Cleaning up Glitter

A Second Chance

Bri Ollre

He died. That’s the last thing Henry remembered. That never ending darkness that swam so suddenly from behind his eyelids. The expanse of all space and time spreading in front of him, pulling him towards something else. He knew he’d died because that’s what his brain told him. But now, now he didn’t know. He reckoned Heaven and Hell didn’t have fluorescent lights. 

“Henry?”

There was that voice again. It was what had woken him in the first place. A soothing voice. Feminine in the lilt of it. A voice he knew. Henry turned towards it.

“Henry?” the woman said. “Henry can you hear me?”

Ah yes, he knew that face. He’d awoken to that face for the past twelve years. That was his wife, Sarah. Henry smiled.

What came next was a swarm of movement. White jackets and questions spinning around Henry like bees—or rather hornets. Something stung him in his left buttocks. A cold piece of plastic was ripped from his chest. Henry cried out then, and the movement stopped, for just a second. Long enough for him to breathe out a single question:

“Where am I?”

Coming home was the easiest part. He sat in his favorite chair in the living room, the one closest to the fire, and the furthest from the television. He could stare out the window into the front yard from this chair; could watch the birds hover around one of their many feeders; could rock until his eyes closed beneath the strain of lifting them.

He slept for most of those first few weeks after. That’s how they’d taken to splitting his life: before and after. Before, he was a computer engineer. A software analyst in the business intelligence department of a health care corporation. He had a wife and three kids, whom he was told he loved very dearly. He never asked if they loved him.

After, he was just Henry. Henry who knew he loved a woman named Sarah but couldn’t quite remember why. He saw those children of his each morning, recognized the shades of their eyes as they stared at him cautiously over bowls of cereal. They’d each hug him before leaving for school. Only one, the youngest girl, would press a kiss to his cheek. 

“You’re so cold, daddy,” she’d say. 

“Sorry baby. I’m trying to warm up.”

“It’s okay.” She’d kiss him again. Her lips soggy from the milk. “It’s okay.”

Sarah was the only one not to stare at him. She barely looked at him at all, though she was the one who helped him out of bed each morning. She was the one who slid on his slippers one foot at a time, massaging out the stiffness in his muscles that had settled in overnight. 

“There you go,” she’d say, like soothing a horse out of its padlock. “Carefully now. Lean onto me. There you go. One foot at a time. There you go.”

She made the meals. She paid the bills, somehow. Henry wasn’t sure exactly where the money came from, but they seemed fine. The kids went out with their friends. Sarah bought new shirts at the mall for Henry, whom she’d then help dress as the accident had left half of Henry’s body paralyzed. He got around using a cane. Everything seemed fine.

The doctors didn’t have a name for what happened to Henry. Each week he returned to their sterilized rooms for tests, and questions he couldn’t answer. They’d stick electrodes to his head, wrap straps around his upper arm, shine lights in his eyes of various shades and brightness. They did everything they could to trick his mind into remembering, but none of it worked.

“What did you see, Mr.Gittleman?” the doctors would ask.

“Nothing,” he’d say. 

The truth. He didn’t see anything. Not with his eyes, and there was no way to explain that to the doctors staring at him with their crisp white coats and analyzing brows. They didn’t want that answer.

“And when you woke up, how did it feel?”

“Like waking up,” Henry said. “It didn’t feel different. I just woke up.”

“And now?”

“And now what?”

“How do you feel now, Mr.Gittleman?”

Different, is what Henry wanted to say, but he didn’t know how he felt different. He just did. So, he said what always did:

“I feel fine.”

Sarah was sitting in the waiting room when his appointment finished. She drove him home in relative silence, the echoes of a Bee Gees song playing in the background. Sarah hummed along to it. Henry just listened, staring out at the scenery that passed by. A memory of a drive similar to this struggled to appear in his mind. He could almost hold it and these days, that was enough.

When they got home, Henry followed Sarah into the kitchen where she began to wash the dishes from breakfast. He sat down at the bar and fiddled with the ring on his finger until he got the courage to speak. Something had been nagging at him. He just didn’t quite know what words to say to get rid of that feeling.

“Sarah?”

“Yes, Henry?”

“I’m sorry,” Henry said. 

The words surprised him as much as they did Sarah, who turned to face him. She looked him in the eyes for the second time since he came home from the hospital. She set down the dish rag and leaned back against the edge of the sink. The water left running in the background.

“What are you sorry for, Henry?”

Henry chewed on the edge of his lips where the scar from his braces still lingered. What was he sorry for? He knew it had to be something important from the way the guilt panged through his body, starting at his wrist of all places. 

“I’m not sure,” he said at last. “But I’m sorry.”

Sarah sighed. She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and turned back to the dishes. Her voice was steady when she spoke again:

“It’s fine.”

Their first children, twins, were a mistake. When Sarah told Henry she was pregnant, she’d cried. Not loud, happy tears, but rather low moaning sobs into the cushions of his stained couch. He’d been elated. She’d wanted an abortion; they’d only been seeing each other for a few months. Sarah was still in university. Henry had just started work at a tech agency. She wasn’t even sure how she’d gotten pregnant in the first place.

“We always use protection,” Sarah had said, mumbling into her hands. “I’m on the pill.”

Henry had taken her hands into his, and pulled her into his embrace, soothing her like people do in the movies, pressing Sarah’s face into his chest, willing away all the bad with a quick squeeze and mumbled words.

“We’ll be all right,” he’d said. “I’ll take care of you—of us.”

“I don’t know, Henry.”

“It’ll be all right,” he’d said, over and over again, until she gave in. “It’ll be all right.”

Sarah delivered alone at the hospital while Henry was working late, as he’d taken to doing after they moved in together. She was sitting with one baby boy in each arm when Henry finally made it to the hospital. As he slipped into the room, she looked up at him with a smile that made him stumble back against the door. She’d never looked at him like that before; like she was in love. He’d expected her to be angry. This was something else.

“Come see, Henry,” she’d said, her voice low but excited. “Come see our babies.”

On the days when Sarah had things to do, and the kids didn’t, Henry watched them. Well, rather, they did whatever they wanted around the house, and Henry listened to make sure no one screamed and nothing broke. Sometimes he even ignored those crashing sounds, choosing to slip back into his nap instead of investigating. It’d take him ages to get up the stairs on his own anyway. Better to let the trouble come to him.

Most days, he didn’t get to sleep for very long before the littlest one would come barreling down the stairs, full of that energy he ached for. 

“Do you remember this daddy?” Dina would ask, perched on his lap. 

A scrap book lay open before them. The picture she pointed at was of the whole family at some sort of tropical resort. Henry was wearing a blue buttoned-down Hawaiian shirt, and double fisting some sort of colorful drink. He probably wouldn’t remember that day even if his memory wasn’t the way it was.

“No, I don’t remember, where were we?” He’d say.

Dina would talk and talk and talk while pointing out all the faces and places she knew. Sometimes she was right, and sometimes she was wrong. There was one thing consistent with most of the photos: neither he nor Sarah ever smiled. 

Not really smiled. It never reached their eyes. They always stood with the three kids in between them. Even at Disney World—‘the happiest place on Earth’ the border on the photograph professed—there was still distance in their eyes. Enough distance to make Henry understand why Sarah didn’t love him now. Sure, she took care of him, doted on him as any good nurse would, but she never took his hands in hers and talked about the old times. Sarah kept her distance. She’d always kept her distance. Henry just didn’t exactly know why.

The day Henry died had been a normal one. He’d woken before Sarah, gotten ready for work and left as the rest of the house was just being to wake. The twins had merely glanced up at Henry as they stumbled to their bathrooms. The littlest one, Dina, had kissed him on the cheek before he left. She’d wrapped her arms around his neck when he leaned down to accept that kiss.

“Love you, daddy,” she’d said.

“See you tonight,” he’d said in return.

He’d climbed into the front seat of his black Mercedes and ran his fingertips over the freshly conditioned leather of the steering wheel before pressing the round ignition button. The engine started with a low roar, rumbling beneath the soles of his leather shoes. It’d continue that purr all the way to work, where he pulled into his normal spot in the parking garage. The one in the corner where no one else liked to park. 

He’d had the regular meetings with the financial team over their quarterly reports, which he would be delivering in a few weeks. They wanted some design changes to the PowerPoints his program generated. He gave that task to the new girl. She seemed capable of handling that.

Brad took him out for lunch. They had sandwiches at Jason’s Deli. Henry had a club sandwich—no mayo. Brad talked about the recent changes in upper management. How the merger with United Healthcare was fucking everything up.

“We used to get half days on Fridays, you remember that, Henry?”

“I used to go golfing.”

“Never getting those back, are we?”

“No,” Henry had said, taking a bite out of his sandwich. “I don’t think we will.”

He left the office a little after 5:30pm and got stuck in the normal traffic home. That’s the last bit he remembers. The traffic. The never-ending line of it in front of him. His smart watch vibrated on his wrist. Henry turned to look at it and saw the notification from Angela. He smiled with boyish glee, but before he could reply to the text, he was dead. 

While Sarah put Dina to bed, Henry would sit in his chair in the dark with the windows open, listening to Sarah’s voice mix with the low coo of the pigeons settling into their nests outside. On weeknights, the twins went to bed when Dina did—or at least they went to their rooms. During the weekend they lingered in the sitting room with Henry. Not much was ever said between them. The one-time Henry asked who they were talking to on their phones, both boys had lifted their heads in unison and said:

“Nobody.”

On special nights, one of the twins would sit on the couch nearest to Henry and show him funny videos he’d seen online: videos of sports cars revving their engines in McDonald’s parking lots and fails from the latest football game. Memorabilia hung on the walls in the living room for the University of Alabama. Henry graduated from there. Sarah said the boys planned to go there as well. That was about as much in common as Henry had with the twins.

When Sarah was done taking care of Dina, she would come for Henry. They’d make their measured ascent to their bedroom, where Sarah would undress him, help him onto the shower seat and stand outside while Henry washed. He could do that at least, after she wet and soaped the sponge.

Everything was a slow process for him. But it was getting better. The psychical therapy healed what had been broken and restarted that which had forgotten how to work. Henry could stand on his own most days—with the help of his cane. If their stairs weren’t so winding, he could probably be trusted to take them himself. 

Their nightly routine ended when Henry would step out of the shower and into the towel Sarah held aloft for him. It was the closest they came to embracing. Sarah’s warm scent would waft across Henry’s face, and for just a moment he imagined what it must have been like when they were in love.

Sarah still slept next to Henry in their wide, king-size bed. The distance between them, no man’s land, was enough for their bodies to never touch, though Sarah’s warmth did spread across that space and settle against Henry’s thigh. He looked forward to that simple warmth every night. 

Once, he made the attempt to rouse her in the early morning hours with a hand to her shoulder. Just a simple caress, the dusting of fingers across a back. It was enough to wake Sarah, who turned and stared at Henry with half closed lids. Her shoulder tensed beneath his touch.

“You all right?” She’d asked, sleep sticking to the back of her throat.

Always worrying, always ready to take care of him. Henry’s brow furrowed. Did anyone ever take care of her? They hadn’t felt like husband and wife at all since after. Was that his fault? Was it his fault before too?

“Can I hold you?” Henry asked. 

The silence continued for long enough that Henry’s heartbeat began to pound against his chest. If Sarah moved closer, she would hear how it pounded. It was such a simple, innocent question, but it was the first time he had asked it since after. Sarah had made no attempts at the hospital, and he’d been too preoccupied with re-learning so much that the yearning for a touch was something he only felt in these darkest moments.

“Hold me?” Sarah asked. Her voice barely above a whisper. “What do you mean?”

“I just—I don’t know. I just want to touch you, to hold you. Please?”

Sarah’s gaze dove deeper into his, searching, calculating. Whatever she was looking for Henry tried to impart in his body language. He placed one hand between them with the palm facing upward, giving Sarah the chance to meet him halfway.

The silence ended with Sarah’s answer:

“Not tonight.”   

Eventually, Sarah got to the point where she would leave Henry home alone while she ran errands. She’d leave her cell phone number, Henry’s doctors’ numbers, and the non-emergency police number on the fridge in case Henry forgot. He never did, or at least he knew how to search the contacts on his phone, so it wasn’t necessary to know the numbers anymore. It made him feel like one of the kids, everything was handed to him as if he couldn’t do it himself.

During one of those afternoons, an unknown number called Henry’s cell. At first, he let it just ring. They could leave a message if it was important. But, something about the numbers was familiar, the arrangement or the pattern. It felt like one he’d seen before, so, he answered.

“Henry?” the voice spoke first. 

A female voice. Not Sarah’s, nor her mother’s. It was someone new. Someone he had forgotten if they knew who he was.

“Yes, this is he.” Henry said.

“Oh,” the voice said “Oh, I’ve been so worried. How have you been? I tried to visit in the hospital after I heard, but your wife—well she was always there and I didn’t want to intrude and, and, oh Henry, I’m so glad to hear your voice.”

Henry pulled at the collar of his simple white shirt. Whoever this woman was, she seemed important to Past-Henry. Henry-Now, had no idea who she was.

“Are you still there?” the voice asked.

“Yes,” Henry said at last. He pulled at the neck of his shirt again, heat blooming around his neck. It never got easier to do this. “I’m here, but, uhm I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not quite sure who you are.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not your fault, I’m sure. The doctors said my memories would come back eventually, maybe. Well, they’re not sure, but if you could just help refresh it, that’d be…great.” Henry felt like a fool babbling on the phone to this woman. Perhaps he did need Sarah to do everything for him if this was how he reacted.

The voice’s breath shook on the other side of the line for a few breaths. Long enough for Henry to assume he’d offended her. He started to speak again, when she cut in.

“It’s Angela.”

When Angela called again, Henry was ready. 

“Why were you afraid to come visit when my wife was around?” He’d asked after the normal pleasantries were said. She never called when Sarah was home. How she knew that Sarah was gone, he wasn’t sure, but the call came when he was alone, like she knew his family’s schedule better than he did.

“Well,” Angela said. “We’ve, that being you and me, Henry, we’ve been seeing each other for the past uh, five years. Yeah, five years, just about.”

The way she said that phrase “seeing each other” was enough for Henry’s brain to finally put two and two together. The same phrasing was used on the daily soaps Sarah watched in the kitchen. The ones where it was rare for the main characters not to have a mistress, or a pool boy that they seduced. 

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

“Yes, well, I’m not sure what to say now.” Angela said, with a breathless laugh to ease the tension growing over the line.

Henry looked around him, in the room where he spent most of his days. There was nothing for him to do here. There was no way he could bring her into this house: Sarah’s house. But he did want to see her, talk to her, learn about what he used to be like, and it was rare for Henry to want to do anything. 

“Do you want to get coffee?” He asked.

“Coffee? Now?”

Henry looked at the clock on the wall. Sarah wouldn’t be home for hours. She always took her time at the stores when he wasn’t with her. He was free to do as he pleased. 

“If you’re not busy, now would be great.” He said.

“Oh, no, I’m not busy.” Angela said, her voice a rush through the phone. “Can you drive? Do you need me to pick you up?”

“No, uh, I can’t drive. Do you know where I live?”

Angela laughed a little at that, and said, “Yes, Henry.”

Henry was waiting outside when she pulled up in her white car. It glittered in the sunlight, the same her smile did when she rolled down the passenger side window. How young she was astounded Henry. There were few lines creasing her forehead, and the girlish glee she smiled at him with made his heart thud rapidly. 

“Hey there, stranger, long time no see,” Angela said. 

Henry smiled and leaned over his cane to stare through the open window. That’s when he noticed the car. It was so low to the ground. One of those sporty types like the Mercedes that collected dust in the garage. There would be no easy way for him to get in without asking for help. His knees just didn’t bend that way anymore.

Angela leaned further towards the passenger side window, her brows creasing at Henry who stood motionless on the sidewalk, leaning on that metallic cane he used the rare time he left the house. He had on one of his work polos, and a pair of khaki pants he’d found folded at the bottom of his side of the closet. It’d taken him 10 minutes just to pull his shoes onto his feet.

“Are you okay?” Angela asked.

“No,” Henry said. His voice cracking over that simple word. He rubbed at the sweat collecting at his hair line. “Can you help me?”

Angela popped open the door from the inside and that’s when she saw just how much Henry was wobbling against his cane. She looked him up and down and that frown between her brows furrowed even deeper.

“Are you sure you should leave the house, Henry?”

Angela asked the question nice and slow, like the nurses used to after he’d first woken up:

“Can you sit up, Sweetie?” They’d say. “Be careful not to pinch your back. Are you sure you can walk that far down the hallway?”

Henry’s excitement for the simple trip slipped away as Angela continued to stare at him. Her dark black lashes blinked several times in a row, fluttering almost like butterfly wings. Henry liked how they moved, the butterflies. They congregated in the garden just outside the window where he sat every day, separated by the thick panes of glass.

“Henry,” Angela said at last, still using that sweet, slow tone. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Oh,” Henry said, deflating even further against his cane. “Should we try another day, then?”

He saw the answer in the way her plump red lips twisted before she said the words:

“No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.” She said, chewing on those lips. “Be good, Henry.”

Henry stared at Angela while she closed her passenger door. She looked at him one last time before rolling up her tinted windows and speeding down the street. And just like that, the last bit of before was gone.

Sarah was carrying a bag of groceries when she walked through the door. Henry straightened in his chair, where he’d sat since Angela left, left him standing on the sidewalk like a puppy thrown out a window. 

Sarah smiled at him over the bag and continued into the kitchen. Henry followed, watching as Sarah put away the groceries in their proper places. She always handled everything with such grace and fortitude. Henry never saw her cry, not over him at least. She’d wept on the phone with the insurance company while they were in the hospital, but as soon as she hung up she’d wiped her face and the tears never appeared again. 

“How do you do it?” Henry asked, out of breath from the walk, the day.

“What do you mean?” Sarah asked. “Do what?”

“Everything,” Henry said. “How can you handle everything?”

Sarah paused. She set down the can of corn and put both of her hands onto the island counter, tilting her head as her gaze traveled across Henry’s face.

“You know, I’m not sure,” she said, a slight laugh to her tone. 

“Right,” Henry said, not quite sure what else he could say, just that he knew that he needed to say something.

“Are you alright, Henry?” Sarah asked.

Henry wiped his hand across his forehead, surprised by the amount of sweat that clung to the back of his hand. Sarah moved around the counter while he stood there, speechless, as Sarah brought a cloth to his forehead and dabbed away the sweat.

“What did you get up to today that has you so worked up, huh?” Sarah asked, tutting like she would when the twins would track in mud on a rainy day.

Henry’s breath felt like it was strangling him. Each inhale hurt. The exhales gave him nothing but an increased need to breathe again. He touched Sarah’s shoulder, lightly, and confessed.

“I saw Angela today.”

“Oh,” Sarah said. 

“I had apparently been seeing her for quite some time before the accident. She called me a few days ago, when you were gone. We talked and I don’t know why, but I had to see her. I had to see her, and I told her to come by and she did but when she got here…when she got here she couldn’t stomach to look at me. She just left.”

Sarah sat down at one of the chairs in the kitchen while Henry spewed his guts. With her hands folded in her lap she looked like a schoolteacher listening to a student complain about another child in the class. 

“Why aren’t you angry?” Henry asked. He wiped more sweat from his forehead. “Why aren’t you yelling at me? I cheated on you. I tried to cheat on you again.”

Sarah shrugged while a tear welled in the corner of her left eye, but before it could fall, she wiped it away as nonchalantly as possible.

“I’ve known about her for a while,” Sarah said at last. “I’ve been angry for years waiting for you to admit it, to confess and leave. I prayed you would leave, and then you died.”

“I don’t understand,” Henry said. “What do you—”

“Shhh,” Sarah said. “It’s my turn to talk. Sit down and listen.”

Henry sat. 

“You’ve never made life easy, you know, Henry,” Sarah said. “I’ve been taking care of you since the first day we met. Someone else took care of you before then, probably your brothers from how they stay away. I know losing your parents when you were young really fucked with your self-esteem and your needy-ness, or whatever. But Jesus, Henry, you’re something else. I’ve put up with so much over the years. I’ve stayed through the affairs and the other various lies. I mean it’s hard to really count all the reasons why I should have left you, but do you wanna know a secret?”

Henry nodded, afraid to interrupt.

“I stay because it’s become so easy to not care about your happiness. If you had stayed dead after the wreck, I would have grieved. A small part of me would have genuinely missed you—for the kid’s sake. I’d have played the sad wife, but inside I would have cheered along with the rest of the people you’ve scammed over the years. But now, it’s really quite nice to be able to treat you like the child you are.”

The room was quiet for a long time after she finished. Sarah’s chest heaved with the emotion she’d revealed for the first time in what Henry had to assume was years. The tears that had threatened to fall before had dried up with Sarah’s anger, but through it all, Henry was silent. He took it. He took what he deserved.

“I’m sorry,” Henry said, finally. “I don’t know what else to say except I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. What do we do?”

“We do what we always do. We keep going,” Sarah said. “At least now I get the pleasure of a submissive husband.”

 She patted Henry’s head before moving back to the groceries. With each step she took her shoulders lifted and settled back into the correct position. Her eyes cleared of the heavy emotion that permeated the room. Everything went back to normal, for Sarah at least.

“The kids will be home from school soon,” Sarah said. “Help me put the rest of these away.”

Henry started seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Wardall, after. They tried hypno-therapy to bring back the moments right before, to figure out exactly what caused Henry to die, but those memories were gone. Henry knew it, but Dr. Wardall was persistent. He asked Henry about before. He listened to Henry talk about that time, humming and offering words when he wanted. 

“Do you miss it?” Dr. Wardall asked one day.

“Before?”

“Yes, your life before. I know it’s been hard since your accident to find normal again. Everything has changed—and that’s normal for patients like you.”

Like me? Henry nodded his head with faked understanding. There were others like him—Henry had even met a handful at the group meetings, but Henry was the only one he knew that felt like a shell of his former self. He didn’t need any doctors to tell him that. He saw it in the faces of his children, his wife, his own brothers. Henry was different. He just didn’t know if it was a good thing or not.

“Before doesn’t feel like me,” Henry said at last. “There’s two distinct periods in my life now: Before and After. I’m responsible for whatever happened before, but it doesn’t feel like me. Does that make sense? That was some other Henry. He had some other parts in him. He didn’t have—” Henry stopped. He looked across at Dr. Wardall who was staring with those empathetic eyes of his. Henry shook his head. 

“I’ll be fine, Doc. What I can’t remember, I can’t miss.”

© 2020 Bri Ollre

About the Author

Bri Ollre is a poet and short story writer from Kemah, Texas. She currently lives in Cork, Ireland and is in the last semester of the Creative Writing MA at University College Cork. Her poetry is set to be published in the forthcoming edition of the The Quarryman, and by Dodging the Rain in June. You can find out more about Bri on her blog: Little Slice of Bri (https://littlesliceofbri.com/), or by following her on Twitter @briollre.