The Stars Are Fire(61)

“No, no, no, no! It was on the second floor. In the turret. Just off my mother’s bedroom.”

“Are you sure? Who would put a piano on the second floor?” she asks.

“For crying out loud, I should know. I took lessons on it for years. I know this house a lot better than you do.”

“Of course,” she says.


The business with the bedpan is awful. He tells her how to prop him up with pillows under his head and back and knees and to put the pan under him and to go away and close the door. Grace does as asked and wants to walk straight out the front door and not stop until she falls down.


The sight of her children as she puts them to bed is a flicker of joy in a dim cave. She gathers them around her on the floor and sings a dozen verses of “Hush, Little Baby,” making up the lyrics as she goes along. From the corner of her eye, she sees her mother scurry about folding laundry and picking up toys. Grace sings until the children feel heavier in her lap, and with her mother’s help, she carries them to their beds. She would like to lie down on the floor between the children and have her mother float a blanket over her.


Amy arrives at the house with an enormous green suitcase full of supplies. For the first time, Grace sees the extent of Gene’s burns along his torso and hip and upper thigh. Her gorge rises. Keeping up a constant chatter, the nurse instructs Grace how to clean the burns, let them air-dry, apply iodine or Vaseline where necessary, take his temperature and his blood pressure, examine the skin, bathe the back of his body, and help him dress himself. She leaves a list of instructions next to the supplies.

“Now the hard part,” Amy says. “He has to stay as flexible as he can without cracking the protective layer of skin he’s building up. That’s why I’ve put the Vaseline on so heavily. Later, we’ll dab it off.”

She turns and addresses Gene. “Do you want to be able to sit on a chair?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to be able to get down onto the floor and play with your children?”

“Oh, come on,” he says, “what’s with the interrogation?”

“I need to know how badly you want these things, Mr. Holland, because if you really, truly want them, you’re going to have to work hard.”

Grace watches as Amy lays Gene flat on his back in the bed, which already causes him some pain as his left side comes in contact with the sheet. She takes hold of his left leg with one hand on his calf and one on his knee. She bends the knee and pushes it toward his face, in and out, in and out. Gene grits his teeth. Whatever Amy does to one side of Gene’s body, she does to the other. She has Gene scoot down on the bed. After he has done so, she climbs onto the bed up by the headboard and asks him to lift his head and shoulders as high as he can. As soon as he rises off the sheet, she gets her arms and her full weight under him and slowly angles him higher and higher until he is nearly at thirty degrees from the flat surface. He cries out and tries to turn and hop off the bed.

“Grace, hold his legs down by the ankles.”

Grace leans over the footboard and pins her husband’s feet to the bedspread.

When Gene’s cries reach a certain pitch, Amy lets him rest. Grace hopes her mother is on the third floor with the children and the door shut.

“Good work, Mr. Holland,” she says. “We’ll rest a minute and give that another try.”

“The hell you will.”

“Do you want to be able to sit on a toilet one day and get rid of the bedpan, because really, that is what this is all about. You getting back your independence. So do you want that?”

“I guess so.”

“No, I’m serious, Mr. Holland. Do you really want that to happen?”

“Jesus Christ,” he says in a louder voice.

“Then bend your head and shoulders as far up as they will go, and we’ll give this another try.”

Without being told to, Grace grabs her husband’s ankles while Amy repeats the process. Grace knows she’ll never be able to do this therapy for Gene, both because she can’t hold his feet and push from behind at the same time and because she doesn’t have Amy’s strength. After the third exercise, Gene says to Grace, “Get that bitch out of here.”


“You’re going to have to toughen up.”

“I don’t have your strength.”

“You’re afraid of him,” Amy says as she puts on her heavy wool coat.

“I’ve always been afraid of him,” Grace confesses.

“Do you want him on a bedpan the rest of his life? Because if he remains as he is for much longer, he won’t be able to sit up ever. It’s been way too long as it is.”

Grace wraps her arms over her head.

“Listen,” Amy says, “you’re going to have to find something within you that can do this. It’ll take a solid month of misery, and if all goes well, each day will get better and better. Be a drill sergeant now, and later you can love him.”

But I won’t, Grace wants to say. I won’t love him.


Grace becomes an unwilling nurse during a string of days that in themselves seem endless. A routine is established. Grace wakes early to prepare Gene’s breakfast before he makes his way into the kitchen and eats it standing up. Hard-boiled eggs and toast pieces serve him well. Her mother knows to keep the children upstairs until seven-thirty, when Grace spirits Gene back into his room or to the sofa in the sitting room. Mindful of his pain and boredom, she tries to carve the day into three separate sections: mornings, during which she sometimes reads the newspaper to him or lets him lie by himself in the sitting room; afternoons, which are devoted to physical therapy (for the first several days until she could convince Gene to cooperate, Grace had to call in her mother to hold his feet down, episodes that made her mother cry after she left the room); and evenings, which he spends back in the sitting room with a plate of finger food beside him. Often, Grace joins him. They remain silent while she knits or sews, or he asks her questions. She can hardly comprehend that the room in which she unwillingly sits with her damaged husband is the same place in which she came to love Aidan Berne. Such utter happiness then, and now such despair.