Before
It only took a day or two and the damn cold was gone. I felt like shit the first day. But around the time I started to feel sorry for myself, my nose opened up and I could breathe. That’s me. For her it’s something different. I can tell by the cough.
She started coughing shortly after me. Not a dry cough like mine, but something much deeper. I’m forcing her to drink tap water. I don’t know much—I’m not a doctor—but it might help.
She feels like shit. I can see it in her face. Her eyes droop. They water. Her nose is raw and red from wiping it with scraps of toilet paper. She’s freezing her ass off all the time. She sits before the fire with her head pooled over the arm of a chair, and she sinks to a place where she hasn’t been before. Not even when I held that gun to her head.
“You want to go home?” I ask. She tries to hide it. But I know that she’s been crying. I can see the tears run their course down the length of her cheeks. They drip to the floor.
She lifts her head. She wipes at her face with the back of a sleeve. “I just don’t feel good,” she lies. Of course she wants to go home. That cat doesn’t leave her lap. I don’t know if it’s the warm afghan she has or the fact that she’s cooking before the fire. Or maybe it’s pure devotion. How the hell would I know?
I picture myself holding that gun to her head. I imagine her lying on the rocky earth surrounded by leaves. These days I can’t get that image out of my head.
I press a hand to her head and tell her that it’s hot.
She says she’s so tired all the time. She can barely keep her eyes open, and when she comes to, I’m always there with a glass of water for her to drink.
She tells me that she dreams of her mother, of lying on their family room sofa as a kid, when she was sick. She dreams of being huddled under a blanket she carried around all the time. Sometimes her mom would toss it in the dryer for a few minutes to heat it up. She’d make her cinnamon toast. She’d wait on her while they watched cartoons and when the soap operas came on, they’d watch them together. There was always a glass of juice to drink. Fluids, her mother would remind her. Drink your fluids.
She tells me that she’s certain she sees her mom standing here in the cabin’s kitchen in a silk nightgown, and slippers the shape of ballet shoes. There’s Christmas music, she says: Ella Fitzgerald. Her mother is humming. The scent of cinnamon fills the air. She calls out for her mommy, but when she turns, she sees me and starts crying.
“Mommy,” she sobs. Her heart races. She was sure her mother was there.
I cross the room and press a hand to her head. She flinches. My hand is like ice. “You feel hot.” And then I hand her a glass of lukewarm water.
I sit down beside her on the couch.
She presses the glass to her lips but doesn’t drink. She lays sideways, her head set on a pillow I brought from the bed. It’s as thin as paper. I wonder how many heads have been here before her. I reach for the blanket that fell to the floor and I drop it to her. The blanket is rough, like wool. It scratches her skin.
“If Grace was my father’s favorite, then I was my mother’s,” she says suddenly. Like it hit her right there, a moment of clarity. She says that she sees her mother running into her bedroom when she’d had a nightmare. She feels her arms around her, protecting her from the unknown. She sees her pushing her on the swing when her sister was at school. “I see her smiling, I hear her laugh. She loved me,” she says. “She just didn’t know how to show it.”
In the morning she complains that her head hurts and her throat and God knows she can’t stop coughing. She doesn’t bitch about it. She tells me because I ask.
There’s pain in her back. At some point she moves to the couch, where she falls asleep facedown. She’s as hot as hell when I touch her, though she shakes as if at any moment she might freeze into a chunk of ice. The cat moves onto her back until I shoo it away. Then it takes refuge on the back of the couch.
No one’s ever loved me so much.
She mumbles in her sleep about things that aren’t there: a man in a camouflage coat and graffiti on a brick wall, sprayed illegally with aerosol paint, wild-style, with an illegible tag. She describes it in her dreams. Black and yellow. Fat, interwoven letters in 3D.
I let her take over the couch. I sleep on a chair, two nights now. I’d be more comfortable on the bed but I don’t want to be that far away. I’m kept awake half the night by that fucking cough, though somehow she manages to sleep through it. It’s the stuffed-up nose that generally wakes her up, that terrifying inability to breathe.
I don’t know what time it is when she says she has to use the bathroom. She sits up and when she thinks she can, she stands. I can tell from the way she moves that everything aches.