Abandoning Regretful Ex After Released

I came back to the world by smell first. Antiseptic. The cold plastic of an oxygen line under my nose. A heart monitor talking to itself somewhere above my head.

White ceiling. Drop tiles. A water stain near the corner shaped like a torn map.

I turned my head and the pillowcase made a paper sound against my ear.

Barbara was in a chair beside the bed.

Not the wheelchair. A regular hospital chair. Her wheelchair was parked a careful three feet away, brake on, blanket folded neat across the seat like she had never been in it.

She had a magazine open on her lap. She wasn't reading it.

"You're awake." Her voice came soft. Sister voice. Careful nurse voice. "Don't sit up, Kate. The doctor said��"

"What do you want."

The words scraped out of me. My throat felt scrubbed.

She closed the magazine. Set it on the rolling table. Folded her hands on top of the cover like she was about to lead a meeting.

"How was prison, Kate."

The sister voice was gone.

"How was three years on a concrete floor." She tilted her head. The pearl clip glinted under the fluorescent. "You came back with all your fingers. All your teeth. You came back to walk into my house in your prison sweater and stand in my foyer and breathe my air, and you think you're going to take Sam back from me?"

Each sentence dropped quieter than the one before it. The IV in the back of my hand began to itch where the tape pulled the skin.

"You didn't come back," she said. "You came back wrong."

I tried to push up on my elbow. My arms shook out from under me.

"Barbara��"

"Shh." She was already standing.

She stood.

She stood up out of the hospital chair the way a healthy woman stands. Knees first, then hips, then a small step toward my bed. The pale blue throw she wore over her shoulders for show slid off and pooled on the linoleum.

The monitor over my head changed pitch. My heart climbed into the hollow of my throat and stayed there.

She picked up the spare pillow off the foot of my bed.

"Three years, Kate." Both her hands closed on the cotton. Her knuckles went white. "Three years and you walk in like a ghost. I told myself if you came back broken I could let you live in the gardener's cottage. I'd be generous. I'd visit."

She brought the pillow down toward my face.

I twisted. The IV line yanked at the back of my hand. The cotton came down across my mouth and the smell was clean detergent and gardenia perfume and I could not pull a breath under it. I bucked my hip up. My knee found the side rail. My fingers got into her wrist and I felt the bones there �� small, real, the bones of a woman who had been walking on those legs for three years while I slept under a bunk.

"Stop fighting." Her voice was very close to my ear. Calm. "Stop fighting, Kate, I'm doing this clean��"

The door handle clicked.

The pillow lifted off my face so fast the air came back over my mouth like cold water. I gulped it. The monitor was screaming.

By the time my eyes focused Barbara was on the floor.

She was on the floor in a small heap beside her wheelchair, one hand reaching pitifully toward the brake, the other pressed to her own chest. The pillow was back at the foot of my bed. I had not seen her put it there. She had moved that fast.

"Sam��" Her voice broke right on time. "Sam, I'm sorry, I tried��"

Sam was already across the room.

"Barbara. Baby, what happened��" His hands were under her arms, lifting her like she weighed nothing. "Did you fall? Did you fall out of the chair?"

"I was trying to fluff her pillow." The tears were already on her cheeks. I had not seen them start. "She �� Sam, she pushed me. She said she didn't want my help. She said she'd rather choke than let me��"

She broke off and pressed her face into his shoulder.

"I know." He held the back of her head. "I know, sweetheart. I know."

Over Barbara's shoulder, his eyes came to mine.

The look in them was not the confusion from the foyer. This was something settled. A man who had been given his answer and was filing it away.

"Kate." Flat. "She is trying to take care of you."

I opened my mouth.

The marble was not under me. The mattress was. I knew the difference. My body did not. My arms came up over my face on instinct and the words came out in the same flat key I had practiced for a thousand nights.

"I'm sorry. I was wrong. I'm sorry."

It was smaller than the foyer. A cell-block whisper.

Sam's jaw worked once.

"Stop saying that."

"I'm sorry."

"Kate, stop��"

"I'm sorry. I was wrong."

I heard him exhale through his teeth. I heard Barbara make a small sound against his collar that could have been a sob and could have been something else.

The monitor settled, beat by beat, back into its normal rhythm. The IV site on my hand was bleeding a little where I had pulled against the tape. A bead of red traveled along the plastic line and stopped.

Sam lifted Barbara off the floor. He set her on the edge of my mattress for one second to free a hand. Her weight jolted up through my hip. Then he scooped her into the wheelchair, tucked the blanket around her knees, snapped the brake off and on again to test it.

She watched me the whole time over his shoulder.

Her face was wet. Her eyes were dry under the wet.

"Sam." She put her hand over his on the chair handle. "Sam, can I ask you something. In front of Kate."

"Anything."

"She's home now." Her voice went tiny. "She's the one Mom's ring belongs to. You and her �� are you going to �� am I��"

"Stop." He crouched down by the wheelchair. His hand came up to her cheek. "Look at me."

She looked.

"My bride is you." He said it without a breath between the words. "It has always been you. Three years ago I made a mistake about which sister I was supposed to marry. I have been correcting it ever since."

Barbara's eyes filled again. She caught his hand and pressed it to her mouth.

I did not move.

I lay flat. The IV tape pulled at the back of my hand. The plastic clip on my finger glowed red. Above my head, the monitor counted out my pulse like a metronome. Eighty. Eighty-one. Eighty.

Three years ago I would have screamed. Three years ago I would have come up off that bed and torn the line out by the root and put my hands in his face and asked him how. How, when six months earlier he had gone down on one knee in my mother's garden with my mother's ring in a velvet box.

Today my pulse was eighty-one.

Today I watched the back of Barbara's head and counted the pearls on the clip. Nine. I had given her that clip for her sixteenth birthday and I had never counted the pearls.

Sam stood up.

He looked at me on the bed.

His mouth was open a little, like a man waiting for a sound that was not coming. He had braced himself, I realized. For the scream. The scene. The Kate from three years ago who would have made the nurses come running.

There was no scream.

There was only me, flat on my back, looking at the ceiling tile with the water stain shaped like a torn map.

"Kate."

I didn't answer.

"Kate, did you hear what I just said."

"I heard you."

The voice that came out of my mouth was not the voice he was waiting for. It was even. Empty. A voice that had eaten gristle off chicken bones for three years and learned not to taste it.

Something passed across his face I could not name. A small flinch behind the eyes. He opened his mouth, closed it. His hand tightened on the wheelchair handle and went white at the knuckle. The hollow of his cheek pulled in once like he had been hit somewhere I couldn't see.

"Get some rest." He said it to the wall above my head. "I'll send Mrs. Lorne in the morning."

He turned the chair.

Barbara did not turn her face from me as he wheeled her toward the door. She watched me over her shoulder all the way across the room. Her hand, the one that had held the pillow, lay open on the blanket now. Palm up. Fingers slightly curled. Like a flower that had been pressed and was just starting to remember its shape.

At the threshold Sam stopped.

He looked back.

Not at me.

At the spare pillow at the foot of my bed.

I followed his eyes down.

A single long hair lay across the white cotton �� glossy, dark, the exact shade of Barbara's. And under it, in the center of the pillow, four finger-shaped dents had not yet smoothed out.

Sam looked at the pillow for two full seconds.

Then he wheeled Barbara into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind them.