The nurses had dimmed the lights at her request, but Ella couldn’t sleep. Light found its way into her room, seeping under the door and through the venetian blinds. After seventeen years of sharing a bedroom with Felix, she, too, could no longer sleep with the slimmest crack of light. He had trained her well. The nighttime sounds of Duke Forest—the occasional owl hooting, deer padding up to their bedroom doors to nibble her azaleas, raccoons nosing around—were replaced by traffic, sirens, and trolley wheels squeaking along the corridor. She missed her woodland garden; she missed her morning power walks with their elderly neighbor, Eudora. She even missed their house, which she’d condemned to Katherine as a twisted fairy-tale nightmare cottage after a record number of copperheads had slithered out of the forest and onto their patio one spring.
Ella had wanted to live in the country, in a modern colonial with a wraparound porch and enough land cleared for a sun garden, despite being vehemently opposed to clear-cutting. Felix had been the one who’d lusted after the 1950s fixer-upper bungalow trapped on the edge of civilization.
She had never liked that dark, hidden house, and now all she wanted was to hear the birdsong in the forest—the wood thrushes, the mockingbirds, the eastern whip-poor-wills, even the jeer of the blue jays. The shadows from the trees, the flickering sunlight that lay across her bed mid-morning, the Monet-inspired bridge that led over the creek to their front path—she missed them all. And soon her camellias and hellebores would be blooming.
There was so much to look forward to, if only she could get home.
Dr. Beaubridge had told her to be patient, but relearning basic self-care was slow and demoralizing. She wanted nothing more than to rise up like Lazarus and go pee unaided, but the effort tied her to the hospital bed with imaginary ropes. All day she’d felt suspended in a weird in-between state of existence. Her mind would tell her to wake up, shake off sleep, move, and yet her body refused to cooperate—except for her heart, which danced a never-ending rumba.
Ella closed her eyes and imagined the softness of her goose-feather duvet. They’d brought it back from London in the days when you could check two fifty-pound bags for free on a transatlantic flight. They used to return home with such precious loot: Dr. Martens, chocolate, candy, Wellington boots, English bone china . . . Would she ever have the strength to travel again?
She had done nothing for two days; nothing had become her new normal. If she had the energy to care, she would be crazier than a shit-house rat. Maybe she was already, since whenever she slept, in snatches, she heard, smelled, and touched her mother. Not a single haunting or symbolic dream in twenty-three years, and now her dead mother was flesh and blood living in Ella’s subconscious.
Maybe she needed a brain stent.
How were the boys coping this evening? They were so different, her guys: Harry, tactile and demonstrative; Felix, someone who lived life with hands firmly in his pockets—unless he was reaching for her. Felix had always been a tender lover, a generous lover who took his time. When had they last hugged with passion, not obligation? And whose fault was that—who was the one who’d reset the ground rules in the bedroom? She might just as well have spray-painted back off, buddy on the bedroom walls.
Ella picked up her cell phone and hit “Favorites.”
“Hello, darling,” Felix said. After all these years, his smooth, quietly sardonic English accent still surprised her, still warmed her with desire. Even now, when she was confined to a sterile hospital room.
“I was missing you.”
“Me too,” he said.
“How’s homework going?”
“I have a double single malt in my right hand. Does that answer your question?”
“You don’t have to supervise. Just check his assignment notebook, write due dates and deadlines on the dry-erase board, and vaguely oversee.”
“Vague isn’t in my repertoire, Ella.”
She smiled, imagining his lips on her breasts.
Ice chinked against his glass. “How can he accomplish anything when he won’t sit still?”
Ella sighed as their shared moment slipped away. “It might look as if he’s not working, but movement is part of Harry’s thought process. He literally cannot think if he sits still.”
Felix slugged his drink. “How the hell does he manage in school?”
“Legally, the teachers have to let him get up in the middle of class, so I established a code word to make it less distracting for other students. Then he goes outside and runs a few laps.”