XII
LIZZIE
He got her flowers. The card read, for all the things I should have said. It was the closest he’d ever come to an apology, which wasn’t the same as delivering one, much as offering flowers in exchange for things not said wasn’t the same as saying them. Fortunately, the flowers were not hand-delivered, which meant he wasn’t there to see her dissolve into tears. This was a phrase she had used before without thinking of its composite words, but now, huddled on the floor of her office, back against the door, legs pulled up tight against her chest, body shaking uncontrollably, she thought about it: the dissolution. That was how it felt, that something in her was dissolving, the wall she’d erected around the things she wanted, the same wall that hid from view all the pieces of herself she’d torn off and given away. She had tried not to want him, and failed. She had tried not to need him, and failed. She had tried not to love him, and this, too, had obviously, piteously failed. And in the process, she had become a woman who made do with less. She had become a woman who lived for a man, a Lizzie who let herself be the Elizabeth he imagined her to be, in exchange for nothing more than the feeling she got when he looked at her and saw something special. She had become a woman who needed someone else to believe she was special.
She got herself together, managed to make it through the rest of the day. She did not go down to his office to thank him for the flowers—but she also did not stray far from her own office. If he wanted to find her, he would know where to look. He did not look. When she left the building that night, she barely made it into the parking lot before the dissolve came again, and with it the tears. She did not want to be this person, weak and needy; she did not recognize this self. It had been a long time since she’d recognized herself.
That night she lay in bed, thought about the flowers, reconsidered their value as apology, as token of love, thought maybe this was a foolishly self-inflicted wound, she could have as much of him as she needed, if not as much as she wanted. She could love him as is.
But she could not call him to tell him this, because she was not allowed to call him. She could not curl her body around his, let his steady breathing steady hers until she fell asleep, because he was asleep beside his wife.
Dissolve: to disintegrate, to break down, to melt away.
* * *
The next day: a resolution.
“I think we should take some time out from—” They were safely inside his office, behind the soundproofed door, but it still felt dangerous to say it out loud in the middle of a workday. She gestured toward him, then herself. “—you know. This.”
“I don’t understand what you think I did,” he said.
It was telling, Lizzie thought. That it wouldn’t occur to him he had actually done anything, only that she might think he had. She was collecting bricks for a new wall; this would do.
“I just need to think,” she said.
“You know I hate when you resort to cliché.”
It was a lucky coincidence for him, how so many reactions he didn’t like qualified as cliché.
Another brick.
“Maybe I am a cliché, has that occurred to you?”
“If you want to tell me what’s really going on, we can have a conversation about it, but if you want to act like a child, maybe you’re right, and you need some time. To think.” He made this sound like a verb she lacked the capacity to enact. Lizzie left. Did not cry until she’d returned to her office. Did not, once she’d started, stop for a very long time.
* * *
He was fine. She spent every day trapped inside his brainchild, surrounded by him even as she was trying to avoid him, tortured by proximity and distance at once. He was fine. When they were forced to interact, he treated her like she was anyone, which was to say, no one. He treated her as he’d been treating her ever since they’d started the affair, of course, but before this, she’d understood it to be an act. Unless it was everything else that had been the act. His performance was effortless enough to believe in. He was fine.
She had asked for it, but it still felt like punishment. To be finally seen by someone who now looked through her—it made her feel like she did not exist, or did not want to. His absence was a wound; her absence, apparently, was painless. She survived one week. She survived two, then three. She managed to resist telling Gwen—she didn’t want approval, nor did she want shame, if she changed her mind. She wasn’t even sure she was allowed to change her mind. He wasn’t acting like a man who wanted her back.
She wasn’t sleeping.
Love should make you stronger, she imagined Gwen saying, and those were the nights she almost picked up the phone, called Gwen, risked the I told you so, but she couldn’t, because telling Gwen would make it real, would make it even harder to go back to him. Then one night she broke, and did tell Gwen, who was so relieved, so proud. Gwen said she would kill Lizzie if Lizzie ever went back to him. She did not know how she would endure the year unless she went back to him; she did not want to go back to him only because she could not otherwise endure.
She couldn’t quite breathe.
* * *
Her mood was contagious. Wendy had retreated into a cloud of gloom. And, on a less existential level, she’d retreated into her room, refusing to leave. She was taking a break from tests, she said. No more research. “You tell Dr. Strauss that if he wants to throw me out, he can throw me out,” she told Lizzie. Lizzie would not be telling him this.
Their conversations tended toward the monosyllabic, and occasionally, at least until the bottle of whiskey stored under Lizzie’s desk ran down, toward the liquid.
“Why are you so miserable?” Lizzie asked her once.
“Why are you?”
There was no reason not to answer somewhat honestly. “When I think about how many days I have to live through before the end of this year, I’m a little tempted to knock myself into a coma.”
“Dark.”
“Yep.”
“If you hate it here so much,” Wendy said, “why not just leave? Nothing’s stopping you.”
Lizzie shook her head. She had teased herself with the possibility. She wasn’t a quitter, especially not when quitting would require something so radical as public failure and transcontinental relocation. But if she was really ready to sever herself from Strauss, if she was serious, then shouldn’t this be the obvious next step? “You can’t walk away from a fellowship like this in the middle, not without a good reason. People would assume I either got kicked out or flamed out, and it amounts to the same thing in the end.”
“What’s that?”
“The end of my career.”
She had no options. Either that or she wanted to believe she had no options, because that would mean the only option was returning to him. She couldn’t be sure. And she was afraid to act, one way or another, until she was. “Basically, I’m trapped.”
Sometimes, Lizzie thought, Wendy looked at her like she hated her. “You have no fucking idea.”
WENDY
Practical considerations
The thing to consider, he says, is that I have nowhere else to go.
It was inappropriate, the thing we did together, and of course it can never happen again. Probably, he says, this should be the last time we discuss it.
The thing we did together, he says, and it’s almost like he believes it.
Not that it wasn’t meaningful to him, he says. I shouldn’t think that. Everyone makes mistakes, he said, but we should agree that this mistake is unrepeatable. There’s no shame in misinterpreting things, he says, and of course he is flattered. But we need to respect certain boundaries.
The thing to consider, he says, is what people would think. There would be questions, certainly. An investigation, possibly. He says he’d hate for me to face the skepticism of those who distrust my memory, but it’s to be expected, since my memory can’t be trusted.
He doesn’t say, what do you remember. So I don’t know what he would say if I told him I rem
embered his beery breath, his grasping hands, the fist of hair he tugged so hard it burned, his palm against my mouth, hard, teeth slicing lip, taste of blood, his voice saying be good, behave, saying I see how you look at me, saying you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, you don’t even have to stay here, saying if you run away now, feel free to keep running, saying trust me, I know what’s good for you, haven’t I always done what’s good for you.
He would probably say my memory cannot be trusted. This is objective fact.
He says, regardless, if anyone even had suspicions, I would no longer be able to stay at the institute with him.
And where would I go then?
He’s only worrying about my future, he says. My safety, my happiness. I have no identity, no way to support myself, nowhere to go but a hell of last resort. A shelter, a sleeping bag on the street. You don’t want to rely on the kindness of strangers, he says. The world is not kind to women like you.
If we keep what we did to ourselves, he says, there’s nothing to worry about.
You’re well cared for here, he says. You’re happy here. Why should that change?
And he’s right. This body is a prison. As long as I’m trapped inside it, I have nowhere else to go.
LIZZIE
On the final day of the third week since he’d last put his arms around her, Lizzie came to work to discover Wendy Doe was gone. In her place was a woman wearing her face, sitting primly on the bed, shoulders hunched, legs crossed, trying to take up as little space as possible.
“You’re her? The research assistant?” she said. She enunciated, as Wendy never had.
Lizzie understood immediately.
The woman stood. She held out her hand. “Karen Clark,” she said. Lizzie forced herself to shake it and tried to smile. “I’m sorry, this must seem strange to you—though not as strange as it does to me! They told me you’ve spent a lot of time with… well, me. I wish I could remember it.” She laughed, thinly, fakely. “Actually, to tell you the truth? I really don’t.”
“Your memory came back.” Lizzie felt like the woman was miles ahead and she was limping to catch up.
“I woke up in this strange place, and—” She laughed again. This time it sounded even less sincere. “Let’s just say I caused quite a fuss. They called the man who runs the place, and he explained the whole thing. It’s like something out of a movie.”
He hadn’t alerted Lizzie. He hadn’t even waited for Lizzie in the room, to be here when she found out.
“I’m not a research assistant, I’m a grad student,” Lizzie said. “You were—I mean, this, the fugue state, it was my project.” Emphasis on my, she thought. Or emphasis on was.
“Yes, sorry about that,” the woman, Karen Clark, said. “They told me you’d probably want to do some tests, but I’d really rather go to my own doctor.”
“There’s nothing medically—”
“They told me,” Karen Clark said abruptly. “But I don’t know them. And I don’t know you.”
Wendy had talked with her hands and her body, flagrantly without care. This woman kept herself still, balled up tight. The part of Lizzie that still imagined herself an objective observer filed this away: body language shaped by memory, the physical inhabitation of one’s own body expanded or constrained by the experiences that body has undergone. Proof of a limit on what the body could remember.
“I wanted to thank you before I left.”
“You’re leaving? When?”
“My husband’s flying in from Colorado. He’s reserved me a room at a hotel downtown, so as soon as I fill out some paperwork—”
It was happening too fast. Wendy Doe was a subject, Lizzie reminded herself, not a friend. But once she was gone, who would be left?
“Do you need help, packing up? There’s clothes, and—”
The woman shook her head. “I’m leaving everything here. You can have it. Or donate it. Or something.”
“Oh. Well, I would at least love to talk to you for a bit, before you go. We could sit down and—”
“No tests, I told them.”
Lizzie wondered why she sounded afraid. “No tests. Just talking. I’d like to get to know you.” It felt treasonous, but she reminded herself these were not two women, they were one. Karen Clark symptomatic, Karen Clark cured. “And maybe you’d like to know how it was for you here. I’d be happy to answer any questions about—”
“I said no. I just want to forget this ever happened.” Laughter. Fake. Smile. Fake. “I suppose that’s all taken care of!”
Lizzie nodded, pretending she understood. Given the intensity with which she would have liked to pretend the last several months never happened, maybe she did. All too soon, after some perfunctory forms and a few more awkward handshakes, it was time. Strauss never turned up.
“I could give you my number, my email address,” Lizzie suggested. “In case later you change your mind about wanting to know more about your time here?”
“Thank you, but no.”
“Wait,” Lizzie said. She nudged Wendy Doe’s dresser out from the wall and extracted the notebook she knew she would find hidden in the crevice. She hesitated before handing it over—it felt, somehow, like a violation of privacy. Even more than it would have for Lizzie to read it herself. Which was a seriously tempting proposition. But the journal belonged to this woman. “If you change your mind, I think you’ll probably find some answers in here.”
Karen Clark took the journal. Then she carried Wendy’s body away.
The photograph of Augustine watched Lizzie from the wall. No one chose madness; no one preferred to be a subject. Remembering was reversion to good working order, and Lizzie should celebrate. Lizzie should be happy. She closed herself in Wendy’s small bathroom, which seemed a safer place for the tears. So it was the crying that was to blame for what she found there, discarded in the trash can, the empty box with the familiar logo. Not the test itself, with its incriminating pink plus or lack thereof. Just the box. Just the question.
XIII
ALICE
Alice’s parents believed life began at conception. They held this belief quietly, but not so quietly Alice hadn’t had it driven home since puberty, and most especially since the dawn of Daniel and Daniel’s fertile sperm. Alice walked to the train station near the widow’s house and got on the first train that would take her away; she didn’t care where. She thought about her mother, awake to herself, a six-month gap in her mind, a fetus in her body, and wondered whether her mother wanted to rip the thing, the Alice, out of her body with a coat hanger. Alice wondered if she had felt all these years like she was raising someone else’s child. Maybe Alice had found the answer she thought she wanted, the reason her mother was gone. Her mother had birthed a daughter she never asked for, could not remember conceiving, raised her for the prescribed eighteen years—who wouldn’t flee the moment her sentence was up?
Her mother could not have wanted her, she thought as the suburbs streamed by the filthy window.
Her father could not have wanted her, she thought, then thought which one.
She called her father, who noted, like he knew it couldn’t be good news, this made twice in one day.
“Dad.” She swallowed. She didn’t want another father, any other father, much less the likely one, under the likely circumstances. She wanted him. Alice tipped her forehead against the glass, closed her eyes. His wife had left him, then his daughter had left him alone. What kind of daughter would do that, if not the kind who was no daughter at all? “When Mom came back from Philadelphia, how long after that did she get pregnant?”
A pause. She tried not to make anything of it.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I just do.”
“I told you, it was a few months.”
“How many?”
“Alice.”
The widow said she didn’t know Wendy Doe was pregnant, not for sure. It could have been a mistake, a coincidence, a false conclusion they’d all le
apt to, because the dramatic always seemed likelier than the mundane. It could have been true, the story her father had told her, the frantic honeymoon, the miracle baby, the fresh start. If he told the right lie, she might allow herself to believe it.
“She had a miscarriage. Before she disappeared,” he said. “A bad one. A late one. And I didn’t…”
“What?”
“Neither of us handled it very well. But especially me. We were fighting. A lot.”
They had never fought, not once that Alice could remember. Sometimes her mother had begged him to have an opinion, make an argument, get angry. He always abstained.
“When she left—I thought she left me, at first, that’s why I didn’t tell anyone. I was… I guess I was ashamed. The things I said to her. But then she came back, and she was—” He stopped.
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