CHAPTER 32
Matt and Diedra stayed there in the room for about half an hour. They helped Glory put together several other jigsaw puzzles and listened to her sing. Diedra didn’t say a word the entire time.
With a small sigh, Glory’s energy drained away and she said, “Lie down,” to the nurse. The nurse and Matt helped her to the bed and pulled a blanket over her, and she fell asleep almost immediately.
After a few moments, as Glory breathed deeply and slowly, Matt said, “No change.” It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t look at the nurse as he said it.
“No,” the nurse replied. “She’ll probably sleep for several hours.”
Matt nodded and, after a few more seconds watching Glory, led Diedra out of the room.
In the car, headed back to the city, Matt said, “We’re still legally married so she can stay on my insurance. She had no family of her own. Neither of us did.” He paused. “We lacked a few weeks getting to our first anniversary.”
“And...she doesn’t...”
“She doesn’t know me. According to the tests, her mental capacity is right on a level with a three-year-old.” He blinked a few times. “When she woke up, the nurses had to introduce me to her. She has no recall of her former life. She only knows me as a friend who comes to visit.”
“Matt, I’m so sorry.” She put a hand on his thigh. It wasn’t sexual.
He looked sharply at her, as though he might snap at her. Instead he glanced down at her hand, ran one finger lightly across the back of it, picked it up, and placed it gently back on her own knee.
“Thank you. Diedra...I’d like to tell you. The rest of it. Everything. I think I need to.”
“Of course.”
The words came haltingly to begin with, but soon they poured out as if draining from a wound.
# # #
Matt first saw shy, pretty Glory Kendrick on a Wednesday afternoon, in the art supply store where she worked. That night he went home and painted a picture of her.
It was the first of his paintings that took on the unearthly quality for which he was eventually to become known. He used watercolor, on a nine-by-twelve sheet, and framed it himself. He was up the whole night doing it, and took it to the art store the next day to give it to her.
He found her straightening the crow quill pens, took a deep breath, and said, “Um, hi. You don’t know me, but this is for you,” and handed her the painting.
She took it, stared at it silently.
“My name is Matt. Matt Sinclair. I was wondering, um, if I could maybe ask you to have lunch with me. Or a cup of coffee.”
He wanted to say more, but he was afraid he’d start babbling, so he waited for her to say something. When she finally did, it wasn’t what he'd expected.
“Who are you?” She frowned at him over the painting. “Have you been following me?”
“No, no! I came in here yesterday and saw you. I painted that last night. I didn’t...actually, I still don’t know your name.” It struck him how bizarre this must look to her. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just...well...I guess I thought this might be a good icebreaker.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “You saw me for the first time yesterday, and you painted this last night. From memory.”
“Uh...well, yeah.”
She stared at it for a while longer. The painting captured her perfectly, just as he’d seen her the first time, in jeans and T-shirt and her employee’s smock. Finally she lowered it and, to his relief, looked him in the eyes with perfect clarity.
“There’s a coffee shop down on the next corner.” She gestured with a thumb. “I’ll be there at seven tonight.”
Matt gave her what he knew must have been a big stupid grin, and said, “I’ll see you there,” and left the store before he could make a total fool of himself.
That evening’s shared pot of coffee marked the first date of many. Ten days after Matt gave Glory the painting he started saving money for a ring. Four months later he asked her to marry him.
At the age of twenty-three Matt Sinclair carried more than his fair share of demons. His father’s death and his own injury, all the time spent in psychiatric care, and now the presence of—he could only think of it as a power, a power he knew he couldn’t let anyone else know about—lent him a gravity, a deep-rooted sadness, and a great deal of forced maturity.
It also left him with an unshakable feeling of isolation.
His life was well-organized, much more so than those of many other young men his age. He had a steady job as an assistant instructor at a dojo, he painted in the evenings in his apartment, and—since he hardly ever went anywhere or did anything that cost much money—he had the beginnings of a down payment on a house socked away in the bank.
Matt felt more alone than he would have thought possible, and didn’t know what to do about it.
He had no shortage of girlfriends. Tall, muscular, graceful, with thick, wavy hair past his collar, Matt usually commanded attention wherever he went, intentionally or not. But the shallow girls he met, the handful of flings—he couldn’t think of them as relationships—did nothing for his loneliness.
All of that changed with Glory.
Tall, not quite bony, she had a natural athleticism Matt appreciated. Her personality was a mass of contradictions and surprises: painfully shy in public, when they were alone together Glory revealed a razor-sharp sense of humor and a surprising capacity for silliness.
She followed a firmly defined moral code, and had a very strong sense of what she considered proper. She was by far the most dignified young woman he’d ever spent time with. Yet her sexuality—which she refused to share with Matt until three weeks before their wedding date—could have been described with the kind of clichéd words found in bad romance novels: “unbridled,” or perhaps “volcanic.”
In Matt’s mind, the day he first saw Glory marked a new beginning in his life. A fresh start, not bogged down by the weight of all the grief and horror that had for so long occupied such a large part of him. When he started seeing Glory, the nightmares which had come to him at least four nights out of every seven stopped cold.
After their wedding they got a small but comfortable two-bedroom apartment together, and with their combined incomes Glory enrolled in night classes at Georgia Tech. She said she wanted to be an architect, and Matt supported her decision.
What began so beautifully ended in a rush of pain.
It was the night of the judo test at the dojo, and Matt had to work late, obligingly letting students flip him onto the mat. Glory went without him to a Wednesday night church supper. At a little past seven o’clock one of the elderly women there complained of a headache, and Glory went out to her car to get some Advil from her purse.
The man who attacked her was never caught. He didn’t even take her purse; police found it lying a few feet away from her, cash still inside.
Matt got the call just as he arrived home from work. He was at the hospital five minutes later...far too late for Glory, far too late to make any difference. His wife was deep in a coma by the time she reached the ER.
A doctor met him in the hall outside the room where Glory lay. His face drained of blood and his heart kicking, Matt almost shoved the man out of the way and burst into the room, but the doctor said, “Mr. Sinclair, please wait, I need to talk to you,” and something in the tone of the man’s voice stopped him. When Matt realized what the doctor must have to say his insides went numb.
“Mr. Sinclair, your wife suffered a severe blunt trauma to the skull. She’s receiving the best care we can give her, but she’s lapsed into a coma. I’m...afraid there’s been some brain damage.”
That started the tears, and after that they wouldn’t stop. Matt couldn’t breathe for a few seconds. He tried to talk, but only got out fragments of words. The doctor put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, and Matt didn’t have the energy to shrug it away. “Brain damage? You mean, you mean like she...she won’t be able to see? Or walk?”
“Mr. Sinclair...the damage is extensive. It is likely that your wife won’t survive. I’m sorry.”
Matt stayed there, at her side, for four days straight. He didn’t sleep, or eat. He hardly moved. Each day the doctors told him Glory’s condition was growing worse. They showed him charts, gave him literature to read, explained it all in their technical ways—and they gave his wife another few weeks, at the very most.
On the morning of the fifth day, Matt finally went home and slept.
# # #
“I couldn’t believe it’d happened again,” Matt said, staring out the Monte Carlo’s windshield.
The sky had been promising rain all day, and the gray clouds had finally turned dark. Rain drummed on the car’s roof like hundreds of fingernails, and lightning crackled near the horizon as they drove back into the city. Faint thunder reached them, but Diedra didn’t hear it.
Matt’s breathing grew ragged.
“I just...see, that was it. Glory had become my whole reason, for everything. For living. Everything I did. And just like that—” Matt snapped his fingers in the air, and a distant burst of lightning limned his face. Thunder crawled through the air behind it. “For a while I thought I could feel it happening again—the way I was for the years in the home. They put me in the Leslie O’Brien house back then, did I tell you that?”
Softly Diedra answered, “No, you didn’t.”
# # #
Matt spent the time after Glory’s attack on something like autopilot, a cardboard-cutout man. He went to work, taught his classes. Came home. Visited Glory. Went back home, stared at the canvas, painted nothing. Went to sleep. The cycle repeated, and Matt felt numb. People from their church tried to see him, but he had no words to say to them. He had no words to say to anyone.
The one-month limit the doctors had given her came and went. Glory lay in the hospital bed and kept breathing.
Then another month passed. And another.
He took books to the hospital, and read to her for hours every evening.
He softly touched her face, and told her how much he loved her. She didn’t open her eyes for him. Didn’t talk. Didn’t move.
Then one evening, at home, he received a call from the duty nurse. “Mr. Sinclair? Matt Sinclair? Mr. Sinclair, I have... I have some news for you.”
Matt bolted up from where he’d been lying on his couch as the source of the call sank in. “This is the hospital? What? What?”
“Mr. Sinclair...your wife has emerged from her coma.”
“What? She’s conscious?” A hydrogen bomb detonated inside him.
“Yes, she is, but there are—”
“I’m on my way!” Matt shouted, and slammed the phone down. In his near-delirium he completely missed the content of the nurse’s last sentence. Not for an instant did he consider that Glory’s recovery might have been less than total. With a hope in his heart hotter than the sun, Matt stepped out his back door into darkness and flickered away to the hospital.
In a miracle recovery that defied all of known medical science, Glory Sinclair was awake and alert, and less than ten minutes after he got the call Matt burst into her room, crying like a little boy, and rushed to her side and put his arms around her.
She screamed and burst into tears and fought him and kicked him away.
# # #
“It was worse, a lot worse than if she’d just died. And they kept telling me, ‘She’s only got another couple of months. Just another couple of months.’“
A sudden burst of rain hammered down, shrouded them. For an instant they were alone in the car, trapped within a gray soulless void.
“That was two years ago. Diedra... I can only imagine what you’re thinking. But this is what happened, and it’s what’s caused me to do what I’ve been doing. After Glory woke up, I...”
He trailed away.
“You got pissed off,” she said.
Matt stared at her, amazed, and slowly nodded. “I got pissed off. I got pissed off at Sammy Kyle, and all his goons, and I got pissed off at the shitheap who did that to Glory, and I got pissed off at just about everybody else in the world. So I trained and trained and trained, I went way beyond what I thought I could, and I stole a suit from a military research lab. And I decided to go out and find some of the same assholes that screwed up my life, and make it so they wouldn’t, or couldn’t screw up anybody else’s.”
“And the Redeemer was born.”
“Yeah. ...But I didn’t come up with that name. That was somebody else.”
She watched the rain. She couldn’t look at him.
“This is so much, Matt. It’s too much.”
He flicked the windshield wipers a notch higher.
After a few minutes, Diedra said, “Do you...has this helped you any? Talking, getting it all out like this? Has the anger gone down any?”
He wrinkled his forehead and drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Not really.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.
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1 comments:
This has been a frustrating week for me. A couple of freelance things that I thought were going to go one way ended up going another, and now I have to revise the way I'm thinking about them.
Anyway. I'm relatively happy with this chapter. I think the prose itself could use some smoothing up here and there, make a few things flow better and read more dynamically, but I think it works over all. It's the chapter coming up, I believe, that's likely to get shifted to some other location in the book.
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