The process of coming up was terrifying for both women.
As the hold of the medicine dropped away from Michael, he began to snort and huff like an animal, eyes wild beneath his closed lids. Talk to him, Ellen was commanded, and so she did—her own strung-out, blurted sentences sounding inane in those tense moments, with the yellow curtains pressing in. But obviously what she said meant little, so she went on and on, describing the hospital and the windy autumn day outside (oh, Ellen—the weather?) and all the e-mails she was receiving, every day, from his friends, and all the calls from Wes and Jane, and how he was going to be fine, just fine, and she was here with him—it was Ellen, did he know that?—and yes, it would feel scary but it was okay, he was okay, and—
Then Michael roared up and knocked a monitor over. Aides jumped in quickly, shoving Ellen aside. She watched him thrash, she shouted, she almost went to her knees when a thin spurt of blood whipped across the room—he had ripped the line out of a shoulder—and she wept, creeping forward and then cringing back. Still, when she could she kept talking, saying anything and everything, in hopes that her voice might find its way into his wild bucking. The doctor adjusted the drip, the aides held him down, and finally Michael opened his eyes.
Ellen made herself come into his view, it’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here. He hissed and babbled, nothing intelligible, and he stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. Without a shred of recognition. And then he bared his teeth and howled, a scream that made her cry out.
“It’s not working! Put him back under,” she begged.
“It’ll take a little while,” the doctor grunted while he and the aides struggled to restrain Michael. He pounded his legs against the bed, his wrapped-up stump. “It’s all right.”
It was anything but all right. But after several minutes, they gave him some of another kind of sedative and his dumb fury died away.
It was a kind of progress, they explained to Ellen later. His vitals were functioning, and the dementia would lessen the more he became used to being awake. It could take some time, she was warned. They’d try again, and again, and soon he’d adjust.
That night back in the hotel Ellen was so wrung out she climbed into bed in her clothes. Unable to sleep, she made herself write down a few important pieces of information in the notebook that she’d begun a few days earlier, to keep track of the constant medicines and procedures. “Disinhibited” is what the doctor had called Michael’s thrashing. “Emotionally labile.” She copied these terms down, amazed by a world where such cool phrases were used to describe the purely animal pain and fear rocketing through Michael’s every nerve as he was pinned down in a strange bed by three men.
And what about me? Ellen thought. Why did my voice do nothing to calm him? His bulging eyes, his whole body shaking. She felt as if he might bite her, or put his hands around her neck. Curled up under the covers, unwashed and hungry, Ellen trembled. Why should he be calmed? What was she to him? Their connection was so precarious, so short-lived. Compared to the trauma of war and injury, wasn’t it likely that everything about them had been obliterated? And did that mean she was even more useless here than she felt? Ellen pictured Lacey calmly and competently handling her husband’s awakening—how reassured he’d be to find her there, to hear her familiar voice, their years of marriage stabilizing him even in the confusion. A thousand previous memories rushing in to align him with reality. With life.
But she could do this. Mike needed her; she’d saved him before, hadn’t she? No, her letters hadn’t worked—she shook her head in bed, disgusted—all those pages, all that reading: worthless. All right, but she could do better. It might be a technicality that brought her to Walter Reed, mere guardian in a world of real moms, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t bring him back, couldn’t find their connection again. She’d find a way.
To get herself to sleep, Ellen clung to a memory: the two of them, on the couch in the basement. The TV on mute, a late-night talk show. Mike had two weeks to make up a dozen incomplete assignments—including a ten-page research essay—in order for him to graduate high school. Ellen, in her bathrobe, knew a dire situation when she saw one, and sorted quickly through a pile of half-written reports and mediocre paperbacks—dog-eared and underlined for decades. Death = theme. Green light = symbolism!! Danny R sux cox. “This first,” she said. “No, this one. If you read two chapters I’ll tell you about the rest. No, Wikipedia doesn’t count for a source. Because I say it doesn’t. Now look, for the research essay you’ll want to set it up like—” She took his pen and swiftly sketched out an outline, muttering about remedial teachers who couldn’t bother to write up clear directions or a rubric, when she felt his gaze on her. “What?”
“Nothing,” Mike had said. Sheepish, grateful.
Ellen went back to writing. “Don’t know what I would have done,” he said then, quietly, almost to himself.
* * *
Eddie Diaz came up smoothly and without incident. Lacey gripped the rosary in one hand and his in another, but no bad dreams shook him, no terror swept through his placid body. In fact, it was so easy that the attending congratulated herself, in pointed response to Lacey’s insistence that the procedure be done in SICU.
Eddie slowly swung his head back and forth against the raised back of the bed. Lacey spoke to him, but he didn’t seem interested in what she was saying. Instead, he pursed his mouth and flickered his tongue in and out, searching. She held the straw to his lips, ignoring the doctor’s not too much at first—and felt him pull deep, until the ice rattled at the bottom of the Styrofoam cup. The doctor began to say something, but was cut short by what happened next.
Eddie laughed. He set his head lightly back on the bed and laughed a long, fluty trill. Lacey dropped his cup and ice slid around on the floor. “Ed, Ed,” she murmured. “It’s okay.”
But her husband let out a long moaning sigh that turned into another laugh. A laugh she’d never heard from him before. Light and breathy, carefree.
One of the aides in the room chuckled until Lacey shut him up with a look.
“It’s just the Versed,” the doctor said. She flipped back a few pages on his chart. “It’ll sometimes cause—”
“I know what Versed does,” Lacey hissed. “And he’s not on it.”
“He’s not? Oh, right. Well, there’s bound to be some emotional disinhib—”
“Hi,” Eddie said softly. “Hi, hi.”
“Hi, hon,” Lacey said, leaning across him on the bed. “You’re in Walter Reed. You can’t see because there was an accident, in the Humvee. But you’re okay, and all the guys who were in there with you are okay—” His men, she knew, would be his top concern.
“Hi, hi, hiiiiiii…” Eddie giggled. He reached up to gently pat the contours of the covered eye.
“Captain Diaz,” the doctor said loudly. “I’m Dr. Renard. We are protecting your eye with a shield. Can you tell me where you are? Do you know why you’re here?”
“Of course he can’t,” Lacey snapped. “He’s been out for a week. Ask him—”
“Here, I’m here,” Eddie began, in nearly a whisper. With a tiny smile flickering. “Ha. Aha ha.” He turned his blind face her way, sweetly. Lacey edged back, throat full of nausea. The aide went awww. Eddie made a smoochie face and she almost bolted. But he just wanted water again, so she filled another cup and put the straw to his lips. After he drank, he swooned backward: asleep again?
Dr. Renard turned to one of the nurses. “Do you have the rotation schedule? For pressure wounds?” She went on to discuss raising his heels for bedsore prevention, and gave orders about his drip and TPN feed.
All the while Lacey fought her dismay. And—yes—her disgust. Who was this simpering stranger? With the cutesy-pie voice and the tee-hees? Where was Eddie? Twenty minutes later, he was still giggling as if he had a secret, while drifting in and out of consciousness.
She followed Renard into the hall. “What’s that about?” Lacey demanded. “He’s not like that. Why is he laughing, for God’s sake?”
“I know it’s disconcerting. But you have to give it time. We don’t know the extent of the closed-head injury, and until—”
“Is it permanent?”
Renard studied Lacey. “If it is, it’s not the worst. Sometimes a personality shift can go the other way. They become angry all the time, flying off the handle at whatever. Or there can be constant crying…”
Lacey gaped at this bitch. Who quickly covered her ass. “But that’s jumping the gun by quite a bit. We’re set to do a CAT scan as soon as Ocular gives the okay. Most likely, it’s a temporary reaction to one of the meds, and will wear off.” Then she hurried away.
For a long time Lacey lingered outside in the hall. Eddie was scheduled to be moved to Ward 58 tomorrow morning; Ellen’s Michael would be in 57 of course—everyone knew about 57, infamous from the sheer numbers of lost limbs from the war. Lacey found herself glad to know that Ellen would be nearby. The professor—she’d been right about that!—had a steeliness that was impressive. She wasn’t some scared bunny, like some of the other moms … or one of those who raised loud and confused complaints to anyone who would listen. Plus, Lacey could use a friend here.
No, she couldn’t call Anne or the other girls back; most of those calls had been trickling away in any case as the days went on. They couldn’t understand. Lacey herself wouldn’t have understood, before this, what it was like here. The FRG women who had meant everything to her—all seemed a long way away now.
She took out her phone and stared at it. Too early to call Otis—he wouldn’t be home from school until five. She’d already spoken to her mother-in-law twice today, anyway, for updates on Eddie and to answer the million questions Lolo had about Lacey’s apartment, where she was staying with Otis: Was this all the towels Lacey had? Why no DustBuster, that vacuum canister was much too heavy? How to work the TV remote (again)? I don’t like this coffeepot, I put it out for the trashman.
But here was yet another message from Lolo; as Lacey listened, prepared to be annoyed, she grew very still instead. Could she possibly be hearing this right? “—And also, that man just came for the bills. He said you said it’s okay, so I gave him the envelopes and those papers by the phone. Also he left an envelope with the money, he says for the groceries? Must be from the army. So I already put the order to Big Apple but they don’t deliver until tonight. Otis needs a new set of uniforms and you need to call me back right away because of his homeworks, I don’t know this math and he says he don’t have to—”
Lacey strode away from Eddie’s room, hands shaking as she pressed buttons on the phone. Jim answered right away and she didn’t wait. “What are you doing? What. You go to my house? You talked to his mom? What the fuck?”
A long breath exhale. “I didn’t do it to get in your way. You didn’t have to call me or anything. I just wanted to help out. As a friend.”
“Help out by what? Hanging around my mother-in-law?” A man in BDUs turned the corner and gave Lacey a crisp nod; she tried to bring her voice down. “Getting her all confused? And what is this—about papers, something you took?”
“Nothing! A couple utility bills and I took care of them, okay? Also a few other things. Those ones that went to collections, Lace—that’s not good.”
“That’s not your business! I don’t need any help! Just stay out of it, all right?”
“Okay. Okay.”
She held the phone tightly so that she wouldn’t cry. “You gave her money?”
“Just a few bucks. For Otis, for whatever. I won’t do it again. If you say. Lacey. Hey, Lace.”
“What?”
“Don’t hang up. I won’t call you, I won’t do anything more … Just don’t go yet.”
She touched a corner of the framed poster on the wall: Family. Community. Country. Together we can save lives! Wounded Warriors ARE America. This was bad. Every second she stayed on this call her resolve buckled. How to fight it, the spreading belief that this was a good man? And that this love mattered, somehow, even amid it all?
“He’s not right, Jim,” she whispered. “I could tell right off the bat. He’s awake but … I think something’s broken in there, even if they can’t see it. More than the eyes, I mean.”
“Oh, Christ. That’s messed up. And it’s gotta be so hard on you.”
“Yeah. Well. Like it should be.”
Long sigh, shhhhh. “It doesn’t work like that. Even if we hadn’t been … what we were, this still would’ve happened.”
So if she tried to be a good wife now, it didn’t count? It wouldn’t make Eddie better? His eye, though … there was still a chance. Just a little light, Lacey thought. Let him have that. Give me that much.
“Tell me something about your girls,” she said. “Are they liking school? Did Jenny get braces on?”
“Ah, she cut a deal with her mom. Braces can wait until after cheering season, if she keeps a B average. Not how I would’ve done it, but who am I? Just the guy who pays for braces.”
“What about the other ones?” Lacey glanced down the hall. No one came in or out of Eddie’s room, but she knew she’d have to go back there soon. A memory of Eddie’s soft, wandering laughter pierced her, and she recoiled. Give her anything else: blood spurting, vomit, protruding bone. But that laugh …
So she held back for a few more minutes. She traced the letters on Wounded Warriors and listened to Jim tell her about his daughters, his voice bright with love for them. She didn’t thank him for the money, or for paying her bills. They didn’t mention it again. His stories about home, about the restaurant and what she was missing in New York, let her hang there a little longer, suspended between two worlds, until it was time to go back down the SICU hall.