IT WAS TEN AT night and his Lyft shift was over, and Simon was rushing home. Sometimes he half hoped that Bette would be back in the apartment even though she had called him the moment she was resettled in her own place in Spain. “You know, you can always call me. Anytime, day or night,” Bette said. He knew she meant it, and he loved her for it.
When Stella had awakened, Simon was stunned. He hadn’t allowed himself to think into the future. He wasn’t there when she came to, but Libby had called him, her voice full of tears, and the first thing he thought was that Stella had died, but Libby reassured him that Stella was alive, awake.
Of course, he had rushed to the hospital, to her. Of course, he had cried when he saw her lying there, struggling, her eyes floating open and then closing again. “It takes time,” Libby told him. “You have to be patient,” and then he saw Libby’s own raw, red eyes, and that made him cry harder.
He had thought everything would be different now that Stella was awake, and it was. Just not the way he thought.
Stella didn’t act like Stella. She didn’t speak like her or move like her, or even smell like her, and it tortured Simon. He leaned into her neck, the way he always had, resting his face against her skin. An amazing thing about her had always been that though she never used perfumes, she always somehow smelled like evergreens. Now, though, all he could smell was soap.
“Let her find her way,” Libby said when he’d asked her about it, but what way was that, and why couldn’t he act as her guide? He had thought—no, he had prayed—that she’d wake up, and when she did, it felt like someone new was inhabiting her body. When he looked at her eyes, he didn’t have a clue anymore what she was thinking or even if she was thinking about him, which made him feel strange and shy and unhappy. He kept trying to make things the same as they had been, telling her old jokes, singing old songs, but none of it worked. She didn’t get the jokes, and she couldn’t concentrate on the movies, instead excusing herself, leaving him alone on the couch. “I’m so sorry,” she said quietly, but he couldn’t make her feel guilty, so he told her it was fine. In bed at night, he felt her moving toward the edge of the bed instead of looping one leg around his, drawing him closer. When he dared to touch her, the curve of her breast, the thing she had loved, she seemed to draw into herself, even farther away. She acted as if he were wounding her. The last time they had made love, he got lost in it, in her, feeling like they were the same couple again, and he was about to tell her how much he had missed her, how happy he was she was back, how he’d never leave her side again, and then he opened his eyes and saw she was staring at the ceiling, and when he stopped moving, she didn’t pull him back to her.
“Maybe we can just talk,” he said, lifting himself up on an elbow.
“I don’t know what to talk about,” she whispered, and he saw the panic in her face, and so he just smoothed back her hair. “Maybe we should just sleep,” he told her. She nodded again, which broke his heart even more.
He paid the bills. He bought the groceries, trying to remember what it was she liked to eat now. He made sure the bathroom was scrubbed, that their friends were kept in the loop about what was going on. “Look what I did,” he told her once, showing off their kitchen, how every surface gleamed, how even the canned goods were orderly in the cabinet, but her face was blank, unsure. How funny, he thought. He had become the person she had wanted him to be, and suddenly it didn’t matter. It was only when Libby came over to see Stella that he felt that anyone realized how he had changed, too. “The house looks great,” Libby told him. She noticed the bills stacked neatly in a box, she watched Simon making tea, fielding phone calls politely. Libby was the one who put her hand on his arm, and when she did, Simon felt it like a tiny electric shock.
He knew Stella had to go out in the world, but he worried each time she left the apartment without him, making sure she had her cell phone with her, that he knew exactly where she was going.
“Don’t go too far,” he said.
She didn’t. She took baby steps, walking from the apartment four blocks north and then coming back. She went to the bodega to buy milk or just to sit on a nearby bench by the Chelsea Cinema and people-watch for a while. She came back with her cheeks flushed, both from the summer heat and the excitement. “There’s my baby,” Simon said, hugging her, but inside, he worried: she’s going to go out again, and what if something happens to her?
STELLA’S DRAWINGS, WHICH had begun as nothing but spirals and circles, gradually morphed into something more creative. She sat down, and without thinking about it, almost in a trance, she started to draw. First there were shapes. Real shapes. The vase on the kitchen table. Simon’s guitar perched against a wall. Then parts of faces. An eye. A nose. Before, she hadn’t known how to draw, but here, on the page, she was doing it like an expert.
Libby had told Simon that some people developed talents along with new personalities, but he hadn’t really believed her. Libby had said that a coma could awaken the part of the mind, the temporal lobe, that had to do with visuals. Some people might become savants, able to brilliantly play the piano when before they couldn’t find middle C. Simon still didn’t get it. How could someone who had never done anything more with a pen than scribble a grocery list suddenly want to do this kind of drawing and be able to do it well?
One evening when it had turned to July, he came home and she was sketching her lunch, a sandwich with a bite out of it, so accurately that it might have been a photo. “Stella—” he said, and she looked up, her eyes glazed. “How are you doing this?” he said, and she shook her head, pained, and looked at the drawing, a look of surprise on her face, as if she hadn’t been the one who drew it.
“I don’t know,” she said, and then she blinked hard. “I just do.”
“What made you want to draw the sandwich?” he asked. “Do you—do you choose what to draw? Do you just draw what’s there?”
She looked alarmed and pushed the paper away from her. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Do you see how good this is?”
Stella got up from the table. “I don’t want to draw anymore today,” she said.
He carefully took her drawing and put it on the shelf in case she wanted it. He left her alone, not pushing her. None of them, he, Libby, or Stella, knew why she was doing this, but at least she had something to occupy herself, though it worried him when she was alone. It worried him that she didn’t have a job now, though it certainly would have worried him more if she did. Maybe he’d ask around, see if anyone had an opening at a shop or a bakery. Someplace with people. Something just to give her a start.
But instead, he let her draw, and he decided that if she could be creative, so could he. It made him sick and ashamed to think that nothing had happened or would happen with his demo. He hadn’t told Bette or Stella that Libby had sent it out to a CEO she knew, and he was too demoralized to follow up on it with her, too disheartened to try to send it out again on his own. But even so, he wouldn’t give up. So he tried to finish a song he had been working on, one about Stella coming home, about how his heart felt like it had tiny cracks in it and he didn’t know whether it would heal itself or rupture into a thousand shards. It felt really new to him, more personal and interesting than anything he had done before.
“Want to hear my new song?” he asked her one evening when he felt it was almost finished. She sat very still while he played, her head tilted to the side. “I like when you play,” she said when he was done. She got up from the table and moved close to him, resting her head on his shoulder. “You should send out that song,” she said. “Call Kevin. Sing to him on the phone if you have to.”
Simon hesitated, then made the call.
“What the fuck,” Kevin snapped. Simon laughed. He waited for Kevin’s familiar irritation to pass. Then: “Simon! How the hell are you?”
It bothered Simon that Kevin didn’t ask about Stella, didn’t ask about anything, but he wanted to power through this, to get it over with.
“So I have this song,” Simon said. “I think it’s really good, really different.”
“That’s great, man,” Kevin said.
“Let me play it for you now, okay?” Simon said.
“Sure, sing away,” Kevin said.
When he finished, Simon asked, “What did you think?” He looked at Stella, who was smiling at him, her eyes half closed.
“Not quite right for us,” Kevin said.
Simon shut his eyes for a moment and then opened them, and the whole room looked different, as if every color had faded. “Why not?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “It doesn’t feel right for us. It just isn’t . . . there.”
Simon thought of all the hours he had worked on that song. He thought of Stella, her eyes half shutting with pleasure. He swallowed. “So, then, how can I get it ‘there’?” he said.
Kevin breathed into the phone, the way he always did when he was thinking about what to say. “Maybe you can’t,” he said. “Maybe the song just doesn’t have the right bones to build on.”
“Do you want to hear something else?” Simon hated the knot of panic building in his chest. “I have other songs. Lots of other songs,” he lied.
Kevin breathed heavily into the phone. “Look,” he said, clearing his throat. “We’re a different band now. A different sound. I’m happy you’re writing songs, but they aren’t for us. Not anymore. You hear our latest stuff? We have a hot new single, “Blow Over.”
“Haven’t heard it,” Simon said, which was the truth. He tried never to listen to the band anymore because it hurt too much; it made him think about all that he had lost.
The conversation ended. Simon put his head in his hands. “I never liked Kevin,” Stella said. “And there’re lots of other bands. Better bands, too.”
He got online and did a search. There it was on iTunes, “Blow Over.” It was on Spotify, too, and niche radio, and on YouTube it already had five thousand reviews, all of them raves. This time, this one time, he’d listen and then he’d try to never hear the band again. Simon put on his headphones and turned the volume up and listened intently. Kevin’s drumming was sharper, more of an attack. They had a violinist now, which felt like an intrusion to Simon. There was the steady thrum of the bass, still the same, but now Rob was purposefully making discordant harmonies. As Simon listened, he realized his own fingers were moving, picking notes and trying to put the melody where he thought it belonged.
What a fool he was. Kevin was right. Even if they asked him, he couldn’t fit into this band. Not anymore. And they hadn’t asked. They wouldn’t.
He turned off his computer. Done. Over. Fuck you. Fuck me.
He couldn’t be here now. “I’m going to get groceries,” he told Stella, though he knew they didn’t need anything. Stella, her head bent, was drawing ferociously on the page a glass half full of water. She didn’t look up when he left.
WHOLE FOODS ON Fourteenth Street was always packed, but he liked feeling the swarm of people around him. He threw things into the cart that might be small pleasures: a tiny tub of cashew yogurt. Strawberries as big as his fist. He was rounding a corner, going over to the ice cream when he saw Libby in shorts and a black tank top, her hair piled on top of her head, her beautiful long legs stretched into a stance.
It was funny to watch her choose two ice creams and wonder over them, when she was so certain about everything else. And then she turned and saw him. She smiled.
“Well, hey you,” she said.
They talked leaning against the freezer door. She asked him about Stella, and then they both admired the Ice Dream in the freezer. “Why doesn’t anyone make marshmallow ice cream?” she said wistfully.
“You can’t have that. You have to have a base, chocolate or vanilla. Marshmallow gets added on. It’d be awful by itself.”
She grinned. “It’d be delicious. I may just buy marshmallows and make it myself and prove it to you.”
In spite of the freezer, he felt warmed somehow just standing beside her. “You are wonderfully weird,” he said, and she laughed.
“See you later, gator,” she said, reaching in and choosing chocolate, then dropping it into the cart.
As soon as she left, he felt the chill again.