John arranges for Sid to drive him home from rehabilitation, but she is so pregnant and busy implanting herself into the infrastructure of her new job before she goes on maternity leave that I convince her to let me do it. We had gone to different facilities, at my request. I wanted to be as anonymous as possible while I healed, I didn’t want to confront my relationship and repair my body at the same time and John felt the same way, I knew without asking. We haven’t spoken since the hospital except for a few necessary administrative emails with Sid cc’d; otherwise we let her act as our go-between. Our silence isn’t out of animosity, more a conservation of energy. We need the solitary time to reconcile ourselves with the new realities of our physical forms before we face each other.
I tell Sid not to tell him about the change of plans, that I’ll come to him as a surprise. In the last few months a friend of Alexis’s from law school had been working to procure an out-of-court settlement for us from the company that manufactured the space heaters, and the week of his release I receive the official amount of our remuneration. It is, as one might say in Victorian novels, a handsome sum, one that creates many possibilities (money is energy, an investment banker once told me), and I decide I will bring the news to him, to give us something to talk about, to frame our journey homeward, as it were. I even consider packing a picnic with cold chicken and sparkling lemonade, stopping in a wooded park on the way back, setting him up in a camp chair with a blanket on his knees, and recounting the happy news of our newfound inheritance.
But on the day of his release, it is sunless, cool, and spritzing rain, the final gasp of the dismal upstate New York spring giving way to summer. It is probably for the best, I tell myself. I don’t know how either he or I will feel in the presence of each other, it would be a mistake to try and force us into some scene, I don’t want to negotiate with the pressure of my own expectations, and besides all that, I don’t know what the money means for us, for me, for us. A few days earlier a home health-aide service installed a bed on the ground floor, as John apparently still had some time before he could climb the stairs easily, and I’d spent hours since then arranging our knickknacks and furniture around it so that it felt somewhat coherent with the room. Two months after my release I am still physically compromised, and I break our Shiite mask and crack the glass on several pictures, unable to lift and move things properly. That morning I lug a heavy nightstand to the side of the bed and one of its legs cuts a long white gash in the wooden floor. I arrange the stand with a lamp and a bouquet of hyacinth I cut from our garden, then lay down for an hour to recover my strength.
His facility is two hours north of us, a wooded and rural area, populated mostly, as the signage would indicate, by a spread-out smattering of communes, hunting enthusiasts, eccentrics, and evangelicals. The final stretch I drive for thirty miles on a gravel road through dense forest, the spring flora—yellow, hot pink, lilac, ghost white—showing in patches through the green of the trees, the colors overbright and unsettling against the gray of the day. The entrance has imposing stone gates, followed by a long approach drive flanked by two low stone walls draped with ivy and edged by dripping, blooming forsythia. I feel momentarily jealous—my rehab place had been a new-construction building in suburbia—but when after some winding I arrive at the parking lot, I relent. The building itself is nothing to speak of: squat, brick 1980s architecture with disproportionately small windows spaced in awkward distance from each other, a few grubby benches in front, and a plastic gazebo I’m sure nobody ever uses tilting on an uneven patch of ground like an afterthought.
A young woman in pastel camouflage scrubs leads me to John’s room. “He’s a nice man,” she says, and when I feebly joke that she probably says that about all the patients she smiles and tells me that she does, but with him she means it. At his door I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths to settle myself before knocking. Electra spends the entirety of Sophocles’s play in a doorway, I say to my students, when we read his Theban trilogy in my Adaptations course. She is unable to return home and unable to venture into the world. Pay attention to doorways, to paths, to in-between spaces, I tell them, these are the places of transformation. The young woman in scrubs, who I don’t realize is still standing behind me, misconstrues my hesitation and reaches around my waist, raps at the door, then turns the handle and pushes it ajar. “You’re fine to go in,” she says, encouraging me. “He’s waiting.”
I find him, bags packed, sitting in an armchair reading a newer translation of Life Embitters by the Catalan writer Josep Pla. He’s lost about twenty-five pounds and his leanness suits him—he looks elegant and patrician. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but I had expected, in line with some clichéd scene, to walk in on him numbly watching bad daytime television, smiling and drooling, his mind and spirit dampened. The fact that he is upright and reading, and reading something of substance, that he is still holding himself to a level of intellectual rigor even though he is injured and battered and dismissed from the world…
“Where’s Sid?” he asks, in his style of abrasive fatherly concern. “Why are you here? Is she all right?”
I reassure him and explain my thinking. “We were going to see each other at home anyway,” I say.
He nods, is still for a moment, and then, gripping the padded armrests tightly, he stands. I see that the hair from the back of his neck to the crown of his head is completely gone, replaced by a reddish-purple graft. He notices me looking and swivels his neck to reference it. “It will fade,” he says. “I might be able to get plugs eventually, or so they tell me.”
Later he tells me he was disturbed to see me, he had been thinking of the drive home as a spiritual enterprise, a journey he was trusting to gradually reacquaint himself with his old familiar world. “I pictured myself getting out of the car and touching the shrubs and hose on the side of the house and laying my hands against the siding,” he says. “And then coming in through the back porch and finding you inside, bent over a magazine or puttering in the kitchen.”
At that time, though, he offers no objections. He slowly bends down to retrieve an electric-blue sock cap from the corner of the chair. It is a fashionable and arresting color, and when he puts it on it conceals most of the back of his head, brings out his eyes, and, with his weight loss, makes him look like a weathered European longshoreman from a travel brochure.
“Your daughter bought it for me,” he says, sheepish.
I nod my approval. “Shall we go?” I ask.
He agrees but doesn’t move, and I realize one of his hands is still tightly wrapped on the arm of the chair for support. A cane rests against the wall, slightly out of his reach. I hand it to him and he takes it without looking at me. “We’ll have to call someone for the bags I imagine,” I say.
“Unless you can take them,” he replies.
“I certainly can’t,” I say, and we both exhale a huff of something like laughter—a sound of shared resignation. I call the front desk and a teenaged boy arrives with a luggage rack. By the time he comes, I have taken John’s other arm, the one not gripping the cane, and, not wanting to move for fear of faltering, we stand still, as though posing for a painting, and watch him work. “You guys are so cute together,” the boy says, before pushing the cart out the door. John and I glance at each other in mock horror and follow him through the dim, blue-carpeted hallway.
The discharge process takes nearly two hours, so by the time we settle into the car, laden with pills and creams and printouts, we are both very hungry, and head directly to the nearest diner I find, which turns out to be a chrome-wrapped homage to some idea of the 1950s, with large spiral-bound plastic-coated menus.
Once we are seated, John reaches across the table and feels the silk scarf I have wrapped around my throat to cover my scarring.
I grew up with a picture of my mother’s grandmother in my home. She was seated, wearing an elegant dress with a large bow on one side of her face. “See that bow,” I remember my mother said once when she caught me looking at the photograph. “They didn’t iodize salt when she was growing up. That bow is covering an enormous goiter.” When I asked her how big, she said, “The size of an Idaho potato. At least.”
Thanks to videos on the internet, I have, in the past two months since my discharge, become quite skilled at tying various fabrics in loopy configurations to conceal my damaged skin. I have never liked my neck, anyway.
“Can I see?” John asks, and I untie the loops to reveal the evidence of my burn that creeps up as high as the side of my chin. He reaches over and feels the bottom edge of my face.
“You don’t need to cover it,” he says. “It’s rather pretty.”
Later I’ll remember what he said and become more emboldened to leave the scarf at home occasionally. Sometimes it will feel empowering, to lay myself bare to the furtive stares and averted eyes. Sometimes it will feel like old times, like when I put on a few pounds and would force myself to wear my tightest pants, no matter how they chafed or dug, as a form of punishment.
But that day in the diner I reply, “No thank you,” and quickly redo my wrap before the waiter arrives to take our order.
We share a club sandwich and a garden salad and a plate of sweet potato fries, and then, because I want some ceremony to my announcement, I convince him to split a slice of coconut cake with me. When it arrives at our table, taller and larger than any piece of cake should ever be, I tell him about the settlement. He pauses, hearing the figure, blinks, and peers into his coffee, somber. I am anxious for him to respond. “What are you thinking?” I ask, an edge to my voice.
“I’m thinking…” He pauses. “I’m thinking…” He pauses again and I snap at him to please talk. “I’m thinking I should have ordered the lobster,” he says, mournfully staring at his cup.
I choke on something between a groan and a laugh, making a far louder sound than I intend—so loud that the girl at the register starts toward me and I have to wave her off.
“Sorry,” he says, smiling at his success, his eyes still cast down. He taps his fork against the cake plate in the “shave and a haircut” rhythm. “So you’re not stuck with me after all. You could get your own place, I could get my own place, we could hire people to take care of us, the whole thing,” he says.
Yes. I’d had the same thought—the money made separating simple. All the logistics that seemed so daunting could be handed off to someone else, someone who could be paid, whether it be selling the house or handling the medical bills or even buying us new homes in distinct and distant locations. “We could.”
“I have some news to tell you, actually,” he says. “The college is letting me keep my pension. Honorable discharge. They feel bad, I guess.”
I congratulate him. Neither of us speaks for several minutes. I draw lines in the heaps of excess frosting we scraped from the cake.
“Dramatic irony, isn’t it? We burned and we were burned. Very French, like Balzac,” I say.
He smirks. “Heavy-handed, if you ask me.”
I feel an old sardonic irritation tug at my chest. “Well, we were never so mighty, so our fall wasn’t much to see. Besides, we got away with it,” I say. “Mostly.”
“You can’t think about it like that,” he says, his eyes dark and dismissive. “Getting away with something, not getting away with something, moral retribution. I don’t matter, you don’t matter. To think we do is just marketing. It’s this cult of personality. You know that.”
“I don’t think that’s a very popular argument right now.”
“I’m not a very popular guy right now.” He tilts his head and spreads his hands in the style of an old vaudeville performer.
“No, that’s true, you’re not,” I say. And I imagine myself in an apartment, each space filled with the definitive and deliberate quiet of my own choices. A velvet sofa and bookshelves with a ladder. A cat, maybe, or maybe no cat, I had never craved pets. Then I picture John in his apartment, the leather club chairs from his office and faded red rugs bought by Sid (or me). A woman. There for the money, one way or another. Or as I look at him, his face framed by his new cap that Sid had surely procured from one of her fancy menswear stores, there for him. Does the woman bother me? Not really. It does all seem like a bit of a waste though, I think, to divide that energy, money, money, energy, when something simpler could be arranged.
Walking down the ramp of the restaurant, we stop and watch a small crew paste what appears to be an anti-evolution sign on a billboard across the road. It feels like a scene from a 1960s auteur film, the ugly poster rising against the dim sky, an old couple standing in the drizzle in front of the blinding silver building. I picture it being shot from above, the two of us small, arms linked, John’s blue cap a vibrant beacon.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he says, after we witness a panel featuring a crossed-out monkey silhouette erected and flattened on the frame.
Toward the end of the drive, his breathing is measured, his position in the seat pains him. Once home it requires a huge effort to help him to the bed, where he falls asleep on his side clutching a body pillow.
Please don’t think I stay with him because of some Florence Nightingale syndrome, because he needs me and that gives me purpose and dominion or some tired story like that. The home health aide comes the very next day and cares for him until he is self-sufficient. I don’t sacrifice my independence or interests; the following night, in fact, I attend a taped screening of a new, much-lauded opera at a movie theater in Albany. No, things work out because of the way they work out, because I open one door and then another, because I find that ease can be one of the greater forms of freedom.