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“I’m divorced,” I’d said, hearing a small tremor in my voice, wondering if anyone could hear it but me. “Though I guess you know that already, because why else would I be here if I wasn’t divorced?” I’d laughed at myself then. Others had laughed too—with me, not at me—and I’d found it to be encouraging. The words came more freely after that, and I was able to tell them how it had been months since I’d filed for divorce. “To say I’ve been having a hard time with it is an understatement, even though I’m the one who left him. I asked for this, in a sense. This was my doing.” I took a breath, noticing that the tremor had gone away. “I think the thing that makes it so hard is that I don’t know anyone who’s divorced. It’s strange, because something like 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, right? So how is it possible that it’s never happened to anyone I know? It makes me feel like some kind of anomaly. No one knows on a personal level what I’m going through. I have great friends who are incredibly sympathetic, but I’ve felt myself pull away from them over the last few months. We just don’t have as much in common anymore. Going through a divorce, there is so much to deal with, like raising a child alone, custody and visitation rights, changing my will, my name, getting rid of the joint bank account, trying to build my own credit because everything we shared was in Ben’s name and so I don’t have much credit history myself. I can’t talk to anyone in my life about this.”
I remembered how I’d stopped there and inhaled a sharp breath, feeling self-conscious because I’d said far more than I meant to say, but also finding it was cathartic. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say so much.”
“No,” Faye said. “Don’t be sorry. Don’t ever apologize, Meghan. This is why we’re here, to listen and support one another. Everyone in this room is dealing with these same issues too.”
All around me, the circle of heads was nodding.
And then she’d asked me to tell the group a little bit about Ben. I wasn’t sure at first how to describe him. When we met, Ben was a dream. We were in high school at the time, back when things like a career and children were so far in the future we didn’t think about them. They didn’t exist, even in our wildest imaginations. Fast forward over twenty years. I wasn’t happy. Ben wasn’t happy. Sienna, by default, wasn’t happy. Ben and I fought all the time. He was so focused on work, and it upset him when I asked him to make family a priority too, because he read that as me being insensitive, as not supporting him or his career, which wasn’t my intent. I just wanted Ben to pay more attention to Sienna and me. I started thinking then, more and more often, about how I’d be better off without him, because being alone and lonely was better than feeling neglected and ignored. But for years, fear of the unknown kept me from leaving him. The reason I finally did wasn’t for me but for Sienna, because I didn’t want ours to be the model of a marriage she saw. I wanted her to know that a marriage could be full of love, happiness and mutual respect too.
I say to Nat now, “Until I started coming, I could think of few things worse than walking into a roomful of strangers and imparting the details of one of the most painful experiences in my life. But now I’ve realized that what is worse is going through it alone.” I pause to let my words sink in, and then I ask, nodding again toward the steps, “What do you think? You want to give it a try?”
“Okay,” she says, giving in.
We head down the steps together to the parish hall, where the large round tables have been pushed out of the way to make space for a circle of black folding chairs in the center of the room. Faye has already gotten the meeting started when we arrive, and so we slip into the last two chairs, which are on opposite sides of the circle, and I watch from afar as Nat shimmies out of her coat and sets it on the back of the chair. She’s quiet during the meeting. She listens, but she doesn’t speak and I don’t blame her.
At some point she takes her hat off, and it’s then, when she sweeps a hand through her hair, pushing pieces back from her eyes, that I spy a bruise along the upper forehead, beneath the hairline. I do a double take when I see it, taken aback by the size of the bruise and by its bright red color as if fresh. Whatever happened, happened recently, maybe today. I stare at it longer than I should, wondering how the bruise came to be there. I’ve done my fair share of dumb, clumsy things before and maybe that’s all this is.
But maybe there’s more to it too.
Nat glances up just then. Our eyes meet. I swallow and force a guilty smile, feeling self-conscious for getting caught staring. By instinct, her hand rises up to the bruise. She feels it, running her fingers over the tender bump, and then plucks pieces of hair down to cover it. And then, as if worried that’s not enough, she puts her winter hat back on.
I look away. I try and listen as others speak, but my eyes keep going back to Nat. The bruise is gone but not forgotten.
When the meeting is through, I grab my coat and start making my way toward Nat, but before I reach her, another woman, Melinda, sidles up next to me and says, “Hey, Meghan, do you have a minute?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, and I watch as Nat steals a glance at me before slipping her arms into her coat and making her way toward the stairs. “I wanted to ask you about the school where your daughter goes, specifically what the admissions process and entrance exam are like. My oldest will be going to high school soon, and we’ve just begun looking into private schools in the area. It’s overwhelming to say the least.”
By the time I finally make it upstairs, Nat has made her way to the entrance. She’s too far away to catch, and so I can only watch as she pushes the heavy wooden doors open to the barrage of snow, which falls sideways and in. Just outside, she stops, taking in the faces of people passing by. She pulls up her hood and lets go of the door, which floats slowly toward closed, but before it shuts I see Nat merge with a group of passersby.
Later, I walk out of the church, back into the cold and the snow alone, my breath coming out like clouds when I breathe, wondering if I’ll see Nat again and if she’ll be back.
I think about the bruise as I walk, though not so much the bruise itself but the way Nat was so quick to hide it. I find myself worrying about her, wondering where she’s going and who she’s going home to.
The snow has built up significantly in the last hour or so, collecting on the sidewalks and streets. Cars and buses move slowly past. There will be a parking ban on some streets overnight, so that the city can plow before morning rush hour.
I take the Red Line home from the church, heading north. It’s getting close to nine o’clock now and I feel uneasy, out at this time of night, worried about myself and worried about Sienna at home alone. I’ve never been afraid in this city, not until the recent spate of robberies and attacks, which has the whole neighborhood on edge.
I get off the Red Line at Sheridan and power walk from there, wanting nothing more than to get home, to be home and to see with my own eyes that the door to our apartment is shut and locked and that Sienna is okay.
Three
The next day at work, I check in with the charge nurse for my assignment when I arrive and find out I’m assigned to two patients today, including Caitlin Beckett, the woman they say jumped from the pedestrian bridge. I say okay, walking away, feeling a little bit more than apprehensive. I was hoping I wouldn’t be assigned to her, that I’d be assigned to the same patients as yesterday, and I want to argue that Bridget should be if, for nothing else, continuity of care, but today is Bridget’s day off.
I set my things in a locker in the break room, and then I go to Caitlin’s room. It’s hard to look at her lying unconscious on the bed and not feel myself come undone. Just inside the glass doors, I come to a stop, letting my eyes run over her, staring at her awhile. Bridget was right; despite the gauze and tubes, you can see that she is pretty. She lies utterly still. Her skin is pale so that if I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was dead. The only reason she’s not is because machines breathe for her and bring nutrients and fluids to her. I’ve heard whispers in the break room already about what people think happened to her—gossip and unverified claims. We shouldn’t gossip about patients, and yet we do. It’s cathartic, a way to de-stress from a long day of work or to steel ourselves for a day to come.
This morning I listened in on a couple nurses talking about her in the break room. One said that when she jumped, she heard Caitlin just narrowly missed the train tracks and landed somewhere between them, on the rocks. “Do you have any idea how many times the train goes by every day?” she asked, meaning that if Caitlin landed on the tracks, she would have been hit by a passing train and that would have been the end of it. She wouldn’t be here in our ICU fighting for her life. She’d be dead.
“Trains can’t stop very fast,” she went on, though it was all very theoretical because it’s not the way it happened. “Even in an emergency. I’ve heard that sometimes it takes over a mile of track to stop once the brake is applied, because of the weight of the train and its speed.”
“She’s lucky then, that she jumped from where she did,” another nurse, Natalia, said.
“Lucky?” Misty asked in reply, incredulous. The long-term effects of a traumatic brain injury can be profound, things like motor deficits, vision problems, difficulties with fine motor skills, difficulty thinking and remembering, more. “How can you say that? Have you seen her?” The answer was yes; we’d all seen her by then. I wasn’t the only one who had walked by her room to get a glimpse of her through the glass. Others had too.
“If she really wanted to die, she should have picked another bridge to jump from, like one with semis and cars.”
“Can you imagine being the driver of a car or train that hit her though?” asked Natalia. I had my back to them. I didn’t want to contribute to the conversation, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to listen, that I didn’t want to hear what other people were saying about her. It was just before seven in the morning, right before the shift change and so the break room was more crowded than usual because of the change of shift. “What do you think it’s like to know you’re going to run into someone, to watch it happen, but not be able to do anything to make it stop?”
Erin told us then how her uncle is a freight train engineer. “Years ago there was a woman on his line, trying to commit suicide.” She described how his and the woman’s eyes locked before he hit her, about how, even after he applied the emergency brake, he had to wait endless, agonizing seconds, listening to the shriek of something like four thousand tons of train trying in vain to stop. Then the inevitable happened. The woman disappeared from view, slipping somewhere beneath him, and it was up to Erin’s uncle to get out of the train when it finally did stop and go looking for her.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the rest. Erin said, “There are two things that can happen when a train runs into someone—one, they can be thrown clear from the train and sustain massive internal injuries, which they’ll probably die from, or two, that they can go under the wheels and most likely be dismembered.” She paused for effect. “That’s what happened to this woman. The second one,” she said, shaking her head at the horror of it, of what her uncle had to witness. “He has nightmares still, to this day. It’s been six years.”
