Later, when he’s spent and near sleep, I remember what his mom said when I showed up that morning. “Hey,” I whisper, propping up on one elbow to face him.
“Hm?”
“What does Te tomó bastante tiempo mean?” I ask, recalling his mother’s words to me on the porch.
He pauses, calculating the translation to English. “Took you long enough.”
I close my eyes and tilt my head back in understanding. I think of the babies we lost. I think of Oliver. I think of how long Harrison has been hurting. I don’t know if he will ever not be hurting. If he will ever recover—if our relationship will survive. But in that moment, I do know one thing for sure. I open my eyes and look right at Harrison. “No. It took me too long.”
Chapter 27
Harrison goes back to work the first week of October.
It took a lot of long, meandering conversations and prodding in the weeks after we returned from his parents’ house, but he finally reached out to one of his professors from Emory, who has been talking to him via phone and email. He hasn’t said much about their conversations, but curiosity compelled me to ask to read one.
We all make mistakes. There is no surgeon alive that won’t do something dumb that causes the loss of a life. Every procedure, by nature, is a risk. Human error is one of those risks—but should one patient’s death keep you from saving other lives? You are an excellent doctor, Harrison, and this may sound like tough love, but not only do I think you should move forward in your career, you have an obligation to do so. You have the skill and potential to save many lives, and one devastating mistake doesn’t absolve you of living up to that responsibility.
I think that one in particular helped, because one week he was talking about maybe quitting medicine altogether and doing something stress-free like opening a running-gear store or going to culinary school and the next he got up one morning, put on his shirt and bow tie and went in to the hospital.
He still walks heavy, shoulders hunched, the pain, though maybe a touch lighter than it once was, still weighing him down. And I catch him at times, in private moments, holding a jar of spaghetti sauce or frozen in midtie of his shoe or staring out the window at nothing. And I know he’s thinking about Noah. I know he’ll always think about Noah, that he’ll never forget. But I so hope he can forgive.
* * *
The second week in October, I stand at the edge of the garden, staring at a row of tall green heads of romaine lettuce. I should be filled with pride at my gardening victory, but all I can think about is Oliver. I want to call him, boast to him about my accomplishment. But I won’t. I think instead of the letter I left along with his suit jacket on Caroline’s front porch the morning I drove to Buffalo. I try to picture him reading it—his face as understanding dawns at my words. That I didn’t know what the intersection of our lives meant, but that I couldn’t dwell on it any longer. That I couldn’t reside in the unknown. I love my husband, I wrote, and though of that I was certain, of everything else, in the weeks since I left the letter, I was less so.
I still wonder; I can’t help it. Every morning I wake up from a vivid dream of him. Or in the middle of a sleepless night, when the words Isak said crawl into my mind and linger like a broken record without an off switch: He give you baby. Or every time I pass a pregnant woman in line at the Giant or at the drugstore or walking down the streets of Hope Springs and I nearly double over from the potent mix of pain and jealousy. That little voice whispers: Did I do the right thing?
* * *
The third week in October, I wake one Saturday morning to find Harrison’s face hovering over mine. His hands clasp my cheeks and I blink, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth with rubber cement. The dream I’d been in the middle of comes rushing back to me in flashes. It was the carnival again, the carousel music, the flashing lights; Oliver was there.
Oliver.
I try to push the image of him from my mind. To put him back in his rightful place as an enigma, a man I knew once, like an ex-boyfriend who is not an ex-boyfriend. But I’m finding as the weeks go on, he is not so easily put away.
I focus on my husband’s face, his eyelashes centimeters from mine.
“Wake up,” he whispers to my nose. “Let’s go paddleboarding.”
“Yeah?” I say, searching his eyes.
“Yeah,” he says.
We rent the boards from a tiny outfit along the Delaware and Harrison turns down the class that’s being offered to teach us how to actually use them. “I’ve got you,” he says when I balk.
And he does. He’s patient and calm, and though I’m nervous, balancing on the board is much easier than I thought it would be. I catch on quickly and we start moving at a good clip, the only sound our paddles splashing in the still water. It’s a beautiful morning, the air crisp with fall, the sun shining bright against the cloudless sky. Harrison points out an egret on the bank to the right of us. I look just in time to see it spread its long wings out and silently take off in flight.
We’re so busy staring at it that I don’t notice my paddleboard drifting toward his until it’s too late. They collide, the resulting tremor throwing both of us off balance, and there’s nothing to hold on to in order to steady myself. We reach for each other out of instinct and then both go tumbling into the water, the sudden cold of it taking my breath. I come up sputtering and my eyes find Harrison, water trickling off his head, beading up in his beard.
But instead of the shock I’m feeling that I expect to see mirrored on his own face, he’s smiling, an ear-to-ear grin that is so genuine it steals my breath all over again.
Because after months of searching, of looking for him, suddenly there he is. My Harrison. Who knows every lyric to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” And thinks Road House is one of the greatest movies ever created. And wears bow ties daily because in med school on his gynecological rotation, he wore a regular tie and forgot to flip it over his back while examining a patient. Let’s just say I had to throw away the tie, he said to me one night, after sex, back when we preferred whispering secrets to each other, long into the night, over sleep.
I grin back at him, and then as if he remembers himself, the smile slowly disappears and the lines return to his forehead, around his mouth. “You OK?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. He heaves himself back up onto his board, and so I do, too, but the joy doesn’t leave my face quite as quickly as his. I burn the image of him smiling into my brain, and know that I will patiently wait to see glimpses of my husband again.
And I see them. I do. Random moments throughout November—an eye twinkle here, a laugh there, a joke even—a joke!—that had Finley and Griffin in stitches at Thanksgiving. Vivian caught my eyes and smiled.