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.
15
OUT OF FUCKS
LUCY
This is what recovery looks like, in practice.
It looks like the back porch at ten in the morning, where the sun comes up at a good angle, and the garden is visible, and the air smells like the magnolias in bloom.
It looks like a blanket across my lap because I get cold now, which I didn’t before, which is apparently a thing that happens when your body has been through something significant and is rerouting its resources toward healing and away from temperature regulation.
It looks like a cup of tea Fox made before he got in the shower—made the way I like it with honey and lemon, which he did not use to do, which means he has been paying attention to how I make it and replicating the process, which I have added to the list of things I am not examining too closely about Fox.
It looks, from the outside, like a woman resting.
From the inside, it looks like a woman doing continuous, exhausting emotional accounting while also managing a performance and also being in genuine physical pain and alsofalling asleep without warning every four to six hours like a phone with a dying battery.
It isnotrestful.
But the sun is good. Uncomplicated. It does not require anything from me, and I have developed a significant appreciation for things that do not.
I hear the front door open and then close. I wonder who it is.
