The Fiance Who Never Came
My fiance barely came to the ICU and I finally understood what he had been waiting for
They told me later that I was awake for the first two days, talking even, but I do not remember any of it. The part I remember starts on the third morning, when I opened my eyes in a room the color of skim milk and heard a machine counting my heart out loud for me.
My name is Claire Dahl. I was thirty-four years old that winter, and I had lived my whole life within twenty miles of a dairy town off County Road G, out past Neillsville, Wisconsin, where the land goes flat and white in January and the silos stand up out of it like candles somebody forgot to light. I waited tables at a place called Marcy’s on the highway, the kind of diner where the coffee is bad on purpose and the regulars would notice if you changed it. I owned a small house my grandmother had left me, two bedrooms and a mudroom and a furnace that complained. I had a dog named Boone. And I was engaged to a man named Brett Kowalski, who sold insurance out of an office in town and wore his collar open and could make a room like him inside of a minute.
The accident happened on a Tuesday. I had worked the early shift and I was driving home on G when a kid in a lifted truck came over the center line on the Willow Creek bridge. That is all anybody needs to know about it. My little Corolla went into the guardrail and then down the embankment, and the next clear thing in my life is the heart machine in that skim-milk room, counting.
My sister Jenny was in the chair beside the bed. She had her coat still on and her boots still on and her hair was not done, which for Jenny is the same as a scream. When she saw my eyes open she did not say anything smart, which is also not like her. She just put her forehead down on the rail of the bed and held my hand against her cheek and breathed.
“You’re okay,” she kept saying, which was a lie we both needed. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”
I was not okay. I had a broken pelvis and a broken left arm in two places and a bleed in my head that the doctors had spent the first night watching like weathermen watch a storm cell. I had tubes in me I will not describe. But I was alive, and Jenny was there, and that was the whole world for a while.
What I want to tell you is not really about the accident. The accident was just the thing that turned the lights on. What I want to tell you is about who was in the room when the lights came on, and who was not, and how long it took me to understand the difference.