Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music by Kara Stanley Page A

me by my writing teacher, Maureen Medved, at the University of British Columbia. The horses, she explained, pull the covered wagon. The pioneers get in their wagon and start their journey west. Everything changes—the landscape, the weather, the relationships in and out of the wagon. The horses alone remain the same. She tapped the thirty pages of my fatally flawed manuscript and said, I don’t see your Horses.
    Some of my writing students understand the concept of Horses immediately. Others struggle with it. Do you mean theme, they want to know, or literary symbolism? No, I tell them, although they are connected. It’s less about where a story is going, I say, and more about how it gets there. What is it, I ask, that pulls us through?
    I believe that a marriage, like a novel (or any successful work of art), requires Horses. Good, strong horses: proud, tall bays with long black manes, possessing speed and endurance. Horses strong enough to pull you both through the changing landscape of your life, the changing landscape of your body.
    Our Horses? Eli, always Eli, our first and most important work. Then the compulsion to do, to make, to create things both useful and sustaining, a compulsion that Simon and I share and that has led us over the years to bake bread, build houses, write stories, and record CD s. And then the standby steeds in our stable: good food, good friends, good family. And music. There has always been music.

{ 8 }
SUCKERPUNCH
----
    AT SIXTEEN, ELI is tall, athletic, and strong. He shares his father’s wide green eyes and the extra-plump lower lip of his mouth, a feature common to many in the Paradis clan, but he is longer and leaner than Simon. It is hard to pinpoint when I started reaching up to hug him, but it is still a new enough sensation as to feel odd and not quite right.
    A serious soccer player, Eli has been attending a soccer camp on Vancouver Island. When he arrives at Sassafras in the morning, he knows only that Simon was injured in an accident, and his face is stiff and strained with worry. He is too big. It would be better if I could pick him up and hold him on my lap while I tell him.
    I explain as best as I can. I strive to keep my voice as normal as possible, as if words like
coma, brain bleed,
and
paralysis
are routinely part of our conversations. Eli is silent while I talk, his hands clenched, his gaze lowered.
    “Do you want to go see him?” I ask.
    “I don’t know,” he says. He stands with a riotous lurch and shifts his weight forward, both hands reaching for the back of a chair, which I think, for a moment, he is going to throw. He is frightened, and his fear is unexpectedly volatile; a barely contained fury sparks off him. He glances in my direction. “I don’t know if I can.”
    “You can,” I say.
    Together we walk down the long hallway and into the glass ICU room. It is a fresh assault: the tubes and the machines and vents and drains and parched lips. Still hands. Swollen face, the swelling worse today. Simon is a fallen giant, and beside me Eli shatters into a thousand pieces, the way I did the night before.
The first lesson of motherhood,
my friend Rachel Rose wrote in her poem “Notes on Arrival and Departure,”
pretend you are brave
/
until you are brave
. I try. I pretend. But it is not enough for either of us.
    “Dad?” Eli says. He stands still in the middle of the room, afraid to move any closer. “Simon?” His face has turned a fluid shade of oyster gray and sweat beads over his lip. I wonder if he will throw up. He turns to me, his eyes wild. “I can’t stay,” he says. “I can’t stay here.” As we leave the ICU , I am blasted by the force of his pain. It threatens to pull me under. I don’t know how to be there for him and still keep my head above water, still breathe.
    Back at Sassafras, people have begun to arrive. Guido, Lou, Ryan, Dave. My mother, who looks healthier now than she did even a few weeks ago. She has gained some weight, and the