“All of it, as far as I know.”
“But…the doctors said you couldn’t. That after the trauma and being unconscious you wouldn’t.”
“They were wrong! Doctors don’t know everything, Nick.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it didn’t matter.”
“Of COURSE it matters! What could possibly matter more?”
“What you did matters more. What you didn’t do matters more. I woke up in the ICU, and my fiance had disappeared. I’d loved you for years; I finally found out you loved me too—or you said you did; and right away you abandoned me when I needed you most.”
“But they said you would forget the whole day! I thought you would wake up and discover that your life was ruined and it was all my fault. Not the fault of the man who loved you, because you would forget all that--your stepbrother’s fault. How could you stand to look at me every day? How could you not hate me?”
“How could you not have stuck around to find out what I remembered? Would it have cut into your busy life to wait another day or two? I’ll tell you what I think, Nick, I think that’s all bullshit! It’s a justification. You didn’t want a wife who was disabled.”
“What? No—” he started to say, but I knew he would deny it.
“I get it, it’s a lot to ask of anyone. But that’s what ‘in sickness and in health’ means. And you couldn’t handle it. Which, fine, you didn’t sign up for that. We were only engaged for what? Twenty minutes?”
“Julia, that’s not it. That’s not the reason, I swear.”
“Of course you can’t admit it. But doesn’t the timing seem strange to you, if it wasn’t about me being in a wheelchair? As long as I was disabled, you were nowhere to be found. Now I’m walking again, doing great, and suddenly you swoop back into my life. Doesn’t that seem…suspicious to you?”
“But when I first came back, I thought you were still in the wheelchair! Don’t you remember that day in the hospital?”
“Sure. But I don’t believe it. A man with a billion dollars can find out anything he wants to know, including the health status of anyone on the planet. Right?”
“Maybe he can, but it didn’t occur to me. Wait, I can prove it! Come with me.”
“What? I will not. I’m going home.”
“Julia, please. If you ever cared for me. Let me show you this one thing. Please give me this one chance. If it doesn’t convince you, I’ll do whatever you want. If you want me to go away and leave you in peace, I will, even though it might as well kill me.”
He had tears in his eyes, actual tears. I didn’t want to go with him, but at the same time, I wanted it more than anything. If I could know for sure that he didn’t leave because I was disabled--what mattered more than that? I wanted to keep him from being able to hurt me again, but it was too late for that anyway.
“Okay, Nick,” I said softly. “Okay. You can show me whatever it is.”
He picked up my hand and kissed it, then led me to the parking deck. We were soon headed out of town, in the same direction he’d taken before, when he’d shown me the tree we hit in the accident.
“Where are we going?”
“Out to the lake.” He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask anything else. I was emotionally wrung out. Uncertainty is hard for me to take, and everything was up in the air during that car ride. I thought I had my future all mapped out without Nick, and now? Did he want to be with me, or was he leaving? It was a beautiful time of day, when afternoon edges into evening, and I tried to just notice the beauty and stop thinking.
Soon we were at the lake, but Nick turned away from the public beach side, and onto a private drive. It was an old dirt road, and I could see glimpses of the lake through the pines as we bumped along. We turned onto a smooth new gravel driveway, and pulled up beside a big, new, lodge-style log house. We got out, and Nick led me behind the house. The back of it was mostly huge windows, and I could see why: the house looked out over the lake. At this hour its mirror-like surface was pure gold.
“Come on,” he said.
“Whose house is this?”
“I was hoping it would be your wedding present. From me.”
I could feel my mouth falling open as I looked back at the house. The long lake-facing side of the place had a deep porch extending for its whole length. Wide stairs led up to it at the center, and also, on the end closest to where we’d parked, there was a ramp.
A handicapped ramp.
I pounded up the steps and waited for Nick to unlock the door. When he opened it, I noticed how wide it was, and how there was no bump between the porch and the floor inside, just a smooth transition. When you’ve spent time in a wheelchair, you notice these things. We entered into a foyer, but where I expected to see a staircase, there was an ornate set of what could only be elevator doors.
I looked at Nick, and I know my mouth was hanging open in shock. He shrugged his shoulders.
To the right of the foyer was a huge room with a stone fireplace and a whole wall of windows. There were polished, exposed beams and beautiful woodwork everywhere, but no furniture. We passed on to the kitchen, another big bright room, and I noticed that on one side, the granite countertops were lower than normal, with no cabinets under them. A person in a wheelchair could easily move close to one of those counters and chop vegetables or stir up cookie dough.
“Whose house is this?” I asked again.
“When I had it built, I hoped that someday it would be yours. Ours.”
“I can’t…. I’m not getting it. Tell me from the beginning.”
He led the way back out onto the porch, and we sat down on the broad steps. He looked out over the lake for a while before he started talking.
“When I left you in the ICU, I was a mess. I didn’t sleep, didn’t eat. Then I started taking double
the amount of courses at school. Just threw myself into working. I studied all the time, and spent the rest in the gym. And it was just…nothing. I graduated and got a job delivering pizza while I worked on the fitness app. I thought, if I could just work hard enough, I could forget about you and how everything got snatched away from us.”
I took his hand. Just to be nice, you know.
“And then the app was done and it took off like crazy, but I couldn’t really feel it. Everything was empty. Once I’d made all the money, all these women just came out of the woodwork, and I thought, okay now I’ll find someone to help me move on. But they didn’t know me. They didn’t want to know me, as long as I stayed rich. Julia, all I could think about was you.” He looked across the lake, and sighed. A bird was flying across the lake, just a foot above the surface of the water.
“So I thought of a plan. How I could at least make you think better of me. Show you how much you meant to me. Maybe get to see you once in a while. Because all this time, no matter how crazy this sounds, to me we were still engaged. And even if I didn’t end up getting to marry you, just seeing you a little bit was better than life without you. But still I hoped. I dreamed that someday we would get married and have a family. And so I got the land out here where we had our only day together, and built this house. It was like a good luck charm.”
“Pretty big for a good luck charm,” I said, but I said it gently.
“This is what I mean, that I can prove it. That I didn’t care about you being disabled. When I pictured us living here together, having kids, all that stuff—I always pictured you in the wheelchair.”
We sat without saying anything for a long time, watching the birds wheel above the water in the sunset light. So many things were whirling around in my head. Could I really have been this wrong about him all the time?