So Much Love Page 13

  The cop sidles into the room behind him and stops abruptly when he really sees her. An hour ago, standing on Grey’s front porch, this man had said the words good news, and now seeing the object of that news steals the blood from his face. Grey senses the officer’s dismay and pity washing over him and Catherine both. He wants to bring his fingers back to his mouth but doesn’t, now too aware of the pathos of his borrowed gesture, perilously close to a thumb in the mouth. They regard this new reality together. This truth is a parody of good news. Grey feels a weighty hand clasp his shoulder.

  On some level, ever since he met Catherine, he had known that his happiness couldn’t last. That he would spend a birthday alone, sitting in a lawn chair in the rain so as not to hear the wail of the phone inside the house. In retrospect, maybe Catherine had always been just about to set a narrow foot into the mouth of a bear trap, be clonked on her shiny-haired head by an anvil, be snatched away by a wolf. In having her in his life at all, he’d had more luck than he’d earned, and his good fortune had leached away some of hers. The shocking thing was not that she disappeared, but that she had returned. That she could return from hell and make it feel like summer had come again had seemed both possible and preposterous until she did it. He was a man who believed in catastrophe. Perhaps what was truly shocking was that he had been so unprepared for this one.

  Once it arrived, though, once she was taken, he’d known almost right away. Almost. He had been waiting for her at a nice restaurant with Evan and Angie, his oldest friends, and the time spent waiting for Catherine passed pleasantly, until it didn’t. Evan was telling a story about a local politician’s legal troubles when Grey fished out the last slice of olive loaf from the napkin-lined basket, then stared at it in his hand, saying, “We ate the whole basket of bread and Catherine’s still not here… ” Catherine mocked people who thought they were important enough to make their friends wait. Grey let the sentence trail off as if it were an idle thought, before checking his phone again. There were no new messages.

  Suddenly the evening that had been spooling out before them like a red carpet—the martinis, the gossip, the warmth of being with old friends—evaporated. He had been picturing Evan the godfather of his and Catherine’s someday child, balancing the baby carefully in his awkward hands. Now, seeing the bottom of the breadbasket, he pictured Catherine stepping in front of a speeding minivan, or some other accident he couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t imagine. Yet he already knew the tone events would take when the waitress set down the second serving of sesame crisps and olive loaf. Nevertheless, he had stood up, politely excused himself from the table, and made the call to nowhere anyway. Her cellphone rang aimlessly, and was later found in a muddy puddle in the parking lot at the restaurant where she worked. Since then, his time and mind have been taken up with prayers and other forms of despair that require no forensic confirmation.

  This body in the bed, this Catherine-he-once-knew, she is a confirmation of another kind, but he can’t be sure of what. That his luck is suddenly returning? That she always had the strength to survive something far worse than his nightmares? Because this scene—these thick gashes on her concave cheek, that awkward angle of her right arm, the web of tubes tangling from her left wrist to a clear plastic bag—is a nightmare that his mind would not have been able to conjure ten minutes earlier, let alone eight months ago.

  When did this become the best-case scenario? Long after the optimistic volunteer searchers in their neon ski jackets and the underfunded police department and the brusquely bored newspaper reporters and even her stoic, sweet-eyed mother gave up hope. He and Sue sat week after week in her apartment eating schnitzel and pot pies and all the things she loved to make for Catherine, talking about Catherine’s noisy laugh, her notion that all fruit should be served chilled, her fussiness about organizing bookshelves. But sometime in the summer, Sue stopped meeting Grey’s gaze and her tone grew heavier, though she kept telling stories about Catherine’s childhood, and the dinners got more elaborate. Or perhaps it was when he almost got rid of his landline—it was getting so expensive—but then he realized that if he did, even if Catherine somehow got to a phone, the first number she would think to call would be out of service. Or the night he slept diagonal on the bed and didn’t wake up sweating. Or perhaps it was during that numb period when he’d seen glimpses of a future without her and thought he might live through it, or sometime during the past few months when he scarcely wept at all, and never on the bus.

  But he’s been proven wrong and, in his error, won everything. Catherine has come back as a living person, not as an eighteen-point headline. These monitors and this narrow bed: this is the longed-for triumph, the victory lap, and grounds for promotion for the cop in the corner. Catherine’s mouth is a meaty swell, the colour of raw chicken liver. Her thick dark hair has been razored, not by her captor’s cruelty but by the gentle hands of nurses, to get at the wounds underneath. Even the spikes of surgical thread along her jaw are a victory, a better alternative than others.

  The white-walled room is tiny—one more step puts him at the shore of the bed. Behind him, the police officer, young beneath his beard, has dropped back against the wall. Grey can hear the man’s heavy breathing and knows they are both fighting to continue to see her, to accept this celebration. For all his clairvoyance, Grey does not know what comes next. Does he embrace her, wake her, ask her how she is? Can he touch her hand? So many of his memories of Catherine are touches. He can remember her skin against his hands, his chest, his throat. What he sees now is an unrecognizable body—gaunt, fragile—and the wires and tubes contain her like a cage, fencing out his pathetic need to touch. Should he be carrying flowers? How long will it take for this day, all these past days and weeks and months of suspended animation, to become blurred memory? How soon can he forget how it felt to half awaken in the night and nuzzle her empty pillow? Would now be possible, somehow?

  Has the cop seen Breathless? Part of Grey—the weak part, the part that would hide from his beloved wife—would like to buy the cop a cup of coffee and tell him about the early days of Goddard and the French New Wave, when things were more linear but still so cool that you could get away with not feeling, if you wanted to.

  But you can’t. Grey can’t leave and he can’t stop feeling the loss of Catherine’s loud laugh, so incongruous with her low, even voice. The loss of that voice too. Can he talk to her? No one has told him what he’s allowed to do here. There are things he can’t quite bring himself to believe: the blankness of her third left finger; the pillow of bruise under her eyes; the blades of her hips sharp enough to slice through the thin blue blanket—these all hammer at his eyes and mind.

  Will this be enough for her? Will this be too much? She was not a woman for whom any sort of pain would be muted. Is. She was fearful of many things but she enjoyed her life, or at least he believed that she did. Does. She put huge amounts of cilantro in her salads and followed a recipe for Bloody Marys that called for pickle brine. He was constantly finding her socks in the front hallway—she hated to have anything on her feet but believed the laws of conformity required it outside the house. She read constantly, on the bus and during breakfast and especially sprawled on her stomach at home on the couch or in bed or on the lawn. She said her favourite poets were the ones who irritated her slightly, the ones who stopped her from easily sliding her eyes from left to right. Once, she painted the coffee table vermilion and then tripped over it, striping her pyjamas, which she continued to wear for years, even so. They had a bright blue couch to go with the red coffee table; this made sense to her. Once, she went through a Barthes period and wanted to work in advertising. She never drank Guinness, she never shopped in malls. Once, at a summer job, she was able to prove a need for the more expensive kind of paper clips, the coloured ones, to code her files, and Admin ordered them every month in a little box, just for her. She only brushed her hair when it was wet. She laughed and laughed at pratfalls and puns and other things that were marginally funny.
She slept on the left side of the bed.

  Grey kneels at the left side of her bed. From this ungated side, he can lean across the slippery sheets and place his cheek, pale and gaunt with the killing fire of hope, against the deep curve between those jagged hipbones. As he presses his thick lips to Catherine’s cloaked belly, he hears the policeman’s sharp inward hiss of breath—Terry, his name is Terry—but he feels Catherine’s breath. Beneath his unshaven face, her stomach tightens into itself, but then it pushes up again. The disinfected hospital air is sliding inside her, pumping through her and through him and through Terry, a perfect intimacy.

  The room is silent. On TV medical shows, there’s always a steady beep of some sort of monitor, but Catherine’s seems to be off, or on mute. Can the doctors really have such faith that this small, frail heart will keep beating? Grey can’t. He keeps his face pressed into his wife’s stomach. He has to feel her breathing to be sure. And as he feels the rise and fall of her belly and watches the slight twitch beneath the unrecognizable yellow slit of her eyelids, he is sure. Hair can grow back. Blood can clot. This is nothing like the movies. And in the back of his throat he feels the miserable burn of gratitude.

  PART TWO

  Sad Stories

  The story ended oddly, with all the characters jumping into a previously unmentioned lake. Grey flipped back to the beginning, looking for a mention of water, a dock, unhappiness. He hadn’t been skimming: he’d understood the story at least enough to read it aloud to Catherine. Still, he just couldn’t fathom why the wedding party had leapt, weeping, into the water. And reading the story from the beginning again, he found no reference to swimming or the shore until the bitter end, and no pages stuck together. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to understand, in that way.

  He leaned over the bar of her hospital bed and whispered, “Do you know why they went into the water?” If Catherine had been able to answer, she no doubt could’ve offered him a symbol, a twist, some insight that would have made the story come together in his mind. She had always paid closer attention than he did, to prose and to life. He brought books home from work so she’d read them, talk about them, let him use her ideas and connections to create theme displays for the bookstore chain he worked at. He read everything too, of course—he considered it part of his job—but she read better, deeper. She could live inside a story—sitting on the train beside the characters, eavesdropping on their conversations, understanding their tones and pauses, their lives and heartbreaks. And she’d come back filled with their insights and ideas, as excited as if she’d spent the time with friends. In those days she always returned to the real world. But now, Grey wasn’t sure she’d ever emerge from whatever other world she was lost in.

  Now, Catherine was locked inside her own pain, and none of his questions about books or how she was feeling or if she wanted him to bring her another pillow elicited a response. Now, it was difficult to tell when Catherine paid attention and when she didn’t. The whole time he was reading the story to her, her gaze had been fixed on the glistening blank of the television screen. She didn’t turn toward him when he put his hand on her shoulder, which was still skinny but gaining some softness under the cotton sleeve. Or when he said, “Good night, Catherine.” He wanted not to be crushed by this, but he knew that sometimes she did react—there was no reason not to hope—and so every time she ignored his voice or the sound of her own name felt like a rejection. Sometimes she stared right at him, like she could see his scruffy beard and sleep-deprived eyes and hopefulness. Like she loved him. He wouldn’t stop longing for that connection, that gram of affection, until he knew for a fact it was impossible. For now, it wasn’t.

  “Your mom will be here in the morning.” She kept watching the still TV as he walked out the door and didn’t move when he said, “I love you.”

  Grey always looked over his shoulder on his way in and out of the hospital—for weeks reporters from the local papers or television stations had been showing up to ask him about his wife’s condition. The hospital had security staff, and although Grey rarely saw them, they somehow managed to keep journalists away from the interior corridors of the hospital, at least near Catherine’s room. But once he stepped outside, he was sometimes accosted in the parking lot. Today, as soon as he stepped off the sidewalk, a young woman in a snug violet coat approached him and asked briskly if she could ask him a few questions regarding his wife.

  “She’s fine, thanks.” That was his usual answer. He never said, “No comment” because even to his own ears that sounded too much like a dodge when he truly just had nothing to say. But he always kept walking. The cops had advised him ages ago not to talk to reporters except in a formal press-conference environment. He strode on now and as usual the reporter followed him to his car. “Do you have any comment on the police activity at a house on the south edge of Turgrove County, where your wife may have been held?” She had more questions, about the house’s alleged owner and where that person might be, but when he opened the car door, she held up a small plain business card.

  “If you ever want to talk, just call, day or night.”

  Everyone he knew—his friends, Catherine’s mother, the staff at the hospital—seemed to assume he wouldn’t want to talk to the media, that he would find it an invasion of privacy. But it was very tempting to talk about the silence in Catherine’s room, her endless gaze on the TV whether it was on or off, the yellowing bruises on her arms, to tell it all to this warm-skinned and carefully eyelined young woman. It was her job to hear about the worst things, like the thick purple vines of cut on Catherine’s palms, like what was found in the basement of that little brick house out in Turgrove. It was her job to break down the hard stories in a way that people wouldn’t turn away from, a version that could be digested in a commercial break. If he told her, the young reporter probably wouldn’t even cry.

  But instead he took the card for want of anything better to do and got into the car. Then he nodded and said, “I’m fine, thanks” as he pulled out, and away.

  Grey meant to reread the previous evening’s short story at breakfast. Catherine used to finish the last page and then immediately go back to the first; she said every reading yielded another layer. But he must have left the book on Catherine’s bedside table, so he read the Art and Culture section of the newspaper instead. The wordy, gleeful book reviews made his head ache. There wasn’t one about the swimming wedding party book, but another sad-sounding book of stories was well praised. Perhaps he’d put together a Sad Stories table display.

  He ate a chocolate-chip waffle and microwave bacon. Single-man food. For years, Catherine had made him breakfasts of granola with yogurt or steel-cut oatmeal. Since she’d been gone, Grey had grieved and prayed, thrown his toothbrush, her picture, himself at the walls, but he’d also marched down the frozen food aisle and bought McCain fries, polar bars, 10%-fruit drink—things that used to line his fridge-freezer when he lived alone. He was happy to have those things again, which was something he probably wasn’t supposed to feel.

  He searched the books section of the paper for a mention of a happier short-story collection, or at least a simpler one. He read Catherine only short stories now, one per evening, filling in the otherwise long silent space between when her mother left for supper and the end of visiting hours with something slightly more intimate than television. While she was gone, he read poetry—a couple of books by the poet from Iria Catherine had been reading right before…before. He’d gotten them from the store a few weeks after she disappeared, when he’d still been in the crazy stage of sobbing and phoning the police over and over. By the time he could manage the calm to read anything, it was starting to be spring. Grey read with his back to the window, to block out the robins and chive shoots and snowdrops that Catherine had been waiting for all winter. He found himself drawn to the poems because not only were they something Catherine liked, they were like Catherine, so simple and matter of fact. A lot of the shorter ones were about waiting tables, reading books, things Cathe
rine talked about all the time. And he could hear her voice reading them in his head. Catherine used to sprawl on the couch behind him while he played video games on mute, reading some of these same poems aloud to him, and he remembered the lilting up-notes of her voice when she was happy.

  Once Catherine returned, he tried reading these to her, but the words were not as vibrant when he read them aloud in the hospital. They were diminished by the beige paint and the lack of windows and the hectic murmuring in the halls; by Catherine’s refusal to come out of her bubble of silence. Dr. Durnsville, the therapist, told Grey not to think of it that way, but he couldn’t help being frustrated. She was there but not there, present but under glass. He read her the poems he remembered she liked best, even though the words felt strange and cold in his mouth. He struggled to follow the meaning of the poems with her vacant gaze pointed away from him. Poems are so spare, what you build into the silences is as important as the words themselves—Catherine had taught him that. But he could tell she was building nothing in her silence, rendering every poem meaningless.