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C
HAPTER
8

F
our days after the surgery, as Claire uncoiled from the cot on which she’d sporadically dozed in Nick’s room, Dr. Sheldon sat down opposite her. The early hopeful hours of watching Nicholas for any indication that he was emerging from the coma had given way to bleak, restless days. All the testing and monitoring were yielding no clear answers. Michael had developed an aversion to anything but the most brusque exchange of words with anyone—unless he was having one of his frequently distraught and unintelligible monologues en route to the elevator—while Claire had developed a constant twitch to her mouth and eyelids from lack of any real sleep.

With a fatherly voice, Dr. Sheldon encouraged her to go home. “You need to rest, Claire. You’ve been running on adrenaline and pretty soon you’re going to crash.”

“I’m fine,” she said curtly.

“You need to take care of yourself and save your energy for what comes later. This isn’t a sprint.”

Michael and Jackie appeared in the doorway, and Claire wondered how long they’d been waiting outside, if they’d put him up to his speech. Michael looked only marginally better than Claire, still spending his nights at the house and coming in before and after work.

“You should go for a few hours,” Michael said with the forced smile he reserved for the presence of the hospital staff. “Go home and get some rest.” The gray rings under his eyes were growing more pronounced by the day, she noticed, and he seemed to look at Nick with as much regret as she did. But it
was
the first time since she’d set up camp that Michael had encouraged this, the first time since the waiting room that he’d truly engaged with her. The prospect gave her limited hope, even if he wasn’t exactly asking her to join him. Still, how could she leave? Claire looked at Nicholas, hoping that he would wake up and resolve this ridiculous standoff. But the only sounds he made were the gurgling, labored breaths that the ventilator pumped through his lungs. He looked to her like a broken puppet, flimsier and paler by the day—not the vital boy who had skied circles around her and closed his e-mails to her with
I love ya.
She blinked her eyes at the sting.

“Come on,” Jackie said, removing keys from her pocket, “let’s get you out of here for a while.”

 

When Jackie pulled her minivan into the long circular drive of her sister’s home, the sight of pink peonies and roses immediately struck Claire. They were the first vibrant things she’d seen in days. She smiled and tried to banish the hospital images, and wondered if she had been wrong about Nick’s surgery.

“You okay?” Jackie asked.

Claire nodded and followed her inside. The lilies in the foyer vase had been replaced with blooming yellow gladioli. She ran her fingers across the stems, rippling them like wind chimes, grateful for Maria’s thoroughness, and even more grateful that she was off for the day. The thought of Maria’s reaction to her beloved Nicky’s condition would be too dramatic for her to handle. She followed Jackie up the stairs.

Walking into her bedroom, Claire counted backward the days that had passed since she’d last slept there. “I feel like I’m in a bad cable melodrama,” she said after a long silence. She picked up a small leopard-print pillow and began to tug at it from both sides of its corded border as she spoke. “How did this get to be our story?” As Jackie approached, Claire chucked the pillow to the floor. “I’ve destroyed his life,” she said, tears grazing her lips.

“Nicholas made a choice.”

“No, I made the choice.” Claire turned her head away.

“Look at me, honey. You can’t take
all
the blame for this. Nick is seventeen, Claire. He’s not a baby.” Jackie wiped hair from Claire’s mouth and eyes.

Claire stared at the ceiling, trapped in the bright moment of rushing emotions. “Please, just go back to the hospital and be with him.”

Jackie wrapped Claire in her arms, and together they rocked, slowly and steadily as they had done when Claire had miscarried her first baby, and when their father had died during Jackie’s breast cancer treatment, and on the countless other life-changing events they’d braced each other through—locking out the pain of the present, if only for a while. When the dance ended Claire urged her again to go.

“Claire, please lie down and get some rest, okay?”

“You’ll call me, right?”

“I’ll call you.”

“Because Michael, well . . . you know. He can barely speak to me, and he seems so . . . off.”

“Um, yeah,” Jackie said, her stupefied expression communicating the unspoken obvious.

Claire sucked in a sharp lungful of air. “I mean, it’s like there’s something else other than Nicky and . . . what happened that’s preoccupying him. Something’s different about him now. You know?”

“Honey, you really look like hell.”

“Nothing’s making sense anymore.” She rubbed circles on both of her temples, trying to erase the pressure between them.

Jackie paused, as if debating whether or not to say what she was thinking.

“What?” Claire finally asked. “What else?”

“Mother’s been calling nonstop since yesterday.”

“I’ve been ignoring it. It was hard enough going through the insulin overdose story with her before the surgery. And it’s not helpful that I keep having to tell her there’s been no change.”

“She wants to come out here, Claire.”

“Ugh.” She flopped down into the pillows on the bed. “I can’t face anyone now. Especially Cora.”

“I’ve been trying to discourage her, but I thought I should check with you. Just in case.”

“In case what? That after a few days of ministering to me, Mother would become a bit achy herself, and
I’d
want to take care of
her
?” She looked up at Jackie. “Please just hold her off for a little while longer.”

“You got it, kiddo.” She kissed Claire on the forehead. “Now be smart, and listen to your big sis. Just chill here for a while, please.”

As the sound of Jackie’s footsteps faded down the staircase, Claire pulled the sheets up over her face, grateful for her sister’s steadiness, for all the phone calls and offers of help she fielded when Claire had decided to go radio silent and focus her energy on the only thing that really mattered. How could anyone help? And how could she talk to anyone without letting her guilt collapse the flimsy house of cards they’d had to erect? Guilt. It had become the defining precept of her days. And Michael’s, it seemed, too, with his retreat into uncharacteristically remorseful moods and strange mumblings. Or maybe not. Who knew anymore? Thank God for Jackie, she thought, stretching out under the covers. The sheets were crisp and cool, the mattress firm and strangely foreign to her. She smelled Michael on the pillows, some new scent she couldn’t pinpoint, but still unmistakably his, fresh and clean. She wondered if they would ever share a bed again. If he could ever want her.

Claire fidgeted and rolled between her side and Michael’s, wanting badly to sleep for just a few dreamless hours. She turned on some music—Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue”—but still her mind wouldn’t let her forget. Ultimately, her search for comfort proved more frustrating than therapeutic, and she stripped off her clothes for a quick shower. Her hair, she noticed, felt old, like fallen leaves. Everything about her needed some tending to, but it all seemed so pointless, she thought as she trudged into the bathroom. She flipped on the light, and the instant her toes hit the marble floor an ice-cold shiver shot through her. She hadn’t been in there since the night of the accident, and the startling reminder sent her sliding backward from the present. Suddenly it was eleven o’clock, Saturday night. And the smell of Andrew seemed to wash over her again.

Claire turned and raced out of the room and into the hallway in a panic of blood and cocaine and flashing lights. Flinging open the door to the upstairs guest bathroom, she saw the cream-and-gold toile shower curtains shudder. She stepped, practically jumped, over the tub ledge and drew the curtains shut with both hands, crisscrossing her wrists so that nothing could slip past. She turned on the taps and stood under the showerhead as the water spouted shockingly cold and then hot on her body, letting it beat down on her shoulders. For ten minutes Claire stood there shaking, waiting for the spray to wash the emotional shock of her flashback down the drain.

Finally she reached for the soap and began lathering her body. One pass of the finely milled bar over her arms and legs turned to five, then ten before she moved on to the loofah. She washed her hair and shaved her legs with the never-used guest razor, reciting her litany of hatred for Andrew: his magnetism, his “party favor,” his general existence. Because no matter how long she exfoliated and scoured,
it
would always be there—the unforgettable spark of their lust, and the damning shadow of its fallout. Because with every cat and mouse game, someone had to lose.

After, as she dressed, Claire tried hard to picture Michael and all the goodness of their life together. The breezy holidays, the lazy Sunday mornings following one of their fabulous dinner parties, the secrets and dreams and jokes they had shared. But all she could bring to mind were his words at the hospital.
You think you can trust your instincts?
And their now obvious lack of communion. When she and Andrew had fucked, they had kissed so passionately that she’d felt her entire body vibrate. But kissing had long since gone missing from her lovemaking with Michael; all that had remained was the act itself and a cool sense of release when it was done. Claire considered for a moment that perhaps she’d applied the wrong terminology to the wrong partner. She could hardly call the swift and occasional maneuverings with Michael
lovemaking
now, and she hated Andrew even more for magnifying this.

Before him, things had seemed decent in their sex life—not perfect, not like the days of their swoon-worthy make-out sessions on the stoop of her Park Slope brownstone, or the comfortable twice-weekly pattern they’d settled into the year after Nick went to preschool, or even the diversion they’d enjoyed with the “bunny” when Michael started doing all of his deals in Asia a few years back and coming to bed too exhausted to give more than ten minutes to the effort. A little more romance and eroticism would have been nice, sure, but their expectations and patterns had shifted. It was the same story she’d heard in countless marriages at that stage in life.
We don’t have the energy; I just can’t muster the interest; he needs Viagra; Every time he gets that edge to his voice it’s like a gut-check to my libido.
Claire could relate to many of these complaints, but not with the degree of resentment or resignation that seemed to deflate so many women she knew. While theirs had never been a crazy, nails-digging-into-flesh kind of hunger for one another, at least she and Michael still had sex, and at least they didn’t fight about it. Certainly this was a more ideal status quo than the majority of her friends’ relationships.

But the old adage about not knowing what you’ve been missing until it shows up on your doorstep hit Claire with a force she couldn’t ignore. Standing there half-naked in her dressing room and brushing her hand over the little half-moon scabs on her back, she acknowledged that their sex life, in fact, had been miles from perfect. Light-years. She tried to recall the last time she and Michael had made the fervent, passionate kind of love she knew she was capable of, and all she could come up with was a couple years’ worth of lackluster-in-hindsight fucks that had become even more robotic since the fall—de rigueur quickies before a business trip or on the odd leisurely weekend, and then nothing for long stretches. And she also had to admit that she shared the blame for this loss of intimacy. It had probably been at least as long that she hadn’t initiated sex. Why had she given up? she asked herself for the first time. Why had this not been important to her anymore? They’d stopped kissing good night when she started falling asleep before him a couple years ago, and then the inattention to any sort of real flame fanning seemed to have snowballed into . . . what? Zipping up her jeans, Claire closed her eyes and thought,
desolation.
And she began to weep for all that they had lost, and all that she had allowed to go unspoken, and all that was broken. And through the blur of those fresh tears and the terrifying uncertainty of the future, she whispered an imploring prayer that she and Michael could somehow bridge their gap and find a route back to each other.

Back in the bedroom she looked for her cell phone to check voice mail, discovering it lodged under the bed where she must have kicked it during her mad dash from the bathroom. But there had been no calls or updates. Feeling even more unsettled and weary, Claire drifted around the house tilting artwork a few degrees up or down to levelness, sorting through unopened mail, rearranging magazine stacks. Stay home a bit longer, or go back to the hospital and let Michael’s smoldering anger bloat around them—the choices were equally disheartening. Finding herself on the stairway landing, she got down on her knees to comb the fringe on the Persian rug with her fingers, and just stayed there.

When she woke up, her head felt heavy and dense. She rolled onto her back, scanning the balcony windows, wondering how long she’d been on the floor. Her cheek, she could feel, bore the indentation of fringe. She checked her watch, incredulous that she’d been asleep for six hours, and called Jackie.

“Hell-o.”

Startled to hear Michael’s voice, Claire immediately felt her body tense up. “Oh, you’re still there.”

“I just got back about an hour ago. Jackie is talking to one of the nurses.”

“Has there been any change?”

“Don’t you think we’d have called?”

“So, nothing?”

“No, Claire, there’s been no miracle yet. Do you want your sister?”

“That’s all right. I’m on my way.”