9. Thoughts And Fucking Prayers
THOUGHTS AND FUCKING PRAYERS
FOX
Lucy’s family came a few hours later. Dina, too. I called them, told them what happened. I told them only about the accident. Nothing else. Not my screw-up. Not the pain I caused her that led to this.
They came. They sat. They worried. They asked questions. And, finally, they left. I told them to. Her father isn’t feeling well, and at his age, hospitals are a death trap. Her mother went with him.
They asked me when I was going home. I told them I wasn’t.
Percy left for a while. He took a shower at his place and came back with a change of clothes and toiletries for me.
I’ve brushed my teeth at this point, because all that coffee and a sleepless night were making me nauseous from smelling my own breath. I even managed to eat half a croissant, but when fear and grief sit in your belly, there isn’t much room left for food.
I still look like shit despite the fresh clothes and minty-fresh breath, and my mother says as much.
Nashville is ultimately a small town, and I don’t know how my mother knows about Lucy’s accident, but she does. She comes through the waiting room door with David behind her and Caroline behind him, the three of them arranged in their unconscious hierarchy.
I stand up when I see them, out of surprise, I think.
“Archibald.” My mother crosses the room and takes my face in her hands, briefly—the Bennett version of an embrace. “You look terrible. How is she?”
The sequence of her statement and question is entirely on brand for her.
“Stable.” It’s the word the doctors have given me, and I’m distributing it like a ration.
“Oh, good.” My mother’s voice carries the same sense of relief one feels when the caterer arrives on time for a party.
She sits down and arranges herself in one of the terrible chairs with the composure of a woman who brings her own standards to any environment. I remain standing.
“How long have you been here?”
“A while.” I don’t want her here. I don’t want anyone here—well, maybe Percy, but that’s about it. My civilized persona is paper-thin right now, and it’s not going to take much for the man I hide, the one without scruples, to get close to the edge.
“Son, you have to wear the polish of stoicism at all times,” my father told me when I was six and broke a glass ashtray because I lost my temper about something.
David claps me on the shoulder with the slight excess of a man performing the correct gesture rather than feeling it. That’s also on brand for my brother.
“Hell of a thing.”
Sometimes I think David was cast as the eldest Bennett brother who’s spent his life living in the shadow of the younger one.
Like Fredo in The Godfather. He resents me—I know that—but he’s bound by our father’s code about behavior and public demeanor, so he pretends he gives a shit about me, and I do the same.
Caroline sits next to my mother. She’s the baby of the family and has been treated that way her whole life.
I don’t think it’s helped her grow into a stable, well-adjusted adult.
There have been DUIs I’ve had to make disappear using the Bennett name.
There was that abortion she thinks I don’t know about.
And right now she’s cheating on her soon-to-be fiancé, the Miller heir, with the guy who reads the news on NewsChannel 5.
She’ll marry Gary Miller, and they’ll have the same marriage my parents did—the marriage I refused to have. And yet….
“What do the doctors say? About recovery?” Caroline asks primly, like she gives two shits. She doesn’t. She doesn’t like Lucy. None of them do.
“They’re monitoring,” I prevaricate.
A pause. Caroline glances at my mother. My mother is looking at her hands.
“And in terms of—“ Caroline begins.
“Don’t,” Percy says, from his chair.
His voice is mild, but it has an edge.
I look at him, puzzled, and then Caroline rolls her eyes. “Percy, I can talk to my brother any which way—”
“I told you when you called me earlier that we won’t be discussing this,” Percy rebukes softly, but his eyes are telling a whole other story.
Rage punches through my chest when I realize what they’re talking about.
Caroline does the adult version of stomping her feet, which is even less attractive on her than on a toddler. “I was only going to say—“
“The divorce papers,” David interjects, because my brother has never once in his life read a room accurately. “I mean, is that still on the table or does this change the—“
I turn and face my brother.
I am aware, from a distance, of Percy going still, of my mother straightening slightly, and of Caroline making a small, sharp movement because once those words are out, she understands this was a miscalculation—a big one.
I take a step, then another, until I’m face-to-face with my brother. I’m four inches taller than him.
“Say that again.”
David’s Adam’s apple bobs. “I’m just asking if the accident changes the timeline for the—“
“My wife,” I say, and my voice is very quiet, which is the register it goes to when I am at the end of something, when the management has run out and the polish of stoicism has completely faded, “is in the ICU with brain swelling and four fractured ribs, and a machine breathing for her, and you are asking me about divorce papers.”
“Archibald—“ my mother begins.
“No.” I turn to face her. I let her see all of it—not the managed version, not the composed version, the actual thing, which is enormous and ugly and has been building for hours.
She recognizes it because she knows it well, as my father covered up a similar persona.
“No, Mother. Not right now. Not ever, in a context like this, but certainly not right now, so if that is why you came—“
“That is not why we came,” my mother cuts in, with dignity.
“Then what would you like to discuss?” I look from her to David to Caroline and back, my eyes narrowed, my intensity feral, even if my tone is even.
“Because I have nothing available for anything that is not about making sure my wife does not die, so if you have something other than that to offer, I am genuinely asking.”
Only David is idiotic enough to speak. “Come on, man, it’s—”
“David,” Mother interjects sharply.
He shuts up, still confused as to why talking about what he’s talking about is so taboo. The man is a fucking moron. I’m being held together by nothing but coffee and terror, and he wants to talk about divorce and asset division.
Mother places a hand on my forearm. “I’m sorry this happened, Archibald. I hope she gets better soon.”
It is the most unperformed thing she has said to me in years.
I nod stiffly.
“Why don’t you all go now?” Percy suggests. “I’ll call if anything changes.”
All three of them look so relieved that it’s almost comical. They hurry out with quick goodbyes.
I sit back down.
“You told them about Lucy?”
“Margaret called me—she’d heard about the accident,” he explains.
“She didn’t call me.” I know why. She wanted a softer landing for her questions about the divorce, and she hoped to find it with Percy.
“No,” Percy agrees and then lifts a shoulder. “They came. That’s something.”
I arch an eyebrow. “David asked about the divorce papers.”
“David is also, and I mean this with full medical accuracy, a clinical-grade idiot.” He looks at me sideways. “You called her your wife.”
I shoot him a long, deliberate look.
“About fifteen times,” he continues. “In about forty minutes. My wife. Every time.” He’s not smiling, exactly, but he seems quite entertained despite our sitting on uncomfortable fucking chairs in a waiting room outside of an ICU where my wife…my wife, is fighting for her life.
I meet his gaze, unamused. “Is that right?”
“I’m just noting.”
“Are you now!”
He stretches his legs out in front of him and looks at the ceiling. “For what it’s worth, Fox, and I say this as the person who has had a front-row seat to your comprehensive failure to understand your own life for the better part of two years”—he pauses—“I think you know now.”
“Know what?”
“Know how you feel.”
I don’t encourage that line of conversation.
I begin to count as my exhausted body and fear-fueled mind keep me in constant tension. How long before they start bringing her back, until she starts coming up through whatever depth they have sent her to for safekeeping, until she opens her eyes and I can tell her—what?
That I have spent hours in this waiting room understanding, with the horrible clarity of nearly losing her entirely, that I was wrong?
That I was confused and scared and carrying a story about Reina and a story about being cornered and a story about doing the right thing, and I used those stories to avoid the simpler, scarier truth, which is that Lucy Vidal from Antioch, who cooks extraordinary food and laughs at her own jokes and plants peonies that grow in defiant and riotous bloom, has been the most important person in my life and I have been the last to know it?
That I have been a fool not to recognize that I am in love with my wife?
That I have always been in love with her?
The reason I never actually filed the divorce papers—never actually made the appointment, never actually moved the process past intention into action—is not, as I told myself, because of the logistics or the timing or any of the comfortable, managerial reasons I was keeping on the shelf.
I now know why.
I have known why since I stood at a kitchen window looking at a fig tree in the dark, and my mother said Reina’s name over the phone, and I felt nothing.
I knew then.
I was too late then. Lucy was already gone.
Was—
No!
She’s still here.
She’s twenty feet away, battling a brain swelling, healing, and when she wakes up, for the first time in my adult life, I will do what’s honest—not right, not Bennett-approved.
And this is what is honest: I love my wife. And I will assuage the pain I caused her by not knowing my own heart. I will do anything to win her back, bring her home to me.
Anything.
Whatever it takes. Whatever she needs to hear and however many times she needs to hear it, and in whatever form makes it real to her, I will do it.
Because, yes, I love Lucy.
What fucking bad timing to find that out when she almost died?
In my effort to control my life, to manage every aspect of it, I thought I could make emotions and feelings do what I wanted.
Like hell!
I fell in love with Lucy.
I don’t know when.
Might have been that first night, or the second, or the time she said she was pregnant.
I mean, a blind man could see I didn’t have to marry her because she was pregnant, but I did, and there was a reason for that.
I know, I know—I was doing the honorable thing. But look at me. I’m not an honorable man. So what I did was because I was in love. I just didn’t want to admit it, because all my life I’ve been told love—emotions like that—aren’t just useless, they’re a weakness.
Well, no mistaking shit now.
And I might lose her…not because she moved out, but because she fucking died. And I don’t know how to go on from either of those things right now.
“I love her,” I say softly. It’s a revelation to say the words out loud.
I love my wife. No truth I’ve held is truer.
Percy pats my shoulder. “I know.”
I turn to look at him. He isn’t even remotely surprised. He’s known all along, which is why he didn’t want me to divorce her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You wouldn’t have believed me.”
I nod wearily. He’s right about that, too.
“How the fuck do you know so much about relationships?” I snap.
He smiles sadly at me. “Easier to see someone’s life from the outside.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, let the fear of losing her, the pain of her lying in an ICU bed, wash over me. I let it suffuse into each cell of my body.
I promise myself that I’ll never again manage my fucking feelings because that’s how I lost Lucy.
“Wake up, sweetheart,” I used to say to coax her awake when her alarm went off, and she snuggled further into the comforter.
I’m telling her again. Begging. Pleading. Imploring.
“Wake up, sweetheart.”