“I love you, too.” There’s a rough, tortured sound. “So fucking much.”
A dream. It’s a dream. Fox doesn’t love me.
I’m hallucinating. I have been swimming through memory for what feels like hours, his voice following me through the dark waters, where my battered, grief-soaked brain has manufactured him.
“Why the fuck isn’t she awake?” he yells.
That can’t be Fox. He doesn’t yell.
“No, don’t tell me you don’t know. You’re a Goddamn doctor, and?—”
I float in and out, and Fox is always there. It’s a comfort. He’s here with me wherever I am. I feel safe even though I know he doesn’t love me.
“Oh, Fox, why can’t you love me?”
“I do love you, Luce. I love you a whole fucking lot, so you better wake up, sweetheart.”
“You’re afraid,” I murmur.
“Never been more scared, sweetheart. So, you need to come back to me.” There are tears in his voice, harsh ones. Sobs. “Because I can’t make it without you.”
This is confusing. Probably unreal because my husband does not lose composure, does not crack. He manages everything, including himself, with the steady, unbothered fluency of a man who has never had reason to be afraid.
“Lucy.” His voice is close now, very close. I can even smell his cologne, the one that makes me want to kiss him, make love to him. I want to open my eyes, but I cannot; the weight is too much, everything is too much.
“Lucy, you have to—“ He stops. “You have to wake up, sweetheart. I love you, and you can’t leave me.”
His voice is lower, wrecked.
It’s obvious I’m hallucinating,andthis is the cruelest thing my brain has ever done to me.
I would like to register a complaint.
“I need you, sweetheart.” I hear more tears, more sobs. “Please. Please just stay.”
Fox is asking me to stay? Why? He said I should go. He agreed we should end the marriage. He said he doesn’t love me.
I don’t know if any of this is real—the room, the lights, the beeping, his hand, which I think I can feel, warm and certain around mine. Though I cannot be sure if that’s genuine or if I’m in the dark waters again, or if I’m back in the kitchen at three in the morning, or at the farmers market with persimmons in a bag and his hand in mine and all of it still intact and uncomplicated and?—
“Stay, sweetheart, stay with me.”
I want to say, “I don’t know if I can,” but I can’t because I slide away out of dreams into darkness.
8
UNDER PRESSURE
FOX
She has a bruise along her left jaw that is turning the color of a storm system.
I keep looking at it. I don’t know why, because there is a catalogue of worse things to look at in this room—tubes, monitors, the ventilator that is breathing for my wife because her body has been temporarily relieved of that responsibility—but the bruise is the thing I keep coming back to.
The size of it.
The wrongness of that color on her face—the one I know so well, one I’ve looked at across breakfast tables, in the dark, and in the kitchen of a diner late at night when she handed me a bowl of cassoulet that changed my life, and I apparently failed to understand the significance of that in any useful timeframe.
The bruise is the size of my hand.
