I can’t use my left side. That, they don’t need to tell me.
A speech pathologist visits with flash cards. The pictures are clear and crude—milky carbon renderings of cats, dogs, goldfish. Awful Highlights-grade illustrations. She asks me to read the words, but there are no words there, just hieroglyphics. That shit is not a word. “What is this,” she says, and I shrug: It’s nothing, lady.
I want to tell her, I’m thirty-two years old. How could this have happened? Why did it happen to me? But all I can make are useless consonants: kkkkk or phbbbb. My face feels like it’s dripping off my skull. It’s a big part of the problem, my mouth not working. When will I be able to speak again? Who the fuck knows? Not the pathologist. “Try again,” she says. “Cuh-aah-tuh.” She is close to retirement and smells like lunch and whatever fabric she’s wearing: tomato soup and flannel, broccoli and polyester. She makes me cry on a daily basis. “Do it again,” she says. “Again. Again.”
—
They allow Mel to visit in the evenings. “How’s it going with Broom-Hilda,” she says, referring to the speech pathologist. She brings graphic design and sketch journals, some books. When she sees those go untouched, she begins bringing in DVDs: Wallace and Gromit, Beavis and Butt-Head. Pet Sematary. “I forgot how much I missed Walmart,” she says. “God strike me fucking dead, but it’s true. This golden bit of cinema was in the discount bin for two bucks. Two.”
My stroke is so sweepingly terrible, it has acted as our eraser. It has hit the reset button on Vaught and Kisses. We will never again mention the fight in the subway, or the plane ride to Florida. It has been wiped from our history. Now there is just this—her, me, and the hospital.
We watch TV. Mel talks. I motion with my good hand, my bad arm like a bag of sand. The entire left side of my body feels heavy and waterlogged; not mine. There’s a new weakness overall, a new, ungainly, haphazard feeling. She does not make fun of me. She’s either restraining herself, or she’s too scared by what she sees. “Are you hurting?” she says when I wince. “Do you need something? I could ask the nurses.”
There are two seams around her mouth that I haven’t seen before. I’ll drop something—a cup of water, and once, her phone—and the lines will deepen. My right side’s off, too. I try to handle a pencil in front of her. I fist it, manage to write my name, then drop it. The blood drains from her face.
She has not asked me about the List yet. I am grateful.
After many afternoons spent thinking about it, face to the ceiling, I decide that it is something for which to ask for forgiveness. This is the person with whom you have lived for the past ten years, I think. We’ve never tracked who spent what on equipment, or groceries, or furniture. We wear each other’s socks; on several occasions, we have used the same toothbrush for weeks, confused as to which belonged to the other. When one of us is in the shower, and the other has to pee, we just saunter in and do it. In summers, when the window air-conditioning unit cuts not even a breeze through the eighty-degree fug of the studio, we strip down and work in our skivvies, without a thought. There’s the joint credit card—and to share your credit rating with someone is the ultimate, blind commitment.
Our investment was so great, in fact, that it was largely thoughtless, a given—even the blank spaces that we both assumed, in theory, existed in the other. Minutiae, maybe, about her mom, or one-night stands, girls with hidden faces who never came around. But the List is an albatross. Not telling her about it was nothing less than a decisive deception, made all the more egregious by the fact that it was something I had made, was making—which, for our kind of people, is the truest extension of the heart.
And now this same person is sitting with me. Ignoring my craven hospital nakedness, the catheter, the smells and sounds of my illness, with not one word of complaint.
Sometimes I catch her staring at me, knee jiggling, and I imagine she’s thinking about it, wondering if I’m the person she thought I was.
I’m wondering the same thing.
—
We’re watching a rerun of M*A*S*H when she asks, “Do you remember me talking to you? When you were out?”
I put two fingers up: a little. My chest burns with worry. This is it. This is when she asks me about the List. The fear prickles my body, waking me up. When she’s silent, I wheel my hand, not able to stand it: what about?
“I said I’d clean up, if you woke up.” She looks studiously at the TV. The color in her face is high. She’s embarrassed. “I meant it,” she says.
I nod. She sees out of the corner of her eye and exhales. Changes the channel.
—