I looked at the spoonful of food and then at him. “Thank you, honey,” I said.
He smiled and fed me another spoonful and another. “I’d like to know how much you love me,” he said. “You can say, ‘I love you so much.’ That would be nice.” He waited.
“I need some water. I can’t talk,” I said in a raspy voice.
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
He rose and got me a glass of water, but he didn’t give it to me. He held it near me.
“How much do you love me, sweet Kaylee? You can do it. You can make some words.”
“I love you so much,” I said. My throat hurt. It felt like it was torn inside.
He brought the water to my lips. “Drink slowly, slowly. You’re doing so well.”
Doing so well? Was he seeing me? How could I be doing well? I was only a foot from my grave, so exhausted and defeated that it looked inviting.
“Don’t worry. We’ll build you up again, and then we’ll have our honeymoon,” he said. “We’ll have music and great dinners. I’ll bring you something beautiful to wear. That’s right, something that fits you. Now that you’re back and you realize how much we love each other, I’ll get you many beautiful things, jewelry and shoes, everything that makes a woman feel like a woman.”
He spoke the way a parent might speak to a little girl, telling her a story, and as he spoke, he fed me some more until the jar was empty. He opened another jar of some chicken mixture and fed me that. I drank and ate, listening to his description of how we would begin a perfect family life.
“We won’t have just one kid, of course. That was my parents’ mistake. I shoulda had a brother or a sister. It’s important. Sometimes I sit in a park not far from here and watch the mothers and fathers and their children play together and think, why can’t that be us? Of course, now it can. Someday soon we’ll be in that park with our kids.
“Okay,” he said when I had finished the second jar. “We got to go slow. I know how this should go when someone’s been away a while and then comes back. It’s sorta like a resurrection. It’ll take at least three days.”
He laughed, and then he checked my feet and nodded.
“Coming along,” he said. “You did take good care of them, but it will be a while yet, so we got to keep you from doing too much for a while longer.”
He gave me some more water, and then he went out and up the stairs. I sat enjoying the feeling of some food in my stomach. When he appeared again quite a while later, I had fallen asleep, probably for hours. This time, he was carrying bags of groceries.
“I didn’t want to go out and shop for all this until I thought you were ready,” he said.
I couldn’t believe how happy I was at the sight of him and the food. I watched him putting it all away as he went on about our future. If it wasn’t being forced on me, I thought, it wouldn’t be so terrible a future, with a dedicated husband whose main concern was his family. Was my father’s main concern his family? How could he leave us? No matter what my mother had done, why didn’t he think of us first and then himself? Was he sorry now? If he hadn’t left, I might not be here. Was he blaming himself? Did his guilt wear on him? Was he crying for me?
Anthony was going on and on about the changes he would make in the house, changes to accommodate more children, repairs he would make once we had reached a point he called “our graduation,” the point when we could move upstairs.
“I know I said we never would, but this place is too small for us, especially when we
have more than one child, especially. Mother told me that would be okay.”
Mother told you? I thought. When? Was it when you had another girl down here?
Or did he believe she had just told him? Was he talking every night to his dead mother in that coffin? Was that really why he kept it in her bedroom? I didn’t think I was capable of feeling more terror, but suddenly, that thought was like the icing on a cake of horror.
“Don’t think I don’t have the money to do all this, either,” he said. “I haven’t spent a tenth of what I have, and who could I spend money on before I had you anyway? My mother never wanted much, and I wouldn’t buy my father a toothpick. You know, my mother used to steal money out of his pockets when he came home drunk. ‘He’ll only waste it,’ she told me. Just her and me knew where she hid it, too. And he never realized she was taking his money. He was always too drunk to remember what he did and didn’t have. We were a good team once, me and my mother. I bet you wish you had a mother like mine. I know you do. You said so. Well, you don’t got to think about her anymore. Just think about us. Okay?”
He looked at me, holding up a fresh loaf of bread in his right hand and a package of ham in his left. How good that would taste, I thought, and nodded.
Why am I listening to him? I really am going crazy, I realized. I’m being led down a path of insanity that he has cut through the maze of his everyday life, and I’m no longer fighting it.
I should have hated myself for even nodding at him and forcing a smile. But what else could I do?
It surprised me that I wanted to live and be well again at any cost.
Anthony had left the door open, and suddenly, of his own volition, Mr. Moccasin strolled back into the basement. I was happy to see him. He could have stayed upstairs, but he wanted to be down here with me. I held out my arms, and the cat came to the bed, leaped up onto it, and curled up beside me.
Anthony watched with a broad smile on his face. “Mr. Moccasin knows who he should love. I’ll give you some more to eat, let you rest a bit, and then we’ll look into cleaning you up,” he said.