She had no plans to work anything out. Whatever he had at her place was no longer his. She turned and shot back into her house, slamming the door behind her. She hated that she gave him the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten to her, but whatever. She gasped for breath, then heard her little sisters tiptoe into the living room to find her. They looked sorrowful.
“Oh, honey,” Felicity said, hurrying forward to wrap her arms around her.
But Shannon didn’t let herself cry, not then. She didn’t want her sisters to think she was pathetic. She didn’t want them to think that she would expend a single tear on a cheater.
“I can’t believe it,” Isabelle breathed. “What did he say?”
Shannon pulled away from her sisters and went back to the dining room, where she sat down and took a big bite of quiche. She both wanted her sisters to stay and desperately wanted them to leave, so she could buy a carton of ice cream and watch television. This was her first real breakup, since she’d been too nerdy for boyfriends in high school.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Felicity said.
“He’ll come back,” Isabelle whispered.
Shannon couldn’t bring herself to speak.
Just then, all of their phones began to buzz. It was the family group chat, where they often caught up together, each of them in their separate rectangle, talking from wherever they were. They could see it was their mother calling. Their parents were on a Greek beach somewhere, sipping wine, and wanted to tell them all about their vacation.
Shannon wasn’t sure if she could take all that happiness just now.
Isabelle cut the call. “We can talk to them later,” she said. “Right now, we need to focus on you!”
But a split second later, their mother called again. The urgency in it told them they needed to answer. All the air left the room.
Shannon reached for her phone first. Her hand shaking, she answered it and put it on speakerphone. They heard their mother sobbing. And then, their world crashed around them.
3
Arietta’s life for the next two weeks went by in the strangest blur. She spent them mostly in a hospital in Athens, listening to accented English as Greek doctors explained to her the extent of her husband’s brain damage. Because she knew more about neuroscience than the average person, she felt as though she were living the worst sort of nightmare. It might have been nice not to know so completely how awful this was.
The stroke had been gargantuan, the sort of thing that scrambles the brain. The man in the hospital bed before her now was, on paper, Fred Peters, her husband of twenty-five years. But for all intents and purposes, that Fred Peters was no longer here. He gazed vacantly through space, took his meals via tubes, and couldn’t stand or move or speak. Sometimes Arietta thought he could see her. Often, she told herself he knew she was there. But a smarter and more intellectual side of her brain told her this was probably not so.
At night, Arietta stayed in a one-bedroom apartment not far from the hospital. It wasn’t the nicest part of Athens, and in her “free time” (not that she had any), she didn’t do anythingrelating to the city or the culture. She didn’t go out to eat or to the beach. She went from the apartment to the hospital and back again. Sometimes the nurses brought her Greek snacks and meals: spanakopita and meatballs and fried feta. Things that she had to choke down. She knew that she’d already lost a bit of weight. The Greeks, ever hospitable, were worried about her. She needed to prove to them that she could take care of herself. She probably needed to prove that to herself, too—and her daughters, who wouldn’t stop calling. Sometimes she answered. Other times, she couldn’t bring herself to.
Each of them threatened to fly out to Athens, but Arietta begged them not to. She wouldn’t be able to handle their anxious energy, not now when she had so much to figure out.
On the night before the flight back to Boston, a private flight that would allow Arietta and Fred the utmost comforts, Arietta read her messages for the first time in days. Many of them were from other journalists, checking in on her. They’d heard about Fred, although Arietta couldn’t remember how they knew. Maybe she’d told one of them after it had happened, or maybe they’d read it in the papers. How did information spread in 2026?
One of the messages was from Jasper, her old journalist friend.
JASPER: Hey, buddy. I’m thinking about you. I’m still in Europe if you want to get together and talk. Sending my thoughts to Fred, too.
Arietta blinked back tears, then began to compose a text message that she couldn’t send. She had no idea what to say to anyone.
Her editors had written to say they understood, since she couldn’t work on any of the articles she’d pitched for them. Shecouldn’t work for the foreseeable future. She had no idea how to put her thoughts on a page.
Arietta hired a nurse to help during the flight back to the States. She spent the entire ten hours of it awake, alternating between watching her husband and staring into space. Did Fred know they were on a plane right now? Before the stroke, he’d loved to look out the window. He’d taken so many photographs from the plane of fields and oceans and clouds. “It’s a miracle,” he’d always said. “Look, everyone’s asleep! They don’t know what they’re missing!”
The nurse didn’t need to do much. She was there to monitor Fred’s vitals and change his bedpan and make sure he was fed. Arietta planned to do all this herself once they got back to the United States. She had a handbook and about a thousand tabs open on her computer. At forty-nine, she was ready to take care of her stroke-victim husband. He would have everything he needed from here on out.
Arietta had asked the doctors numerous times, “What caused this? Why did it happen?”
Of course, they hadn’t been able to give her a clear answer. Fred was only fifty-six. He’d had slightly high blood pressure, as of late, and he’d had a slightly irregular heartbeat a few years ago, but Arietta had thought all that was resolved now or mostly a non-issue. Maybe he’d eaten a little too much meat, and perhaps he hadn’t exercised as much as he should have, but nobody was perfect. Why had this happened to Fred? Could he be fixed?
Arietta knew enough about neuroscience to know questions like “Can he be fixed?” were dangerous to ask. But still, she couldn’t help but hope for a miracle. It didn’t hurt to believe.
Ariettaand a few nurses from the Boston hospital set up Fred in the guest bedroom at their house. Arietta set up a television in there, if only because she knew Fred hated to be bored. He needed stimulation. She put it on one of their many sports channels, then went downstairs and waited for her daughters to arrive. Shannon was driving in from New Haven, and Isabelle and Felicity were carpooling from their shared apartment. When the front door opened, bringing her daughters back into the home where she and Fred had raised them, Arietta erupted from the kitchen table, surprised. She realized she hadn’t bought anything for dinner. She didn’t have anything for them to drink.
Her daughters were shell-shocked and red-faced, as though they’d spent the past two weeks crying. Arietta wrapped them in hugs and collapsed with them on the sofa, where they asked her how she was and doted on her. Shannon, the eldest, ordered pizza and wine, and the food came twenty minutes later, maybe because it was too early for the dinner rush.