The Museum of Us

by Tara Wilson Redd

  “But I guess you think that wasn’t true happiness,” he said. “It wasn’t real.”

  “I was happy. I had you.”

  “Well. Have,” he said. “Not had yet.”

  He pulled at the fingers of one glove, one at a time, then removed the other one. He laid the gloves to rest back in the trunk. He began to take off the jacket. Sadie felt her arm reach out and put one hand on the twists of gold. Beneath her fingers, they glimmered and twisted into their original brilliance, all the dinginess of time coming off the white coat.

  He wrapped his bare hands around hers, clutching them to his heart. A little of the color came back into his cheeks.

  “Don’t you think you owe me some kind of reality?” he mumbled. He couldn’t look at her.

  “You’re not real,” Sadie said gently. She pulled her hands away.

  “I was to you,” he pleaded. “I matter. I feel. I deserve an ending, at least. Sadie, I love you.”

  “You’re not real,” she repeated, this time to herself.

  “God damn it!” he yelled, punching the mirror. It shattered and fell to the floor. He jumped back, frightened of his own anger. He turned on her. “Don’t you see? This is exactly what I warned you about! They’ve tricked you. They’ve stolen your dreams. Think, Sadie. Try to remember. Of course I’m not real. But to you, to me…this matters. The mattering is what’s real. This is what’s been keeping you alive. And you’re just going to let that die.”

  “George. You are a symptom.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. You are a sickness, and it’s time for me to get better. That’s what I’m supposed to say, right?”

  George leaned against the silver balcony, looking out over his shoulder at the stars. They seemed so close.

  “The sickness is the world, Sadie. Why does it have to be so black-and-white? Why is it either real or me? Stories are special. Powerful. Stories make sense of what reality leaves as absolute chaos. Constellations arrange themselves out of meaningless stars. The universe aligns in the translation of moments into story.

  “That’s the magic of fiction: that something can be more true than the truth. That’s the magic of you and me. Why would you want to throw that away?”

  “Because…we can’t unsee. We can’t unlearn. We can’t ungrow. George, what I wanted more than anything was to be with you. But now everything’s broken open and in the light. I have to live in the real world. We can’t go back. There’s only forward.”

  George paced, the way he did when he came close to losing at chess, even though he always beat Sadie in the end.

  “Listen,” he tried again. “You can’t be a wizard in the real world. You can’t be a spy in the real world. You can’t have this great and timeless love. If you choose to be only real, Sadie, there is so much you will never do. And Henry’s great, but he’s not me. No one ever will be. You know it’s true. Real isn’t what you want.”

  “How am I supposed to know what I want when I spend all my time with you?”

  “Alternative hypothesis: you know what you want. That’s why we spend all of our time together.”

  Sadie sighed and walked to the balcony.

  It was an impossible choice.

  It would be so easy to keep him safe. No one really knew her thoughts, not even Henry. She could hide George away, tell Roberts just enough to get out, and be more careful next time to never let him show. Maybe she could even admit that George wasn’t real. Could I tell a lie that big, and bring him back? she wondered. She looked around. Of course she could. If she could dream a story this big, she could dream anything.

  The temptation was there, glinting in George’s eyes. She could pretend that she’d exiled him from her mind. She didn’t have to let all of this go.

  She leaned over and looked into the abyss below, into the distant planet with all its blue oceans and green land, its moon on the other side, still a sliver rising. The earth was an infinitely complex machine of particles floating along a defined orbit. On its surface, how many protagonists were starring in their own little dramas? And what did it matter if in one little hospital in one little city, one little girl was dreaming all of this?

  Why was that so wrong?

  Research and books can tell you almost anything, but they can’t tell you everything. Sometimes you need to talk to someone.

  I take out my earbuds and smile at my tiny iPod shuffle: Henry’s mixtape. It doesn’t tell you what the songs are, so it’s both magic and maddening. I hate not knowing things. I can pick his songs out of a million, I’m certain, but a few others I don’t recognize, so I take out my new phone, which is clean and empty of text messages and history, and send the first new text.

  “Addicted to this cover,” I text Henry.

  “Which?” he texts back a millisecond later.

  “Guitar torture version of ‘As Time Goes By.’ ”

  “LOL guitar torture?!”

  “Who is it?”

  “These punk twin girls I met this summer. They might come tour with us next year. You’ll really like them; they’re almost as cool as you.”

  (Note the semicolon. Next time he asks me, I’m adding this to my list of reasons why I love him.)

  “Next summer?” I text after a minute.

  “Emoji heart.” He always writes out emojis. Reason #2 of the day.

  I reply: “Emoji heart emoji heart.”

  And then, my fingers shaking, I find the letters to write: “Would you record a cover for me? There’s a Beatles song I want to hear you sing.”

  At the door I hear a soft knock. My phone buzzes again, but I shove it into my pocket before I see Henry’s reply.

  The door opens.

  My dad puts the toe of his shoe over the threshold and stops. “Hi,” he mumbles.

  “Hi,” I reply. He looks like he hasn’t slept in two weeks. The eternal grease living under his nails has been scrubbed, but his eyes are blackout tired. And I realize I really don’t know what me being here has been like for him and Mom. What were they doing all this time?

  “We’re a little early,” he says.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Getting coffee.”

  “Can I have some?”

  “If it’s decaf.”

  “Dad.” He laughs, and some of the weariness is crossed out by the smile lines on his face.

  “Fine, you win. I’ll text her.” He pulls out his phone and it feels like an excuse not to look at me. But you can only play with a phone for so long, and then you’re back in reality.

  He slides it back into his pocket. We stare at each other like a paused movie.

  “How are you?” he asks, rolling and unrolling his shirtsleeves. His eyes pick over the room, looking at what’s left of the treasures I have accumulated in such a short time. His gaze seems to rest on the notebook on the bed.

  “Fine,” I say, sliding the notebook into my lap. I need my book of truth and secrets for what comes next. I’ve been writing in it all night.

  “Okay.” He opens his mouth to say more, but nothing comes out.

  He’s scared. I see that. But I’m scared too.

  Is this the silence we’re going back to? Is this the noose of unspoken things growing tighter? The drums in my chest hit a crescendo, like the soundtrack telling me to flee. Ever a coward, I obey.

  “I have to go,” I tell him, wheeling myself out the door and putting him behind me. “I’ll be back after.”

  “We saw a great Aston Martin on the way here,” he calls out to my back as I roll away. “Some kind of classic car club or something meeting in the park. I was thinking maybe we could stop and ask around….Maybe someone’s got a junker just like Old Charlotte.”

  I turn my wheelchair to face him.

  “We can’t bring back Old Charlotte. She’
s gone,” I say. His eyes fall. “But I would take an Aston Martin.”

  He laughs. “Keep dreaming, Sadie.”

  “I’d like to look, though,” I add. “Maybe not today. I kind of want to go home. But sometime.”

  He smiles and his eyes brighten. “Any time you want.”

  * * *

  I roll myself into Dr. Roberts’s office, and she’s standing by her shelves. I wonder if she planned it that way: that she’d be standing there with her back to the door, hands behind her back, gazing at the spines of her books. When I come in she turns around and smiles, and she sets a little plastic cup right on the desk in front of me.

  “Hi,” I say, because it’s all too much. I am taken over by that sense of strangeness, like I could draw a square around the limits of the scene, framing it. So instead I think about real things: about the nurses in the hall and how they all have a sense of style even in scrubs. I think about what the scribbles on the whiteboards on the doors are for. I think about what Henry is doing at exactly this moment, exactly right now. And Lucie. I think about Eleanor, wherever she is.

  “Ready to get out of here? Bet you’re tired of hospital food,” Roberts says.

  “Can I see Eleanor before I leave?”

  “Eleanor’s gone home,” she says. “She didn’t say goodbye?”

  I cross my arms and she smiles, like she’s read some kind of super-secret meaning in that body language. So I uncross my arms and glare at her, but she keeps smiling. She opens up my folder and flips through some pages. My folder has gotten pretty thick. An encyclopedia, an epic of notes about me, telling my story. I clutch my journal tight. My version of that story is thinner, but maybe it’s more true because it’s mine.

  I remember what Eleanor told me, about how dangerous these people really are.

  But I don’t feel that way. Not really.

  “Great. Well, let’s see….We agreed that we’d start with an antidepressant….”

  “Wait, don’t you want to…?”

  “Yes?”

  “Talk.”

  “About what?” Her eyes light up.

  “About…”

  “George?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “You want to tell me about George?”

  “Which George?”

  She doesn’t look stunned the way I expect her to. She just waits. The silence wants my secrets, and I want to fill it.

  “Because, you see, there are at least two of them: my George, and the George you’re talking about, who was in the other car, who changed everything in one accidental moment. That’s not my George, but he’s a George.”

  “Your George is…?”

  “My George is…” I try to think, but there are too many words flying around in my head. “My George is a million people…an infinity of options….”

  “But who is he?” she presses.

  I try to say, but all my words flutter away.

  I open my journal in my lap. Toward the end, I find the pages that are completely written over, sentences toppling over sentences, memories intersecting memories. The page looks like a black storm of words.

  I look at the truth. I’ve written it right there in the middle of the page: three words in one bright white eye, the center of a hurricane of text. I cannot say them out loud, but I must. I let the words lift themselves off the page, possess me, and speak themselves with my mouth:

  George isn’t real.

  Dr. Roberts’s eyes twinkle. She doesn’t miss a step. Did she know all along?

  “Ah. And you see, this is the question we must ponder. Because…we’re still talking about him like he’s real. He seems very real to you.”

  I look at the pages that follow. There aren’t very many yet, even though I worked all night. I smile at the very first lines of my true story:

  George’s blue eyes captured her. They were dark as the deep blue sea and Sadie was adrift under a starless night. No going back now.

  I love it, cliché and all.

  “He is real to me,” I say.

  “But he’s just a story.”

  I shrug. “ ‘Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?’ ”

  “Who said that?” she asks. I must have been using my quoting voice.

  “John Lennon.”

  “You know, he also said, ‘I get by with a little help from my friends.’ ”

  I roll my eyes.

  “What I mean is, it’s okay to ask for help too.” She glances at the tiny plastic cup on her desk, and my eyes follow hers.

  “So we agreed that we’d start with an antidepressant,” she begins again. “These pills are not magic, Sadie, and this is a long-term plan. Do you have any more questions about what this medication does?”

  I try to remember to be strong. I played through this conversation a lot last night, and I imagined all the things I might say. Imagining something can be a good way to get ready for it.

  “If they have to build up in your system and they don’t work right away, couldn’t you just, like, give me a prescription and then I’d get it filled and all that?” I ask. It turns my stomach to have to do this here and now, like an execution. I can feel the gun to my back. It’s like George always says: the most important part of dying is saying goodbye.

  “Listen, Sadie. You love a symbol, right? Think of it that way. This symbolizes making a choice. It’s a metaphor.”

  “Except it’s also drugs.”

  “Well, yes,” she admits. “Also drugs. You know, you’ve taken so many big steps here, and I’m so happy that we’ve managed to start talking about George and your true story. But it’s easy to fall back into old habits when you return to your old environment. We’d prefer it if we sent you off on the right foot. Besides, you love a crossroads, don’t you? A fork on the highway. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood—’ ”

  “And I, I took the road most traveled by.”

  “The traveled path is often the safer one.”

  I wonder if she’s read that poem. It’s the road not taken that one regrets.

  She’s smiling. Does it even matter what the words “really” mean? Or should I just listen to what she’s trying to tell me with them? It’s hard to interpret a smile. I feel like the Sadie who came into this hospital would have wanted me to say that I feel afraid, but I don’t. Her smile doesn’t seem sinister. I can’t make myself see those things in her anymore.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I lie.

  “That’s not true, but it’s okay. I hope you find someone you can trust enough to tell your stories to. I hope you can find someone to take this adventure with.”

  “I had someone,” I say. She shakes her head.

  “But that’s not real.”

  “It’s real to me.” To George and me, I think.

  “Something can be powerful without being real. You don’t think you would be happier living in the real world, instead of in stories and books?”

  I shake my head.

  “Every story I’ve ever needed has arrived like…” Like what? I think of the Star Palace opening to welcome me. “Like a door at exactly the right time. They became my story. It was like reading them made me a different person, like casting a spell over me. And I have no idea why that is…some magical combination of time and place, and the characters and the author and the universe…and me. What you’re making me give up…”

  “You understand that no one is asking you to give up anything….No one is saying you can never read another book.”

  “But it won’t be the same. It won’t be like before.”

  “You said it yourself. It’s a combination of things. You can still read. You can even still imagine things and daydream. But we want you to be able to live in the real
world with everyone out here who cares about you. We want you to walk away from your crash at last.”

  She hesitates. “But, remember, it’s up to you. No one is making you do this. Do you want this, or don’t you?”

  She hands me the cup and sits back in her chair, folding her hands in her lap.

  A blue pill rattles around in the bottom of the cup.

  “Can I just…have a moment?” I ask, holding the cup with both hands.

  “Take your time,” she says.

  I let my eyes wander, and my mind follows. I feel George slip in.

  Dr. Roberts won’t make me tell her what I see, but I will remember. It will haunt me forever, as it should.

  * * *

  “Cigarette?” George asks.

  The palace has succumbed to ruin. Have a hundred years passed in this place, as they would have in Narnia? Is neglect the measure of its years? I imagine him sitting on the edge of our bed, watching the walls crumble around him.

  He’s packed up his attaché case, which lays open on the floor. It isn’t weapons or tools he’s packed, but memories: pictures, maps, and treasures. Like he’s fleeing.

  It makes my heart hurt, seeing what is most precious to him.

  “I can’t play these games now, George,” I say, my throat tight. He shrugs and smiles, his crumpled suit aging rapidly before my eyes. He takes two cigarettes from an ivory box on our nightstand and holds both in his mouth to light them. He gives me one, but I don’t raise it to my lips the way I should. I let it sit between my fingers and burn.

  George strides over to the balcony in a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, and when he turns back to me, his smile is as addictive as it was the first instant we met.

  “I know you have to leave me now. But this doesn’t have to be The End,” he says. “We just have to get out of here. Stick to the plan, my spy, my witch, my darling.”

  I make myself say the words.

  “This is the end, George. This is it. We can’t do this anymore. You are not real, and I am.”

  He turns away, and though he is perfectly still, I know him too well not to realize that he is crying.