Sometimes I Lie

In many ways the novel is designed like a game of dominoes. In these opening chapters, the mystery of Amber’s hospitalization, even told in a fragmented and fractured narrative, seems to be laid out carefully and even predictably, like a line of dominoes that, the reader assumes in the back half of the novel, will be knocked down, one event linked to the next, in the end resolving the mystery of Amber’s accident. In these middle chapters, those dominoes are lined up carefully—these chapters set up a predictable mystery of a husband cheating on his wife with his wife’s emotionally disturbed sister and the two of them in cahoots to get rid of the wife. At the same time, the wife finds her way into the arms of a handsome ex-lover whose charisma and easy charm make the wife second-guess the commitment she made in her marriage and see her ex-lover’s return as a second chance for her. Infidelity, passion, and reckless risks are all traditional elements of a mystery thriller. However, if these dominoes are so carefully set up in these chapters, the chapters that follow upend the table and scatter the neatly laid-out dominoes. When Amber, on her sort-of date with her sort-of ex, compares herself to Alice in Wonderland, the novel foreshadows its own collapse into confusion and the unnerving sense that nothing is what it seems and no one can be entirely understood.

In these chapters, Paul emerges as a handy caricature, the shady and evasive husband, unable or unwilling to answer simple questions from police detectives and acting generally suspicious. Amber confirms as much: “Paul is missing. My marriage is hanging by a thread. What am I doing?” (73). Paul is never where Amber expects him to be. She returns home from work the Tuesday before the accident to find Paul gone. She finds the satin lingerie in the closet, hidden in the back in a gift bag. Not her size, the lingerie appears to confirm Paul is involved; after all, Amber confesses the two of them seldom make love. Then there is the matter of Paul’s car parked in Claire’s driveway, again with no explanation, even from Claire’s husband, who says he has no idea why the car is there and that his wife has been gone all day. It would seem the novel positions this evidence as easy-to-constellate: an evasive and secretive husband, a twisted sister whose favorite wine is inexplicably suddenly in Amber’s refrigerator and who is herself absent without a trace the same afternoon as the husband.

When in these chapters, Paul slips earbuds into Amber’s ears and plays wedding music, it is clear that he is attempting to block her hearing of a conversation he is about to have with his paramour Claire. The story of running off to help his mother seems a bit too pat—Amber checks his phone for any messages from her and finds none. She does find a message on her phone that she does not remember receiving and is perhaps an elaborate deception made hours after Paul disappeared, a ruse to cover his philandering. The police surely suspect Paul, who says he cannot explain the marks on his wife’s neck nor why Amber was driving his car, a car she has difficulty operating, or why she was not wearing a seatbelt. The only explanation that makes any sense is that Paul had a fight with Amber and was driving the car and left his wife to die on the road. When Claire whispers into Amber’s ear that Paul has been detained by the police, one mystery seems most assuredly resolved. Paul is the novel’s villain, devious and conniving, using his wife like a character in one of his novels. The entire marriage narrative line seems to echo the premise of the 1938 British psychological thriller novel Gas Light, about a scheming husband callously trying to drive his trusting wife “crazy.” When Amber hears the gravelly male voice whisper in her ear that she is to blame for the accident, all signs suggest this is Paul disguising his voice, driven by his own culpability in the accident to try to confuse its only other survivor.

Even as Paul emerges as a handy cardboard cut-out villain, Amber turns to an ex-lover, Edward Clarke, as a sort of stay against the confusions and scheming of her failing marriage. From the moment she sees Edward, the chance reunion seems wonderfully serendipitous. When they meet in the bar, Amber feels nervous (she is sick to her stomach before heading to the bar; later she will figure this was the first hint she is pregnant), and when she sees him, she is pitched into an emotional whirlwind: “Time has changed, he but clearly left him alone. More than a decade of life seems to have only improved him. I can’t help noticing the tanned skin, white teeth, and mischievous brown eyes that seemed to dance with delight as he stares at me” (111). Within the familiar convention of mystery romance, this ex-lover is introduced as Amber’s chance to find the passion she lacks with her cheating husband. Unlike her husband out in the shed writing stories, Edward works at a hospital (Amber knew him back in medical school). As the drinks lead to a sumptuous candlelit dinner in an exclusive tucked-away private restaurant, Amber feels like Alice, in a world at once familiar and yet tantalizingly exotic and new. As she lingers over their departure, she is sure that not going with Edward, not returning to his apartment to make love, while she returns to her conniving husband was surely a “big mistake.”

Thus, these chapters locate the reader within a familiar environment—the cheating husband, the duplicitous sister, and the dashing ex-lover. The husband and sister no doubt plotted the accident as a way to get rid of both Amber and the unwanted child, a plotline encouraged when Amber recalls the shocking conversation she had with her mother years earlier when her mother confessed without apology that her life had been ruined by her unexpected pregnancy with Amber. The dashing Edward, so touchingly still in love with the woman who left him 10 years earlier, is Amber’s best hope for surviving her husband’s infidelity.

Of course, these neat dominoes will be brushed off the table entirely as Amber slowly regains her memory and begins to piece together a more informed understanding of what has happened to her, that her husband is loving and dutiful and caring and that Edward is an obsessive stalker who orchestrated their chance encounter and who is now plotting to destroy the woman he believes destroyed his life.