All's Well(45)

Stupidly, I think they’re going to applaud us. At the very least, Mark will applaud me.

But Mark’s hands stay in his pockets. He’s just looking at me.

“Why don’t we go into a treatment room? Little too crowded in the gym today, am I right? I think one just opened up.”

A treatment room? Why? I thought surely Mark would want me to exercise today.

“Um, okay.”

“Just go to the one at the end of the hall there. You go on ahead. I’ll be right there. I’ll catch up with you.” He hands me a blue medical gown to change into.



* * *



Alone in the treatment room, I put on the gown. It hurts my hip of course, my back too, but not like before, that’s another thing I should remember to tell Mark. That it hurts less to dress. That it still hurts, but less. Less, better, these actual words on my actual lips, not so dry anymore, and Mark looking at me as if I’ve spoken gibberish. I sit down on the medical table. I stand back up, just to be sure. Leg straightens and I sigh with relief, yes, I can still do it. I smile. It still feels like a miracle, a fluke, a trick every time. Tears spring to my eyes. I sit back down. Stand up. I laugh at how easy.

Better. Maybe I really am. Not all the way better. Not even close. But who knows? Maybe I’ll even be able to stop coming in a few months. Maybe I’ll be able to tell Mark it’s over, John too. Maybe I’ll quit the pills altogether. Maybe I’ll be able to quit this hideous job, go back to the stage. No, too old now. Well, maybe some community theater. Just being back on the stage again would be so nice. I’d do it for free. I cry when I think how I’d do it for free. In a run-down, drafty church, Grace alone in the pews clapping. Thank you, I’d say. Thank you so much. Maybe soon I’ll be able to walk by my old house. I’ll pick a spring day when it’s sunny, when Paul might happen to be out in the garden. He’ll see me walking along, how I’m smiling at the world around me—the grass, the sky, the street, the houses—not crying, not bracing myself as if the very air is something to be endured, not dead inside anymore. He’ll see me walking and he’ll gasp. Princess, is that really you?

I sit, with my leg swinging, it won’t stop swinging wildly. Time passes. I hear it ticking somewhere, though there’s no clock on the wall. Where is Mark anyway? I’ll catch up with you, he said, didn’t he say that? I feel it getting dark outside, even though I’m in the basement. No windows here. I stare at three-year-old magazines, magazines I’ve flipped through a hundred times already. But I can’t read again about the anti-inflammatory properties of coffee or how the goji berry is a super fruit. Six ab exercises you can do at home that I could never do at all.

The tune I was humming has left my lips. The silence hums. I hear the creak of machines. The little gasps of pain beyond the door. The anxious voices complaining faintly, reporting their symptomology.

“Whenever I sit…”

“Worse when I stand up…”

“Here…”

“And here…”

“Should I put ice on it or heat?”

“Heat on it or ice?”

My bones are beginning to ache. I stand up just to check. Sit back down. Leg still swinging but more subdued now. I walk to the door. Open it. In the hallway, no sign of Mark. Just an old man with a TheraBand around his ankles walking sideways through an obstacle course of orange cones. At the other end of the hall, a therapist with hair out of a Heart video is watching, arms crossed. She’s the one who put the orange cones in the man’s path. Laid a ladder of rope on the floor. His job now to step between the ladder rungs, while also dodging the cones. He’s shaky. Losing his balance. Taking the smallest steps. Mark made me do this very obstacle course once.

The old man looks at me. His eyes say, We’re stuck here, aren’t we?

I close the door. Stare at the ugly room. Mark’s never made me wait like this before, has he? Only Dr. Rainier ever made me wait this long. I remember whenever he finally showed up it would always feel like a miracle. Like getting a visitation from God. Silver hair gleaming. Smiling at me. Holding my medical history in his hand—divorced, mother and father deceased—like it was the key to me.

Your pain is your loss, Ms. Fitch, he would say. The loss of your husband, your mother. Your pain is a vigil to all of this, don’t you see that? He wouldn’t even look at my MRI. He just stared at my crooked body like it was proof. Proof of my grief, my inability to let go. I wanted to remind Dr. Rainier that I’d lost my mother a number of years ago, well before the accident. That I grieved her, of course I grieved her—I’d lost my one dark cheerleader, clapping violently in the wings. But her death had also freed me. Soon after, I left for Edinburgh. Found new solace in my craft, on a stage across the sea, playing Helen. I’d never connected with All’s Well before, but Helen’s orphan status, her drifting, lowly place in the world, her pain and longing for love, suddenly spoke to me, moved me beyond words. Grief, far from crushing me, had actually been a gift—it had given me Helen. And Helen had given me Paul. And Paul had given me back the family I’d lost. You eclipsed them all, he said to me that first night. And just like that, there were my mother’s hands on my seven-year-old shoulders again. And we were happy. So happy for a while. The theater—my place on the stage, Paul’s place in the audience—brought us together, wedded us. Only after I hurt myself were those spheres disrupted. I wanted to remind Dr. Rainier that the loss of my husband and career had been casualties of the pain, not its cause.