Not His Dream Girl

Stress Reliever

Nick had started to make a tremendous amount of progress by the time June ended. In just a couple of weeks, he could sit up in bed without help and was using the wheelchair to move around. So I'd usually take him for a quick stroll around our care home's front lawn at least once a day. Though he still couldn't eat most of the baby food, I was attempting with him.

However, by the end of July, Nick was almost 50% himself. He was able to walk with the use of a walker, though not far. Food intake also got better. As the baby food method wasn't working, I turned to milkshakes and smoothies, then moved to soups, and finally, he could chew and keep down a few chowders and stews. The best thing in all his progress, however, was the fact that he was talking in almost complete sentences. It took him a while to think of words, and he sometimes did get certain words wrong, but you still could understand him. He used this newfound skill to mainly talk about how much he loved his wife, babe, as I had officially become, and how much he hated Lucky. "He know nothing!" He sometimes yelled out.

Although physically he was getting better, his delusion that I was his wife grew daily. He spent hours telling me stories about how "him and babe" used to go shopping every Wednesday together for groceries, something I still do, typically alone, on Wednesdays. Sometimes his stories even involved kids. Gia, our daughter, was sometimes 3 or 5, and Daniel, our son, was never the same age. His stories were inconsistent and never followed the same trajectory. Gia sometimes had really short hair, but sometimes her hair was long and flowy
like her mother's. Anytime he started describing his fantasyland (which is what I had started calling it), it almost always increased my heartbeats, made my palm sweat, and at times it made me feel like I was having a heartache. I was nervous he would ask where our kids were and why they hadn't come to see their father. What could I say to that? Of course, a part of it was also my guilty conscience reacting to the fact that I was partly the reason he thought all of this was true. Me being here, acting like his wife, validated his stories.

I wanted to stop, but Bonnie was convinced that my being here was helping Nick get better. She even started asking me to spend nights here. "He could get lonely at night. I am not saying every night, but maybe twice a week?" And I listened to her. I stayed with Nick every Tuesday and Friday night because I was part of the problem too. I was addicted to the attention he was giving me. Every time he looked at me, it was like I was the only thing he saw. Every time he touched me, his warmth transferred over and lingered. His mint, lemon smell was also back, making it much harder for me to escape. Even worse, though, was the fact that there were glimpses of 'normal Nick' behind all of this. Just the other day, he talked about his game-winning goal at his senior soccer match. "You try beer the first time at the after party." A correct, in reality, fact. At the after-party, Nick's idiot friends made me chug a lot of beer. "You puke all over car. First time we slept together." Another fact in our shared reality. Though the 'we slept together' part was a bit of a stretch. I couldn't go home drunk because my parents would have murdered me, so I stayed at Nick's. I slept in his bed, and he slept on the floor.

Seeing that Nick was remembering made me aware that Melissa didn't know. Whenever she called or I snuck out to get dinner with her, I barely took part in the conversation. I nodded and added a few yeses and nos as she droned on and on about the new bar Jacob was opening. Though I was thankful she was so full of topics to discuss as of late, it helped me not worry that I would let slip, during an awkward silence, that Nick was awake because, well, there were no awkward silences.

So since I couldn't tell Melissa about Nick, I started talking about Melissa to Nick. So one Saturday afternoon, I finished my shift, and Nick was sitting on a table across from his bedside doing some work. I talked about the time I tagged along on a trip to Puerto Rico with them. "Remember Melissa insisted that we go there to celebrate the end of college."