The Choice (32 page)
In the clinic, he put his hand on the counter to steady himself. Madeline rounded the counter with her keys dangling. Travis looked around the waiting room, then at Madeline, then at the floor. When he raised his eyes, all he could do was mimic exactly what he’d heard on the phone only moments before.
“She’s awake,” he finally said.
Twelve minutes later, after thirty lane changes and three traffic lights that were definitely yellow and perhaps even red, Madeline brought Travis to a halt at the entrance to the nursing home. He hadn’t said a word since he’d been in the car, but he smiled his thanks as he pushed open the car door.
The drive had done nothing to clear his mind. He hoped beyond hope and was excited beyond all measure; at the same time, he couldn’t shake the thought that somehow he’d misunderstood. Maybe she woke for an instant and was in a coma again; maybe someone had gotten the information wrong in the first place. Maybe Harris had been referring to some obscure medical condition that improved brain function, rather than the obvious. His head spun with alternating scenarios of hope and despair as he made his way toward the entrance.
Elliot Harris was waiting for him and seemed far more in control than Travis imagined himself ever being again.
“I’ve already called the physician and the neurologist, and they’re going to be here in a few minutes,” he said. “Why don’t you go up to her room?”
“She’s okay, right?”
Harris, a man Travis barely knew, put a hand on his shoulder, ushering him forward. “Go see her,” he said. “She’s been asking for you.”
Someone held the door open for him—no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t even remember whether it had been a male or a female—and Travis entered the facility. A quick right led him to the stairs, and he bounded up them, becoming more wobbly the higher he got. On the second floor, he pulled open the door and saw both a nurse and an orderly waiting, as if expecting him. By their excited expressions, he assumed they must have seen him come in and wanted to tell him what was happening, but he didn’t stop, and they let him pass. As he took the next step, he felt as if his legs were about to give way. He leaned against the wall to steady himself for a moment, then took another step toward Gabby’s room.
It was the second room on the left, and her door stood open. As he got closer, he heard the murmur of people talking. At the door, he hesitated, wishing he’d at least brushed his hair but knowing it didn’t matter. He stepped inside, and Gretchen’s face lit up.
“I was at the hospital next to the doctor when he got the page, and I just had to come see. . . .”
Travis barely heard her. Instead, all he could register was the sight of Gabby, his wife, propped up weakly on her hospital bed. She seemed disoriented, but her smile when she saw him told him everything he needed to know.
“I know you two have a lot of catching up to do . . . ,” Gretchen went on in the background.
“Gabby?” Travis finally whispered.
“Travis,” she croaked. Her voice sounded different, scratchy and hoarse from disuse, but somehow, it was Gabby’s voice just the same. Travis moved slowly toward the bed, his eyes never leaving hers, unaware that Gretchen was already backing out, shutting the door behind her.
“Gabby?” he repeated in near disbelief. In his dream, or what he thought was a dream, he watched as she moved her hand from the bed to her stomach, as if that took all the strength she had.
He sat on the bed beside her.
“Where were you?” she asked, the words slurry but nonetheless full of love, unmistakably full of life. Awake. “I didn’t know where you were.”
“I’m here now,” Travis said, and at that he broke down, his sobs coming out in heaving bursts. He leaned toward Gabby, aching for her to hold him, and when he felt her hand on his back, he began to cry even harder. He wasn’t dreaming. Gabby was holding him; she knew who he was and how much she meant to him. It’s real, was all he could think, this time, it’s real. . . .
With Travis unwilling to leave Gabby’s side, his dad covered for him at the clinic for the next few days. Only recently had he returned to something resembling a full-time schedule, and on weekends like this, with his daughters running and laughing in the yard and Gabby in the kitchen, he sometimes caught himself grasping for details of the past year. His memories of the days he spent in the hospital had a blurry, hazy quality to them, as if he’d been only slightly more conscious than Gabby.
Gabby hadn’t emerged from her coma unscathed, of course. She had lost a great deal of weight, her muscles had atrophied, and a numbness persisted on most of her left side. It took days before she could stand upright without support. The therapy was maddeningly slow; even now, she spent a couple of hours daily with the physical therapist, and in the beginning, she often grew frustrated that she could no longer do simple things she’d once taken for granted. She hated her gaunt appearance in the mirror and commented more than once that she looked as if she had aged fifteen years. In moments like those, Travis always told her she was beautiful, and he’d never been more sure of anything.
Christine and Lisa took a bit of time to adjust. On the afternoon that Gabby woke up, Travis asked Elliot Harris to call his mother so she could pick up the girls from school. The family was reunited an hour later, but when they stepped into the room, neither Christine nor Lisa seemed to want to get close to their mother. Instead, they clung to Travis and offered monosyllabic answers to whatever Gabby asked. It took half an hour before Lisa finally crawled onto the bed alongside her mother. Christine didn’t open up until the following day, and even then she kept her feelings at bay, as if she were meeting Gabby for the first time. That night, after Gabby had been transferred back to the hospital and Travis brought the girls home, Christine asked whether “Mommy was really back, or if she’d go back to sleep again.” Though the physicians made it clear they were fairly certain she wouldn’t, they hadn’t ruled it out completely, at least for the time being. Christine’s fears reflected his own, and whenever he found Gabby sleeping or simply resting after a grueling round of therapy, Travis’s stomach would clench. His breathing would get shallow, and he’d nudge her gently, growing increasingly panicked that she wouldn’t open her eyes. And when she finally stirred, he couldn’t mask his relief and gratitude. While Gabby accepted his anxieties in the beginning—she admitted the thought scared her as well—it had begun to drive her crazy. Last week, with the moon high in the sky and crickets chirping, Travis began to stroke her arm as she lay beside him. Her eyes opened and she focused on the clock, noting it was a little after three in the morning. A moment later, she sat up in bed and glared at him.
“You’ve got to stop doing this! I need my sleep. Unbroken, regular sleep, like everyone else in the world! I’m exhausted, can’t you understand that? I refuse to live the rest of my life knowing that you’re going to nudge me awake every hour!”
That had been the extent of her comments; it couldn’t even be classified as an argument, since he didn’t have time to respond before she’d rolled over with her back to him, muttering to herself—but it struck Travis as so . . .
Gabby-like
that he breathed a sigh of relief. If she no longer worried about slipping into a coma again—and she swore she didn’t—then he knew he shouldn’t, either. Or, at the very least, he could let her sleep. If he was honest with himself, he wondered whether the fear would ever disappear completely. Now, in the middle of the night, he simply listened to the way she breathed, and when he noticed differences in the pattern, differences that hadn’t occurred when she’d been in a coma, he was finally able to roll over and go back to sleep.
They were all adjusting, and he knew that would take time. Lots of it. They had yet to talk about the fact that he’d disregarded the living will, and he wondered whether they ever would. He had yet to tell Gabby the extent of the imaginary conversations she’d had with him while she was in the hospital, and she had little to say about the coma itself. She didn’t remember anything: no aromas, no sounds from the television, nothing about his touch. “It’s like time just . . .
vanished
.”
But that was fine. It was all as it should be. Behind him, he heard the screen door creak open and he turned. In the distance, he could see Molly lying in the tall grass off to the side of the house; Moby, old guy that he was, was sleeping in the corner. Travis smiled as Gabby spied her daughters, noting her content expression. As Christine pushed Lisa on the tire swing, both of them giggling madly, Gabby took a seat in the rocker beside Travis.
“Lunch is ready,” she said. “But I think I’ll let them play for a few more minutes. They’re having such a good time.”
“They are. They wore me out earlier.”
“Do you think that maybe later, when Stephanie gets here, we can all head over to the aquarium? And maybe have some pizza afterward? I’ve been dying for pizza.”
He smiled, thinking he could stay in this moment forever. “That sounds good. Oh yeah, that reminds me. I forgot to tell you that your mom called when you were in the shower.”
“I’ll call her back in a little while. And I’ve got to call about the heat pump, too. The girls’ room just wouldn’t cool off last night.”
“I can probably fix it.”
“I don’t think so. The last time you tried to fix it, we had to buy a whole new unit. Remember?”
“I remember you didn’t give me enough time.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she teased. She winked at him. “Do you want to eat out here or inside?”
He pretended to debate the question, knowing it wasn’t really important. Here or there, they would all be together. He was with the woman and daughters he loved, and who could ever need or want anything more than that? The sun shone bright, flowers were blooming, and the day would pass with a careless ease that had been impossible to imagine the winter before. It was just a normal day, a day like any other. But most of all, it was a day in which everything was exactly the way it should be.
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