Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

No, she thinks. Gran would only come up and overwhelm her with smug care, as if a fire was exactly what she expected. George Ray couldn’t come back even if he wanted to. Thanking Lenka, Maggie replies that she’ll call them herself when she’s feeling better.

Fletcher turns up that afternoon looking drained and ill-shaven, as though he jumped in the car and drove all night, a romantic thought undercut by the fact that he’s had at least eighteen hours in which to complete a nine-hour trip. As he leans over to kiss her cheek, she asks what took him so long, and when he starts to protest, she tells him she’s only kidding. It’s a poor way to begin.

Once he’s sitting on the chair beside the bed, he asks if she’s in much pain. She says it’s not too bad, then asks in turn whether he has stopped in to see Brid.

“Not yet,” he replies. “The doctor says she’s pretty delirious. Third-degree burns on her arms, and she broke her back. Apparently she keeps saying how it’s all her fault because she left a candle burning.”

“She saved my life,” Maggie tells him. He nods but doesn’t ask for details, as if they’d be an embarrassment because he wasn’t around to save Maggie himself. Here he is, finally back in this country, and all he can do is assess the damage to company assets. When she asks whether the farm was insured, he looks uncomfortable.

“I didn’t get around to it,” he says. She wonders if his father has jumped on him for the oversight or if Fletcher’s still bracing himself for that conversation. “Some developer might want the land, at least,” he continues. “Maybe that Dodd guy could buy it to expand his wrecking yard.”

As he says this, she remembers that he doesn’t know what has happened with Lydia. He doesn’t even know about the graffiti, and right now she doesn’t feel up to telling him. It’s hard enough to hear him fall so quickly into talk of business matters, as though she isn’t lying in front of him wounded and drugged. He goes on speaking for some time before he seems to recognize she isn’t listening. Then he hunches over in the chair and falls silent.

“So here we are,” she says.

“Here we are.” Slowly his eyes rise to meet hers. He inspects her face before reaching to touch her cheek. She’s in too much pain to pull away. His fingers on her skin are soothing. “You look good,” he says.

The pronouncement makes the bandage over her eye feel hot and itchy.

“Yeah, I’m a real beauty queen.”

“I mean it,” he insists, the solemnity in his voice a little disconcerting. “You’ll be out of here soon. If you need money or a place to stay—”

She thanks him without accepting. He’s only being polite. Still, if she’s honest with herself, a part of her feels owed something. She can’t go on like that, though, forever demanding reparations. When she looks at him, she finds him staring back with a pained expression. What’s he thinking? Could there be recrimination on his part? Some nostalgia, even? Perhaps he’s remembering the day they first arrived at the house, just the two of them, with all their belongings and hopes in tow.

“Never thought it would end up like this,” she says, and he offers his agreement, his face shaded by a certain wistfulness that surprises her. “Did you really think it might work out?” she asks. “I mean, back in June, did you really think we might live here forever?” It hurts her to see him nod, regretfully and without hesitation.

“Naive, huh?”

“What happened, then?” she asks. Maybe it’s the drugs that let her pose the question, or maybe it’s the fact that finally she can ask it face to face.

“You know what happened,” he says. The sorrowful expression that overtook him the night of the party returns exactly as it first appeared.

“I don’t mean in the summer. I mean after that, in Boston. Why didn’t you come back?”

He shakes his head in frustration. “I never got together with Cybil again, if that’s what you mean.” He speaks as though pained that she might think as much. He’s always so sensitive to others’ judgment, and at the same time he seems to accept it as inevitable.

Upon having this thought, Maggie says something that until now has only occurred to her in a vague, unformulated way. “Fletcher, you ever wonder if you did it on purpose? The film, I mean.”

His face darkens and he looks confused.

“You ever think,” she says, “maybe you wanted everyone to see it?”

He gives a harsh laugh. “Why the hell would I want that?” His voice is angry, but he waits to hear her answer.

“I don’t know. Maybe you were looking for an excuse to go home.”

He only laughs again, though in an excessive way. Then he regains a look of concern. “You should come back to Boston.”

The words jar her. It’s not the sentiment that’s surprising but the tone in which he utters it. During the fall, his counsel for her to return always seemed like a way to allay his conscience. Now he offers it with a kinder inflection.

Casting her a sidelong glance, he adds, “You could stay at my place.”

Now it’s her turn to laugh uneasily. “You’re just a pushover for a girl in a hospital gown.”

“No, I mean it.” He tries to say it in a lighthearted way, but it’s obvious he isn’t speaking idly. Then he utters something that seems a hallucinatory product of the drugs. “We could try again.”

The sentence seizes her. For a second it manages to blot out the pain, before passing through and taking her defences with it, so that her ankle begins to pulse more sharply than ever. For most of October, after the news of her father’s death, after Fletcher told her he wasn’t coming back, the words he has just spoken were what she most wanted to hear. Then there was George Ray, and her hopes changed.

“Fletcher—” She thinks of telling him about George Ray, except George Ray doesn’t really have a bearing on the matter. What she wants to say isn’t even clear to her, beyond a conviction that the time for what he’s just suggested has come and gone.

It turns out she doesn’t even have to say anything. The way she has spoken his name is enough.

“Never mind,” he says. “It was just a thought.”

He looks about the room as if searching for an exit, then settles his gaze on the blank television set against the wall.

“You watch the moon landing the other day?” he asks, and she says she didn’t. “Last one for a while. You know, in high school I was space crazy. Wanted to be an astronaut. Did I ever tell you that? At least until I found out they can’t wear these.” He taps his glasses with a rueful smile before sinking back to his hunched position in the chair.

He’s travelled a long way to be here; she should be grateful for that. It wasn’t a journey through outer space, only a trip to a foreign country, but still he’s made the effort, even though by now for him this place must be synonymous with disappointment. It’s a marvel, really, to think there was a time when he hoped settling here would be a worthy substitute for earlier dashed dreams, when he thought a life with her might be enough. She lies there sensing the presence of another Fletcher somewhere over them, unfulfilled. She imagines him orbiting Earth, his long body wrapped in a silver suit with a flag on the shoulder, suspended in darkness among pricks of light. His face is illuminated by blinking instruments, and he’s thousands of miles from home, from family, from obligation and disapproval. As she envisions him like that, there’s a pang, because she feels pretty certain the image is similar to one he once invented for himself, and it might come closer than anything else to his picture of happiness.

A certain amount of pleading is necessary before the doctor allows her to venture from the room. Then, as Fletcher helps a nurse move her into a wheelchair, Maggie muffles cries of pain. With her foot propped out front like a tender battering ram, Fletcher pushes her into the hall. The corridor feels ethereal with its abandoned gurneys and strings of Christmas lights. A few yards down, he wheels her into Brid’s room. It contains a single bed, the body on it obscured by a jungle gym of pulleys, straps, and struts. Brid’s face is scratched but free of burns, while her arms are wrapped in gauze. On the windowsill is a bouquet of lilies that produces in Maggie a brief, ludicrous envy, because no one has brought any flowers for her.