”Words cannot express,” was the phrase Claire couldn’t get out of her mind. People had said it to her about her own losses (her mother all those years ago, her son’s perfect vision the previous spring), and she had used it herself in comforting others, but now she felt ashamed at having called on it so cavalierly. She lay in bed with her back to Mark, whom she was almost certain was also not asleep, and they were silent.
They had lain like this, back to back, for over an hour—it was past 1:00 a.m.—and she literally could not think of how to frame a single thing she was feeling into words. Surely there would be some solace, at the very least some relief, in talking, in rolling over and beginning a sentence, fumbling through some explanation of her state of mind, however inadequate. But there were simply no words. It wasn’t that she couldn’t bring herself to say them; it was that she didn’t have them.
They had brought Meredith home in the afternoon, set her up in the family room on the foldout couch with her favorite magazines and an assortment of snacks. Meredith had sat cross-legged on the bed for about an hour, staring vaguely at the television, the cat across her lap, and then after dinner had said she’d really rather sleep in her room than on the foldout. And she’d taken the cat (the tolerant cat, who allowed himself to be cradled like a baby) and gone up to her room, and Claire had thought to herself that she would give her a few minutes, give her a little space, and then go up and sit on the edge of her bed and talk about it. Really talk about it.
A psychiatrist had spoken to them in the hospital room while Meredith and Evan were out walking the halls. This psychiatrist specialized in trauma, they’d been told by the medical doctor. Trauma was his thing. The psychiatrist had said of course it was impossible to predict precisely how someone would react to a situation like this, to an event so unimaginable, so distressing, that each person would handle it differently, with different types of coping mechanisms.
“Like what?” Claire had asked.
“She might be terrified?” the psychiatrist said. His name was Dr. Moon. He was very thin and had silver hair, so perfectly silver that Claire was certain that friends had sung “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” to him at his fiftieth birthday party. Claire already didn’t like him—though, to be fair, she did not like psychiatrists in general. She had seen a psychiatrist in college, to combat test anxiety, and plunged into a deep depression after a half-dozen sessions. “She might have nightmares? She might be afraid to leave the house?”
“Understandably,” Mark said.
“Understandably,” Dr. Moon agreed. “Or she might be angry? She might be angry at you, that you let this happen to her? She might feel like she can’t trust you? She might look to her brother for support, or she might shut him out? She’s bringing her own personality into this, so you might have some idea of how she’ll react. You know her. But she’s also grappling with something entirely new, so she may also act completely out of character? She may be needy or she may be reserved? She may feel frightened or she may feel emboldened? She may feel relieved or she may feel guilty? Or she may feel all of those things?”
“Thank you, doctor,” Mark said, and Claire had nearly laughed out loud. Thank you, doctor? Really? For a hundred questions and no answers?
“So you really can’t tell us anything,” Claire said.
Dr. Moon raised his hands in the universal symbol for being useless. “Keep the lines of communication open,” he said. “That’s really all you can do at this point. I’ll be available if you need me.”
“We can do that,” Mark said. He nodded at her resolutely. “We can definitely do that.”
He turned back expectantly to Dr. Moon, and Claire realized with equal parts despair and affection that her husband was apparently so pleased to have been given something concrete to focus on that he failed to realize that the lines of communication were not literal lines of communication and that Dr. Moon would not, in fact, be handing them a telephone or a walkie-talkie or even pair of tin cans connected by a string. She could read the disappointment on Mark’s face as Dr. Moon excused himself and pushed open the door, revealing Meredith and Evan standing just on the other side, in the gleaming white hall, an odd space between them large enough for the psychiatrist to walk through with ease.
Oh yes, it had sounded very simple in the hospital room, and the truth was that even she had nodded understandingly at Dr. Moon. Of course The Lines Of Communication would be open! Of course! But now here they were, ten hours out of the hospital, and Meredith seemed to be underwater, in some kind of tank that separated her from the rest of them, like Harry Houdini on a stage inside one of those giant tanks wound with heavy chains and those huge, ancient padlocks. How the hell could The Lines of Communication be open when someone was on a stage inside a giant tank?
Ascending the stairs, Claire steeled herself against the wall she was about to face, determined to break through. This was her child. Her baby girl. She would do anything for her. But when she cracked open Meredith’s door she found the room dark and Meredith and the tolerant cat sound asleep. Not pretend asleep, either, and not fitful sleep—Claire stood there long enough to make sure—but just normal, another-ho-hum-night-of-my-life sleep. And she had been enormously relieved—thank god! off the hook! conversation postponed!—and then embarrassed and disgusted by her relief.
Then she went to find Evan, but he had retreated to his room as well—she could hear him watching something on his computer, something with gunshots—and she told herself lies she knew were lies to justify not knocking on his door, and so then by 9:00 p.m. it was just her and Mark, and then Mark went to the grocery store, because that was what he did, and so she stood in the kitchen by herself and drank two beers and ate an entire bag of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, listening to the house settle. And now here they were lying in bed, she with a beer-and-sour-cream lump in her stomach and a taste in her mouth no toothpaste could combat. Here they were, lying in bed, and no one in her family was talking about anything, no one was even making a sound, despite the fact that her daughter had been through an unimaginable trauma and should be screaming and pulling out her hair while her family held her and wept with her and raged.
But.
But.
Yes, but.
She was in her room.
Her daughter was in her room, in her pajamas, under her blankets, under her roof, in the light of her nightlight, in the sight of her cat, nine steps from her brother, fifteen steps from her mother, her clothes in her closet, her shoes on her floor.