3

STELLA FLOATS.

She doesn’t have a body, though she knows it’s there, apart from her, on this bed. She can hear Simon talking to her, although she can’t make out the words. The rise and fall of his voice confuses her. It’s rich and almost gravelly, they way it had been when he was in his twenties, when she had first met him and he was still smoking. Allergic to smoke, she had sneezed at his kisses. But he stopped for her.

Simon now says something to her, more urgent, but she can’t make out a syllable. Grr, it sounds like. A fake kitten growl. Bzzt, he says. Like the wings of a fly smashing up against a pane of glass. Even though she can’t understand him, his voice soothes her. It’s real and known and familiar. Simon. My Simon. She wants to tell him how sorry she is that they argued. She doesn’t think he meant it, about their dreams being different. It was the storm raging outside, the wine making them both woozy. It was her cold plugging up her sinuses, and her headache throbbing. They were both so tired. So exhausted.

But how funny. She doesn’t have her cold anymore. Here in this place, she isn’t aware of her body and its functions. Breathing, sweating, peeing, they all seem part of another life to her, something she used to do but doesn’t do any longer. Wave bye-bye, body. Sayonara. The thought of it makes her laugh, makes her glad she still has her sense of humor.

Mostly what she does is smell things. Something sharp like lemon whisks by her nose. Wait, she wants to say. Please wait. But the scent fades and vanishes before she can really lock onto it. She hears sounds, and she perks with interest. Feet pad on the floor. Voices dip and rise and grow silent. She feels an elbow bumping against something hard, but she knows it isn’t her elbow, so how could she feel it. She dreams, too, but it isn’t so much that she is dreaming as that she feels she is actually there in her dream, dropped down from one place to another. She doesn’t bother to wonder why. She isn’t certain that there are any answers.

I’m here, she wants to say to Simon. I’m right here. She feels so sorry for him when she hears him crying. She can feel where he is by the heat in the room moving closer to her, warming her. She can hear it, too, little skips in his voice, the loss of control. He’s a color, too, a soft gray blue. She knows there is a scientific name for that, that there are people who can hear colors, who can see sounds. Synesthesia. The word appears in her head, a surprise memory.

She wants to stroke his hair and tell him it’s going to be okay. Don’t worry, baby, she thinks, though she’s never once called him baby. Don’t worry.

He’s crying harder. He’s not a crier. She’s the one who weeps when they argue, who even tears up at the phone commercial in which that college kid calls his parents to tell them he loves them. “I live with a wuss,” Simon said, kissing her.

The only other time she had known him to cry was when he invited his parents to Manhattan for a visit to hear him play. Simon had planned a monologue, to introduce his father to the crowd. He was even going to make his dad stand up so his father could be applauded. But his father never showed up, and there, on the stage, Simon’s eyes were wet. Everyone but her thought that he was crying because he was feeling the song, the emotion of it.

It stung. But Simon never stopped trying with his dad, and maybe that was part of what she loved about him, his willingness to believe. Back then, Stella had thought they had lots of time. She was sure that whatever was wrong between Simon and his father might work itself out, the same way whatever was wrong between her and Simon would.

She tries to remember Simon’s father’s name. Michael, she thinks. Fred. Frank. Names swim around in her mind. Ricardo. Henry. None of them feel right. She tries to dig deeper, but she can’t find a name.

She isn’t afraid right now. That surprises her. To her, being helpless was always the absolute worst. Babies were helpless, but that’s not the same. Babies responded to care and love, and helplessness was their natural state. But true helplessness, a lack of power that might go on forever—the patients with locked-in syndrome, the ones who were quadriplegic—that really scared her.

She tries to move and can’t. Or maybe she’s moving, but it feels totally different to her. She doesn’t have limbs. She knows something has happened, although she isn’t sure what. Time seems to have gone elastic, stretching like a rubber band, ready to snap at any moment. Whenever she seems to get panicked trying to remember, she falls asleep, or maybe it’s not sleep. It’s a kind of blankness. She’s been erased for a while and then redrawn. When she comes back, she always feels a bit better, though she thinks how nice it would be if she could stretch and shower, hum and brush her hair, and go outside and feel the air on her skin.

She hears Simon playing music to her, the soft acoustic guitar she likes. Simon! She wants to shout to him, to lace her fingers with his, but nothing inside of her moves. She tries to remember the words to the song he’s singing, to grab onto the melody so she can sing it to herself later. She can hear he’s playing badly, but she doesn’t know why except he only plays out of tune when he’s upset. She hears her name: Stella. At least she knows that. Wake me up now, she thinks. I’ll go on tour. I’ll go anywhere. Do anything.

The music stops and she yearns for it to come back. She hears voices again, a ring of them, moving in on her, closer and closer. She wishes she could pull back.

No one knows, someone says. No one knows what, she wonders. The voices blur and then fall away.

Whenever the doctors arrive, her calm leaves her. The energy of the room changes, breaking up. They do things that scare her. They scream at her. She can’t move. Her speech is so jammed she can’t announce her presence. I’m here. I’m here. Hello, hello, hello.

“God,” someone says. She doesn’t recognize the voice. Stella stopped believing in God when she was twelve. It wasn’t a difficult decision. Back then, her parents worshipped only each other. They called each other five times a day. Stella couldn’t remember being taken to the zoo just by one parent, or to the beach; even when a story was read to her, it was always both of them. One night, she had heard them talking and her mother calmly said that having Stella had been a mistake, and when her father didn’t jump right in and tell her she was wrong, Stella froze. “I mean, I love her,” Stella’s mother had said. “I’m so glad she’s here, but think how much easier things might be.” Stella, terrified, wondered if any moment she might just die and go to heaven, and if so, what would that be like? The next morning, she made the mistake of asking her mother where heaven was, and her mother laughed and said, “Heaven is your father.”

All Stella could think was that heaven didn’t include her.

God, she thought, was like the Easter Bunny, a precious dream people needed to make them feel more hopeful, but now, like anyone caught in a muddle, she prays. Dear God, get me out of this. Whatever it is. Rescue me. She prays to Simon, but what she wants from him is simple. Don’t leave me.

“Stella.” She hears her name again. A different voice this time. A smell: L’Air du Temps. Her mother’s perfume. Mom. Mom. Mommy. She feels a rush of need. And then the scent fades. Her mother’s in Spain. Or is she? Mom. Does her mom need her? Stella had gone into nursing because of all the need she saw in the world, because she could be the one to take care of it.

Sometimes she panics. Right now, for example, her mind goes numb with terror. This can’t be happening. This isn’t real. I have to get out of here. It’s as if this crazy state was the real world and everything she had lived before was a fake world. She feels like she is in a TV show, like she is wrapped in layers of cotton. There’s an audience, the rustle of arms and legs and paper, the blur of conversation. A soundtrack of beeps. She doesn’t know how, but she’ll get out.

What happened to her? When did it happen? She remembers only shards. She had a cold. She took a Sudafed. One. Two. Did she take two? She remembers Simon was going to tell her something important.

Something shifts. It takes a moment, but Stella realizes that she is being turned on her side, that something is being done to her and she has no idea what.

Stella wants to communicate with the people around her, but she doesn’t know how. She has different senses now. Simon comes close to her and leans his forehead against her, the way he used to. Mind melding, he called it, a trick he got from Star Trek. She’s Spock to his Kirk, or maybe it’s the other way around. When he used to do it, she never really knew what he was thinking, but he always wanted her to guess. Blue, she said. Green. Sometimes, just because of the law of averages, she’d get it right. He moves away, giving her room to feel his panic, his love, his gargantuan need for her. Good, she thinks, good. Because the truth is she’s afraid of being alone. She’s always been afraid.

“Stella.” She hears her name, but she can’t respond. She doesn’t know who is talking to her now, who’s calling for her. She’s pinwheeling away. She smells Simon’s hair and she wants to touch it, but she can’t lift her hand. Something is brushing against her skin, something soft.

Something is floating, and then she realizes, once again, it’s her.