I’ve spent the last hour reading Victoria’s diary.
She described in detail her earliest dates with Adam. How romantic he was. How totally in love they were. When I finally read the entry about how he gave her the necklace with the snowflake and they decided to move in together, I had to stop. It’s too hard to read, knowing how it ended in tragedy.
At the very least, I need a break.
Fortunately, Victoria is awake by then and is even willing to eat about a third of the lunch I prepared for her. She has tremendous trouble keeping food in her mouth. I finally have to stuff a napkin into her shirt, because about half of the stuff I put in her mouth comes right out and stains her clothing.
“Is there anything you’d like to do this afternoon?” I ask Victoria as I mop off the food that got on her chin.
She doesn’t answer me. But at least her eyes are open and she’s looking right at me.
“What if we style your hair?” I picture the photograph of her with the shiny golden locks. It’s a far cry from her current limp colorless hair. “I can brush it out for you. And… French braid it? What do you say?”
She blinks at me. I take it as a yes.
Victoria’s stash of hair care products is located in one of her bathroom drawers. There’s a layer of dust covering them, which explains the condition of her hair. I find a bottle of Moroccan oil infused with antioxidant Argan oil and flaxseed extract that supposedly nourishes and helps strengthen hair. It looks incredibly expensive, and it smells nice. I also pick out a brush and one of her many combs. God, she had a lot of hair care products. All I’ve got is a brush and a shampoo/conditioner-in-one. I can’t even afford separate shampoo and conditioner.
When I return to the bedroom, Victoria isn’t looking out the window for a change. Her eyes are pinned on the door. She’s been waiting for me.
Maybe she’s getting to like me.
“I’m back!” I hold up the bottle. “I got you some of this great Moroccan oil. It’s going to make your hair look so beautiful.”
I watch her face, hoping for a tiny smile. Nope. Oh well. At some point during my time working here, I’m going to coax a smile out of this woman.
I spend the next hour working the oil through her hair. Presumably, somebody has been brushing out her hair because it didn’t look tangled, but there are tiny matted areas that I need to work through carefully. Also, the last person who cut her hair obviously didn’t care about doing a good job. The ends are all uneven, so I have to grab scissors from the bathroom and I spend some time trying to give her a decent haircut. I even give her a little bit of layering, but I don’t want to go to crazy. I’m not exactly a master hairstylist.
“Adam is going to love your hair like this.” Even though she doesn’t acknowledge what I’m saying, I feel a need to keep talking. On some level, she must understand. “Men are obsessed with hair. I mean, they like boobs and butts and legs, but you can’t underestimate the importance of nice hair.” I pause as I snip at an uneven strand in the back of her head. “Freddy—he was my first boyfriend—he always really loved my hair.”
When I come around to cut the front of Victoria’s hair, I realize how intently she’s watching me. She likes it when I talk to her. And for some reason, there’s something therapeutic about it for me too. I’ve never really talked about the whole Freddy thing with anyone. Not really.
“I met Freddy in high school,” I tell her. “He was a year ahead of me. He was a senior and I was a junior. He just seemed so… cool and sophisticated. And cute.” I smile at the memory of watching Freddy smoking with his friends behind the school. I used to let my hair fall in my eyes as I walked past because I was embarrassed to let him catch me looking at him. “Not as cute as Adam, I guess. But he had this adorably tousled dark hair and these smoldering dark eyes… and a cleft in his chin. Jesus, he was so hot. I used to fantasize about him late at night. I couldn’t believe it when he liked me back. I mean, me.”
I wasn’t cool when I was in high school. I was quiet and not particularly good at writing or math or sports or anything. I wore way too much eye make up, at least according to my mother, and in retrospect, she may have been right about that one. Freddy was a guy who everybody
liked, a bit of a class clown, but decidedly cool. The first time he talked to me, I could barely string two words together. I didn’t even realize at the time that he was shy and awkward around me too.
“So we started dating.” I snip a lock of hair on the right side to even it out. “And this is the crazy part: he was a really good boyfriend. I mean, I didn’t have much to compare to. I only kissed a boy once before him. But… he was sweet. He used to call me every night and we would talk for hours. Like, about everything. My friends said when we started going out that he just wanted to get in my pants, but that wasn’t true at all. We connected. I thought he was…”
I thought Freddy was the love of my life. But I feel silly saying it now. The love of my life. What does that even mean? “I really liked him a lot,” I finally say.
I tie her hair back in a French braid. I remember when I was a kid, how I used to practice French braids on my dolls. And then later, my friends. I haven’t tied a French braid in years, but my fingers haven’t forgotten how. Unfortunately, the braid makes the scar on her scalp more prominent. So I pull apart my handiwork and start combing it out again.
“Anyway, Freddy loved running his hands through my hair.” I run my hand through Victoria’s now silky hair. “We would lie together in his bed and he would just run his hand through my hair for hours.”
Victoria looks up at me, a question in her eyes. What happened next?
What happened next was Freddy got me pregnant. Obviously, we did a little bit more in bed than just hair touching. I mean, we were a couple of teenagers.
But I don’t think I should tell her that story. I should stick with happy stories. Too bad I don’t know any real ones. But she doesn’t know that.
“Your hair looks gorgeous,” I tell her. “I’ll show you. Let me get a mirror.”
I run to the bathroom and grab the handheld mirror. I bring it over to Victoria and hold it up to her face. She looks at herself for a long time. Well, she looks with her right eye. The other eye still is looking off somewhere entirely different.
“You look beautiful,” I say. “Adam is going to love it.”
She frowns at herself. Then she reaches out and touches the jagged scar on her left cheek. She shakes her head.
“You know,” I say. “I bet you could cover that up with makeup.”
Well, not cover it up. There’s no chance of covering up that scar. But we could make it less prominent, at least.
She shakes her head. “No,” she says.
Despite everything, I have to smile. “That’s the first thing you’ve said to me all day.”
Victoria blinks at me silently. Apparently, it’s going to be the last.
I clap my hands together. “I’ve got a great idea. How about a manicure?”
Unsurprisingly, Victoria does not seem enthusiastic about the idea of a manicure. But I look around the bathroom again and find a stash of nail polish, as well as an emery board and nail clipper. I select a vivid color called Big Apple Red.
While I give Victoria a manicure, I tell her more about Freddy. I tell her about our courtship, about how we got married in this beautiful church with our family and friends watching, and about how he completed college and got a great job as a salesman. About how we wanted to have children, but we were waiting for the right time. Saving up our money so we had a nice little nest egg.
It’s all fiction, of course. It’s the life I had imagined with Freddy a long time ago. It’s the happy ending I always wanted to have.
Victoria’s nails have been clipped down to the quick. I brought the nail clipper, but I’m hesitant to use it. Her nails are never going to look pretty if they’re cut so short.
Then again, Adam told me I need to cut them short. She scratches at him when he tries to give her the medications she needs, and I don’t want her to scratch his eyes out. So the nails need to go.
Victoria watches me clip the nails on her immobile right hand. When I try to clip the left, she attempts to pull away from me.
“Just hold still,” I tell her. “I’m almost done. Then your nails are going to look pretty for Adam. You’ll see.”
She shakes her head. “Nub,” she says.
Well, at least she’s talking again. “They’re not completely nubs.
They’re just short.”
“No.” She grips my right hand in her left. “Nub. Adam nub.”
“Do…” I search her face, trying to figure out what she wants to say. “Do you want Adam to cut your fingernails?”
“No.” She shakes her head again, her eyes filled with frustration. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to not be able to get out the words you need to say to express what you want. “No. No. Adam nub. In the… nub.”
Uh…
“I’m sorry,” I finally say. “I just don’t… understand.”
It’s at that moment Adam peeks in the doorway to Victoria’s room. It’s sweet that he’s always coming to check on her. Although once I get my footing, he probably won’t feel the need to do it anymore. He offers a crooked smile. “Everything okay in here?”
I look over at Victoria, who has given up on what she wanted to say.
She’s now staring vacantly out the window.
“She keeps asking for something,” I say. “But I don’t know what it is.
She keeps saying ‘nub.’ Do you have any idea what that means?”
He cocks his head to the side. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard her say that before.”
Oh well. “Anyway, we did her hair and her nails. Doesn’t she look great?”
“She looks beautiful,” Adam says, although there is a definite lack of sincerity in his voice. He is telling Victoria she looks beautiful the same way you tell a small child that their scribble in crayon is beautiful. “You cut her hair. It looks good.”
“Yeah, whoever did it last time did a terrible job. You shouldn’t hire them again.”
Adam snorts. “I think it was the surgeons, right before they operated on her skull.”
“Well, they should stick to emergency surgeries then.”
“I’ll pass on the feedback.” He crosses the room and spends a moment looking at his wife. He lifts her right hand out of the armrest. “Did you cut her nails?”
“Yes. But she didn’t like it.” “Unfortunately, it’s not her decision.”
Victoria won’t turn her head to look at him. It’s like she has completely turned herself off the moment he walked into the room. Given they were
married before and he has dedicated his life to taking care of her, it’s strange that she won’t even acknowledge him. Strange and sad.
“Why don’t you take a break, Sylvia?” Adam says. “I need to help Victoria with some personal stuff.”
“Personal stuff?”
His eyes flick downward. “Change her diaper.”
Oh God. Of course, it makes sense. But I’m suddenly mortified for this beautiful, intelligent woman who is now so dependent for her most basic needs.
I wonder what a nub is. I wonder what she was trying to tell me.
I just want to understand her better. And the only way to do that at this point is to keep reading her diary. After all, she wanted me to have it. And I’ve got nothing but time out here.
