“I’ll come check on you in a bit,” I promise.
I’m almost to the sliding French doors when I hear him call out, “Hey, Nola?”
“Yeah?” I turn around.
With his hands behind his head and his eyes still closed, he says, “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I ran into a giant salmon today.”
“There’s my pool.Yes, I am swimming outsideeverydayin February.” Emma holds up her iPad to face the yard as she brags about her current lifestyle to her fifth-grade class. I make out a bunch of distant voices gasping in jealous awe.
“That’s very lucky for you, Emma. Now I need you to go sit down and get ready to learn,” her teacher says in a kind but firm voice.
“I am going to be so ready to learn . . . from my personalloft,” she says with all the sass a ten-year-old can muster.
The weekend was a lot of making sure Max was breathing while he slept, keeping him medicated around the clock so he wasn’t fussy from the pain, feeding him when he got hungry, and making sure he changed his clothes periodically. He didn’t say much either after that first night. A few sentenceswhen prodded and a lot of grunts in place of a simple yes. It was like having an infant in my life again—a big, ill-tempered infant.
The first two days of his post-concussion life, I gave him a free pass. I empathized with his feelings of anger at the unexpected setback. I could tell he was worried he would lose his chance at this season and his place on the team when he’d only just begun. Unfortunately, I caught him watching an ESPN highlight on Saturday night. They replayed his run-in with the mascot and while the commentators weren’t rude, per se, there were a few jokes at Max’s expense, and I watched him completely shut down.
By Sunday morning, it was clear Emma and I couldn’t leave him while he recovered. He’d woken up at some point in the early hours and made the trek up to his room. When I asked if he was more comfortable in his own bed, he was hallow. “It’s fine. I came for the blackout shades and the ability to wallow in self-pity alone.”
I rebooked our flights for the following Saturday, emailed Emma’s teacher, requesting access to do a distance-learning week, and updated Callie on my change in plans. When she asked how my new landscape for the Hotel McCall was going, I hung up and placed a delivery order from the closest art supply store. I’d begun one before coming to Arizona but it would be easy to start over and ship the project home.
Max wasn’t kidding when he said the kitchen nook had great morning light. Once the canvas and acrylics come on Monday morning, I spread out everything on the large island and begin to mix blues together to get the right hue. There’s a photo I took of Payette Lake on my camera roll, with a deer at the water’s edge and a cool morning’s summer mist rising from the trees. I had pulled it up on my phone for guidanceand was studying the balance of light when Emma paraded through the room, leading her field trip.
Around noon, the shower from Max’s ensuite turns on. I take this as my chance to sneak into his room and grab his phone.
“Whatcha doing?” Emma’s voice at the doorway makes me jump.
“Tidying up.” I smile and fluff his pillow.
She scrunches up her face. “That lie is going to cost you.”
“That’s fair, but then your phone bill is due the fifth of the month.” I’m not messing around.
“Well-played, Mom.” She backs out of the room. “I have homework to do.”
His passcode is our wedding anniversary—I teased him about it when he set it but now I’m grateful for a set of numbers I know. Once I’m in, I scroll through his contacts and add what I’m searching for into my phone before leaving his device where I found it and going back downstairs to my nook.
I’m not sure what the rules are in our situation when it comes to each other’s family. Obviously, I have a working friendship with Stella, but his sisters? I haven’t talked to them since the wedding. Can I drop them a text? Could he randomly call Belle? I don’t know. Whatever is happening, though, feels intervention-necessary, and so it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Me: Hello, this is Nola—Max’s wife. Not sure if you know, but he got a concussion at Thursday’s game. I’m here in Arizona to help and he’s fine, but he’s not handling life very well. I think I’m out of my wheelhouse here.
I push send and begin drafting a second text that is on its way to becoming dissertation-length when an incoming video call pops up. Madelyn. Quietly, I sneak out the front door and pop in my earbuds, accepting the call.
“Hi,” the redhead movie star greets me. She’s in full hair and makeup, with a bib still tucked into her shirt collar. “Hang on just a sec, I’m going to conference Violet in.”
In a couple of seconds, her video materializes and I see her in what appears to be her office. With a smile, the oldest Hutchings sister asks, “Can you two hear me?”
We both nod. Madelyn tosses her hair over one shoulder and tells us, “I’m going to be summoned in about ten minutes to film my next scene, so I thought this would be easier than texting. What is going on?”
I give them the Cliff Notes version and add, “Is he going to be mad at me for talking behind his back with the two of you?”
“Please,” Madelyn scoffs. “He’s harmless. Yes, he loves to be totally brooding and woe-is-me, which we’d all hoped he would have outgrown by now, but . . .”
“Oh yes, he’s loved to play the down-and-out, misunderstood man, but I don’t know if we can say he’s still that way, Lynnie. I saw a totally different guy at the wedding,” Violet muses.
“Only because the baseball carrot was being dangled in front of him,” I remind them to get us back on track. “And now he’s worried it will go away as fast as it came. This is the part that I’m not sure how to handle. Do I call Aaron? Is there somebody within the team I’m supposed to pass him over to?”
“No. Unfortunately, this is what he does,” Violet sighs. She asks some follow-up questions about his concussion andcourse of home care prescribed by the team doctor, agreeing with what’s been happening before continuing her thoughts about his behavior. “You’re doing everything right and he’ll recover. But he goes to his dark place where he gets in his head. Our brother is the baby of the family—by fourteen minutes—and he lives it hard.
