The spleen, a doctor explained, functions as a blood filter and as a place to store blood. He drew a picture in the air, plucking the invisible body part and tossing it, casually, Helen thought, over his shoulder. The doctor looked a little like Scott, and for a moment Helen considered asking him this hypothetical question: If you lived with your girlfriend for two years and suddenly you stopped getting along, fought over when the pasta was al dente, whether to watch Letterman or Nightline, where to keep the unread magazines, would you start to sulk and sigh dramatically at odd moments or would you break up or would you at least discuss what was wrong? But by the time the question was formulated, he was already on his way out, his Nicole Miller tie, decorated with hot pink stethoscopes and bright blue syringes, flapping behind him.
Propped in her hospital bed, her stomach clamped shut with staples, IVs in the tops of both hands, a slight Percocet buzz in her head, Helen realized that after all the hours of phone conversations with her friends, all the nights spent awake staring down at Scott as he slept, all the daisies plucked from their ridiculously small garden murmuring to herself, “He loves me, he loves me not,” after going to a palmist and a tarot card reader—each with different opinions and predictions—after all that, Helen realized she would never know what Scott was thinking. Her question, “What is wrong with you anyway?” would never be answered. Instead, it would hang for eternity over the Thurbers Avenue curve.
HELEN’S FRIEND JOANNE knew the truth.
Helen had told her that she was going to break up with Scott. I’ll move out, Helen had said, and give us both some breathing room.
So when Joanne appeared in Helen’s hospital room, dressed in black, she seemed embarrassed, red-faced with downcast eyes.
She said, “God, your spleen. How awful.” Even though both of them knew that was not what was awful.
Helen answered by telling her about the staples.
Without looking at her, Joanne said, “My cousin’s wife got really fat and had her stomach stapled so she couldn’t eat a lot.”
“I think those are internal staples,” Helen said. “Mine are outside.” Her hands fluttered above the damp gauze. A faint, strange smell came from the wound. A smell that Helen could not place. She supposed it was the smell of the insides of bodies. Scott, she’d been told, had no apparent injuries. No blood or gaping holes. Everything was internal; he looked fine.
“Did you see Scott?” Helen blurted.
Joanne looked up, frightened. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again.
“He . . . uh . . . died, Helen,” she said. She indicated her black outfit as proof. Then she glanced into the hall for a nurse or someone to assist her.
Inappropriately, Helen laughed. “I know that,” she said. “I meant . . .” She searched for the word. “Did you view him?”
Joanne lowered her voice, eased herself onto the very edge of Helen’s hospital bed. “He looked great,” she said.
They were silent, each contemplating, Helen supposed, what that meant. To Joanne, she supposed, it meant not dead. But to Helen it conjured images of Scott in his white boxer shorts, about to dress or undress, caught between things. That was when he looked vulnerable, open. Asleep, he kept his crotch guarded with both hands. Active, he was a frowner, a worrier, a man who disliked clutter, who complained she left her mail and necklaces and shopping lists in too many piles on every countertop.
“God,” Helen said. “Dead.”
She tried to think of what that meant. Really meant. If they had simply broken up, she would drink too much wine alone one night and call him, drunkenly, to cry. They would go to bed together a few more times, passionately. She would hate him, miss him, desire him. People would call her to say he had been spotted—at a café, in his car, mailing a letter. Dead was something else altogether.
She started to cry.
It wasn’t the first time. The first time was when his parents arrived at her bedside, their faces red and blotchy, their eyes swollen, and told her they did not blame her. “That fucking curve,” Scott’s father had said. He was an economics professor at Brown and Helen had never heard him say “fuck” before. It startled her. Scott’s mother said, “I know how much you loved him.” That was when Helen began to cry. Did she? Love him? Hadn’t she been thinking of breaking up with him? That very morning of the accident she had yelled at him for obsessively dust-busting around the litter box. “I am stepping on tiny pebbles!” he had shouted back at her.
Crying made her side ache and her staples itch. But once it started, there was nothing Helen could do.
“Hey,” Joanne said, wrapping her arms awkwardly around Helen. “Come on.”
“I killed Scott,” Helen blabbered.
“No, you didn’t,” Joanne said, her voice soothing, the way a mother calms an infant.
But they both knew she had.
Helen could feel the impact, car against guardrail. She remembered being airborne, rocketing off the highway. In that instant, she had time-traveled back to her high school senior-class trip to Disney World, where she rode Space Mountain again and again, convinced dying felt like that.
Joanne was talking in that maternal voice, urging Helen to reconsider and spend the summer at an artists’ colony in upstate New York with her. She had made that offer a few weeks ago. Joanne was a photographer; there would be other artists there. There would be cocktail parties. “I’ll say you’re my assistant,” she’d said. “You can get away from Scott for a little while.” But Helen had been unsure. Was getting away the right thing? Was a little while the right thing? Maybe they should be apart, she’d thought, forever.