Once More With Feeling (30 page)

If he didn’t remember what he’d done, did I have to?

‘I don’t …’ He shook his head as if his mouth wasn’t working the way he wanted it to. ‘I don’t know …’

He reached for me when I got to the side of his bed and I didn’t think. I sat down on his bed with him and hugged him. I pulled his head to my shoulder and wrapped my arms around him, and I felt him breathe, ragged and a little bit wild, against my collarbone.

It had been so long since I’d held him. Longer still since he’d held me. Something that felt like stone inside of me seemed to melt a little bit.

‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ he told me, his
voice the smallest whisper of sound, the words more garbled than not. It wasn’t Tim’s voice at all. It wasn’t his easy, confident way of speaking. But it was Tim.
Awake
. I let it wash through me, over me. I held him tighter and rocked him a little, stroking his hair with my hand. Soothing him. Soothing myself, too. Reminding us both that he was alive, and conscious, and everything outside of that was a detail. Just a tiny detail. And maybe the fact that he couldn’t remember his own details meant we got some kind of do-over here. A chance to live as if none of this had happened.

And who wouldn’t want a do-over?

‘It’s okay,’ I whispered. ‘You’re okay.’

I stared past him toward the window, where the world waited, cold and harsh and unforgiving. There would be no escaping what we’d have to work through. There was a baby on the way, innocent of all of this despite what its parents had done, but a complication all of its own, nonetheless. And I had no doubt that Carolyn had every intention of fighting her way back into Tim’s memories, his life, however she could.

But none of that mattered today. Now. It couldn’t. I wouldn’t let it. He might not have protected us when he’d had the chance, but I could. I would. Didn’t I have to?

‘You’re awake, Tim,’ I murmured to him, holding him close, letting myself love him the way I had for all those years, as he clung to me the way I knew he wouldn’t if he’d had access to his own history. I let myself do it anyway.

Once upon a time he’d kept me safe, I thought then, my eyes drifting closed, my cheek on the top of his head. Now I could do the same for him.

And I wanted to.

I did.

But it turned out that his dramatic awakening wasn’t quite the Christmas morning miracle I might have been a little too tempted to imagine.

The real story came out later, after Tim was transferred to a rehabilitation centre for the rest of his recovery and I was forced to interact entirely too often with Carolyn, who Tim said he didn’t want to see but who lurked daily in the clinic’s lobby or outside my house so she could prise information from me. She was remarkably consistent. Determined, even.

Today, I realized with some surprise as I pulled into my driveway to see Carolyn’s car already there, engine running and kicking up clouds in the late-afternoon cold, was New Year’s Eve. It felt as if much more than a week had passed since my Christmas Eve in Vermont – but I couldn’t let myself think about that. Not when there was so much else to do. Like watch Tim work so hard to recover all of his speech, his ability to walk, parts of his memory. Like
be the proper wife he’d asked for the moment he’d been capable of asking for something. As if we could erase the past few months, just like that.

I was clinging to that. Maybe more than I should. It was easier to simply fall back into my old role. I knew it so well it hardly required thought. It even felt good.
Right
, I told myself.
It feels right
.

‘How is he today?’ Carolyn asked, climbing out of her car after I parked mine and started toward the front door. She looked defensive and miserable, and yet I couldn’t seem to take any pleasure in that the way some part of me wanted to do. If anything, looking at her made me feel sad. For all of us.

‘Better,’ I told her. I outlined the progress he’d made today, the steps he’d taken, both literal and more metaphorical, and the doctors’ new thoughts on his prognosis. I did this as quickly as possible. There was no point holding things back; she would find out eventually and anyway, I wasn’t her. I didn’t have anything to hide. ‘If he keeps going at this rate, he should be back home in a couple of weeks.’

‘That’s great!’ she breathed, more to herself than me. Then she frowned up at the house. ‘Will you move him back in here?’

‘This is his home, Carolyn,’ I pointed out as I unlocked the front door and pushed my way inside. Maybe a little bit testily.

I let her follow me into the house and shut the door
behind her. I didn’t even complain when she slumped into one of the chairs around the little table in the eat-in kitchen with entirely too much weary familiarity. My knee-jerk reaction was to toss her out into the cold, but I contained it. For one thing, barring Carolyn from my house after finding her with Tim in my bed seemed way too much like making a big production of slamming the barn door long after the horses had galloped wild and free. And for another, this was actually the rare occasion when I
wanted
to talk to her. Possibly the first time I’d wanted such a thing since September.

‘When’s the earliest they think he might be able to leave that rehab centre?’ she asked me now. I shuffled through the stacks of mail, an assortment of catalogues and bills, then tossed it all on the kitchen counter. I didn’t go over and sit with her. That seemed far too civilized for the mood I was in.

‘Earlier than you might think.’ I studied her for a moment. Her jet-black hair was showing a hint of grey at the roots. Her eyes seemed to sport permanent bags. She shrugged out of her coat and sat there, looking listless and sad, her hands rubbing her belly. I decided it was an unconscious gesture on her part, that it wasn’t for my benefit. But that didn’t change what I suspected she’d done, did it? ‘Earlier than I would have thought, certainly. But then, Tim didn’t suddenly wake up in a searing burst of clarity on Christmas morning, did he?’

I watched Carolyn flinch. She shifted in her chair, almost
as if she were nervous. She was slow to meet my eyes.

‘That depends on what you mean, exactly,’ she said. Much too carefully.

‘I mean that he was twitching and thrashing a little bit before I went to New York,’ I said, keeping my voice cool and very nearly prosecutorial. ‘But apparently, while I was away, he started opening his eyes and seeming to track conversations. He grunted responses. All signs that he was coming around. He started
talking
on Christmas morning, but he’d been waking up for days.’

She didn’t have to answer. I already knew. And even if I hadn’t been sure, I could see the truth written all over her face.

‘That was why you were so angry with me when I came back from New York that morning.’ I shook my head, still trying to take it in. I’d cried when I’d finally understood what Tim’s doctors were telling me. I was finished crying now. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt, or that I wasn’t stunned by what further depths she was willing to go to. ‘I thought it was because you knew I’d seen a private moment between you and Tim, but that wasn’t it, was it? You didn’t want me to know he was coming out of it already.’

‘Sarah …’ she began, her hands reaching out like some kind of supplicant. Except that wasn’t Carolyn’s style, was it? She wasn’t
beseeching
me about anything – she was trying to get me to calm down. Same gesture, different meaning. It was a crucial distinction and I needed to heed
it. Carolyn wanted Tim. I was in her way. That was the whole story, the end.

‘What I have to ask myself,’ I said slowly, staring at her, wondering how she’d turned into such a monster right in front of me this past year without my ever noticing it, and how I’d managed to be so incredibly oblivious for so long, ‘is whether you were ever going to tell me. What was your plan, Carolyn? How long were you going to keep it a secret?’

She wrapped her arms around her waist, and blew out a breath. She didn’t try to argue. ‘I didn’t think it would matter.’

‘How can you possibly think that’s true?’ I was flabbergasted – more that she would admit it than anything else. ‘What kind of sociopath are you?’

‘Well, I didn’t.’ She lifted her chin. Defiantly. ‘The fact is, if Tim could remember the last six months, he would want me with him, not you. I’m not trying to be mean. It’s the truth. So why tell you that he was waking up? You would have found out eventually. And he would have gone ahead and divorced you, the way he planned.’

‘Do you listen to the things you say?’ I asked her, in some kind of amazement. ‘I get that you think that you and Tim have some magical connection, and who knows? Maybe you do. But I’m still married to him. I’ve
been
married to him for years. What makes you think you’re the only person who cares about him?’

‘I’m in love with him,’ she said, and it was the way she
said it that set off some kind of air-raid siren inside me. She was so matter-of-fact. So calm, as if there was no room whatsoever for debate. I had to repress a shiver. She met my gaze, and there was no shame in hers, only that strange directness, like she didn’t care what the consequences were. Or maybe it was only strange because I’d never owned anything like that in my life. ‘Are you?’

‘Of course I love him,’ I snapped at her.

Because what did it matter what she
owned
? This was about me, too. This was my life she was playing with. I had the passing thought that being back here, playing the wronged wife, felt something like good – it was black-and-white, anyway. It was easy. And Carolyn had no leg to stand on, did she?

‘That doesn’t change because he did something horrible,’ I continued, my voice warming. ‘
I
wasn’t the one who had the affair, Carolyn.
I
wasn’t the one who wanted a divorce. I didn’t get the
option
of deciding whether to love or not love Tim, the two of you
took it
from me.’

‘That’s not the same thing as being in love with him,’ she replied immediately, and I remembered, then, that she’d thrown something like that at me on That Day. It was hard to recall her exact words; they were still buried in all the screaming. Most of it mine. ‘I think you’re comfortable with Tim, Sarah, but you don’t love him. Not really. Not the way I do, and not the way he deserves to be loved.’

I scraped my hair back from my face and tried not to
scream bloody murder. Much less commit it. I told myself that seeing red got no one anywhere they wanted to go and waited, therefore, for my vision to subside to something a bit more calmly orange before I replied.

‘Thank you for your incredibly patronizing and self-serving analysis of my marriage,’ I managed to grit out.

‘Is it patronizing?’ she asked, her voice smooth. Untroubled. I wondered if these were the conversations Carolyn practised in her bathroom mirror. ‘Or is it true?’

‘What makes you think you have the right to comment either way?’ I realized my hands were in fists. ‘It’s none of your business. Even if Tim regains all of his memories tomorrow and never wants to lay eyes on me again, you don’t know a single thing about our marriage. All you know is what you wrecked.’

She hugged herself again, and started rocking, slightly, in her chair, which made me think she wasn’t quite as calm as she wanted to appear.

‘You can’t wreck something if it’s already broken,’ she said, and her voice was a little rough then, as if there were some emotion buried in there.

But not, I was sure, for me. Never for me.

And that was the part I couldn’t seem to understand, not even after all of this. Especially after all of this. Sure, my relationship with my sister had always been a little bit rocky. We had never dressed in matching outfits or called ourselves best friends. We had never shared secrets or whatever else the world fantasized sisters did. She was
never my first call when something went wrong; most of the time, in fact, we didn’t talk much at all between major holidays. And not because there was some kind of falling out between us, but, I’d always thought, because we didn’t have anything much in common besides our parents. The house we grew up in. The remnants of a shared childhood. We were two very different people who happened to be sisters.

We didn’t have to be close, I’d always thought, but that didn’t make us enemies, either.

She’d had her wild-child Portland years, and then she’d moved to Boston, claiming she needed a complete change. She’d pursued that goal the same way she did everything else: with 150 per cent total commitment. Damn the torpedoes, etc. The last few years or so she’d been in what Tim and I had called her
elite goth
phase, which involved the dyed black hair and severe lipstick she’d suddenly seemed to prefer, but also her perfectly unobjectionable marketing career. She’d seemed happy in Boston. And that life had made more sense to me than her self-righteous, hemp-clothed communal existence in Portland, all Burning Man and medicinal weed. I’d actually wondered if maybe, with her laid off all those months and living with my parents, she and I might reconnect the way that people claimed adult siblings sometimes did. And the crazy part was, I’d thought we had. We’d seen so much more of each other, and it had been pleasant enough. No scenes, no drama. I even remembered thinking at some point over the summer
that it was nice that Tim was so much more accepting of her than he had been …

I was such an idiot.

But it had never occurred to me that my older sister might not care about me. Not really. Not
enough
. That she might weigh up her options and decide that hurting me was an acceptable risk. That had never crossed my mind until I’d walked into my own bedroom and seen the proof of it. It was still so hard for me to accept, to really believe, and yet here she was in my house, telling me so from her own mouth.

‘I don’t understand why you’re okay with this,’ I said finally. Painfully. ‘Why doesn’t it give you any pause at all that you’re sitting here debating with me –
with your sister –
about the way you broke up my marriage? About whether or not I love Tim the way
you
think I should? Where’s the shame, Carolyn? The regret? Do you think the way you’ve hurt me is more noble somehow because you did it for love? You have to know that’s ridiculous.’