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Gloria turned, walking back to the kitchen.
Mia watched her go and braced herself to find Walter and help him pull his pants up.
Needing a little extra help, she closed her eyes and thought about that notebook she kept of all the places Jack went to for his work. The deserts for digging, the cities for conferences. She scrolled through what she knew and picked Italy.
Italy because she was starving and would kill for a pizza, and she wouldn’t have to deal with her father-in-law, stuck like a turtle on the bathroom floor.
Hell. She’d take the high pasture at this point.
“Good God,” she muttered, stomping out of the living room and down the hall. He’d better have his pants on. Really.
She passed the dark and open doorway to the office and stopped. The computer was on, the white light from the screen illuminating the weathered, bearded face of her father-in-law.
“Walter?”
“Apparently, Cal Poly is having some kind of board meeting in a month,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Jack’s supposed to be there. Answer questions about what happened in Sudan.”
His fingers, the ones pointing at the screen and the ones securely around the mouse, were shaking, but still…he was using a mouse. That would have been impossible a month ago.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Trying to find out what’s happening to my son, since he won’t come out of his room and tell me.”
“No…” She stepped into the room to get a better look at him. His face seemed to have more mobility. He seemed, ridiculously, just a little more like…Walter.
“Did you take your meds?” she asked.
Walter held up his hand. The tremors were there but his whole hand didn’t relentlessly circle. The counterclockwise movement that could wind a watch was gone.
He had taken his meds.
“How many days?”
“Five counting this morning.”
The doctors said that within days of taking the medicine regularly there’d be a decrease in symptoms.
Looked like they were right.
“How you feeling?” she asked. She didn’t want to be relieved. She didn’t want to take this as some kind of sign that maybe, please dear God, maybe things might swing north for a change.
“Can’t shit,” he said, taking a sip from a glass filled with ice and amber liquid.
She laughed. Walter, it seemed, was back—in some fashion.
She turned again, heading back toward Gloria, to tell her everything was okay, but she was sidetracked momentarily by Jack’s shut bedroom door.
Her heart, buoyed by Walter’s unprecedented step back into the land of the living, sank again.
She pressed her hand against the wood, the white paint, and thought for just a moment that she felt a heartbeat. It was a trick, of course, the rebound of her own heart beating in her palm, bouncing against the wood and back against her skin.
Because it certainly wasn’t him she felt.
The weight of her grief threatened to pull her under so she walked away from the door. From Jack. And instead she thought about Walter. About Walter taking his meds and how things could change around here if Walter joined the land of the living for good.
And it was just enough hope to keep her head above water.
It was a dream; she knew it was. The dark, the horses, the sensation of flying. Oliver. None of it could be real.
Wake up, Mia, she told herself.
But she couldn’t seem to pull herself free, the dream was quicksand and she was caught.
The horses grew wings and the flying sensation turned into falling and she fought it, fought everything.
“Mia.” Jack said, and she knew that was a dream too, because Jack didn’t come out of his room.
“For crying out loud, Mia, wake up.”
Mia’s eyes snapped open and she jerked herself upright, nearly clipping Jack in the chin.
“What’s happening?” she panted, adrenaline making a mess of her. There was a problem? Right? She needed to do something? Fix something? She was in the living room, which was weird. Sitting in the recliner with her feet up. Golden light from the reading lamp beside her pooled in the creases of the red blanket over her chest.
“You were having a nightmare,” Jack said. He sat on the ottoman next to her feet and she could feel his heat through her wool socks. It felt like a dream. Her husband here in the quiet night, tucking a blanket around her shoulders. Waking her from a bad dream.
It was a lingering fantasy from over from a year ago when she’d still gone to bed thinking that this marriage of hers might one day be real.
“Am I still?”
“What?”
“Dreaming.”
“No.”
“Then what the hell are you doing?”
What the hell are you doing, Jack? the voices asked. The voices were annoying. There was a whole damn chorus in his head these days. Not for the first time he considered how the painkillers would shut those voices up.
How the painkillers would make it all go away.
