Broken (27 page)

In the end, I couldn’t erase what was all I had left. I grabbed a handful of blank CD’s and began backing up his data. The class lectures and notes I deleted, along with the folders full of e-mail. His correspondence didn’t concern me. Nor did I bother transferring the websites he’d bookmarked or the copies of his online orders.

When I came to his personal documents, however, I stopped. I stare at the computer for a full, long minute before I could open the folder he’d titled “Sadie.”

He’d always craved feedback, reading me ten or twenty versions of his poems, the only differences between them the placement of a comma or choice of a word. When he no longer talked about his writing, I’d thought he stopped. But in that, as I’d been in so many other places, I was wrong.

Two quick clicks of the mouse took me to a place inside Adam’s head he’d refused to allow me for a long time. Here he’d typed, meticulously and with what must have been agonizing slowness, dozens of poems he’d never shared.

He wrote about his anger. Frustration. He wrote about the joy and satisfaction of being able to write, and of his despair when the words wouldn’t come. He’d filled document after document with his careful phrases, the small spare haiku and long, rambling free-form poetry he’d once mocked as cheating.

He wrote about how he loved me.

He wrote about how he hated me.

It was the most honesty I’d had from him since his accident, and he’d hidden it from me. Angry, I dragged it all to the trash. I hovered the mouse over the delete button, but at the last minute, I undid what I’d done and returned my husband’s words to the file he’d named after me. I burned them to a disk, which I labeled carefully and put away in the box where I stored special things like the clippings of his hair.

Those were Adam’s thoughts and dreams. Himself and me, painted in pictures of words. They were his perceptions and images, and whether or not they were true made little matter, now. They were Adam’s pictures. Adam’s stories.

Not mine.

It was time to stop being what Adam had needed me to be, or what he thought I was. Time to stop trying to be the wife I thought I had to be and become the woman I wanted to be, instead.

August

I
’m a psychologist, and I love my work. I like to run and read, I like peppermint-stick ice cream and scary movies, and my favorite color is red. I love the smell of lavender. These are not things I have just discovered, though some of them were hidden from me, for a time.

I’ve stopped being surprised by my face in the mirror. I know the shape of that face, the color of those eyes, the fall of hair. Now my reflection shows someone I recognize, even if I’m still learning who she is.

Today the wooden bench cradles my back as I lean. The flowers along the path in front of me nod yellow petals in a breeze that stills smells like summer.

There was much I needed to figure out before I could decide if this bench was a place I needed to be. It’s taken me a while. I’m still uncertain what this means, but I’m sure of my desire to find out.

I have no place to go and nothing to do but sit and wait, and the waiting is pleasant enough that I don’t mind. Mothers pushing strollers and people walking dogs hurry past. Squirrels chase each other around the trees, while birds peck for bugs in the grass.

Then, he is there, covered in sunshine. He wears it like a suit of gold, shining. He sits beside me carefully, and the bench shivers at the new weight.

There is, perhaps, much to be said, but neither of us says it. Time and circumstance have made us new to each other. I look at him, but he’s looking at his hands, linked in his lap.

At last he looks up at me with one eye squinted shut against the brightness. He straightens and turns. He holds out his hand, and I take it, waiting, breathless.

“Hi.” His fingers close around mine. “My name’s Joe Wilder.”

“Hello, Joe,” I say, and add with utter confidence. “I’m Sadie.”

Our fingers squeeze together. “It’s nice to meet you, Sadie.”

There are many things I don’t know, but quite a few I do. I know you can’t be lost if you know where you are. I know that life is full of precious and fragile things, and not all of them are pretty. I know that the sun follows the moon and makes days, one after another. Time passes. The world turns, and we turn with it, and though we can never go back to the beginning, sometimes, we can start again.

“It’s nice to meet you, too, Joe.”

I’m uncertain of how the story will end, but sitting in the sunlight with Joe’s hand in mine, I have no doubts about how it begins. There is only one truth of which I feel confident, one thing I know that nothing else can change.

This month, my name is Sadie.

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