“I didn’t say he didn’t.” Jeremy shot her a wry smile. “I just said he loves that boat.”
Four days later, Jeremy suffered a stroke in his office at the college. He suspected it was a stroke but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure, so he drove himself to the nearest hospital. He drove his car halfway up onto a curb and staggered to the entrance. He made it to the ER on his own two feet but promptly suffered a second stroke in the waiting room. The first orderly to reach him was surprised by the strength in Jeremy’s soft professor’s hands when he grabbed the lapels of the orderly’s lab coat.
The last words Jeremy would speak for some time made little sense to the orderly or to anyone else, for that matter. He yanked the orderly’s face down to his own and his eyes bulged in their sockets.
“Rachel,” he slurred, “is in the mirror.”
6
DETACHMENTS
Maureen shared the orderly’s claim with Rachel during Jeremy’s third night in the hospital.
“‘Rachel is in the mirror’?” Rachel repeated.
“That’s what Amir said.” Maureen nodded. “You look tired. You should get your rest.”
Rachel had to be back at work in an hour. She’d be late. Again. “I’m fine.”
In the bed, Jeremy stared up at the ceiling, his mouth agape, his eyes wiped clean of awareness.
“The drive must be terrible,” Charlotte said.
“It’s not bad.” Rachel sat on the windowsill because there were only three chairs in the room and they were all occupied by family.
“The doctors said he could be like this for months,” Theo said. “Or longer.”
Both Charlotte and Maureen began weeping. Theo went to them. The three of them huddled in their grief. For a few minutes all Rachel could see of them was their heaving backs.
A week later Jeremy was moved to a neuro-treatment facility and gradually recovered some motor ability and the most rudimentary kernels of speech—yes, no, bathroom. He looked at his wife as if she were his mother, at his son and daughter as if they were his grandparents, at Rachel as if he were trying to place her. They tried reading to him, scrolled through his favorite paintings on an iPad, played his beloved Schubert. And none of it connected. He wanted food, he wanted comfort, he wanted relief from the pains in his head and body. He engaged the world with the terrified narcissism of an infant.
The family made it clear to Rachel that she could visit as much as she wanted—they were far too polite to say otherwise—but they failed to include her in most conversations and were always visibly relieved when she had to go.
At home, Sebastian grew resentful. She’d barely known the man, he’d argue. She was sentimentalizing an attachment that didn’t really exist.
“You need to let it go,” he said.
“No,” she replied, “you do.”
He held up an apologetic hand and closed his eyes for a moment to let her know he had no interest in a big fight. He opened his eyes and his voice was softer and conciliatory. “You know they’re considering you for Big Six?”
Big Six was what they called the national network in New York.
“I didn’t know that.” She tried to keep the excitement from her voice.
“You’re being groomed. Now isn’t the time to ease up on the throttle.”
“I’m not.”
“Because they’ll test you on something big. Something national-scale.”
“Such as?”
“A hurricane, a mass murder, I dunno, a celebrity death.”
“How will we soldier on,” she wondered aloud, “after Whoopi has passed?”
“It’ll be hard,” he agreed, “but she would have wanted us to show courage.”
She chuckled and he nestled into her on the couch.
Sebastian kissed the side of her neck. “This is us, babe, me and you. Joined at the hip. Where I go, you go. Where you go, I go.”
“I know. I do.”
“I think it’d be cool to live in Manhattan.”
“Which neighborhood?” she asked.
“Upper West Side,” he said.
“Harlem,” she said at the same time.
They both laughed it off because it felt like what one did when crucial differences in a marriage revealed themselves in strictly theoretical terms.
Jeremy James improved significantly through the fall. He remembered who Rachel was, though not what he’d said to the orderly, and he seemed to tolerate her presence more than rely on it. He had retained most of his knowledge of the luminist movement and of Colum Jasper Whitstone, but it was disjointed, his general sense of chronology off, so that Whitstone’s vanishing in 1863 was placed on a timeline just prior to Jeremy’s first trip to Normandy in 1977, when he was a graduate fellow. He thought Rachel was younger than Charlotte and couldn’t understand some days why Theo could take so much time off from high school to visit him.
“He doesn’t apply himself in the first place,” he told Rachel. “I don’t want him using my sickness to apply himself even less.”
He moved back into the house on Gorham Lane in November and was attended to by a hospice nurse. He grew physically stronger. His speech grew clear. But his mind remained elusive to him. “I can’t quite grasp it,” he said once. Both Maureen and Rachel were in the room and he gave them his hesitant smile. “It’s like I’m in a beautiful library but none of the books have titles.”
In late December of 2009, Rachel twice caught him checking his watch in the first ten minutes of her visit. She couldn’t blame him. Without their shared detective stories to discuss—he to find evidence of Colum Jasper Whitstone crossing paths with Claude Monet, she to find her father, and the both of them to understand Elizabeth Childs—they had little to talk about. No shared ambition, no shared history.
She promised to stay in touch.
Leaving his house, she walked down the flagstone path to her car, and she felt the loss of him anew. Felt too the old suspicion that life, as she had thus far experienced it, was a series of detachments. Characters crossed the stage, and some hung around longer than others, but all ultimately exited.
She looked back at his house as she reached her car. You were my friend, she thought. You were my friend.