Chapter Twenty-Five
Trust can come and go. It can be earned and lost. Losing trust in others can sting, a fact I knew well. But losing trust in yourself can pierce like a wolf’s bite and shred to pieces any semblance of self, all belief in reality, any understanding of truth. While I had been watching out the window, piecing together the puzzle of the new neighbor, the wolf had sunk its teeth into me.
And that morning, it threatened to devour me.
As we pulled out of the neighborhood, I twisted the blanket on my lap.
“You have to believe me.” My voice shook with urgency. Henry hadn’t spoken a word since he had gotten in the car. When he didn’t respond, I scooted across the seat and reached for him. “Please, Henry.” He kept his eyes on the road. “You can’t trust Gary.”
“This isn’t about him.” He said it so quietly and measured. I wished my voice could match his.
“But he’s lying.” Under different circumstances, I would’ve kept my voice calm, but there was no time for politeness. He needed to understand. He needed to believe me. “I’ve never trusted that guy. The way he’s tried to finagle his way into your job. That night in our house, after dinner, the way he cornered me in the kitchen—”
Henry’s eyebrows scrunched together as he finally turned toward me.
There was that look. I knew what he thought—that this was another lie or a delusion, more proof of my hysteria. I had never told him about it because what was there to tell? On the surface, Gary had come in to thank me for
dinner and say goodbye. How could I get Henry to understand how I’d felt like a trapped animal? Instead of explaining, I kept going. “And Katherine? I was just trying to help. She’s a sweet girl who seemed sad. But look at him.
Look what he did to his wife.”
“He didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, he did! You have to believe me.” By now I was sitting in the middle of the seat, holding on to Henry’s arm with both hands, trying to shake him into understanding. “I saw the discharge paper. It said she had a lobotomy.”
“When did you see that? When you broke into their house?”
“Please, Henry, believe me. I know what I saw.”
Without hesitation, Henry mumbled the last words we would speak to each other on the drive that day: “Like how you saw Esther?”
His words pierced my heart like shards of glass, splintered daggers of a truth I couldn’t yet come to terms with. If I focused on Gary or Bitsy or how Henry wasn’t listening to me, then I didn’t have to reckon with why that blanket on my lap was empty and always had been.
We didn’t speak for the rest of the drive. Any words I had would only solidify his belief that I was nothing more than the hysterical housewife, another woman lost to the epidemic of nerves mixed with boredom and madness.
But what other conclusion could he come to if in fact he and Wesley were right? For weeks, I had been caring for a baby, hearing her cry, holding her to my breast to feed, but she had never existed? Had I imagined the pregnancy as well?
No. I knew that much was true. I knew that I had carried her, that my stomach had stretched and my feet had disappeared. But as I looked back, as I tried to remember where my reality broke from theirs, the last moment I knew to be true was when the labor started, when Wesley brought me a glass
of water in the living room, and he told me he’d be the best big brother he could be.
And what did I recall beyond that? The car ride home, the bundle on my lap, and the Betsers moving in across the street.
We rode in silence. I didn’t ask where we were going. I recognized the route even though it had been more than a decade since I had last been there, and only a couple of times at that. But I knew the place before we turned into the driveway, the leggy pines crowding one another, pointing to the sky, a claustrophobic path carved out beneath them as they shifted and creaked in the passing breeze.
The sanatorium loomed over the landscape, a stone structure jutting from the earth, the windows always darkened no matter the time of day. Mama had shushed me when I said the place scared me the first time we arrived to visit Georgie back when it was a hospital for polio patients. Three stories of stacked bricks and white columns… It had more detail than any building I had ever seen.
As we drove down the pine-shrouded drive, I couldn’t help but feel as though I was coming home, but not to one I wanted to return to. After all these years, that moment a decade ago that forever changed our family was coming to haunt me again.
They put me in a room of my own. I don’t know if that was standard care. I didn’t ask. I didn’t talk to anyone. It wasn’t exactly a summer camp where we got to know our fellow inmates. Henry told me not to call them that, but wasn’t that what we were? Were any of us there because we chose to be?
When Georgie had been there, he was placed there in the hope of avoiding permanent paralysis. It had partially worked. But it hadn’t prevented his leg from withering. I hadn’t contracted anything contagious, and yet there I was, in a room, on a bed with white sheets as rough as sandpaper.
“I’ll be back soon,” Henry told me.
Soon. He used that vague word. The one I would say to Wesley when he wanted something, and I didn’t want to say no but I also didn’t want to do it right that moment. It was the perfect word to stall, divert, hope he forgot.
Henry squeezed my hand but didn’t look me in the eye.
In the quiet, a shiver tickled its way up my spine. I hoped Henry had packed me a sweater. I didn’t know what he had put in the bag while I was on the bedroom floor sobbing as our son attempted to comfort his mother.
“Remember,” Henry said. I waited for him to say more. I thought he was starting a memory, about to reminisce about something, but there was no story to unfold. It was a command, a directive, a plea. “Lulu, remember.”
There was a lot I remembered, but there were some things I’d rather keep buried in the recesses of my mind, the crevices of my body, instead of letting them intrude into the forefront of my reality.
But I couldn’t tell him that. I needed to do as Mama used to say and be sweet. Because if I didn’t, they might sever my brain, too.
So I looked away from the blanket. I smiled and nodded as if agreeing to obey.
He stood to leave and said, “Rest and get better.”
He said it as if it was as simple as that, as if a little nap would fix it all. As if this was a passing fever and tomorrow I’d be right as rain. My empty arms and aching bones knew I needed help, but what I also needed was a husband who believed me. And a reality I could trust.
