12. Until Now
UNTIL NOW
LUCY
Iremember the conference room with its door slightly ajar.
Percy’s voice and then Fox’s—patient and certain—explaining me like I was a problem he’d been managing.
“I don’t love her. I don’t think I ever have.”
I remember the bag from Dina’s in my hand. I remember the dogwoods. I remember all of it.
I remembered it the moment I opened my eyes in the ICU and found him sitting next to my bed, one hand on mine, the other on his knee, carrying himself like a man being taken apart.
I remembered it when he looked up, and I saw his face—the jaw, the dark eyes, the particular quality of his expression when he is not performing, when the management has run out—and I thought, with perfect clarity: I know exactly who you are.
Then he said, “I love you. I love you so fucking much,” and I snapped.
How dare he say that now? Was he performing for the doctor? Why was he saying this when he’d told me to my face that he didn’t love me?
And that’s when another thought emerged—he doesn’t know that I know who he is.
It wasn’t a decision…not exactly. It was more like an instinct, you know, one of those that arrives fully formed, even though there isn’t much reasoning attached to it.
My body cashed this check that my brain hadn’t signed off on, and I looked at Fox, the man I loved with every cell in my body, the man who told me he never loved me, who let me drive away crying and didn’t stop me, and I thought, “You don’t get to know what I know.”
So I said, “I’m sorry. Who are you?”
And then I watched his face, and what I saw is something I’m going to be thinking about for a long time.
It was not—and I want to be exact about this, because I am trying very hard to be accurate about everything right now, to see clearly without the fog of drugs or pain or confusion—it was not the face of a man who was caught.
It was not guilt. And it was not relief. It was devastation.
Brief, total, and immediately folded back behind the composure before most people would have seen it.
But I am not most people. I know the difference between Fox’s real face and his performed one, and what I saw in that half-second before he put it away was real.
I don’t know what to do with that.
So I’m doing this instead. Faking amnesia like I’m in a movie or a book. I mean, who does that? Not anyone sensible and grown up.
But I have my reasons, right?
And they’re good reasons, too, right?
His name, he tells me, is Fox.
“Fox,” I say, like I’m trying it out. “That’s unusual.”
And he tells me about the foxes in the woods when he was seven, and I listen to it like it’s new, like I haven’t turned this story over in my hands a hundred times, worn smooth with handling.
I nod at the right moments.
I ask the right questions. I think.
I am, and I will not pretend otherwise, a surprisingly competent liar when sufficiently motivated, which I am.
He tells me about the diner.
The cassoulet.
“I didn’t leave until two in the morning.”
He tells me about the courthouse wedding with my family, Dina, and Percy, and about the pasta at Rolf and Daughters afterward.
He tells me about our home.
“You planted the fig tree. I’ve made sure it’s taken care of while I’m here with you. The peonies are growing very nicely.”
I listen to him describe my own life back to me with fascination.
He tells me we married because we fell in love. “Madly, immediately.”
The what?
I keep my face arranged so as not to show my shock at that blatant lie.
“How long did we date before the wedding?” I ask.
“About four months.” He smiles at me with his whole heart in his eyes. “We didn’t want to wait.”
Apparently, there are two consummate liars in this marriage.
I nearly laugh out loud, in the ICU, at my husband lying to my face with the composure of a man who has never told anything but the truth.
Four months.
He didn’t want to wait.
What utter bullshit!
I was ten weeks pregnant when we got married, and he said, “Okay. I think we should get married,” like it was a sensible logistical decision, and I was so stupid and so in love that I heard it as “I love you.”
“We sound impulsive,” I remark.
“It’s not impulsive when it’s right.”
I look at him.
He looks back.
There it is again—that thing in his face that I cannot account for, that doesn’t fit the story I’ve been holding since I left our home, that sits in the register of real rather than performed. It makes me want to ask, “Which part is the lie? The conference room or this? Or both?”
Fox is truthful. He may prevaricate, talk around things, but outright lying was never his way. Apparently, it is now. Apparently, it’s mine now, too.
I let him take my hand in his as I slide into sleep.
The pills are extraordinary. Whatever they are giving me for the ribs and the head is doing genuinely impressive pharmaceutical work, and the consequence is that I keep falling asleep mid-thought, mid-sentence sometimes, dropping into unconsciousness the way you drop a glass—suddenly, without warning, with no graceful transition.
In practice, this means I have no reliable sense of time.
I sleep and wake and sleep again, and the room is sometimes light and sometimes dark.
Fox is always there.
Every single time I surface—groggy, disoriented, running my internal inventory of what I remember and what I’ve decided—he is in the chair next to my bed, or standing at the window, or speaking to a nurse in the doorway.
Always.
I wake up at what must be three in the morning. He’s asleep in the chair with his head tipped back and his arms folded, and my first thought, before I can stop it, is, “He looks terrible.”
My second thought is, “He hasn’t left. Oh God, does he mean it when he says—”
My third thought is, “Get a grip, Lucy, you don’t know why he’s here and why he’s saying he loves you.”
I watch him sleep for longer than I should.
He looks younger this way, unmanaged, the composure gone soft with slumber and exhaustion.
He looks like the version I imagine exists underneath—the one I was always trying to get to, the one I caught in glimpses, the three-in-the-morning version who said hey to a baby who didn’t stay.
Well, he didn’t either, now did he?
I look away, my emotions rising hotly.
The anger is helpful.
Especially when he’s around all the time, being the kind of husband I used to think he was.
When a nurse helps me sit up, Fox is on his feet before she finishes arranging himself between me and any difficulty, as if he were trained for it.
“I’ve got her,” he snaps at the nurse, and then to me he says, gently, “Sweetheart, put your weight here—is that okay, does this hurt—”
“Yes,” I choke out, because it does hurt, because four fractured ribs are not a small thing, and I am not above my own actual pain.
But also: “Yes, this hurts,” in the larger sense.
Yes, you have done this, all of this, the accident and the grief and the driving and the crying, all of it leads back to you, and now you are standing here asking if this hurts like you have any business being tender about it.
My anger the foundation on which I build my performance, brick by brick. It is very good building material because it does not warp, it does not soften, and it does not look at him sleeping in a chair at three in the morning and feel anything complicated.
I use it. Sometimes pettily.
“Can you get me some water?” I ask when he has just sat down.
He gets up. Gets the water.
“Actually, can you close that blind a little? The light—”
He does as I ask.
“Sorry, can you open it again?” I ask as soon as he sits back down. “I think I need the light.”
He does so without any hesitation.
“Anything you need, sweetheart, you just have to ask,” he murmurs, stroking my cheek with a finger.
Tell me the truth, then, so I can tell you the truth.