Eleven
RACHEL
She fiddled with the phone cord, plugging and replugging it into the side of their old laptop. Soon the Internet connection started up, with its buzzing little song, and Rachel felt relief. You never knew if it would work on this computer, and without quite knowing why, she hadn’t wanted to use the girls’ computer, in their room, for what she was about to do.
The house was quiet; Bob had gone to the store and Lila and Melissa were watching a friend play tennis. She rolled her head twice, once to the left, then to the right, trying to dislodge some of the tension there. Finally, the browser sprang open; she narrowed her attention to the screen.
It hadn’t been hard at all, to set up a new bank account in her own name. Jerry had talked her through all of it, and with surprising speed and ease she clicked open the right folder and entered her password, and then there it was: $25,000. For a full moment she held herself still and stared at the sum, a figure shining brightly in computer blue. And then she got to work.
She paid down MasterCard first, slowly typing the unfamiliar account number into the form, and then she paid off Discover entirely, with a muttered curse for that 19 percent interest rate. It took longer to figure out how to access the various medical and insurance companies, but eventually she knocked down just a few of those many outstanding debts. The first couple thousand that Jerry had lent her had gone to the most persistent of the collection agencies, the one whose Tampa-based phone number everyone in the house had learned to recognize on caller ID, and ignore. Rachel had planned to hold on to what was left from this $25,000, to string it out as slowly and as cautiously as she could, but on a whim she stood up, went into the kitchen, called Waugatuck, and prepaid Lila’s diving fees through the winter. That brought the MasterCard back up, so she went back to the computer with a bowl of raisin bran and paid it down again.
And then, even as she told herself not to, Rachel began to browse a few of the clothing stores that the girls loved, and before she knew it, she had ordered two Banana Republic tops for Lila, plus a skirt for Melissa from that other brand they craved, the English-sounding preppy one. For Christmas, she told herself, or birthdays. But then again, who knew? Maybe she would just lay the clothes out on their beds, and wait for them to be surprised. She pictured herself in their room, watching them try on the new things, admiring a new style or color, the three of them together. Yes.
Rachel felt like she could breathe again. There actually seemed to be a millimeter’s worth more room down around the bottom of her lungs. The deception she was practicing was a temporary one, she told herself. And maybe it wasn’t even a deception. After all, she didn’t know for sure that Bob wouldn’t have agreed to borrow from Jerry—she only suspected it. Rachel had said nothing about it to him, then, and it was the first real secret she could remember keeping from her husband; the whole thing, from idea to planning to execution, had been done without his knowing. But not for long, she told herself. She would just get them out from under some of the worst of it, those endless thin envelopes with their cellophane windows; she would ease the burden a little bit, and then tell Bob—if he hadn’t already found out. In any case, whatever would ensue—the arguments, his surprise and hurt—was distant, compared to the immediate relief that the past few minutes had brought.
“I don’t really know how to thank you,” she had admitted to Jerry last week, embarrassed by the way her voice caught on the words.
“Don’t have to,” he’d said, shaking his head with finality. “Family’s family.” But then the phrase hung in the air between them. Rachel had been thinking of Bob, with a small measure of guilt, and Jerry, she realized now, must have been thinking about Annette.
Rachel logged out from the bank’s website and closed the windows on the screen. She stretched her hands back behind her, as far as they would go. The real secret, she knew, was that Jerry’s money—and his generosity, his no-bullshit way about everything—had given her another idea. A plan that Rachel hadn’t exactly articulated to herself or anyone else; it had to do with her house, and it had to do with Jerry. She looked slowly around the living room, her eyes traveling up the back wall, which bordered her other home—her real home.
She was about to close the computer when the words on the screen stopped her. It was a file Bob had left open. She read a bit, and then scrolled down to read more, one hand holding a spoon, the other on the track-pad.
Most of the science books and nearly all the head-trauma movies have this part wrong, he’d written.
What it’s like to lose your understanding of language, and then to regain it, is less a sudden or glorious deliverance—common metaphors involve lights going on, or random notes of music instantly falling into the pattern of a symphony—than it is a shameful, embarrassing piece of self-awareness. The sensation wasn’t so much that I had lost the ability to do something important but that I had fumbled badly—had forgotten my manners at a crucial social event. Left my fly down, exposed myself. It was like farting in public, over and over, uncontrollably. Grasping at something to say, the most basic things, I sent forth great gusts of human stink instead. And then I was forced to watch as those around me, the ones taking care of me, the ones I loved, politely looked away, afraid to let me see how badly I had messed up.
Rachel stopped. It wasn’t just that the writing was better than she had guessed it would be—though it was, more confident and clear than she had any right to expect. (Not that she was any expert. But nothing about Bob’s life before this had suggested any talent or interest in writing. No one they knew was a writer, after all—Hartfield just wasn’t that kind of place.) So what had shocked her about what she had read? Was it that he hadn’t told her any of this before? Was it strange or sad or hard to find out these painful thoughts about what he had been through because she read them? Or was it that Rachel hadn’t imagined that the experience was a profound one, to Bob, one worthy of examination and—well, why not say it—art? She knew it was hellish, she’d known it was brutal agony as he recovered, and she certainly knew it did a world’s worth of damage to their finances. But that it was something else, this injury, this recovery—something else to Bob—she hadn’t known.
A muffled thump came from inside the house, and then the sound of the grinding gears of the garage door opening. Rachel shut the computer and walked through the apartment, and outside. The pavement was wet under her bare feet as she stood on the path that led to the front of the house. Vikram backed his car out, saw her standing there, and gave a brief wave, which she returned.
If she could only know what had happened the day of Bob’s accident, she could handle the rest—where they lived, the fear she knew the girls still had, what had changed between her and Bob. Why she believed this, Rachel didn’t know, but she clung to the idea, anyway: someday, she would know, and then everything else would fall into place. But Bob had moved past the events themselves, she understood now. What he had written, what she had just read, confirmed the divide: they were each struggling, but with different mysteries.
She could hear her phone ring, but Rachel remained in front, long after Vikram had driven away. She looked from the garage to the side of the house, up to the windows, and back again. In her mind, Rachel paced out an imagined version of Bob’s steps that day, of her own, counting silently. It was an equation she had to get right, so she kept adding and subtracting, over and over, to figure out what might have been lost.