AFTER ALL I’VE DONE
A Novel
MINA HARDY
To Lori, my best friend, who is in no way an inspiration for anything that happens in this book. Thanks for the decades of friendship and support! Here’s to many more!
For Robert, my best husband, who also is in no way an inspiration for the circumstances in this story.
CHAPTER ONE
Diana
Imagine yourself in a dark room.
The difference between closing your eyes and keeping them open is the flicker of lashes on your own cheeks, and that’s all. You keep your eyes open, trying to see, because you haven’t yet given up the hope that somewhere, somehow, you’ll catch a glimmer of light. That you are not a prisoner here in this endless night.
Wait long enough, try hard enough, and you’ll see hints of light, maybe around a door frame. Maybe it’s the end of a hall or a tunnel. It could be the pressure of your own eyes, straining so hard that the blood vessels burst. Then the light is gone, and you’re back to staring at nothing but darkness.
That’s my mind.
Laundry
Groceries
Transfer money
Cancel dentist
New phone
Pay RC
The yellow legal pad I just found in my nightstand features a list, written in my own handwriting. It’s my own list, the items crossed off or circled to remind myself of the minutiae of my life, but I don’t remember writing it. I don’t remember completing any of those tasks.
New phone. My phone was lost in the accident, but I wrote this list before that happened. Who—or what—is RC, and why did I need a reminder to pay? Did I ever visit the dentist, or do I need to reschedule?
“Babe, I can’t find my red tie,” Jonathan says from behind me. “The one with the polka dots?”
Quickly, I shut the nightstand drawer and turn to face him. My husband used to laugh at me when I walked into a room and looked around, perplexed, before walking out without whatever it was I’d gone in there to find. We joked it was old age, although at forty-five, I’m nowhere close to old. We used to joke a lot. We don’t anymore.
The days of walking out of a room without remembering why I went into it have now become a real joke, laughable. That’s normal forgetfulness. What I have is deeper, more pervasive. Darker.
“Have you seen it?” he asks when I don’t reply at once with the location of his missing tie.
“I haven’t. It’s not in the drawer?” Already I’m crossing to the walk-in closet so I can help him search. “Where did you take it off?”
“Uh …”
“Never mind. I’ll look around for it.” I force fake cheer in my voice so that neither of us has to address his awkward silence.
“Thanks, babe. You’re the best,” my husband says. “I gotta run. Oh … yeah, in case you forgot, I have that board meeting tonight. Don’t wait up.”
That word forgot hangs between us, more uncomfortable even than a few minutes ago when he couldn’t own up to where he’d probably left his tie. Jonathan has always thought he was a better liar than he really is. There’s no board meeting, but he doesn’t realize that I’ve already figured out what he’s really doing all the nights he’s “working late.”
I accept his kiss and wave him off to work the way I’ve done for the last ten years of our marriage. Like nothing’s wrong. Like we are fine, or at least as though I am.
I am not fine.
About five weeks ago, on the last day of September, on a dark and stormy night, my car hit a deer. I lost control and ended up in a ditch—or so I was told. I can’t, perhaps thankfully, remember the car accident. The car, my baby, a cherry red Camaro that was flashy and ridiculous and utterly, completely mine, was totaled and hauled off to the junkyard before I woke up. Me? I opened my eyes in the hospital to find multiple incisions in my abdomen from an emergency surgery to rip out my gloriously infected gallbladder, both my arms immobilized in slings from two broken collarbones, and a lot of pain. I still hurt like hell when I get up in the morning, mostly throughout the day and always, always when I try to go to sleep. There’s still a vague, persistent ache in the space below my ribs that hits me when I’m not expecting it. My digestion’s a wreck. I don’t miss my gallbladder at all, but the two broken collarbones have really messed me up.
When your collarbones break, you lose the use of your arms.
Without the use of your arms, you basically become an invalid.
It’s much better now, but for the past month it’s been rough. I’ve barely been able to feed myself. Forget about personal hygiene. The last time I needed someone to wipe my butt for me, I was four years old. This sucks.
I was lucky, though. I could have gone head-on with the eighteen-wheeler coming at me, the one that stopped to make sure I was all right after I ran into the ditch. I learned later that the driver called the ambulance for me. He stayed with me until it arrived. For all that, I don’t know his name. Can’t thank him. And of course, I don’t remember him at all.
I don’t remember anything after Memorial Day weekend five months ago. Driving to the beach with my best friend, Val, the windows of my sexy car rolled down and the summer’s pop hits cycling through the radio stations that changed from town to town. It’s called anesthesia-induced amnesia, and there’s no cure.
I might, one day, spontaneously recall what happened between the end of May and the first week in October, but it’s more likely that I’ll never get that time back. Instead, I have pain and lists I can’t remember writing and a husband who lies to me every day. I have a brand-new reality, and nothing in it makes sense. The accident didn’t kill me, but I’m not sure how I’m going to survive it.
CHAPTER TWO
Valerie
Jonathan tastes like chocolate when I kiss him. His mouth is warm. Hot, even. I breathe him in and pull him close, and I hold him next to me until he rolls away and tosses off the covers so he can leave the bed.
Don’t, I want to say. Don’t go.
Of course I don’t say that, no matter how much I want to. It would sound desperate and grasping, and even if that’s how I feel about him and this situation, it’s not how I want him to think of me. I watch as he gets out of bed and walks naked to the bathroom. I listen as he takes a long hard piss, the water in the toilet splashing. He doesn’t close the door. I guess we’ve been together long enough to feel comfortable with an open bathroom door, long enough that we don’t have to pretend that we don’t have bodily functions. With someone else, this would be irritating. I’d want to keep the “magic,” whatever that means. With him, it’s intimate. I want to make it permanent.
When he comes back to the bedroom, he looks me over. I haven’t pulled up the covers. I want him to see me naked. I want him to crawl back into bed with me, to cover me with his body, to put his mouth on mine. To kiss me there, and in lower places. I want to make him cry out my name the way he does every single time.
There’ve been other men. So many of them. But none of them ever made me feel as beautiful as they told me they thought I was.
I don’t want him to go back to her.
“I’ll call you later,” he says. “After she goes to bed.”