He came home with the wrong pills.
Josh did not feel right prescribing the antiepileptic for Rose and had tried to get a medical doctor he was friendly with to do it for him. His colleague had played coy, knowing that Josh was asking for a script without a patient consult, and suggested that he would be able to see Josh’s wife in a few days.
Josh had felt his pride flare at this. He was certain his “friend” the doctor was acting on some latent inferiority he felt toward Josh and other surgeons. That he was lording the prescription over him.
But now that somebody knew that Josh was trying to bend the rules, Josh didn’t feel comfortable asking anyone else to do it for him. He reluctantly agreed to get Rose to come in for an appointment. He would need to coach her on what to say to make sure she got exactly what she needed.
So it would be a few days before he was able to dim the lights in Rose’s brain.
But he was able to secure a few sleep aids from some pharmaceutical reps. The single-blister trial packs of new formulas of old drugs were commonly passed around the hospital … though both parties knew there was little reason for the doctors there to prescribe common sleep medication. The availability of free and fast sleep drugs was a perk of the job.
But Rose refused to take them.
She was worried that instead of promising her deep, dreamless sleep, the sleeping aids would lock her in the dream … her body would be sedated, but her mind would be imprisoned in a nightmare with no escape.
“I’ll just stay up.”
“Rose…”
“It’ll be fine.”
Josh set the single-blister packs on the kitchen counter. Rose’s eyes lingered on them for a moment—thinking of the medicine chest in Hugo’s bathroom. Their faces framed in the mirror. The feel of the expired blue pill as she placed it on Hugo’s tongue.
How long ago was that?
Yesterday.
It didn’t seem possible. It had been only a day.
Yesterday she had embraced sleep … and Hugo.
Today she was running from him.
What a difference a day makes. Rose snorted at the thought. Almost a laugh.
“Rose, are you okay?” Josh put his hand on the small of her back.
God, she was so tired. Lack of sleep was making her feel light-headed, slightly giddy. A little punch-drunk.
“I’m fine,” she heard herself say. Everything will be fine. Or at least it will be the “not fine” it was before.
Then Josh kissed her.
He pressed his face into hers, his lips soft and open on her mouth, his tongue a gentle presence between his teeth. Rose could sense him inhaling her, taking her in. His fingers caught the greasy hair of her ponytail, frizzy and loose above her ears.
His eyes were closed, but he was seeing her. Seeing her with his mouth and his nose and his hands. Claiming her.
His mouth pulled away as he locked her into an embrace, his chin against her forehead. Rose felt one of their pulses at the contact. His or hers, she wasn’t sure.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Even as she said it, she was tugging on his clothes.
* * *
They made love, first against the countertop and then, when logistics made that difficult, on the floor of Rose’s kitchen, stray crumbs and pieces of lint embedding themselves in the flesh of Josh’s bottom.
From the vantage of the floor, Josh stared up at his wife, filling himself with the sight of her, the feel of her, the her of her. His Rose.
And for the first time in years, Rose did not mind.
In fact, Rose had the odd sensation that she wasn’t even really all there for Josh to see. While part of her was aware of her body grinding and enfolding itself against Josh’s, another part became convinced that she had somehow slipped out of her skin.
She wasn’t Rose at all.
She was a glowing ball of golden light set loose in a field of dark time. Rose felt herself expanding from a central core, her consciousness floating, hovering in space, as she grew larger and larger.
Josh’s hands on her body, the building feeling of potential between her legs … it all seemed somehow related, but distant from the radiating light of herself. She was both on her kitchen floor and at play in the universe.
She cried out, and the orb that was her pulsed. It suddenly pulled away from an unseen force, unfettered at last.
She exploded, her edges straining away from the gravity at her center until they were no longer edges … until she was just bits and pieces, molecules of matter, spinning in a forced trajectory away from what she had once been. She was everywhere. She was everything.
To Josh, pinned on the floor beneath Rose’s orgasming body, she looked not just like herself, but like every self she had ever been or ever would be. She was as she was now in this moment. But she was also as she was when he met her. And as she was when she was pregnant with Isaac. When she was nursing Adam. When she told him to expect the arrival of Penny. She was young Rose from the pictures her parents had shown him when they had gotten engaged. And she was also Rose as he imagined her to be in their future together, her hair streaked with white, her face an etch of elegant wrinkles.
His wife in all forms, in all places and times.
He reached the precipice of fullness … and tipped over.
* * *
He did not stay awake with her, though he had wanted to.
But Josh’s body was stretched even thinner from lack of sleep than Rose’s at this point. He had not had an illicit nap on Hugo’s bed. He had not even had the hour of sleep that had granted Rose the nightmare of Isaac’s death.
Josh’s wife led him to their bedroom and tucked him under the covers, as she did with all of her babies. She kissed his mouth.
Assured him, “I’ll be okay.”
She even believed it for a moment.
The wash of oxytocin was still cresting through her body, those love hormones of orgasm and childbirth and breast-feeding.
She remembered a thousand sleepy nights with the children when they were new. Infants latched pink mouths to her nipple. Tug, tug, tug until she felt it. The let-down of milk accompanied by the “ah” of hormones, tingling outward, drifting from her shoulders to her toe tips and fingers. It made her sleepy and happy, drunk with hormonal love for the tiny people staring up at her, noses pressed to her breasts, filling themselves up with her. Tiny eyes in the dark, surfeiting themselves with the sight of their mother. Sustaining themselves. With her.
Isaac. Adam. Penny.
Each of them a part of Josh and Rose.
Two cells that had found each other in the dark tunnels of her body. One pushing its way past the fortress of the cellular wall, until it finally exploded itself inside. From the two there was suddenly one … that then divided again and again and again—half, half, half … somehow the division of itself making more instead of less.
Twisted strands, beads containing the instructions for growing humanity. Forming into miniature organs, pencil tips fluttering, dark buds of eyes and ears. Blobs of limbs. Each already with its own proclivities and propensities. A seed that could bloom into a tendency toward depression, or genius, or risk taking … All there in the fish-shaped sliver in the dark of the womb, burrowed down into its endometrial bed. Mother’s first homemade meal.
Rose felt full of the miracle of what she had with Josh.
What they had built together.
People. Life.
The glow of the orgasm still felt warm inside her.
Josh fell asleep quickly in their bed, the length of his chest rising and falling under the blankets.
It will all be okay.