After Ninety-Nine Lies, My Husband Finally Told Me the Truth novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Pill

A pharmacist says the pill is a memory-blurring sedative Cora has taken nightly for five years. A pregnancy test in the bathroom is positive. Anders is waiting outside with her coat.

The pill bottle was on the porch rail, in a white paper bag with the top folded over twice.

Signe's car was gone.

There were fresh tire marks in the frost, turned around in my grandmother's gravel.

I took the bottle out and read the label as I had read it every night for five years.

Cora Fjelstad. One tablet at bedtime for sleep.

It was the same small orange bottle, with the same blurred name at the bottom.

I had not taken a tablet last night, and I had not slept either.

But I had never been so awake.

I could remember every word of the dinner, in order.

I could remember Cliff's three corrections and the parking lot I couldn't see.

I put the bottle in my jacket pocket and drove into town.

The pharmacy on Main Street opened at eight.

The woman behind the counter knew me from the hospice, where she filled our comfort-care orders.

"Cora," she said. "You're up early."

"Can you tell me what this is?"

I set the bottle on the counter.

She turned it in her hand and read the label.

Then she tapped something into her computer and read that too.

Her face changed.

"Who gave you this?"

"My sister-in-law picks it up for me. It's for sleep."

"It's a sedative," she said quietly. "A heavy one. It's not for sleep, not at this dose. It's for people who can't stay still in the hospital."

"How heavy?"

"Heavy enough that a person on it nightly would be foggy in the morning. Forgetful. She might lose chunks of an evening."

I held onto the edge of the counter.

"The dose went up in year three," she said, still reading. "It tripled."

"I never asked for that."

"The prescriber is the family doctor on Water Street." She looked up. "He's never seen you here. Every refill has been picked up by a Signe Fjelstad."

"On the family account."

"Yes. For five years."

She looked at me for a long moment.

"Cora, is there any chance you're pregnant?"

I had told no one.

I had been carrying it alone since Tuesday.

"Eight weeks," I said.

Her hand went flat on the counter.

"Then you stop taking this today. Not all at once, because that's dangerous too. You see a doctor who isn't him. Do you have one?"

"I have an appointment at the clinic in Duluth."

"Keep it. And Cora?"

"Yes?"

"Don't give it back to her and don't tell her you know. Not until you've got somebody else's name on a piece of paper."

I thanked her.

My own voice sounded calm and polite.

In the bathroom at the back of the pharmacy I sat on the closed lid of the toilet with my jacket bunched in my lap.

I thought of every morning I had woken up late.

I thought of every dinner I had laughed through, and not remembered the end of.

I thought of the ledger, ninety-nine entries long, each one with a date.

The thing was that I had been so sure I was sick.

I had told Cliff I couldn't remember the wedding, and I had been ashamed.

I wasn't sick.

Someone had been giving me a drug every night so I would forget what I did.

And then someone had written down everything I forgot.

I washed my face in the sink.

I looked at myself.

I would go on as I was.

I would be the wife who couldn't remember, and I would let her think it was working.

I would find out how much of it was hers, and how much of it was his.

I put my hand flat on my stomach.

"Not you," I said to it. "You're not in this. I'm going to keep you out of it."

When I pushed through the front door and out into the cold, Anders was standing on the sidewalk.

He was alone, and he had my good wool coat over his arm, the one I'd left on a hook at his mother's house.

He must have been standing there some time.

There was frost on his shoulders.

He held the coat out to me and did not say a word.

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