singing an entirely different song. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it up there for the birth, but I’m sure I’ll get there before the end of the year. I want to give her a chance to settle in first.”
Her patter continued while she finished cutting his hair. Afterward, she gently lifted his head and slid out the pillow. She removed the pillowcase, shook it a couple of times, and examined it to make sure it was clean before reversing the process, putting the pillow back in place. She adjusted the sheet and kissed his lips with a tenderness that nearly brought a tear to my eye.
“I miss you, sweetheart,” she whispered. “Please try to get better soon, okay? I love you.”
She reached for her bag, then stood from the bed and motioned toward the door. I led the way out into the corridor, and we retraced our footsteps to the car. When we arrived, she pulled out the keys. “I could use a glass of wine,” she said. “Are you up for that?”
“Without a doubt.”
* * *
We went to a bar in Havelock called Everly’s. It wasn’t too far from the hospital and I had the sense when we walked in that it wasn’t Natalie’s first visit to the place. After ordering our drinks, we found a quiet booth, partially sheltered from the noise.
“Now you know,” she said.
“I’m very sorry for what you’re going through. It must be awful.”
“It is,” she admitted. “It’s like nothing I ever imagined.”
“What do the physicians say?”
“After three months, the chances for recovery are very slight.”
“What happened? If you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll understand.”
“It’s all right. You’re not the first to ask. A year ago last April, for our third anniversary, we spent a long weekend in Charleston. As crazy as it sounds, neither of us had ever been there before and we’d heard so much about it. We left Thursday night. He told me that he felt tired and he had a headache, but who doesn’t toward the end of a workweek? Anyway, we had a nice day on Friday despite his headache, and then on Saturday, he got a fever. It got worse as the day went on, so we went to the emergency room and he was diagnosed with the flu. We were supposed to be heading home on Sunday anyway, so neither of us was too worried about it. But in the car the next day, his fever kept getting higher and higher. I wanted to stop in Wilmington, but he told me to just keep going. By the time we got back to New Bern, his temperature was a hundred and four. We went straight to the hospital, but they didn’t figure out what was wrong with him until the next day. By then, his fever was over a hundred and six, and even with all the antibiotics, the fever just didn’t break. It was a nasty virulent strain. After the seventh day of sky-high fevers, he went into a coma. After that, once the fever finally broke, he was able to open his eyes. I thought that meant we were past the worst, but he didn’t seem to know who I was and…”
She took a sip of wine before going on. “He stayed in the hospital for another month, but after that, it was pretty clear he was in a vegetative state. We eventually found a really good place for him—where we just were—and he’s been there ever since.”
“That’s terrible,” I said, grasping for words. “I can’t imagine how hard that must have been—must still be.”
“It was worse last year,” she said. “Because I still had hope. But these days, I don’t have a lot of hope.”
With my stomach in knots, I couldn’t fathom taking a drink. “Was he the one you met in college?”
She nodded. “Just such a sweet guy. He was shy and handsome, but wasn’t arrogant in the slightest, which surprised me, especially considering how wealthy his family is. They own one of the car dealerships here in town, and two or three others in other parts of the state. Anyway, he was on the lacrosse team, and I used to watch him play. He wasn’t quite good enough for a scholarship, but he was a recruited walk-on and played in almost every game his last two years. He could run like a gazelle and score from almost anywhere.”