Loveys
Every weekday morning, a gray striped cat droops on the other side of our sofa. In 1886 a girl in France took over her older sister’s room. For months I have held a photo of my wife in mind. We are all doing the same thing.
* * *
The other side of our sofa is my wife’s side. Visit us any weekend and you’ll find her ensconced there, making her online jigsaw puzzles, Sir Charles sprawled over the fleece blanket on her lap. On Saturdays they can sit this way for hours.
On weekdays they can’t. So every morning, minutes after my wife leaves for work, Sir Charles curls his muscular frame into the back of her seat. He sleeps there till noon, next to where I sit with my laptop. Some experts would tell you her scent makes him feel safe. He cannot be where she is, but he can be where she was.
* * *
No one should ever have to live through what Thérèse Martin endured. At four, “my happy disposition completely changed after Mama’s death,” she wrote in her autobiography, describing her girlhood in France. “I, once so full of life, became timid and retiring, sensitive to an excessive degree.” Right after the funeral, a friend lamented that “you have no mother any more.” Thérèse threw herself into the arms of her older sister Pauline and cried, “It’s Pauline who will be my Mama!”
Thérèse’s second Mama coddled her, instructed her, shared wisdom from their Catholic faith, and Thérèse glommed onto her with abandon. But Pauline didn’t last either, entering the monastery in their Normandy town in 1882, when Thérèse was nine. This would have been the perfect time for Thérèse to take over Pauline’s room, while the scent of her sister lingered there, but she didn’t. If she had, she might not have come undone.
* * *
I’ve seen more attractive pictures of my wife. After all, no one looks good in a hospital gown. Her eyes gaze at the camera, expressionless, the tube in her mouth delivering oxygen to her lungs. She’d had the tube and the gown for maybe four days. I never saw any of this in person, since her COVID (and mine) made visits impossible.
During those four days she’d sent me a terse text or two. Then, voilà: photographic evidence that she lived. I gasped, my body’s way of rising to good news.
People keep photos of their beloveds in their phones, or as wallpaper on their laptops. I did neither: the photo of my wife clung to my memory like her scent on the sofa, and I carried that memory with me everywhere.
* * *
Losing two mothers must be more than any nine-year-old can stand—let alone someone as sensitive as Thérèse—and the hallucinations proved it.
No one paid much attention to her headaches, which began after Pauline’s departure. The tremors—“nothing was able to stop my shaking,” she wrote, “which lasted almost all night”—were a different story. Everyone, the doctor included, agreed they were serious. Her father moaned that his little girl was either going crazy or about to die.
Worse was to come, and it went on for weeks. “I often appeared to be in a faint, not making the slightest movement…. Once it happened that for a long time I was without the power to open my eyes…. My bed seemed to be surrounded by frightful precipices; some nails in the wall of the room took on the appearance of big black charred fingers.”
With no help and no answers, Thérèse turned to a statue of the Virgin Mary by her bedside, and she credited the statue’s smile for her cure. Something else might have helped as well: a letter from Pauline. “My greatest consolation,” Thérèse wrote. “I read and reread it until I knew it by heart.”
* * *
Two nights before my wife entered the hospital, we’d spent eight hours in a different ER—the dreariest shift of all, 4:00 p.m. to midnight—and neither of us wanted to return. But then she blacked out in the shower and dragged the glass doors off their rails; her blood oxygen plunged to eighty-three, her speech slurred, her eyes barely opened.
The nurse on the phone listened quietly to our ER aversion. “There’s another ER in town that isn’t a trauma center,” she explained, her voice a comforter. “So the wait time is shorter. I’ll get an ambulance to your door.”
Slowly, gingerly, I helped my wife down the stairs when the EMTs came. Just off our front porch they laid her on the gurney and started carting her away. We didn’t lose eye contact until they loaded her in. The ambulance drove off, and I rushed to my place on the sofa to sob.
There was much to do in the next few days, so I couldn’t have imagined my need for the photo of her and the breathing tube and the hospital gown. My body knew, which is why it saw the photo and gasped.
* * *
Sir Charles may know more about scents and loss than he lets on. He could have learned it from Max, his gray striped predecessor, even though they never met. Max and his best friend Beorn would curl up into my wife’s seat as well, partly for her scent—Max adored her too—but more for each other’s presence. They’d form a yin-yang symbol, exchanging pheromones while each groomed the other’s head.
Beorn died first, after a long wasting in which he never lost his high spirits. Two yowls from his cat bed and he was gone. Amid our sorrow, we looked forward to the extra time we’d have for Max, to give him more cuddles, in the few years he had left. Max had other ideas. He drooped in his friend’s old haunts and eventually turned away from food, his life’s great pleasure. It was only six months later when grief carried him off.
This is what Sir Charles may know, and why he insists on lying where he does, never too far from the scent, and the ghosts, that sustain him.
* * *
Four years after Pauline’s departure, Thérèse finally took over her old painting room in the attic and “arranged it to suit my taste.” She used a whole page in her autobiography to describe her bric-a-brac: a cage full of birds, a massive cross in black wood, statues of saints, baskets made of seashells, schoolbooks scattered all over, an hourglass, a doll’s cot that was once Pauline’s.
She also dedicated a wall to a portrait of Pauline. The portrait was not her sister in the flesh, of course, but that didn’t keep Thérèse from sitting in its shadow.
* * *
Six days after the photo I pulled up to the hospital’s main entrance and waited till a nurse wheeled out my wife: wan, befogged, but more herself than when she left our home in the ambulance ten days earlier. Years ago we began to point at each other when meeting somewhere—there’s the one I love—and my arm shot out, index finger extended, of its own accord.
At some point I got hold of her discharge papers, settled into my seat on the sofa, and ran web searches on the medical terms in the one-line diagnosis. Two or three times, I read and reread the definitions to make sure I hadn’t imagined the phrase in front of me: often fatal. Each time, something deep inside me rattled like a china teacup during a tremor, threatening to shatter.
* * *
Some years ago, when visiting Thérèse’s childhood home in France, I bought the photo of her that I love best: face close up, enshrouded in her nun’s habit, a steady gaze, a hint of weariness around the eyes. Now the image occupies a space on my sitting room wall, just as Pauline’s portrait did for Thérèse herself.
Amid the darkest of my dark moods, I trudge to the sitting room, lay my body on the futon, and talk with the photo as one would a friend. Conversations like this are easier when I can see the person, I’ve found. As we look at each other and chat, I can sense my place among all those who’ve gazed at icons, kneeled before crucifixes, or ranted at statues, pouring our hearts out and hoping, more than anything, for the solace of a response.
* * *
The image of Thérèse, my wife’s photo, Pauline’s old room, Sir Charles’s place on the sofa: whenever a comfort does its work, an ancient practice plays out again. We relearn this practice from our children, who know from instinct how to use such things.
On most nights in the late 1980s our toddler clutched her hand puppet, a pink bunny, while she lay on her bed. The bunny traveled everywhere with her: to Boston for play days, to child care, on walks to see the cows at the nearby farm. Her index finger slid in and out of a fold in the puppet, which was trimmed with satin edging. Today parents call them loveys: those objects that no child—that none of us—can ever, ever, be without. We didn’t know what losses our toddler warded off with the pink bunny, but she must have known they would inundate her, as they inundate us all, without her friend by her side, bearing the scent of everything she loved.
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John Janelle Backman (she/her) writes about gender identity, ancient spirituality, the everyday strangeness of karma, and whatever else comes to mind. Janelle’s work has appeared in Catapult, the tiny journal, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Tiferet Journal, and Amethyst Review, among other places. Her essays have made the shortlist of the Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize and Wild Atlantic Writing Awards. She can be found on the web at www.backmanwriter.com.
Amethyst Review 