Таррин Фишер - The Wives

“But he never tried to end things with me,” I said.

And then the good doctor produced half a dozen emails between Seth and me, all of which came directly from my email account. He let me read them. Seth, always logical, pleading with me to accept the fact that we were over and that he was sorry for cheating on Hannah. I had no memory of reading those emails, no memory of answering them. Dr. Steinbridge said that I deleted them in my desperation to pretend it wasn’t happening.

“The police also found the account you created under the name Will Moffit, the one you used to get access to Regina...”

“Yes, but I only did that because I thought she was cheating on him...”

He’d looked at me sympathetically.

“What about Seth’s parents? They sent me cards... I have them.”

“The cards were part of your case. Your attorney presented them to the jury as evidence when you pleaded guilty by reason of insanity. You wrote them. They brought in a handwriting analyst to prove it.”

I saw myself in line at the grocery store, a stack of cards on the conveyor belt. I’d whimpered, pressing the heels of my hands to my eyes.

“It’s right there, Thursday, right in front of you,” he’d said, tapping the papers with a finger. His fingers were gloriously bent, like knobby tree branches. I watched them poke at the printed pages in fascination. “You and Seth were never married. He had an affair with you when he was married to his first wife, Regina. Regina left him when she found out that he got you pregnant.” He’d paused to let that sink in. “But you lost the baby, and that caused you to enter a psychotic episode.”

Seth had not caused our miscarriages, but Regina made me believe that he had. Why? Regina had lost a baby—that all came out in the trial—but much earlier than mine, at eight weeks. She testified that she caught Seth tampering with her birth control. I’d looked back at Regina at that very moment, as she sat on the other side of the courtroom, remembering her confession in the diner that day, and I’d seen her face pale.

Once I made Seth the enemy in my mind, it was so easy to believe what Regina fed me. My baby had been healthy one day, moving and kicking, and then he’d just stopped. There was no medical reason found. Sometimes those things just happen, babies stop living.

“Dr. Steinbridge,” I say during one session. “Isn’t it funny that Seth never mentioned any of this the last time I was here?”

“He never claimed to be your husband, Thursday. When you came in last time it’s because Seth tried to end things with you. He admitted as much to me when I spoke to him privately, that he was married to someone else, and that you were his mistress. His wife, Hannah, figured out who you were on the last night you saw her. Do you remember?”

I remember having dinner with her, going to the bathroom and coming out to find her gone. I tell the doctor this.

“Seth figured out where you were and texted her. He told her to leave right away.”

“But when I got back to my apartment, he was there. His hand was beat up...”

“Yes, well, he claims he punched a wall when he found out you were stalking his wife. You attacked him when he told you it was over. I imagine he felt a sense of duty in visiting you here after that.”

“But he came to pick me up, take me home.”

“No,” the doctor says. “Your father picked you up and took you home.”

I laugh at that. “Are you kidding me? My father came to see me once after I got out of here. He doesn’t care about me.”

“Thursday,” Dr. Steinbridge says. “I was there. Your father came, brought you clothes, stayed with you for a week until you crushed Ambien into his dinner and snuck out to drive to Portland.”

“No,” I say. My limbs feel odd, like they’re not a part of me. The doctor has it wrong, or he’s lying. Maybe Seth got to him, paid him off to keep quiet...

“You were on heavy medication and still suffering from delusions.”

I want to laugh. How crazy do they think I am, mistaking my father for Seth?

I stand up suddenly, my movement so abrupt my chair falls backward and hits the ground with a metallic smack. Dr. Steinbridge stares up at me from where he’s sitting, his hands folded calmly on the desk. His eyes, shaded by those caterpillar eyebrows of his, look sad. I feel as if I’m evaporating, slowly being sucked away into oblivion.

“Close your eyes, Thursday. See it again as it really was.”

I don’t have to, I don’t have to close my eyes—because it’s playing out like a reel in my mind.

I see those days in my condo, except this time I see it the right way: my father hovering and handing me my pills, my father reading thrillers from my bookshelf, my father watching Friends with me on the couch.

“No,” I say again, my eyes filling with tears.

Seth hadn’t come to get me because he told me our affair was over and he’d gone back to his wife. Seth had abandoned me for the second time. I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. I deserved to be alone. My wail is a siren, loud and shrill. I claw at my face, my arms, anything I can reach. I want to scrape off all of my skin, scrape until there is nothing left but muscle and blood, until I am merely a thing and not a human being. There is warmth on my fingertips when they charge in and grab me; my blood leaves stains on their scrubs.

In my first year as a nurse, a man came into the ER two weeks before Christmas with a crushed skull. His name was Robbie Clemmins and I swore I’d never forget his name, so tragic was his accident. A roofer who volunteered in his spare time at a nursing home, he’d been hanging Christmas lights on the outside of the building when he’d fallen two stories and landed on his back, smacking his head on the pavement. When someone found him, he was conscious, lying on his back and speaking in a calm, normal voice. He was reciting an oral report he’d given in the fifth grade about how to properly skin a squirrel. When they wheeled him into the ER he was sobbing, muttering something about his wife, though he wasn’t married. I remember seeing the concave in his head and wanting to throw up, and then later the X-rays in which his skull looked like a cracked egg. The impact had jarred his brain; chips of his skull entered the brain tissue and had to be removed during a surgery that lasted eight hours. Though we saved his life, we were unable to save who he was before the accident. I remember thinking how fragile we were as humans, souls covered in tender flesh and brittle bone; one wrong step and we became someone else entirely.

My brain is intact in the traditional way; I did not fall from a roof, though it seems I fell at some height from reality. Dr. Steinbridge has diagnosed me with a list of things I’d be embarrassed to repeat; the bottom line is that I have an unhealthy brain. I often sit in my room and picture my brain enflamed and oozing with my various diagnoses. There are days where I want to crack my own head open and remove my brain, and I find myself fantasizing about all the ways I can do it. I want to get better, but sometimes I can’t even remember what’s wrong with me. I am in my room one afternoon when I look up and see Dr. Steinbridge standing in the doorway. The serious look on his face tells me he has news.

“Regina Coele has requested a visit with you,” he tells me. “You don’t have to see her if you don’t want to.”

I’m touched; his interest in my case has become more tender than the stiff, formal way our relationship started.

“I want to talk to her,” I say. And it’s true—I’ve been waiting for this for a year, wading through the days until I could come face-to-face with the answers Seth’s first wife holds.