I mouth the words Thank you, and I try to add, though I am fading, I hope you’re right.
Dana is embarrassed now, or maybe she is sick of trying to cheer me up. For whatever reason, she is on her feet, brushing her lips against my forehead, pressing my hand, shrugging into her coat. At the door, she turns to look at me once more. “I’m sorry I didn’t catch him,” she repeats into my fading consciousness.
I try to tell Dana, although I doubt that I actually form the words, that I am pretty sure that the him she keeps apologizing for not catching, the person who fired the third bullet into me, was actually a her. I do not know her real name, but the first time I saw her, she was wearing Rollerblades.
“You’re looking a lot better today, honey,” burbles my wife of nine years, even though she no longer thinks of me as her husband.
“Must be all the push-ups,” I manage through parched lips. But I am sitting up and can even drink liquids through a straw. My aching jaw is wired shut. Dr. Serra says I fractured it, but I do not remember when.
Kimmer smiles one of her slow, warming, secret smiles. She pours me some water from a carafe and snaps the plastic top onto the cup. Then she leans over and puts the straw to my mouth so that I can sip. It hurts to watch her move. The sharp professional cut of her inky-black suit and ecru blouse do nothing to disguise her lazy sensuality. Since shutting me out of her life a week ago, Kimmer seems to have blossomed. She is, at this moment, a remarkably happy woman. And why not? She is free.
“Had enough?” asks my wife, sitting down again. I nod. She smiles. “The doctor says they’ll have you up and walking soon.”
“Great.”
“When they let you out, you can come home if you want,” she tells me, smiling, but even in the midst of my drug-induced torpor I recognize the trap. Kimmer is not proposing that we try to rebuild our marriage; she is simply suggesting a place for me to recuperate, her house, by her sufferance, placing me in her debt. “I could nurse you back to health, like in the movies.”
She is trying hard, I must grant her that, but the offer is hardly one I can accept, as she well knows. So I merely stare, and eventually my wife loses her smile and drops her eyes and searches for a less controversial topic.
“You wouldn’t recognize Bentley. He’s getting so tall. And talking so much.” As though I have been away for months or years, rather than hospitalized for four or five days.
“Mmmm,” I acknowledge.
“Nellie hasn’t been around the house,” she adds softly, instinct telling her where my fears lie. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Misha. Or to our son.”
I wonder whether any particular word of this is true. Kimmer is a fine lawyer: how, I ask myself cleverly, is she defining around?
“I’m so sorry about how things worked out,” Kimmer says a little later, her eyes teary as she holds my hand in both of hers. I pat her fingers.
“Me, too,” I assure her.
“You don’t understand.” She seems ready to resume the argument she has already won, although I cannot imagine why.
“Not now,” I plead, closing my eyes. All I can see is Bentley’s glowing face.
“It’s not that I don’t love you, Misha,” she continues unhappily, shoving my heart closer and closer to the precipice. “I do. I really do. I just… I can’t… I don’t know.”
“Kimmer, please. Don’t do this, okay?”
She shakes her head. “It’s just so complicated!” she bursts out, as though my life is the simpler of the two. But maybe poor Sally was right all along. Maybe it is. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me!”
“It’s okay, Kimmer,” I whisper, to no apparent purpose. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay! I tried, Misha, I really tried!” Pointing a slender finger at me. “I wanted to do it right, Misha, I really did. For you, for my folks, for our son-for everybody. I tried to be what you wanted, Misha, but you got too crazy on me. Or I got too crazy. Either way, I couldn’t be that person any more. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her for the third time, or the thirtieth.
She nods. The silence stretches out.
The nurse comes in to do some of those invasive but necessary things that nurses do and asks my soon-to- be-ex-wife to wait outside. Kimmer dries her tears and stands up and says she has to be going anyway. She kisses me gently on the corner of my mouth and walks proudly to the door, where she turns and offers a half-smile and a quarter-wave, all the while looking tall and strong and incredibly desirable and not at all mine.
“You’re a lucky man,” says the nurse.
The odd thing is that, from the depths of my several pains, I agree.
CHAPTER 53
On the fifth day following my surgery, I am able to stand and walk around for a few minutes a day. Three days later, I trade in the assistance of the nurses for the support of two metal crutches. Then the harridans of physical therapy have their turn at adding to my medical torture, laughing and cajoling as I suffer and half die all over again. After nine days of their ungentle tutelage, the doctors reluctantly concede that I am about ready to go home.
This is the part I have dreaded. How can I tell my doctors that I have no place to go home to? I have no intention of setting foot in the house on Hobby Hill, trying to live under the same roof, even temporarily, with a wife who has not only thrown me out but who had, and may still be having, an affair with one of my students. Dana has offered to put me up for as long as necessary, but I can tell from the way she says it that Alison is opposed. Rob Saltpeter invites me to stay with his family, and I am tempted by the simple stability of his household, but I do not want to burden Rob and his extraordinary wife, Sara. Don and Nina Felsenfeld, still practicing the art of chesed, offer me their guest room, but living next door to the wife who no longer wants me would be slow torture. Uncle Mal leaves word that I am welcome at his house down in Vienna, Virginia, but I do not return the call. Dean Lynda does not offer me a place to stay, but she does suggest by phone that I take the rest of the semester off. And this time she says it nicely.
With Nurse White’s occasional assistance, I finally turn to the get-well-soon cards stacked on the windowsill. Many of them are from the usual suspects-faculty and students and bits of family-but there are also a few surprises, including a couple from college friends I have not seen in years who must have heard about the shooting on the news, because it was reported everywhere. There are flowers from Mallory Corcoran and the law school, and cards from Wallace Wainwright and even Sergeant Bonnie Ames. And another card, postmarked at Miami International Airport, probably while its sender was on the way out of the country, brings me up short, for it is signed at the bottom, in a strong but feminine script, Sorry, Misha. A job is a job. Glad you’re OK. Love, M. Somehow I doubt it is from Meadows. I gaze out the window and try to reconcile two images, a gentle evening stroll on the Vineyard, and a third bullet that almost killed me in the Old Town Burial Ground.
Morris Young stops by several times to see me, talking to me about God’s providence and what the Bible has to say about how marriages end. God prefers that marriages last until death, he says, but also forgives us, if we are repentant, when we fail in the quest to do as he would like.
His message does not reduce my pain.
Three days before I am to be released, somebody from Accounting comes down with a thick sheaf of papers for me to sign. At last I have the opportunity to find out how it is that I came to spend my entire stay in a private room. She shows me the intake form: Howard and Mariah Denton are paying for it. I suppose I should have known.
