Mia Darien - Good Things

Squeezing his hand often, she talked to him. It was the most energetic thing she had managed to do since they ended up in this terrible place. She felt like she nearly had roots stretching into the ground, to be uprooted when they came to move him to another room for longer-term care than ICU could provide.

Jesse didn’t like when that happened. “Long term” were words that poked holes in her brain and her heart, letting her hope leak out and run off down the hallway. The fog around her thickened and she followed the wheeled hospital bed with the orderlies through the hospital until they reached the new room.

This one had four people in it, all curtained off. Not all of them were in a coma, but they were all “long term” care.

Long term...

Sitting beside his old bed in its new location, she traced the lines on his hand over and over again. She’d lived with these hands for over ten years now, but had never spent as much time contemplating them as she had these past three days. The door opened, but now there was only a one-quarter chance it was for her. She didn’t bother looking up, but the clicking of a pair of professional pumps on the tile floor drew near her.

“Mrs. Dixon?” the voice belonging to the heels asked. As expected, the voice was female.

Jesse forced herself to look up and received an overly sympathetic smile. She introduced herself as Ella Ari, and she was a social worker at the hospital. She came to talk over...’things’ with the patient’s wife.

It had taken only the length of a breath for Jesse to decide she hated the woman. She stared at her like steel doors were shutting around all the open ports in her mind. She blocked away her hatred, but stared silently and blankly. The social worker just droned on, and everything she said sounded like a grief counselor come to console Jesse.

“He’s not dead yet, you know,” Jesse murmured.

“What was that?” the other woman asked, still with her funereal air.

“I said...” Jesse replied, forcing her voice louder as she lifted her dead gaze to Ms. Ari. “I said, he’s not dead yet. Stop talking to me like you’re here to help me mourn.” She spoke each of these words with enunciation, hints of her emotions slipping into it.

Ari blinked. “I... I didn’t meant to imply otherwise, Mrs. Dixon. But we must face the possibilities—”

Jesse cut her off harshly. “No, I mustn’t!” Pressing her lips together, she forced herself to reel it back in. There was nothing this social worker could do to her or Tom, except bother her deeply. She ground her back teeth together for a moment. “My husband is not dead and until they come in and tell me otherwise, that’s the only possibility I plan to focus on.”

To her credit, Ari recovered quickly and nodded. She put a card down on the small table beside Tom’s bed. “If you need anything,” she said and hastily made her exit.

When the door shut, Jesse shuddered with her entire body. Once again, she gripped Tom’s hand tightly in hers and then pressed her forehead against their fingers. Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to stem the flow of tears as they welled up in her eyes but there was no stopping them and they spilled over their joined hands.

She cried for what seemed like forever before finally lifting her eyes to look over Tom’s face. It just looked like he was sleeping, nothing like he was hovering on the verge between this world and the next. What would it take to pull him off that point and into this existence again?

Rising, she stroked his cheek and then pressed her lips to his ear. “If I have to crawl into the hall of the gods and strangle the All-Father myself to bring you back, I will.” She pressed her lips to his cheek and then left his room.

Jesse knew she could do nothing for him just sitting and crying at his bedside.

Their studio apartment felt bereft the moment she walked into it. The emptiness and darkness was so total that she almost turned around and left again. She stopped herself from doing so and walked in.

She turned on all the lights, whether she needed them or not, and she turned on the television to a show Tom liked and let it run. It didn’t matter if she liked it, just that its noise filled the space. Jesse even turned the heat up to where Tom liked it, and where she was constantly turning it down from in their Thermostat War.

Some part of her knew that she should eat something, but instead she went right to her laptop. Setting it up on the bed, since she didn’t have a desk for it, she let the background noise start to soothe the gaping pit in her soul—which she could feel like a physical pain just below her breastbone—while she pulled up the internet.

Jesse accessed the saved links she had for her pagan studies. Although not wholly Asatru—those who were devoted to the Norse gods and reforging their ways—her pantheon was full of the deities of the Northmen. She knew others that she could call and ask questions of, but she didn’t want to.

There was an idea blossoming in her mind, but she didn’t want to share it. She knew they would think she was crazy, but she had always believed that the gods were all around them. If you looked hard enough, you could find them. She was more literal than a great many of her fellow pagans, but that was okay in their world.

Just searching the internet for the old tales from the North about how people used to gain the attention of the gods was overwhelming, and she knew there was a task ahead of her to sort through them all and find the ones that might be useful. She knew that simple prayers, even over her altar, would not call them down. If it did, then there would be a lot more chats over beer with Thor and Freyr.

Time ceased to have any meaning. At one point, she forced herself to get a glass of water.

She found a notebook on the dining room table and flipped past pages of shopping lists and things to do until she found blank pages. Setting it on the bed beside the laptop, she began taking notes. Some of them were direct from the pages she saw, and others were about eddas and sagas that she needed to find and research. She knew that she had some in books that she already owned.

Names and years and places began to swim before her vision and started to make less and less sense. When she had to re-read the same word four times and it still didn’t make sense, she began to wonder if maybe the lack of sleep and food was telling on her.

Closing the laptop, she put it on the nightstand and then laid down on the bed just as she was. She had taken off her shoes earlier, but left her clothing on.

She didn’t sleep.

Every time her eyes opened, she saw the empty side of the bed. When she flipped over, her bruised arm hurt and she saw Tom’s winter coat as it hung by the door until the season when it was needed again. She tried lying on her back, but just wasn’t comfortable. It felt unnatural to try to sleep that way.

Getting up, she grabbed her pillow and then Tom’s and carried them to the couch. With her own under her head and his in her arms, she resisted the pain from her bruises to keep that pillow clutched to her chest as she closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep.

Eventually, her exhausted body and mind forced both to shut down into a state of restless, dreamless sleep.

In the morning, she went back to the hospital. There had been no change in Tom’s condition, and she hadn’t really expected there to have been. This time, she laid down on the bed beside him. These beds really weren’t made for two, but for a few moments, she would make it work. Closing her eyes, she laid next to his unmoving form and choked her heart back down from her throat to where it was meant to be.

Her boss called while she was driving home.

“Jesse... How’re you doing?” She could tell that he was trying to sound sympathetic, but it had never been his strong suit.