When she opens it and the three of us walk through the door, the tension is palpable. There is something wrong, and all three of us know it.
“I installed a seat in the shower and took the door off. It’s just a curtain now. That should make it easy for you to get in and out on your own,” Mark says.
He’s talking to me, but he’s looking at Gabby. He wants her to know all the work he did.
“I also moved all of your things into the first-floor office. And put the guest bed in there so you don’t have to go up and down the stairs. And I lowered the bed. You can try it.”
I don’t move.
“Or later, I guess.”
Gabby looks at him sideways.
“You should be able to rest down on it to sit and then swing your legs over, as opposed to having to use your pelvis to sit or stand.”
“Mark, what is going on?” Gabby asks.
“I bought a two-way pager system, so if you’re in bed, you can just talk into it, and Gabby will know to come get you. And the dining-room table was too high, so this morning I had one delivered that is lower to the ground so your chair can reach.”
Gabby whips her head around the corner, surprised. “You did that this morning? Where did our table go?”
Mark breathes in. “Hannah, could you give us a minute? Maybe you could confirm that your bed is the right height?”
“Mark, what the hell is going on?” Gabby’s voice is tight and rigid. There is no bend in it, no patience.
“Hannah,” he pleads.
“OK,” I say, and I start wheeling myself away.
“No!” Gabby says, losing her patience. “She can barely move herself from place to place. Don’t ask her to leave the room.”
“It’s fine, really,” I say, but just as I say it, Mark blurts it out.
“I’m leaving,” he says. He looks at the ground when he says it.
“To go where?” Gabby asks.
“I mean I’m leaving you,” he says.
She goes from confused to stunned, as if she’s been slapped across the face. Her jaw goes slack, her eyes open wide, her head shakes subtly from side to side, as if incapable of processing what she’s hearing.
He fills in the gaps for her. “I’ve met someone. And I believe she is the one for me. And I’m leaving. I’ve left you with everything you two could need. Hannah is taken care of. I’m leaving you the house and most of the furniture. Louis Grant is drafting the paperwork.”
“You called our attorney before you talked to me?”
“I was just asking him for a referral when he explained he could do it himself. I didn’t mean to go behind your back.”
She starts laughing. I knew she was going to start laughing when he said that. I wonder if the second it came out of his mouth, he thought, Oh, crap, I shouldn’t have said that. I want to wheel out of the room very badly, but I also know that my wheelchair squeaks, and we are three people in one room. If one of us leaves, the other two are going to notice. And I’m not even sure they are registering that I’m here. I don’t want to bring attention to the fact that I’m here by not being here anymore.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “But I’m not. We should talk about this in a few days, when you’ve had time to adjust to the information. I’m truly sorry to hurt you. It was never my intention. But I am in love with someone else, and it no longer seems fair to keep going the way we have been.”
“What am I missing?” she asks. “We were talking about having a baby.”
Mark shakes his head. “That was a . . . that was wrong of me. I was . . . pretending to be someone I’m not. I have made mistakes, Gabrielle, and I am now trying to fix them.”
“Leaving me is fixing your mistakes?”
“I think we should talk about this at a later date. For now, I have moved my clothes and other things to my new place.”
“Did you take my dining-room table?”
“I wanted to make sure you and Hannah had what you needed, so I took the table to my new home and bought you both a table that would work better for Hannah’s situation.”
“She’s not an invalid, Mark. She’s going to be walking eventually. I want my table back.”
“I did what I thought was best. I think I should go now.”
She stares at him for what feels like hours but is probably only thirty seconds. And then she erupts like I have never seen her before.
“Get out of my house!” she screams. “Get out of here! Get away from me!”
He heads for the door.
“I never should have married you,” she says, and you can tell she means it. She deeply, deeply means it. She doesn’t say it as if it’s just occurring to her or as if she wants to hurt his feelings. She says it as if she is heartbroken that her worst fears came true right in front of her very eyes.
He doesn’t look back at her. He just walks out the door, leaving it open behind him. It strikes me as cruel, that small gesture. He could have shut the door behind him. It’s almost instinctual, isn’t it? To shut the door behind you? But he didn’t. He let it hang open, forcing her to close it.
But she doesn’t. Instead, she crumples to the ground, yelling from the base of her lungs. It’s throaty and deep, a grunt more than a scream. “I hate you!”
And then she looks up at me, remembering that I am here.
She gathers herself as best she can, but I wouldn’t say she succeeds. Tears are falling down her face, her nose is running, her mouth is open and overflowing. “Will you get his key?” she says. She whispers it, but even in attempting to whisper, she cannot control the edges of her voice.
I spring into action. I wheel myself out the front door and down the ramp. He’s getting into the car.
“The key,” I say. “Your key, to the house.”
“It’s on the coffee table,” he says. “With the deed. I signed over the townhouse,” he says, as if it is a secret he has been waiting to tell, like a student excited to tell the teacher he did the extra credit.
“OK,” I say, and then I turn my chair around and head back toward the front door.
“I want her to be OK,” he says. “That’s why I gave her the house.”
“OK, Mark,” I say.
“It’s worth a lot of money,” he says. “The equity in the townhouse, I mean. My parents helped us with the down payment, and I’m giving it to her.”
I turn the chair around. “What do you want me to say, Mark? Do you want a gold medal?”
“I want her to understand that I’m doing everything in my power to make this easier on her. That I care about her. You get it, don’t you?”
“Get what?”
“That love makes you do crazy things, that sometimes you have to do things that seem wrong from the outside but you know are right. I thought you’d understand. Given what Gabby told me happened between you and Michael.”
If I hadn’t just been in a car accident where I almost lost my life, maybe I’d be hurt by something as small as a sentence. If I hadn’t spent the past week learning how to stand up on my own and use a wheelchair, maybe I’d let myself fall for this sort of crap. But Mark has the wrong idea about me. I’m no longer a person willing to pretend the things I’ve done wrong are justifiable because of how they make me feel.
I made a mistake. And that mistake is part of what has led me to this moment. And while I neither regret nor condone what I did, I have learned from it. I have grown since. And I’m different now.
You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again. And I know I’ll never make that mistake again. So I let his words rush past me and off into the wind.
“Just go, Mark,” I tell him. “I’ll let her know the house is hers.”
“I never meant to hurt her.” He opens his car door.
“OK,” I say, and I turn away from him. I roll myself up the ramp. I hear his car leave the street. I’m not going to tell her any of that. She can see the deed to the townhouse on her own and form an opinion about it. I’m not going to try to tell her he didn’t mean to hurt her. That’s absurd and meaningless.