Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [47]
And then, in Chicago, her car was hit head-on by a taxi, the front end crushed, the bones of both her feet broken. Never particularly strong—her health compromised by years of living marginally—the recovery was terrible, and partial, though she spent months in bed, though there was more than one operation. David used to carry her, once she could get out a bit, up and down the four flights of stairs leading to their lakeshore apartment.
When she was walking, out in the world again after months of physical therapy, she took a job in Boston for a semester. It wasn’t a happy choice: she was still physically frail from the accident’s aftermath and addicted to painkillers. Boston had been a difficult city for her, the location—dreamy and often nightmarish now, in memory—of many of her hardest years, the old days of using and getting by from deal to deal. The details of that fall would only emerge for me later: how she’d been hospitalized, nearly dying from an overdose of the painkillers she’d taken, how a friend coming to collect some clothes for her in the hospital had found her closet full of bottles.
And yet, that night, in the middle of that season of dissolution, she was entirely present, in focus, strong, sober. How did she do it? Was her show of strength a gift to me?
In December, she came for a visit; the home health aides who were in the house to help care for Wally insisted she was stoned, but I couldn’t see it. Perhaps I didn’t want to, or perhaps it was simply that my attention was so focused on Wally, in those late dark hours, that I couldn’t see her. Though I could feel that something was off, that her visit was really more about her than about us, as if there was something she needed from us that I couldn’t give. How could I give to anyone, when every bit of me was centered around that hospital bed in what used to be our living room? Every bit of my psyche was involved with surrounding that man as he drifted toward being a child, toward a simple radiant awareness, toward being no one.
Lynda decided she’d come to Provincetown in the winter, when her teaching gig was up. In part she wanted to take time to write; in part I believe she was avoiding going home, since she was using and didn’t want to confront David and the evidence of her domestic life. And in part she wanted to be near Wally and me, wanted to help us, and didn’t understand she wasn’t in any shape to help anyone. She told me a dream she’d had; in it, she was living in a cottage on the beach, and out on the shore, hunkering around near the wharves and piers, was a huge, hungry rat, bigger than a dog, red-eyed, malevolent. The rat’s my addiction, she said, I’m coming to Provincetown to finally confront the rat.
Moments after Wally died, Lynda called; I think she knew. I heard her voice on the answering machine in the kitchen, but I didn’t go to it then, lost as I was in the unbelievable hour Wally had filled with himself and then with his absence. She called again from Cambridge the next morning, and after I told her she said she’d drive down later in the day. She arrived, late in the afternoon, drunk.
I sat on the bed, in the ringing ache and resonance of that room, the room I’d only just been able to enter again, all its evidence of him—glasses, toothbrush, little wooden angel hanging from a thread above his pillow—precious and unbearable.
And my friend could not see or feel what was happening,