some damage was done. We won’t know for sure right away, but really, I’d say her chances are good. It’s possible she’ll be back home within the week. I’d say there’s a very good chance that, given a bit of time, she’s going to be just fine.” His smile grew. “Just fine.”

The first doctor beamed at me. “It really is a miracle.”

A miracle.

She’s going to be just fine.

I wasn’t sure I could breathe. I couldn’t stand to see the joy on their faces. I turned away from them all. Away from their smiles and their optimism and their wonderment. Away from the stupidity and the gullibility and their denial.

“Trey?” somebody said.

I walked.

Down the hall. Past the room where the praying women had been, now empty. Out the doors of the ICU. Around the corner. To the waiting area by the elevator.

Courtesy phones. Boxes of tissue. Plastic potted plants that did nothing to turn the thick, choking, mind-numbing atmosphere of the hospital into life. I had a sudden urge to grab them. To tear them to shreds. To rip them apart, just to feel the power of my anger, to give it a way to break free. I could throw them to the floor. Stomp on them. Crush them out of existence. Cry and scream like a petulant child while I turned them to dust.

I pushed myself into a corner of the room. I grabbed handfuls of my hair. I choked back a sob.

What would happen? I was always so calm and rational and collected. What would happen if I suddenly tore the waiting room of the hospital apart? Would they chalk it up to grief?

Would they say it was a miracle?

“Fuck!”

I banged my head against the wall and bit my lip.

I would not cry. Tears could not help me now.

“Trey?”

It was Vinnie. I didn’t have to look at him to know what I’d see. Confusion. Concern.

She’s going to be just fine.

“No she’s not!” I yelled. “She’s not going to be fine!”

A second of silence. A heartbeat of fear. I felt my iron grip on reality slipping. I couldn’t possibly hang on. “Oh God,” I cried. “She’ll never be fine. Don’t you see? She
can’t
be fine. They say that. They say that word, like it means something. Like they know what they’re talking about, but they don’t. She’ll be awake. She’ll be alive. That’s what they really mean. But she
won’t be fine!
”

I pulled harder on my hair. I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to tear the world apart and watch it bleed.

“Honey?”

He touched my arm, and I jerked away from him. I couldn’t take his tenderness. I couldn’t stand the compassion I saw in his eyes.

“Don’t you see? It never ends, Vin. It never. Fucking. Ends. She’s awake, and now everything is validated. Everything is absolved, Vinnie, except
not to me
.”

He blinked at me, trying to understand, but I couldn’t expect him to. How could anybody?

“She can’t be fine. She’s incapable of being fine. She’ll fuck it up, like she always does. Another year. Another month. Another week, and we’ll be here again. Right back here in this goddamn hospital. Right back here, coddling her and her goddamn
disease
.”

“Maybe this time—”

“No!
No.
Don’t fucking say it. Don’t fucking say that this time she’ll change. This time it’ll be different, because it won’t. Do you have any idea how many times, Vinnie? How many times I’ve had to take her home and clean her up and hear the excuses and the apologies and the selfish fucking way she turns her addiction around on to me? Do you have any idea how many times I’ve told her it was okay? How many promises she’s made? How many times I’ve tried to believe that this time, she’ll keep them? That this time, it might be different?”

I choked again. I was sobbing. I didn’t know when it had happened. I only knew that tears streamed down my face. My throat was ragged from the force of them. My chest ached. A nurse I did not know stood at one of the doorways, watching us. Not condemning. She had sympathy in her eyes.

Yes, I could yell. I could scream. I’d come from the ICU. She’d assume I was in pain.

She’d be right.

I choked again and put my head in my hands.
This
was grief. This horrible weight in my chest. The burning in my eyes. The rage inside my brain. This was grief, finally upon me, finally making me its victim, but not the way anybody could ever accept or understand. Not in any kind of way that made sense to rational human beings.

Vinnie put his hand on my shoulder, warm and steady.

That tiny seed of emotion I’d buried so deep inside was gone. I’d denied it and tried to squash it out of existence, and now it was dead, and I knew what it had been. I knew what I hadn’t wanted to know.

It was hope.

“Do you know what it’s like,” I asked, “to wish for your mother to die?”

He pulled me into his arms. The rage gave way, and I wept. I cried for the kind of person I could have become that would be able to think such things, let alone say them. How could he love me? How could he stand to hold me when I’d said something so wrong and cruel and foul?

“You can see your mother tomorrow,” he said quietly in my ear. “It’s time I took you home.”

Chapter Thirty

Trey said nothing as Vince drove them from the hospital, nothing until he pulled in front of Sophia’s house, at which point Trey said, simply, “No.”