In thirty-two years of marriage, my husband never once told me not to touch him.
Not when he had the flu. Not when he threw his back out lifting our son’s dresser up the stairs. Not even the time he burned his hand on the grill and made me hold a bag of frozen peas on it for an entire baseball game while he groaned through all nine innings.
Conor wanted to be touched when he was hurting. He wanted to be fussed over, checked on and asked about. That was who he was.
So the night I heard the crash in our bathroom and ran in to find him on the floor beside the tub, his cast cracked open, a towel already in his hands, I didn’t understand why he looked at me the way he did.
He didn’t look like a man in pain.
He looked like a man who had been caught.
“Don’t touch it,” he said.
But I had already seen what was under there.
To understand why that moment knocked the air out of me, you have to know who Conor was before it. And you have to know how hard I worked, for almost three weeks, not to see what was right in front of me.
Conor Doyle was the biggest baby I have ever known, and I raised two children.
I mean that with love. Mostly.
When we were first married, living in a one bedroom apartment above a dry cleaner, he caught a cold in our second winter. I came home from work and found him on the couch under three blankets with a box of tissues balanced on his chest like a little altar.
“Annie,” he said, in a voice like he was calling to me from the bottom of a well. “I think it’s in my lungs.”
“It’s a cold, Conor.”
“You don’t know that. You’re not a doctor.”
I made him soup. I made him tea with honey. I took his temperature. An hour later he asked me to take it again, because he felt “different.” Then again before bed. Then again at eleven, when he woke me up to say he was sure he had a fever now.
It was 98.9.
“See?” he said, pointing at the thermometer like it had testified on his behalf.
Four times in one evening. I never let him forget it, and he never stopped finding it funny that I remembered.
That was Conor. A big, broad shouldered man who could fix a furnace, rewire a garage and carry a full sheet of drywall by himself, and who turned into a seven year old the second he had a sore throat. Our daughter Kelly used to call it “Dad’s dying again” when she was little. She’d bring him her stuffed rabbit to hold.
He held it, too. Every time.
When he had his gallbladder out eleven years ago, he gave me updates every twenty minutes for a week. “Still sore.” “A little better.” “Worse again.” “Did you hear that? My stomach made a noise.” I could have set a clock by him.
So when Phil Brennan’s truck pulled into our driveway on a Tuesday afternoon in late September, and I looked out the kitchen window and saw Conor in the passenger seat with his right leg stuck out stiff and white, I actually sighed.
Six weeks, I thought. Here we go.