The Fiance Who Never Came

And Brett came on the first night for forty minutes, and then he did not come back for nine days.

I want to be fair to him, because I have had a long time to think about this and I would rather be accurate than cruel. Brett was not a monster in a movie. He did not laugh. He did not say a cruel thing out loud that you could write down and hold up. What Brett did was worse than that, and quieter than that, and it took me a long time to see it because it did not have a sound.

That first night, before I was really awake, he stood at the foot of the bed with his coat on. Jenny told me this later. He looked at the machines and he looked at me and he asked the doctor three questions. He did not ask the ones you would think. He did not ask, is she going to live. He did not ask, is she in pain. He asked whether I would be “the way I was,” he asked how long the recovery would take, and he asked, and Jenny said this part so flat and so angry that I knew she had been carrying it like a stone, he asked whether they thought I would be “able to work again.”

Then he squeezed my foot through the blanket, the way you would test a melon, and he said he had to get back because the roads were bad, and he left.

The next morning he texted Jenny, not me, I was not holding a phone. He asked how it was looking. Jenny told him it was bad but stable. He texted back a blue heart. The morning after that he asked again, and Jenny told him I had opened my eyes, and he said that was great news and that he would try to get up there that weekend if the weather held.

If the weather held. I live forty minutes from that hospital. Jenny had driven three hours in the dark on sheet ice to sit in a chair. Brett was going to try to come forty minutes if the weather held.

I did not know any of that yet. In the ICU, foggy and broken and grateful just to be breathing, I asked for him. I asked Dawn where he was. I was embarrassed that he was not there, the way you are embarrassed for the people you love when they let you down in front of strangers, and I made excuses to Dawn before she had even asked a question. He works a lot, I said. The roads are terrible, I said. Dawn said “mm” in the way that holds a whole paragraph, and she fixed my blanket, and she did not tell me then what she had already seen. She told me later, when I was strong enough to hold it.