Jessica Chiarella - And Again

“Honey,” he says, as I’m reaching for my closet door. My hand freezes. He looks like he’s steeling himself against something, the way he used to look when we’d drive down to his parents’ house in Iowa for Christmas. I imagine his father’s gray crew cut and his booming voice. Could I possibly be so fearsome?

I open the closet, and then I understand Tom’s hesitance. The ironing board rests against one wall of the little walk-in space. Boxes labeled “Christmas Decorations — Upstairs” are stacked in the corner. My clothes are gone. I step inside. All my things are gone. My shoes. Even the tall, thin dresser that held my belts and scarves and underthings, it’s gone too.

“Where…” is all I can manage. My vocal chords have wound themselves into a tight little knot at the base of my throat. I’m wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt that Tom bought me at the Target on State Street before I left the hospital, and it occurs to me that this is all I have. My clothes are gone.

“We sold some of it. And donated some of it,” Tom says. “But honey, this was years ago. You have to understand, we had no idea.” He doesn’t finish, but I know what he’s going to say. There’s no way he could possibly have known that I would be cured. It would be illogical to keep my things, especially when the closet could so easily be used to store an ironing board and Christmas decorations. Why keep around reminders of a wife who might as well be dead?

“Who is ‘we’?” I ask.

“Me and the kids.”

“Oh.” My family. My traitorous little family, ganging up against me. The question swings back at me again, the one I asked Dr. Bernard at the first support group meeting.

“We didn’t get rid of all of it. Some of your things are up in the attic.” He pauses, waiting for something. Gratitude, maybe? When he doesn’t get it, he continues. “We’ll get you new things, of course. Tomorrow, we can go out and get you a whole closet of new clothes.”

“Sure.” After all, what is the loss of my belongings when I’ve already faced the loss of eight years of my life? I imagine this is what it must be like for families whose houses have burned down, leaving them nothing familiar to call their own. I remember stories of refugees who would not give up their deteriorating shoes because they were the only things remaining from their old lives. That is what I am, I think. A refugee. A woman who has been so cast out of her life that she will forever be a stranger in it.

“I don’t want,” Tom begins, and then he gets choked up, wipes at his eyes. Tom has always been the one of us who was quickest to cry. It’s amusing in a dark way, how some things never change. “I don’t want you to think we didn’t miss you,” he says, his voice an octave higher than usual because of the strain of his tears. I used to find it endearing, his wealth of emotion and his willingness to display it openly. But I’ve seen him cry one too many times during the past eight years to see it as anything but useless. Pathetic, even. “We missed you every single day. If I had thought there was any chance at all that you could come back, I would have saved every single thing. But baby, they told me there was no chance. Zero. They told me there was no point in believing in miracles.”

“Right,” I say, nodding, shutting the closet door. Is this a miracle, this thing that has happened to me? I don’t know. It feels too clumsy, to fleshy and utilitarian, to be miraculous. But I don’t want to argue with him, so instead I stand there and watch him cry.

The TV is huge. It might be the biggest TV I’ve ever seen, the kind you’d usually find mounted on the walls of sports bars so a person sitting in one of the back tables can still see the game. It takes up half the living room, eclipsing most of the brick fireplace against the back wall. That fireplace was the clincher for us when we were looking at houses; we imagined ourselves wrapped in wool blankets, sitting in front of crackling logs in the middle of winter, and we made an offer on the spot. We’d actually used the fireplace only once or twice, in the years we lived here before my accident. I wonder if it’s been used at all since.

“It’s a little much, I know,” Tom says from the kitchen, when he sees me standing in front of the big black screen of the television. “It was a sort of family Christmas present last year. I might have gone a little overboard.”

It strikes me that we didn’t even have a TV when we first moved in here. Our old apartment was so small that we’d watch movies on Tom’s desktop computer, and we’d eventually bought an ancient TV at the Brown Elephant when we decided that our kids deserved to grow up on Sesame Street the way we did. But I never imagined anything like this, not for us.

I’m delighted by it. Even the remote is gigantic, nearly as long as a paper-towel roll and twice as wide. It feels like a weapon in my hand when I pick it up. I’m endlessly fascinated by how things feel to the touch, now that I’m more able to discern one sensation from another. It’s gotten easier to filter through the chaos of sights and sounds and movement, and I’ll find myself running my hands over the wood of our kitchen table or the scratchy fibers of a knitted throw or my own skin, and marveling at the texture and temperature inherent in all of these things. My favorite thing is sticking my fingers into the container of uncooked rice Tom keeps on the counter. It’s a shivery feeling, like dipping your hand into water that’s not quite water, and I do it again and again when Tom is in another room, feeling my stomach clench every time at the sensation.

The TV remote is surprisingly heavy, and I point it at the TV with one hand and press the red button at the top with my other. The screen flickers to life, like the start of some great engine. The volume is so loud that it knocks me back and I drop the remote, which hits the floor with a plasticine pop, sending batteries scattering. I clap my hands over my ears as Tom rushes around the kitchen counter and fiddles with one of the black boxes in the cabinet beneath the TV, and the volume quiets to a tolerable level. Whatever Tom is saying is muffled through my hands, so I gingerly remove them from over my ears.

“… had his video game plugged in. He cranks the volume up and the whole house sounds like a war zone. I swear, I’m going to get PTSD, but he and Katie are just happy as clams.” He retrieves the remote from the floor. “Where’d the batteries go?”

I don’t really answer, because I’m still recovering from the sudden onslaught of sound. I feel shaken, like all of my nerves have been thoroughly plucked, and my palms are clammy. My heart is charging forward like I’ve had a near-miss on the expressway.

Tom kneels down to fish the batteries out from under the sofa, and then hands the remote back to me. “I’d tell you what’s on, but I figure you probably know better than I do, right?” he says with a too-big grin, as if he’s said something devilishly funny. I nod, but I don’t smile back.

As it turns out, the TV is quite the revelation. I turn it on as soon as Tom bustles the kids off to school in the morning and then departs for his job running his outdoor equipment service. It’s bright, so bright that I could probably sit with the curtains closed and hardly tell the difference. The picture has a clarity that I can barely believe; the characters are three-feet tall and I can see every line on their faces. It convinces me even more that Connie would make a terrific actress now, because even the sharpest of cameras couldn’t pick up a flaw in the skin of her face. It makes me feel proud in a possessive sort of way, as if I’d created Connie myself out of a perfect piece of clay.