the same. I don’t tell him about it. Instead, I smile and pat his knee. I need him to believe in the easy thing we both signed up for, the glorious, uncomplicated future we designed together in my old apartment, with its vacations to Colorado and Christmas-tree shopping and pink-gummed babies that scoot across the floor. I need him to believe in it so that I believe in it too. Our harmless, happy little dreams are worth protecting. I spare him for today and try to trust in a sweet tomorrow.
* * *
The pain doesn’t go away. Over the next few days, it happens again and again. It doesn’t clock out at 5 p.m. to let me rest; it lusts after me, especially in the night. I can’t sleep, and I start to dread the setting sun. The violet-spotted evening sky I used to love is just the opening act for wide-awake aloneness in the dark. I lie for hours playing jigsaw with pillows and throws, but there’s no getting comfortable anymore. I beg for rest, I pray for it, but it never comes. I shake Jack sometimes, looking for him to rescue me, but all he can do is watch me lose the cruel night game.
“Shhhhhhh,” he breathes, stepping just partway out of a deep sleep to speak to me.
I let him cover me up with his warm, clammy body; he almost has to hold me down. The sleep comes in the early morning and there’s never enough of it. The truth in my bones speaks louder every day.
By April, I’m starting to miss work and my wonderful boss, Andy, gets worried. He calls to check in and I tell him over the phone what happened. Unlike Jack, he finds a hundred questions to ask me. He wants to know the exact location of pain, the exact location of the Starbucks, and if anybody in my family has ever suffered from anxiety. Andy’s specialty is making people feel better, so he sets me up with a good Christian doctor from our church whose name sounds like that of a German Christmas cookie. Doctors scare me; they’ve scared me ever since I left Baton Rouge General with the brace fastened tight around my neck. I take the appointment though because right now, my body scares me more.
We go to the hospital on a Tuesday. I make Jack come with me because the smell of hand sanitizer and sight of scrubs return me to the bed, to the tubes, the pee bag. I think about the accident and I want to curl up into a ball and sob.
The office is on the fifth floor of a building called the “Doctor’s Tower”; the name had to have been inspired by my actual worst nightmare. I hold my breath all the way up the elevator and plunk into a chair as soon as we arrive. Jack signs me in with his charming adolescent chicken scratch and says hi to the lady at the desk. We’re a pair of Sesame Street opposites: He’s bright, smiling, and sure that everything is fine; I am bracing myself for the worst under a cartoon rain cloud with Oscar the green trash puppet.
The exam room is papered in salmon-colored stripes and it smells like a Yankee Candle melted over isopropyl alcohol and sickness. Jack is standing guard beside me, squinting at a family portrait on the wall. It’s an old picture, with gap-toothed children who are probably grown now and the golden kind of spouse and dog that every doctor probably has. The man who stands proudly beside them in the photo is a little bit fat and very happy underneath his giant red mustache. He walks in ten minutes later after a swift knock.
“You must be Ruthie.” He smiles, cradling my hand in his and giving it a firm squeeze. He looks much older now than he was in the photo but still happy. He’s shaved his giant red mustache and lost weight.
We sit across from each other, he on a short padded stool and I up high on an exam table spread with paper that crinkles underneath my butt. I am ready for him to fix me and Jack is ready for me to be fixed.
I tell him everything: about the accident in Louisiana, the Starbucks, the insomnia, the fear, the headaches, and the panic attacks. His expression remains friendly and professional the whole time, but I start to lose it. My voice shakes and snot