Николас Спаркс - The Choice

“Can I do anything? Close the blinds? Bring you something from home?”

Will you sit with me a while longer? I’m very tired.

“Of course.”

And hold my hand?

He nodded, covering her body with the sheet once more. He sat in the chair by the bed and took her hand, his thumb tracing it slightly. Outside, the pigeon had come back, and beyond it, heavy clouds shifted in the sky, transforming into images from other worlds. He loved his wife but hated what life with her had become, cursing himself for even thinking this way. He kissed her fingertips one by one and brought her hand to his cheek. He held it against him, feeling her warmth and wishing for even the tiniest of movements, but when nothing happened, he moved it away and didn’t even realize that the pigeon seemed to be staring at him.

Eleanor Baker was a thirty-eight-year-old housewife with two boys she adored. Eight years ago, she’d come into the emergency room vomiting and complaining about a blinding pain in the back of her head. Gabby, who was covering a friend’s shift, happened to be working that day, though she didn’t treat Eleanor. Eleanor was admitted to the hospital, and Gabby knew nothing about her until the following Monday, when she realized that Eleanor had been placed in the intensive care unit when she didn’t wake up on Sunday morning. “Essentially,” one of the nurses said, “she went to sleep and didn’t wake up.”

Her coma was caused by a severe case of viral meningitis.

Her husband, Kenneth, a history teacher at East Carteret High School who by all accounts was a gregarious, friendly guy, spent his days at the hospital. Over time, Gabby got to know him; at first it was only a few niceties here and there, but as time wore on, their conversations grew longer. He adored his wife and children, and always wore a neat sweater and pressed Dockers when he visited the hospital, and he drank Mountain Dew by the liter. He was a devout Catholic, and Gabby often found him praying the rosary by his wife’s bedside. Their kids were named Matthew and Mark.

Travis knew all this because Gabby spoke about him after work. Not in the beginning, but later, after they’d become something like friends. Their conversations were always the same in that Gabby wondered how he could continue to come in each and every day, what he might be thinking as he sat in silence beside his wife.

“He seems so sad all the time,” Gabby said.

“That’s because he is sad. His wife is in a coma.”

“But he’s there all the time. What about his kids?”

Weeks turned into months, and Eleanor Baker was eventually moved to a nursing home. Months eventually passed into a year, then another. Thoughts of Eleanor Baker may have eventually slipped away, if not for the fact that Kenneth Baker shopped at the same grocery store as Gabby. They would occasionally bump into each other, and always the conversation would turn to how Eleanor was doing. There was never any change.

But over the years, as they continued to run into each other, Gabby noticed that Kenneth had changed. “She’s still going,” was the way he began to casually describe her condition. Where there had once been a light in his eyes when he spoke about Eleanor, there was now only blankness; where once there was love, now there seemed to be only apathy. His black hair had turned gray within a couple of years, and he’d become so thin that his clothes hung off him.

In the cereal aisle or frozen food section, Gabby couldn’t seem to avoid him, and he became something of a confidant. He seemed to need her, to tell her what was happening, and in those moments they met, Kenneth mentioned one horrible event after another: that he’d lost his job, lost his house, that he couldn’t wait to get all the kids out of the house, that the older one had dropped out of high school and the younger one had been arrested again for dealing drugs. Again. That was the word Gabby emphasized when she told Travis about it later. She also said she was pretty sure he’d been drunk when she’d run into him.

“I just feel so bad for him,” Gabby said.

“I know you do,” Travis said.

She grew quiet then. “Sometimes I think it might have been easier if his wife had died instead.”

Staring out the window, Travis thought about Kenneth and Eleanor Baker. He had no idea whether Eleanor was still in the nursing home or whether she was still alive. Since the accident, he’d replayed those conversations in his head nearly every day, remembering the things Gabby had told him. He wondered whether somehow Eleanor and Kenneth Baker had been brought into their lives for a reason. How many people, after all, knew anyone who’d been in a coma? It seemed so . . . fantastic, no more likely than visiting an island filled with dinosaurs or watching an alien spaceship blowing up the Empire State Building.

But Gabby worked in a hospital, and if there was some sort of reason for the Bakers to have come into their lives, what was it? To warn him that he was doomed? That his daughters would lose their way? Those thoughts terrified him, and it was the reason he made sure he was waiting when his daughters came home from school. It was the reason he would be taking them to Busch Gardens as soon as school let out, and it was the reason he let Christine spend the night at her friend’s house. He woke every morning with the thought that even if they were struggling, which was normal, he still insisted they behave at home and in school, and it was the reason that when they misbehaved, both of them were sent to their rooms for the night as punishment. Because those were the things Gabby would have done.

His in-laws sometimes thought he was being too hard on the girls. That wasn’t surprising. His mother-in-law, in particular, had always been judgmental. While Gabby and her dad could chat on the phone for an hour, conversations with her mother were always clipped. In the beginning, Travis and Gabby spent the mandatory holidays in Savannah and Gabby always came home stressed; once their daughters were born, Gabby finally told her parents she wanted to start her own holiday traditions and that while she would love to see them, her parents would have to come to Beaufort. They never did.

After the accident, however, her parents checked into a hotel in Morehead City to be close to their daughter, and for the first month, the three of them were often in Gabby’s room together. While they never said they blamed him for the accident, Travis could feel it in the way they seemed to keep their distance. When they spent time with Christine and Lisa, it was always away from the house—outings for ice cream or pizza—and they seldom spent more than a couple of minutes inside.

In time, they had to go back, and now they sometimes came up on weekends. When they did, Travis tried to stay away from the hospital. He told himself that it was because they needed time alone with their daughter, and that was partly true. What he didn’t like to admit was that he also stayed away because they continually, if unintentionally, reminded him that he was responsible for Gabby being in the hospital in the first place.

His friends had reacted as he’d expected. Allison, Megan, and Liz prepared dinners in shifts for the first six weeks. Over the years, they’d grown close to Gabby, and sometimes it seemed as if Travis had to support them. They would show up with red eyes and forced smiles, holding Tupperware containers filled to the brim with lasagna or casseroles, side dishes, and desserts of every kind. They always made a special point to mention that chicken was always used in place of red meat, to ensure that Travis would eat it.

They were particularly good with the girls. In the beginning, they often held the girls as they cried, and Christine grew especially fond of Liz. Liz braided her hair, helped her make beaded bracelets, and usually spent at least half an hour with Christine, kicking the soccer ball back and forth. Once inside, they would begin to whisper as soon as Travis left the room. He wondered what they said to each other. Knowing Liz, he was certain that if she felt it was something important, she’d tell him, but usually she’d simply say that Christine wanted to talk. Over time, he found himself simultaneously thankful for her presence and envious of her relationship with Christine.