On The Mend

When Adam got the phone call that changed his life, he was half asleep and making himself breakfast. It was ten thirty on a Tuesday in the middle of summer, and no amount of air conditioning could stop the heat that rose to his cheeks after waking up to an empty bed. His body temperature did not rise out of anger, but embarrassment. Some part of him thought he would wake up and his wife would still be there, so close that he would be able to see the rise and fall of her stomach as she breathed through what he hoped was a good dream. He never wanted anything but the best for her, and perhaps that's why he did what he did. But of course she wasn't there when he awoke. Likely, she was halfway to happiness.

As he buttered his toast and heard his phone ring, he thought about letting it go. It was nobody important, as it wasn't like Sophia would call him ever again except to discuss the divorce. But his curiosity got the best of him, as it usually did, and he picked up with a simple “hello.”

“Is this Adam Burish?” asked a female voice from the other end of the phone. He almost hung up thinking it was an old fling, one that helped the demolishment of his marriage. Instead he took a bite of toast and spoke with food in his mouth.

“Yes,” he replied. If you can't avoid them, he thought, disgust them.

“Hi, this is Doctor Joan Rent from Aurora Saint Luke's Medical Center. I'm calling because your wife was in an accident this morning and was brought in to our emergency room. She is in critical condition. How soon can you get here?”

He was out the door before Joan Rent finished speaking, his cell phone left on the counter and half-eaten toast laying next to it.


An hour later he sat next to a sleeping Sophia wearing nothing but slippers, a hoodie, and a pair of sweatpants he managed to slip on before running out his front door. The nursing staff glared at him as he walked in to the emergency room but he said nothing, only asking where to find his wife. When they showed him to her room, he asked a million and two questions.

“What happened?”
“Is she okay?”
“How long has she been here?”
“Is there brain damage?”
“What about the baby?”

The answer to the final question was one he wished that he didn't hear. Some part of him, the cruel, evil part of him that would be the definite reason for his going to Hell, wanted the baby to be dead. He wanted things to go back to the way they were before the baby, before Brody. Back to when “date night” was every Tuesday and all the other days involved teasing and Chicago sports. He wanted game nights and Sophia in her personalized “Mrs. Burish” jersey, beer and pool at a local bar after a win. Back rubs, foot massages, and the overall comfort of showing love and being loved in return. He wanted all of it, but what he wanted most was the guilt of being the one who ruined it to go away.

When Sophia asked him for a divorce, Adam ran. When Sophia tracked him down, Adam emotionally detached himself. But when Sophia admitted she was engaged to another man, Adam's entire world crashed. His wife, the one he vowed to always love and cherish, committed herself to another man. Didn't that make her actions worse than his own actions? He didn't give his heart away. The only thing he did wrong was sleep with other women, no emotions involved. He wasn't the bad guy.

At least that's what he tried convincing himself to think.

Deep down, Adam knew he was the only one to be blamed for the way his marriage turned out. The first time was a whim―had had no reason to sleep with the obvious bottle blond he met at a bar down the street from the place he and Sophie lived. He was horny, Sophie never was anymore. He did what he had to do. The second and third time was a result of the same thing. And then Adam began to get antsy. The team would be in Calgary and, knowing that Sophia would never find out, he would let his hands wander on to the treasure chest of a girl named Ariel, followed by a raven haired vixen in San Jose whose alias was Patsy. Adam became confident in his actions, too confident to care about what he was doing behind his wife's back.

And then, in the blink of an eye, things got worse.

Sophia decided one day in the middle of January, a few weeks after the first time Adam cheated on her, that she was sick of not getting pregnant. She had been trying for almost a year, Adam willingly going along with it because not wearing a condom felt pretty good. It's not that he didn't want kids, he just wasn't ready for them. He wanted to commit himself fully to the idea of a family and wasn't able to at the time due to the continued push for the playoffs and constant training schedule. The fertility doctor took samples and, exactly two days later, called with the results: Sophia was one hundred percent, but Adam showed signs of poor sperm quality. It was a major blow to his ego and Sophia's dreams of ever being a mother.

To cope with the news, he continued cheating. While Sophia buried herself in books and essays written by her students, Adam played tonsil hockey with women across the continent, trying to prove to himself that he could still be a man and have “tainted” sperm by sleeping with as many women as possible. His theory, however fucked up it may be, was that if someone came back to him and told him she was pregnant he could prove to Sophia he could be a father. Although Dr. Roy mentioned he wasn't “infertile,” he also said there was a slim chance of Adam's sperm impregnating someone. Adam didn't bother to think about the consequences of his cheating—what if one of the women had come back pregnant?—and focused on what he was doing until Patrick Sharp's eyes could glare no more and Sophia finally found out about his infidelity.

Part of him knew she wouldn't be in attendance on the ninth of June, more of him wished she would be. He left her a plane ticket to Philadelphia on their nightstand on the morning of the eighth, but by then she hadn't been noticeably home in days and it was becoming harder and harder for him to contact her through phone. Adam ignored the guilt in his gut through the entire game and lifted the Stanley Cup over his head later that night, knowing his smile was as real as it could be and his actions in the following days would be used against him by the only person he ever really cared about.

Still sitting at Sophia's bedside, Adam held a magazine in his hand but couldn't look down at the pages. His own life was more interesting than any article or novel ever written. The doctor had been by twice to check on Sophia and sent nurses in every half hour to make sure she was still breathing regularly. When he'd arrived at the hospital, a police officer was waiting for him to explain how his wife ended up there.

It happened mere seconds after he texted her, as if the guilt of ruining a marriage and wishing death upon an innocent baby wasn't enough to make him feel like shit. For some reason, Sophia had decided to take I-94 instead of US-41, adding twenty minutes to her drive time and putting herself right in the danger zone: residents of Milwaukee and its surrounding towns were warned not to use the outer-city roads that made up I-94 that day because the West Allis Municipal Airport was testing windspeed on new airplanes. Unfortunately for Sophia, one of the airplanes generated too much air and caused a few older trees along the highway to fall—one landing on the hood of her car, its branches cracking the windshield and just barely missing her head. The shock was what made her pass out, but, as he found out from Dr. Rent, pure exhaustion and sleep deprivation were what kept her in a blackened state.

Sophie had never mentioned sleep deprivation in any of their counseling sessions or other communication efforts, but then again Adam never really gave her the opportunity to. He was always pushing, always putting pressure on her to come back to him and leave the goody-two-shoes rich kid she was betrothed to. If a life of extravagance and wealth was what she wanted, he could give it it her. But Adam knew better—his Sophie wasn't with Brody for the money or even to make her parents happy. For whatever reason, she had fallen in love with the guy.

That hurt the most.


I am pulled from the black by the sound of hushed voices that so badly want to be loud voices. I keep my eyes closed, trying to figure out who they are. I know from the use of the words “fuck off” that one voice is Adam and the tone of the following “excuse me?” that the other is definitely Brody. I want to keep my eyes closed and fake them out but I know they aren't going to stop unless I do something about it. Slowly, I lift my eyelids to reveal them: Adam in his sweatpants and a hoodie and Brody looking like he just walked off of a GQ cover. Typical.

“Would you two shut the hell up?” Their heads whip to look at me and before I can blink, Brody is hugging me tightly and kissing my forehead multiple times. “What happened?” I ask quietly, looking directly at Adam. I know I'm in a hospital and I remember the texts he sent me, but I'd like to know why there was a tree branch in my face before I blacked out.

Adam, still standing at the foot of the bed, looks at Brody with disgust before answering me. “You are so stupid,” is what he starts with. “So, so stupid.” Before I can retaliate, he walks to the other side of the bed and kneels beside me, grabbing my hand.

“Hey--” Brody begins. I cut him off.

“Shut up,” I say, still looking at Adam. “Let him talk.”

“Sophie, Jesus Christ. Look at this, look at us. You almost died and I...it would have been my fault. I should have told you about I-94, it was all over the news and I knew you would be difficult and take the long way back to this...this asshole,” Adam spits with a scowl. Brody scoffs but I ignore it, urging Adam to continue with a look. “Sophie, I love you. I love you and I miss you and I'm sorry for every wrong thing I have ever done to you. You are my one and only,” he recites a line from his wedding vows. “You are my one and only and I love you with every fiber of my being. I have a lot of explaining to do, I know, and I'm willing to talk through everything with you and be there for you even if the baby you're having isn't mine. I just want you, Sophie. All of you. Forever.”

“Oh, please,” Brody says from my opposite side. I turn my head and look at him. “The only thing you can give her is an STD. I've already given her the one thing she wanted most and the only reason you're upset is because you screwed up too badly to do it yourself. Sophia, you and I are meant to be together. We're from the same class, the same social structure, and I love you more than life itself. I know you love me too. Come on now, get out of this bed and we'll go home, away from him and the rest of this god-forsaken state.”

Something, either the force of his hand in mine or the current of this is right, I'm supposed to be with you pulls me out of bed and I begin to follow him out of the room. With a heavy heart and a glance back at Adam, I start a new life with Brody.

But when I wake up for real, exactly one day and six hours after passing out in my car, nothing is the way it was in my dream.