26. The Truth And The Twist
THE TRUTH AND THE TWIST
LUCY
We made love three times—once in the kitchen, once in bed, and once in the shower.
Now we’re happily exhausted, in bed. The room is quiet but for our breathing.
Through the window, the garden is a dark shape, and the fireflies are doing their early summer thing, brief and random in the hedges.
I am on my back, staring at the ceiling. He’s on his side, an arm over my midsection, holding me lightly.
You have to tell him, Lucy.
Now.
“Fox.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“I need to tell you something.”
The same thing I said in my parents’ backyard, before Milo’s kid, the laughing, and the moment that broke my resolve.
“Okay.”
I breathe.
“I remember,” I admit in a small voice. “I’ve always remembered.
Since the ICU. Since the first moment, I looked at you in that chair, and I knew exactly who you were, and I—“ I stop and close my eyes. “I lied to you. About the amnesia. I lied, and I’ve been lying, and I’m sorry.
I’m—“ My voice fractures, and I let it, because I owe him at least that. “I’m sorry.”
The room is very quiet.
He leans over me, his hand cupping my cheek.
I keep my eyes closed.
“Open your eyes, sweetheart.”
I do so, afraid of what I’ll find. Afraid of what I’ll see on his face.
Anger? Disgust? What?
He smiles gently. “I know.”
My eyes widen. “What?”
“I know,” he says again. Kisses my nose and then my lips. “I’ve known for a while.”
“How long?” I ask.
“A while.”
I feel the first burst of anger. He knows? What the hell?
“How long is a while?” I grit my teeth.
“Ah…I don’t know, Luce. Probably a few days after we came home.”
I want to sit up, but he doesn’t let me. He crawls atop me, keeping me caged under him.
“H-how did you…how do you know?”
He’s known all along, and I’ve been thinking I did such a great job of pretending.
“You never asked the same question twice.”
I stare at him. “What?”
He shrugs. “You never asked a question twice—and that told me that you didn’t really forget anything, you were…testing me.”
My husband is a whole lot more perceptive than I give him credit for.
“You knew, and you didn’t say anything, and you just…”
“Kept going,” he repeats.
I push at him, and he rolls away. I sit up because I need to be vertical, to have distance, to think. “You kept going? What the…Fox?”
“I know.” He sits up and rests against the headboard.
“That’s two of us lying to each other…”
“I know.”
“For weeks!”
“Lucy.” He takes my hand in his and holds my gaze. “I knew. And I decided that what you needed to see was worth more than calling it out. If you needed to watch me—if you needed to see what I did when I had to earn you”—he kisses my hands—“then I was going to give you something worth watching.”
I stare at him, lost in his blue eyes. “That is the most manipulative thing I have ever heard.”
“True,” he agrees.
I wrench my hands away from him. “You are…” I press my hand to my eyes briefly. “You are the most…”
“Yes.” He comes closer to me. Smiles. “Yes, to all of it. I know what I am. I’m not going to pretend the last weeks were anything other than what they were.
I had information, and I used it, and I would do it again, because what I was trying to do was make you—“ I look away, and he holds my chin to bring me back to a place where I see him—“understand that I know what I cost you. That I know what I did and what I didn’t do, and how long I didn’t do it.
That I’m not that man anymore. That I don’t want to be that man anymore. ”
I just feel way too many emotions. I can’t parse through them. I just…can’t.
“I need to move out. Back to Dina’s, like before.”
The look on his face is something that I don’t ever want to see again.
My strong Fox, breaking—it’s devastating to watch.
“Fuck no!” he explodes.
But I know what I need, what we need.
If we’re going to make this work, we need some time to process. I need time to process. We need to let this relationship breathe, be authentic, which it hasn’t been since we’ve both been lying to each other.
“I can’t keep living here, feeling this way, and not knowing what’s real. We were getting divorced, Fox. We had agreed. And then the accident happened, and we’ve been in this—this—“
“This what?”
“I don’t know what to call it,” I confess.
“I don’t have a word for it. It’s not the marriage we had, and it’s not—I don’t know what it is.
And I need—“ I press my hands together in my lap, a thing I do when I need to keep them still. “I need to be somewhere that’s mine, where I can think, where I’m not—“ I look out the window, at the garden in the dark. “Where I’m not surrounded by things I planted and a man I…”
“A man you what?” he urges.
I don’t answer.
“Lucy, why did you make love to me tonight?”
I close my eyes.
“Lucy, open your fucking eyes and answer my question.” There’s no heat in his voice. He’s just being him. Persistent.
“Because I can’t keep my hands off of you.”
He smirks.
“Oh, stop!”
“Lucy, why do you want to move out?” He’s serious now.
My shoulders slump with the weight of it all.
“I…I really think we need time to be honest with one another. I did you wrong…but damn it, Fox, you said you loved me in the hospital, and I didn’t know if it was guilt talking or…
. Why the hell were you lying when you’d just told me three days earlier you’d never love me? ”
“I made a mistake.”
“What if it’s guilt…again?” I demand.
His eyes fill with emotion, and I feel like a horrible, horrible person for doing this. But I want us to be honest with each other, and we haven’t been, not from the start.
“The reason I lied to you—as in made you think that we were happily married and desperately in love when you said you’d forgotten us, sweetheart, was because that is the truth.”
I groan. “You’re making no sense.”
“You love me, Luce. You always have. And I found out after you left that I love you, too. And the accident. Fuck!” He stops talking for a moment as if trying to contain his feelings.
“I…I can’t tell you how scared I was. I’ve never ever been scared.
So, I can assure you this isn’t guilt. It’s love. ”
I shake my head. “You made me feel like I wasn’t enough.”
“You were and are always enough.”
“You told your best friend you didn’t love me.
” This time, I take his hands in mine, hold them.
“You told me the same thing. You said it calmly and with complete certainty. Then there was the accident.” My voice fractures.
“I know that you’re trying and…you want us to have a marriage, a future.
I’m not an idiot, and I’m not blind, and I have spent these weeks watching you be”—I squeeze his hands—“the most amazing husband a woman could want. But I felt it before, too. I was sure, I was completely sure, and then I heard what you said to Percy, and everything I was sure of turned out to be…”
“I was wrong.”
“I know you believe that.”
“I love you.”
“Fox, I—“
“I love you,” he cuts me off and repeats the words.
“My commitment to you is not a response to the accident. Not because I almost lost you, though that is its own reckoning. But because you are the person I want to be in a room with. Because you make everything better than it needs to be and you say the true thing even when it costs you, and you plant peonies in spite of my mother, and you water the fig tree because it needs it, and you—” He stops.
Resets. “Because I was in love with you while I was telling myself I wasn’t, and I was too scared and too scarred and too convinced by a story I’d been telling myself about what I deserved to see what was right in front of me. ”
I feel like crying. I let go of his hands.
“I can’t believe you yet.”
“I know.”
“I want to,” I tell him, and this is the most honest thing I have said in weeks. “I want to believe you. But wanting to believe something and being able to are…. I don’t know how to get from one to the other.”
“I know.”
“So, I need to go,” I plead. “Just for a while. Just for us to find our footing again. We can’t do that living in the same house.”
“I disagree.”
“Please, Fox.”
He looks at me for a long, long moment.
“Okay.”
It’s not the old okay. This is giving me what I ask for when he doesn’t want to wear the same simple okay.
“But I want you to know.” He holds my gaze. “I’m not going to stop. I’m not accepting this as a conclusion. You can go and be somewhere that’s yours and think.” His jaw sets in the way it does when Fox has decided something. “But I will fight to make you believe me.”
“And how will you do that?”
A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “I’m going to court my wife. Properly. From the beginning. In the way I should’ve done two years ago.”
That’s one of the most romantic things I’ve heard my husband say.
My heart melts. Turns into a puddle.
“I’m just giving you fair warning,” he adds.
I look at this man—in the dark, on our anniversary, after a whole marriage of not quite knowing what was real—and I think, “I love you.”
I don’t say it.
But I think it, completely, without the armor of anger or the protection of performance, just the plain and inconvenient truth of it.