Donna Martin

The doctors told me to say goodbye to my husband. Instead, I brought him back to life in a way nobody expected. Bill collapsed on a Thursday in March. We were in the kitchen. I was wiping the counter. He was telling me about the hardware store. Mid-sentence, his face went slack, his hand grabbed the back of the chair, and he went down like a man cut from a rope. I called 911 with one hand and held his head off the tile with the other. His eyes were open but he wasn't in them. The ambulance came in eight minutes. They worked on him in my kitchen for what felt like an hour. I stood in the doorway watching men I'd never met try to keep my husband alive on my floor, and all I could think was I didn't make him lunch today. He asked for a sandwich and I said make it yourself, I'm tired, and he did, and that might be the last thing I ever said to the man I've been married to for thirty-one years. They rushed him to St. Catherine's, forty minutes away. I followed in the car. I don't remember the drive. I remember my hands on the wheel and nothing else. The ICU had him on a ventilator within the hour. A tube in his throat. Wires everywhere. Monitors beeping like a room full of clocks that couldn't agree on the time. The doctor pulled me into the hallway. He was young. Younger than my daughter. He had a way of talking that was gentle and final at the same time. "Mrs. Davis. The next forty-eight hours are critical. His heart sustained significant damage. We're doing everything we can. But I want you to prepare yourself." Prepare yourself. I have been preparing myself for nothing my entire life. I prepared myself for menopause. I prepared myself for an empty house. I prepared myself for a marriage where nobody touches anybody and everybody just stays on their own side of the bed until one of them dies. I was not prepared for this. Bill's younger brother Kevin lives ten minutes from St. Catherine's. I hadn't seen Kevin in two years. Not because of a fight. Just because that's what happens in families. You drift. You mean to call. You don't. Kevin showed up at the hospital at midnight. His wife Megan was with him. Megan is 36. I've met her three times. Their baby was born in January. Kevin hugged me in the hallway. Hard. The way men hug you when they know the news is bad and they don't have any words for it. "Come stay with us," he said. "You're not driving home at 2am and you're not sleeping in that chair." "I'm not leaving him." "You're not doing him any good running on nothing. The nurses have your number. Come sleep. Come back at six." Megan put her hand on my arm. "Donna. We have a guest room. Please." I looked at her. She was in jeans and a sweater at midnight, her hair up, no makeup. She had the baby in a carrier in one hand and her purse in the other. She'd gotten out of bed for a man she'd met three times. I went with them. Their house was ten minutes from the hospital. A small colonial on a quiet street. I walked in and the first thing I saw was the wall. The entire hallway was covered in baby photos. One month. Two months. Four months. Five months. Seven months. Each one in a little white frame with the month handwritten underneath. A baby in a different onesie every picture, growing bigger every frame, that gap-toothed gummy smile widening month by month. I stopped in the hallway and stared at them. Seven months of a life. Documented. Celebrated. Framed and hung where anyone who walked in could see every single step of it. Megan saw me looking. "I'm behind on eight months," she said, touching the last frame. "I keep meaning to order it and then the days just get away from me." She said it the way a woman says something small when she knows the person next to her is falling apart. The baby was asleep in the carrier. Megan carried him upstairs without waking him. Kevin showed me the guest room. "It's not much," he said. "Bathroom's across the hall. Towels are in the closet." He stood in the doorway for a second. He looked like Bill. The same jaw. The same way of standing with one hand in his pocket and the other on the door frame. "He's tough, Donna. He's the toughest guy I know." I nodded. He closed the door. I sat on the edge of the bed and the room was very quiet. Down the hall I could hear the baby stir once, then settle. A monitor crackled. The house breathed the way a house breathes when there's a baby in it. Alive in a way mine hadn't been in years. I looked at my hands. They were still shaking. I hadn't eaten since the sandwich I didn't make for Bill. The sandwich I told him to make himself. The thing nobody tells you about almost losing someone is that your whole marriage plays on a loop in your head. Not the big moments. Not the wedding or the vacations or the births. The small ones. The ones you wasted. Bill putting his hand on my hip in the dark and me moving it. Bill asking me to take a walk and me already in my robe. Bill reaching for me across six feet of cold sheet and me lying there pretending to be asleep because I was too tired and too in my own head to let him in. Years of that. Years of brain noise. The to-do lists. The hot flashes. The waking up at 3am soaked through and furious at my own body. The slow drift from being a woman in a bed with her husband to being a body that occupied space next to another body. I went 52 and something switched off. I thought it was just menopause. I thought this is what getting older looks like. You go quiet. You stop wanting. You stop being wanted. You lie three feet from the man you married and feel more alone than if he were in another state. And now that man was on a ventilator forty minutes away and the last thing I'd said to him was make it yourself. I got up to wash my face. The guest bathroom was clean and warm. A wicker tray on the counter. Hand towel folded the way they fold them in hotels. A little glass of fresh flowers. And on the corner of the counter, three things lined up. A tube of hand cream. A small jar of something. And a third tube. Pink and white. Smaller than my thumb. I picked it up before I really thought about it. The label was upside down. I turned it around. Vanilla O Frosting Cream. I read it twice. Then a third time. I am 57 years old and I am standing in my husband's brother's wife's guest bathroom, my husband on a ventilator down the road, holding what I now understand is not hand cream. I should have put it back. I want to be clear about that. I did not. I unscrewed the cap. The smell hit me first. Warm. Sweet. Like the icing on a really good cinnamon roll. Real vanilla. Not chemical. Not synthetic. I read the side of the tube. Sweet vanilla taste. Made for her, fun for both. 95% report being in the mood within 5 minutes. I thought that was a marketing number. And I thought, what kind of woman uses something like this when her husband is in the ICU. Then I thought, what kind of woman hasn't touched her husband in four years. What kind of woman told him to make his own sandwich the morning he collapsed on the kitchen floor. I put it back. I washed my face. I went to bed. I didn't sleep. At 1:30am I got up again. The house was dark. The baby monitor in the hallway glowed blue. I could hear the little one breathing through the speaker. I went into the bathroom. A drop on my fingertip. Maybe two. Light tingle, almost cool, then warm. I went back to the guest bed. I lay down on my back in the dark. Within a few minutes the brain noise was just gone. I don't know how else to describe it. The ventilator was gone. The ICU was gone. The doctor's careful, final voice was gone. The sandwich was gone. The six feet of carpet was gone. The four years of not touching was gone. Everything I'd been carrying since Bill hit the kitchen floor — gone. There was just my body. Warm. Awake. Awake in a way I hadn't been in years. The sheet against my legs felt like something. The pulse at my throat felt like something. The space between my hipbones felt like something. And for the first time in years, I wasn't running a list. I wasn't three feet above myself watching. I was just in my own skin, breathing, and the breathing felt like something instead of just a thing my body did to stay alive. I put my hand flat on my own stomach. Just to feel it rise and fall. Just to confirm I was in there. Somewhere under the exhaustion and the menopause and the years of going quiet, I was still in there. I cried. Quietly, into the pillow, so I wouldn't wake the baby. Not sad crying. The other kind. The kind you do when you realize the thing you thought was dead in you was just sleeping. I slept five hours. I had not slept five hours straight in three years. I was at the hospital at six. Bill was the same. Ventilator. Monitors. The room cold and beeping. But I was different. I was there. Actually there. Not running a list behind my eyes. Not three feet above the chair. I sat next to him and I put my hand on his arm and I felt the warmth of his skin through the hospital gown and I was in my hand for the first time in I don't know how long. I talked to him. I told him about the sandwich. I told him I was sorry. I told him I'd been gone for a while but I was back. I told him he had to come back too. The nurse came in to check his vitals. She looked at me. "You slept," she said. It wasn't a question. "How can you tell." "Because you look like a different person than the one who walked in here last night." Bill came off the ventilator on day three. The first thing he did was cough. The second thing he did was open his eyes and look for me. I was in the chair right next to him. I hadn't left. He couldn't talk. The tube had been in his throat. But his hand found mine and he held on. I stayed at Kevin and Megan's for nine more days. Bill moved from ICU to a regular room. Then to rehab. Every night I went back to their house, walked past the baby photos on the wall, and went to the guest bathroom. I used the cream every night. Not for sex. I used it because it was the only thing that turned off the noise in my head long enough for me to sleep. The warmth. The quiet. The way my body came back online like a machine being plugged in after years in storage. By the fourth night I was sleeping seven hours. By the sixth night the hot flashes had gone from five a night to one. By the eighth night I woke up and realized I hadn't thought about the to-do list once. Megan noticed. She didn't say anything until the fifth morning. We were in the kitchen. The baby was in the high chair. She was feeding him something orange that ended up more on his face than in his mouth. "Donna. Can I say something and you not take it the wrong way." "Sure." "You look ten years younger than the woman who walked in here last week." I looked at her over my coffee. She was mashing a banana with a fork, easy, one-handed, the baby grabbing at the spoon. "Megan. This is going to be the strangest question. But there's a tube on the guest bathroom counter." She didn't look embarrassed. Not even a little. She smiled the way you smile when someone finally asks you the thing you've been waiting to be asked. "You found it." "I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have." "Donna. Stop. It's fine." She put the banana down. "I started using it about a year ago after the baby was born. Not because I was dating anyone, Paul travels for work half the month. Because I couldn't get out of my own head. I was tired all the time, I didn't sleep, the baby was on me all day and by night I was a piece of furniture. I found this on a recommendation from a friend and it changed everything within a week." I sat down across from her. "Megan. I lost that side of my marriage for years before all this. I figured out that I had stopped being in my own body. The cream was the thing that got me back in." She topped up my coffee. "Small company. Sells out every time they restock. My mom is on her third tube and she's 72." I looked at the baby photos on the wall. One month. Two months. Four months. Five months. Seven months. A whole life being documented while mine had been quietly slipping away. "Megan. How much of that" — I pointed at the wall — "do you actually feel? Not the photos. The living of it." She was quiet for a second. "Before the cream? Maybe half. I was so tired I was going through the motions. I took the pictures because that's what moms do. But half the time I wasn't really there. I was thinking about the laundry or the bottles or the fact that Paul wasn't home. The cream got me back into the room. Into my own body. Into the moment with him." She looked at the baby. "Now I'm there for all of it." Bill came home on a Tuesday. I'd already been home for two days. I'd ordered the cream the day I left Megan's house. Two tubes. Buy one get one free. Two free gifts. Thirty-day money back. Plain brown box, no branding on the outside. I made the bed. I cleaned the kitchen. I made him a sandwich and cut it the way he likes it, diagonal, and set it on the plate with a pickle and two chips, the way I used to when we were first married and I still cared about things like pickles and the angle of a sandwich. He came through the door in a wheelchair. The rehab nurse pushed him in. He was thinner. Grayer. But his eyes were his. He looked at me. Not the way he'd looked at me in years. Not past me. Not through me. At me. "Hi," he said. "Hi." "I heard you talking to me." "In the ICU?" "Every day. You said you were sorry about the sandwich." I laughed. Then I cried. Then I did both at the same time, which is something only women in their fifties can do properly. That night I helped him into bed. He was weak. He couldn't do the stairs yet so we set up in the living room. I put him on his side, propped the pillow under his arm, and went to the bathroom. I put a drop on my fingertip. The warm tingle. The vanilla. I came back and sat on the edge of the daybed next to him. Within a few minutes the brain noise was gone. The hospital was gone. The ventilator was gone. The fear was gone. I was just there. In my body. In the room. With my husband. I put my hand on his chest. His heart beating under my palm. The heart that had almost stopped on my kitchen floor. He put his hand over mine. "Donna." "I'm right here." "No. I mean it. Where did you go. The last few years. Where did you go." I knew what he meant. This time I had an answer. "I got lost. I'm back." He held my hand against his chest and neither of us moved for a long time. We didn't do anything that night. He was too weak and I was too full. But I lay next to him, my forehead on his shoulder, his heartbeat under my hand, and I slept the way I hadn't slept since my forties. Two weeks later he was strong enough for the stairs. A month later he was walking the block. Six weeks after that he was back at the hardware store part-time. And one night, about a month after he came home, I put a drop on my fingertip and went to bed and he reached for me and I didn't move his hand. I was there. I was in my body. I was in the room. And when he put his mouth on my neck I felt it the way I used to feel it at twenty-six. Like a current. Like a door opening. Like coming home to a house I'd forgotten I owned. He said, "where did you go." I said, "I'm right here." He said, "no. Where did you go." I said, "I got out of my own head. I'm back now. I'm not going anywhere." He kissed me and I was actually there. Not running the list. Not three feet above myself. Just there. My sister Linda called while I was checking out the second tube on the website. I told her the whole story. The collapse. The ICU. The ventilator. Kevin and Megan. The baby photos on the wall. The bathroom counter. The cream. The night Bill came home. Linda was quiet for a long second. "Donna. Are you telling me your husband almost died and you found a sex cream in his brother's wife's bathroom?" "Linda. Focus." "I am focused. I'm focused on the fact that you were in the ICU for nine days and you came home with a tube of frosting cream." "LINDA." She laughed so hard she had to put the phone down. When she picked it up again she was wheezing. "And now you and Bill are —" "Yes." "After a heart attack." "Linda." "The doctors cleared him for this?" "LINDA." "Send me the link." I sent it. She called me back four minutes later. "Sold out in the size I wanted." "That's what Megan said happens." "You're on a first-name basis with the sister-in-law now?" "She's nice, Linda." "She has a baby on the wall." "She has a nice baby on the wall." She hung up on me. She called me back ten seconds later. The package came on a Thursday. Plain brown box. No branding. Bill thought I'd ordered vitamins and I let him think so until the night I put it on and he tasted the vanilla and made a sound I had not heard him make since our thirties. I told my friend Maureen about it at lunch that week. Edited the heart attack part to "a health scare." Kept the cream. Kept the years of going quiet. She put her fork down halfway through my second sentence. "Donna. Send me the link." "I haven't even told you what it is." "Donna. Send me the link." There were three other women at the table. Every single one of them was looking at me. "I haven't initiated anything in four years," one said. "My husband and I haven't —" the next one started. She stopped. Looked at the table. "It's been a while." "I thought it was menopause. Then I thought it was just being 55." Every one of them was nodding. I sent the link in the group chat. Phones came out. Maureen got two tubes before the size she wanted ran out. The others got on the waitlist. Bill is back at the hardware store full-time now. He takes a nap most afternoons, which he never did before. The doctor says that's fine. The doctor says a lot of things are fine now. Last Sunday he made me coffee in bed. He sat next to me. Didn't pick up his phone. Didn't ask what was on the calendar. Just sat there. "What." "Nothing." "Bill." "I just like you a lot today." I almost cried into the coffee. Megan sent me the eight-month photo last week. The baby in a onesie that says 8 MONTHS, sitting up on a quilt, grinning with two teeth. I texted back: He looks like Kevin. She texted back: He looks like Bill. Same jaw. I looked at that photo for a long time. Same jaw. Same family. Same stubborn men who hold on when they should let go. I think about that wall of photos a lot. One month. Two months. Four months. Five months. Seven months. A life being documented, frame by frame, while the woman behind the camera was barely in her own body long enough to notice she was living it. Megan told me last week she's caught up now. All nine months framed and hung. She said she's there for every one of them now. Not behind the camera. In the room. I think about my own wall. Thirty-one years of marriage and I don't have one frame from the last five years. Not because we didn't take them. Because I wasn't in any of them. I was somewhere else. Running a list. Above myself. Gone. Bill took a photo of me last Sunday. I was on the porch with my coffee. I didn't know he was doing it. He showed me later, on his phone. I looked at it for a long time. I looked like me. The cream is called Vanilla O Frosting Cream by Aurica. A quick note, because I get this DM at least once a week: yes, the packaging is plain. Brown box. No branding. My UPS guy didn't even look up when he handed it to me, and Bill thought I'd ordered vitamins. So that fear, the one I had too, you can let go of. Right now they're running buy one get one free with two free gifts. I went back to check before I posted this because Maureen asked me to, and the BOGO is still live, but the page is showing under ten units left at this discount. I don't know what their restock timing is. I do know I bought a second tube the week after Bill came home because I did not want to run out and have to wait. It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you try it once and your brain doesn't go quiet the way mine did, you send it back and you're out nothing. That's the only reason I clicked the first time — I figured the worst-case scenario was a return label and a slightly embarrassing email. The best-case scenario turned out to be the morning Bill made me coffee and told me he liked me. If you've been gone from your own body for a while too, you already know. Your move. https://tryaurica.com/products/vanilla-frosting-enhancement-cream