From Middle: I
From halfway down the block Ross caught sight of Iliana waiting outside the rehab hospital, her give-away blondness, her posture in the chair exaggeratedly, almost balletically erect. Ross saw her, yet didn’t realize it was her, not until he pulled up. For a moment he sat behind the wheel, shocked that he had not recognized his own wife, his better half, the love of his life. It was the chair that had thrown him off. He still expected her to be standing at her full, impressive height.
Then exactly the same thing happened, but the other way around. He got out, hurried around to open the passenger door, strode right over grinning idiotically to compensate for his unforgivable slight—and she didn’t recognize him. “Babe,” he had to say.
She looked up in surprise. Ross had always claimed that the Volvo was the most beautiful of automobiles because of how the diagonal bar across the grille resembled a beauty pageant contestant’s sash. Iliana didn’t know him getting out of something else. “Where’s Miss Stockholm?” she asked.
He cringed. Of course he expected to be called to account for the accident. In a way it was what he had been waiting for all those days Iliana had been unconscious in ICU—for her to wake and turn her pretty jutting ear to him. Some atavistic Catholic impulse compelled him to press his face right up against the confessional screen, hard, until it marked his forehead like in a ritual scarring. What he had not expected was to be put through the ordeal again and again. In the hospital she’d asked him every morning to explain. The square peg of the incident apparently could not be pounded into the round hole of her memory. Now that she’d moved to rehab, he’d hoped these torments would cease.
Perceiving his distress, Iliana smiled and lifted up her arms. He bent in submission and hugged her hard and long. It was a second, competing embrace. He could feel that, beneath her sweater, she was already in the metal arms of her brace.
“You look good,” he said, straightening.
“You, too.”
He ran both hands down his chest and puffed himself. “I changed my shirt.”
“Well!”
They laughed with the staccato awkwardness of strangers or the long-separated, though in real time he was last here yesterday. As he stepped behind the chair to push her, she said, “Don’t. Let me.” Bag in her lap, she began to wheel herself toward the curb where the car waited—curvy, green, new, the interior perfumed with vinyl, its seats unlittered. “This is not a Ross car,” she told him.
“It’s leased.”
So was the wheelchair, a loaner she was borrowing until the one made to her specifications arrived. She heaved herself out of it and onto the car seat with some effort and less grace, in part because of the restricting brace. Lifting her legs in after her was now a conscious action. She had to remember to bring along her lower half.
Ross, hands on his hips, said, “Now tell me how to take this thing apart.”
“It’s an intelligence test,” she teased.
The name of the rehab hospital was, hilariously, G. F. Strong. It was stenciled on the back of the chair: Property of—(R. P. Tired, Q. Z. Weak, A. B. Flaccid, Iliana had joked). As they drove away from the blocky brick and concrete structure Iliana, looking out the window, made a chagrined observation: the leaves on the trees had already burst into the colors of flame, one season giving way to another, without waiting for her. It was not only that her personal disaster meant nothing in the wider, leaf-strewn world, but that autumn always presaged for her an inevitable melancholia.
“I feel sad.”
“Don’t,” Ross pleaded. “Please don’t.” They reached the end of the street. “It’s going to be great finally having you home. I wish it was for longer than the weekend. I wish it was for good.” He touched her leg, then remembered and fumbled for her arm.
He had misunderstood. “Because it’s fall I mean.” She offered her hand and he placed the back of it on his thigh, weaving his fingers between hers, squeezing, his grip sweaty. When he released her to make the turn, her palm, left lying open on his leg, felt cool and empty.
At the intersection an impromptu procession of children from the school on the corner crossed in bunches, skipping, walking backwards, swooping to retrieve a construction-paper masterpiece. The windshield was so clean it almost seemed to magnify them. The light changed and Ross turned onto Oak Street, driving along in what was to him a suspenseful silence. When they reached the exact spot where the accident had happened, he looked at Iliana. Because he couldn’t turn his head to the right without bringing along his left shoulder, she noticed his unsubtle glance. The one she returned asked a question: What?
Ross looked away again, satisfied that she really didn’t remember. It occurred to Iliana then that this feeling that Ross was withholding something might only be him favoring his own injury.
“Have you been going to physio?”
“What for?”
“Your neck.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It makes you seem nervous.”
“I am nervous. I’m sweating like a pig. I was less nervous on our wedding day.” He lowered the automatic window and shouted out across three lanes of traffic, “I just want everything to be okay!”
