Rebecca Watkins
I.
The night my husband’s heart stops, warm spring air floats through the window. Outside the dogwood trees’ soft petals litter the sidewalk. When I scream his name, my voice sounds far away from where his body has fallen onto the hardwood floor.
He is taken away in an ambulance and then medivacked across the river from one hospital to another. Arrythmia. Tachycardia. A burst fracture. Words that seem like the names of rare moths and dying stars rather than the taste of terror in my mouth. The doctor tells us that the pacemaker under my husband’s skin has saved his life.
After a couple of days, I return to my job teaching children. Adrenaline propels me from the school, then to our home to take care of our two dogs, then to the hospital to visit him in the cardiac unit, and then back home again.
II.
I can’t quit moving because when I do, I see that moment when his body dropped to the floor over and over in my head. Before my husband comes home from the hospital, I decide to plant a vegetable garden in our backyard for the first time in many years. I buy wooden frames, seedlings, soil, and compost. When I think about how his heart sped up to 300 beats per minute, I break the ground with our rusty shovel. When I think about his eyes rolling back in his head, I grasp the sod with both hands and yank it from the ground.
When the beds are ready, I cup the seedlings of zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, and herbs and tuck them into the soil. And when I feel the sting of a mosquito bite on my chin, I don’t stop, I just swipe it and the sweat away. I work until the sun sets, then fall asleep exhausted. I think now that the gods must have been laughing as I tried to bend life to my will.
III.
After five days in the cardiac unit, my husband comes home. We buy a chair for the shower because he is still shaky on his feet. I dole out pain pills and drive him to appointments. I move my exhausted body through each day, and the mosquito bite on my chin, just a tiny incision the day it happened, grows hard and swollen. Within a week, it is black and infected under the make-up I wear to school every day, trying to fake it as I face a classroom of teenagers.
Finally, I go to see my doctor, and she listens as I tell her what happened that night. She gives me antibiotics and advice. You must stop, she said, rest.
That evening when I go to water the garden, I find the seedlings are stunted, fragile looking, the soil too alkaline. I sit down on the lawn, clutch the grass in my hands, bend into myself, and the tears come. In a triage of my life, now that my husband is safe, it seems I am the one who is bleeding out.
IV.
It is June now. My husband has healed but moves cautiously around the house. I attend doctor’s appointments with him when I can, asking for the signs to watch for, asking how our hearts can just stop, wondering how to save the ones I love.
We are home for the night, the dogs and us fed, and I am standing in the doorway, staring at the deluge of rain from a near-black sky. This is not a warm summer rain, and the heavy drops strike the roof like stones.
In the stories I read with my students, when a character is submerged in water it is symbolic. Whether the ocean or a rainstorm, they are reborn, renewed. As I watch the rain gushing out of the gutters, streaming into the muddy yard, I want this to be true for me, too. As a child I played in the summer rain with no care for the mud on my legs and clothes, free from the rigidity of rules.
I reach my hand out and let the drops hit my palm, snake down my arm. I shiver in my cotton summer dress. What had I hoped to gain by giving myself and my time away, by trying to control what is ungovernable?
Stepping off the porch, instantly I am drenched. The sharp rain drops pelt my face and arms, soaks my dress. My vision blurs, but in the distance, I see the storm’s edge glowing with gold sunlight. I make a promise, one that I will fight like hell to keep, that I will never forget myself again.
V.
The days are shorter now, darkness comes faster. I prepare the beds for winter, pull the dying plants out, put the tools in the shed. My garden didn’t turn out how I planned: the zucchini grew to the size of a man’s arm, the cucumbers climbed over and suffocated the carrots, the border of crimson and yellow marigolds, although stunning, shaded the rosemary, and the tomatoes refused to ripen. It was imperfect. Messy. Life.
At night now I rub cream on my chin where a scar remains. The infected mosquito bite healed, but it left a pale divot, a misshapen star where the flesh had fallen away. This mark will never entirely leave me, the way my husband’s heart will always beat strangely, the way some seeds once dormant live again.
#
Rebecca A. Watkins holds an MFA in poetry and an MSed from the City University of New York. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Ginosko Literary Journal, the Quartet Journal, Hole in the Head Review, the Amethyst Review and the Amaranth Journal among other literary journals. Her creative nonfiction has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards. She is the author of Field Guide to Forgiveness (Finishing Line Press 2023) and Sometimes, in These Places (Unsolicited Press 2017). More of her work can be found at rebeccawatkinswriter.com and @rwatkinswriter.