48 pages • 1 hour read
Alice FeeneySometimes I Lie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 214-258Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 214-258 Summary
It is January 2, more than a week after the accident. Paul and Claire are in the hospital room. Amber feels stronger, more alert. She begins to recall the events leading up to the accident, specifically the violent encounter with Edward at her home. She also recalls Claire’s dark obsession with destroying Madeline Frost, her estranged aunt, who years earlier repossessed the family home from her family after Claire’s grandmother, Madeline’s mother, died. Amber also recalls her early diagnosis with obsessive compulsive disorder: “It’s not a big deal,” she says, “but it’s got worse as I’ve got older” (225). Claire assures her that Edward’s rape was caught by the camera Paul put in the room—Amber can only imagine how Paul felt watching the violation. Paul whispers, “I love you”—and Amber mouths the words back and opens her eyes. She is awake.
In the next few hours, Amber takes some nutrition until Paul departs. Now Amber is alone with Claire, and Claire apologizes “for all of it” (244). Amber castigates her for leaving her at the accident. Amber has remembered the accident. While still at Claire’s get-together with Paul, Paul gave her an early Christmas gift, a diary. Amber says that Claire used to keep a diary and thanks Paul for the gift. She wants to tell him about her pregnancy but does not think the time is right. The two walk home despite the rain. When they pass a gas station, Amber recalls when she drove Madeline home from the studio and told her that her gas tank was empty (Amber had earlier sucked the gas out of the tank) knowing that Madeline would give her her credit card to fill the tank. In addition to filling the tank, Amber filled two canisters and charged them to Madeline’s card, leaving no evidence she bought them. Now, back at home, she and Paul share a bottle of champagne, and Paul tells Amber he told Claire he had found the diaries. Amber goes ballistic—she will kill you, she warns; she is a terrible person. Amber grabs Paul’s car keys and heads back to Claire’s house. Paul objects—it is Christmas after all—and the two argue briefly in the rain in the driveway.
At Claire’s house, Amber tells her Paul never read the diaries and to leave him alone. She lies and says she has burned the diaries so no one will ever read them. Claire is not convinced. Her eyes are “dark and cold” (248). Just as the argument escalates, Amber feels a trickle of blood down her leg. She is losing the baby. Claire tells her she must go immediately to the hospital. Claire drives Paul’s car. In the rain, the driving is dicey, but Claire keeps speeding up. Amber begs her to slow down. Claire looks over, tells her “I love you” (240), and then deliberately slams on the brakes, sending Amber through the windshield. Back at the hospital, with Amber now alert, Claire, ignoring Amber’s accusations over leaving her to die at the accident site, only wants to know where Edward lives. Claire gives her the bracelet from their childhood—the bracelet she stole from Amber—and departs.
By Valentine’s Day, Amber is well on her way to recovery. Paul and she have adopted a puppy, and to show Claire she forgives her, Amber is preparing a romantic dinner for Claire ad her husband and has even offered to watch their kids for the evening. Later that afternoon, Amber returns to Claire’s house lugging two can of gasoline. As she expects, she finds Claire’s husband dead in their bed and Claire next to him, dying, her pulse weak, poisoned from the fancy dinner Amber prepared. She methodically spreads the gasoline throughout the house, strikes a match, and calmly walks back home as sirens sound in the distance.
Weeks pass. Amber and Paul are working out terms for adopting Claire’s twins. They are all on holiday at the shore before Paul departs for his book tour. Edward, Amber confirms, was never found. Police entering his apartment found his tanning bed with blood stains and bits of burned flesh, and neighbors reported hearing screams from the apartment. The television is on, and Amber watches the reports of famed radio host Madeline Frost’s trial for the murder of Claire. Amber admits to having framed Madeline for Claire’s death, created a threatening note from Claire to Madeline over Madeline’s legal maneuvering that had stolen Claire’s family’s home years earlier, and even charged the gas cans to Madeline’s credit card. She has long since burned all the diaries that Claire kept, taking particular relish in destroying the pages from 1992 in which Claire flat out said that Taylor (that is Amber) told her to kill her parents. As she watches Claire’s twins play on the beach, Amber feels “happy” for the first time. It is short-lived. Paul has ordered champagne brought to their hotel room. Amber does not see who delivers the tray, but on the tray she is stunned to see a bracelet held together with a safety pin and engraved with her birth date. Is Claire still alive? Did Edward do this? Is it a gift from Paul? The novel ends without resolving the mystery.
Pages 214-258 Analysis
If the novel begins with Amber suspended between reality and a dreamworld, lost to a world of shadows and fragments, and emerges gradually from the shadowy world, it is the reader who reverses that movement. In these closing chapters, even as Amber surfaces from her comatose oblivion and reveals one surprising plot point after another, and even as the picture of Claire’s obsessive friendship and her malicious nature begins to emerge, the reader becomes a variation of Amber from the early pages. Is Amber telling the truth or is the entire sequence of confessional facts a manifestation of her obsessive-compulsive disorder? Is she at last recovering her memory and understanding her part in her parents’ death and how despicably her fake sister used her, finally asserting a strength of character she has not shown? She plots an end to Claire’s emotional terrorism the only way she can: She will kill Claire. To ensure nothing is ever revealed and on the hunch that Claire and her husband might have shared confidences, she rids her life of Claire’s toxic influence by dispatching her, with perfect symbolic symmetry, in a vicious housefire kind of like how Claire herself dispatched Amber’s parents.
The issue, of course, is the admission of OCD. Although Amber herself is offhanded in admitting it and dismisses the diagnosis, even she admits her obsession with order has only gotten worse as an adult. Undoubtedly, the reader has a mess on their own hands: two sets of dead parents (one, maybe both, under questionable circumstances), two dead unborn babies, a dead sister and her husband, and a dead ex-boyfriend. Amber in these closing pages maybe is doing what those impacted by OCD do: She hurriedly tidies up the mess and establishes a kind of order in which Claire will play the villain, Paul the quiet hero, and Amber herself the emerging moral center who acts, although clearly illegally (she kills two people), to save herself and her marriage and, in her eyes, Claire’s own children.
Amber within her own story emerges as the unexpectedly strong woman who at last throws off the smothering and dictatorial control of Claire. Because Claire, in her own compulsion to protect Amber as she has done since the two first met, has dispensed with Edward, Amber looks about and feels, yes, this is good, this is right, this is happiness. For the briefest possible moment, the world and Amber’s need for order align: “I am in paradise with my family and this is what happiness feels like. I’m not sure I have ever truly known it before” (258). It feels like a fairy-tale ending—indeed, Amber’s account of her awakening from the coma only after Paul bestows love’s sweet kiss on her recalls (or perhaps parodies) the awakening of Sleeping Beauty.
The questions, however, persist. Does the world finally fall into place? Is Amber what she appears to be? Has she earned the happiness she claims at the end, the happiness of a successful husband and children—or has she stolen it, having killed Claire and her husband on Valentine’s Day in cold blood and then, in a brilliant stroke, ruined her boss by framing her for Claire’s murder, thus getting even with a woman who destroyed her family’s happiness (not Claire’s) and who has finally paid the price? Is Amber then a victim or victimizer? Just when those pieces seem to fall in to place, Amber is delivered the bracelet on a tray. It is held together like the one Claire stole from Amber when they were kids—down to the safety pin holding it together—except it has a different inscription. In that last sentence, the reader is left like Amber at the beginning: puzzled, uncertain, struggling to piece together a semblance of a cohesive plot, struggling to bring order to the emotional and psychological mess of Amber and Claire, trying to sort out what is real and what may or may not be lies. If Claire has survived the poisoning and the housefire and send a mock-up of the bracelet as a pernicious threat, then Amber faces a new world of threat and anxiety. If Paul bought it as a kind of going away present, trying to restore a bracelet that meant something to his wife down to the safety pin detail in a cute, even charming gesture of love, then Amber may have gotten away with a double murder. Or is Edward back, intent now on submerging Amber in a brutal environment of psychological torture beginning with sending the bracelet to taunt her?
In the end, the novel offers no reassuring answer. There is no way to objectively determine who is gaslighting whom—is Amber using the diary her husband gave her to gaslight the reader, to create a coherent story to cover all the dead bodies that have seemed to amass around her, and managing neatly to skirt any responsibility for any of them? Is she a hapless victim or a cunning psychopath? Is the diary we are reading actually Amber’s creation using the gift from Paul to frame her dead sister for all the mayhem she has caused? Much as the bracelet on the tray pitches the novel into mystery, the reader is dropped summarily into a shadowy world of possibilities, perhaps, and maybes.
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