Chapter 7
Grace
The lobby was deserted and the reception desk unmanned, but I didn’t need directions. I knew the way—left from the lobby, right at the corridor, to the end of the hall. A woman with brown hair striped gray at the part looked up from her desk.
I forced a smile. “Hi, Alicia. How’s he doing?”
“Hi, Grace. I didn’t think you were coming. I just checked on him. He’s fine.”
Fine means the same. The same as yesterday, and last week, and last month, and last year. The same, not better. Better was not going to happen. Now there were only two possibilities—the same and worse.
“Well . . . I’ll get out of your hair. I’m just going to stay for a few minutes.”
“Are you okay?”
She frowned, examining my face. Alicia knows me pretty well by now.
“Busy. You know how it is. But I’m fine,” I said.
I was fine. I was the same. Or would be. I’d had a momentary lapse in judgment. It wouldn’t happen again. I wouldn’t let it.
I tiptoed into Jamie’s room, thinking he might be asleep, and felt an involuntary jolt run through my body, the kind of sensation you get from walking across thick carpeting in socks and then touching something metallic—a short, sharp shock that makes your muscles twitch and your breath catch.
Even after all that time, coming up on two years, when I saw my once-oak-strong husband, the man with deep roots, lying in bed, shrunken and dependent on the ministrations of nurses to eat, control his bowels, and simply survive, I felt that same inward gasp. Sometimes it was hard to make myself believe the body in the bed truly belonged to my Jamie.
He was awake, looking toward the doorway as if he’d been waiting for me. Maybe he was. I couldn’t tell. That was the worst part of all of this. Though his eyes looked the same as they always had, deep steely blue, fringed with thick bristles of shoe-polish-black lashes, there was no way for me to tell what he thought or didn’t think. Or if he could think at all. The doctors said no. At times like this, I wasn’t so sure.
I stood next to his bed, but his gaze remained fixed on the open doorway. I brushed hair from his face. Still, he watched the door. Who was he waiting for?
“You need a trim,” I said. “I can bring the scissors next time I come.”
He didn’t respond. I didn’t expect him to. That didn’t stop me from talking.
When Jamie was still in the coma, he never opened his eyes or responded in any way. For a time he couldn’t even breathe on his own. The medical staff urged me to talk to him anyway. They said it might help him recover, so I did, telling him about the little inanities of my day—how beautiful the trees were when autumn arrived, turning orange, red, and gold; how they’d raised the cable prices so I canceled the service; how I’d met Nan and Monica, adopted Maisie, found a new recipe for chili, or a sweater on sale at Macy’s; how I’d decided to stitch two dozen cardinal Christmas ornaments, made from red felt and embroidered with gold and black thread, to give to the nurses. Little things, ordinary things, the daily details of living life and passing the time, waiting for something to happen, good or bad. Stupid things that I felt stupid saying when all I really wanted to do was sob and beg him to wake up and open his eyes.
One day, he did.
I was so phenomenally happy, convinced that it was only a matter of time before he recovered completely. Talking to him was easier after that. It became a habit that stuck with me even after I was educated about the stages of recovery for brain injury and understood that the progression from coma, to persistent vegetative state, to minimally conscious, to conscious isn’t always a continuous line. Some people start at A and progress all the way to Z. Others get stuck and stay there forever. Jamie got stuck.
He could breathe on his own, had sleep and wake cycles, blinked, sometimes followed things with his eyes. He could move his limbs, but not on command, laugh or cry, but not as an appropriate emotional response—it was just something he did.
I pulled a chair up close to the bed.
“Sorry I’m late. I went out to dinner at The Fish House. That’s why the dress,” I explained, fanning the skirt, spreading the wings of the flamingos. “Monica was supposed to come too; I never would have gone otherwise. But then she had a crisis and canceled at the last second. So it was me and Luke, and—”
Jamie made a choking sound. That happened fairly often, but I jumped to my feet, looked into those eyes that looked through me, making sure he was okay.
“Babe, listen to me. I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known that Monica was going to cancel. But I couldn’t walk off and leave him alone, could I? The dancing was a mistake. I see that now. But there was nothing to it. I thought it would be nice, this once, to have a nice dinner, wear a pretty dress, and spend time with a handsome—”
The words caught in my throat.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I just wanted not to be alone. Can you blame me?” I asked, lifting my head toward the ceiling, speaking to the empty air, the invisible, wordless presence I felt pressing in on me. “I’m thirty-one years old. I’m human. I miss having a man to talk to and laugh with. I miss being admired and important to someone. Is that so wrong? It’s not like any of this is my fault!”
Jamie coughed again and I took his hand, feeling for the spot on his thumb where the skin was still thick, a final testament to all the things those hands were once able to do.
“I know. I know. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. You were just being who you are. But, don’t you see? It was just dinner, a dress, a dance. I didn’t see any harm in it. I was just being me, being who I was when we were still us. Do you remember?”
Jamie turned his head and gazed toward the empty doorway, resuming his vigil. He was tired, I could tell. Soon he would sleep. I would stay until he did.
I sat down in the side chair, on the seat cushion that had molded to fit my frame over these long months, and pulled out the clear zippered pouch I carried with me everywhere, filled with scraps of red, green, white, brown, and blue. My habit of carrying handwork was an old one. When you spend a lot of time in hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s waiting rooms, it’s a good idea to bring along something to do.
I pulled out a big, eight-inch square of plain, cream-colored fabric and smoothed it out across my lap. It was more of a patch than a block, but I planned to put it in the center of the quilt. It would be the biggest individual patch of fabric in the quilt.
Measuring from side to side, I was the biggest girl in my high school. At the start of senior year, I stood five foot five and weighed 228 pounds.
Like this block, I tried hard to blend in, to go unnoticed. It’s a coping mechanism familiar to most overweight kids or anyone who was bullied as a child. You quickly learn that the way to keep from being picked on is to attract as little attention as possible. And so you become wallpaper, try to blend into the background and go unnoticed because it seems the only way to survive.
Yet no one truly wants to become invisible. Everyone—no matter how fat, or slow, or tall, or ugly, or beautiful—wants to be important and loved, the center of someone’s world.
When I was eighteen, Jamie Saunders saw me.
He wasn’t the smartest guy in the class, or the best looking, or really the best anything. But everybody in school knew and liked Jamie. He was friendly to everyone, said hello to every single person he passed in the hall, regardless of their social standing, even me. But our first real conversation took place in the lobby of the local medical center, near the beginning of senior year.
I was sitting in a corner of the lobby, my face to the wall, crying. I felt his presence even before he spoke and was wiping away tears when he asked if I was okay, then sat down next to me on the love seat, even though there wasn’t much room. He was wearing a light blue chambray shirt.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “It’s okay, you can tell me.”
Something about the way he said it made me believe it was true.
I told him about my failed appointment and how the doctor had denied my request, saying I was too young and not obese enough to justify the risk of surgery.
“That’s the first time in my life anybody, especially a doctor, said I wasn’t fat enough. Wish I’d brought along a tape recorder. I could play it back for my mom.”
I tried to make a joke of it, but couldn’t.
“What does he want me to do? Buy a case of potato chips so I can get fat enough to finally get thin? It’s so stupid!”
Jamie frowned. “I’m sorry, Grace. That really sucks.”
It did. Hearing him say so didn’t change anything, but it made me feel better. I said thanks and asked where he was going.
“Orthopedist appointment. I went out for cross-country and my knees hurt. My mom wants me to get checked out.”
Penny was standing with her back to us, looking out the window toward a small garden with orange mums and a fountain.
“Your mom is waiting,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I mean, I will be.”
“You sure?”
I nodded.
“I think so too,” he said, and for some reason, I believed him. He seemed trustworthy. And that’s how it all started.
I took some patches from the bag, the same off-white I was using in the center and some blue chambray, scraps from a shirt Jamie would never wear again. This block, a friendship star, would represent our beginning, a moment of kindness, a sea change neither of us saw coming.
I threaded my needle and started sewing, as I did every night, passing time, marking time, keeping my eyes on my stitches, refusing to look at the door or think about who Jamie was waiting for or when they might come.