It's a miracle for me.
I wrote this for my fiction class. it hasn't been critiqued yet...next week...

The whole thing is 14 pages double-spaced, 4,146 words.

Summary: She's not crazy, she's just a little unwell...Chelsea believes her husband is cheating on her, but is he really?



Something I remember about those days is how I used to hate the summers. They were so stifling, they seemed to clog up your throat and seep through the walls of your house, so you couldn’t escape it no matter where you went. When I sat on the porch, fanning myself with a rolled-up newspaper, I sometimes saw dogs drop dead from the heat. It rose up in shimmering waves from the streets, lingering in the air, covering everything.

The summers were largely responsible for my hate of this place, but my husband refused to move. He always told me that the summers never lasted forever, and when it was finally fall, what a relief it was to us! The leaves would change and the cool breezes would sweep away the things that had died in the heat, and the children went back to school. And with the children went David.

He was a professor at the local college, so he always went back to work at the end of the summer, when the heat was at its worst and it was all one could do to get up in the morning. I hated those first couple of weeks, dragging myself about the house, unable to work on my book. Sometimes I would fill up the bath to the rim with freezing water and sit in it until David came home. He always got mad at me when he found me there, half asleep, water dribbling down the sides of the tub and collecting in the carpet. But it wasn’t because I was wasting water, or even because he thought I was being lazy.

“Do you mean you haven’t worked on your book today?” he would ask me, grabbing my robe as I stepped out of the tub. “That’s a shame, Chelsea.”

And he said the same thing every day. What a shame that you haven’t worked on your novel. Wow, it’s too bad you didn’t get any work done. Well, don’t you have a deadline? You can’t miss your deadline. I was glad he seemed to care so much about my future.

After I got dressed again, I’d come downstairs and find him with his head in a book, his tie loose around his neck and his feet propped up. He never bothered with changing out of his suit, not until he was going to bed. He’d sit there and read until I stated poking around in the kitchen, looking for something to cook. I always tried to keep his favorite food in the house. I always kept him in mind when I made dinner.

Most nights we ate in the living room. He put the TV on at a low volume and silently picked at his food until I dared to break the silence. I always asked the same question first:
“How was your day?” I was always genuinely curious, hoping he would open up to me and tell me something, anything, about the life he lived when I wasn’t around.

“Fine,” he would reply, or “long”, or “frustrating”, or even, once, “the air conditioner busted.” But never anything more than a word or a sentence, nothing more than a fragment of his entire day. I would pout at him and push lightly at his shoulder, trying to get him to say more, but usually he would protest that his mouth was too full and he’d tell me later.

Sometimes when he went downstairs to read or work at night, I sat down on our bed next to the dresser and opened the top drawer. The photo album would be sitting on top, a wedding picture my mom had taken plastered across the cover. I sat there with the album and flipped slowly through each page, reliving each year of our lives until now. I looked at the way his eyes gleamed and the way he smiled when he had his arm around me or was just standing near me. I touched his time-frozen face and smiled too, but in a different way.

I wondered what I had done. Why was I losing him?



My father died of cancer when I was thirteen, and in the wake of his death I clung to my mother with a fierce tenacity. She didn’t do anything to push me away, as scared and heartbroken as she was. We moved to a different state, bought a smaller house and a new kitten, and started over. She bounced from job to job, never quite finding anything that satisfied her, and so we were low on money all the time. It didn’t seem to bother Mom, though, and she never gave me the impression that we weren’t well off. I got whatever I wanted, so fast that I never even had time to want something else.

Mom sheltered me. She kept me in the house on Friday nights, suggesting we cook something together, or read a book, or rent a couple movies. I turned down plans my friends tried to make with me, and didn’t understand why they thought it was strange that I spent so much time with my mother. I liked the feeling I got when I was around her. I liked the clean smell of her; I liked smiling and laughing with her.

I was sixteen when she started getting sick. I didn’t even notice it at first. I would come home from school and flop on the couch to listen to the answering machine messages, and I’d discover she’d missed an appointment or a meeting with her boss. It started getting more and more frequent, such that eventually it was normal to me. I never once thought it was due to an illness.

But then she forgot my name, one day.

I can still see it vividly in my head. I woke up to the smell of smoke one morning and ran downstairs to find the stove had caught on fire, its fumes tickling the alarm on the ceiling above it. I dashed the flames, all the while screaming for Mom. She didn’t come.

I found her out on the porch, staring off into the yard. I came round to face her; there was the strangest look in her eyes. It was as though she had gone wandering and left her body behind. She didn’t seem there.

“Mom? Mom.” I waved my hand back and forth in front of her face. She started, blinked, and her eyes met mine. I sighed in relief.

“You left breakfast on the stove too long,” I told her. “You need to watch things like that.”

She was silent for a moment, and it was in that silence I realized her eyes were still far away.

“I’m…sorry, Tiffany,” she mumbled.

My heart jumped painfully against my throat. “It’s me, Mom. Chelsea.”

She hesitated, her brows wrinkling, and then at once her face cleared. The Mom I knew returned to her eyes. “Chelsea, you’re up! Good. Let’s have some breakfast, shall we? Goodness, how long have I been sitting out here…?”

After that it only got worse. Mom forgot more names. She started having mood swings, like a teenager would. She’d sit for hours in the same spot, staring off at something only she could see. She missed so many things at work that she was fired, and it was when I walking with her to look for a new one that it suddenly struck me she might be sick.

I took her to the hospital, but it was too late to do anything. The disease—dementia, the doctors said—was already running its course. “The same way her husband went,” I was told.
Mom had been too embarrassed to tell me that Dad had died of dementia, not when I was thirteen, but just a few months ago in a mental hospital.

They took her to the same one, and I never saw her again.

I didn’t go to college. I left the house we’d lived in and went off in search of someone, anyone, who could make me feel the way Mom did. And I found David.

He was a few years older than me, and when I met him he was a street painter in San Francisco. He just picked me out of the crowds and asked if I would allow him to paint me. So I sat sweating in the sun for two hours, and when he had finished and showed me my picture, I told him it was beautiful. He smiled and asked if I’d like to go dinner.

We got married when I was twenty. He went on to teach art at the university in the town we chose to live, and I stayed at home, working on my book. Every day, he came home and cooked dinner for me. We talked for hours after we were through, the leftover food becoming cold and hard on our plates. At night we kissed in the dark for ages. He said we would have children to fill our small house with.

Sometimes, if I listen hard, I can almost hear them. But it might only be the echo of my own memories.



I first became suspicious when I was doing his laundry one autumn day, and something slipped out of his coat pocket as I was throwing it into the wash. On a torn sheet of notebook paper, in a girl’s loopy scrawl, was an unfamiliar phone number. I stared at it for a moment, my lips twisting, then stuck it in my apron for later.

When he got home, I handed him the paper. He stared down at it, then slowly back at me.
“Whose number is it?” I prompted, rocking back and forth on my heels. “I was going to put it in the phone book for you.”

He took the bit of paper from me and studied it for a long moment. I watched his face very carefully. He was unreadable. When he started to explain, I wasn’t sure if I believed the smooth words coming from those lips I loved.

“A new teacher moved into my office,” he said, closing his hand around the phone number and glancing away from me. “She’s from the east; you’d probably like her…”

“Why did she think you would need her number?” I pressed. I wasn’t angry with him. My voice was regular, soft.

“Just in case,” he replied, and then he stepped forward swiftly and tugged me close. The tenseness in my shoulders melted away instantly and I slipped my arms around him, burying my nose in the familiar smell of his jacket. “I’m taking you out tonight. Why don’t we check out that new Chinese restaurant on Third? You keep telling me we should go there.”

And when I squealed gleefully and leaned back to grin at him, I saw he was smiling like he used to, the way he did in the photos. He kissed me for awhile, and when we left for dinner I felt like he loved me.



The secrets were all in David’s clothes. I discovered something else another time I was doing laundry, and it was so small, but so completely abnormal.

I lifted his crisp white-collared shirt, holding it up to the light. I squinted and pursed my lips and tried to stop my heartbeat from picking up, but I couldn’t dismiss this suspicion as easily as I could the first.

It was lipstick. I was sure of it. I had only worn it when I was a teenager, but all women can recognize lipstick smears. But, why would these stains be on my husband’s shirt collar when I hadn’t worn lipstick in ten years or more?

“It’s tomato juice,” David said when I asked him. You don’t drink tomato juice. “I had some in the fridge at work.” You don’t have a fridge in your office. “I guess I was a little messy.” That’s not it. It’s not tomato juice, it’s not a new teacher, it’s not, not, not…

“Is there someone else?” I blurted, the words flying from my mouth before I could stop them. Immediately afterward I clapped my hand over my lips, trembling, afraid now. I shouldn’t have these fears.

David looked startled. He watched me shrink against the wall, my hands clenching in my clothes. “Chels? What would give you an idea like that?”

“The lipstick, the lipstick on your collar—“

“—is tomato juice. Chels!” He caught my hand, pulled me away from the wall, and I don’t know why I felt relieved when he laughed. “I’ll bring home the can for you to see, if that will satisfy you. How ridiculous…”

He brought me the can. I asked him when he had started drinking tomato juice, and he said that it was what the new teacher drank. I kept the can on the top of the refrigerator, and when I looked at it my fears seemed to shrink back into my mind.

Another day, there was a call.

That day, I decided to work on my novel, because it had been so long now since I’d looked at it. I was typing away happily, snacking on a bowl of peanuts, when the phone rang from the kitchen. I hopped up to answer it, my mouth still half-full with peanuts when I said, “Hello?”

“Uh, is this Professor Ackland’s house?”

I froze. Why was one of David’s students calling me? “Yes. Who’s calling?”

“Oh, I’m….um, who are you?”

“A friend of his,” I told her. A friend who lives and sleeps with him, and has tried many times to give him a child.

“Oh, well…can you tell him that Lucy Kirkpatrick called? Just…tell him that I called…yeah.”

I wrote her name down on a sheet of paper. “I’ll tell him.”

“Ah, Miss Kirkpatrick!” David said later. “I thought she would probably call while I was still at work. Did she say anything important?”

“No.” I was tapping my foot against the tiled floor. “Why does one of your students have our home number, Dave?”

“She might have been RSVP’ing for my social,” said David casually, joining me on the couch. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a list of names, which he handed to me. “It’s for the kids in 360. Lucy’s having a few family issues, so I told her to give me a call if they were resolved.”

I read each name slowly, committing each one to memory. There were exactly six girls and four boys.

“The ratio of boys and girls is a little skewed, don’t you think?” I pointed out calmly. “Why don’t you invite a few more boys?”

David frowned. “That’s my whole class. Hey, Chels…you aren’t upset about this, are you? I meant to tell you I had made plans for a party….it’s still not for a few weeks…”

I blinked. That thought hadn’t even entered my head. “Of course. I’d love to meet your students, Dave.”



That night, I lay motionless in our bed, listening to his breathing. Once it had become slow and regular, I slipped from the bed as quietly as I could. Tiptoeing across the carpet, I opened the closet doors and pulled his briefcase out. It was so heavy—but I managed to drag it from the room without waking him.

The office in which I worked on my novel was right down the hall. I took the briefcase in there and spent a few minutes trying to pry apart its cold metal jaws. His papers were neatly stacked and ordered inside—he was always very neat—which made it that much easier for me to find the personal information of every student he had. My eyes skimmed the names feverishly. At last, I found the ones he’d written on the list.

Lucy Kirkpatrick.

She was an art major, a junior, only twenty years old. I recognized the name of her street; it wasn’t far from here. She was a commuter, then, and was able to go to the university from home.

I copied down the address and turned out the light.



The next day, after David had left for work, I got into my car for the first time in several months. I was shivering in my thin robe, and the gas pedal was like a block of ice under my bare feet. I stepped on it hard, skidding out of the driveway, and headed for the address I’d written down last night. As I drove, a Beatles song I recognized came on the radio, and I tapped my fingers against the wheel, singing under my breath.

“I want to be a paperback writer,” I warbled, slightly off-tune. “Paperback writer…”
Lucy Kirkpatrick lived in a clean, respectable neighborhood, the kind of neighborhood where you would expect to find girls riding bikes with bells, boys out back playing catch with their dads, and children setting up lemonade stands. The house that matched the address on my paper was painted a dark blue with cheery red shutters. The lawn was freshly mowed and a sprinkler was running. A black Bug was parked in the driveway. It was exactly the sort of house my mom had wanted for me growing up.

I turned off my car and sank down in the seat, peering out at the house. I’m not sure how long I sat there, my gaze locked on the bright front door. But when Lucy Kirkpatrick walked outside, my terror expanded tenfold.

She was tall, slender, and pale, with dark, curly hair. She knew how to dress; I’d never quite learned that. I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror and was suddenly repulsed by my own dark hair, the light freckles smattering my face, and the small gap between my front teeth. Shuddering, I turned the car back on and sped away just as Lucy Kirkpatrick was getting into the front seat of the Bug.


I dressed up real nice for David’s social. I got out a dress I hadn’t worn since I was twenty-three, relieved when it still fit fine. I washed my hair and curled it. I even tried wearing some lipstick, although I kept licking it off by accident, and was forced to reapply it.
David stepped in the bedroom before the students started arriving. He kissed my cheek and told me I looked beautiful. The comment calmed me. I felt happy and content.

This feeling stayed with me even when the kids started showing up. They were dressed more casually than me; I was pretty and clean. I greeted each one of them with a smile, my hand wrapped loosely around David’s arm, and he welcomed them to the snacks and drinks I had set out in the kitchen. I let myself relax, listening contentedly to the banter of the students in our house. It made me think of when David and I were that age, and he had been that penniless painter who had picked me off the street in San Francisco. If I closed my eyes, I could almost see his face, that first time I saw it.

David wandered off after awhile, claiming he was going to see if there were any more chips in the garage. I went upstairs to check on my makeup, and when I got back downstairs, I saw her.

She had dressed up too, I saw with horror. Her white skin practically glowed in the soft light I’d provided for the party, her arms bare in her elegant cocktail dress. She had chosen to bunch her hair up on top of her head, a few curls hanging in her face. And her lips, those pouty red lips, were smiling and moving at a thousand miles an hour. She was looking up, her eyes bright and affectionate.

I followed her gaze, staring at David’s face. I was shocked to find him smiling just as widely, twirling a wine glass in one hand while he motioned with the other. And then he laughed, and I could hear it clear across the room. In my mind, I saw the street in San Francisco, his easel, the bright palette of paints. He was laughing at something I said, and shortly after that I had realized we were flirting.

He was flirting.

My hands clenched and unclenched. And then there was the anger, hot, blinding, so that I hardly saw the glass that I picked up and flung at Lucy Kirkpatrick’s pale, perfect face. I scarcely saw the blood on the carpet amidst the broken glass; I didn’t really hear the shouts of the other students as they gathered around us, straining to get a good look. I couldn’t feel David’s hands when he grabbed my arms, shaking me, yelling.

In fact, I can remember little about the rest of the night. I remember the flashing lights on the ambulance bouncing off the windows. I remember Lucy being carried away on the stretcher. David wouldn’t let me go to the hospital, so I cleaned up while he was gone. When he got back, hours and hours later, I was still awake, waiting for him.

“What did I say to you that time?” I asked him, before he could get in a word.

“What?” He stared at me oddly, looking so very tired. I would have to call the hospital tomorrow and tell them off for keeping him so long. Lucy wasn’t even his family.

“That time when we first met in San Francisco. You were going to paint me. You had your paints out and everything, and I sat down in the chair and then I said something, and you laughed. What did I say to make you laugh?”

He kept looking at me in that odd way. “I don’t know,” he replied after a time. “I think that was someone else.”



After that, all I can remember comes back in brief little flashes. I’ve managed to blot most of it from my memory. But, no matter how I try to forget, I can still recall my last time together with David. He drove me to the hospital. He wouldn’t talk to me, no matter how I tried getting him to, and so eventually I fell silent. My gaze dropped to the space between our seats, and, as if it had been highlighted in bright yellow, that girl’s godforsaken name leaped out at me.

He was paying her medical bill. He must have offered to, he must be so sorry for what his stupid wife did…

I think I lost control of my body then, because I really hadn’t intended to lash out at him. The car swerved dangerously, and we nearly crashed. When I regained control of myself, David made me sit in the backseat. He even strapped me in himself.

The people at the hospital ran all sorts of tests on me. I don’t know why David thought something was wrong. I knew I wasn’t sick; I was just frustrated and hurt. I was heartbroken! Was he hospitalizing me for a broken heart?

I was forced to stay inside those whitewashed walls for a couple of days. They put some tubes in me, asked me a few questions, and took David aside several times to tell him things I wasn’t allowed to know. The last thing they did is the only thing I still remember every detail of.

I was pushed down on a cold metal table and told to keep still. The table moved, and the next thing I knew, I was inside a strange white tube with a window on either side. The doctors said this was called an “MRI”, so they could get a picture of my brain.

The next day, I got to leave the hospital. And I was so happy…until I realized that David wasn’t coming with me. Oh, I fought against them, all of those mean doctors in their stupid white coats, but they strapped me down and put me in the back of an ambulance. I rode for a long, long time, and when they took me out again I was inside of a strange building, lying down on a little bed. Sitting up, I found a glass of water next to me, and underneath it was a white sheet of paper with my name on the top.

October 3, patient was discharged from Greenwich General after MRI revealed tumor in right temporal lobe. Thought to be the cause of her psychosis. October 4, patient admitted into Harpshill Mental Institution.

“Tiffany,” I said aloud. That was the name my mother had called me before she was diagnosed. But I could still remember names. I could still remember David.

“David,” I said. “David, David, David.”

I would never forget. I would not go the same way as my mother.

They would let me go soon.




Hopefully this will get a good reception.