The Stories We Tell (8 page)

“Bruce Willis in
Die Hard
? Like that?”

“Exactly.” I rub at the top of his headful of hair. “I'm sorry. I just don't know what to say. Dr. Lewis said plastic surgery will fix—I'm just glad you're alive and okay.” My lips feel shaky, the way they do when I try not to cry.

“My work, my clients, my travel—it's all screwed up now.”

“I'm so sorry, Cooper.”

He stares at me through that one opaque blue eye and then in slow motion he reaches up and peels off his bandage. An angry red slash screams from underneath his left eye and extends upward along the side of his face. Black stitches crawl like spiders and pull his skin tight to close the wound, yanking at his face and causing his cheek to slant upward. An oval of sheared skin shines from behind his ear.

I hold my face still, taking in a long breath and walking closer to him. “It's an injury. It will heal.”

He replaces the tape and bandage just as Gwen enters the kitchen. The doorbell rings—delivery guy with the Chinese food—and I pay, carrying the brown paper bags to the table, where we all sit together.

“Does it hurt?” Gwen asks her dad, sidling up to the table.

“Yes,” he says. “Like hell. It has its own heartbeat.”

“I'm sorry, Dad.”

And there we sit at the table, the three of us, my family, silently eating fried rice and kung pao chicken.

“Great home-cooked meal for
family dinner
night,” Gwen finally says, scraping her fork across her plate.

“Thanks,” I say. “I worked hard at it.”

Gwen smiles, grateful, I believe, for a sarcastic reply instead of a reprimand.

“I bought sea bass and then left it in the car too long.”

“Sea bass?” Cooper stops eating.

There's a thing in marriage—a secret code used in front of kids and others. Words can be said and only the spouse knows the true meaning. So if the sentence was dictated and put on paper, the utterings would be harmless, unless of course you knew what the spouse was
really
saying. And this is what Cooper is really saying: You bought expensive fish from the best market in town and let it go bad?

Then I get to choose: Do I answer the asked question or the real question? I choose the asked. “Yes, sea bass.”

“My favorite,” Gwen says.

“I know. That's why I got it. Sorry, Pea.”

She shrugs. “It's okay.” She hesitates, her fork in the air. “Can I please go back to see Aunt Willa tonight? I can hardly stand thinking about her alone in the hospital.…”

I look to Cooper. “What do you think?”

“No,” Cooper says. “You're grounded for sneaking out.” He glances from Gwen to me and then again at Gwen. “Does anyone remember that part of the night? Sneaked out with her boyfriend? Am I the only one who thinks she shouldn't go out?”

“It's my sister in the hospital,” I say. “That's not going out.”

“Then you take her,” he says. “Because I don't trust her with the car.”

Gwen stifles a cry and stands quickly, so her chair falls backward, hitting the ground with a crack. “You hate me.”

“No, I don't. I love you and want to keep you safe.” Cooper's voice is low and tired, an admission and an accusation combined. “And while we're talking about this, I need you to hand over the credit card. You've abused its purpose, which was only for emergencies.”

“What do you mean?” Gwen asks.

“The shopping. The clothes. Restaurants and movies. If you want to spend that kind of money, you need to get a job.”

“What is going on?” Gwen covers her face. “Aunt Willa is, like, totally unconscious or something and you're worried about me going to too many movies? This is insane.”

I want to step into the conversation, to ease the tension and clear the air. But the lost sleep finally catches me and is wrestling me to the ground. I stand also. “Let's all just get a good night's sleep and start over tomorrow.”

“‘Start over'?” Gwen asks. “As if Aunt Willa can start over tomorrow?”

I reach for my daughter and place my hand on her arm. “I mean us, baby. I mean us.”

“Will you please take me to see her?” Gwen asks. “Or please let me take the car.”

“If I drive now,” I say, “it would be about as good as driving drunk. So you can take my car. But to the hospital and home. That's it.”

“I promise,” she says.

Cooper gathers the dishes and I place them into the sink, the clanging and ringing of porcelain our only statement. He walks out of the room without a word. Gwen looks at me. “He hates me.”

“Of course not.”

“Well, I hate him.”

“Of course not,” I say, repeating myself.

“As if you know how I feel. You're not me.”

Gwen takes the keys and leaves the house, slamming the door on the way out. I stand alone in the kitchen and sink into a chair when Cooper reappears in the doorway from the family room. “I need you to support me.” His voice is deep enough to reach the center of the earth.

“What's that?”

“You can't negate me in front of Gwen. It's not fair to me,” he says, using the palm of his hand to punctuate every word, as if pressing against an unseen wall.

“She's just going to see Willa.”

Cooper comes toward me. “You really think she's going to see Willa?”

“Yes,” I say. “I do.”

And then, sounding as if he's absorbed the adolescent lingo, he says, “Whatever,” and walks away.

*   *   *

I rest on my half of the bed with my eyes wide open. Cooper is lying next to me. I'm on my side and I stare at the silver frame on my bedside table, which glints in the slight moonlight. The room is too dark to see the photo inside the frame, but I know what's there: Cooper holding Gwen on the day she was born. He looks impossibly young to have a baby, although at the time he was twenty-seven years old. I was twenty-four.

“Baby,” he says.

I roll over and place my hand on his forehead, gently, so as to avoid the bandage. “How are you feeling?” I ask.

“Percocet says I feel fine.” He smiles, and in the dark his teeth and the whites of his eyes shine through.

The house creaks in the way it does when it's left alone, and I try to find some words of solace. “I'm so sorry this happened. I know it was my sister's fault, which makes me feel like it's also my fault. I just don't understand any of it.”

“What don't you understand?” He wraps an arm around me and pulls me closer, so my body runs along his, skin on skin.

Yes, I think, my husband, I can ask anything. “Why did you make her leave the bar? I mean, what was she really doing? She wasn't drunk. I'm trying to figure out what it … could be.”

“All I can tell you is that she seemed drunk. Other than that, I don't know what to say. I didn't ask her if she'd taken anything. Honestly, all I wanted to do was get her out of there because I'd been working so long with these clients that the last thing I wanted was to be embarrassed in front of them.”

“Wasn't leaving them alone at the restaurant embarrassing?”

“Dinner was over. I was about to go anyway.…” He brushes his hand through my hair. “You know I don't blame you. So you can stop saying sorry.”

“I know.”

His hand slips from my head and his eyes close. The pain meds are doing their job and my husband slips into sleep. I set my alarm so I can get up in four hours to give him another pill. “Stay ahead of the pain,” the doctor told me. Yes, stay ahead of the pain. I wish there was a way in the real world to do the very same damn thing.

 

seven

Now, days after the accident, there are brief moments when I'll forget what happened to Willa and Cooper. I'll cook dinner or roll cotton paper under the press and I'll sense a deep heaviness before I remember:
The accident
. In the middle of the night, I'll sense something terrible is about to happen before I realize that it already has.

Willa is still in the hospital and is improving, thank God. In the next day or so, she'll be allowed to come home. The swelling is subsiding, and today I'll meet with the neuro practitioner and try to understand her medical babble. Thank God for the handouts; I can read them over and over without having to pretend I understand.

Willa weeps over the hospital bills. “I've become exactly what I promised myself I wouldn't be when I came here—a burden,” she says over and over, forgetting that she's already told me.

Cooper is trying to return to his before-the-accident life; he's back at work, but only part-time. The stitches won't come out for another week, and he hides the damage beneath tightly taped bandages. Soon, the doctors tell us, it will be time to plan and discuss plastic surgery. Cooper doesn't talk about embarrassment or his need to cover the scars, but I've seen him in the bathroom, staring into the mirror, with his thumb and forefinger pinched around the threads of a stitch, as if any moment he is going to pull at the black thread and undo it all. But then he shaves and dresses, has a cup of coffee and a single egg on wheat toast. He leaves for work as if the day at hand is like all the days before the wreck.

This is one of the things I love about him—his ability to keep going, his tenacity, his drive to get things done no matter the circumstances.

*   *   *

When Cooper started
Southern Tastes,
digital magazines were the next big thing. His affinity for all things male and southern—hunting, fishing, bourbon … all the accouterments of a well-bred gentleman—filled the pages of the publication. It seemed the perfect fit: a man from the South with all the right personal contacts and a business degree. Robert Redford in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
relocated to Savannah.

Last year, when the first article came out about how tablet magazines were failing—how the “platform that would redefine consumer consumption” had turned into a lukewarm business venture—Cooper went into overdrive. He turned everything to high gear: his charm, his frustration, his creativity, and his travel. But success seems to be slipping away in incremental shifts, in decreased subscriptions and advertising money. He'll gain an advertiser and then lose two. He'll add a new creative section—“Home Place” for example, a section devoted to small towns—and then find that the readers don't resonate with the idea.

I watch him at night, his brow furrowed, his face jaundiced by the light of the computer, and I wonder what he thinks and feels. It's easy to take his moods personally, but
I
know how worried he is about this business he started, the one that separated him from his dad's business. He clicks away on the keys, writes notes on a yellow legal pad. When I ask, “Can I help?” or “Is there anything I can do?” he'll shake his head no. “I got this,” he'll say. Cooper has used that phrase since our first date. And it's been true. He's got it—always. There's a certain relief in partnership when a task is handed over, when the weight of something is lifted and carried. For me, this was the family finances. He pays the bills, chooses the investments, and leaves the paperwork for me to review. I'm perfectly capable of handling money, but it's still one less thing to do in an endless and vast list of things I'm responsible for.

In a world I know Cooper never thought he'd see, the balance of success has tipped—the Fine Line, Ink is faring far better than
Southern Tastes,
and yet we've not once discussed the situation. This silence is a private pact, some marital contract that I don't remember signing. But I understand. I keep my business accounts separate and put my assigned salary into the family account. Cooper does the same.

He's got it, he says. He always does. It's true—he's always taken care of us.

In any marriage, there are times that the thrill of falling in love leaks into everyday life, into what has become mundane. And that's what happened last month when I remembered the sweet spot of our romance, when I again saw him as I'd seen him in the beginning.

Cooper had organized a baseball game to raise money for his philanthropy—Home Run, a foundation that manages inner-city baseball teams for young kids. Businessmen from the community jumped at the chance to play in Savannah's historic 1926 Grayson Stadium. (More to the point, they opened their wallets to be a part of what Cooper had offered as a “big scene.”) The Sand Gnats—a local-class A baseball team—donated their time by offering team members to play in the game with the kids. It was there that I watched Cooper on the field and remembered how I fell in love: hard and fast with a man who made a girl feel she needed to be along for the ride.

*   *   *

At the studio this morning, music plays, as usual, from Max's iPod speakers. Emmylou Harris sings “Boulder to Birmingham” softly, as it should be. Max and Francie sit with me at the long table and we talk over one another, as we often do, somehow hearing everything, until we simultaneously fall quiet. Max scribbles at the edge of the paper.

We work on the Ten Good Ideas line and it feels like a magic potion, a palliative cure to Willa's healing. We brainstorm about number seven—
Be Patient
—when Francie leans forward. “Don't be mad, boss, but I have to ask. Did you ever find out exactly what happened?”

“With?”

“The accident.”

“I already told you what happened.”

“But it's not what happened,” Francie says. “She wasn't drunk. She just wasn't.”

I don't know how many times I can have this conversation—with Francie, with Cooper … with myself. “Look, Francie,” I say. I sound angry, but that's not how I feel. “It's just—”

Max interrupts with a light touch on my shoulder. “It'll all come together. These things take time.”