14. Can I Handle The Truth?
CAN I HANDLE THE TRUTH?
LUCY
By the time they discharge me, I have refined my performance considerably.
I have the slight bewilderment calibrated—the soft edges of a woman who is missing two years of herself and is trying to find her footing.
I have the looking-at-familiar-things-as-if-for-the-first-time face, which is unfortunately easy to produce because I am in quite a lot of pain and heavily medicated, and everything does feel slightly like it’s for the first time.
I am asking a lot of questions, and not only because I want to be believable as a woman suffering from partial amnesia, but also because I’m curious about Fox’s answers, and about seeing us and me through his eyes.
Fox drives us home, taking the long way.
He goes past Dina’s, and I look at it with real recognition—don’t have to fake that—and past the Arcade and through Germantown. I watch it through the window.
We come home, and a wave of longing runs through me.
I think about the morning I walked to his office—the cassoulet, the conference room, all of it. Anger surges.
Then, I look at what I made, what I grew in a place that was never fully mine, and the anger does something it hasn’t done yet.
It wobbles.
Just for a moment. Just at the peonies.
I planted peonies the first spring we lived together—after the baby. I think caring for the garden was my way of healing.
Fox’s mother stood on the lawn in her sunglasses with an air of insouciance. “You should get a landscaper, darling, and not get dirt under your nails.”
“Mother, this is her garden.” Fox put an arm around me. “She can do whatever she wants here.”
It was his way of saying, butt out, woman.
See, those were the things that made me feel loved, made me feel like he chose me. Now, I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t. I don’t know what is real and what isn’t.
And my head hurts all the time, which makes it hard for me to think in straight lines, which makes me wonder: How damaged is my brain? What am I doing pretending not to know Fox?
He opens the car door and offers his hand to help me out.
I take it.
We stand in the driveway as I look around.
I loved living here.
I loved him.
Oh, Lucy, you still love him.
And that makes me feel pathetic and foolish.
My ribs shift when I breathe. The pain makes my eyes water. Fox’s hand tightens on mine.
“Sweetheart, are you okay?”
I want to scream that he doesn’t get to ask me that, call me sweetheart, say he loves me whenever he feels like, or kiss me whenever he wants, because it all makes me needy and hopeful, and I don’t want to be either.
“I moved wrong,” I murmur.
He walks me into our house—the one I thought was mine—and I stand in the hallway and say nothing.
I know this house.
I know the Victorian bones of it, the high ceilings and the original cornicing that someone decided to keep when they gutted everything else and pulled it into the present.
I know the formal living room off the hallway, the deep sofas and the fireplace with the mantle that has actual things on it—our things—and the tall windows that look into the garden.
I know that this is not where we live. This is where the house presents itself.
I let Fox steer me through it, into the room beyond, the one that is really ours—the long open space where walls used to be, living, dining, and kitchen running into each other seamlessly and yet clearly separate.
The sofa pointed at the television.
The dining table that has seen my heartbreak.
Every window looks into the garden. I can see the peonies from here, the ones lining the south wall.
I know all of it.
And Fox is watching me with the careful, hungry attention he doesn’t know I’ve clocked.
So I maintain the expression of someone who is lost.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, as if I’m seeing it for the first time.
He cups my cheek. “You made it beautiful.”
There is such naked emotion in his eyes that, for a moment, there is nothing else in the room—just him, just that look, exactly the way it used to be. Exactly the way I let it be, like a fool who knew better and looked anyway.
I swallow. Step back.
Somewhere underneath the pain and the pills and the performance, there is another Lucy—the one who drove crying through that curve on our street, who didn’t see the truck that skipped a stop sign and slammed into her—and she is standing to one side with her arms folded, watching the two of us with something between amusement and contempt.
“Go on then,” she says. “Let’s see how long this lasts.”
I know what I’m pretending and why. What I don’t know is what he’s pretending—and why.
Is all his care guilt dressed up as devotion?
Is it duty that he’s finally decided to call love?
Or is it something he buried so deep he had to nearly lose me to find it?
I don’t know. And not knowing somehow feels safer than knowing the truth, which I know will ultimately reveal itself.