Alix Ohlin - Inside

Behind her, Azra laughed guiltily. “Sorry, Grace. I know you don’t usually give her chocolate.”

“It’s okay,” Grace said, unconvincingly.

The patient in the other bed seemed to have fallen asleep, and Mitch reached up and turned off the television. In the sudden quiet, Sarah’s high voice rang brightly as she stood at her mother’s bedside and talked about her day. Playtime, a story about elephants, a boy who had pulled her hair, something the teacher said, a bug at recess — he could tell Grace loved hearing all these details, her eyes fixed on Sarah. After a while, the girl ran down like a battery losing its charge. Her attention shifted to the window, and she started over to it, explaining something she’d just learned about Canada geese.

Azra took some crayons and paper out of her bag and suggested that she draw a goose for her mother.

“Okay,” Sarah said, then sat down in a chair, balanced the paper on her knees, and started to draw, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth in a caricature of concentration.

Leaning against the wall, Azra let out a long breath, obviously exhausted. Mitch wondered where Grace’s parents were, or the rest of her support network. She had always had plenty of friends.

Azra excused herself to go to the restroom, nodding at Mitch to indicate that he should keep an eye on Sarah.

He returned to Grace’s side and said softly, “She’s really cute.”

“Thanks.”

“She looks like you.”

“No she doesn’t. She looks like her father.”

“Does she?” Mitch said, but Grace didn’t respond. The subject was clearly off-limits. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he said.

Grace looked at him with a small, quick smile, her eyes flickering. He realized — still able to read her after all these years — that she was in enormous pain, and scared, certainly not in any condition to tell him what he could do to help. He had a sudden, intense urge to hold her in his arms or, equally powerful, to walk out the door and never come back. He glanced down, afraid that his face might betray these thoughts, and when he looked up she was still smiling, as if that tight-lipped expression were holding her entire face together. He touched her hand and made his voice strong and calm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

She barely nodded. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said. “Seeing each other again.”

When he was at work, he tried to act as though his confidence hadn’t been shattered. Everything there — his office, his coworkers, the nurses — felt not familiar, as it should have, but strange, his days all out of rhythm. He wondered if his chair had always seemed a little too low for the desk in his office, or if he had called the secretary on the third floor by the right name. He wasn’t sure, in general, of anything. Showing up each morning in his sports jacket and khaki pants, takeout coffee in hand, he felt he was faking it even more than he ever had when, as a student and intern, he actually was. His own voice seemed to stand at a remove. Time passed stickily, each minute clinging to him as though not wanting to let go.

His coworkers had heard about what happened during his rotation in Nunavut, and their response was to avoid him, expressing their sympathy with distant nods and grimacing smiles when passing in the hallways, everyone’s eyes focused on a spot just over his shoulder. Mitch understood this fear of contagion. Failing a patient as he had was every therapist’s worst fear, and it was far better to steer clear of it, even for those whose profession advocated understanding. He only wished that he could steer clear of it himself.

Commencing a new group-therapy session on substance abuse, he tried to pare away self-doubt and cleave to the core of his work. There were ten patients, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty, united by their reek of cigarette smoke. They sat in a circle, downcast, jittery, each one’s chair at a calibrated distance from the next; no one wanted to touch another person, even by accident, in this room of misery and anger. Thank God for other people’s problems, he thought.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s start.”

He laid down the ground rules in a lecture he’d memorized so long ago that he didn’t even mark the words as they left his mouth. Then came the introductions, and he tried to listen carefully and note every detail, but time and again he felt himself drifting away, untethered to the moment, and had to reel himself back in again.

An hour and a half later he was alone, uncomfortably, with his thoughts. The session had gone reasonably well, and they all had left with their “homework” for the next week, nodding as he’d told them what to do. He knew from experience that there would be a serious drop-off in attendance, and he usually made bets with himself about who would stay and who would go. This time, though, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Thomasie’s face kept passing through his mind.

He threw his pencil across his desk, and sighed.

At five o’clock, he left work and headed to Martine’s apartment. He didn’t want to call in advance. He wasn’t sure that what he had to say could be blurted out over the phone, in the few moments her politeness would afford him, and he wouldn’t be able to say it without being able to read her face as he spoke.

He rehearsed a speech over and over in his mind, knowing he had only a few seconds in which to win her over. He was so preoccupied with the wording of his plea that he didn’t even see her coming down the street until she was almost in front of him — her cheeks chafed red by the autumn wind, a blue scarf bunched beneath her chin. She was carrying grocery bags and he reached out to help her with them, but she shook her head. Her hair was twisted into one of her usual chaotic arrangements, strands escaping everywhere. They stood in the street, afternoon traffic inching by, horns blasting. She was beautiful.

“Martine,” he said. “Please.”

Her short, humorless laugh hung between them like smoke. All the lines he had practiced dissolved in the frigid air. Instead he said, “Will you marry me?”

He had no plan, no ring. Martine cocked her head to one side, her expression neutral, examining, as if he were some new piece of evidence brought before her in court. He had no idea what she was thinking.

“So, you’re back,” she said at last.

“I know I should’ve come by earlier. Much earlier. I just — I’m sorry. But please, I love you. I love Mathieu.”

Martine set the grocery bags down, then fished around in her pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and drew on it deeply. Finally she said, “I know you’re attached to him.”

“It’s so much more than that,” he said impatiently. “I should never have gone away. I shouldn’t have let us drift apart. I should have told you how much you mean to me, I should’ve insisted . I never should’ve let you let me go.”

Almost involuntarily, it seemed, she was nodding in agreement. “That’s right,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”

Then she glanced up at her apartment. Since the windows of both Mathieu’s room and the living room faced the street, he thought she was checking to see if her son was watching, to incorporate him into the decision. This gave him the confidence to think that she might invite him in. Five more minutes, and he’d be inside.

He was buoyed by this thought, and by the idea of seeing the child again, playing with him, hearing his high, tinny voice. He had missed those cozy weekends, the family dinners, even the science lectures.

Martine was looking at him steadily, waiting for him to say more.

He wondered why she hadn’t picked up Mathieu from day care, as she usually did, but maybe she had a sitter for him. Surely he wouldn’t be in the apartment alone. This might explain her hesitation, when of course she ought to be inviting Mitch in so they could have this conversation in comfort rather than on the street.