Inside (21 page)

“Azra gave me a Snickers,” Sarah said.

Behind her, Azra laughed guiltily. “Sorry, Grace. I know you don’t usually give her chocolate.”

“It’s okay,” Grace said, unconvincingly.

The patient in the other bed seemed to have fallen asleep, and Mitch reached up and turned off the television. In the sudden quiet, Sarah’s high voice rang brightly as she stood at her mother’s bedside
and talked about her day. Playtime, a story about elephants, a boy who had pulled her hair, something the teacher said, a bug at recess—he could tell Grace loved hearing all these details, her eyes fixed on Sarah. After a while, the girl ran down like a battery losing its charge. Her attention shifted to the window, and she started over to it, explaining something she’d just learned about Canada geese.

Azra took some crayons and paper out of her bag and suggested that she draw a goose for her mother.

“Okay,” Sarah said, then sat down in a chair, balanced the paper on her knees, and started to draw, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth in a caricature of concentration.

Leaning against the wall, Azra let out a long breath, obviously exhausted. Mitch wondered where Grace’s parents were, or the rest of her support network. She had always had plenty of friends.

Azra excused herself to go to the restroom, nodding at Mitch to indicate that he should keep an eye on Sarah.

He returned to Grace’s side and said softly, “She’s really cute.”

“Thanks.”

“She looks like you.”

“No she doesn’t. She looks like her father.”

“Does she?” Mitch said, but Grace didn’t respond. The subject was clearly off-limits. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he said.

Grace looked at him with a small, quick smile, her eyes flickering. He realized—still able to read her after all these years—that she was in enormous pain, and scared, certainly not in any condition to tell him what he could do to help. He had a sudden, intense urge to hold her in his arms or, equally powerful, to walk out the door and never come back. He glanced down, afraid that his face might betray these thoughts, and when he looked up she was still smiling, as if that tight-lipped expression were holding her entire face together. He touched her hand and made his voice strong and calm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

She barely nodded. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said. “Seeing each other again.”

When he was at work, he tried to act as though his confidence hadn’t been shattered. Everything there—his office, his coworkers, the nurses—felt not familiar, as it should have, but strange, his days all out of rhythm. He wondered if his chair had always seemed a little too low for the desk in his office, or if he had called the secretary on the third floor by the right name. He wasn’t sure, in general, of anything. Showing up each morning in his sports jacket and khaki pants, takeout coffee in hand, he felt he was faking it even more than he ever had when, as a student and intern, he actually was. His own voice seemed to stand at a remove. Time passed stickily, each minute clinging to him as though not wanting to let go.

His coworkers had heard about what happened during his rotation in Nunavut, and their response was to avoid him, expressing their sympathy with distant nods and grimacing smiles when passing in the hallways, everyone’s eyes focused on a spot just over his shoulder. Mitch understood this fear of contagion. Failing a patient as he had was every therapist’s worst fear, and it was far better to steer clear of it, even for those whose profession advocated understanding. He only wished that he could steer clear of it himself.

Commencing a new group-therapy session on substance abuse, he tried to pare away self-doubt and cleave to the core of his work. There were ten patients, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty, united by their reek of cigarette smoke. They sat in a circle, downcast, jittery, each one’s chair at a calibrated distance from the next; no one wanted to touch another person, even by accident, in this room of misery and anger. Thank God for other people’s problems, he thought.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s start.”

He laid down the ground rules in a lecture he’d memorized so long ago that he didn’t even mark the words as they left his mouth. Then came the introductions, and he tried to listen carefully and note every detail, but time and again he felt himself drifting away, untethered to the moment, and had to reel himself back in again.

An hour and a half later he was alone, uncomfortably, with his thoughts. The session had gone reasonably well, and they all had left with their “homework” for the next week, nodding as he’d told them what to do. He knew from experience that there would be a serious
drop-off in attendance, and he usually made bets with himself about who would stay and who would go. This time, though, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Thomasie’s face kept passing through his mind.

He threw his pencil across his desk, and sighed.

At five o’clock, he left work and headed to Martine’s apartment. He didn’t want to call in advance. He wasn’t sure that what he had to say could be blurted out over the phone, in the few moments her politeness would afford him, and he wouldn’t be able to say it without being able to read her face as he spoke.

He rehearsed a speech over and over in his mind, knowing he had only a few seconds in which to win her over. He was so preoccupied with the wording of his plea that he didn’t even see her coming down the street until she was almost in front of him—her cheeks chafed red by the autumn wind, a blue scarf bunched beneath her chin. She was carrying grocery bags and he reached out to help her with them, but she shook her head. Her hair was twisted into one of her usual chaotic arrangements, strands escaping everywhere. They stood in the street, afternoon traffic inching by, horns blasting. She was beautiful.

“Martine,” he said. “Please.”

Her short, humorless laugh hung between them like smoke. All the lines he had practiced dissolved in the frigid air. Instead he said, “Will you marry me?”

He had no plan, no ring. Martine cocked her head to one side, her expression neutral, examining, as if he were some new piece of evidence brought before her in court. He had no idea what she was thinking.

“So, you’re back,” she said at last.

“I know I should’ve come by earlier. Much earlier. I just—I’m sorry. But please, I love you. I love Mathieu.”

Martine set the grocery bags down, then fished around in her pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and drew on it deeply. Finally she said, “I know you’re attached to him.”

“It’s so much more than that,” he said impatiently. “I should never have gone away. I shouldn’t have let us drift apart. I should have told you how much you mean to me, I should’ve
insisted
. I never should’ve let you let me go.”

Almost involuntarily, it seemed, she was nodding in agreement. “That’s right,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”

Then she glanced up at her apartment. Since the windows of both Mathieu’s room and the living room faced the street, he thought she was checking to see if her son was watching, to incorporate him into the decision. This gave him the confidence to think that she might invite him in. Five more minutes, and he’d be inside.

He was buoyed by this thought, and by the idea of seeing the child again, playing with him, hearing his high, tinny voice. He had missed those cozy weekends, the family dinners, even the science lectures.

Martine was looking at him steadily, waiting for him to say more.

He wondered why she hadn’t picked up Mathieu from day care, as she usually did, but maybe she had a sitter for him. Surely he wouldn’t be in the apartment alone. This might explain her hesitation, when of course she ought to be inviting Mitch in so they could have this conversation in comfort rather than on the street.

“Martine,” he said.

She threw her cigarette down and stubbed it out with the pointy toe of her boot, rubbing the black stain of ash into the sidewalk. When she finally met his eyes again, she just shrugged. Mitch knew, then, that Mathieu was with a man, not a sitter, and that this man had, in a matter of weeks, already gotten further with her than he ever had.

“That doctor?” he said. “Vendetti?”

“It’s going well,” she said. “Mathieu likes him too. You taught him to be friendlier with people. I’m grateful to you for that.”

She was speaking with grave formality. He felt like he was being presented with a plaque at some awards banquet. It made him angry, and he couldn’t restrain the sad, inevitable sentiments, so stale until you had to inhabit them yourself, when suddenly they glowed freshly with truth. “He’s not the one for you,” he said. “You and I belong together.”

With a distant, constrained smile, Martine picked up her grocery bags, one in each arm, balanced, self-sufficient. “You should go,” she said, and she walked away up the stairs.

And that was it. He had felt so unmoored the past few weeks that
this latest blow hardly sent him into a tailspin, just dropped him deeper down the same dark well. The next morning he was back at work, greeting his coworkers and drinking coffee from his regular mug. He was sitting at his desk, feeling moody and nauseous, when he remembered someone who had it a lot worse. So when he had a break in his schedule, he took the elevator downstairs and knocked gently on Grace’s door.

She was alone, staring at the ceiling, her expression pinched, the braid in her hair loose and tangled. She was still wearing the fuzzy red sock on her foot below the cast.

“Hey there,” he said softly.

She turned her head slowly, as if her neck pained her, but when she saw him her eyes again lit up, giving him the first good feeling of the day and, possibly, the week. “Mitch. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I hope you don’t mind. I’m on a break.”

“I don’t mind at all. I’m just lying here in a drugged-out fog.” She patted the bed beside her, her hand flopping jerkily in the air, and said, “Come over here.”

He pulled up a chair and sat down.

Over her hospital gown she was wearing a pink bed jacket that looked like it belonged in an old lady’s closet. The other patient had apparently been discharged, so she had the room to herself.

“How are you feeling?”

“Not bad,” she said.

From her stiff posture, her hands quieted at her sides, her head leaning heavily on the thin pillow, he knew she felt a lot worse than she was letting on.

“Can I ask you a favor?” she said.

“Shoot.”

“Can you get me a pen?”

He cocked his head. “You planning to write your memoirs in here?”

Instead of laughing at this admittedly pitiful joke, she was holding out her hand expectantly, her expression dire. He took a pen from his jacket pocket and handed it over. Immediately she stuck it down inside her cast, using the end of it to scratch. She let out a loud, involuntary groan of satisfaction, and Mitch, embarrassed, looked away.
She kept digging for a couple minutes, feverishly, then stopped and held the pen out to him. “Thanks.”

“Keep it,” he said.

She grimaced. “You have no idea how itchy a cast is. It’s almost worse than the pain.”

“It sounds awful, Grace.”

“Oh, it’s not,” she said lamely. “They think I’ll be able to go home soon. I don’t know about going back to work.”

“What kind of teacher are you, again?”

She closed her eyes, her voice faint and distant. “Grade six. In Beaconsfield.”

“What happened to your practice?”

“It’s a long story,” she said. It was the second time she’d used the shopworn phrase about this, and he didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t even sure why he was here. Of course he was worried about her, as he would be about anyone he knew in this condition. But maybe there was something else, too. These days he felt disconnected from everything, even his own past, and seeing Grace again after so many years seemed to offer him something: a thread, a hope of stitching himself back together.

“How about you?” she said. “How’s your work?”

That was the last question he wanted to answer. But he could see she was tired of talking, so he told her about his group this morning. The young man who was already forming a crush on the thirty-year-old management consultant next to him (Grace nodded very slightly at this), the older bus driver whose only contribution to the discussion was to say, “My wife made me come.” The mousy, brown-haired woman who didn’t say anything after she introduced herself and then, halfway through, burst into tears. The bus driver, with an immediate, fatherly instinct, patted her shoulder as she buried her head in her hands. And everyone else relaxed, because each of them knew that at least one other person in the room felt just as desperate and injured as they did. Grace listened to all this with her eyes closed; except for that initial nod, she didn’t move at all. Her breathing was soft, and he wasn’t sure if she was awake, if he was keeping her company or simply filling the room with noise. After a while, he
ran out of substance-abuse anecdotes. They were quiet together, and he felt strangely peaceful. Between the slatted blinds a ray of late-afternoon winter sun shot into the room, thin but brilliant, streaking across Grace’s face, and she squinted. When he realized she couldn’t move away from it, he got up and closed the blinds.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I’d better leave you alone. Sorry I talked your ear off.”

Grace smiled at him, but her eyes looked tired. “It was nice,” she said, “but you don’t have to keep coming here, you know. It was kind of you to help with the apartment and everything, but you’ve done enough.”

Mitch snorted—the idea that he’d ever done enough seemed ridiculous, given the recent truths of his life—but then nodded. “I don’t mean to intrude.”

“You’re not intruding,” she said. “You’ve been great. But you’ve done so much already.”

This was as direct a request to leave as Grace would ever utter. Yet something bound him there in the room—her wan eyes, or his need to be of help. “Where are your parents?” he said.

She sighed. “My father died a few years ago. My mother isn’t well enough to travel.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her head moved slightly in a gesture that was meant to be a shrug. She was exhausted now, her eyes fluttering open and closed, her hands splayed out beside her, palms up. He moved closer, wanting to touch her arm, to somehow lend her some of his physical strength, because she needed it.