The Stories We Tell (5 page)

I was six years old when Willa and I stopped fighting with each other and turned our frustration toward a common goal: the church. We sneaked out of services and covered for each other. We ripped up our Sunday school homework and said we'd lost it. We pretended to sing the hymns while saying “watermelon” over and over, smiling at Mom as if in rapture. They may have been small rebellions, but they gave us a sense of power in our powerless lives. And now, alone in the studio, I desperately want to go to the hospital and heal my sister as the elders once claimed they could do with some oil on the forehead and a prayer in babbling tongue.

“So what do you think happened?” Max asks, startling me.

“What?” I spin my chair around.

He laughs. “Didn't mean to wake you.”

I rub my eyes. “I'm not going to get a damn thing done today, am I?”

“Why should you? Stop pushing it. Go see your sister.”

I stare at him, at his brown eyes edged in blue. There's always a first thing you notice about a person. If I look back, I can tell you what it is about almost anybody I know. For Max, it was his eyes and the way a band of deep navy surrounds the dark brown.

“You asked something.” I sit straighter. “What did you just ask me?”

“What do you think happened last night?”

“Cooper was at the Bohemian bar. He saw my drunk-as-hell sister. He made her leave. She was mad and grabbed the wheel and made him crash into a tree. That's what I think happened.”

He nods.

“You don't believe it?” I ask.

He looks away from me and his gaze settles on a photo of Gwen tacked to the wall. In this picture, she's twelve years old, laughing and holding a melting Popsicle, her mouth red with its juice.

“What do
you
think happened?” I ask.

He looks back to me. “I don't know. I couldn't even begin to know.”

“My sister,” I say. “I've seen her drunk, of course. I've seen her embarrassing and slobbering and giddy. I've known nights when I had to fill in her blackouts. I've had to sit with her while she got sick. But that was a long, long time ago, and I've never, in all those long-ago drunken sloshes, seen her angry or belligerent enough to grab a wheel. She was an emotional drunk, a crier. I can't believe she'd do this.”

Max doesn't answer, but I know he's listening. With Cooper, I've learned to say what needs saying in bite-size pieces.

“She's always been the more sensitive of the two of us,” I say to Max. “When we were growing up, she was sad; I was mad. Hardly ever the other way around.” I stare off at the barn doors, closed tight in a feeble attempt to keep the cool air inside. A poster hangs on the back wall, announcing our opening six years before. “Like the time I got in trouble for making up these ten ideas. I was mad, but Willa cried for days. She felt responsible because she'd helped me, which she had, but not that much.”

The playlist changes and Johnny Cash's voice cracks open, saturating the air with “I Still Miss Someone.” As he sings those lyrics, the barn doors swoosh open. Francie tosses her purse in the general direction of her chair but misses, and it falls on the floor. She slumps into the same chair. “She's still asleep.”

“They said they'll call me the minute she wakes up,” I say.

“I can't stand to see her like that.”

“I know. But it's just swelling. It will get better.” Emotion flares inside me, but I can't label it, pin it to an exact word. I don't know how to be both angry with Willa for causing the accident and worried about her recovery. They seem opposite emotions. They
are
opposite emotions.

The door opens again and a woman steps into the barn. The three of us look at her as if she's an apparition, when really it's just the wedding planner, who needs a new logo, a client with an appointment.

Francie stands up to greet her and Max leans close to me. “Go see your sister.”

I nod but then hesitate as I reach the door. It's always difficult to leave.

 

four

The first thing I noticed about Cooper was his walk. He had this way of moving that only those comfortable in their skin can pull off. The other high school boys were tentative and clumsy—all pointy elbows and awkward knees. But not Cooper. He was tall and good-looking, with a touch of the aristocrat about him. You could say that he had the sort of confidence that comes with money. But it wasn't just that. There was something else that marked him as special. He walked as if his limbs were made of liquid, and his smile—well, it settled on everyone he passed. And everyone made room for him. We moved aside in the cramped hallways so he could get to his locker. We bunched up to make room for him on the bleachers or in the cafeteria. We all saw it. We all did it. We all made room for Cooper.

No doubt about it, I made room for Cooper, too. He was a junior at Tulane when we met again. I was eighteen years old and working at the local print shop. Cooper's single-minded pursuit of me was flattering—and confusing. I mean, he hadn't noticed me in high school. So why now? More to the point, why me?

I was scraggly then, with long tangled hair. I was also painfully thin. But not because I dieted or went to aerobics with the girls in hot-pink leotards. I was thin because I missed dinner at home most nights, because I survived on peanut butter sandwiches. My eyes were almost too big for my face, and this made me appear curious, I guess, and prompted others to confess their life stories to someone they thought was safe. A girlfriend would tell me about how she'd cheated on her boyfriend, another would confess how she stole lipstick, always just lipstick, from the five-and-dime. I gathered the stories and kept them safe. Maybe that's what Cooper saw in me: safety.

I was wary when we first started dating, and then I wasn't, and then I was in love.

And that was that. We were struck down with the kind of love that believes it was meant to be, the kind of love that makes you sure that all the world is in collusion to make sure you find each other. Cooper and I may not have known each other in high school, or been each other's first love, but we promised to be each other's last love.

We married two years after our first date. That was twenty-one years ago. Cooper's always said that no matter how many choices he had, I would still and always be his
only
choice. But lately, the frustration and bickering, the underlying anger and pushing back—and by lately, I mean the past eight years—makes me wonder if he's not regretting his choice. It's my fault, I'm sure. I stopped making so much room for him. I stopped moving aside.

After high school, I couldn't afford college. Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), to be precise, which was where I wanted to go. So my job at Soapbox Press was my education. But as Cooper moved into my life, that thing I recognized as creativity seemed less necessary. But then a few years into our marriage, I found a Vandercook press in the back of a cathedral where I was attending a christening. When I touched the tap lever and stepped onto the gripper pedal, my days at the print shop came back to me in a rush.

I bargained with the priest (probably some kind of sin) and had the machine delivered to our empty barn. While two-year-old Gwen napped, I lovingly put the press back together. Then I started printing again. At first, I crafted small things like notecards for a friend, a birthday party invite, or a poster for one of Cooper's colleagues. I made coasters as gifts and business cards as favors.

It wasn't a studio in the beginning. At first, it was just me, the empty barn, and a printing press, together in a private rendezvous, a quiet time that belonged to imagination. As I started getting paid for invitations, for personal stationery or business cards, I named the company the Fine Line, Ink and incorporated. Cooper was ambivalent about this business endeavor, and yet with a smile he said, “Sure, it'll be nice for you to have a hobby as Gwen gets older. And really, we'll never have horses, so why not use the empty barn?”

A hobby. Yep. His magazine was a business; my printing press was a hobby. I hired Francie first, then Max. The Fine Line, Ink found its place in the barn. Then Willa found her way to our guesthouse. Now she's in a hospital bed and pulling me from Cooper once again.

*   *   *

It's been two days since the accident and I've memorized the labyrinth of hallways to my sister's room and come to know the nurses on every shift by name. I'm on my way to the hospital again, and I'm so damn tired, it's as if I'm on autopilot. I'm going around in the kind of daze that only fatigue can offer—a special gift of misery and floating dissociation. The calm after the storm. It's funny, that, because the storm that blew through the night of the accident hasn't spent itself yet, and it spills through the Spanish moss and thick-leaved magnolias with hand smacks of water on the windshield.

It's easy to love Savannah. I've lived here my entire life and yet I still stumble across a building or door I've never noticed, usually one thing that had once been something else: a hotel that was once a convent, a studio that was once an elementary school, a coffee shop that was once a home. No waste here. One thing is turned into another, until the original is long forgotten, a ghost within the existing structure. I'm tied to the city with tight knots, and yet Willa always wanted to escape. Now she's here, unaware and unconscious in its oldest hospital.

I need to compose myself, so I take a seat in the hospital waiting room. Hospital waiting rooms are interminable places of wasted time, and this one is no exception. People are texting on cell phones, holding cold cups of coffee, and staring at framed artwork declaring the winners of the elementary school's art contest. If Willa were here with me, she would likely make a joke to break the tension—maybe something about the toddler who's going through her mother's huge bright blue bag and tossing its contents onto the floor. Or something about the old man whose head has dropped to his chest, displaying a shiny bald pate under the fluorescent lights. She wouldn't be cruel (she's never cruel, my sister), but she would say something funny and sweet; she would find a way to break the tension.

I'm just getting settled in a cracked red vinyl chair in the corner when my phone pings with a text from the hospital:
Your sister is awake. She's asking for you.

No more waiting.

I try not to run as I wind my way through the sterile hallways with their identical doors. The room numbers are posted in black, and I recognize the font: Cambria. Even here, my mind searches for clues, as if the font will someday offer up some secret.

Number 426.

There's a hushed swish of the door I enter Willa's room. The single bed is positioned underneath a tangled mass of medical equipment that beeps and hisses. A mound of hospital blankets rise from the bed, and at the sides of that mound, small, pale hands rest, palms up, an IV in the left arm. The bandage has been removed and there's only the tiniest cut next to Willa's eye, with a single black stitch that looks like a fallen eyelash. It's the bruised swelling that morphs the right side of her eye and temple.

“Willa,” I whisper, my voice cracking. She opens her eyes to see me. I rush to her side. “Should I call the nurse?”

She shakes her head in a tiny movement and says, “No. I'm just glad you're here.”

I take her hand. I don't know what to say or where to start. How do you feel? Does it hurt? Why did you do that to Cooper? What happened? What happened? But she asks me first.

“What happened?” she says.

“A car accident,” I say. “With Cooper.”

Her face doesn't register emotion. Her lips are blanched, and cracked. She bites the bottom left side and speaks clearly. “No. I wouldn't be in a car with Cooper.”

“You were,” I say.

“Why?” she asks.

“He said you were … He said you were drunk and he tried to take you home.” I release her hand and sit in the chair, staring at the IV pole, unable to look any longer at the damage.

“Where?” she asks, as if that's the important thing.

“The Bohemian.”

“No,” she says, and sits up, holding the IV tube stable. “I wouldn't do that. I sing there. I work there.”

So I tell her the story—the part about Cooper's Charleston clients and how she fought him about leaving the bar. I tell her about the rain and the live oak. She denies it with a single word: “No.”

“The doctor said you probably wouldn't remember anything.”

She doesn't answer, because if there's one thing a drunk can't argue, it's what they did or didn't do while drunk. We've been here before and the familiarity makes me prickly. It's been years—ten or more—but it still feels too close.

Dr. Lewis enters the room. “Good afternoon,” she says.

“You don't sleep?” I ask.

“Sometimes,” she says, smiling. She walks to Willa's bedside. “How do you feel?”

Amid the talk between patient and doctor, I meander to the window, pushing aside the vertical blinds to view the parking lot. I spot my car and then gaze past it to ever-present church spires reaching high, higher. Dr. Lewis and Willa talk about her pain level and her injuries, about how lucky she is that nothing is broken.

“But my head and eye,” Willa says. “They feel broken.”

“Yes,” Dr. Lewis says. “That's the part we have to watch. You have a mild TBI—traumatic brain injury—and some swelling in the temporal lobe. We don't know exactly what this will mean in the long or even short term. But usually it's your memory that will be affected. It might return in little bits or not at all. Sometimes, though, nothing is affected. I'm sorry I can't be more specific. This isn't like a broken bone or an infection that an antibiotic will cure.”

I turn from the window. “Long-term damage?”