Bonus - Grant #4
Dr. Shah asks Maggie’s name, her age, when she was born, and the questions piss me off until I realize I can’t answer the last one.
August comes immediately. The year doesn’t.
I was there, so of course I know the year.
Laurel was in labor for fourteen hours. I remember holding her hand.
I remember her threatening to break my fingers.
I remember—except I don’t remember the hospital.
I don’t remember the room. I don’t remember bringing Maggie home.
Every memory falls apart the second I try to touch it. “Don’t fucking quiz me about my own child,” I tell him, but my voice has changed.
“Grant, look at Laurel.”
I do, and for the first time I don’t want to.
She turns toward me with flour on her cheek and love all over her face.
I know every line of that face. I know the little crease beside her mouth when she is trying not to laugh, the look she gets when she is furious but refusing to give me the satisfaction, the exact way her eyes change when she is about to cry.
“Tell him to leave,” I say.
Laurel looks at me and says, “I love you.” Relief nearly drops me where I stand. There. That is my wife. That is Laurel. Then she smiles and says, “I knew you’d fix it.”
Everything inside me goes quiet.
Laurel would never say that.
She’d tell me fixing myself was my responsibility.
She’d tell me love didn’t erase what I did.
She’d probably remind me that cleaning up my own destruction did not make me a fucking hero.
She’d never stand there looking at me exactly the way I wanted her to look, saying exactly what I needed to hear.
I stare at her smile and finally see what has been wrong with it from the beginning.
It is perfect. Too perfect. Not the crooked one she gets when she is genuinely amused, not the thin one she wears when she is holding herself together.
This is the smile I would give her if I were allowed to build Laurel from memory and remove every part of her capable of saying no to me.
“Laurel?”
She smiles wider.
I step back, and the kitchen disappears.
The hardwood under my feet becomes pale vinyl.
The island shortens. Cabinets flatten into a cream wall.
Dr. Shah is no longer standing where the pantry should be because there is no pantry, only a door behind him and Marcus near it, keeping his distance.
The rain continues its perfect rhythm because it is coming from a sound machine beside the window.
The lake holds on for another second, gray water shining beyond the glass as if my mind is begging me not to look too closely, and then even that is gone. Wet lawn. Fence. Nothing else.
“No.”
I turn back to Laurel.
She is still there. Thank God, she is still there.
“Baby.” I move toward her, but Dr. Shah speaks behind me. “Grant, Laurel isn’t in the room.”
“Yes, she is.”
“She isn’t.”
“She’s right fucking there.”
Laurel puts one hand over her stomach, and another answer rushes in.
Pregnant. Of course. That is why the dates are wrong.
That is why Maggie is already four. We are having another baby.
A boy this time. I start laughing because my brain has found the missing piece, and for one beautiful second everything fits again.
“She’s pregnant,” I tell them. “That’s what I forgot. We’re having a boy.”
The look on Dr. Shah’s face kills the laugh.
“Grant, Laurel is not pregnant with your child. You and Laurel are divorced.”
“No.”
“The divorce was finalized.”
“No.”
“You did not remarry her.”
“Stop.”
“You sold the lake house.”
“I bought it back.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. They moved to Colorado. They called us, and the number was fucking insane, and I paid it.”
“That did not happen.”
My hand catches the mug when I move. It hits the floor with a hollow plastic clatter, and I stare at it as water spills across the vinyl. Not ceramic, not coffee. A plastic cup filled with water. The same kind they give me with medication.
My breathing turns ragged.
Dr. Shah says my name once. “You are at Ashland. You are in your room. You have been back here for eleven weeks. You told staff this morning that Laurel was downstairs making breakfast, and you asked us to help you reality-check when this happens.”
“I didn’t ask you shit.”
“You did.”
Then Maggie says, “Daddy?”
I turn so fast it hurts.
She is standing beside Laurel in her pink pajamas, one sock on, Bunny tucked against her side. My whole body goes weak with relief. “There. You heard her.”
Dr. Shah doesn’t turn around. “Grant, Maggie is part of the episode.”
Rage comes so fast I barely recognize it. “Don’t call my daughter an episode.”
His answer is quiet. “You do not have a daughter.”
I stare at him. Then at Maggie. Then Laurel.
Maggie’s little hand is wrapped around Laurel’s fingers, and Laurel is looking at me with tears on her face. They look real. More real than the doctor, more real than the room, more real than the vinyl under my bare feet.
My daughter looks frightened, and every instinct I have screams at me to go to her, pick her up, get both of them out of here.
But Laurel’s hand isn’t depressing the fabric of her shirt where Maggie grips it.
Maggie casts no shadow. And when Laurel steps closer to me, the floor doesn’t make a sound.
That is when I understand what “going away” meant.
Laurel wasn’t disappearing.
I was.