21. I Know What She Knows
I KNOW WHAT SHE KNOWS
FOX
Eleven days after our Bells Bend sojourn, I know.
We have settled into something—a careful, provisional something that neither of us has named, that exists in the space between where we were and where we are going, and that feels like a room with the furniture rearranged in a way that is better than before but still unfamiliar enough that you move through it slowly, checking the corners.
I have been watching her.
Not obviously—I am not a man who is obvious when it matters—but consistently, the way I watched the foxes in the clearing when I was seven, with complete attention because I understand that stillness is the prerequisite for seeing anything true.
I have been watching her face when she thinks I’m not looking.
I have been listening to the quality of her questions—the ones she asks about our marriage, about the house, about the things she supposedly doesn’t remember—and I have been noticing something.
She never asks the same thing twice.
A person with genuine amnesia, working to reconstruct two years’ worth of memories, asks the same questions repeatedly from different angles because the information doesn’t stick the way it does for someone with a formed memory.
The doctors told me this.
And Lucy Vidal Bennett—my wife, the best cook I have ever encountered, the woman who does nothing halfway—asks each question exactly once, absorbs the answer completely, and never needs to return to it.
Because she already knows it.
All of it.
The question I have been sitting with since I understood this—since I caught a brief, unguarded look on her face, the look of a woman receiving information she is filing rather than learning—is not whether she remembers, because I know she does.
The question is: why is she pretending she doesn’t?
Why is she doing this?
And the answer, which I have been turning over with the careful attention I give to things that matter, is that she is observing what I do when I think the stakes are this high and is waiting to see what Fox Bennett does when he thinks he has to earn something.
She lived through the accident, and she woke up in the ICU, and she looked at my face and made a decision.
And I have made the decision—after two days of knowing, after the honey at Bells Bend and the kiss in the kitchen and the look on her face when I told her I’d do whatever it takes to gain her trust—that I am not going to tell her that I know her lie from her truth.
Not yet.
Because she is watching me, and I am going to give her something worth watching.
I call Percy on a Friday morning from my office—the first time I’ve been there for more than three hours since the accident—because the office hasn’t been where I needed to be.
He’s traveling, and I catch him in his hotel room in Austin before an event he has to attend for the company.
He picks up on the first ring. “What?”
“I’m in my office.”
“Historic.” A pause. “How’s Lucy?”
“She’s good. Better. The ribs are almost—“ I stop, because that is not why I called. “She’s faking the amnesia.”
Complete silence.
Then Percy makes a sound I have not heard from him in a long time, a sound that begins somewhere in his chest and arrives as something between a laugh and a cough and is completely uncontrolled, which is unusual because Percy, like me, is a man who controls most things.
“Percy.”
All I hear is laughter.
“Percy.”
“I’m—sorry, I’m—“ He cannot stop laughing. I wait, with what is considerable patience, while my oldest friend loses his composure on the other end of the phone. “She’s faking it,” he finally manages. “Lucy. Is. Faking. The. Amnesia.”
“Yes.”
“Holy fuck.”
“Yes.”
“While you—“ He breaks down again briefly. “While you have been—the fig tree—“
“I am aware of the fig tree.”
“You’ve been watering the fig tree and giving her the”—he makes a gesture I can somehow hear—“the whole performance, the whole—”
“Percy.” I lean back in my chair. “Are you finished?”
“I genuinely don’t know.” He takes a breath as a short laugh escapes again. “Fox. She is playing you.”
“Yes.”
“She’s been watching you this whole time.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not going to tell her you know.”
“No.”
A pause. A different quality of pause—the one Percy uses when he is shifting from amusement into actual engagement. “What are you going to do?”
I look out the window. From the fourteenth floor, facing west, the city is going about its late morning. The dogwoods are past their bloom now, moved on, the trees in their ordinary green.
“I’m going to woo my wife,” I announce. “And wait for her to tell me the truth.”
Percy is quiet for a moment.
“And what are you going to do if she doesn’t come clean?”
“That I haven’t figured out...but I’m going to make sure she is…going to come clean to me, that is.”
“You’re very confident about that.”
“I know my wife. The guilt has got to be killing her.”
Percy lets out a chuckle. “You’re a pair—you both are.”
“I love her.”
“You’ve loved her for a while.”
“Yes.”
“What’s step one?”
“We’re going to a barbecue,” I say cryptically.
He makes an assenting sound. “Well, I say the Memphis dry rub is the way to go.”