Page 29 of Fox
I arch an eyebrow. “David asked about the divorce papers.”
“David is also, and I mean this with full medical accuracy, a clinical-grade idiot.” He looks at me sideways. “You called her your wife.”
I shoot him a long, deliberate look.
“About fifteen times,” he continues. “In about forty minutes.My wife.Every time.” He’s not smiling, exactly, but he seems quite entertained despite our sitting on uncomfortable fuckingchairs in a waiting room outside of an ICU where my wife…my wife, is fighting for her life.
I meet his gaze, unamused. “Is that right?”
“I’m just noting.”
“Are you now!”
He stretches his legs out in front of him and looks at the ceiling. “For what it’s worth, Fox, and I say this as the person who has had a front-row seat to your comprehensive failure to understand your own life for the better part of two years”—he pauses—“I think you know now.”
“Know what?”
“Know how you feel.”
I don’t encourage that line of conversation.
I begin to count as my exhausted body and fear-fueled mind keep me in constant tension. How long before they start bringing her back, until she starts coming up through whatever depth they have sent her to for safekeeping, until she opens her eyes and I can tell her—what?
That I have spent hours in this waiting room understanding, with the horrible clarity of nearly losing her entirely, that I was wrong?
That I was confused and scared and carrying a story about Reina and a story about being cornered and a story about doing the right thing, and I used those stories to avoid the simpler, scarier truth, which is that Lucy Vidal from Antioch, who cooks extraordinary food and laughs at her own jokes and plants peonies that grow in defiant and riotous bloom, has been the most important person in my life and I have been the last to know it?
That I have been a fool not to recognize that I am in love with my wife?
That I have always been in love with her?
The reason I never actually filed the divorce papers—never actually made the appointment, never actually moved the process past intention into action—is not, as I told myself, because of the logistics or the timing or any of the comfortable, managerial reasons I was keeping on the shelf.
I now know why.
I have known why since I stood at a kitchen window looking at a fig tree in the dark, and my mother said Reina’s name over the phone, and I felt nothing.
I knew then.
I was too late then. Lucy was already gone.
Was—
No!
She’s still here.
She’s twenty feet away, battling a brain swelling, healing, and when she wakes up, for the first time in my adult life, I will do what’s honest—not right, not Bennett-approved.
And this is what is honest:I love my wife. And I will assuage the pain I caused her by not knowing my own heart. I will do anything to win her back, bring her home to me.
Anything.
Whatever it takes. Whatever she needs to hear and however many times she needs to hear it, and in whatever form makes it real to her, I will do it.
Because, yes, I love Lucy.
What fucking bad timing to find that out when she almost died?
