“You should go out and stop him. He shouldn’t kayak at night.” I went to the door and peered out, but I couldn’t see past six feet in the dark.
“He’s fine. What could happen?” John waved my concern away, then raised his eyebrows for a joke. “Ominous, no?”
I batted at his chest, telling him to hush. He reached his arm around me and I folded my head like a swan against his chest. We stood there for a while. He brushed my hair with his large hand.
John tinkered with the radio dial until he found the jazz station, which played something light and melodic as I cleaned the plates from the living room and tidied some refuse from dinner that I had been too tired to deal with earlier that evening. I made us chamomile tea, which we drank at the kitchen table. A comfortable, melancholic fatigue washed over us both, and when, in a recognition of nodding off, I jerked my head awake, I saw John, cheek on the table, asleep.
I crept into the bedroom, pulled back the wool camp blankets and the comforter, and stripped the linens, cold and sodden from the evening’s earlier activities. I replaced them with an old set of flannel sheets printed with large sketched cats that Sid had loved when she was little. I remember walking into her room one night and finding her passionately wiping her face back and forth against one of the cat’s faces—a seven-year-old’s version of romance.
I woke John gently. “I can sleep out here,” he said, but I told him I was too tired to bother with the pullout sofa, and he should just come to bed with me.
It was freezing in the bedroom, and the only way we could get warm was to wrap ourselves in and around each other, limb intersecting with limb. He rested his chin on top of my head and I nestled mine in the soft part of his neck.
Entwined, I saw from the bedside clock that it was after four in the morning.
“Are you going back to the college for the hearing tomorrow?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you want me to set an alarm?”
“No.”
He was emanating a kind of heat that calmed me at the core of my nervous system. Security some men call the suburbs of hell.
I was nearly gone when I remembered. “What’s your poem about?”
“What?”
“The epic poem you’re writing. What’s it about?”
“Oh,” he murmured. “It’s about a modern-day Don Quixote. An old man who refuses to see the world as it is.”
* * *
And huddled together like the babes in the wood, innocent and abandoned, we fell asleep.
XX.
The first time I wake I am surrounded by orange and smoke. Vladimir is pushing at me, shouting at me, but I can’t understand his words. Colors and shadows. He half lifts me and I realize I am supposed to walk and I try to walk but I can’t get my brain to speak correctly to my legs and so he mostly pulls me through the light, dark, cold, and heat out to the beach, where he puts my lower half in water and leaves again.
The second time I wake I am in a puke-yellow room with beige plastic molding on the ceiling. My body feels a pain I cannot countenance. I try to say hello. What comes from my throat sounds like a hum. Something, someone, appears in my vision and says, okay, okay, and then disappears. I strain to keep my eyes open as long as I can but then they close again.
The third time I wake I hear Sid’s voice. Mom, she says, Mom, there you are. She sounds muffled and strangled. Her head appears before me, blurry, warped, but hers—blink twice if you can hear me, Mom—and I try to say, of course I can hear you, but all that comes out is a croaking sound and Sid gasps—just blink twice, Mom—she says, and so I do and she says I love you and I close my eyes once more.
XXI.
I am diagnosed with third-degree burns on 22 percent of my body. Mostly my legs, some on my neck and the lower part of my face.
John is diagnosed with third-degree burns on more than 30 percent of his body. His torso, up the back of his head, down the back of his legs, on his outer arms.
I am in the hospital for twenty days, rehabilitation for four months.
John is in the hospital for thirty-two days, rehabilitation for six months.
They patch our skin with the skin of a cadaver.
XXII.
Vladimir came back from his kayak ride and saw the conflagration inside. No phone to call 911, he dove into the lake water then ran into the house and dragged me out, then John, before running and knocking on neighboring lake houses until he found someone home. Much later I ask him how he chose who to save first. He didn’t choose, really, he says, there was no time. But maybe, if he delved, there might have been the thought that he should save me first, if only because I am younger.
XXIII.
The day I transfer from the hospital to the rehabilitation center, Sid and Alexis come to settle me into my room. It is also yellow, and I make a joke about The Yellow Wallpaper, which is low-hanging fruit, but I am still on medication. We sit down, me on my twin bed with its faux polyester quilt, Sid in the armchair, Alexis behind her, her hand holding Sid’s. They look like they are posing for a 1950s photograph of a corporate executive and his wife. “I’m pregnant,” Sid tells me. “From the man on the train, do you remember, I told you about him?” Alexis squeezes her hand. “Are you happy?” I ask Alexis. “I am,” she says. “We know nothing about him,” Sid adds. “So it’s like he doesn’t exist,” Alexis finishes.
XXIV.
The insurance assessment concludes that I neglected to turn off the space heaters.
My computer, containing the only draft of my book, is destroyed in the fire.
XXV.
John arranges for Sid to drive him home from rehabilitation, but she is so pregnant and busy implanting herself into the infrastructure of her new job before she goes on maternity leave that I convince her to let me do it. We had gone to different facilities, at my request. I wanted to be as anonymous as possible while I healed, I didn’t want to confront my relationship and repair my body at the same time and John felt the same way, I knew without asking. We haven’t spoken since the hospital except for a few necessary administrative emails with Sid cc’d; otherwise we let her act as our go-between. Our silence isn’t out of animosity, more a conservation of energy. We need the solitary time to reconcile ourselves with the new realities of our physical forms before we face each other.
I tell Sid not to tell him about the change of plans, that I’ll come to him as a surprise. In the last few months a friend of Alexis’s from law school had been working to procure an out-of-court settlement for us from the company that manufactured the space heaters, and the week of his release I receive the official amount of our remuneration. It is, as one might say in Victorian novels, a handsome sum, one that creates many possibilities （money is energy, an investment banker once told me）， and I decide I will bring the news to him, to give us something to talk about, to frame our journey homeward, as it were. I even consider packing a picnic with cold chicken and sparkling lemonade, stopping in a wooded park on the way back, setting him up in a camp chair with a blanket on his knees, and recounting the happy news of our newfound inheritance.
But on the day of his release, it is sunless, cool, and spritzing rain, the final gasp of the dismal upstate New York spring giving way to summer. It is probably for the best, I tell myself. I don’t know how either he or I will feel in the presence of each other, it would be a mistake to try and force us into some scene, I don’t want to negotiate with the pressure of my own expectations, and besides all that, I don’t know what the money means for us, for me, for us. A few days earlier a home health-aide service installed a bed on the ground floor, as John apparently still had some time before he could climb the stairs easily, and I’d spent hours since then arranging our knickknacks and furniture around it so that it felt somewhat coherent with the room. Two months after my release I am still physically compromised, and I break our Shiite mask and crack the glass on several pictures, unable to lift and move things properly. That morning I lug a heavy nightstand to the side of the bed and one of its legs cuts a long white gash in the wooden floor. I arrange the stand with a lamp and a bouquet of hyacinth I cut from our garden, then lay down for an hour to recover my strength.