One of my jobs is helping Victoria with meals.
I meet Adam in the kitchen to discuss meal planning. I’m not exactly a gourmet chef, but I can do the basics. Spaghetti. Macaroni and cheese. I can put together a sandwich. It’s not rocket science. Unfortunately, Adam explains it won’t be that easy.
“Vicky chokes on regular consistency foods,” he says. “So anything you give her has to be ground up.” He gestures at an expensive-looking device on the kitchen counter. “I got this food processor to turn everything into a purée. Everything she eats has to go in there first.”
I cringe, imagining what it would be like to have all my meals puréed for me. Puréed steak would get old fast.
“And in a pinch…” He taps open a cabinet above the sink. “She could eat any of these.”
It’s baby food. Rows and rows of baby food. Puréed carrots. Sweet potato. Mashed peas. Stuff no adult should ever be consuming.
I swallow a lump in my throat. “I’d hate to have to feed her baby food…”
His cheeks color slightly. “I don’t use the baby food much, but sometimes there just isn’t time to cook something that tastes reasonable as a purée. Believe me, this stuff is a lifesaver.” He lets the cabinet door swing closed. “You can let her have water, but only if she drinks it very slowly. Keep a close eye on her.”
I nod. “What if she doesn’t want to eat?”
He lifts a shoulder. “It’s not a big deal. She’s got a feeding tube in her belly, so if you give me a sense of how much she eats, we can give her extra nutrition through the tube.”
Poor Victoria. She looked so happy in that photograph on the mantle. Happy and beautiful and young and alive. And now her life is puréed baby food and a tube stuck in her belly. “Adam?”
He raises his green eyes, although I can tell he’s still focused on the task of teaching me food preparation. “Yes?”
“Is… Is Victoria ever going to recover?”
Of all the hard questions I’ve had to ask him, this is the worst. He inhales sharply and rakes a hand through his hair. I want to take the question back, but I also don’t. I want to know the answer. I want him to tell me that, yes, she looks bad right now, but she’s going to get better. Someday, she’ll be that pretty girl in the photograph again.
“The doctor said…” He clears his throat. “They said she’s recovered all she’s going to at this point.” He drops his eyes. “We had her in rehab for a while, but she wasn’t making any progress. She was there for three months and was still completely dependent for everything. She still couldn’t move her right side at all and that was really limiting her progress. And the speech just wasn’t getting better. So… I took her home, figuring she might do better in her own environment. But…” He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. “It looks like this is it. This is the best she’s going to get.”
Wow. So that’s that.
I want to reach out and put a hand on his shoulder, but it seems like it would be somehow inappropriate. “I… I’m sorry.”
He lets out a sigh. “Yeah. Well, she’s my wife and I’m going to take care of her. I made a vow. I’m not going to let her end up in a nursing home. No way.”
I admire this man. Adam is young and attractive—he could have any woman he wants. But instead, he’s honoring his marriage vows and staying loyal to a woman who barely seems capable of acknowledging his existence. He promised to love her in sickness and in health, and by golly, he’s doing it.
I feel terrible that my next thought is: this guy is never going to have sex again for the rest of his life.
It’s true though. And it seems unfair. Adam is young. Victoria, as she is now, can’t be a partner to him in any sense of the word. She can’t give him children. Is he simply going to dedicate the rest of his life to a woman who can give him nothing back?
Of course, I can’t say any of that. I barely know the guy, and he’s my boss. So I just smile and say, “I think that’s really romantic.”
Which is partially true.
He rubs at the back of his neck. “Here, let me show you how to make mashed potatoes the way she likes them.”
Ultimately, Victoria’s dinner consists of a mound of mashed potatoes, seasoned with butter and salt (“nothing spicy—it will upset her stomach”) and a mound of puréed meat. The meat is ground beef at least, so it could be worse. It could be puréed lobster. But the food on the plate seems very unappetizing. I certainly wouldn’t want to eat it.
But Victoria will have to.
I climb the stairs carefully, holding the plate in one hand and the railing with the other. I’m terrified of this staircase. With every step, I wonder if this is the one where Victoria tripped and fell down the stairs, ruining her entire life.
When I get to Victoria’s room, I find her exactly as she was the first time I met her. She’s sitting in her wheelchair, staring vacantly out the window. She does not react at all when I rap my fist against her open door. I know she won’t answer, but it’s force of habit.
“Hi, Victoria!” I say cheerfully. “It’s dinner time!” She still doesn’t look up at me. Well, fine.
I walk across the room with her food and place it on the tray that Adam snapped onto her wheelchair. There’s a glass of water on her dresser and I put that on the tray as well. Then I pull up a seat next to her and sit down.
“Do you want to give eating a try, Victoria?” I ask her.
She doesn’t turn her head. Her restless left hand reaches for her face.
Her fingers run along that painful-looking scar on her cheek.
I clear my throat. I remember the nickname Adam always calls her by. “Vicky?”
Finally, she tears her eyes away from the window. But she doesn’t look pleased. She frowns at me. Maybe I shouldn’t have called her Vicky. I don’t know her well enough to call her by a nickname. I’m going to start over.
“My name is Sylvia.” I already told her that once, but I’m assuming it’s now new information to her. “But a lot of people call me Sylvie. You can call me that if you like.”
Victoria doesn’t have anything to say to that. “Can you say my name? Sylvie?”
I don’t know what I was thinking. That maybe I could teach Victoria to say my name? That I would perform some sort of miracle on this poor
woman? Well, that doesn’t happen. She just stares at me with her one good eye with the other one still pointed at the window.
I pick up her spoon from the plate and hold it out to her. “Do you want to take a bite? It’s pretty good.”
Well, the mashed potatoes are pretty good. I can’t say the same for the puréed meat. To be honest, the sight of it is making me queasy.
Victoria obediently takes the spoon with her left hand. Her right remains motionless in the armrest. But she doesn’t make any motion to scoop up any potatoes. She doesn’t have the slightest bit of interest.
Well, Adam had said that most days, he has to feed her. It looks like that’s going to be the case today.
“Would you like me to feed you?” I ask her. “Or… would you like something else to eat?”
Victoria’s eyes widen. All of a sudden, there’s a clarity there that I hadn’t seen before. The blank expression is gone and I catch a glimpse of the girl from the photo. “Dorn,” she says.
Dorn? What the hell is a dorn?
I look around the room, trying to figure it out. “Door?” I try. “Do you want me to close the door?”
“No. No.” Victoria shakes her head. A little bit of drool leaks from the right side of her mouth, and that’s when I realize the entire right side of her face droops. She can only lift her lips on the left. I hadn’t noticed it before because her expression was always so blank. “Dorn. It’s… dorn.”
“Dorm?” I guess. Whatever that means.
She’s getting frustrated. She throws the spoon down on her tray and starts gesturing with her left hand. “Dorn! In… dorn!”
Oh God. She’s getting really agitated. “Listen…” I rise to my feet. “Let me get Adam. He’ll know—”
“No!” The expression on her face is almost wild. “Dorn! For… dorn!”
Her left hand is shaking, but she manages to extend her index finger. She’s pointing at something. I turn around and realize she’s pointing at her dresser. “Drawer? Do you mean drawer?”
Victoria’s shoulders finally go limp. She nods slowly. Okay then.
I walk over to the drawer she was pointing at. I pull it open. It’s filled with… sweatpants. So.
I lift one of the pairs of pants from the drawer. “Do you want new pants?”
She looks at me like I’m the biggest moron on the planet. She shakes her head and puffs with frustration. Her left hand is very shaky but she manages to point more vigorously. “Dorn. In…”
I don’t know what else to do. So I start pulling pairs of sweatpants out of the drawer and holding each one up for her. They all look about the same. I get that she’s frustrated, but so am I. It seems like there’s something very specific she wants, and I have no clue what it is.
Until I pull a pair of gray sweats from the drawer and a notebook falls
out.
Victoria’s shoulders finally relax. “Dorn,” she says softly. “You…”
I pick up the notebook which is bound in leather and about an inch
thick. I flip through it and see pages of handwritten words. I can tell from the tiny, careful lettering that a woman wrote it. (What can I say—men have terrible penmanship.) I flip to the first page and see the date from three years ago.
Today I met the man I am going to marry.
I realize what I’m looking at. This is a diary.
I lift my eyes from the book. Victoria is watching me. Her one good eye is clear as day. The other is still looking in the other direction. This is the most alert I’ve ever seen her.
“You,” she says again.
I nearly jump when I hear loud footsteps outside the door. I shove the notebook back into the drawer and slam it shut, barely missing the tips of my fingers. Adam is standing in the doorway, a large syringe in his hand that looks more appropriate for basting a turkey than giving an injection.
“Hey,” he says. “I want to give Victoria her medications. Is this a bad time?”
Oh my God. Is he going to inject her with that? It looks like a syringe you’d use to give elephants their medications. “You’re going to inject her with that?”
He looks down at the syringe then his face breaks out in a smile. “No.
God, no. It goes into her feeding tube.”
He mentioned earlier that he would train me to give her food through the tube, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a feeding tube up close and personal. He lifts the hem of her T-shirt and I see the tube jutting out of her belly. He reaches for the end of the tube, and while he’s trying to uncork it, Victoria grabs at his wrist with her left hand. It takes me a moment to realize she’s trying to keep him from giving her the medications. She’s fumbling for his wrist, trying to scratch him and shove him away, but he ignores her. He sticks the syringe into the end of the tube and injects the contents.
“She doesn’t seem to like that very much,” I comment.
“No, she doesn’t,” he agrees. He puts the stopper back on her tube and lowers the hem of her shirt. “I’m sure it doesn’t feel good when it goes in. But she needs her medications. That reminds me…” He taps on her right hand. “One thing I need you to do is keep her fingernails trimmed. I don’t need to get scratched when I’m trying to do this. There’s a nail clipper in the bathroom.”
It makes me think of when I used to trim my cat’s fingernails when I was a child, so she wouldn’t scratch up our furniture. “Okay,” I agree.
Now that she’s had her medications, the fight seems to have gone out of Victoria. She’s slumped in her wheelchair, her blue eyes cloudy. Adam touches her cheek gently. “I’m sorry we had to do that, Vicky baby,” he murmurs.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even look at him.
I want to tell him about the notebook I found, but when I look over at Victoria, she slowly shakes her head. I have no idea why, but if she doesn’t want him to have her notebook, I have to respect that. It’s obvious she wants me to have it. You, she said.
He lets out a sigh as he looks down at the plate of food she hasn’t even touched. “Sylvia, see if you can get her to eat… something. But I’ll come back in half an hour and we’ll give her food through the tube if she won’t.”
“Does she eat most nights?”
He shakes his head. “No. Not really.”
The first thing I do when Adam leaves the room is take the notebook back out of the drawer and tuck it inside my sweater.
