Free Monday's Lie by Jamie Mason

Patrick was never better than when he was playing sweet. He was the very picture of all it should look like. I was proud that I drew out his calm, his normal , despite my upbringing. Without her, our regular days were long, but pleasant, a bustle of manageable to-do that faded into a routine of cuddle, drowse, and then deep, undisturbed sleep.
    And if there was ever lightning and thunder in the dark, I’d pull his arm over me to pin me to my place and remind me that I need not venture out into it.
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    As much as he admired my mother, Patrick never understood what she’d done for Simon and me by all that she’d done to us with her games and with her outlook on life. He resented our oddness without the rest of the equation. He felt left out even though he knew the stories of origin. By the transitive property, he shouldn’t have liked her since he didn’t like her handiwork, but somehow he stubbornly never did that math. He wanted what he wanted of it, and to hell with the rest.
    The first Tuesday of each month, Patrick had a standing work meeting downtown, which we’d steered into the habit of meeting for a monthly date night on restaurant row. One Tuesday I remember, I didn’t recognize Patrick as I walked toward him. He sat at the table under the awning, two-thirds turned away from me, watching the course of people and traffic on Derby Street. I saw that it was him, of course. There were no surprises left in the way we looked to each other. I knew his face from every angle, the tilt of his shoulders, the certain blend of browns that made it only Patrick’s hair. But I didn’t recognize him.
    Every now and again, I’d turn a corner—in my office, in my neighborhood, in the grocery store, or even sometimes in the mirror—and find myself pitched into the exact opposite of déjà vu. For a disorienting set of seconds, nothing rang true. Nothing looked right. None of it felt in any way mine.
    This happened at the crosswalk behind Patrick. I knew the smell of cars idling in their own exhaust as they waited, tailpipe to grill, waiting to gain a few yards down the street only to stop and wait again, but the sensation felt more like catalog than actual memory—as if I’d been schooled in a laboratory to identify the throat-tickling fog of it rather than that I’d been steeped in it daily when I had worked downtown a few years earlier.
    The leaves that spun on their stems in the storm-front wind looked painted on. The sun glowed hard white from behind the cloud cover. Where I fit into this alien landscape, I couldn’t feel—and I couldn’t recall when I’d lost track of it. The endless second of lunatic doubt that I was possibly a figment of my own imagination was an open space in my empty head, and the lightness of it was the precursor to both fear and bliss.
    In these short-circuited moments, pinned between outlander and full-on Martian, I was compelled to run a full inventory of my entire life in the span of a few heartbeats in order to reclaim reality. It was Tuesday and Patrick was in the center of the picture, both in fact and in practice.
    The fence of my world drew its bold line around me again, my husband at the hub. I remembered that I had made it so, and all of it very much on purpose. Relief reattached itself to me as life came back online.
    I was always reborn after these little episodes, once I’d tightened the straps back down and shoved the bundle of my life firmly into its slot. All the colors were deeper, the blood in me keen and ready. It was probably epilepsy’s cousin, but it came with a dump of endorphins. I felt like Joan of Arc.
    Patrick must have sensed me behind him, tickled with a psychic flutter to feel me watching him. He straightened up and turned to find me in the flow of early-evening hustle. He waved me over and dragged the metal chair beside him away from the table in invitation.