She takes a deep breath. She can’t think these nightmare scenarios.
—
“Hello, this is Grace Holland. May I speak to Dr. Lighthart?”
“Grace, it’s Amy.”
“Hi, Amy. Actually, it might be better if I spoke to you.”
“Okay.”
“I need help.” The statement strikes Grace as true on so many fronts that for a moment she nearly laughs.
“Yes?”
“I need to hire a nurse to come on a daily basis, to help with Gene. I’m having difficulties.”
“I thought so. I know of an organization that does just that. Hang on, I’ve got the number here. But how are you?”
The truth, Grace thinks. “At my wit’s end.”
“His care is too much for you. I knew it would be.”
“It’s not just that. Things are…difficult. It’s made taking care of him nearly impossible.”
“How’s your health?”
“My health? I don’t even know.”
“I tell you what. I’ll call first thing in the morning and get someone out there straightaway. You’ll be all right?”
“Yes. And, Amy? Send someone strong-willed. And big.”
—
Grace watches as a large woman in a white cap and navy cape emerges from a car that with its dents and rust looks as though it’s barely survived a military skirmish. There are no pleasantries, hardly enough time to tell Judith, the nurse, the nature of the difficulties she is having with Gene. Grace, trying to keep up with the nurse’s long strides, makes it to Gene’s door just before Judith does. “Wait here,” Grace says, trying to stop the woman.
“No need to wait. He’ll figure it out.”
Grace steps away and lingers long enough to hear Judith announce herself and tell Gene that she’s been sent to check him out. Not wanting to hear his reply, Grace walks away, but doesn’t dare go farther than the sitting room in case the nurse needs her. From time to time, loud sounds emanate from the library-bedroom, but she stops herself from investigating. She doesn’t want to know.
After a time, she climbs the stairs to Merle’s closet and retrieves Aidan’s letter from the hatbox. When she holds it, she begins to recall the music he once played, but stops short when she discovers that she can’t remember certain phrases in their entirety. She presses the letter to her chest. Will time erase the notes that are more precious to her than jewels?
She sees vividly the day she met Aidan and can feel her physical reaction when he played the piano. She recalls being happy and how she naïvely thought that state would continue forever. She will buy a record player and fill the house with classical music. The children will appreciate it and remember when Aidan was here—and a time when their mother smiled often.
—
Grace, back in the sitting room, is startled by a door slamming. When she looks up, Judith is standing before her, wiping her hands on a towel.
“I won’t be returning,” she says.
Grace stands. “I’m sorry. What happened?”
“I worked him hard, I’ll admit that. You probably heard the shouting. And for my troubles, I got a glob of spit down the front of my uniform.”
Grace wants to apologize for her husband, to explain.
“You seem a nice person. But your husband— There’s something wrong with him. And I mean more than his burns.”
“I’m sorry this has happened to you.”
“I don’t mind telling you that I don’t like leaving you alone with him.”
“I’ll be fine,” Grace says, gathering herself. “He was just furious with me for getting a nurse behind his back.”
The nurse peers at Grace. “Are you aware of how crazy that is? Most men in his situation want to get better.”
“Men have pride.”
“I’ve seen pride and stubbornness, yes I have. This is something different.”
—
When Grace goes in to see Gene, she finds a subdued husband. “I don’t need anything,” he says in a quiet voice.
—
The next afternoon, Grace arrives home with a secondhand record player that the salesman in the music store turned on for her so that she could listen to a Mozart record. He didn’t need to talk up the quality; Grace could hear it for herself. He helped her select music from Chopin and Brahms, from Beethoven and Bach. Nearly giddy with her purchases, she asks her mother to bring the kids downstairs. Grace plugs in the machine, puts a record on the spindle, and lets the music of Chopin fill the house, a grand salute to her mother and Claire and Tom as they make their way down the staircase. Grace beams at them. “I’ve bought a record player. We’ll have music now.”
“It’s beautiful,” her mother says, putting her hands to her cheeks. Claire hears the music as her cue to start dancing. Tom holds on to the coffee table and shakes his hips and dips his knees, trying to imitate his sister, which makes Grace and her mother laugh. Marjorie asks Grace to dance. The pair hold hands, and Grace remembers the silly joy of dancing for Aidan. Because neither she nor her mother really knows any steps to this sort of music, they make up their own movements, sometimes following rhythm, more often moving too fast for the stately composer. They meet in the center, smiling, and Grace twirls her mother around and spins her out, only to have her roll back again.
“WHAT IS GOING ON?”
Grace, her mother, and the children stop short as if they had been shot. A pianist, oblivious to the disruption, plays on.
“What’s that?” Gene asks, pointing a finger at the machine.
Because the children are present, Grace holds her sarcasm in check. “I bought a record player,” she says.
“You bought a record player knowing how I hate loud sounds, knowing that I have a constant headache, knowing that I need silence at all times?”
“Could you hear it?” Grace asks, not so innocently.
“Could I hear it?” He performs a truncated roll of his head to indicate what an idiotic question that is. Claire and Tom gravitate to their grandmother, who gently leads them into the kitchen.
“The children need music,” Grace says in as calm a voice as she can manage.
“Did you have music when you were growing up?”
“There’s a thing called progress,” she says. “There’s another thing called beauty. There’s a third thing called fun. And believe it or not, there’s such a thing in the world as a choice.”
“Not in my house,” he says. “Get rid of it.”
Grace sticks her hands in the pockets of her dress. “You get rid of it,” she says.
“You know very well I can’t get into a car and drive it back to wherever it came from.”
“Then break it for all I care.”
—
Marjorie confides to Grace that she isn’t feeling well.
“Is it your stomach?” the daughter asks, feeling her mother’s forehead with the back of her hand.
“Not sure yet. I’m achy all over. And tired.”
“Of course you’re tired.”
“I don’t want to give it to the children.”
“The children will be fine. Just go up and rest.”
As she watches her mother climb the stairs, Grace is aware of Claire and Tom touching her clothes, as if now she must be activities director. She closes her eyes but can’t think of a single game they used to play together. Has she lost the part of her brain that functioned on automatic? “Shall we go up to the nursery and see what’s there?” she asks in an overly cheery voice.
Claire shakes her head. Grace kneels down to be at her level. “Say the word.”
“No,” says Claire.
“Why?”
“Boring.”
“We could color,” suggests Grace.
“Boring.”
“We could cook.”
“Boring.”
“I know! How about we go upstairs and jump up and down on my bed?”
“Yes!” cries Claire as she heads for the sta
irs. Grace follows more slowly behind Tom since he insists now on doing everything “byself.” When Tom and she enter the bedroom, Claire is already bouncing high, her hair leaving her head. She falls deliberately on her bum and pops right up again.
My little gymnast, Grace thinks. She takes off her shoes and climbs onto the bed. Mindful of the chandelier, she jumps in rhythm with Claire, trying not to tip over Tom, who can’t keep his balance on the constantly moving surface. Grace feels gleeful at the thought of the subversive activity she’s invented. Exhausted, she quits before Claire, but even Claire winds down.
“Yay for us!” Claire says, breathless.
—
The playing on the bed annoys Gene. Infuriates him.
“That’s my mother’s bed.”
“We were only fooling around.”
“What mother lets her kids jump on the bed?”
“I do. Did.”
“If you ruin the springs, you won’t have a bed left. Goddamnit, Grace. What’s got into you?”
Grace pauses, studies her husband’s face. “What’s gone out of me is a better question.”
—
In quiet moments Grace understands that Gene went to the fire to perform his civic duty. He was all but killed in the blaze. He’s suffered enough pain to last a hundred men a lifetime. He’s so disfigured he doesn’t want to leave the house. If he’s true to his word and no longer participates in his physical therapy, he will become a bedridden invalid.
Who would want that kind of life?
—
If you love a man, Grace thinks, you might be willing to do anything for him. And if she loved Gene, she might touch him on his good side, say soothing or funny words. She would stay in his room every free minute that she had, perhaps even installing a cot so that she could sleep beside him. She would cajole him into more and more physical therapy and would praise him for every small accomplishment. She would kiss the good side of his face and, if he wanted her to, find a plastic surgeon who might be able to improve his appearance. She would sell all the jewelry so that he and she were set for life, able to be companions and, one day, lovers again. She would take him for walks outside in the spring. They would sit together under the cherry tree she knows is about to bloom, and they would hold hands and laugh.
She is thinking of Aidan.
—
Time passes so slowly that Grace hates to wake up. Every moment longer that she sleeps is a minute she won’t have to fill. There are so many of them in a single day. When she was with Aidan, she was unaware of time. When she worked for Dr. Lighthart, she was so busy she was often surprised to look up and discover that it was already five-thirty in the afternoon. Now it seems as if it takes days to get to five-thirty, never mind eight o’clock, when she can reasonably go to bed.
—
Grace can’t read anymore, can’t even finish a magazine article at the kitchen table. Her concentration is shot. She no longer reads to Gene, who doesn’t seem to miss it.
She wonders what can be inside his head.
When she thinks it might be time to reintroduce the children to their father, she speaks to Claire and Tom for a long time and then enters Gene’s room with them. Before they have even reached the bed, Gene confronts his daughter. “What the heck did you do to your hair?”
“Mommy did,” Claire answers in a tremulous voice.
“I loved your long curls,” Gene wails. “You were so beautiful.”
Claire begins to cry.
—
An hour later, Grace charges into Gene’s bedroom. “Can you just answer me one question?”
He tilts his head on the pillow, his face uncertain.
“Why did you marry me?” she asks.
“You got pregnant, remember?” he says defensively.
“Yes. But before. You were romantic, you courted me.”
“Did I? I don’t think we should discuss the past.”
“But I want to know.”
“You were there.”
“But I wasn’t inside your head.”
“I could lie to you.”
“But don’t.”
He props himself up with his right elbow. “You reminded me of my love,” he says.
Grace at first doesn’t understand. “I reminded you of…your love?”
And so he gives it to her, the answer she thinks she wants, the answer she’ll wish she had never asked for. “You reminded me of the woman I loved when I was in the war.”
He waits to see how Grace will take this announcement, but she’s motionless.
“She was French,” Gene adds. “She looked a lot like you. I couldn’t persuade her to come back to the States with me. I used to write to my mother, and once I sent a picture of the two of us together. I told my mother I would marry the woman.” He pauses. “It’s why she didn’t like you.”
The explanation smacks Grace in the face as if she had walked into a glass door. She leaves the library, climbs the stairs to her bedroom, and lies on the bed facedown.
—
Amy comes to visit, bringing new supplies. After her time with Gene, she addresses Grace, who is waiting outside his room.
“I heard the visiting nurse was a fiasco,” Amy says.
“What did she say specifically?”
“Only that your husband was completely uncooperative. What happened to the physical therapy? He’s as limp as a fish.”
“He won’t do it.”
“It’s your job to make him do it.”
“There’s only so much I can do,” responds Grace.
“You look like hell. What’s happened?”
Grace shrugs.
“I’m going to go in there and give him what for,” says Amy.
“Good luck with that.”
—
When Amy drives away, Grace walks down the driveway, reaches her hand into the postbox, and takes out the mail. She sees, between the electric bill and a final check from Dr. Lighthart, a cream-colored envelope. The return address is a hotel in New York City.
Dear Grace,
You thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t. I heard you leave the bed, and it took all my strength not to snatch you back. Stay, I called in my mind. But it wasn’t you who was leaving that house, it was I, and it’s likely I never did a more difficult thing.
You, with me, all the time.
A.
—
Grace leans against the mailbox and closes her eyes. A letter. A tangible letter. He still thinks of her. She is with him all the time.
Two letters now to parse and treasure and remember word for word. Two letters to touch, to trace the words. Two signs that what she experienced with Aidan Berne was real. She wants to savor the moment.
But before she has even climbed the driveway, she understands the agonizing thing she must do.
In her room, she sits at Merle’s dressing table with paper and pen. She writes in care of his hotel address and adds, “Please Forward.”
Dear Aidan,
If only you had caught my hand. Another hour would have been worth the risk. I think of you every day.
My husband, Gene, has arrived home. He was badly burned in the fire and remained in a coma for nearly three months. He has only begun his road to recovery. We are an injured family in many ways, but we are a family. I must keep my children safe and tend to my husband.
I wish you only the best of luck everywhere you go.
Grace
—
The finality of the letter makes her ache. She wraps her arms around herself and tries to imagine Aidan’s reaction as he reads it. Will he crumple up the paper and throw it into a wastebasket? Who would want to keep such a note?
She knows she has to mail the letter immediately; otherwise, she’ll tear it up. After carrying two recalcitrant children out to the Buick, she backs down the driveway and navigates the short distance to the post office. She marches to the mailbox like a soldier under orders. She holds the letter for a long time until finally
she pushes it through the slot.
“Mommy, your eyelashes are blinking,” Claire says when Grace slides back into the driver’s seat.
“Just something in my eye,” she answers, clearing her throat and peering into the rearview mirror.
It’s possible Aidan might never get her letter. No one is obliged to forward it.
“Who wants to go to the playground?” she asks.
—
Grace can’t make herself get out of bed the next morning. If she lies still for long enough, she thinks, she might be able to fall asleep again and what a luxury that would be. She forgets her children. She forgets her husband. She stares at the medallion on the ceiling, hoping it will hypnotize her.
When she rouses herself, she slips into her robe and heads to the kitchen to start the coffee. Claire, with a mix of hurt and pride on her face, sits before an overloaded bowl of Rice Krispies and milk, a cup of which has spilled onto the table and then to the linoleum. Tom, sitting on the floor with dry Krispies all around him, is eating only those inside his wet diaper because they’re easier to pick up and put into his mouth.
Claire might have dropped the milk bottle, shattering it on the floor.
Grace will set an alarm clock and be in the kitchen at six-thirty every morning.
—
Gene cries out in the night. Grace sits upright and listens intently. There are no words, merely a harrowing cry into the void of his nightmares. He told her he might do this. She lies back and puts a pillow over her head.
—
For three nights he does this.
—
Grace moves herself and the children to the third floor, where they sleep together in the nursery, Grace on a cot she drags into the room.
—