Face Of The Monster

26 - Island

"Wait, wait, down here. Yeah, there. Can you feel it?"

Ricky's face crumple with concentration, his soft, warm fingertips resting on the bottom of my stomach. He looks at me, lips turned downward. "No," he says.

His voice is still such a surprise, even though he has spoken to me on my last few visits. It's a croak, a reluctant groan of a sound, as though the hearer is yanking the words out of his mouth against his will. He doesn't mean to sound that way, but it still startles me.

"Well. That's alright." I pull my shirt back over my belly. Ten weeks. Phoebe looked it up last night and showed me a picture: rosy, shadowed fetus, curled like a peachy tadpole, forehead huge against tiny hands. Little bloated stomach, tiny holes for ear canals. The size of a kumquat, Phoebe read. One and one-fourth inches long. How can such a little thing be kicking up such a storm in my stomach?

Phoebe thinks I might be imagining it; she can't feel it either. But to me, it's as real as my own hands, fingers already growing bloated and shiny. It presses on me, little jolts of pressure. I don't know what it is saying, but it's important.

An image of Alan surfaces in my mind, oily and wrinkled. What will I do, I wonder, if the doctor hands the baby to me and its eyes are not Ricky's soft brown or my chaotic hazel, but rather his languid, frightening blue?

Enrique takes my hand, making a point to do it with his right arm. He's getting better, no doubt about it. His therapist says he can take a few steps with a walker now and, in her words, "should be back on his feet in no time!". When he focuses on it, he can smile at me. He can hold my hand and drink water from a cup, not coffee yet, though, in case he spills. He washes himself in the shower now and wipes his own ass when he uses the bathroom. If he can't go back to work, at least some of his basic human dignity has been restored.

But even in the midst of progress, new problems reveal themselves. He's been diagnosed with aphasia, a disorder common among stroke victims which basically makes it hard for him to understand or express himself through language. The way it was explained to me, it sounds almost like speech dyslexia. The letters are all there in his brain, queued up in the right order, but when the come out, they spill messily into the air like soup. Other times, the right words for what he wants to say just escape him altogether. Likewise, when I speak to him, the words come out all straight and neat like a piece of thread pulled taught, but when they enter his ears, it all unspools into a tangled disaster.

Another diagnosis: Major Depressive Disorder, again, not uncommon with stroke survivors. In here, they call it Post-Stroke Depression, or PSD. That one didn't have to be explained to me. All I had to do was look into those helpless eyes.

It's dangerous, of course, an swirling circle, whirling into oblivion. The worse his depression gets, the worse he does with rehab. The worse he does with rehab, the worse his depression gets.

Baby steps, the therapist says. He's taking his own showers, walking with a walker, feeding himself some nights, even though it can take upwards of an hour. He says words sometimes. But he won't talk in sentences, doesn't want to. Between the jumble of English in his brain and the effort it takes to move his jaw, talking must seem like a hopeless pursuit.

That doesn't stop me from talking to him, though. Between sentences, I pause and watch his eyes, wondering how much or how little he can decipher when I speak. Is it all nonsense, or do certain words jump out? Does he try hard, straining to untangle the thread of language coming from my mouth, or does he not care anymore? Is he too tired?

The therapist says they'll work with him for another month. That's her recommendation, she says. One more month of this, and if it's still not working, we have to try something else. We have to take him home or to another facility or, I don't know, load up his wheelchair on top of the car and streak down the highway until he goes flying off. What do they expect us to do with him?

It would be easier if he stayed. I've grown used to this arrangement: living with Phoebe, basking in her warmth, seeing Ricky once or twice a week for an idle, one-sided conversation. What a change it will be to have him back in the house, back where I will be expected to take care of him.

He can wipe his own ass, but he still needs help standing from the toilet seat. I can imagine myself gripping his left arm, waiting for his slow, clumsy right to finish up. Finally snatching the toilet paper from him and doing it myself. I can see him sitting beside me at dinner, insisting on feeding himself, forkful after forkful of salad missing his mouth. I can see him reaching for me in the middle of the night, can see myself pretending to be asleep. What a never ending nightmare our lives could become.

Will become. He's coming home. Where else would he go?

Phoebe will go home, too. At first, I will find strands of her long, black hair caught in my comb, in the crevice between the bed and the nightstand, on the doggy bed, rubbed from Duck's body onto the felt. I'll find little things of her left behind. A barrette, a novel, a tube of lipstick. Then there won't be anything left and she will slowly fade from my life like a sunset sliding from one day into the next.

It's not what I want, but it's what I know. I squeeze Ricky's hand, giving him a tight smile. I'm growing disenchanted with this little courtyard-windowed room, open curtains revealing rumpled sheets on either side of us. Everything is starting to smell of waste to me, and they still haven't shaved Ricky. I bring an electric razor with me every week or so and shear off the scratchy layer of stubble they let take over his face like ivy on an abandoned building.

There's the courtyard outside, but I never see anyone in it except aides on break, blowing thick rings of smoke into the air with their shoes off in the clipped grass. I've tried to ask Ricky if they ever take him outside, but, of course, he doesn't answer. I asked his physical therapist and she gave a very vague answer along the lines of, "Yes the outdoors do exist and sometimes people are there." Anyway, his skin is paling. I promised myself last time I was here that I will take him outside every day when he gets home.

We share a look. It's the only real form of communication we have left. His eyes are the deep brown of melted dark chocolate, of freshly tilled soil, of midsummer tree bark. They are deep set, elephantine in their sad, gentle way. I love those eyes, have ever since I met them.

Now, I lean forward to kiss each of his eyelids. "I love you," I tell him. He might not understand the words, but I hope he can feel them, warm and alive on my tongue. I touch his lips, missing his voice. Missing our conversations. Missing the entire life we lost in one instant on that operating table all those weeks ago.