I Wish You Happy: A Novel Read online

  “You promised,” she says. “You promised to help me, and now you’re here with him. You want me to go to the hospital?”

  No words will come when I first try to speak. I manage to swallow. Once, twice, and then again. “I don’t want you to die,” I finally manage, my gaze locked with hers.

  Kat does not release me. “My life,” she says. “My choice. And if you both think that seventy-two hours in the loony bin is going to fix me, you’re crazier than I am.”

  Guilt weighs heavy on me. An obligation. As if, having almost killed her, now I am responsible for both her sanity and her safety.

  “I’m afraid it’s not that easy,” Cole says. “The hospital is not an option just now.”

  Kat laughs, a harsh sound, far from mirth. “Make up your mind. What exactly do you want from me?”

  “Your safety,” he says. He rubs the back of his neck with one hand and stifles a yawn with the other. “Sorry, been up all night. Here’s the thing. None of the hospitals seem to be able to care for somebody with your injuries. Sacred Heart is really the only one that might be able to handle it, and they’re full. Eastern has beds, but they won’t even think about taking you, not with the medical follow-up and the fractures. So we’re back to making a crisis plan.”

  “You appear to have given it plenty of thought,” Kat says. “What do you propose?”

  “Tom was willing to have you come home. Just to heal, he said, to be clear.”

  “No.”

  Cole’s lips curve in a rueful smile. “He also said you would say that. Any other family you could stay with? Parents? Siblings?”

  “Let me be clear.”

  Kat has mastered her tears. She looks cold and remote, her lips move stiffly. “If you send me back to live with my husband or my family, I will kill myself. Sooner, later, there will be no if. Do you understand this?”

  “The only other option I have is the crisis house.”

  “What is that?”

  “The agency I work for has a safe house. It’s staffed around the clock. You could be there on observation, although we also are not equipped to deal with your injuries.”

  “She can stay with me.” The words are out of my mouth before they’ve even connected with my brain.

  Both of them stare at me, Cole and Kat, as if I’m speaking Sumerian.

  Silence grows around us, and I fill it, the words coming from somewhere that has nothing to do with logic or sense.

  “You can have the bedroom. I’ll sleep on the couch. I’m a nurse; I can help with your care. It’s small, but better than the crisis house, right?”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Cole says, slowly. I can’t read him, can’t identify the emotion emanating from him, but it grates on my skin like sandpaper.

  “Do you have a better one?”

  “Give me a bit. She’s not being released today. There’s time—”

  “Hey,” Kat interjects. “Over here. Do I get a say in this or is it just between the two of you?”

  “Sorry. Of course.” Tearing myself away from the target lock I have on Cole is a physical jolt. Even when I’m not looking at him I can feel his energy, so different from Kat’s. Hers dark and secretive, his fierce and bright.

  “I don’t need handouts—” Kat begins, but I cut her off.

  “Let me do this. I ran over you. So you turned in front of my car. I wasn’t looking. I glanced away. Maybe I could have stopped. So it’s my fault, too. Let me give you a place to stay until you’re mended.”

  My words hang between us all, and I realize I’m holding my breath, waiting for judgment.

  Neither of them says a thing.

  “I promised,” I say, glancing at Cole out of the corner of my eye and then away. “I told Kat I wouldn’t let them send her to the hospital. And I promised you I would help you. We’re all in this together now.”

  “Rae,” Cole protests, “I don’t—”

  “You wanted me to be here. I’m here. You want a safe place for her to stay. I’m as good as it gets.”

  He runs both hands through his hair, standing it on end. Dark stubble shadows his jaw. I’m still furious with him, but I also want to smooth his hair, want to make that bright flash of a smile appear on his face.

  “If you’re sure,” Kat says. “Since Cole will never just let me be.”

  “I’m sure. What do we have to do?”

  He doesn’t like it. He really doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t argue anymore. Extracting a folder from his briefcase, he selects a sheet of paper and fills in some blanks. Then he passes it to Kat.

  Her brow creases as she reads.

  “I have to do counseling? Please tell me you’re not serious.”

  He answers her with a look.

  “Oh, for God’s sake. I’ve done so much counseling I could be the counselor.”

  “I can keep looking for a hospital bed. There’s also the option of trying for a single bed certification—keeping you here with the sitter until you’re judged to be no longer a risk to yourself.”

  “You’re a bastard, you are.” But her eyes go back to the paper. “Fine. Hook me up with a counselor. Give me an antidepressant. They don’t work, just so you know.” She initials boxes as she reads. “Yes, I will stay with Rae and advise her of my whereabouts should I ever be well enough to go somewhere on my own. Yes, I promise not to kill myself or commit any acts of self-harm for”—she looks up at the ceiling for inspiration—“for two weeks. Sorry. That’s all I will promise to.”

  “I’m good with that,” Cole says, quietly. “Much better than promising the moon with no intention of keeping your word.”

  She signs with a flourish and passes the paper to me.

  “Your turn.”

  The paper has an official agency header and two columns. One is for Kat’s responsibilities. The other is mine. I’m promising to lock up all sharp items, to manage any and all of Kat’s medications, to assist her in getting to counseling and medical appointments, to let Cole know the minute she breaks her end of the bargain or if I’m worried about her.

  I hadn’t realized, quite, what I was committing to when I blurted out my impulsive offer for her to come and live with me. She’s not a motherless kitten or a bird with a broken wing, or even a naked rat too young to fend for himself.

  She’s a human being with a history I don’t know—a history that includes enough desperation to carve into her wrist with every intention to die, to turn her bike in front of a car. My hand is shaking by the time I’ve initialed all of the items and moved to the binding signature at the end.

  I’m committed, though. I’ve stated my case. I’ve talked myself into this corner. And I am not about to let her kill herself, not if I can stop her.

  I sign and pass the paper over to Cole. His eyes are dark and resigned and sad, all of which are emotions I don’t want to equate with him.

  The tension between the three of us wraps around my lungs and makes it hard to breathe. I need to get out of this room. Away from Kat and her darkness, away from Cole and his conflictedness, mostly away from myself, but there is no escape from that.

  A nurse comes in and saves us all from any ensuing awkwardness.

  “You’ve been up quite long enough,” the nurse says to Kat. “It’s past time for your pain meds. Do you two mind?” Her lips are pursed in disapproval, of what I’m not certain, but I’m glad for the excuse. Cole follows right behind me.

  “You all right?” he asks.

  “Not exactly.” I keep walking. He keeps pace beside me.

  “I had no idea you were going to do that.”

  Despite the fact that I had no idea, either, I turn on him. “What did you expect me to do? Why did you ask me to be there, if that’s not what you had in mind? Looked to me like you had no plan at all.”

  “I thought . . . she might listen to you.”

  “Yeah. Well, it looks to me like she needs somebody to listen to her. What’s wrong with her husband, anyway? Why isn’t he
here? What kind of man doesn’t come see his wife when she’s been run over by a car?”

  He doesn’t answer, probably maintaining some idea of confidentiality. Well, it’s a little late for that.

  “A lot can change in a couple of days,” he says. “Listen, about the Oscar Event.”

  My footsteps slow, waiting for the punch line.

  “My schedule got changed. One of my coworkers had a family crisis out of town, the other one is sick. Looks like I’m on call Saturday night.”

  As excuses go, it’s a decent one. I didn’t want the Oscar Event. I check myself for relief, but what I feel is disappointment.

  “Nancy will be devastated.”

  “She’ll be fine. We’ll just have to shuffle it off to the next weekend. It will give her longer to live.” The flash of humor is back in his voice, side by side with exhaustion and determination and the lingering disapproval.

  “You’re not cancelling it?”

  “You can’t cancel an Event.”

  “What about Kat? Don’t I have to watch her every minute?”

  “Were you planning to not go back to work?”

  My feet stop of their own accord. Cole stops, too. This forces me to look at him, to make the eye contact I’ve been avoiding. The intensity of his gaze makes me feel dizzy, and I look away. “I have to work. I was thinking—if I secure her meds and the sharps—there’s not too much she can do to hurt herself.”

  I expect he’ll argue, tell me I’m not a fit watchdog after all.

  What he says is as unexpected as my mother’s late-life crisis.

  “It’s really just a formality, all of this planning. We can’t stop her, if she’s hell-bent on doing it.”

  Images throng the movie theater in my head. Kat dead on the floor, my paring knife lodged in her chest. Kat hanging from the ceiling. A tiny Kat curled up in Oscar’s cage, one hand resting on the exercise wheel. This one is bizarre, even for me, and I shake it off in favor of reality, even though in this case reality means Cole and the darkness in his voice just now.

  “I don’t understand you, at all,” I tell him.

  I’m rewarded with a flash of his smile, a little subdued but still bright, still there, not at all altered by the depth of the sadness I pick up from him at the same time.

  “That makes two of us,” he says. “I’ll call you.”

  Chapter Nine

  Kat comes home on Sunday.

  We ditch the nurses at the station, and I roll her out to the car myself in the wheelchair. It’s an absolutely gorgeous day. Warm, not hot, with a clear blue sky you could get lost in, and a gentle breeze blowing away the besmirching pain-racked atmosphere of the hospital.

  “Stop,” Kat says, the minute we clear the doors.

  I think maybe she’s changed her mind about going home with me, but she leans her head back to get the sun on her face and makes a sound that is half purr. “You forget, locked up inside, what sun feels like,” she says.

  I know what she means.

  For my sixteenth birthday, I got the measles.

  I’d had all of my immunizations right on schedule. My mother, a firm believer in the infallibility of vaccines, felt personally betrayed when the damning red rash erupted on my itchy skin. She drew the blood for the confirmation test at home, herself, rather than allow a display of my immune system’s failure at the clinic.

  Of course, I was never dangerously ill, or I would have been whisked off to the hospital forthwith. As it was, I didn’t leave the house for two weeks, not until the last, lingering vestige of rash was gone.

  I remember with crystal clarity that first breath of fresh air when I stepped outside. The movement of a breeze on my face, the expanding world with all of its smells and colors and changing rhythms. The sensory impact nearly knocked me off my feet. So I do know something of what Kat is feeling, and I wait until she says, “Okay, let’s go,” before I resume our progression to the car.

  They’ve pronounced her pelvic fracture as stable and not in need of surgery. But the bone is still broken. That and the staples in her belly make moving agony for her. By the time I have her stowed in the car her skin has blanched white, the bruises standing out in garish contrast.

  “No seat belt,” she says, when I reach for it. “Ribs,” she adds, as if she knows I’m wondering about her death wish. “Belt would do more damage than good.”

  She’s probably got a point. It’s only a few blocks to my place, anyway. I drive like I’ve got an unbuckled baby in that seat, feathering the brakes at every intersection, double- and triple-checking for oncoming traffic, accelerating at a pace that makes even the elderly gentleman behind me lift both hands in the air in a what on earth are you doing? gesture of frustration.

  Finally, though, we reach the moment I’ve been dreading.

  I get her out of the car and into the chair, then roll her in through the front door. I try to see the house through her eyes. The tiny front room, with my secondhand couch and armchair, the overflowing bookshelves, the clean white walls with the poster print décor. The kitchen with the scarred wooden table and two old chairs. And then on into the bedroom, which I’ve arranged for her with clean sheets and a new comforter. A bouquet of fresh flowers conceals the water marks on the dresser, and a small bedside table covers the spot where Oscar’s cage used to be.

  There’s just enough room to roll the chair up to the bed.

  Kat waves off my attempt to help. “I can do this,” she says. Bearing all of her weight on the good leg, she pivots, balancing on the arm of the chair. A gasp of pain escapes her as she sinks down onto the mattress, and she sits like a statue, eyes closed, barely breathing.

  This time she doesn’t object when I kneel down to take off her shoes and then help her swing her legs up onto the bed. I dispense an oxycodone, bringing her a glass of water with a straw so she doesn’t have to sit up. It’s stuffy and a little too warm, so I open the window and turn on the fan to get air circulating.

  “You’ve thought of everything,” Kat murmurs, lying back with her eyes closed, as if all of the energy has been sucked out of her. “This is lovely.”

  She says nothing about the shabbiness or the posters or any of the other shortcomings that I fear my mother will go on about. Back out in the living room I flop down onto the couch, hoping this isn’t all a terrible mistake.

  It’s not forever, I remind myself. It was the only option.

  But my living space feels heavy and claustrophobic, an energy of pain and sadness permeating the atmosphere.

  While Kat rests and recovers from the trip, I spend my time figuring out how to honor my part of the crisis agreement. All of my sharps, not that I have many, go into a locked box I picked up at Walmart. Kitchen knives, scissors, razors. Now I add in Kat’s medications. The pain pills. Vitamins. Her hospital discharge instructions from the physician, the list of exercises from her physical therapist. With some dismay I realize she has a lot of appointments. A follow-up with the orthopedic surgeon. A follow-up with the general surgeon. Physical therapy twice a week. Counseling isn’t set up yet, and we’ll have to wedge that in somewhere.

  Just getting her to appointments is going to be a logistical challenge, given that I will still have to go to work.

  The anger I feel toward her husband wells up again. He should be here. He should come and take her home. Unless, of course, he’s an abusive asshole. Maybe he beats her. Maybe her whole existence has been one of gaslighting and verbal abuse, and the whole reason she’s been suicidal in the first place is because of him.

  Protectiveness of Kat fills me with a dark energy. I will take care of her. Forget wishing. I will find a way to make her happy.

  By the time Kat wakes up from her nap, I’m ready with a plan. The pain pill is doing its job, and we get her into the wheelchair and out to the living room without too much trouble, taking a detour to the bathroom.

  “I can manage this,” she says.

  There’s no room to get the wheelchair in and close
the door, so I walk away to the kitchen to give her privacy, wincing at a couple of thuds and a stifled groan. There are also reassuring sounds. The toilet flushing. Water running.

  “Well,” she says, rolling herself out to the living room, “that was an adventure.”

  “It will get easier. Hungry?”

  She shrugs. “I guess.”

  Pain meds, inactivity, and depression don’t make for a healthy appetite. I, on the other hand, am starving, and she needs to eat so her body can heal. Martha Stewart I am not. In fact, as I carry out two bowls of tomato soup and a plate of grilled cheese sandwiches, I realize that I eat like a college student.

  “I’ll go shopping tomorrow,” I tell her, setting the food on the coffee table and drawing over my old TV stand to set it up in front of her wheelchair. “I tend not to cook, since it’s just me.”

  Kat leans forward and inhales a little too deeply, her hand going automatically to her side to brace her ribs. “I love tomato soup. Just like this. Out of the can. Tom didn’t—” She stops midthought. “Anyway, this is perfect.”

  She sounds like she means it, but I’m still braced for criticism. I realize I don’t know her at all—what she likes or dislikes, what interests her. The only bond we have is pain and death, which is great for cosmic moments but not so much for an evening of togetherness in a small and confined space.

  “Would you like to watch TV? Or read, maybe? I have tons of books.”

  “I noticed.” A smile takes the sting out of what might have been sarcasm. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile, and my heart grabs on to hope and runs with it. “How about a movie?”

  “Sure.” We scan through Netflix and select Sleepless in Seattle.

  “I’ve never actually watched this,” I confess as I cue it up.

  “Me, either,” she says. “Why, I wonder?”

  I know why. I’ve started watching it twice, and bailed within the first thirty minutes. It’s not just the grief of Tom Hanks and his young son at the beginning, it’s the knowing that people have relationships like that. So deep, so connected. It makes me feel alien and alone.