The Burning Side(31)

I nod. “The others don’t.”

“Okay, then.” Swirling his whiskey, Billy stares down into it like tea leaves. “Tomorrow.”

He says it like a weather forecaster, powerless to reroute the storm.

“When it rains, it pours,” I offer.

A nostalgic smile tugs at his lips as he recites my line. “Couldn’t we get a little London drizzle for once? Some light Seattle mist?”

Soon, he might not know these lines. But in this moment, he does.

A moment is moving time, and if it’s the nature of time to move, then it’s my nature to keep up. So, I stand. Glide toward our beautiful home, sorrow crackling in my chest, radiating out toward everything around me. The bricks Billy power washed last summer. The roof that was replaced after the tornado. The couch we bought the day Josie’s shirt got stained red with punch.

I ask Billy to follow me.

In our bedroom, I turn the lock on the doorknob, and he raises his eyebrows.

I unbutton his shirt, expertly. Run fingertips up his skin, muscle, sinew, leisurely. Spread my fingers through the luxurious curls on his chest. I refuse to rush this. I’m not denying my sadness—I am looking it in the eye. If a storm is coming, let it come. Let it drench us.

When my husband is over me, inside me, mine entirely, my tears flow freely. He kisses them, and he thrusts harder, eyes open, looking at me through the rise and release of it. He is with me in body and mind, and my sadness is on his lips.

When he tries to roll away, I pull his full weight back onto me. “Stay.”

And he does. He always has.





APRIL


2020

“IT’S POSITIVE.”

I cough to punctuate the positive test, but the cough isn’t bad. This is what we keep repeating those first few days: it’s a mild case.

Sadie is three. We’ve heard that the virus isn’t bad for children, but we don’t want to find out. We don’t want to be the exception. So I don’t leave the bedroom.

Six days pass. Seven.

On the morning of day eight, Leo leaves a plate outside the bedroom door: an egg hash with bell pepper and mushroom. A mug of hot broth. My appetite is robust again, and my cough has waned to a crescent of sound, soon to disappear completely. I wait a minute after his knock before opening the door to retrieve my breakfast. We’ve got quarantine down to an art.

The steam from the broth hits my face, and Sadie giggles in the distance. Leo makes animal sounds. I hear him whinny and know he is crawling around with Sadie on his back. Leo, I think, his name a prayer of gratitude. The current of Sadie’s entrance into our lives almost carried us away from each other, but we’re still here, living through times we couldn’t have imagined.

Actually, no. Suffering is easy to imagine. It’s our responses that take us by surprise. The ways trials edit who we are.

I stack my mug on the empty plate and set it outside the door, turning back to the bedroom, where I begin to walk around, my morning ritual. Then I take a bath and watch The Office and call Josie, these powder-blue walls my refuge and my cage. I put the pulse oximeter on my fingertip: ninety-eight, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-nine. I organize our dresser drawers, rolling Leo’s undershirts, pausing at the swimsuit drawer and running my fingers over his American flag swim trunks, thinking of our trip to South Padre, the sun-hot skin of his broad shoulders as I smeared sunscreen across them. The day we learned how to eat lobster, its salty tang as we passed the metal lobster cracker back and forth.

I’m not sure when I fall asleep, but it’s dark when I awaken. This hodgepodge of hours has become normal, but something isn’t right this time. My brain is slamming into my skull. I try to sit but am too weak. With wincing effort, I stretch for my phone, thermometer, pulse ox. Fever is high, oxygen is low. Ninety-three percent. The doctor said ninety-three was the lower limit. So I’m okay, but barely. Drenched and increasingly confused, I manage to text Leo: OX 93. BAD FEVER/HEADACHE. ICE BY DOOR PLZ.

Next thing I know, the door is opening in slow motion. I protest, but not out loud. Leo walks toward me like a hologram. The sight of his beautiful face sets off an internal siren: Sadie. Danger. I fall back asleep and wake to Leo placing pills on my tongue, instructing me to swallow. Swallow again. He’s touching my mouth? I’m furious; I’m contagious. But I don’t have energy to shout, I don’t even have energy to speak. My pain is so severe that I think my skull might explode, a bursting dam of bone. For a second it’s all I want, death. Ice is rubbed across my neck, freezing drops of water pearling down my shirt. I’m eating lobster in the sun, a tender gradient of pink meat behind claws. And through it all, Leo. My prayer. My deliverer.



* * *



The sun is bright, but I am not at the Gulf. I’m in my blue bedroom with a dusty ceiling fan circulating above me. Hair is sticking to my forehead in cool, drying sweat. I turn my neck like a crank. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Leo is beside me, new hair growth above his lips, on his chin, his cheeks. I try to lift my finger to touch it, but I’m caught in the mouth of the pulse ox, red lines forming square numbers: ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-nine.

“Sadie…” The name comes out of me with less effort than the person did, but barely.

“Sadie’s fine. She has Bluey and chicken nuggets.”

“Time?” My mouth is arid.