The doctors had told him waking from a coma doesn’t happen like in the movies, from one instant to the next. It’s a sluggish affair, and every single patient must fight their own way back to life.
“Look forward to it — it’ll be an amazing moment,” said a nurse, who appeared to be completely convinced that things would be looking up for Lærke now.
Half past five in the morning. Not a sound to be heard on the ward except for the faint hum of machines. The sky outside the tall windows beginning to lighten a pale blue. It was Day Thirteen, and in the last couple of days Lærke had had recurring convulsions while still comatose. Now her right leg and arm went into spasms. Bernard held her hand as it twitched between his hands. He whispered that there was nothing to fear, that he was there to take care of her; that he loved her. For she always looked so terrified when she went into convulsions.
“Can you hear me?” he asked, just as he did every single time he was there. “Can you? Lærke, can you hear me?”
Her head lay still upon the pillow, turned toward him, and then her eyelids trembled. He was on the point of shouting; this was so major, so unexpected. Her eyelids trembled and they opened and suddenly, for the first time in almost two weeks, he was looking straight into his wife’s blue eyes.
“I’m right here,” he said. “Your husband.”
Her eyes regarded him for what felt like several minutes.
“Can you hear me, Lærke? Can you understand me?”
Her eyes that were only half open; that were far, far away. He sensed that she had no idea where she was.
“I’m Bernard,” he said. “Your husband.”
“Watch out!” she said — or in any case that’s what he heard it as, her speech nearly unintelligible, as well as muffled by the oxygen mask.
And then she disappeared again.
Bernard wanted to call everyone he knew, he wanted to get up and run out to the nurses, he wanted to squeeze Lærke’s hand. Everything. He could feel his body shaking, just like hers. He wanted to jump up and run into the corridor, but he couldn’t leave her; she might open her eyes again.
He called a nurse, and after she left, he sat and gazed at Lærke until the first nurse on the morning shift came in, one hour later.
Then he went down to the parking lot, where he was allowed to use his cell phone, and called his parents, who had flown up from Paris and were staying at a hotel in Copenhagen. They’d been very fond of Lærke ever since she’d been a teenager working for them as an au pair. He also called his in-laws, and the parents of the twins’ best friend from school. The twins had been sleeping there so that they’d be as unscathed as possible by the family’s disintegration.
The grandparents all arrived at the hospital an hour later, but nothing more happened that day. To wake up and try to warn Bernard about some unknown peril had required a huge effort from Lærke. She remained completely unconscious for another twenty-four hours.
Because Lærke might be about to wake, the doctors cut back on her morphine and replaced the oxygen mask with a thin tube that ran from her nose. It was odd to see her without the mask; she was starting to look more and more like herself.
The next day she woke again, and this time the boys were in the room too.
“Jonathan,” she said. “Benjamin.”
Her speech was still very indistinct, but there was no doubt she recognized them. Jonathan climbed up into bed with her, and Bernard let him. After his attack, Jonathan had said he didn’t want to go back to the hospital, and now Bernard was glad he’d insisted. Benjamin crawled into the bed too. Lærke said both of their names several times, and then a minute later she was gone again.
Bernard lifted the boys down, explained to them that their mother was very tired now, and took them out into the common room, where he unpacked some of the many lunches that their friend’s mother had packed them.
So Lærke could speak, and she could see, think, and recognize them. Good news. Just that she was in there, in her apparently dead body. Yet as Bernard was trying to make the shared meal a pleasant experience, he was also thinking of something he’d have to ask the doctor about: Lærke hadn’t smiled when she saw the boys. There was no joy on her face when they climbed up to her — only something that looked like wonder. The whole thing felt so new to him that he didn’t yet know what to think about it.
In the days that followed, she woke up for a few minutes every couple of hours. It was clear she didn’t understand where she was, regardless of how many times Bernard explained it to her. But he was patient, and he told her she’d get well, and he told her he loved her. The wonder was still in her face, though without a trace of the gentle smile she would have smiled if it’d been a movie. As if he were some math problem to her; as if she didn’t see him as a person.
Then, late one evening as Bernard listened to the sounds of a family out in the hallway — the family of a teenager who’d just died in the next room — Lærke said her first sentence.
“Ah luh ooh.”
He sat in his chair for a long time and gasped for breath in the half darkness. She closed her eyes again and he kept sitting there, stock-still, even though he’d read enough about brain damage in the last few days to know she was probably just echoing the words he’d said to her.
• • •
In the following months, the whole family began to founder. Lærke’s parents moved in to help take care of the boys.
The doctors at the rehab center were quick to say they didn’t expect Lærke would ever be able to return to her job as project manager at the ad agency. They also doubted she’d be able to walk again. Bernard had to relinquish his career plans and his hopes for the boys and himself.
But everyday life at home with Lærke was more draining than anything else. Her injury was distributed across her entire brain, which basically meant she had less of everything: she lacked emotion and was indifferent to herself and others; she got tired after a few hours of mere conversation and couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes at a time; she couldn’t make decisions or deal with the most ordinary trifles; and she usually couldn’t remember anything Bernard or the kids told her.
She used to pump so much energy into the family, but now her dominant trait was utter passivity. She never took the initiative or said anything of her own accord, and it seemed like she didn’t even think or imagine anything on her own. Her face hung dead from her cheekbones, without those tiny twitches that in a healthy person indicate life beneath the skin.
The boys started getting into a lot of fights, because they felt the other kids were teasing them about their mother. Sometimes it was true, but as a rule it wasn’t. And no matter how much Bernard and his in-laws tried to give them the support they needed, the boys’ close friendships began to fall apart, simply because the twins were fighting their best friends too much.
So this is my family, Bernard would think as he headed home from yet another parents’ meeting where the other parents had brought up the issue of his sons. This is what we’ve become.
He tried to be constructive in their new situation, to come up with something that would improve the boys’ lives, and above all to avoid destroying anything else. Jonathan and Benjamin mustn’t notice how he felt like he’d lost his way, every day, though he still lived with them in the same house on the same peaceful-looking residential street.
On one Saturday, around lunchtime, Bernard came home hauling five bags of groceries for the week ahead. Lærke was waiting in the hall. She always was when he came home, though she never opened the front door, even after a ramp was installed so she could roll herself outside.