“Hi,” she said warmly, putting a hand around his neck and touching her forehead to his. She closed her eyes briefly, trying not to notice that faint aroma of decay that clung to his atrophied body, despite all the toiletries she brought in for him.
“How are you, lover?” She kissed his forehead and ran her fingers through his hair, giving the curls an encouraging nudge toward the frothy chaos that had once been their preferred arrangement. “Sorry I’m a little late. Traffic.”
He blinked. She dropped in his lap the paper sack she had brought in from the car, then moved behind the chair. “Let’s go sit. I’m beat.” She wheeled him into his room, where she kicked off her shoes and shrugged out of her trench coat, tossing it on the bed and pushing up the sleeves of her suit jacket. Then she moved him over to the computer table in the corner.
“Headstick?” she asked. One brown eye closed, opened, then closed—the signal for no. He seemed alert and Mariah berated herself again for having made him wait.
She put aside the headband with the attached stick that he used to tap the keyboard when his faltering right hand became exhausted. The left hand was useless, drawn into itself and held tightly against his chest by the constricted arm, perpetually reverted to a fetal position except when he was deeply asleep and his muscles finally relaxed.
Mariah removed the paper bag from his lap and pulled a rolling table over his thin legs. She lifted his right hand, bringing it to rest on the computer keyboard. His bony index finger reached out shakily and landed on a key. Mariah looked at the screen and saw the letter L—Lindsay.
“She’s at the swimming pool,” she said. “I’m picking her up on the way home.” Mariah leaned back against the windowsill and smiled. “She’s doing great in the water. The coach says she may even make the team next year. She’s such a fighter, David.”
His eyes regarded her intently.
“And the doctor says it’s doing wonders for her leg,” she went on. “It’s definitely growing and he thinks there’s a chance it might eventually catch up to the other one.” Mariah reached into the paper bag she had brought. “Lindsay couldn’t come, but she did bake cookies for you—chocolate chip.”
Slow, lopsided grin.
“She does this to irritate me, you know, just because I’m allergic to chocolate. I hope it gives you both zits.”
David watched her pull out one of the cookies. She put it in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. The tendons on the back of his hand stretched taut like puppet strings as he lifted the cookie to his mouth with agonizing slowness. Mariah took some shirts out of the bag and walked over to the small wardrobe next to the bed. David’s eyes followed her every step as his jaw slowly worked on the cookie.
“I washed your flannel shirts for you. It’s getting frosty out there.” He didn’t go out much, of course, except when she and Lindsay took him for walks on the weekend or, once a month or so, home overnight. But it was a recognition that he was alive and the seasons were still turning.
Mariah came back and pulled up a chair next to him, wiping a line of chocolate drool that ran down from the corner of his mouth, then stroking his arm absently as she spoke to him. She talked about Lindsay and her new school, their evenings, office gossip, inconsequential stories of people, some of them old friends, some people he didn’t know. It didn’t matter, as long as she could make him feel that he was still part of their world.
As she rambled on, David’s eyes watched her and smiled. It was the only part of him that was recognizable anymore, Mariah thought. The orderlies always managed to do something peculiar with his curly black hair. Not their fault, really—they hadn’t spent years watching him step from the shower and give his head a distracted shake until each curl found its own equilibrium, had they? Now, the way they combed it, the curls were straightened and flattened, parted at the side, giving him a strangely organized air that he had never possessed when he was in charge of his own grooming. And he was getting grayer. In the ten months since the accident, he seemed to have aged a decade or more beyond his forty-one years. His frame, slight to begin with, had withered to a wispy frailty.
Only the eyes held the essence of the man David had once been. They were also the only part of him capable anymore of reflecting a familiar emotion. The emotions she saw there these days were fleeting and elemental—pleasure at her coming, sadness at her leaving, frustration during his rare attempts to communicate.
Once though, in Vienna, when he had fully emerged from the coma into which he had been plunged for several weeks after the accident, Mariah had seen in those eyes the terror of realization.
For several days previous, there had been times when he seemed to recognize her. In those moments of brief lucidity, he had struggled to reach out to her, but his body had become permanently contorted, twisted into an unnatural stiffness by the misfiring synapses in his brain. The effort exhausted him and he would lapse again into catatonia. One morning, however, Mariah had stepped off the hospital elevator to the sound of unearthly shrieks coming from the direction of his room. Heart pounding, she had raced down the corridor, the cries growing louder as she approached his door.
It was what she had most dreaded—the one thing she had prayed would never come. Multiple skull fractures from the accident had left irreversible brain damage. She had seen the X-rays and CAT scans herself, had had the damage explained in detail, and she knew that his life was over, even if his heart still beat and his lungs still drew breath. The only thing the Viennese doctors hadn’t been able to tell Mariah with any degree of certainty was what portion of his cognitive abilities would be left when—and if—he ever regained consciousness. She had found herself, incredibly, beginning to pray that he would die rather than understand what he had become.
But when she stepped into the room that morning, she knew that her worst fear had come true. David was screaming in inarticulate anguish, having awakened to discover that his body had become a tomb—and that he was buried alive.
Mariah shuddered now at the memory of his cries, guttural and incoherent, and of the terror in his eyes as he searched hers for a sign of hope that this was only a passing nightmare. She had sat next to him for hours, rubbing his back and stroking his hair and holding his twisted body until his screams had subsided to choking sobs and then faded altogether.
In that time, she had watched a light in those newly conscious eyes flicker and die. She never knew whether the calm that finally settled on him was madness or some kind of divinely inspired state of grace. It didn’t matter, she thought, as long as it gave him peace.
It gave her none, however. Most of what was left of her husband—Dr. David Tardiff, nuclear physicist and ex-boy wonder, harmonica player and Wayne Gretzky wannabe, love of her life and father of her only child—had died that day. All that remained now was this sad shell of a man—that, and a hard angry fist in the pit of her being that was perpetually raised in defiance of the God or the fates that had allowed such a thing to happen.
Mariah glanced at her watch. “I have to go soon, David. Lins will be almost done with her practice.”
His head lolled on the headrest as he turned his eyes to her, their expression sad, wistful as always. But he held her gaze fixedly and then his right hand reached out to hers, resting on the arm of his chair. He grappled for her wrist. Her hand followed his as he moved it shakily into his lap.
“Oh, David,” she said softly. She rested her head against his shoulder for a moment, then lifted it. “Just a minute,” she whispered. She rose and went to the door, closing it firmly, regretting the absence of a lock. The room was a private one, but institutional privacy was a contradiction in terms.
The first time this had happened was one Saturday when she and Lindsay had taken him home to their condo overnight. It had been late in the evening. Lindsay had gone