7. In A Dream
IN A DREAM
LUCY
“She’s breathing.”
The voice arrives from somewhere above and to the right.
“Barely. BP’s low—seventy over fifty. Head lac, significant. Get me a line.”
“How long was she down?”
“Witness says four, five minutes before they called. She was unconscious on arrival.”
It’s like an episode of Grey’s Anatomy—only, there are hands on my body.
Many hands.
I cannot move, cannot open my eyes, cannot find the surface of myself.
I am somewhere just below the level of my own body, looking up at it through dark water with my eyes closed, so I can’t really see anything.
“She’s going to—”
The voice drops out.
“Hey, sweetheart, what are you doing up?” Fox asks, his arm sliding around me.
It’s three in the morning.
I can’t seem to sleep these days.
My body has become a foreign country—I am learning its geography, its new rules, its revolts. I sit at the dining table with a glass of water and my hand on the small curve of my stomach.
He puts his hand on mine and smiles. “You need anything?”
I shake my head, loving his care, his love, his concern. I lean into him and sigh. “She’s restless.”
“She?” he asks, amused.
I didn’t mean to say it out loud.
I bite my lower lip and shrug. “I think so…that’s how I feel.”
He comes around then and crouches in front of me, puts both his hands on my stomach. “You want a girl?”
“I want a healthy baby…as the cliché goes. You?”
“Boy, girl…doesn’t matter. I just…” He leans forward and pulls up my nightshirt and kisses my stomach. “Hey, baby.”
This is so unlike Fox that I stop breathing.
“Hey,” he says again. “I can’t wait to meet you. I don’t know what kind of father I’m going to be”—he pauses and looks at me—“but you’re going to have an excellent mother.”
I bite my lips to keep from crying. My hormones are all over the place, and seeing Fox like this is all my dreams come true.
“Come on, let’s go back to bed.” He rises and extends his hand.
He holds me as we fall asleep, and I know that what we have is forever and ever and ever.
The alarm goes off just then, and I hear Fox say, “Wake up, sweetheart.”
Then there are other voices.
Frantic.
“Pulse ox is dropping—”
“Get me suction—”
“How far out are we?”
“Two minutes. Tell them we’ve got a head injury, possible internal, they need to—”
The sounds layer over each other.
Then they slip through.
I cannot hold them.
I cannot find the surface.
“Wake up, sweetheart.”
That’s Fox’s voice, from when I was pregnant, from three in the morning when I sat at the dining table.
It doesn’t make sense.
I don’t know how much time has passed because time is not operating correctly.
It folds, extends, and doubles back on itself. I feel as if I’m inside a dream, moving through spaces that don’t hold their shape.
At some point, there are brighter lights and the smell changes, antiseptic and cold.
More hands.
More voices.
“GCS seven on arrival—”
“CT showing subdural—”
“Multiple rib fractures, left side, pneumo—”
“She’s going to need—”
The sounds layer over each other.
Then they slip through.
I cannot hold them.
I cannot find the surface.
Then the smell changes—not antiseptic, not cold.
Something else.
Persimmons! And herbs, and the particular dry sweetness of a farmers market in October, and then his hand on the small of my back, steering me gently, and the light is different now, softer, residential.
“Welcome, sweetheart.”
We are in the Germantown house. When I moved in. Before I knew what it would become to me—before I planted things in it, before I learned its sounds, before it learned mine.
The room is bright, and I flinch at the lights.
There are loud beeps hurting my ears.
They’re steady and mechanical.
Where am I?
But I can’t open my eyes.
I can’t move my head.
There is something on my face.
My body is an enormous, imprecise weight that I am tethered to but cannot fully inhabit.
“Fox,” I whisper because I can smell him on top of all the other smells.
“Yes, sweetheart.” I can hear him over all the other sounds.
“Love you,” I mumble.
“I love you, too.” There’s a rough, tortured sound. “So fucking much.”
A dream. It’s a dream. Fox doesn’t love me.
I’m hallucinating. I have been swimming through memory for what feels like hours, his voice following me through the dark waters, where my battered, grief-soaked brain has manufactured him.
“Why the fuck isn’t she awake?” he yells.
That can’t be Fox. He doesn’t yell.
“No, don’t tell me you don’t know. You’re a Goddamn doctor, and—”
I float in and out, and Fox is always there. It’s a comfort. He’s here with me wherever I am. I feel safe even though I know he doesn’t love me.
“Oh, Fox, why can’t you love me?”
“I do love you, Luce. I love you a whole fucking lot, so you better wake up, sweetheart.”
“You’re afraid,” I murmur.
“Never been more scared, sweetheart. So, you need to come back to me.” There are tears in his voice, harsh ones. Sobs. “Because I can’t make it without you.”
This is confusing. Probably unreal because my husband does not lose composure, does not crack. He manages everything, including himself, with the steady, unbothered fluency of a man who has never had reason to be afraid.
“Lucy.” His voice is close now, very close. I can even smell his cologne, the one that makes me want to kiss him, make love to him. I want to open my eyes, but I cannot; the weight is too much, everything is too much.
“Lucy, you have to—“ He stops. “You have to wake up, sweetheart. I love you, and you can’t leave me.”
His voice is lower, wrecked.
It’s obvious I’m hallucinating, and this is the cruelest thing my brain has ever done to me.
I would like to register a complaint.
“I need you, sweetheart.” I hear more tears, more sobs. “Please. Please just stay.”
Fox is asking me to stay? Why? He said I should go. He agreed we should end the marriage. He said he doesn’t love me.
I don’t know if any of this is real—the room, the lights, the beeping, his hand, which I think I can feel, warm and certain around mine.
Though I cannot be sure if that’s genuine or if I’m in the dark waters again, or if I’m back in the kitchen at three in the morning, or at the farmers market with persimmons in a bag and his hand in mine and all of it still intact and uncomplicated and—
“Stay, sweetheart, stay with me.”
I want to say, “I don’t know if I can,” but I can’t because I slide away out of dreams into darkness.