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

unnatural red chemo flush is fading from her cheeks. But her breath quickens just crossing the floor of the cafeteria. Her hair and eyelashes have yet to grow back, and her bald head is wrapped in a rust-colored cotton bandana.
    “Your Georgia O’Keeffe look,” Simon said when she came to hear him play the Sunday jam at the Garden Bay Pub a few weeks earlier. “It’s working for you. You look great, Kathryn.”
    She holds me now, too tight, too long. I am suffocating against her shoulder. I am relieved to see her but also, irrationally, angry. She shouldn’t be here. A hospital is the last place she, with her weakened immune system, should be.
    “You must be so frightened,” she says as she reaches for and holds Eli, and he howls, an animal noise, part grief, part anger, while he pushes her away and grabs my hand.
    “I can’t stay here,” he says again. “I need to get out of here.”
    It is inconceivable to me to leave the hospital, so Guido takes Eli to the hotel room Dave has booked for us and paid for. It is a hard realization that I can’t make this better, or safe, for Eli. But I feel some relief too that he has left with Guido. There is no one I trust more to be with Eli than Guido—that is why he is Eli’s godfather—and now I can focus on the moment when Simon’s mother, father, and sister will arrive. The moment when I will tell them what I have just told Eli. The moment when I have to repeat the litany of dire outcomes Dr. Griesdale outlined. The moment when I have to tell them Simon’s spinal cord is severed. I have repeated this new information to Guido, Lou, Ryan, and Dave, and that was hard enough. Lou gasped and doubled over, suckerpunch to the gut, when he heard about the spinal cord. Since the moment he arrived at our kitchen door, his every action and gesture has told me that we can navigate this crisis together. That everything will be okay. But as he crumbles with this new update, it is clear we are all now passengers in a car that has spun irrevocably out of control.
    The thought of telling Simon’s family this is unbearable. In the pauses between breaths I continue to clutch at the thought that this can’t be happening. It is a thought thick with desperate, childish need, a need that, with neither logic nor faith to fuel it, magically, savagely, continues to persist: if they don’t come and if I don’t say it out loud, it won’t really be happening.
    SIMON WENT BACK to Toronto in mid-March to visit his family—his parents; his sister, Emily; her wife, Sarah; and their two children, Oscar and Alice—while Eli and I stayed at home. It’s been over a year since I have seen any of them, but here they are—Marc, Lorna, and Emily—sharp-edged and white with worry, standing at the entrance to Sassafras. We huddle in a small circle, barely able to hug hello for the weight of words hanging between us. Although I have been doing nothing but waiting, their appearance seems sudden, out of context. Bewildering. I feel as if I am meeting them for the first time, the familiarity of their faces only a pleasant déjà vu, a fleeting dream of a sweet but distant previous life.
    In family photos, Lorna is the person who gazes directly at the camera, head tilted back, chin jutting out in a defiant thrust, suggesting a personality who is unafraid, even embracing, of confrontation, a personality well suited to her successful career as a criminal defense lawyer; but that bristling, pugnacious energy is absent today. She is deflated, trembling, her hand tentative on Marc’s upper arm. Marc, a lifelong athlete who, in his mid-sixties, still plays tennis and hockey a couple of times a week, is the guy in the family who gets things done, who keeps things running smoothly. While Lorna always seems to step forward into the fray, Marc’s most characteristic gesture, especially when he is particularly intrigued or troubled, is to take a step back, folding his long arms over his chest. This is how he