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As much as he wanted to communicate, the conversation was pulling too much energy away from him, his lids drifting back down, his breathing suddenly feeling laborious.
“Don’t know… happened.”
“You’re safe,” she said. “That’s all you need to think about right now.”
“Missed you…”
There was another pause, and the image of the great C.P. Phalen, in one of her sleek power suits and those fucking high heels that made her legs long as a mile, was as clear as if she were standing in front of him and he was up-on-his-Converse-high-tops and a-okay.
He needed to stop talking—
“I missed you, too…” Something brushed his forehead. Her hand? Please let it be her hand. “Don’t leave me again.”
Had he left her? He couldn’t remember. But he knew one thing. There was pain in that steely voice of hers… so much pain.
“Okay,” he replied to the statement that was really a question. “I won’t, Cathy.”
As Cathy pulled a Kleenex free of a box on the bedside table, she wiped her eyes and reflected on how much she had always hated that name.
Recently, however, she had embraced the honesty that came with it. She had been born in the middle class and had never been anything fancy growing up; so when it had become time to reinvent herself, she had clothed her modest origins in the mantle of Catherine—or even better, the androgyny of her initials, C.P. But now, especially coming out of the mouth it did?
She was ready to get the five letters tattooed on her forehead.
Wadding up the tissue in a fistful of relief, she wanted to touch Gus all over to reassure herself he was alive for real—as if, were she to confirm the warmth of him, it was a predicator that he would stay with her. But that was magical thinking, forone thing. And then there was the horrifying reality that there was almost no part of him that wasn’t bruised.
Taking what she could get, she satisfied herself with brushing his temple, his jawline, the lobe of his ear. She told herself he liked her touch. She didn’t know whether that was true.
As Gus stayed quiet, his mouth parted and he breathed shallowly. He was clearly drifting off again, and she had a spear of fear that this was it, the final surge of life before he passed. Weren’t things always most vivid right before death? She had read that somewhere. That the mortally wounded, the mortally diseased, had a second wind right before the grave came for them.
Would she have one? she wondered. Would he be there for her when she did?
Trying to find solace in the monitoring machine’s steady rhythm and lack of alarms, she reminded herself that they were surrounded—literally—by doctors and nurses. All she had to do was open that door and shout down the hall to that great open area of workstations.
The cavalry would come running—
The knock was quiet, and she didn’t look away from Gus’s face as she answered it with aCome in. Out of the corner of her eye, two people registered as they entered, but she was too consumed by the eyelashes that curled up tightly from Gus’s shut lids.
Also, she was willing him to reopen his eyes.
“Did he wake up or something?”
At the astonished male voice, she jerked to attention. “Oh… hello. Welcome.”
As if she were a greeter at Home Depot.
Daniel and Lydia were standing at the foot of the bed, all kinds of shock showing on their faces—this time, for a good reason.
“Yes, he’s back,” Cathy said to the person they all cared so much for. “Aren’t you, Gus. Gus?”
When he didn’t respond, toxic terror clawed her in the throat—but then his head nodded up and down on the flat pillow.
Daniel said something. Lydia said something. But the syllables bled into a sound salad she didn’t bother sorting into its components…
She was not a God person. The whole Christian tradition she’d been raised in hadn’t survived her eighteen-year-old emancipation as she’d left that small town for college, and the further and further into the sciences and pharmaceutical business she’d gotten, the more and more of a secularist she’d become.
Yet as her eyes roamed around Gus’s misshapen face, she found herself thanking… someone up above. The fact that he was alive after what had been done to him?
Miracles go… and miracles come. Back.
