Me Again (25 page)

“You should have seen me. My hair is all blonde and big. My boobs are nearly hanging out of my dress. I’m joking. Laughing. Dancing. Singing.” Rebecca sighed. “Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard me do
Sweet Caroline
.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, then reopened them, her stare even more intense.

“I was the life of the party. The person everybody wanted to hang around with. Saying all the right things. Smiling my Hollywood smile. Flaunting my body. Laughing like crazy at jokes that weren’t funny. I was fun. Sexy. Perky.”

She paused.

“Bubbly.”

A tear began to trail down her left cheek.

“That’s not me anymore. I can’t do it. I can never be like that again. Looking at that video this morning, I don’t know – it just had never been so clear to me before how much I had lost.”

I said, “So that’s when...”

“That’s when I took the pills,” she answered.

She wiped absently at the tear on her face, just as another one began its descent.

“I couldn’t take it. I was looking at a woman I could never be. At a standard I could never live up to. So I gave up. Or at least I tried to give up.”

“I’m glad you failed.”

Rebecca gave a slight nod. “I guess I am, too. Right now I’m mostly just tired.”

Taking my cue, I began to scramble to my feet. “I’m sorry, Rebecca. I’ll get out of here.”

“No,” she said. “Stay. I mean, if you don’t have something you need to be doing right now.” Again her lips tried to smile. “It’s nice knowing that you’re here.”

Easing back into my chair, I said, “I’ll stay as long as you want. Now, get some rest.”

I sat back in my chair and watched her as she slept. Slowly the exhaustion I’d been staving off began to envelop me. I blinked it away as best I could, trying to focus any positive energy I could on Rebecca’s pale, sleeping face, but ultimately my eyes closed and I surrendered to a dreamless sleep.

Chapter 30

“W
HO THE HELL ARE YOU?”

The deep, angry voice tried to penetrate my slumber, but I resisted.

Then I heard a thump, one that shook my bed. Only I wasn’t in a bed; I was in a chair. A chair that somebody had just kicked.

“I said, who the hell are you?”

I opened my eyes to see a huge man looming over me, dressed in a dark blue warm-up suit. One hand clutched a large paper coffee cup; the other was clenched in a fist.

Fighting through the fog of sleep, I adjusted my glasses and stammered, “Jonathan. I’m... Jonathan. Friend of... Rebecca’s.” Not, apparently, a friend of complete sentences.

The man’s face, already scowling, squeezed itself into a look of even greater consternation.

“The guy with the coma?”

“Yes,” I answered more succinctly.

The man pulled back a little, surveying me slouching beneath him.

“Wow, Beck was right,” he said. “You really are skinny.”

I scrambled out of the chair and stood to face him. He was taller than me, but not by as much as I’d expected. I recalled Rebecca’s suspicion that the man lied about his height.

“I’m Jonathan Hooper,” I said, extending my hand. I had decided to ignore the remark about my physique.

The man considered my hand for a moment, then reached out and shook it, exerting far more pressure than necessary.

“Big Bob Chase,” he said. “Becky’s husband.”

“Nice to finally meet you,” I said, immediately cringing at calling a meeting in front of an attempted suicide victim “nice.” My embarrassment was diminished by concerns as to whether I would need to get my hand x-rayed after Big Bob released it.

“I thought only family was allowed back here,” Big Bob said, his scowl returning.

I didn’t want to throw Jason under any buses his cantankerous coworker might deploy in his direction, so I said, “I might have made them think I was her brother. I’m sorry – I was just really worried about her.”

The scowl deepened. “How did you hear about this?”

To my surprise, a lie presented itself readily. “I was here for physical therapy when they brought her in,” I said. “You know, from my stroke.”

This response seemed to satisfy him. His expression relaxed a bit, and he nodded.

“Yeah, Beck told me about that. Said you had a lot of brain damage, too.” Big Bob grunted. “I guess I figured you’d talk like a retard or something.”

I felt less than inclined to share my cerebrocortical woes with the man, so I just said, “I got pretty lucky as far as my speech being affected.” Trying to shift the focus of this unexpected encounter, I said, “So, what are the doctors telling you?”

Rebecca stirred in her bed, halting our conversation. We stood and watched her attentively, but she remained asleep.

Finally Big Bob whispered, “We should probably move this conversation out to the hallway, okay?”

I filed out of the ICU behind him, ignoring the angry glare of the colorfully clad woman so reluctant to let me see Rebecca. Out in the hallway, we stepped aside to let a young man in blue scrubs wheel a cadaverous old man past us in a rolling bed.

“Man, hospitals give me the creeps,” Big Bob said once the pair was out of earshot.

“You get used to them,” I said, drawing on my years of expertise.

Big Bob began to walk aimlessly down the hallway, and I followed along.

“Anyway,” he said, “the doctors think she’s going to be okay. They’re pretty sure she only had the pills in her stomach for a few minutes. I was out running, and I usually knock out my morning two-miler in about twelve minutes, so I found her pretty quickly, thank God. Plus, the combination of stuff she took made her nauseous, so we think she threw up a lot of what she’d swallowed.”

“What kind of pills did she take?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t crossing some line. The etiquette of discussing spousal suicide attempts was uncharted territory for me.

“You name it, she took it. There were empty bottles all over the counter – aspirin, sleeping pills, some prescription painkillers from when I tore my rotator cuff, even some antibiotics. Like I said, it made her sick – I found her in a pool of vomit on the bathroom floor. Between that and how fast I got back from my run, God was really looking out for her.”

We had come to a bench placed against a wall under a large painting of a kindly looking old woman. The hallways were decorated with many such portraits, commemorating people whose families had presumably given money to the hospital.

Big Bob sat down on the bench and sipped his coffee. He gestured to me, and I joined him.

“Man, what a mess,” he said. “First the stroke, and now this. Sometimes I really wonder what the Lord is trying to teach me.”

“You think this is all some kind of lesson?”

Big Bob turned to face me. “It’s got to be, doesn’t it? I mean, God doesn’t do things by accident. There’s something I’m supposed to learn from being put through all this.”

“
You’re
being put through all this? What about Rebecca?” The words spilled out of me before I could stop them.

If I expected my words to anger him, I was mistaken. Instead he furrowed his brow and said, “Well, yeah. This has been rough on her, too. That’s why she really needs me to take care of her, now that she’s, you know, not right in the head.”

He sighed. “Man, you should have seen her before the stroke. You wouldn’t understand what it’s like to lose somebody like this.”

“But you haven’t lost her!” This came out louder than I’d meant it to, causing Big Bob to pull back in surprise. I watched as his face registered surprise, then anger, then resignation. When he spoke, his voice was calm.

“It’s like I said. You wouldn’t know what it’s like.”

He nodded his head in the direction of the ICU. “That’s not Beck. I mean, it is, but... but it isn’t.”

He sank back in his chair. “You should have seen her before.”

I’d had just about enough of this. “So why don’t you divorce her?” I’ll admit, I was pushing things, but hey, if he hit me, I was in a hospital, right? At least medical care would be close at hand.

Anger returned to Big Bob’s face. To his credit, he took a deep breath before addressing me in a carefully measured tone.

“First of all, where do you get off asking me something like that? That’s way out of line, pal. Secondly, you’re not Catholic, are you? We don’t do divorce in the Catholic Church. It’s all or nothing. Death do us part and all that. That’s the deal. It’s what I signed up for, for better or worse. I just got stuck with worse. But that’s my problem, not yours.”

“Rebecca is not a
problem
. She’s a—"

“She’s none of your fucking business, is what she is.” Looming in close, suddenly Bob looked very big indeed. He must have seen the fear in my eyes, because he then softened his tone.

“Look, I’m all stressed out. And frankly, you’re not helping, not when you say things like that.”

He let out another heavy sigh. “You’ve got to understand, it’s been a
really
rough day. And I just can’t stop thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t found her. I mean, I can’t even imagine how I’d deal with that. And this may not mean anything to you, but suicide is a mortal sin in the Catholic Church.” He shook his head. “Man, there’s no way to live something like that down.”

Okay,
now
I’d had enough.

“Well, thank God for small favors,” I said, standing up. “I need to go.”

Oblivious to how angry he’d made me, Big Bob offered me his hand. “Listen, Jon – thanks for checking in on Beck like that. I know she likes you, and that you helped her a lot during rehab.”

Reluctantly I shook his hand. To my relief he refrained from crushing any metacarpal bones this time.

“What are friends for?” I said bitterly.

Then feeling a little sheepish for growing so angry, I tried to shift my focus back to Rebecca’s plight. “Have they said how long she’ll be here?”

Bob nodded. “They’ll probably keep her in the ICU for the rest of the day, unless she has any problems. Then late tonight they’ll put her in a regular room overnight, you know, for observation. If all goes well, I should be able to take her home tomorrow afternoon, God willing.”

“I see,” I said. “Do you, uh, have any problem with me maybe visiting her, once she gets set up in her regular room?”

His scowl came back, then softened. “I guess not. Actually, that could give me a chance to get into the office and take care of a few things. I had to move a lot of stuff around because of this.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, with what I hoped was a sympathetic expression.

“Just don’t say anything that would upset her, okay?”

I wish I had heard more concern in Big Bob’s voice, but instead the remark came across as a threat. “Of course not,” I said, swallowing my anger. “I just want her to see a friendly face.”

Bob looked hard at me, and I almost expected him to make some crack about my twisted face, but if he felt that temptation, he resisted it. Maybe he didn’t like to make fun of
retards
, sensitive sort that he was. And okay, maybe I needed to dial back on the defensiveness. Fair enough.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’ll see you around, I guess.” On impulse, I added, “I could give you my cell number, you know, in case you need any help or anything.”

Big Bob looked at me as if I’d just offered to shampoo his hair. Finally he said, “Nah, that’s okay. I’ve got it from here.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll be around.” Then I walked away, doing my best not to limp.

* * * * *

I dawdled uselessly around the hospital for maybe an hour, then I remembered to call my father. He was first shocked, then relieved as I relayed what had happened.

“Listen, Jonny, why don’t I come pick you up? Rebecca’s husband is there if she needs him – there’s really nothing more you can do.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’m going to hang around just a little longer and see if I can arrange for somebody here to call me if there’s any change.”

“You could ask her husband to...” Dad’s voice dwindled off as he realized what he was proposing was probably not an optimal tactic.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’ll just be a little longer, then I think I’ll just catch the bus home.”

“It’s really no trouble for me to—"

“No, that’s okay. I need to do some thinking.” Remembering how our day together had begun, I added, “I’ve already put you through a lot today.”

“That’s okay, Jonny. I’m glad it happened.”

This surprised me. “Are you?” I asked. “Really?”

There was a pause. Then Dad said, “Yeah, I guess I am. Oh, and Jonny?”

“Yes?”

“I put something in your room, for when you get back. It’s a... it’s a photo album.”

“Maggie?” A lump formed in my throat.

“Yeah, it’s all photos of Maggie. And when you get home, I’ll be... I’ll be happy to go through it with you. You know, if you have any questions or anything. I... well, I remember where and when pretty much all of those photos were taken.”

“Wow, Dad, I—"

“Just one thing, Jonny. I don’t think your mother is ready to look at those. Or talk about them, either.”

“I understand.”

“But I want you to know that I am. Just say the word, and we can talk about, well, whatever you want to talk about.”

After processing this for a moment, I started to say
thank you
.

But what came out was “I love you.”

A long pause ensued, then Dad said, “Okay, then. I’ll see you when you get home.”