Matters of Faith (22 page)

She'd called them “pee-ony” sheets when she'd first spotted them in the store and fallen in love with the bold reds and oranges of the overblown petals. They didn't smell like her yet, and despite their journey through the washer and dryer, they still smelled new. I huddled against the back post and sipped my wine while I tried to pretend that she was here, that Marshall was just away at college, and that my biggest concern was finding some common ground in my marriage again.

I had looked forward to Marshall graduating and Meghan going off to college. I had thought that Cal and I would have time to fall in love again, as though it had just been put on hold for a little while, but was still there, waiting for us to pick it back up and nourish it back to health. I had counted on it, taken it for granted.

I thought we had time.

I took a deep breath, gulped the rest of the wine, and climbed out of my daughter's bed. It was time to get back to the hospital. To my daughter's new bed, and my new marriage. I had been right all along. New was dangerous. And very, very sad. And I would never let it sneak up on me again.

I tried to decide what I should tell Cal as I drove back to the hospital, and came up with two choices: tell him everything, or tell him nothing at all, and there were valid arguments for both sides. By the time I arrived, I still hadn't decided.

The nurse was showing Cal how to work the controls on the side of Meghan's bed. It took me a moment to figure out what was different. Her respirator. Meghan was off the respirator and it was sitting in the corner, its tubes and cords hanging limply, its digital display dead. Meghan's throat was wrapped in brilliant white gauze.

My hand flew to my chest and everything,
everything
, evaporated: my concern over Marshall, the crazy doctor who put it all in motion, the problems within my marriage, all gone, and I could not help the cry that escaped me.

Cal and the nurse turned in surprise and he caught me as I rushed to the side of her bed, the smile on his face as unguarded as my own feelings had been.

I ran my hand along her forehead and the side of her face, but she was nonresponsive. I stroked her again, whispered, “Baby?”

“No, Chloe, no, they just, the doctor said she could come off the respirator, they're confident she's strong enough. There's no . . . there's no other change.”

I wanted to wail out loud. It was my fault, the hope that had expanded so quickly inside of me, it was my fault. The doctor had told us about the respirator, that it would be coming out, that there was a chance of infection if they left it in and that as soon as she healed enough they would take her off of it.

He had told us, but who thinks rationally about those things, who considers each step until it happens? The people who think rationally about it are the people who have been living with it for long enough that the fog has cleared, the people who have had enough firsts under their belts to think long-term, the people who finally accept that they might live with this situation for years.

I was not ready to be that person.

I would never be ready to be that person.

The nurse bustled around, pulling the sheets taut, keeping her eyes down. I realized I'd had another first, hard on the heels of the last one; they were coming faster now. For the first time, I did not care what the nurse thought of me. What, after all, did they have to judge me against? Other parents? How many marriages did they watch crumble? How many mothers and fathers did they see slowly lose their grip on their sanity?

And so another first; I cried in front of the nurse.

She left the room and I slid out from under Cal's hand.

“It doesn't mean anything,” he said, as if he meant to comfort me. At the look I gave him he tried to elaborate. “It doesn't change her prognosis.”

“And what is her prognosis, Cal?” I asked. “Nobody can tell us that. Why do you think you know? All I get is a bunch of ‘we don't knows' and ‘we're still learning' and ‘when she's ready.' So are you hearing something I'm not? Are you privy to information I don't have?”

He looked at me blankly. I knew the look. I wasn't going to affect him. I wouldn't get anything out of him, no reaction, positive or negative. He'd gone neutral, which always succeeded in making whatever reaction I had, no matter how measured and reasonable, seem like a nuclear incident.

I needed to tell him about Rhoades and Hernandez, about Marshall and Ada, about the lawyer who would be coming to the hospital tomorrow, but he beat me out with his own news.

“Kevin called,” he said. “He can't take my charter tomorrow.”

“So did he cancel it?”

He shook his head. “I'm going to go out.”

I stared at him. He was going to leave. It hadn't been a week yet, and here it was, the slow shift back to daily life. He was going back to work, to spend his days on the water fishing.

“Don't look at me like that,” he said. “What do you want me to do? We still have bills to pay, Chloe, and we're going to have a ton more before any of this resolves itself. We can't do . . . this, forever.”

Ah, but I could. I'd ship every Highwayman painting in mid-restoration back to its owner, would not take another commission from the fine art galleries in Naples, would figure out what to do about the bills.

But I also knew, did not want to admit, but knew, that I could afford to do that. Because, really, Cal did bring in more money, more regularly. What did the mothers do who didn't have a husband to help support them, or who were the main breadwinner for their family? How did they make that shift?

I didn't have to answer that. Because this was my situation, my family, my husband. And I was torn between punishing him for his realism and falling on my knees in gratitude for it. Because it would allow me to stay here, with Meghan, as long as I needed to.

“No sense going all the way home,” he said, studiously not looking at me. “I'll just stay on the
Trill
.”

“What do you mean you'll stay on the
Trill
?” I repeated.

“It's closer to the hospital than home,” he said.

“So, you're not going to stay here overnight?” I asked, ignoring the larger question looming in the back of my mind.

“I have to get up at four in the morning,” he said. “I need a decent night's sleep. I think you should get one too.”

“I'll be staying here,” I said, enunciating each word, pointing to the floor.

“You can't be a martyr forever.”

“I'm not being a martyr. I'm being a mother.”

“You're being stubborn.”

“And you're shutting down so you don't have to hurt over any of this.”

“We can't keep doing this.”

“What? You want to go down to the chapel and bitch at me there?”

He sighed. “No, I don't mean where. I mean—” He waved his hands between us, as if he were guiding a plane in. “—
this
. We can't keep doing this.”

“You know, Cal, people go through hard times. Sometimes they fight through it, but they get through it.”

“Believe it or not, Chloe, I've been through tough times before. And we've been going through tough times for a lot longer than just this particular tough time.”

My heart was beating so hard in my chest that I could feel it bumping against my ribs, and my breathing was shallow and becoming more so with every moment that I continued to stare at him. “What are you trying to say, Cal? Just say it.”

“I'm not trying to say anything. I'm just—Chlo, I'm just going to stay on the
Trill
for a little while, okay? What do you care? I thought you said we didn't have a marriage, and you're not at home anyway.”

I didn't say anything. He was right. “Do you want to know about Marshall?” I finally asked, looking away from him, my arms crossed tightly over my chest.

“He home?”

“No. Wait, is that it? You don't want to go home because Marshall is there?”

He hesitated, and I could tell he was weighing something, but I could not tell what it might be, and I ached for that, for the fact that I couldn't read him when he was closed off like this. “No, that's not it.”

“Well, I don't know where he is.”

“What do you mean?”

I took a deep breath. “He bailed Ada out last night after I dropped him off at home. Nobody's seen him since.”

His jaw tightened and he leaned in toward me. “What are you telling me here? He jumped bail?”

I almost laughed. Cal had never been one for cop shows or detective mysteries. I'd never heard him say anything like “jumped bail” in my life. We had grown apart. There was no denying that. Somehow, we had grown apart and not made an effort to change it. Not a real effort. We made token efforts, and I wasn't willing to take all the blame for that, we had
both
only made token efforts. We'd gotten lazy, it was that simple. We'd gotten lazy with our affection.

But I could not help but remember how cute he was when he said something out of the blue, something that surprised me, that arranged his lips in unfamiliar shapes, that reminded me of how much I had wanted to kiss him that first time we'd been aware of each other in the airboat. Attraction was still there, and if that was still there then did that mean there was still hope? Did you really still want to kiss someone if it was over?

I wouldn't know. Cal had certainly not been my first kiss, or even my first lover, but he had certainly been my first love. And yes, absurd as it sounded, him saying “jumped bail” made me want to kiss him.

I didn't.

He was, after all, talking about our son, about whom I was even more conflicted than I was about Cal.

“No,” I said. “He didn't
jump bail
. He's not due in court for almost two weeks. For all we know, he's just holed up in some hotel because he's afraid to bring Ada to our house.”

“Yeah, he'd better be,” Cal said darkly, and all thought of kissing him fled. I had never been, and never would be, attracted to anger against one of my children, no matter how deeply under the surface it simmered. It made things easier. Cal would find out about Marshall and Ada sooner or later. But it wouldn't be from me.

If we were separate but for our physical presence in Meghan's room, then I supposed we would just have to discover what else was happening in our once shared lives on our own. I had Rhoades and Hernandez, I had Mingus and this new lawyer, Barker, and I knew that when Marshall realized he was out of his depth, I would be the one he came to.

Cal was—consciously or subconsciously, I didn't know yet—removing himself from the life of this family. And I wasn't sure I was terribly sorry about it.

“So, you're moving onto the boat.”

“For now, Chloe, just to make things easier . . . on all of us.”

I nodded. “Fine.”

It did not feel monumental. It simply felt sad, and I looked at Meghan, wondering what she heard. We had never hidden our relationship from our children. I had never known if my parents had problems with each other. If they did, they were well hidden from me. Cal and I did not have the kinds of disagreements that needed to be hidden.

I had often thought that in order for our children to realize that something might be wrong with our marriage, they would have had to develop more finely tuned sensibilities. They had not yet appeared to realize that their parents existed outside of their lives.

But if Meghan had heard what was happening in her room over the past five days, she could not help but know that her parents were in trouble. Even a girl in a coma could tell that we were falling apart. I motioned to Cal.

“Can we talk in the chapel?” I asked.

He looked at Meghan. “Could you give me a minute?”

“I'll meet you down there,” I said, and walked out the door. Almost ten minutes later Cal eased himself into the pew beside me.

“We have to come to some sort of understanding,” I said quietly.

“About what, Chloe?” He sounded exhausted. But so was I.

“About how we're going to handle this. We can't talk in front of Meghan as if she can't hear.”

“Do you really think she can?” he asked. I almost snapped at him, but when I saw his face I realized that he was asking the question earnestly, as if he truly wanted to know my ideas on it.

“Everybody tells us she can. I think we just have to stop thinking about her as asleep. She's not asleep. She's in there.”

He shook his head. “I don't get it.”

“I don't either, but when she does wake up, do you want her to remember that while she was lying there we did nothing but fight?”

He turned toward me, the rough seam of his old jeans rubbing my knee through my thin cotton skirt, and then leaned in, closing us off from the empty room, from the glass gaze of the dove.

“Do you really, really believe she'll wake up, Chloe?” His voice was pleading.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I do. I'm so sorry you don't.”

His shoulders slumped and his leg moved away from mine. “Me too,” he said. He left, taking his bag with him. Before he did, he leaned over the back of the pew and kissed the top of my head. His mouth connected this time, and as he pressed his lips against my hair, I breathed in deeply of him.

Ada placed her hand on his wrist and he dropped the knife. He wasn't exactly sure what they had just agreed to, but he was as terrified as he'd been in that boat. Ada looked into the living room.

“Why don't you go sit down with your grandmother? I'll finish this.”