“She was in a car accident last week,” Azra said. “I thought maybe you’d heard. She was stopped at a light on Jean-Talon when a car rammed straight into her. She has a broken leg and a broken pelvis and I don’t even know what else.”
“That’s awful,” Mitch said. “Are you heading in now? I’ll go with you.”
She hesitated for a second, then shrugged and nodded, and they walked inside together, catching up on each other’s news. Azra and Mike had two children, and Mitch heard their names and ages with the usual small pang of having let a stage of life pass him by. Outside Grace’s room, he stopped and touched Azra’s arm. “Why don’t you go in first and make sure she doesn’t mind if I say hi?”
He waited in the hallway after Azra disappeared inside. He worked on a different floor and knew few of the doctors here; it occurred to him now how circumscribed his routine really was. Then the door opened, and Azra gestured him in.
“Grace,” he said.
Nobody could look their best when lying in a hospital bed after a car accident, and Grace was no exception. Her face was etched with wrinkles, her skin weathered. Threads of silver shot through her limp brown hair. Her broken leg, on top of the covers, was frozen in its white trunk. Below it, a fuzzy red sock seemed the only brightness in the room. Surrounded by machines and hooked up to an IV drip, she seemed fractured and frail. Mitch couldn’t help thinking about Gloria and Thomasie Reeves, about Mathieu’s shoulder and Martine’s ankle. Feeling like the world had broken everyone he knew, he took one of Grace’s small, dry palms in his. “You look like you got hit by a truck.”
“It was a Honda, actually,” she said. Her facial expression held the dreamy vagueness of sedation. Behind him, Azra cleared her throat. She had taken off her coat and was setting things on a counter by the window: books, a pillow, a stuffed animal. Watching her friend’s movements, Grace seemed to have trouble turning her head.
“Sarah thought you should have the bear,” Azra said, waving it at Grace. “She said he’d keep you company.”
Grace licked her lips, which were chapped and feathery. “How is she?” Her voice cracked, and Mitch poured her a cup of water from a bedside pitcher and handed it to her.
“She’s doing great. She really wanted to come today, but I told her you wouldn’t want her to miss her swimming lesson. I’ll bring her tomorrow.”
“I don’t even know how to thank you.”
“Oh, shut up,” Azra said fondly.
“Who’s Sarah?” Mitch said.
Grace’s eyes met his. “My daughter.”
Mitch swallowed, surprised he hadn’t heard that she’d gotten married and started a family. On the other hand, after the divorce they’d migrated into separate social circles and never ran into each other. He’d been the one who stopped seeing their mutual friends, who’d switched neighborhoods and haunts. It was easier that way.
“She’s staying with Azra and Mike while I’m here,” Grace went on. “It sounds like she’s having a great time. I don’t think she’ll want to come home.”
“It’s fun for all of us, having her,” Azra said lightly.
“She’s always hated being an only child,” Grace said. Though her words were wistful, her voice was calm.
There was no mention of the father; Mitch guessed he was out of the picture. He realized that both women were looking at him expectantly. “Is there anything I can do?” he said, more to Azra than to Grace.
“You know, there is,” Azra said. “Maybe it’s weird to ask, but Mike and I are both working, and with the kids and all their activities … Well, is there any way you could go over to Grace’s and do the mail and the plants?”
“Of course. You don’t mind, Grace?”
When she looked at him, her expression was dazed. She couldn’t be bothered to mind right now, that much was clear.
“She lives on Monkland, I’ll write down the address,” Azra said. “Here, I have an extra set of keys. This really helps, Mitch. Thanks.”
He felt dismissed. He squeezed Grace’s hand again — cold against his own — then walked down the green hallway with her keys in his pocket.
He drove west along Sherbrooke, past the dark red turrets of the Westmount Library, the setting sun piercing the windshield. All along the street people were hurrying home from work, leaning forward against the wind that was whipping leaves off trees and whirling them around. He knew a lot of people who lived in this part of town but rarely socialized here, having peeled away this layer of his life a long time ago.
Outside Grace’s building the trees were a riot of green and early, creeping yellow. He walked up the steps, remembering the apartment they had moved into as a young married couple so long ago. They had been so thrilled to buy their first things together, furniture and dishes, all of domestic life a novelty. It was hard to believe they’d ever been so young. He left the mail on a table in the hallway and went into the kitchen, looking for a watering can. There were dirty plates in the sink, and cereal boxes and granola bars and fruit scattered across the counter. But it was a homey kitchen, a child’s smeared finger paintings tacked on the fridge. On the counter was a school photo of a blond girl with a gapped smile and clear, wide-set green eyes. She didn’t look much like Grace, who had had dark hair even as a child.
He couldn’t find anything to water with until, rummaging through the cupboards, he found a teapot that he recognized, queasily, as his mother’s. God knows when she’d given it to them. She’d been dead for seven years.
He filled the teapot with water and wandered from plant to plant. Toward the back of the apartment was Grace’s bedroom, and he peered in for a second and then, seeing no plants, stepped back with a feeling of relief. The other bedroom was a riot of pink sheets and stuffed animals and books and toys. No plants there, either.
Five minutes later he was done, and he put the teapot back exactly where he’d found it, which seemed stupid given how messy the kitchen was, but still. It felt like the right thing to do.
Back at his own apartment, he thought about Grace as he made dinner. When they met, he was halfway through his PhD program, the teaching assistant for a course Grace took called Personality. Later in their relationship, she confessed to having an encyclopedic memory of that time — what they’d said, where they’d been, what each of them had been wearing. He smiled and nodded, but truthfully he remembered little of those early encounters. What stuck in his mind was Grace’s work, her professional, detailed lab reports, so superior to those of her peers that halfway through the term he stopped reading them and gave her an automatic A. The sophistication of her performance was in dire contrast to the handwriting on her quizzes, which was round and bubbly. She didn’t dot her i’s with hearts or flowers, but she seemed like the kind of girl who had, and not that long ago. She pressed down so hard that sometimes the pen broke through the paper. It was the penmanship of a very young, very determined person.
Although he’d thought then that he was depressed, in retrospect his time as a grad student was, in fact, the happiest of his life. The worries that had so nagged at him now seemed like luxuries. Was psychology important? Was it effective? Did it matter? He stayed up at night chewing over its various intellectual and emotional bankruptcies, and these anxieties functioned as ballast, distracting him from his suspicion that it was himself, not the profession, that was unworthy. Eventually, as he started working, the worries dissipated, and at night he thought about the people he worked with and their problems, not his own.