So Much Love Page 20

  He comes home with Swiss Chalet and flowers—purple tulips that must have come from very far away to be so vibrant in the depths of winter. When Grey arrives, the house is silent. He wanders past the kitchen, the scraps of breakfast toast he left in the sink, the book he left folded over on the dining room table—all of it undisturbed for the last ten hours. At the foot of the stairs, he already knows that Catherine is staring at the blood-orange sunset. Her hair smells like the curry he’d made for dinner three nights ago because she hasn’t showered yet this week; he knows this too. And that, when she sees him, her expression will be faintly pleased but largely—nothing. Largely nothing at all.

  When he realizes they don’t have a vase, he puts the flowers in a juice pitcher of water and carries that and the sack of chicken up the stairs. Be grateful, he tells himself. He has her back in real life now, as well as the images of her he keeps in his head: the one of her laughing and hopping on one foot outside a locked park bathroom, snow in her hair; the one of her resting her head on his stomach, knees curled in, reading a book; so many more. Does she ever think of that ghost of herself, he wonders, and her old simple life full of work and books and food and love, before everything bad came raining down?

  He reminds himself of Donny Zimmerman, found buried in the yard of the house where she was kept. It could have been Grey instead of Donny’s parents weeping at the memorial on TV, him instead of that poor young girl on the phone. He is grateful to have his wife back, he is. He just wants a little more.

  Catherine’s gaze comes directly to the door as he enters—a good sign, maybe. “These are for you.” The tulips flop in her direction. A droplet of water sloshes onto the rug. The mustard-coloured rug, he notices suddenly, is ugly.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  He sets the vase on the nightstand, the bag on the bed beside her knees. “Quarter-chicken dinners, one with salad, one fries, just like always!” He cringes at his own tone: too close to that of a host on a children’s TV show. He unwraps the meal, being careful not to get grease on the duvet, and hands Catherine her plastic oval takeout container, fries jammed around the chicken like packing peanuts. She holds it out for him to take a fistful of the fries, which he dumps on his chicken. Then he takes some salad, still using his fingers, and drops it into her oval. “Bon appetit!”

  They chew for a few moments in silence. He watches her fine jaw working under her olive skin, now pale and striated with tiny red veins. Capillaries?

  “Catherine?” He says her name mainly to see if she’ll turn toward the sound. Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t. This time she does.

  He swallows a fatty bit too quickly and feels it slither down his throat. “I know you’re not, you don’t have to be…okay. I don’t want to push you. Like Dr. Durnsville said, you can take all the time you need.”

  She looks at him—he feels it. This is one thing that hasn’t changed; Catherine’s intense gaze. Forget the way novelists talk of haunted eyes, eyes with a depth of worry—Catherine and Grey both think that sort of description is crap. Eyes are wet live cells, and when they watch you, you feel it.

  “But I don’t think this is good. I think it might help you to…start some routines. Maybe you could…get out of bed, at least. It might help you and… ” A prick, a selfish prick—how could his discomfort matter in the face of her genuine suffering, the scars on her palms and forearms?

  Her gaze drops as she pokes one slightly burnt fry with another. Eventually she eats that fry, and a few others, and the wing part of her chicken. She gets up to pee and to brush her teeth, but then sinks back into bed beside him. “Goodnight,” she says blandly but unprompted.

  “I love you, Catherine,” he whispers. He feel like he says this a thousand times a day, but he’s not sure if it’s ever out loud.

  He waits a long minute, and when it comes it’s very quiet, but eventually she says, “I love you” back.

  —

  They have a very quiet weekend too, but Catherine is out of bed a few hours each day. She wanders from room to room, exploring as if for the first time. She stares out all the windows, studies the spines of the books on the shelves, opens closets and cupboards and gazes at what she finds inside. But she’s exhausted by even a half-hour of moving through her old life, especially if she has to speak, and keeps returning to the soft duveted kingdom of the bedroom. When he spots her in the den, gingerly touching her pretty blue couch, he asks if she wants to watch TV and she nods, sits down beside him. He had been planning on Orange Is the New Black but that doesn’t seem right. He opens up Netflix and scrolls through. “Whatever you want is fine. See anything you like?”

  Catherine cocks her head, taps his hand when she wants him to stop so she can read a description. Which is exactly what she used to do. Which is unnerving, because they really don’t do anything they used to do anymore. They end up watching a sitcom about attractive young people running around a bar trying to find true love. It’s impossible to take their gossip and sex seriously, but Catherine gives it her full attention, her hands on her knees.

  On Monday when he comes home from work, she is in the kitchen, and her hair is damply clean. Her clothes are from her past life as his cheerful wife, an undergrad, a waitress, a sweet nerd. These clothes were waiting for her in the closet, but now the jeans are so loose she has folded the waistband down over the pockets, and the cuffs of her favourite dark blue blouse are rolled back while she grates a carrot on the counter.

  Grey has brought her a cake but she probably actually needs something else. After what she’s been through, who can imagine what she needs? He hasn’t brought her flowers again; they looked stupid in the juice pitcher. Maybe she needs a vase. Maybe a better grater. Half the kitchen is sprinkled with flecks of orange.

  She scrapes carrot off the grater, the cutting board, and her hands into the salad bowl. Without glancing up, she asks, “Did you have a good day?”

  “Fine. You?” He toes off his shoes and kicks them onto the mat. He gives her a beat to respond, but when she doesn’t he’s ready with, “Hey, I brought dessert.” He raises the cake box at her. Her smile is small, bitten. He winces at her effort, his weak contribution. The torrents of conversation he used to receive, in those pre-trauma days, when he’d come in the door to Catherine studying for exams or writing papers and full of italicsy commentary—they seem like fables now, or memories of another woman. Her dark hair is just getting long enough to hang into her face. When she brushes it out of her eyes with the back of her hand, she reminds him of a silly young girl he once knew, someone he rarely sees these days. He has always known her with long smooth hair falling down her spine, with a book in her hand, with a frank, affectionate gaze. Without these accessories, she looks like a stranger. Almost a stranger.

  She plucks a beer from the fridge, opens it, and hands it to him. The gesture is familiar, and comforting. He knows she’s really trying; he just wishes she would say more than two words to him at a time.

  She opens the oven door and pulls out a pan with the pork roast that had been in the back of the freezer, about to succumb to freezer burn. She turns toward him with the brown lump of meat on the pan framed by her oven-mitted hands—Christmas-patterned ones, though Christmas is over. She must have noticed that the everyday ones were covered in burn marks because he is an idiot and left them too near a burner one dinnertime rush. He doesn’t know where she found these; Grey hasn’t seen them in years. All the time she was gone, the house hid secrets from him.

  “It’s good to see you…up and about.”

  She nods, though she seems a little unsteady, unsure. Still she’s moving, active. As she crosses the kitchen, he reaches out to touch her, only to have her pull away from him toward the stove. Grey freezes, wounded, tears suddenly hot in his eyelashes. All those nights in bed, her warm shoulder centimetres from his own, he hadn’t dared touch her despite his longing—picturing her startling away from him, cringing toward the far edge of the bed. He’d thought it was his
imagination. Apparently not.

  When she faces him again, empty-handed, he is still standing with his hand frozen outstretched.

  Her wet eyes flicker in the kitchen light. “The pan was hot. I had to put it down.”

  “Oh… ”

  She reaches out, taps the back of his hand. “I made dinner for you.”

  He lets his arm drop limp at his side. “Thank you.” This is what he dreamt of when she was gone; he needs to be more grateful. “Thank you so much.” When the tears have cleared from his eyes, he gathers the cutlery from the drawer and begins setting the table.

  The weeks flow by and Grey has noticed that Catherine assigns herself new tasks each day. Doing the laundry, cleaning out the junk drawer, scrubbing a mysterious ink stain from a wall in the hallway. She asks him about his day and follows up on what he says, wanting to know how plans and worries at work are going.

  But there are many things Catherine doesn’t do now—read, make phone calls, engage easily in conversation, give hugs, focus on anything for longer than the length of a sitcom. Sue has tried all the DVDs she saved from Catherine’s childhood, Disney classics and zany adventures, but Catherine gets up and wanders off about half an hour in.

  She also doesn’t go anywhere unless someone asks her to. She doesn’t have a problem with leaving the house, but she doesn’t initiate it. In her previous life, she was never a socialite, but she liked the library, her mom’s place, her own yard—places that now, when Grey suggests them, she shakes her head at. Grey, Sue, and Dr. Durnsville, have all urged walks to the park, down the street, even around the yard, but Catherine always demurs politely, her eyes canted away.

  Her only excursions are to see her doctors and therapists several times a week. For those appointments, he comes home from work early and often finds her already waiting by the door with her shoes on. Totally normal, except she doesn’t have a book or a magazine with her—and Catherine used to read when she was on an escalator or in line at the grocery store. Instead she just stares at a blank space beside the door where they’d always meant to hang a picture or at least a mirror. He doesn’t like to think about how long she’s been sitting there.

  She was trapped for so long. He’s seen the basement now, in grainy newsprint colour beneath a dull headline. Staring at the photo, obsessing over not the bloodstains on the floor but the tiny window set flush with the ground on the outside. Eight months. How did she keep opening her eyes when there was so little to see? And how can she stay indoors day after day, still confined, although now by her own walls?

  If he can’t ask, who can? When they were first together, he asked her a million questions about her life, her childhood, her parents and friends and jobs and school. After they started sleeping together, he queried the exact sensations in her clitoris, nipples, and vagina during sex, trying to make her come. What couldn’t he ask her, his wife?

  So, en route to the therapist’s office, driving through the sleety streets downtown, he asks, “Are you scared? Scared to go out?”

  That shrug again. She meets his gaze, though. “Fine. I’m fine.”

  “But—I mean, you don’t go out unless I’m with you.”

  A chubby woman with a stroller crosses slowly against the light. He presses the brake as a new thought strikes him. “I’m worried you might be getting, what’s the word? Agra-something.”

  The old Catherine would have quickly filled in the blank, and in fact Grey has asked prematurely—the word slides into his mind a beat later: agoraphobia.

  This new Catherine stares at him while he pulls into the clinic parking lot. “I don’t have that. I just…I don’t know. My bus pass expired ages ago. I don’t have any money, and I haven’t talked to most of my friends. I can’t even remember my email password.” She seems to collapse back against the seat from the effort of having said so much, the most he’s heard her say in one go since she came back.

  He pulls into a spot right by the door and twists the key before speaking again. “I didn’t think…I should’ve helped you more, I just—”

  “You are helping me. You are.” But her head dips low, examining the floorboard with its crumpled receipts and salt stains. Finally she returns her gaze to him, a rare treat and a challenge. “I just don’t know how to help myself.”

  He leans forward but catches against his forgotten seatbelt. “If you need me to take another leave from work or if you need to move away from here—I would do anything for you. You know that, right?”

  “Of course I know that.” She unbuckles her seatbelt and slides forward, presses her palm onto the back of his hand, the most she has touched him in nearly a year. “You’re the whole point.”

  —

  Dr. Durnsville is both rote and kind. How are you, Catherine? How are you sleeping? Are you eating much? How do you feel in the mornings? What do you do when you are sad? The doctor rubs her hands down her thighs a lot. Grey suspects she’s never had a client who has been in the newspapers before. She mentions the calls from journalists often enough that Grey can tell it bothers her.

  Has your mother been to visit again? How do you feel about that? Have you been writing in your journal very much? Do you feel comfortable sharing anything from your journal?

  Catherine’s answers are precise, clinically helpful.

  I feel okay, thank you. I try not to sleep more than nine hours or so, but I get tired. Every morning I feel good, but then the day wears on me. When I’m sad, I look out the window. She seems comfortable in the first half of the sessions, comfortable enough in the time they spend together in this white sofa-ed room, chatting about the banalities of insomnia, iron intake, trauma. When my mother visits, we watch movies, and she tries not to cry. I don’t write in the journal very much, mainly recipes or ideas for what I want to cook.

  Grey is only there for the first half of each session, something Dr. Durnsville suggested. There had been an explanation the first time she asked him to leave, but Grey had waved it off—he has always given Catherine her space, let her have her secrets, even back when the stakes were so much lower. Of course, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to know what happens once he’s gone, not when Catherine so often returns to the waiting area red-eyed and shaky. Her words in the car this afternoon make Grey realize how little he knows, still, about what she is feeling. Perhaps he has left her too much space, given her more privacy than she wants. Or maybe there’s just no way out but through the worst of it.

  Sitting across from Dr. D and beside his wife on the expensive white-leather couch, Grey suddenly wants to ask the hard questions. In the midst of the rundown of meals eaten, he asks, “Do you think about him a lot?”

  The expression on the therapist’s face is tense, watchful, but she doesn’t intervene.

  “Who? Dex?”

  This is the first time he’s heard Catherine say this name. By the time she felt up to answering questions, the police had located the house where she’d been held, found the body of the man who held her captive. Once they found Donny Zimmerman’s body buried in the backyard, there was nothing left to investigate. The cops said the cuts on her hands were consistent with the shattered fluorescent tube that cut the veins in Dex’s neck and face. Catherine had killed him, or at least helped him die. The paperwork was filed, of course, but for the most part Catherine was spared much questioning.

  “I try not to. But of course I think about him. He did a lot of damage.”

  He nods slowly. “I think about him too.”

  She scrutinizes him, really seeing his exhausted face. “You shouldn’t. He was—like a tidal wave, like a hurricane. All that pain, and for no…for no reason.” Her voice is shaking slightly. “But he’s dead now. Right?”

  The therapist murmurs, “Yes, he’s dead and buried. But it is still okay to be angry.”

  Chin jerking from side to side, Catherine says, “No. He’s gone. It’s done. There’s nothing, no one to be angry at.”

  Dr. D’s bony hand darts out, as if to touch her, bu
t she pulls back before making contact. “That’s good moving on, Catherine, but it is understandable to feel some anger, some rage. If not for yourself, and it would be completely natural, then perhaps for—”

  “Donny.” Her voice is a stone dropped in water.

  By the time Grey stands to leave at his appointed time, Catherine has said little more but she is crying, which is not surprising. The surprise happens when she sees him get up: she eases to her feet too and makes a move to follow him.

  Grey glances at Durnsville before saying to Catherine, “You have another half-hour, Catherine—you can stay. I’m just gonna wait for you in the other room, okay?”

  “No.” She shakes her head and her hair flops over her cheeks, finally long enough to move. “I’m ready to go now.” She walks to the door and nods at Dr. D, who gets as far as “Take a moment to transition and—” before Catherine darts out, as if fearful of being caught.

  The new Catherine does what she is told, or she does nothing at all—this initiative is a first. Grey shrugs at the doctor and follows her out. By the time he gets his coat on, he has to catch up to her in the parking lot.

  Perhaps a good compromise would be a new chair in front of the window, or a loveseat—there’s room. That way, Grey thinks, Catherine could stare out the window without lying in bed, and maybe sometimes he could sit with her. Not too long ago, they’d had an uncomfortable olive-green chair in that spot, which no one ever sat in. They used it for clothes worn once, not yet dirty though not clean enough to go back in the bureau. During Catherine’s long absence—during the time, Grey supposes, when she was getting beaten and raped daily—the improperly sealed bedroom window leaked during a west-driven rain and drenched the chair. It didn’t dry properly, even in front of the radiator, and after a week it started to smell. Now there is a blank spot by the window where Catherine stares sometimes. As he chews a bite of ham steak, Grey realizes Catherine hasn’t asked about the missing chair, but surely she has noticed that it is gone?