11. She’s Coming Home With Me
SHE’S COMING HOME WITH ME
FOX
The next few hours are the worst of my life, which is a significant statement given the competition over the last few days.
The doctors do their assessments—questions, responses, memory tests administered with the careful neutrality of people trained not to telegraph their findings.
Lucy answers most of them.
She knows her name.
She knows Dina—asks for her, actually, in the first ten minutes, with a certainty that makes my heart contract.
She knows her parents, her brother Milo, and the name of the street she grew up on in Antioch.
She knows Nashville.
She knows the diner.
She does not know me and she does not know the last two years.
Dr. Reyes pulls me into the corridor while a nurse stays with Lucy and explains to me in the careful, measured language of someone delivering information they know will land badly.
Dissociative amnesia.
“It’s not unheard of following significant head trauma, particularly when the trauma occurs in proximity to acute emotional distress.” She crosses her arms. “Did something happen right before the accident?”
Yes. I was a jackass.
I nod.
She waits.
“I fucked up.”
She nods.
I wait.
She sighs when she realizes I’m not giving her any more information. She’s not the one I need to talk about my screw-ups to. That’s Lucy, my wife, who can’t fucking remember me.
“The brain, under sufficient pressure, will occasionally—not always, not predictably, but occasionally—excise a period it has flagged as intolerable. It is,” she continues, “a protection mechanism.”
Her brain was protecting her against me. Self-loathing and I have become close friends this past week—it settles around me like a second skin, and if I thought I could feel worse, I’d be wrong.
“Will it come back?”
“It might. There’s no reliable timeline. Could be days. Could be longer. Could be—“
“Could be permanent?”
She meets my eyes. “It’s unlikely. But yes. It’s possible.”
I tuck my hands into the pockets of my jeans as I process this new development.
My wife does not remember me.
She does not remember our marriage, our house, the farmers market, the kitchen table at three in the morning—a married life I spent, most of which I didn’t appreciate and would now, I understand, with the comprehensive clarity of a man who has been awake for four days, give anything to return to.
Her brain has decided I am intolerable.
I cannot, with any honesty, argue the point.
As the day progresses, her family and Dina arrive in a slow trickle. I am jealous because Lucy knows all of them.
She doesn’t know me.
She doesn’t know Percy.
Thankfully, she also cannot remember my asshole brother, stiff and insincere mother, and vapid sister.
They don’t come by. I ask them not to.
“Lucy needs her rest.”
The past four days have brought a sort of détente between Dina and me. Whenever she looks at me, though, she wears a compound expression that I have come to read as “I blame you,” layered over, “But I know you care about her.”
I watch Lucy and Dina from the doorway. I’ve been either inside or at the door, standing like a sentinel, waiting for any instance of my wife recognizing me, even a fraction.
Lucy’s face, which has been carefully composed since she woke—taking things in, not giving much out—opens up with pure joy as she talks to her friend.
I am so fucking jealous, I can hardly stand it.
She used to look at me like that until I fucked it up.
She reaches out her hand, and Dina takes it as she sits on the edge of the bed.
They don’t say anything for a moment, and I look away because it feels private in a way I have no standing to intrude on, but that isn’t going to stop me. I am here to glean every tiny piece of information I can about my wife.
“I love you. I was so scared.” This is from Dina.
“I…I can’t remember what happened, but…they’ve told me.”
“You’re never allowed to drive again,” Dina declares.
I’m with her on that. Like fucking hell, Lucy is getting behind the wheel. She’ll have a car and a driver from now on. If she doesn’t like it. Tough.
They talk about Dina’s, about how Jackie, who is Lucy’s replacement there, is doing, and how Lucy wants to get back to cooking.
Like hell!
Dina doesn’t argue with her, just says, “As soon as the doctor gives you a clean bill of health.”
Then, after a long pause, Lucy calls out to me. “Fox?”
I turn. “Yeah, sweetheart.”
She frowns whenever I use the endearment. So I keep using it. I want her brain to remember me, and if that means keeping her uncomfortable with how I talk to her, I’m going to do it.
I also keep telling her I love her, which makes her look even more puzzled.
I’ve told her I’m her husband.
We’ve been married for nearly two years.
We’re very much in love.
I don’t tell her about the baby. She doesn’t need to remember that. As far as I’m concerned, she doesn’t need to remember anything painful—even the moment where I broke her heart by telling her I didn’t love her and never would, that I married her out of duty and stayed out of guilt.
What utter bullshit!
“Ah…can you give Dina and me a minute?”
No.
“Of course, sweetheart. If you need something, just let me know. I’ll be in the hallway.” I cast a warning look at Dina before I close the door behind me.
I told her on the phone that she doesn’t remember me, and then I lied and said that the doctor has decided we shouldn’t tell Lucy about the recent emotional distress.
I assume Dr. Reyes would agree, right? I mean, she’s recovering; she doesn’t need to know she moved out.
She needs to feel safe until her memory comes back.
And then what?
I don’t listen at the door. Not because of scruples, but I’d be caught by the hospital staff, and they already don’t like me.
I pace the hallway like a caged animal.
After a while, Dina comes out, and I accost her.
“She really doesn’t remember you,” she remarks, as if she’s surprised by it.
“No.”
“She remembers everything else. Right up to about two years ago and then—“ She makes a gesture that says gone. “She asked me what year it is, and when I told her, she looked like I’d said something in a foreign language.”
“I know.”
Dina is quiet for a moment. She is, I have always known, significantly smarter than she is given credit for, and she is currently applying that intelligence to me in a way that is not comfortable.
“She should come home with me,” she states. “When they discharge her. She knows my place. She’ll be comfortable, she won’t be confused—“
“No.”
Her eyes narrow. “Fox—“
“She needs continuity. The doctors said—routine, familiar environment, and low stress. Our home is her home. Her things are there. Her garden. Her kitchen.” I keep my voice level.
I keep it reasonable. I am, and I am aware of this, performing reasonableness the way I have always performed things that are in fact something else entirely.
“Taking her somewhere new, somewhere she has no memory of—“
“She has no memory of your house either.”
“She has no memory of anything from the last two years. At least in our home she can—“ I pause because my throat is closing up again. For a man who hasn’t cried since I was a child, I’m having no trouble producing tears. “She can start building them again. In an environment that’s actually hers.”
Dina looks at me for a long time. The I-blame-you layer is doing significant work.
“Her things are at my place,” she tries again, but not with as much gusto as before. “She was staying with me. She moved out.”
Like I need to be reminded!
“I know.” I hold her gaze and make a note to text my assistant to get Lucy’s stuff back to our home from Dina’s ASAP. It’ll be like she never moved out. Like that shit never happened.
“So—”
“When she gets her memory back,” I cut her off again with barely restrained frustration, “if she decides she wants to leave, I won’t stop her.
But right now she is fragile, and she is healing, and she needs—” I stop.
I let something through, just enough, just the part that is real and not strategy, though I’m not entirely certain where one ends and the other begins anymore. “She needs her husband.”
And I need her.
Dina gives me a measured look and does me the favor of not saying that I was the one who had decided the marriage was over, that I didn’t want to be her husband.
The corridor hums. Somewhere, a cart wheels past. The fluorescent light does its indifferent fluorescent thing.
“If she’s unhappy”—Dina steps in front of me, goes on tiptoe, and still, her forehead only comes up to my chest, but she makes the most of it with her glare—“if she’s stressed or asking to leave—“
“She goes wherever she wants. Immediately. No discussion.”
“I’m going to be there every day,” she warns.
“I would expect nothing less.”
She unfolds her arms. Refolds them. Looks past me at the ICU door.
“You’d better be good to her, Fox.” Her voice has dropped past the layered expression to her truth, and there is such sadness in her voice that it touches me in a way I never imagined such things could.
“She’s the best person I know. You understand that?
The actual best. And she has had—“ She stops as her eyes fill with emotion. “Just be good to her.”
“I will love her every day for the rest of my life.” It is the most unqualified thing I have ever said.