“Now I’m not sure if I imagined it,” I say with a shake of my head. “I don’t think I did, but Dr. Rossi says her brain function hasn’t improved enough for that, and I’m so tired…”
“He says that, from what he’s seen on a scan?” James almost sounds scoffing. “That’s not proof.”
“Isn’t it?” I feel almost dizzy now, by his seeming about-face. “You’ve always thought it was before.” I don’t mean to sound accusing; I’m more confused than anything else. Why is James changing his tune now? Why is he sounding more like me, after all this time?
“Maybe I was wrong.” He speaks quietly, his head lowered, his gaze still on Emily.
“I don’t understand you, James. Where is this all coming from?”
James doesn’t speak for a long moment. As I wait for him to explain, I am conscious of many things—the rain that has begun to fall gently outside, streaking down the window. Emily’s hand giving one little twitch against the sheet. The silence, the emptiness, the waiting… it has gone on for so long.
I’ve spent over two years in rooms like this one, always waiting for something that hasn’t yet happened, and now I am starting to believe never will. And maybe, just maybe, that isn’t giving up. It’s a new thought, one that feels like both a relief and a fear, but not quite as terrifying as it once might have been. I can actually start to envisage it, something I was never ready to do before.
“I feel…” James begins, and then stops again. He won’t look at me, only our daughter, his fingers laced together in front of him. “I feel I haven’t handled any of this as I should have,” he says finally.
“What do you mean?”
“When Emily started to get sick… I wasn’t prepared for it. I know you weren’t either, no one was, no one could be. It was so sudden. It felt surreal. I kept just waiting for it to stop. I told myself it was some weird virus, it was going to clear up. Anything…”
“I know,” I say softly. My throat is starting to ache. I’d done the same thing. Panicked, even as I told myself there was nothing to panic about, that whole first year as we ignored symptoms and then went to the doctor, at war with ourselves and our unspoken fears.
“You read stories online about stuff like that,” James continues in a low voice. “People who fall mysteriously ill, who die for seeming no reason, and every time you think, ‘that’s horrible, that’s sad, but that would never happen to me.’”
“Until it does.”
He looks up at me then, the expression on his face so bleak that it makes me want to reach over and hug him, or at least touch his hand. But I don’t, because we haven’t had that kind of relationship for a long time, and I don’t know whether we can start now. “Yes,” he agrees. “Until it does.”
He lapses into silence again, and I realize I still don’t know why he’s here. Did he come because he felt guilty? Or because he wanted to see Emily, or support me? And what about Eva? I feel too tired, too sad, to ask him. To hash it all out. Maybe it’s too late, anyway. I glance again at Emily.
“I’ve been thinking a lot,” James says, “about everything. Since you’ve come to Italy.” I wait. “And how I handled it all.” He glances up at me again. “Not very well, I mean.”
“It was a hard situation. The hardest.” If we’re going to do confessions, then I’ll give him mine. I don’t have any pride left to hold onto; the self-righteous fury that buoyed me for so long has trickled away. “I didn’t either, James. I can admit now that you were right, I did make it a competition. I didn’t mean to, but I can see that’s how it felt. I think it was a way to feel in control, when of course I wasn’t. I couldn’t be.”
“Still… I just shut down. That had to have been hard for you to deal with. I suppose that was my way of being in control, but it didn’t work.”
“Nothing did.”
“I really did believe we would be happier apart.” He sounds as if he is asking my forgiveness.
“I know you did. And I came to see that, too.” Although I still wonder if we’d both been different, stronger, maybe our marriage could have made it, even if our daughter didn’t.
But just like I told Eva, I know there is no point in raking over the past, languishing in regret. What happened, happened. James has a wife now, a wife whom he loves, who is having his baby. We can’t wonder what if.
“When you set up that page…” James begins in a low voice, and I tense. Now come the recriminations? “I felt so guilty.”
I start at that. “You did?”
“It was like looking at some sort of alternate reality, seeing how our lives could have been. I thought, why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I think of that? Why did I…” His voice wavers and then breaks. “Why did I just give up?”
“You didn’t give up, James.”
“Can you really say that—”
“Yes, I can.” I realize it’s true, no matter what I’ve accused him of. “You’ve always been there, always been supportive. And you advocated for the decision you believed was in Emily’s best interest.”
“I don’t know if that’s true.” His voice is so low I can barely hear it. “Maybe it was just easier for me.” Which are the same words I once flung at him, but I’m not sure I ever meant
him to take them to heart. “I’ve wanted this to be over, Rachel,” he confesses. “Because it hurts so much.”