by Joy Fielding
Jane stared at her husband’s tear-streaked face, felt the kindness in his eyes, the tenderness of his touch. She said nothing.
TWENTY-TWO
“SHE’S in the sunroom.”
“How is she?”
“Not good.”
“I don’t understand. How long has this been going on?”
“It started about the middle of June. She’s been getting progressively sicker ever since.”
“The middle of June? That’s over a month ago. For God’s sake, Michael, why did your housekeeper tell me that she was in San Diego visiting her brother?”
“We thought it was the best way to handle the situation. Please understand, Diane, that no one, not me, not her doctors, ever anticipated that her condition would last this long, that it would get worse.”
“She has no idea who she is at all?”
“We’ve told her who she is,” Michael explained. “She just doesn’t remember. She knows all the details of her life. She just can’t recall having lived it.”
“My God, I don’t believe it. Do you have any idea what brought this on?”
“The accident,” he said simply.
“But that’s over a year ago. She seemed to be over the worst of it.”
“I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it.”
Jane heard their voices as if they were surrounded by static. The words wafted toward her, starting strong, only to fade out prematurely, pushing painfully against her eardrums, only to pull away before she managed to interpret their meaning. They were talking about her, she knew. They were always talking about her. Did it matter what they were saying?
She was lying on her beloved sofa-swing, blankets covering her from her chin to the bottoms of her feet despite the fact that she was sweating. Was it sweat or drool? she wondered, not bothering to wipe the dribble away from the side of her slightly parted lips. She let them do that—her guests, the multitudes that Michael had been reintroducing into their lives ever since he brought her back from the hospital. How long ago? A few days? A week?
She smiled, grateful that time was once again slipping away from her. To think that she had railed against this feeling just a short time ago, that she had been resentful and angry because the drugs they were giving her made one day blend into the next, like chocolates melting in the sunlight, forming one unrecognizable blob. To think that she had tried to fight against the delicious oblivion to which she had finally succumbed, and for what? So that she might remember the sordid details of a wasted life, a life she clung to even after she had sacrificed those of her mother and child?
Michael had brought her home after her outburst at the hospital. She recalled the doctors and nurses being very solicitous, remembered Michael explaining to Dr. Klinger that he had everything under control, telling him he’d be in touch with Dr. Meloff when Dr. Meloff returned from vacation, saying he thought the best thing for Jane at the moment was plenty of rest.
She hadn’t offered even a hint of protest. The idea of seeking refuge in her bed suddenly held great appeal. She wanted to crawl under its down comforter and disappear forever. She wanted to die, she realized in that moment, and felt her body shrug.
She no longer fought against her medication, accepting whatever they gave her, feeling the familiar numbness return to her body, reaching into her fingertips and toes, filling her pores, ultimately settling somewhere behind her eyes, creating a buffer zone between her brain and the outside world. This time she welcomed each unpleasant side effect, almost enjoying the muscle spasms that plagued her because they seemed a fitting punishment for all the pain she had caused, wearing her drool like an expensive piece of jewelry.
It all made sense now.
The money. The blood. Pat Rutherford. The logic of his name appearing on a note in her pocket and not in her telephone-address book where Michael might see it. At first she wondered whether he had tried to contact her, was at all curious as to what had happened to her. Had they been planning to run off together? Or had he chosen that morning to end their affair?
The questions disappeared with the restarting of her medication. She felt relieved. What was the point of fixating on questions she couldn’t answer? Even Michael couldn’t tell her what had happened prior to their fight, before she had flipped out and tried to kill him with an Oriental brass vase. That she had tried to kill her husband no longer seemed a shocking idea. Hadn’t she already killed her mother and her daughter?
Jane tried to put a face to death, recalling the many images of the little girl she had watched grow up between the plastic covers of her photograph albums, the beautiful child with the shy smile and curious eyes, wearing one red shoe and one blue, sniffing a low branch of a lilac tree, holding her father’s hand, clinging tightly to her mother’s side. Emily is a memory now, she thought, except that she wasn’t even that.
How many times in the past few days had she gone over the details of the last month? Sitting here in the sun-room, watching the mornings slice across the floor like narrow pieces of pie, growing in size until it grew dark again, she daily retraced her steps, beginning with the first time Michael had brought her home after she had lost her memory. She remembered crossing the threshold into her old life, wondering what exactly was in store for her, then scoffed, feeling the constriction in her throat. In her wildest dreams, in her worst nightmares, she could not have envisioned a scenario so bizarre, so hopeless. No wonder she had been so desperate to escape.
She saw herself cross into the living room, approach the piano, heard her fingers stumble across an old tune from Chopin, watched those same fingers lift several photographs toward her face, among them three class pictures of young children arranged in neat little rows according to height. A little boy in the front row held up a small blackboard identifying them as the children of Arlington Private School. Jane had smiled at the delicate little girl with long, light-brown hair and enormous eyes, dressed all in yellow, standing proudly in the last row, at the same little girl, older by one year, clad in pink and white, her hair in a ponytail, still tall and proud, at the same little girl, her hair flowing free, dressed in black-and-white checks, her smile somewhat less assured, more circumspect. Junior kindergarten, senior kindergarten, grade one. Grade two missing. “I guess we didn’t get a picture this year,” Michael had told her. “She must have been away sick.”
Why hadn’t it seemed strange to her that the most recent pictures of Emily were at least a year old? In a family that had carefully recorded and framed its every move, why hadn’t she found it peculiar that there were no photographic reminders of the past year? Because she hadn’t wanted to, she realized. Because she wasn’t ready to confront the mess she had made of her life, to face the havoc she had wreaked, to come to terms with the lives she had destroyed.
I’m the one who should be destroyed, she thought. Put to sleep like a dog gone bad. Lethal injection, she decided, rubbing her arm under the blanket, feeling the spot where Michael had given her another shot just this morning.
She recalled her growing suspicions of Michael, her conviction that he was plotting against her, deliberately trying to rob her of her sanity when all he’d been doing was trying to help her find it.
And now he was bringing someone to see her. After weeks of denying her access to even her closest friends, he had now decided it was time to make them aware of the hell he had been living. First, he had called Sarah and Peter Tanenbaum, and they had come at once, Sarah obursting into tears at the very sight of Jane, Peter averting his head, talking to Michael instead.
She had wanted to reach out and comfort them, to tell them it was all right, that it was better this way, that she had chosen insanity, that it suited her, that they shouldn’t worry about her. But somehow her arms wouldn’t move and her voice refused to squeeze past the lump in her throat. She stared at them, her eyes clouded, like a camera lens that has been rubbed with Vaseline, and said nothing, wishing only that they would go away and leave her to her fate. It was no less t
han she deserved, after all. She had tried to run away but she had been recaptured and brought back to face her execution.
There had been other visitors as well. In the past few days, Michael had rallied most of their friends to her side, although he allowed them to stay only a few short minutes. Janet and Ian Hart, Lorraine Appleby, David and Susan Carney, Eve McDermott—Ross was away fishing, she heard Eve explain—they all filed into her sunroom, studying her as if she were one of Madame Tussaud’s famous wax dummies. “Don’t mention Emily,” Michael cautioned each one, and no one did, for which she was grateful.
“Don’t mention Emily,” she heard him whisper now, from the other side of the door, and in the next minute Diane Brewster was kneeling before her, her eyes immediately filling with tears.
“My God,” Diane moaned just loud enough to be heard, her body swaying as if she might faint.
“It’s all right,” Michael assured her, reaching down to pat her shoulder. “She’s not in any pain.”
“Can she hear me?”
“Yes,” Michael answered, coming to Jane’s side and stroking her hair. “Diane’s here, sweetheart. Can you say hello to Diane?”
Jane tried to force her lips into the appropriate shape, to get her tongue around the uncooperative name, but the result was only a few wayward twitches, and so she stopped trying. What was the point, after all?
Diane rose angrily to her feet. “I don’t understand this, Michael. I don’t understand what’s happened to her. I know you told me what to expect. I know she suffered a major trauma …”
“Diane,” he cautioned, and Diane took several deep breaths, trying to calm herself down.
“Damnit, Michael, this is my oldest friend. She was always so enthusiastic, so definite about everything. I just can’t believe this is the same person.”
Michael said nothing, merely nodding his head in agreement.
“Can’t the doctors do anything?”
“We’re doing everything we can.”
“But she’s lost so much weight.”
“She won’t eat.”
Diane slapped her hands against her sides, then returned to her knees in front of Jane. “You’re going to be all right, Janey. You’re going to pull out of this real soon. We’re going to see to that. Michael and me and all your friends. We’re going to make sure that you get better again.”
“Why don’t you read this to her?” Michael suggested, slipping a brightly colored card into Diane’s trembling hand.
“It’s a postcard from Howard and Peggy Rose,” Diane announced, forcing an upbeat inflection into her voice that made her sound vaguely hysterical. “From France.” She displayed the front of the card, a little cafe by the side of an aquamarine sea. “Let’s see, it’s hard to make out the handwriting, it’s so small, but here goes: ‘Well, here we are in the south of France, predictable old us. But we love it and we’re having a great time—‘” She stumbled. “’… like I’m sure you are back in boring old Boston. Why don’t you drop everything and pay us a surprise visit? We love surprises. And we love you. Hope all is well. Like the old song says, See you in September. Howard and Peggy.’ That was nice,” Diane said, her enthusiasm vanishing into a flood of tears.
A surprise visit, Jane thought, remembering the surprise visit she was supposed to have paid her brother. She tried to picture him off somewhere in Spain, but failed to bring him into sharp focus, managed a clearer image of her sister-in-law. Gargamella, she thought and laughed out loud.
“My God, Michael!” Diane exclaimed, her hand reaching over to caress Jane’s face. “What kind of sound was that? It didn’t sound human.”
“Are you all right, Jane?”
I’m fine, Jane responded silently. I just want everybody to go away and leave me alone so that I can die in peace.
“Do you want a drink of ginger ale?” Michael asked solicitously. “Or something to eat? Paula made a wonderful blueberry pie.”
I prefer Paula’s apple pie, Jane thought, remembering the time she had held Paula at bay with the knife she had been using to chop apples. The good old days, Jane thought, wishing now that she had plunged the knife into her stomach and twisted it up through her heart.
Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe it was still worth a try. Maybe she could indicate to her husband and her oldest friend that she would indeed like a piece of Paula’s blueberry pie but that she’d prefer to eat it in the kitchen. Then, once they were all comfortably seated around the table, lulled into a false sense of security, she’d make a lunge toward the counter, eviscerating herself neatly with her own knife, the blood staining the front of her dress. Her own blood. As it should have been all along. Full circle.
But she said nothing, only watched them stare at her through frightened, confused eyes. It would have been better for all concerned if she had simply disappeared, if no one had ever found her, recognized her, brought her home. Michael would have eventually divorced her—God knew he had enough grounds. Her friends would have talked about her for a while, then moved on to other, more interesting topics. After a little while, she would be like Emily, little more than a memory. A suitable irony for an amnesiac, she thought, and laughed again.
This time her laugh emerged as a truncated sigh. Diane clutched her hand in support. “You’re sure she’s not in any pain, Michael?”
“I’m sure.”
“I feel so helpless….”
“We all do.”
Jane wanted to take her friend’s face between her hands and kiss her gently on both cheeks, to reassure her that everything was going to work out for the best. But she knew that if she said or did anything, even something as insignificant as stroking her friend’s hair, she would be sending her incorrect signals, giving out false hope. And there was no hope. She knew that now. There was no hope, and there was no point in trying to pretend there was.
She no longer prayed for her memory to return. In fact, she went to bed every night desperately hoping it would never come back. She knew as much about herself as she needed to know. If there was a God, and if he was a merciful God, she told herself, he wouldn’t force her to relive the death of everything she once held dear. He’d let her bury herself alive in her drug-induced cocoon until she disappeared again, this time for good.
“I saw this terrible movie the other night,” Diane suddenly exclaimed in what Jane understood was another attempt to elicit a response. “Supposed to be very sexy. You know how I like sexy movies. I mean, even if they’re bad, they’re good, right? Well, forget it. This one had a lot of bare boobs and tushies, and plenty of grunting, but the dialogue was so awful that the audience was actually laughing out loud. Tracy wanted to walk out. You remember my friend, Tracy Ketchum, the one who thought she was pregnant last year only it turned out to be early menopause? Can you imagine? At forty?” She looked to Jane for any reaction, continued when she received none. “Anyway, we were sitting there trying to decide whether or not to leave this turkey, when suddenly one of the guys in the audience starts yelling things at the screen, and he was so much fun that we had to stay and listen. I mean, at one point, this woman, played by Arlene Bates—God knows where she’s been hiding out all these years and why she chose to come back in this horrible thing, but she looks great, I think she must have had a face-lift, I mean, there wasn’t a line anywhere on that woman’s face, although her neck, let me tell you, hers was not a young neck. I don’t know why these women do it. And the men too. They have all these lifts and tucks, so that they all look vaguely Oriental, you know like Jack Nicholson and Richard Chamberlain, and even Burt Reynolds, but they have this old skin. Tracy says it gets worse after you hit forty. She says there are all these things that start falling apart. I told her that happened to me at thirty, but she said there’s no comparison. She said that the first thing to go is your eyesight. Suddenly, you can’t read the back of cereal boxes anymore, and you start holding books farther and farther away, unless you’re near-sighted and then it kind of evens out. So, suddenly you�
��re wearing reading glasses, looking like your least-favorite aunt. Then your ass drops. Tracy said that what surprised her the most wasn’t that it dropped, but the way it dropped. She said she always assumed that when it dropped, it would stay the same shape, only lower. She didn’t realize that it dropped because it flattened out. Can you imagine? A flat behind? Like Jack Lemmon’s in that movie, what was it, That’s Life!?
“Anyway, back to Arlene Bates and that guy in the audience. Well, Arlene says to this doe-eyed former-fashion-model-turned-excruciatingly-bad-actress, I can’t even remember her name….”
Cindy Crawford? Jane wondered, thinking of the famous cover girl, feeling her eyes heavy, wanting to close.
“Pamela Emm!” Diane exclaimed. “That was the poor thing’s name. Can you imagine, an initial for a last name? She claims it’s genuine. Well, who knows? It’s a name I don’t think we’ll be hearing a great deal of in the future. Yes, sir, it’s back to the silent pages of Vogue and Bazaar for Pamela.”
Michael coughed, cutting into Diane’s monologue. “Jane’s starting to look very tired, Diane. Maybe you could finish this another time.”
“Oh, please, Michael. Just a few more minutes. I just have this feeling that I’ll be able to reach her.”
Jane watched Michael nod and walk toward the back window to stare out at the yard. How can he stand it? Jane wondered. How can he stand being here? Taking care of me? How can he even bear looking at me after everything I’ve done to him? Oh, I’m a prize package all right. I’m one for the books. One for the silver screen.
“Anyway,” Diane was continuing, a growing urgency to her voice, “Arlene, who’s playing this bitchy real estate tycoon, says to Pamela, who’s in the market for a new house, and judges the livability of each room by making love on the hardwood floors, that she should ask the paperboy to help her out in this regard, since her husband, who’s a senator—what else?—is too busy trying to feed the starving multitudes of Ethiopia. And here she is starving at home, right? So, Arlene, who’s hiding a pair of opera glasses in her Hermès purse, so we know she’s a major voyeur, right?—she says to Pamela, ‘Tell him to come in here.’ And Pamela floats over to the window slower than it would take me to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a canoe, and stares out at this adolescent who’s hurling papers off his bicycle, for God’s sake, and she opens her mouth in this little half pout, afraid to speak until Arlene prompts her again, saying, ‘Tell him.’ And this guy in the audience yells out, ‘Tell him quickly!’ We all cracked up. And I thought of you. I even said to Tracy, ‘That’s something my friend Jane would do.’ God, do you remember the time you almost got us run over by that maniac in the red Trans Am?”