Once More With Feeling (3 page)

‘I think we have to start considering the fact that this is really happening,’ Lianne said, carefully, as if I were
inordinately fragile and might shatter if she used the wrong tone. As Lianne was my best and, really
only
, remaining friend from high school, and had thus known me since we were both infants, I had to consider the possibility that, in fact, I might. ‘I don’t think he’s coming back.’

We stood together in Lianne’s bright and inviting kitchen, drinking coffee out of charmingly mismatched ceramic cups that somehow seemed perfectly grown-up and
planned
, like everything else in her happy life with Billy, whom she’d started dating way back in the eighth grade. We were having our longstanding Wednesday midday coffee date that we’d instituted not long after I’d moved back to town three years ago. I couldn’t remember the last time either one of us had cancelled it. These days I considered it my lifeline – to a degree I was afraid would make Lianne a bit uncomfortable were I to tell her.

‘It’s okay,’ Lianne said in that same gentle way, such a far cry from the usual matter-of-fact briskness that made her such a good nurse in the OBGYN practice where she’d worked for years. ‘We’ll get through this. We’ll be just fine. I promise.’

Her use of
we
, I noted in a kind of dazed amazement, was even more comforting than Tim’s had been. And also meant exactly what I wanted it to mean – no contortions of reality required.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. It wasn’t. It was any number of things, many of them in direct opposition to each other and all
of them changeable and contradictory, but it certainly wasn’t
fine
. And yet I found myself producing a smile, however faint. ‘I mean,’ I heard myself say. ‘It’s not like we’re
those people
.’

Lianne poured some more coffee into my mug even though, after thirty-three years of friendship and the fact that she had given me my first cup of coffee in her parents’ house when we were twelve, she was well aware that I was not the kind of person who liked ‘topping up’ my coffee. I preferred to fix the whole cup myself, so that it had the perfect ratio of coffee to creamer to sugar. But Lianne’s brand of nurturing wasn’t about coddling. It never had been.

‘Which people?’ she asked, not looking at me. ‘The people who argue about every last detail because they’re heartbroken and hurt and trying to fight back the only way they can?’

‘Tim and I aren’t like that,’ I said with a certain loftiness that I suspected was simply because I looked for any excuse at all to say that these days.
Tim and I
. ‘We’re not going to make a big circus out of this, whatever happens.’

Lianne blew on her coffee as if she expected it to be scalding. ‘Why not?’ She looked at me, then away. ‘This is the end of a marriage. Maybe it deserves a circus.’ She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t have to be the full three rings, but maybe a clown or two? Some trapeze artists? A parade of elephants?’

Thinking of trapeze artists made me think of Carolyn’s
rather impressive contortions in bed. In
my
bed. Contortions, I couldn’t help but think, that my body simply wouldn’t perform, yoga or no yoga. Carolyn was built willowy and bendable. I was curvier and shorter and significantly less flexible. I thought of myself as
solid
. I wasn’t flashy, like Carolyn. I kept my more-dirty-than-blonde hair in a sharp, professional bob that I hadn’t cut since That Day. I wore professional suits that had to pass muster in court. I didn’t lounge around in tattoos and kohl, like Carolyn.

‘Is this supposed to be helpful?’ I asked, and I could hear the rage in my voice, but knowing it was unfairly directed at Lianne did nothing at all to dampen it. ‘Don’t you think this is humiliating enough? My fucking
sister
is sleeping with my husband, planning a June wedding
to my husband—
’

‘I have one question for you,’ Lianne said in a calm, wholly unperturbed way that was more effective than slapping a hand across my mouth. She met my gaze, her own steady and sure. ‘And I really want you to think about your answer.’

‘Am I tired of you talking to me like I’m a crazy person?’ I asked dryly. ‘The answer is yes.’

‘Are you upset that you lost Tim?’ Somehow, her very calmness made it worse. ‘Or are you upset that Carolyn took him?’

I spent a lot of time spinning that question around and around in my head. Luckily, I had nothing
but
time. It was
increasingly more humiliating to leave the house and see anyone, because every single person in this town knew what had happened to me – what was still happening to me, right this very minute in the bed and breakfast in the centre of the village – which meant I had a lot of time to sit alone and
brood
when I wasn’t working, explaining to Rivermark’s drunk and wealthy why the state of New York was not going to be impressed with their pedigrees.

It was getting harder and harder to cling to my belief that Tim would shake this madness off one day, and come back to me, the way I knew he should. But I was nothing if not tenacious, hide it though I might beneath the veneer of pathetic despair and questionable dietary choices. My belief in what should happen, what had to happen, only grew as the days passed – took root and spread wide, created whole forests. I knew, I just
knew
, that Tim would come back to me. He had to.

He had to.

And then came the lovely day two weeks before Thanksgiving when nosy, gossipy Mrs Duckworth, who had always been such a stalwart supporter of mine, always eager to talk about Carolyn’s numerous trespasses with relish and glee, made that awkward, embarrassed face in the bread and cereal aisle at the supermarket where I had never, not once, seen the faintest hint of my sister. I had been secretly regarding that as
incontrovertible proof
that Carolyn’s unholy alliance with Tim was therefore doomed. Because I knew the earth would be well into another ice
age before it occurred to
Tim
to do the shopping.

‘These things do get complicated,’ Mrs Duckworth clucked, holding a family-sized loaf of multigrain bread between her pudgy hands. I looked down, dazed, to see I’d clenched great big grooves into my own skinny, newly-single-person’s baguette. I forced myself to loosen my grip. Mrs Duckworth shrugged. Guiltily, I thought. ‘But it’s different when it’s love, isn’t it?’

Which was when I accepted the fact that maybe it couldn’t actually get much worse, after all.

But, of course, I was wrong about that, too.

‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying, Mom,’ I said, frowning, barely able to hear my mother’s voice over the sound of Lianne’s family’s noisy Thanksgiving evening game of running charades – which mostly involved her kids careening into walls and their boisterous accusations of cheating. ‘Are you in a wind tunnel?’

I made an apologetic face at Lianne, who had just handed me her house cordless phone, and took myself out into the slightly quieter front hall. Behind me, her oldest girl screamed out a condemnation of her nine-year-old sister, with the kind of high-pitched outrage only a thirteen-year-old girl could manage to produce. I was smiling when I finally concentrated again on the phone call.

Not that I
wanted
to concentrate on this phone call. I’d boycotted my own family’s Thanksgiving dinner this year, and my mother had made her displeasure about that abundantly clear.
I can’t make you change your mind about coming to Thanksgiving dinner with your family, Sarah
, she’d said with
a sniff,
but it seems you’re determined to lash out and hurt your father and me as much as you’ve been hurt, and I can’t support that
.

I imagined she was calling now, at almost ten o’clock at night, to rub a little more salt in that festering wound.

‘Are you there?’ I asked, girding my loins for the usual mother–daughter battle of wills. And, if I was totally honest, kind of anticipating it, too. Mom would be sad and wounded and often cold; I would, I swore, be calm and rational and not too ‘lawyery’, as she liked to accuse me of being. I’d been practising my speech all day in Lianne’s downstairs bathroom mirror.

‘I am not in a wind tunnel,’ came my mother’s frosty reply.

As far as I could tell, my mother had been this particular level of quietly angry with me ever since I’d thrown Tim out of the marital home, thereby, quote,
sharing your private business with the whole town
. Carolyn’s flaunting of said private business in a bed and breakfast in the centre of the village, subject to the eyes and ears and gossiping mouths of all our neighbours? Apparently not as grave a violation of the family honour. Thanksgiving had only made it worse: my ‘choice’ to ‘abandon the family’ and ‘force us to choose between you and your sister’ being confirmation that I was ‘determined to punish’ her. I checked the weary sigh that threatened to come out.

‘I’m at the hospital,’ she said. ‘You need to come at once.’

I felt a single greasy punch of nauseating fear, hard and incapacitating.

‘Is it Dad?’ I gasped, as terrible scenarios chased through my head.

I wrapped my free arm around my waist. I should have gotten over my damned self and gone to Thanksgiving at my parents’ house, the way she’d wanted me to do. I shouldn’t have taken a stand and refused to attend simply because they’d invited Tim and Carolyn as well.
We can’t take sides
, Mom had said, in that surprised, somewhat affronted way as if I’d suggested she shiv her firstborn in the shower.
She’s our daughter too
. I shouldn’t have replied with such ferocity.
Pretending not to notice the problem
is
actually taking sides, Mom
, I’d snapped back. Was it worth it now?

‘What happened?’ I gasped out.

‘Your father is fine,’ Mom said, her voice thawing slightly, but only slightly. ‘It’s not him. I’m afraid it’s Tim.’

I stared out the glass panel in the front door at the dark November night beyond. Something frighteningly large yawned open inside of me, too dark for me to look at directly.

‘I think you called the wrong daughter, Mom,’ I said evenly. When I could speak.

‘Carolyn is already here.’ Mom let out a small noise too sharp to be a sigh. ‘She tried to call you herself, repeatedly, but said you refused to answer her calls.’

I pressed my fingers hard against my forehead and told
myself this was not the time to address all the problems I had with that statement.

‘What happened to Tim, Mom? Is he all right?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘He went out after dinner to pick up some beer. When he didn’t come back and he didn’t come back, Carolyn called him and an EMT answered his phone. Apparently the roads were icy and his car spun out. He crashed into a tree a few blocks down from the supermarket.’

I was outside of myself. My mother’s disembodied voice was in my ear, stringing together nonsensical words. The sounds of Lianne’s family shouting and laughing down the hall floated around me but didn’t touch me. The cold of the November night was a shock against my palm when I pressed it against the glass panel in the door, but I pressed harder, as if that could make it real somehow. Make me real, right here, living in this terrible moment. I saw that scrap of bright-blue silk, flying through the air, making as little sense as this. I struggled to pull in a breath.

‘Is …?’ I couldn’t form the necessary words. My throat felt as if there was a hand wrapped tight around it, crushing me. ‘Is he …?’

‘We don’t know anything yet.’ That was not the immediate refutation that I wanted. It solved nothing, least of all that choking sensation. ‘He’s in surgery now.’

‘But what do they think?’ I whispered. ‘What did they say? How bad is it?’

Mom was quiet for what was probably only a moment
but felt like years. Long, iced-over ages, and I was suspended there in silence, waiting. Only waiting, as if there had never been and would never be anything but this moment. This telephone call. I was aware of the breath moving in and out of my chest, the seeping cold against the skin of my palm, the heat pricking at the back of my eyes, and that constriction in my throat like some kind of instant onset of strep. My mind raced and raced, but came up with nothing, and in the darkest part of me, that great emptiness seemed to stretch. Grow. Take over. I didn’t know how I could survive it. How anyone could.

‘You have to come, Sarah,’ Mom said then, finally. ‘You’re still his wife.’

I had been in the town hospital far too many times over the years, and didn’t like the fact I was back now.

I’d been born here, and had the pictures to prove it. But those pictures were the only happy memories connected to the place. The rest involved pain, of one sort or another. The time I’d fallen off of my bike in the fifth grade, breaking two fingers and giving myself a minor concussion. When I’d gotten my tonsils removed in the sixth grade and was given only ice chips to soothe the burn, rather than the promised vats of ice cream. My cold-blooded attempt to add
good works
to my college résumé in high school as a candy striper, which had involved entirely too many tragically dying people and my reluctant acceptance of the fact that I was terrible
with other people’s physical pain and suffering.

When I’d had my appendix removed the summer after my junior year of college. When I’d visited Lianne’s mother while she was dying of cancer, and nineteen-year-old, just-married Lianne was falling apart. When my father had had pneumonia that winter. All of those memories seemed to chase me, nipping at my ankles as I walked down the gleaming halls, my head swimming with the scent of the industrial-strength cleaning agents and that underlying, cloying smell of
unwell
that never seemed to go away no matter how much they scrubbed. The lights were always too bright here, the walls somehow too dingy.

It was not a happy place.

I followed the signs up to the ICU, aware that my body felt like someone else’s as I walked. A borrowed body, one physically up to this task, somehow, despite the fact I felt as if I’d left the contents of my brain behind at Lianne’s. Not that it mattered, because none of this felt real anyway. I thought I ought to
feel
any number of things, really, but I couldn’t seem to get there. I just couldn’t. I was numb everywhere I should have felt something. Just frozen all the way through. I’d driven across town in a daze, parked in the overpriced lot, marched across the cold asphalt as if on a mission, found my way inside … all without managing to form anything in the way of a coherent thought. I would have said that was impossible, had I not just done it.