Page 52 of Beautiful Ugly
Her eyes are the only thing that doesn’t look right about her. They’re brown, which is wrong. My wife’s eyes were the bluestI’ve ever seen. Her hair is longer than it was before too, but it would be after all these months. Her face looksexactlythe same, except for a small cut on her forehead that is bleeding. I can’t process what I am seeing. Or hearing.
“Stay the fuck away from me,” says my wife who never swore.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” I tell her. Abby stares at me as though I might be crazy.
She might be right.
Long-term insomnia can cause permanent damage to a person’s brain, and in extreme cases, death. Confusion and paranoia are early warning signs of the mind starting to unravel. My doctor said he’d had insomniac patients who had seen the faces of dead relatives. Some had entire conversations with people who were not there. They even heard the other person talking, insisted that they were there in the room. What if that’s what this is? A hallucination as a result of grief, stress, and extreme exhaustion?
I reach to touch her, again. She slaps my hand away, again. I think she’s real.
Abby tries to sit up and is clearly in pain. I should help her but I am still frozen to the spot. I have so many questions but she beats me to it with one of her own.
“Who are you?” she demands again.
Another trickle of bright red blood starts to crawl out of the cut on her forehead and run down the side of her face. Someone needs to put some pressure on the wound and in the absence of anyone else I guess that’s me. I take a clean hankie from my pocket and lean toward her, but she jerks away.
“It’sme, Grady,” I say.
“Okay,Grady. Why are you driving Whitty’s old car, and why did you run me over?”
“Whoa! I didn’t run you over!”
“The only reason I’m not dead is because I dodged you. You drove the car straight at me and knocked me off my bike.”
“No. I didn’t see you. The mist...”
“What mist?” she asks.
I look around and of course the mist has completely cleared now. But she must have seen it before she came off her bike; it was almost impossible to see anything else. She takes a tissue from the sleeve of her red coat and holds it to her head. Then she looks at all the blood on it and turns an even paler shade of white.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says. “MaybeIimagined you knocking me over. Oh, hang on, I’m lying in the middle of the road and bleeding. Are you off your meds?”
My wife used to say that too.
This is too much to process.Sheis too much.
“I don’t understand what is happening. You’realive,” I say.
“No thanks to you.”
I stare at her. “Do you really not know who I am? You’ve been gone for over a year, have you been here all this time?”
“Gone? What are you talking about?”
MaybeI amlosing my mind.
“Why are you acting as though we know each other? I don’t know you,” she says.
I feel like someone just turned my world upside down and shook it.
“Knoweach other?” I say. “I’m your—”
“Look, I don’t wish to sound rude,” she interrupts. “But I have somewhere I need to be and, thanks to you, I don’t think I can ride my bike.” The bike is on the side of the road. It has a large wicker basket on the front and is clearly very old. It belongs in a museum—like most things on this island—but otherwise I can’t see anything wrong with it. Not even a scratch. “Given you almost killed me, do you think you could give me a lift?” she asks and I hesitate. “If it’s too much trouble—”
“No, of course I can give you a lift. I just... maybe we should call a doctor.”
“The doctor only visits on Tuesdays,” she says, attempting to stand. I try to help her up but she makes it clear that she can do it on her own.