The shock of the moment welds Grey’s feet to the floor, but he can still raise his hand to make his Jean-Paul Belmondo gesture, running his right thumb around the bow of his upper lip and the dip of his lower one. Doing this in front of the cop who brought him to the hospital, Grey feels self-conscious in a way he hasn’t in years. Maybe not since he started imitating the gesture with an adolescent fervour the first time he saw the movie Breathless, somewhere back in high school. Watching that cheerful thief watch the confusion of Paris and brush his lips in consternation, Grey saw something he could use, something to do when he didn’t know what to do. In front of his parents’ medicine-cabinet mirror, he trained himself, learning to use the gesture in moments of stress and distress and deep thought. By eighteen, he had finally internalized the motion to the point that he, like that small-time criminal, was scarcely aware of the touch at his mouth, save for the tiny measure of comfort it brought. In the twenty years since, he has traced his mouth in concern and terror and anticipation and barely been conscious of it, but now, in this small, white room, he wishes his hands hung at his sides. Still he can’t stop. Webbed with thin blue blankets and IV lines, black thread stitching across the left edge of her jaw, Catherine is breathing.
His left hand is on the doorknob, and even though he’s pushed the door to Catherine’s room all the way open now, he can’t quite let go yet. The metal is smooth and cool in his grip but warming, growing moist with sweat. He watches her breathe. He can’t tell if she’s unconscious or if her eyes are swollen shut. The yellow-purple flesh around them doesn’t twitch at the echoing click when he finally releases the doorknob, drops his hand from his lips, and slides one foot across linoleum and into the room. One step and then another and then she’s real.
This moment—Grey standing at the foot of this strange bed—is the best-case scenario. This is what he has prayed for with such repetition and passion that the prayer too has passed into unconscious habit. For the eight months she’s been gone, every streetlamp he saw, barking dog he heard, moment of stillness he experienced, has been accompanied by that please please please please please that doesn’t require will or thought. It just comes; he gives his mind the freedom. And yet, in all that time he has never let himself look too closely at the possibility that Catherine might not be alive anymore. He’s never allowed himself the thought of that other Catherine, past-tense Catherine, subterranean and still.
He has pictured this room before. Everything that has happened and is about to happen has already been imagined a thousand times in the darkness of his silent bedroom: the respectful tap on the front door at dinnertime, the cop’s heavy face in the window, the gulp of terror at the possibility of the worst news tinged with the lottery-scratchcard hope of what if? The semi-hysterical questions he asked in the police car, the many bobbing journalists with their cameras and questions on the plaza in front of the hospital—it was all distressingly like a TV crime drama. The excited, beaming deference of the hospital staff and the bleached whiteness of the hallway, the nurses’ station, the door to her room. The narrow barred bed. Except, in his fantasies, the hospital room had a window.
There have been things he didn’t imagine—couldn’t, or wouldn’t. If she wasn’t dead and wasn’t with him, then she was somewhere else, but he never pictured where or how, any more than he pictured the insides of his eyelids. And he never pictured how she would look in the hospital bed—partly shaved hair, broken dirty fingernails, her tall form so rigidly pinned on her back underneath the white sheets. Catherine could never sleep on her back. He had needed to save his strength for whatever reality would sooner or later deal him; he had no reserves for potential tragedies. Even in the worst of fear—the nightmares where she was bleeding, sobbing, being dragged away by the hair, or the times he watched her mother weep into a cup of tea—it always seemed possible that he could get to this moment. And here it is. This is his new reality, unambiguous, unimagined, sharp as a knife blade: his wife on this white, white bed. His vivid, fidgety wife, who bounced through drugstores and libraries, now a stone sculpture of herself—except for her breathing belly rising small under the sheet. His stomach churns with both relief and revulsion at having her back but not back, alive but broken.
The cop sidles into the room behind him and stops abruptly when he really sees her. An hour ago, standing on Grey’s front porch, this man had said the words good news, and now seeing the object of that news steals the blood from his face. Grey senses the officer’s dismay and pity washing over him and Catherine both. He wants to bring his fingers back to his mouth but doesn’t, now too aware of the pathos of his borrowed gesture, perilously close to a thumb in the mouth. They regard this new reality together. This truth is a parody of good news. Grey feels a weighty hand clasp his shoulder.
On some level, ever since he met Catherine, he had known that his happiness couldn’t last. That he would spend a birthday alone, sitting in a lawn chair in the rain so as not to hear the wail of the phone inside the house. In retrospect, maybe Catherine had always been just about to set a narrow foot into the mouth of a bear trap, be clonked on her shiny-haired head by an anvil, be snatched away by a wolf. In having her in his life at all, he’d had more luck than he’d earned, and his good fortune had leached away some of hers. The shocking thing was not that she disappeared, but that she had returned. That she could return from hell and make it feel like summer had come again had seemed both possible and preposterous until she did it. He was a man who believed in catastrophe. Perhaps what was truly shocking was that he had been so unprepared for this one.
Once it arrived, though, once she was taken, he’d known almost right away. Almost. He had been waiting for her at a nice restaurant with Evan and Angie, his oldest friends, and the time spent waiting for Catherine passed pleasantly, until it didn’t. Evan was telling a story about a local politician’s legal troubles when Grey fished out the last slice of olive loaf from the napkin-lined basket, then stared at it in his hand, saying, “We ate the whole basket of bread and Catherine’s still not here… ” Catherine mocked people who thought they were important enough to make their friends wait. Grey let the sentence trail off as if it were an idle thought, before checking his phone again. There were no new messages.
Suddenly the evening that had been spooling out before them like a red carpet—the martinis, the gossip, the warmth of being with old friends—evaporated. He had been picturing Evan the godfather of his and Catherine’s someday child, balancing the baby carefully in his awkward hands. Now, seeing the bottom of the breadbasket, he pictured Catherine stepping in front of a speeding minivan, or some other accident he couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t imagine. Yet he already knew the tone events would take when the waitress set down the second serving of sesame crisps and olive loaf. Nevertheless, he had stood up, politely excused himself from the table, and made the call to nowhere anyway. Her cellphone rang aimlessly, and was later found in a muddy puddle in the parking lot at the restaurant where she worked. Since then, his time and mind have been taken up with prayers and other forms of despair that require no forensic confirmation.
This body in the bed, this Catherine-he-once-knew, she is a confirmation of another kind, but he can’t be sure of what. That his luck is suddenly returning? That she always had the strength to survive something far worse than his nightmares? Because this scene—these thick gashes on her concave cheek, that awkward angle of her right arm, the web of tubes tangling from her left wrist to a clear plastic bag—is a nightmare that his mind would not have been able to conjure ten minutes earlier, let alone eight months ago.
When did this become the best-case scenario? Long after the optimistic volunteer searchers in their neon ski jackets and the underfunded police department and the brusquely bored newspaper reporters and even her stoic, sweet-eyed mother gave up hope. He and Sue sat week after week in her apartment eating schnitzel and pot pies and all the things she loved to make for Catherine, talking about Catherine’s noisy laugh, her notion that all fruit should be served chilled, her fussiness about organizing bookshelves. But sometime in the summer, Sue stopped meeting Grey’s gaze and her tone grew heavier, though she kept telling stories about Catherine’s childhood, and the dinners got more elaborate. Or perhaps it was when he almost got rid of his landline—it was getting so expensive—but then he realized that if he did, even if Catherine somehow got to a phone, the first number she would think to call would be out of service. Or the night he slept diagonal on the bed and didn’t wake up sweating. Or perhaps it was during that numb period when he’d seen glimpses of a future without her and thought he might live through it, or sometime during the past few months when he scarcely wept at all, and never on the bus.
But he’s been proven wrong and, in his error, won everything. Catherine has come back as a living person, not as an eighteen-point headline. These monitors and this narrow bed: this is the longed-for triumph, the victory lap, and grounds for promotion for the cop in the corner. Catherine’s mouth is a meaty swell, the colour of raw chicken liver. Her thick dark hair has been razored, not by her captor’s cruelty but by the gentle hands of nurses, to get at the wounds underneath. Even the spikes of surgical thread along her jaw are a victory, a better alternative than others.
The white-walled room is tiny—one more step puts him at the shore of the bed. Behind him, the police officer, young beneath his beard, has dropped back against the wall. Grey can hear the man’s heavy breathing and knows they are both fighting to continue to see her, to accept this celebration. For all his clairvoyance, Grey does not know what comes next. Does he embrace her, wake her, ask her how she is? Can he touch her hand? So many of his memories of Catherine are touches. He can remember her skin against his hands, his chest, his throat. What he sees now is an unrecognizable body—gaunt, fragile—and the wires and tubes contain her like a cage, fencing out his pathetic need to touch. Should he be carrying flowers? How long will it take for this day, all these past days and weeks and months of suspended animation, to become blurred memory? How soon can he forget how it felt to half awaken in the night and nuzzle her empty pillow? Would now be possible, somehow?
Has the cop seen Breathless? Part of Grey—the weak part, the part that would hide from his beloved wife—would like to buy the cop a cup of coffee and tell him about the early days of Goddard and the French New Wave, when things were more linear but still so cool that you could get away with not feeling, if you wanted to.
But you can’t. Grey can’t leave and he can’t stop feeling the loss of Catherine’s loud laugh, so incongruous with her low, even voice. The loss of that voice too. Can he talk to her? No one has told him what he’s allowed to do here. There are things he can’t quite bring himself to believe: the blankness of her third left finger; the pillow of bruise under her eyes; the blades of her hips sharp enough to slice through the thin blue blanket—these all hammer at his eyes and mind.
Will this be enough for her? Will this be too much? She was not a woman for whom any sort of pain would be muted. Is. She was fearful of many things but she enjoyed her life, or at least he believed that she did. Does. She put huge amounts of cilantro in her salads and followed a recipe for Bloody Marys that called for pickle brine. He was constantly finding her socks in the front hallway—she hated to have anything on her feet but believed the laws of conformity required it outside the house. She read constantly, on the bus and during breakfast and especially sprawled on her stomach at home on the couch or in bed or on the lawn. She said her favourite poets were the ones who irritated her slightly, the ones who stopped her from easily sliding her eyes from left to right. Once, she painted the coffee table vermilion and then tripped over it, striping her pyjamas, which she continued to wear for years, even so. They had a bright blue couch to go with the red coffee table; this made sense to her. Once, she went through a Barthes period and wanted to work in advertising. She never drank Guinness, she never shopped in malls. Once, at a summer job, she was able to prove a need for the more expensive kind of paper clips, the coloured ones, to code her files, and Admin ordered them every month in a little box, just for her. She only brushed her hair when it was wet. She laughed and laughed at pratfalls and puns and other things that were marginally funny. She slept on the left side of the bed.
Grey kneels at the left side of her bed. From this ungated side, he can lean across the slippery sheets and place his cheek, pale and gaunt with the killing fire of hope, against the deep curve between those jagged hipbones. As he presses his thick lips to Catherine’s cloaked belly, he hears the policeman’s sharp inward hiss of breath—Terry, his name is Terry—but he feels Catherine’s breath. Beneath his unshaven face, her stomach tightens into itself, but then it pushes up again. The disinfected hospital air is sliding inside her, pumping through her and through him and through Terry, a perfect intimacy.
The room is silent. On TV medical shows, there’s always a steady beep of some sort of monitor, but Catherine’s seems to be off, or on mute. Can the doctors really have such faith that this small, frail heart will keep beating? Grey can’t. He keeps his face pressed into his wife’s stomach. He has to feel her breathing to be sure. And as he feels the rise and fall of her belly and watches the slight twitch beneath the unrecognizable yellow slit of her eyelids, he is sure. Hair can grow back. Blood can clot. This is nothing like the movies. And in the back of his throat he feels the miserable burn of gratitude.