We agreed: it was too big a risk to say you were my girlfriend, couldn’t chance that the nurses would withhold information about me from you because the government hadn’t yet become the third in our relationship. So, before we walked into Mass General, we agreed that no matter what, we would commit to the lie that you were my wife. Nobody would ask to see proof or question where my ring was—I wouldn’t be allowed to have it at McLean anyway. I couldn’t have drawstring sweatpants or the metal buckles on my Birkenstocks, much less a deliciously swallowable diamond, razor-sharp and begging for a throat to tear.
For ten days, the other patients asked me about our wedding. I could say that it scared me how easy it was to lie. But it didn’t feel like lying; it felt like prophesying. The ceremony was outside, the day sweetly folded in the pages of a lush Vermont summer. Your father cried and your mother wore forest green. The cake was gluten-free. I walked down the aisle holding a bouquet of tiger lilies—you got me a bouquet the first time I brought you home to Texas—in the white dress I’d picked out on our sixth date, the one you begged me to show you every few months for almost five years. I told you it would be worth the wait, and you agreed. It was.
The other patients—my friends for the long weekend over which I stayed—oohed and aahed and sighed with their faces in their hands, cartoonishly melting across tables under aggressive fluorescent lighting. You’re so lucky you have someone out there. “Out there” was how we described everywhere else: beyond the concrete walls, beyond the curly barbed wire fluff atop the courtyard fence, beyond the cruelly unpadded rooms, the portable cafeteria cart with its Styrofoam cups of Jell-O and reheated green beans, the clipboard jotted with notes regarding my whereabouts at 15-minute intervals. For the first forty-eight hours, I wasn’t allowed to piss without asking permission to lock the door. Each night, I had to request to use my shampoo, and I only thought about drinking it once. In the shower, I thought about the champagne we drank in our fantasy. Sweet pea-scented suds dropped over my shoulders and I watched the spray of a green glass bottle arch into that cloudless sky in my mind.
It was impossible to go back to being your girlfriend after I’d been your wife. I ached for a ring on my left hand the way you ached at the sight of my straightjacketed body strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance. It was always there, that sense of loss like a false start. Nothing had disappeared: not my life, not our marriage. I could not have known then that the stories I told about our matching manicures, the soft wet paths of tears on your face, vows privately exchanged to the rolling tempo of sunrise, would be the closest we would get to holding those moments in our hands.
You were my wife for ten days and my girlfriend for 1,633. That’s almost as many days as there are miles between our hometowns—1,763—a different number that once consumed us when we spent over a year doing long distance. The difference between 1,633 and 1,763 is 130, which is divisible by 13, and Friday the 13th was the day we started dating. You taught me that I could read asinine meaning into anything. As long as we both thought it meant something, it meant everything. Out there, somewhere in the wilderness between those 1,633 days and the amorphous after, our believed wedding existed. You’re so lucky you have someone out there. You’re so lucky you have someone out there.
When you drove over an hour to bring me home on the tenth day, I walked into the discharge lobby like I was a kid being picked up from school, going home sick. The first thing we did was drive to McDonald’s. I told you that one day, when it came time to plan our real wedding, we should have a French fry buffet at the reception. You laughed and said we were already married. Remember? You asked me to tell the story again. I looked out the window, watched the trees grow cropped as we got closer to the city. It always started the same: the rain was soft, light pooled on the floor, we awoke in the same bed.