Once More With Feeling Read Online Free PDF Page B

myself to breathe through it. In. Out. Until the worst of it passed.
    I wanted a real adult to walk in here and tell me what to do. Not one of my parents, who were compromised and complicit simply by being a part of my dysfunctional family – and inexorably tied up in my feelings about my sister. A
real
adult, the kind who would exude competence and grace and know exactly what needed to happen. Even in a situation like this. It baffled me that I was supposed to be that adult right now. That I was supposed to be able to handle this, or at least survive it. Dignity and grace under these circumstances seemed like asking for far too much. Like for the sun and the moon maybe,when I was beginning to think I was lucky to be upright at all.
    I straightened in my chair, and leaned forward onto the bed. The hospital mattress creaked like plastic beneath my elbows, and I rested one hand on Tim’s arm, well away from the vicious-looking IV drip that was taped to the back of his left hand. I studied him, taking him in from much closer than I’d been to him in weeks. He looked different, as if my memory were starting to blur him a little bit around the edges now that I no longer saw him daily. He looked like someone else with his eyes closed, with the brutal architecture of medicine and potential healing all around him and in him, and with the bright pull of him dimmed, somehow, because of it. Here, he was just a man, just a body, no more than broken flesh and bone.
    He’s in what we call a medically induced coma
, the doctor had said, looking as exhausted as I felt,
to encourage his brain to stop swelling, and the rest of him to keep healing. In a few days, if it all looks good, we’ll take him off the drugs and wait for him to wake up
.
    Looking at Tim now, I couldn’t see his swollen brain, or any of the other sickening, dangerous, life-threatening things the doctor had mentioned so matter-of-factly. I could only see the hands that had held mine so tightly once, so small now against the white sheets and blankets, freckles and faint golden hairs dusting the backs of them like remnants of the life I remembered far too vividly. The jawhe always kept clean-shaven, even if that meant he had to shave twice a day, was shadowed tonight, making him look even more unlike himself. But this was him, and I was here, and I couldn’t turn back time on any of the things that had happened in the last few months, not even this.
    I opened my mouth to speak to him, but stopped myself. What could I say? Even if he really could hear me, which I somehow doubted, what was the right thing to say under the circumstances? What did a soon-to-be divorced wife say to the husband who had so cruelly and callously betrayed her, when he was himself so terribly hurt?
    If I were a better person, I thought then, looking at Tim as I listened to the machines breathe for him, I would have allowed Carolyn to be his first visitor. However little I liked it, my sister was the one he wanted. How much more obvious did he have to make that?
    But I wasn’t a better person. That was perfectly clear to me, as I sat there hollow-eyed and with leftover adrenalin and fear churning around inside me. There was the part of me, I could admit, that saw this accident as an opportunity. Isn’t that what near-death experiences were supposed to do? If Tim woke up from this, wasn’t this exactly the sort of thing that should snap him out of his Carolyn Fever? I had resigned myself to waiting this out, because I knew it couldn’t last. But maybe this accident would expedite the process. When he woke up, maybe he’d realize it was high time he came home.
    He had to.
    Carolyn, I knew, was just a distraction, and I was happy to do whatever it took to figure out why this had happened in the first place. Counselling. Marriage retreats. Whatever he wanted.
    He just had to wake up so I could tell him so.
    I had loved him first, and for longer, and I loved him enough to hold on through this