Signs and Wonders Read Free Page A

show it. She cocked her head and spoke in a high, chirping voice apparently meant to be sympathetic. “You’ll get through this, Kathleen,” she said. “I know you will. You’re a very strong woman, and you’ll prevail.”
    Kathleen said, “Whatever happened to that bird of yours? Did anybody ever figure out who took it?”
    “Um, no,” Fleur said, clearly rattled. She looked down at the ground and fiddled with the fringed edges of her beaded, ruffled scarf.
    “Maybe no one took it,” Kathleen said. “Maybe it just escaped.”
    Fleur was looking at Terence now, at the cage of his body. If Kathleen wasn’t mistaken, there were tears in her eyes. “Stranger things have happened,” she said.
    Each week, Fleur came back. Sometimes she came to the hospital, during visiting hours, but more often, as time dragged on, she came to the house, dropping in on Kathleen on Thursday afternoons after classes were over. She brought a book, or brownies, or departmental gossip, and also, sadly, she brought the annoying gift of her personality and her chortling, exasperating laugh.
    Kathleen made no attempt to be polite; she never offered coffee or tea, or even thanked her for coming by. Fleur took to bringing coffee with her, in a thermos, and separately packed containers of milk and sugar, along with cookies that she arranged on a floral plate. Which she also brought. She was a portable concession, a coffee-shop-mobile.
    She rarely asked about Terry, seeming to assume that if there was news on that front, Kathleen would tell her. Rather, she asked about Kathleen’s week, what she’d been doing, as if she had a life. And because Kathleen was proud, she found herself anticipating this question throughout the week and then developing a life in order to have an answer. She read books, knitted a scarf, watched a documentary film about turtles so that she could understand her son’s job better. These things weren’t much, but they were better than nothing, and in Fleur’s presence she offered them to herself.
    Fleur days, as she thought of them, gave her weeks their only shape. Otherwise she separated the days into mornings, which she spent at home, afternoons, spent with Terry, and evenings, witha bottle of wine. Each day was distinguished from the next only by the shift rotations of the hospital staff, all of whom she came to know by name. She asked after their kids and helped them celebrate their birthdays by eating sheet cake in the lounge.
    Alone with Terry every afternoon, she played Shakespeare for him and read. She rarely spoke to him. The doctors had told her that the sound of her voice might help, but reading to him would have felt too much like pretending. She sat with him. She watched as they changed his catheter, his bandages. His skin was healing, and day by day he looked less like bruised fruit and more like supermarket poultry, naked and trussed up.
    Inside the hard container of his skull, his brain was also trying to heal, she imagined, pulsing gently as it rifled through useless things—childhood memories, sports scores, Marxist theory—in search of some pure cells that would bring him back to life.
    It was entirely possible, the doctors said, that he might never wake up. They spoke in measured tones of percentages and possibilities. She needed, they said, to be prepared for every eventuality. But when she pressed them for details—When do I decide? To do what? And how will I know?—they shook their heads and counseled patience.
    To say that what she felt, sitting next to him, was complicated would be more than understatement. She believed, with all her heart, that Terry didn’t want her there; that he had long hated her just as she had hated him; that her presence had grown to be a burden, even the sound of her chewing, or the rhythm of her steps, inconsequential things that only married people can hate. It was as a gesture of kindness that she didn’t read to him, because surely being in a coma doesn’t