Leni handed him a jar and climbed aboard. As she sat on the bench in the back, staring up at the town perched on stilts above the sea, she told herself not to have any hopes for today. She knew Matthew’s condition, had heard the words so often they’d worn a groove in her consciousness. Brain damage.
Even so, at night, after writing her daily letter to Matthew, she often fell asleep dreaming it was a Sleeping Beauty kind of thing, a dark spell that the kiss of true love could undo. She could marry him and hope that her love would waken him.
Forty minutes later, after a bumpy, splashing crossing of Kachemak Bay, the water taxi pulled up to the dock and Leni jumped out.
On this ice-cold winter day, fog coiled along the waterline of the Spit. There were only a few locals out in this weather and no tourists. Most of the businesses were closed for the season.
She left the road and began the uphill climb into Homer proper. She’d been told that if she came to the house with the pink boat in the yard and Fourth of July decorations still up, she’d gone too far on Wardell.
The care facility sat at the edge of town, on a wildly overgrown lot with a gravel parking lot.
She stopped. A huge bald eagle perched on a telephone pole watching her, its golden eyes bright in the gloom.
Forcing herself to move, she went into the building, spoke to the receptionist, and followed her directions down to the room at the end of the hall.
There, at the closed door, she paused, took a steady breath, and opened the door.
Mr. Walker stood by the bed. At Leni’s entrance, he turned. He didn’t look like himself. The months had whittled him away; his sweater and jeans bagged. He had grown a beard that was half gray. “Hi, Leni.”
“Hey,” she said, her gaze cutting to the bed.
Matthew lay strapped down. There was a cagelike thing around his bald head. It was bolted in with screws; they’d drilled into his skull. He looked thin and scrawny and old, like a plucked bird. For the first time she saw his face, crisscrossed by red zipper scars. A pucker of folded skin pulled one corner of his eye downward. His nose was flattened.
He lay motionless, his eyes open, his mouth slack. A line of drool beaded down from his full lower lip.
Leni went to the bed, stood beside Mr. Walker.
“I thought he was better.”
“He is better. Sometimes I swear he looks right at me.”
Leni leaned down. “H-hey, Matthew.”
Matthew moaned, bellowed. Words that weren’t words, just apelike sounds and grunts. Leni drew back. He sounded angry.
Mr. Walker placed his hand on Matthew’s. “It’s Leni, Matthew. You know Leni.”
Matthew screamed. It was a heartrending sound that reminded her of an animal caught in a trap. His right eye rolled around in the socket. “Waaaaath.”
Leni gaped down at him. This wasn’t better. This wasn’t Matthew, not this screaming, moaning husk of a person.
“Blaaaa…” Matthew moaned, his body buckling. A terrible smell followed.
Mr. Walker took Leni by the arm, led her out of the room.
“Susannah,” Tom said to the nurse. “He needs a diaper change.”
Leni would have collapsed if not for Mr. Walker, who held her up. He led her over to a waiting area with vending machines and eased her into a chair.
He sat in the chair beside her. “Don’t worry about the screaming. He does it all the time. The doctors say it’s purely physical, but I think it’s frustration. He’s in there … somewhere. And he is in pain. It’s killing me to see him like this and not to be able to help.”
“I could marry him, take care of him,” Leni said. In her dreams she’d imagined it, being married, her caring for him, her love bringing him back.
“That’s a really nice thing, Leni, and it tells me Matthew loves the right girl, but he may never get out of that bed or be able to say ‘I do.’”
“But people get married, people who are injured and can’t talk and are dying. Don’t they?”
“Not to eighteen-year-old girls with their whole lives in front of them. How’s your mom? I hear she took your dad back.”