The Twilight Wife

by A. J. Banner

He gives me an anxious look. “Don’t be long. She needs to get some rest.”

  “I’ll have her back soon.” We turn right onto the dirt lane winding through a dense fir forest. When the men are out of sight, she says, “This road was a lot bumpier when we were kids.”

  “How long have you and Jacob known each other?”

  “Since we were babies,” she says wistfully. “Spring, summer, Christmas. He lived in the city, came to the island on holidays with his parents. But I told you all this.”

  “Sorry. I still have a little trouble—”

  “Have you given any thought to seeing Sylvia? She might be able to help.”

  “Sylvia?”

  “The therapist.”

  A familiar anxiety seizes me. “We talked about her, too, didn’t we?”

  “I asked you if you were seeing anyone, like a psychologist. You said your doctors in Seattle did all they could.”

  “They gave me memory exercises to practice at home, but—”

  “I told you if you want to consult with a professional here, I know of one.” She reaches into her coat pocket and hands me a business card embossed in blue text. Sylvia LaCrosse, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, with a telephone number and an address on Waterfront Road. The card looks familiar.

  “Did you give me a card last week?” I say. She must have, and I’ve lost it. What did I do with it? My fingers tremble. I nearly drop the card in the dirt.

  “No, I didn’t give you a card,” she says. “You said you wanted to think about it.”

  I breathe a sigh of relief. “She’s not a psychologist.”

  “She’s as good as one. She worked for Pierce County for a lot of years, family therapy. She got burned out in the city. Too many sad cases and not enough funding. She’s semiretired, but she’s still taking on some clients in private practice.”

  “You told me all this last week, too, didn’t you?”

  Nancy nods sadly. “You need to see her. Trust me, she’s good at what she does.”

  “Thank you,” I say, tucking the card into my pocket. Somehow, the possibility of talking to Sylvia LaCrosse calms me, like a soothing balm.

  When we get back, Jacob gives me a searching look. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m okay,” I say, although my legs are wobbly.

  Nancy gives him a high-wattage smile. “We were talking about how you two have to come over for dinner.”

  Jacob looks up at me. “If Kyra wants to—”

  “We would love to,” I say.

  Van is already in the truck, revving the engine.

  “He’s too impatient,” Nancy says. She gives me a quick hug. “We’ll pick a date for dinner. Don’t forget about the school. So good to see you.” But she’s smiling at Jacob, not at me.

  “And you,” I say as she heads back to the truck.

  Jacob takes my hand. “We don’t need to go for dinner if you’re not up for it.”

  “It’ll be nice to be with friends. They can tell me things about my past, fill me in, so it’s not all on you. And it sounds like Nancy might have some great stories about you as a teenager. I wouldn’t want to miss out on that.”

  “I don’t mind it all being on me.” He kisses my forehead. “And I’ll have to warn her not to give away any of my secrets.”

  Nancy climbs into the truck next to her husband. He says something to her, not looking at her, waving his arm in a dismissive motion. She shrugs and looks away, tapping her fingers on the passenger-side window. The wind scatters leaves across the garden as he shifts the truck into reverse, hits the gas, and peels out of the driveway.

  In the spacious master bathroom, I run my fingers through my hair. My wavy mane is growing at a breakneck pace. I barely recognize my sunken cheeks, haunted expression, and the scar on my right temple, just above my eyebrow. But I am me. My features are mine—large brown eyes, thick lashes, full mouth, and high cheekbones. The slight indentation in my chin. But my left front tooth is chipped. How did that happen?

  How did I end up here, in this spacious bathroom in a beautiful house, with such an attentive husband? Four years ago, I was a heartbroken, jilted woman whose boyfriend had just dumped her. I was renting a room in a drafty Victorian, my future unwritten. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the grating traffic, the screech of the Route 70 bus braking on the corner of 50th Street and Brooklyn Avenue. I can see my quilt bunched up on the bed, the glow of my alarm clock, and I remember my loneliness, my longing to escape the confines of city life. I can see the dim bathroom with its slightly moldy grout, chipped tile, and claw-foot tub, opening onto a view of a postage-stamp yard and surrounding houses crammed together in our Seattle neighborhood. I am almost there again—in my mind, I was there only a few weeks ago. I imagined eventually moving away from the crowds, but I did not anticipate meeting a man like Jacob—or living with him on this windswept island.

  I have to remind myself that years have passed. I fell in love with him over a period of time. We came to this island after much planning and deliberation. Our relationship evolved. Nothing happened suddenly or by accident.

  And yet, I still expect to hear my roommate’s laughter, to find her towel thrown on the floor, her bra hanging over the doorknob. Instead, I have this tidy bathroom all to myself. Lined up on the countertop are my lotion, toothpaste, and the bottles of diazepam, alprazolam, and zolpidem tablets. Strange to be on so many medications, when I rarely took even an aspirin for a headache. But here I am, overloaded with pills like some kind of junkie. The zolpidem, brand name Ambien, is supposed to help me sleep.

  But I don’t want any more help. I finally stopped taking the pills a few days ago. Without chemicals circulating through my bloodstream, my mind is clearing.

  I wash my face, which feels like an unfamiliar mask made of bone and skin. I brush my teeth and run a comb through my tangled hair. Each strand is four years older than I remember—maybe most of my hair is new, my old head of hair having gone through its life cycle of two to six years when I wasn’t looking.

  How much of my body is the same as it was? White blood cells live only a few weeks, red blood cells only about four months, but brain cells last a lifetime. When neurons die, they’re never replaced. I don’t recall where I learned all this, or how—but I know I’m only a shadow of my former self, as spectral as a dream.

  I can’t recall who I was in this house, or the nights I spent with Jacob in our corner bedroom overlooking the sea. I sleep in here alone now, while my husband has been exiled to the guest room. I don’t remember gazing out these windows, which run along two walls, or painting the other two walls bluish-white. They’re lined with bookshelves and a modern, mirrored dressing table. On the shelves, the books reflect my profession: Principles of Marine Biology, Introductory Oceanography, and more intriguing titles: The Soul of an Octopus, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells. There’s a binder with a printed label on the front, Kyra Winthrop, Instructor, Intertidal Invertebrates. On the pages inside, I jotted notes for my lectures in bold strokes, unlike my writing now, which trembles across the page, shaky and insecure.

  But I was once confident. My self-assurance shines out from a wedding photo on the shelf. I’m dancing with Jacob at the reception. My shimmering white gown fans out around me. I’m grinning in pure delight. Jacob looks impossibly dashing in his tailored tuxedo, his features rough-hewn. The way we gaze at each other makes my heart ache. He must be lonely, lying awake in the guest room down the hall, hoping I’ll climb into bed with him. But I need time to get to know him again. To get to know myself.

  I tear my gaze from the picture and search through my dresser drawers for a comfortable pair of sweats. I don’t recognize any of my clothes, all in muted twilight colors. I pull out an unfamiliar gray cowl-necked sweater, the kind my best friend, Linny Strabeck, would wear. We often shopped in vintage boutiques together. I see her whipping a sweater off a hanger and pressing it against me. Perfect, she says in my mind. She has an ey
e for fashion.

  If only Linny would return from Russia. She flew back to spend a week with me in the hospital before she had to return to work. I barely remember her there. I feel like I still need her support, her memories of the last few years. But she’s pursuing her passion, studying orcas in a race to protect the species. She emails me when she can get to a computer, but her brief messages pale in comparison to her presence in person. I miss her dramatic stories, her impulsive nature, and her propensity to choose my clothes.

  She would not approve of these baggy blue sweats. They hang loosely on my body, but they’re comfortable. The act of putting them on requires concentration. When I get dressed, my fingers still fumble with strings, buttons, and zippers.

  I take the business card from my pajama pocket, run my finger along the embossed letters. Sylvia LaCrosse, Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Her address is 11 Waterfront Road, Suite B. Five miles south of here. I could ride my bicycle.

  I tuck her card under a T-shirt in my top drawer, and I go out to the living room, which opens into a dining room and kitchen. Everything is made of salvaged wood and river rock, from the floors to the ceiling beams. Bay windows offer panoramic views of the sea. I imagine Jacob as a child, laughing by the woodstove with his parents, when the house looked radically different inside, bare bones and furnished for the late 1970s. He was probably handsome even as a child, charming the socks off the grown-ups. Maybe he already had plans to become rich like his father, but not from an inheritance. He prides himself on being a self-made man.

  He’s in the living room making a fire. We rely on the woodstove for heat. He has put on socks and slippers, and his T-shirt is no longer inside out. He’s carefully choosing firewood from the bin and making a perfect triangle of cut logs.

  In the kitchen, I open the cabinet and choose a multicolored ceramic mug, squished on one side, as if it got skewed on the pottery wheel. Jacob says I chose the mugs at the Fremont Sunday Market in Seattle. I wish I could remember strolling the aisles with him, buying produce, ceramics, and locally made honey. He adds three tablespoons of honey to his coffee every morning, the only vice of an otherwise health-obsessed man.

  I pour myself coffee and sit cross-legged on the couch, savoring the robust flavor of freshly ground beans. The pungent aroma fills me with nostalgia, for . . . what? The answer eludes me.

  “What were you and Nancy talking about?” he says, fitting kindling into the stove.

  “She said I taught the kids at her school.”

  “You did, for an hour here and there.”

  “I’d like to try it again.”

  “You have to be careful with her,” he says.

  “Why? She seems nice. Although, I think she may have had a crush on you when you were kids.”

  For a split second, his shoulders stiffen. “I’ve known her a long time. She can be a little strange . . .”

  “What do you mean, strange?”

  “Obsessive. She was into the Rubik’s Cube for a long time, always playing with the thing. Then it was the Cabbage Patch dolls. When she hit puberty, she traded in the dolls for a Walkman. Then all she did was listen to that thing, all the time.”

  “Did you two have a thing? You and Nancy?” I sip the coffee, savoring the slightly bitter flavor.

  “We were friends. I think she may have wanted more at some point, but nothing ever came of it.”

  “What about you? Did you have a crush on her?”

  He looks up for a moment, out at the shifting clouds. “She’s a nice person. But no, I did not have a crush on her. It was a long time ago. A lot of years have passed. We’re all grown-ups now. We’ve matured.”

  “Except me,” I say. “I’ve regressed.”

  “You’re recovering well,” he says.

  “But I can’t believe this is all I am. This lost woman without her memory. I need to do something with my life.”

  “You are doing something. You’re regaining your strength.”

  “And relying too much on you.”

  “Never too much.” He jumps up and grabs his Nikon camera from the windowsill. “I almost forgot our picture for today.”

  “What was yesterday’s again?”

  His expression registers deep disappointment. “You don’t remember, really?”

  I press my fingertips to my temples. “Yesterday morning, you took a photograph of the sliced boiled egg on my plate. With all the salt and pepper on it.”

  He breaks into a bright smile of relief. “I printed it.”

  I pull the memory book from beneath the coffee table, a handmade, linen-bound photo album among the many others he created for me. But this album is special, a scrapbook to recreate our previous trip to the island. On the front, he pasted a photograph of the two of us sitting on the beach above the words, Live, Laugh, Love.

  I flip to the first page, which shows a dreamy black-and-white photograph of me crouching in the sand, holding a perfect, closed clamshell in the palm of my hand, both halves of the shell intact. I’m grinning into the camera, my cheeks flushed. He took the photograph the day after we arrived, to reenact a moment from last summer. You loved to find undamaged seashells, without any missing pieces, he said. I remember one time when you found a perfect clamshell, but it was much bigger than this one. Still, this one will do.

  The next pages show snapshots in time, re-creations of shared moments. I’m spearing a square of ravioli with my fork; a selfie shot shows the two of us smiling on a forest trail beneath a cathedral of fir trees; I’m paddling a two-person kayak in the calm waters of Mystic Bay, close to the shore, laughing as Jacob makes faces at me. He printed thirteen photographs for our thirteen days here so far, each image representing something fun we did here before. In yesterday’s picture, the egg is sliced thinly. I’m grinning at Jacob across the table, the slanted morning sunlight in my hair.

  “What should I do for the picture this time?” I say, putting the album on the table.

  He stands back against the window. “Get naked?”

  “Not a chance,” I say, blushing. “Try again.”

  He grins. “All right. Before the accident, every morning, you got up and drank a cup of something. Usually it was orange spice tea.”

  “Coffee now,” I say, holding up my mug.

  “You were always reading a magazine.”

  I pick up a copy of the New Yorker from the coffee table, the Style Issue from last autumn. I open the magazine in my lap.

  “You liked to fold back the page,” he says. “Just like that. But you didn’t sit all stiff and upright.”

  I look down at myself, then at him. “Am I stiff and upright?”

  “Self-consciously so. You were carefree. You doubled up the cushions against the arm of the couch and lay down, sprawled out. That was more your style.”

  Carefree. Is that even possible anymore? I’m trying so hard to file away every moment into memory. To remember where I set down my mug, what I last read in my book on the nightstand, what I had for breakfast. I turn and lie on the couch, setting the cushions under my head. “Like this?”

  He looks exasperated. “Not so staged.”

  “I can’t help staging—I don’t know who I was before.”

  “Just relax,” he says, beginning to snap photographs. “Smile.”

  I laugh. “I’m self-conscious, I can’t help it. You keep taking pictures of me.”

  “You’re so beautiful,” he says, looking at me above the camera.

  “If this is foreplay, it’s working,” I say, my cheeks heating even more.

  “Are you relaxed now?”

  “This is definitely comfy,” I say.

  He comes over and squeezes onto the couch beside me, holding the camera above us and taking a selfie of the two of us lying side by side.

  “You’re squishing me,” I say, giggling.

  “That’s my MO.”

  I shove him over and he falls onto the floor and snaps a picture of me at an angle, grinning down at him. Come down h
ere with me, he says in my memory. He lay in just that spot, in the warmth of the fire. I tumbled onto the plush carpet and into his arms. We must have taken off our clothes . . . But I’m only guessing. Whatever actually happened next, and on all the days afterward, is lost to me.

  “After I get some work done,” Jacob says, “I thought we could visit more of the places we used to go.”

  “There are more?” I say, taking another sip of the coffee. We’ve driven the scenic routes, kayaked in protected bays, and hiked the bluff trails.

  “The island is full of beautiful places.”

  “What about Nancy and Van? Did we go places with them? Were we friends with them as couples?”

  He looks thoughtful. “We hung out with them last summer.” He crumples paper and tucks it inside the pyramid of logs.

  There’s a beat of silence. “You and Van? You’re friends?”

  “He’s a decent guy. A good fix-it man. His forte, not mine.”

  “But you’re good with computers. You did a great job of rigging up the Internet. Nobody else on the island even has a connection.”

  “It’s our secret.”

  “I won’t tell a soul. You’re an expert at making fires, too.”

  He grins at me. “I like to look at you in the firelight. We used to . . .”

  A blush spreads through my cheeks. I’m thinking what he doesn’t say. We used to make love by firelight. “You’re a romantic.”

  “Speaking of which, we should go to the Whale Tale for dinner.”

  “A date,” I say.

  “No strings attached.”

  “You’re my husband, we’re attached.”

  “But I don’t want you to feel pressured.”

  “You’re not pressuring me.” I run my finger around the rim of my mug. “I made a good decision, marrying a patient man.”

  “I try. But I’ve snapped at you more than once since we got here.”

  “It has to be difficult for you, living with Mrs. Rip Van Winkle.”

  “At least you didn’t wake up speaking a foreign language, like that guy who lost his memory and wandered around speaking Swedish. The doctors couldn’t trip him up and get him to speak English. But he’d never learned Swedish. How could a guy who never knew a language start speaking in only that language?”