That’s where her mother and Millicent found her when they arrived. Jane held Jim’s hand and glared at the monitors for week after week, he never emerging from his coma, she never emerging from her quiet hysteria, until she finally understood what she had to do.
“I want us to get married,” Jane said, standing up.
“That’s wonderful,” said Millicent. “Do you hear that, buddy?” she said to Jim, leaning down to shout in his ear. “I told you she’d come around.”
“Good, dear,” said her mother, giving Jane a hug. “That’s very good.”
“Right now,” Jane said, not hugging her back. Her mother stiffened. Millicent frowned.
“But Jim’s not awake yet,” her mother said.
“And he won’t be,” Jane said. “Not until we’re married.”
“Darling,” her mother said. “That’s just trauma and superstition talking.” She held Jane at arm’s length.
“It’s not superstition,” Jane said. “It’s what I feel.”
“Exactly,” her mother said. “And even if we could find someone to do the ceremony, how could Jim say yes?”
“He already did,” Jane said. “Do you think I don’t know what he said? And you can do the ceremony.”
“Jane,” her mother said. “You’re not being rational about this.”
“You are going to do this for me!” Jane shouted, clutching at her mother’s shoulders and squeezing them until she could feel her bones.
“Let’s just have a confab,” Millicent said gently, untangling the two of them and taking Jane’s mother outside. They came back pretty shortly. “First things first,” Millicent said. “We need to see about a dress for you.”
It was easy enough to arrange. Jim wasn’t brain dead, but nobody on the icu team thought he was ever going to wake up. His poor brain had completed its heaving sigh, swelling up and then down, and now he was just lying there. Collegiality made Jane’s fellow physicians a little brutal with her (I’m going to tell it like it is, Jane, they’d say, because I know you can take it) but it also afforded her some autonomy.
They did it as soon as Jane could change her clothes — Millicent found her a white tracksuit in the gift shop. Jim’s nurse was Jane’s witness, Millicent was Jim’s. Not that they needed witnesses. It didn’t have to be official in that way. The room was already full of flowers, but the only music they could get was a music thanatologist who had just finished harping somebody into the next life in the palliative care suite down the hall, but she could play “Heart of My Heart” after Jane hummed a few bars.
“Dear friends,” her mother began, and then launched into an extemporaneous sermon about the nature of divine surprise. Jane wasn’t listening. She had too much to say to Jim, and she knew that time was running out. I’m so sorry, she told him. I didn’t know what I felt, but now I know what I feel. “Do you, Jane Julia Cotton,” her mother was asking her, “take this man to be your wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and health, to love, cherish, and worship, until death do you part, according to God’s holy ordinance?”
“Yes,” Jane said. “Hurry up!”
Her mother asked the corresponding question of Jim, and Millicent leaned down next to him as if to listen for his whispered reply. “He does,” she said. Jane’s mother told her she could kiss the groom, so she bent down to do it. “Careful!” the nurse whispered, anxious for his ventilator tube, but Jane was exquisitely gentle. With the tube in the way she couldn’t press both her lips to his, but she caught his lower lip in a sort of dry hug with her mouth. She thought it would be enough.
Then everybody but the bride and groom wept gently, and the music thanatologist played the wedding march, as if Jane was going to pull up the cuffs of her sweatpants and rush in merry ecstasy out of the icu and the hospital. “Now wake up,” she said to him in tears, “so I can tell you how happy I am,” but really she was afraid he might just roll over and die.
He didn’t die, but he didn’t wake up either. He just lay there, same as ever, for another two months, at which point he opened one eye and peered around the room, then closed it again. He did that for a couple of weeks, that single open eye like the periscope of his consciousness taking the lay of the world above to decide if it was safe to come up yet.
The first thing he noticed, when he woke up fully, was how weak he was. He could barely lift his hands to look at them, and he noticed how much heavier the left was than the right before he saw his wedding ring. “Look at that,” he croaked, and Jane turned around from where she was digging through a bag. Then, in an instant, he knew he was in the icu, and could guess that he had had an accident. For some reason he thought it would be funny to play a joke on Jane, so he said, “Who are you?”
That was a terrible idea. He’d never seen her cry so hard, or so despondently. Thirty seconds into my second chance, and I’m already fucking up! he thought, and then he was asleep again, exhausted by the effort of raising his hands to embrace his wife, which was what Jane kept calling herself.
“But we’ll get married again,” she said, “so it’s real.”
“Sure,” he said. “We’ll get married every day.”
“Well,” she said. “It was pretty emotional. I don’t think I can handle it more than once a week.”
“That’ll do,” Jim said. He pulled so weakly at her, he didn’t even know if she would feel it, but she came closer. “This is going to be totally awesome,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
But Jim still had months of rehab to get through, and it would be just over a year before they finally got married again. “We’ve become citizens of the icu,” he said to Jane over and over in the last week of his stay in the hospital.
“You’re not in the icu anymore.”
“You never really leave a place like that,” Jim said, sniffing his arm. “I’m going to smell like a hospital forever. I never smelled like a hospital when I just worked here. I’ve become one of those sad stories.”
“No, you’re not,” Jane said.
“Yes, I am,” Jim said. “I’m a sad story, but not a sad person. I’m a very happy person. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do,” Jane said, leaning down to kiss him. “I’m happy too.” There was a knock on the door, and a man came in smiling.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’m one of the chaplains. Would you like to chat?”
“Go fuck yourself,” said Jim, with a little salute.
The chaplain bowed and returned the salute, then withdrew from the room. Jane watched him go, eyes wide.
“Don’t worry,” Jim said. “He told me I could say that. He comes by every day, and I tell him to fuck off. We have an understanding.” Which was true. Jim had told the man he could come see him every day, and in return the man had told Jim he could dismiss him any way he liked. “You can’t really tell the doctor or the nurse to fuck off,” he had said, laying a warm palm on Jim’s arm. “But you can tell me to fuck off anytime you like.”