Николас Спаркс - The Choice

She was a lovely child with bright blue eyes who liked to wear neat bows in her hair. She wanted her room to always appear just so and refused to wear clothes that didn’t match. She didn’t throw temper tantrums when things weren’t right; instead, she was the sort of child who organized her toys or picked a new pair of shoes. But since the accident, she got frustrated easily, and temper tantrums were now the norm. His family, Stephanie included, had recommended counseling, and both Christine and Lisa went twice a week, but the temper tantrums seemed to be getting worse. And last night, when Christine went to bed, her room was a mess.

Lisa, who’d always been small for her age, had hair the same color as Gabby’s and a generally sunny disposition. She had a blanket she carried with her everywhere, and she followed Christine around the house like a puppy. She put stickers on all her folders, and her work in school usually came home covered in stars. Still, for a long time she’d cry herself to sleep. From downstairs, Travis could hear her weeping on the monitor, and he’d have to pinch the bridge of his nose to keep from joining in. On those nights, he would climb the stairs to the girls’ bedroom—since the accident, another change was that they wanted to sleep in the same room—and Travis would lie beside her, stroking her hair and listening as she whimpered “I miss Mommy” over and over, the saddest words Travis had ever heard. Almost too choked up to speak, he would simply say, “I know. I do, too.”

He couldn’t begin to take Gabby’s place, and he didn’t try; what that left, however, was a hole where Gabby used to be, an emptiness he didn’t know how to fill. Like most parents, each of them had carved out fiefdoms of expertise when it came to child care. Gabby, he knew now, had taken a far greater share of the responsibility than he had, and he regretted it now. There were so many things he didn’t know how to do, things that Gabby made seem easy. Little things. He could brush the girls’ hair, but when it came to braids, he understood the concept but found them impossible to master. He didn’t know what kind of yogurt Lisa referred to when she said she wanted “the one with the blue banana.” When colds settled in, he stood in the aisle of the grocery store, scanning the shelves of cough syrup, wondering whether to buy grape or cherry flavoring. Christine never wore the clothes he set out. He’d had no idea that Lisa liked to wear sparkly shoes on Fridays. He realized that before the accident, he hadn’t even known their teachers’ names or where in the school, exactly, their classrooms were located.

Christmas had been the worst, for that had always been Gabby’s favorite holiday. She loved everything about the season: trimming the tree, decorating, baking cookies, and even the shopping. It used to amaze Travis that she could retain her humor as she pushed through frenzied crowds in department stores, but at night, after the girls had gone to bed, she’d drag out the gifts with a giddy sense of glee, and together they’d wrap the items she’d purchased. Later, Travis would hide them in the attic.

There was nothing joyous about last year’s holiday season. Travis did his best, forcing excitement when none was evident. He tried to do everything Gabby had done, but the effort of maintaining a happy facade was wearying, especially because neither Christine nor Lisa made things any easier. It wasn’t their fault, but for the life of him, he didn’t know how respond when at the top of both their holiday wish lists was the request for Mommy to get better. It wasn’t like a new Leapster or a dollhouse could take her place.

In the past couple of weeks, things had improved. Kind of. Christine still threw her tantrums and Lisa still cried at night, but they’d adapted to life in the house without their mom. When they walked in the house after school, they no longer called for her out of habit; when they fell and scraped their elbows, they automatically came to him to find a Band-Aid. In a picture of the family Lisa drew at school, Travis saw only three images; he had to catch his breath before he realized there was another horizontal image in the corner, one that seemed added almost as an afterthought. They didn’t ask about their mom as much as they used to, and they visited rarely. It was hard for them to go, for they didn’t know what to say or even how to act. Travis understood that and tried to make it easier. “Just talk to her,” he would tell them, and they would try, but their words would trail off into nothing when no response was forthcoming.

Usually, when they did visit, Travis had them bring things—pretty rocks they’d found in the garden, leaves they’d laminated, homemade cards decorated with glitter. But even gifts were fraught with uncertainty. Lisa would set her gift on Gabby’s stomach and back away; a moment later, she’d move it closer to Gabby’s hand. After that, she’d shift it to the end table. Christine, on the other hand, would move constantly. She’d sit on the bed and stand by the window, she’d peer closely at her mother’s face, and through it all, she’d never say a single word.

“What happened at school today?” Travis had asked her the last time she’d come. “I’m sure your mom wants to hear all about it.”

Instead of answering, Christine turned toward him. “Why?” she asked, her tone one of sad defiance. “You know she can’t hear me.”

There was a cafeteria on the ground floor of the hospital, and on most days Travis would go there, mainly to hear voices other than his own. Normally, he arrived around lunchtime, and over the past few weeks, he’d come to recognize the regulars. Most were employees, but there was an elderly woman who seemed to be there every time he arrived. Though he’d never spoken to her, he’d learned from Gretchen that the woman’s husband had already been in the intensive care unit when Gabby was admitted. Something about complications from diabetes, and whenever he saw the woman eating a bowl of soup, he thought about her husband upstairs. It was easy to imagine the worst: a patient hooked up to a dozen machines, endless rounds of surgery, possible amputation, a man barely hanging on. It wasn’t his business to ask, and he wasn’t even certain he wanted to know the truth, if only because it felt as though he couldn’t summon the concern he knew he’d need to show. His ability to empathize, it seemed to him, had evaporated.

Still, he watched her, curious about what he could learn from her. While the knot in his stomach never seemed to settle enough for him to swallow more than a few bites of anything, she not only ate her entire meal, but seemed to enjoy it. While he found it impossible to focus long enough on anything other than his own needs and his daughters’ daily existence, she read novels during lunch, and more than once, he’d seen her laughing quietly at a passage that had amused her. And unlike him, she still maintained an ability to smile, one she offered willingly to those who passed her table.

Sometimes, in that smile, he thought he could see a trace of loneliness, even as he chided himself for imagining something that probably wasn’t there. He couldn’t help wondering about her marriage. Because of her age, he assumed they’d celebrated a silver, perhaps even golden, anniversary. Most likely there were kids, even if he’d never seen them. But other than that, he could intuit nothing. He wondered whether they had been happy, for she seemed to be taking her husband’s illness in stride, while he walked the corridors of the hospital feeling as if a single wrong step would send him crumpling to the floor.

He wondered, for instance, whether her husband had ever planted rosebushes for her, something Travis had done for Gabby when she’d first become pregnant with Christine. Travis remembered the way she looked as she sat on the porch, one hand on her belly, and mentioned that the backyard needed flowers. Staring at her as she said it, Travis could no more have denied her request than breathed underwater, and though his hands were scraped and his fingertips bloody by the time he finished planting the bushes, roses were blooming on the day Christine had been born. He’d brought a bouquet to the hospital.