Can you feel this?
You all twisted and knotted up, this is the mess Misty drives three hours to see in the hospital. And that doesn’t count the ferry ride. You’re the mess Misty’s married to.
This is the worst part of her day, writing this. It was your mother, Grace, who had the bright idea about Misty keeping a coma diary. It’s what sailors and their wives used to do, Grace said, keep a diary of every day they were apart. It’s a treasured old seafaring tradition. A golden old Waytansea Island tradition. After all those months apart, when they come back together, the sailors and wives, they trade diaries and catch up on what they missed. How the kids grew up. What the weather did. A record of everything. Here’s the everyday shit you and Misty would bore each other with over dinner. Your mother said it would be good for you, to help you process through your recovery. Someday, God willing, you’ll open your eyes and take Misty in your arms and kiss her, your loving wife, and here will be all your lost years, written here in loving detail, all the details of your kid growing up and your wife longing for you, and you can sit under a tree with a nice lemonade and have a nice time catching up.
Your mother, Grace Wilmot, she needs to wake up from her own kind of coma.
Dear sweet Peter. Can you feel this?
Everyone’s in their own personal coma.
What you’ll remember from before, nobody knows. One possibility is all your memory is wiped out. Bermuda triangulated. You’re brain-damaged. You’ll be born a whole new person. Different, but the same. Reborn.
Just for the record, you and Misty met in art school. You got her pregnant, and you two moved back to live with your mother on Waytansea Island. If this is stuff you know already, just skip ahead. Skim over it.
What they don’t teach you in art school is how your whole life can end when you get pregnant.
You have endless ways you can commit suicide without
And just in case you forgot, you’re one chicken-shit piece of work. You’re a selfish, half-assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap. In case you don’t remember, you ran the fucking car in the fucking garage and tried to suffocate your sorry ass with exhaust fumes, but no, you couldn’t even do that right. It helps if you start with a full gas tank.
Just so you know how bad you look, any person in a coma longer than two weeks, doctors call this a persistent vegetative state. Your face swells and turns red. Your teeth start to drop out. If you’re not turned every few hours, you get bedsores.
Today, your wife’s writing this on your one hundredth day as a vegetable.
As for Misty’s breasts looking like a couple dead carp, you should talk.
A surgeon implanted a feeding tube in your stomach. You’ve got a thin tube inserted into your arm to measure blood pressure. It measures oxygen and carbon dioxide in your arteries. You’ve got another tube inserted into your neck to measure blood pressure in the veins returning to your heart. You’ve got a catheter. A tube between your lungs and your rib cage drains any fluids that might collect. Little round electrodes stuck to your chest monitor your heart. Headphones over your ears send sound waves to stimulate your brain stem. A tube forced down your nose pumps air into you from a respirator. Another tube plugs into your veins, dripping fluids and medication. To keep them from drying out, your eyes are taped shut.
Just so you know how you’re paying for this, Misty’s promised the house to the Sisters of Care and Mercy. The big old house on Birch Street, all sixteen acres, the second you die the Catholic church gets the deed. A hundred years of your precious family history, and it goes right into their pocket.
The second you stop breathing, your family is homeless.
But don’t sweat it, between the respirator and the feeding tube and the medication, you’re not going to die. You couldn’t die if you wanted to. They’re going to keep you alive until you’re a withered skeleton with machines just pumping air and vitamins through you.
Dear sweet stupid Peter. Can you feel this?
Besides, when people talk about
So sit tight. Nobody’s pulling any plugs until Misty figures a way out of this crappy mess you’ve left her in.
Just in case you don’t remember, every time she comes to visit you, she wears one of those old junk jewelry brooches you gave her. Misty takes it off her coat and opens the pin of it. It’s sterilized with rubbing alcohol, of course. God forbid you get any scars or staph infections. She pokes the pin of the hairy old brooch—real, real slow—through the meat of your hand or your foot or arm. Until she hits a bone or it pokes out the other side. When there’s any blood, Misty cleans it up.
It’s so nostalgic.
Some visits, she sticks the needle in you, stabbing again and again. And she whispers, “Can you feel this?”
It’s not as if you’ve never been stuck with a pin.
She whispers, “You’re still alive, Peter. How about
You sipping your lemonade, reading this under a tree a dozen years from now, a hundred years from now, you need to know that the best part of each visit is sticking in that pin.
Misty, she gave you the best years of her life. Misty owes you nothing but a big fat divorce. Stupid, cheap fuck that you were, you were going to leave her with an empty gas tank like you always do. Plus, you left your hate messages inside everyone’s walls. You promised to love, honor, and cherish. You said you’d make Misty Marie Kleinman into a famous artist, but you left her poor and hated and alone.
Can you feel this?
You dear sweet stupid liar. Your Tabbi sends her daddy hugs and kisses. She turns thirteen in two weeks. A teenager.
Today’s weather is partly furious with occasional fits of rage.
In case you don’t remember, Misty brought you lambskin boots to keep your feet warm. You wear tight orthopedic stockings to force the blood back up to your heart. She’s saving your teeth as they fall out.
Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn’t bother to torture you if she didn’t.
You fucker. Can you feel this?
OKAY, OKAY. FUCK.
Just for the record, a big part of this mess is Misty’s fault. Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman. The little latchkey product of divorce with no parent at home most days.
Everybody in college, all her friends in the fine arts program, they told her:
Don’t.
No, her friends said. Not Peter Wilmot. Not “the walking peter.”
The Eastern School of Art, the Meadows Academy of Fine Arts, the Wilson Art Institute, rumor was Peter Wilmot had flunked out of them all.
You’d flunked out.
Every art school in eleven states, Peter went there and didn’t go to class. He never spent any time in his studio. The Wilmots had to be rich because he’d been in school almost five years and his portfolio was still empty. Peter just flirted with young women full-time. Peter Wilmot, he had long black hair, and he wore these stretched-out cable-knit sweaters the color of blue dirt. The seam was always coming open in one shoulder, and the hem hung down below his crotch.
Fat, thin, young, or old women, Peter wore his ratty blue sweater and slouched around campus all day, flirting with every girl student. Creepy Peter Wilmot. Misty’s girlfriends, they pointed him out one day, his sweater unraveling at the elbows and along the bottom.
Your sweater.
Stitches had broken and holes were hanging open in the back, showing Peter’s black T-shirt underneath.
