Chapter 1 — Behind the Curtain

I was three days out from surgery, still tethered to an IV pole and the particular fog of the pain medication, when I heard my husband, on the other side of the thin green curtain that divided our shared recovery room, explain to a woman named Liesl that I was furniture.

He thought I was asleep.

That is the only mercy in it, if you can call it one — that Gregor did not know I could hear him, and so what I heard was not a performance for my benefit but the truth, unguarded, in his own tired voice.

“As soon as I’m out of here, the Brookline house is yours,” he was saying.

“The deed’s in Henrietta’s name but I’ll handle that, my notary can draw up a transfer.

Don’t worry about her.

Twenty-two years, and she’s like a piece of furniture — you set her down somewhere and there she stays.” He laughed, and the laugh turned into a wince, because laughing pulls at fresh stitches, and I knew that pull intimately, because three days earlier a surgeon named Dvorak had taken one of my kidneys out of my body and put it into his.

I lay very still.

I did not cry.

People always ask me, later, how I did not cry, and the answer is that something breaks so completely, sometimes, that there is no crying in it — crying is for the wounds you think might heal, and this was not that kind.

I looked down at my left hand, where my wedding ring, loose now from the weight I’d lost being sick and then being cut open, sat waiting to be taken off.

So I took it off.

It slid off without the slightest resistance, which felt, in that moment, like the truest thing that had happened to me in years.

I want to describe what that was like, the ring coming off, because it is the hinge of everything and I have thought about it a great deal since.

A wedding ring is meant to resist.

It is meant to be a thing you have to work at, over a knuckle, a small effort that reminds you it is a bond and not a decoration.

For twenty-two years mine had fit that way, snug, part of my hand, a thing I no longer felt because I no longer had to.