The Shadow Wife - Diane Chamberlain [69]
“Call me no matter what time it is when you get home,” he said.
There was no point in going to bed yet because he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he’d spoken to her, so he walked into the den and sat down at the computer desk. Once online, he navigated to the website that contained the essays—sometimes uplifting, sometimes heartbreaking—about aneurysm survivors. His jaw ached from clenching his teeth all evening, and he tried to relax as he looked through the website, but within moments he’d realize his jaw was clamped tight again.
There were no new essays on the site, even though he hadn’t visited it in a few days. He tried to read some of the older stories, but it was a struggle to find one that could still hold his interest. Those stories had offered him such hope in the beginning. They were written not only by the families of patients, but often by the patients themselves after they’d come back from the brink. In the beginning, he’d imagined Mara one day adding her own essay to the site, but that fantasy had evaporated along with his dreams for their future together.
He knew the essays by heart, and he had analyzed them. They fell into two broad categories: Either the patient had died within a few days, or they had begun their recovery. Sometimes that recovery was rapid, sometimes it was slow and involved many steps backward, but it always headed in the direction of rediscovered health. None described the limbo that had become Mara’s existence. He’d longed to find a story like Mara’s: a young woman, alive but not truly living, who’d left her husband with a small child and no promise of a future. If he found such a story, he would have written to that husband to ask him how he was handling it. How did he get up and keep going every day? How did he face his own future? How did he feel in the middle of the night when he woke up and reached for his wife, his lover, only to remember that she was lying in a nursing home and could offer him nothing more than a vacant smile?
How did other men in his position manage this? At the age of thirty-five, was he to have only his fantasies—and his own hand in the dark—as his wife and lover for the rest of his life? Would this man Liam searched for, but could not find, give in to temptation the way he had with Joelle?
In those moments when he could step away from the pain and the loss, he would ask himself if there might be a reason for what had happened to his family. What was he to learn from this? But he could see no lesson here. Just a cruel joke by a cruel god.
He recalled working with the husband of an Alzheimer’s patient a couple of years ago. The man had been in his sixties, and he’d slept with an acquaintance, a one-night stand. “I needed to know I was still a man,” he’d said.
Liam had maintained his professional composure, remaining nonjudgmental as he helped the man talk through his feelings of loss and grief. Personally, though, he had recoiled from the man’s words: “I needed to know I was still a man.” To himself, he’d thought, Selfish bastard. Whatever happened to your vow of “in sickness and in health”?
When he thought of that man now, he knew he’d been of little help to him. He hadn’t understood what it was like to lose that part of oneself. Not just sex, but the intimacy that accompanied it, the waking up together with stale breath and bad hair, and feeling love in spite of it all.
His head began to ache as his thinking turned in circles. If he hadn’t pushed Mara to have a child, she would be well. She’d still be that healthy, vibrant, bright, talented woman with whom he’d fallen in love. But then he would look at Sam and wonder how he had ever existed before having this child. Sam was a miracle wrapped up in flesh and blood, and the thought that he and Mara might never have created him was unthinkable. And yet, if Sam did not exist, Mara would be well. He could get lost in those thoughts, spinning in a circle that had no end.
He’d