Chapter 4: The Seven Days
I woke up on Sunday morning with a pain in my head like an iron rod pushed in through one temple and out the other. The first day I thought it was a migraine. I’d had a few in my life. I lay in the dark with a cold washcloth and waited. The second day it was worse. I threw up twice before lunch. The light from the window felt like it was cutting into me. When Ethan came to check on me, I said, “I think I need to see a doctor.” He sat down beside me and smoothed my hair. “Tori, it’s a migraine. You know what they do at an ER? They make you wait six hours. They give you a bill for four thousand dollars and a Tylenol and they send you home. You’re fine. You just need to rest.” Denise stood in the doorway with a fresh mug in her hands. “Your mother made everything into a crisis, too, sweetheart,” she said gently. “You don’t have to be like that.”
I can still feel the way those words landed. My mother never made anything into a crisis. My mother said it’s nothing for a year while an illness consumed her spine. And Denise knew that. She’d been at the funeral. She had held my hand at the funeral. I didn’t answer her. I drank the tea because it was there and because I was too sick to argue. On the third day, I decided I would just drive myself to urgent care. I got as far as the hook by the garage door where my keys always hung. The hook was empty. “Ethan took them,” Denise said from the kitchen. “Honey, you can barely walk a straight line. You’d put that car in the lake. He’s just keeping you safe.” I asked for my phone. Ethan had put it on do not disturb and plugged it in down in the kitchen, he said, because the screen light was making my headaches worse. He’d bring it to me if anything important came in. Nothing important came in.
I threw up again that night, and Denise brought me another mug of ginger tea to settle my stomach, and Ethan sat on the edge of the bed and waited while I drank it. On the fourth day, I remembered Janet. I remembered Monday. I asked Ethan for my phone so I could call her office. “Already handled it,” he said. “I emailed her for you yesterday. Told her you’re under the weather. She said no rush. Take all the time you need.” “You emailed her from where? Your laptop, babe. You were asleep. I didn’t want her waiting on you.” He kissed my forehead. “You’re fine. Everything’s fine. Rest.” That was the third time in four days he said it. The first time it sounded like comfort. The second time it sounded tired. By the fourth day, it didn’t sound like either one, it sounded like an instruction. And the worst part, the part I’m still a little ashamed of, is that I followed it.
On the night of the fifth day, I woke up with a pen in my hand. That’s the only way I know how to say it. I came up out of a heavy, muddy sleep, and the first thing I understood was that my fingers were curled around something thin and hard, and that another hand was wrapped around mine, holding it there. The bedside lamp was on, turned down low. There was a clipboard resting on my thigh on top of the blanket. Ethan was sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning over me, his hand closed over mine. “Hey,” he whispered. “Hey, you’re okay. It’s just the insurance forms for the doctor you keep wanting. Just sign here and I’ll take care of everything.” I blinked at the paper. My eyes wouldn’t focus at first. The words swam. But I have read ten thousand documents in my life and some part of my brain that was older than the fog went looking for the heading the way it always does. Durable power of attorney.
It’s a very specific feeling reading those words with someone else’s hand on yours. It isn’t fear yet. It’s more like missing a step in the dark. Your whole body lurches before your mind catches up. I pulled my hand back. Ethan didn’t let go. His fingers tightened around my wrist hard. And he pulled my hand back down toward the paper. “Sign it, Tori.” His voice was different. Not loud, flat. The voice of a man who is done asking. “That’s not insurance,” I said. My tongue felt thick. “Ethan, that’s a power of attorney.” “It’s so I can help you. Sign it.” I twisted my wrist. He held on. He pushed my hand down until the tip of the pen touched the signature line, and I yanked sideways with everything I had, and the pen skidded across the page in one long, ugly scratch. The paper tore under it, a ragged split right through the middle of the signature block. My other hand flew out without my deciding anything. It hit the mug on the nightstand, the cream one with the big V, and knocked it flying. It hit the floor and shattered. What was left of my tea splashed across the floor, across the blanket, across the clipboard.
For one second, maybe less, Ethan’s face changed. I saw something on it I had never seen in six years of marriage. Something cold and disgusted, the way you’d look at a dog that had just ruined the carpet. “Look what you did,” he said. Then it was gone. His face softened. He let go of my wrist. He put the clipboard down on the floor beside the bed and smoothed my hair back from my forehead, and his voice went low and gentle and sad. “You’re having a bad night, babe. You’re confused. It’s okay. You’re fine.” I looked past him. Denise was standing in the doorway in her bathrobe. She didn’t say a word. She came in quietly, knelt down, and started picking up the pieces of the mug one by one, laying them in her open palm. When she’d gathered them all, she picked up the clipboard, too, tucked it against her chest, and left without looking at me.
In the morning, the floor was clean. There was a new mug on the nightstand, a plain white one. Ethan brought me toast and talked about the weather. Denise hummed in the kitchen. Nobody mentioned the night before. By noon, I had almost convinced myself I’d dreamed it. Then I went into the bathroom and pushed up the sleeve of my nightgown. And there on the inside of my left wrist were four dark marks in a row. I hadn’t dreamed anything. That afternoon, the sixth day, Denise brought my tea up early. Ethan was in the shower. I took the plain white mug, thanked her, and when she left, I walked very carefully into the bathroom and poured the whole thing down the sink. I want to be honest about why I did it. I think I did it because I hated that new white mug. Because it sat where the V mug used to sit. Pouring it out was the only thing in that house I could still say no to. By evening, the iron rod in my head had loosened a quarter turn. Not gone, just loosened.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Around ten, I went down the back stairs toward the laundry room for a clean towel. The laundry room shares a heating vent with the little room off the kitchen that Ethan uses as an office. When my father renovated in the nineties, he never quite sealed it. And when I was a girl, I used to sit on the dryer and listen to my parents talk about Christmas presents through that vent. I heard Ethan’s voice through it now. “Just the usual amount, Mom. You promised. You said it just keeps her resting.” Then Denise, sharp and tired. “Calvin says if she’s not signed by Friday, we do it his way. It’s already Friday, Ethan. You had your chance last night and she tore the darn thing in half.” “I know. I know. Tomorrow. I’ll get it done tomorrow.” “You’d better because I’m not having that man look at me the way he looked at me today.” A chair scraped. Footsteps. I stood in the dark laundry room with a towel against my chest and my heart going so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I put it together the only way I knew how. They were drugging me. Sleeping pills, something like that. Crushed into the tea to keep me foggy and agreeable long enough to sign that paper. That’s what I believed that night. It was bad enough. I didn’t have the imagination yet for anything worse.
