Sometimes I Lie

The novel uses the symbol of the coma ironically. In medicine, a coma is the body’s way of suspending functions; it is a therapeutic strategy for survival. It can be the body’s way of righting itself after trauma. It promises recovery after a period of the body’s readjustment to injury, in this case Amber’s flying through the windshield.

Amber’s emotional turmoil surfaces as she struggles to recollect what happened to her. She shares her problematic marriage to a novelist who more and more prefers time apart surrounded by made-up people doing made-up things. Her adopted younger sister, Claire, reveals a distinct menacing threat, particularly her manipulations of Amber at her job, compelling Amber to sabotage the career of her boss to settle a grudge Claire, not Amber, holds. There is the unresolved guilt over her parents’ deaths and the return of a disturbed ex-boyfriend. It is small wonder that Amber, in part at least, relishes her respite apart, the “free fall between sleep and consciousness” (1). Here, however, the coma works ironically at first. The longer the coma persists (and Amber understands only later that her ex-boyfriend, now a porter in the hospital, prolongs her comatose state using her IV drip with a special drug cocktail), the more alarmed Amber becomes as she pieces together the depth of Claire’s villainy and her own part in the fall of Madeline and the deaths of her own parents.

Much like a fairy tale, it is only Paul’s sweet “I love you” and his delicate kiss on New Year’s Eve that stirs Amber awake. At last, she pushes through the miasmic fog of the drug-induced coma. Her recovery, ironically, can be completed only after she poisons Claire, a criminal act, certainly, but one that reflects Amber’s own helplessness and her moral outrage. She emerges from the coma physically—the novel closes some two months after her awakening, and she is enjoying the company of her new family—but that recovery is ironic. Indeed, in her return from the darkness of the coma, she is awakened into a new awareness of the world and its dark potential for evil.

Imaginary friends are coping mechanisms for kids with troubled home lives, difficult tensions in school, or the emotional pressures from loneliness or shyness. Imaginary friends are reassuring presences for kids transitioning into adulthood.

At age 35, Amber Reynolds maintains a tight relationship with an entirely imaginary friend named Jo. It is unsettling because within the novel Jo appears in scenes, chats with Amber, and is even described as joining Amber for lunch. It is only when Paul makes queries at the radio station and finds no Jo working there that the reader is led to suspect this is the same Jo that Amber/Taylor shared with Claire when they were kids. What is understandable for a child of 10, particularly given Amber’s difficult relationship with her parents, most notably a mother who tells her she never wanted children, seems more troubling at midlife. Amber’s imaginary friend reveals Amber’s profound loneliness, her inability to trust people, and her deep psychological need for the comfort and support she did not feel her husband or her adopted younger sister could give.

The imaginary friend reveals the effects of Amber’s disastrous relationship with Edward Clarke and her inability to entirely trust Paul. Unlike Paul, who maintains a sense of fact and fiction out in his writer’s shed, Amber cares for Jo (when Claire initially rejects the idea of an imaginary friend, Amber castigates her for hurting Jo’s feelings) in ways that reveal her emotional emptiness and her dark need for validation, the need that in turn drives her into the machinations of Claire. Jo’s last appearance, when a comatose Amber struggles with trying to remember whether Paul was in fact driving the car, she reassures her that Paul loves her and that she gave up a promising job at the BBC for nothing, a reflection that Jo has become something of her conscience, telling her to love the man who loves her and stop being Claire’s puppet. As Jo departs, she calms Amber down, reminding her it is time for Amber to face the real world.

The bracelet, or more likely bracelets, symbolizes the persistence of mystery and the strategies through which the novel manipulates uncertainty, leaving the reader suspended between and among likely possibilities but nowhere near the kind of closure expected in a traditional mystery thriller. In a novel that sustains the deepening feel of a mystery thriller by regularly revealing that what the reader has assumed up to that point may be an elaborate ruse, the final plot twist, in the closing two sentences, focuses on a bracelet that appears without explanation on the room service tray at the holiday resort where Amber and her new family are relaxing before Paul heads off to America. The holiday represents the feeling, new to the novel, that Amber can at last relax. She has killed off her nemesis with a certain calculated kill-or-be-killed survivalist logic. In addition, in adopting Claire’s twins, Amber has provided Paul with the family they long discussed having and that the accident, actually Claire’s calculated attempt to destroy the baby that might pry Amber away from her, destroyed. Amber recounts as Paul pours a glass of champagne, “I realize I am happy. Things are so much better between us now. Back to how they used to be. This is all I ever wanted. I am in paradise with my family and this is what happiness feels like” (258). That passage reads like the tidy closing of countless mysteries in which the protagonist, after going through trauma, now faces only the bright prospects of a future uncluttered with the pain and the anxieties of the past.

The thin bracelet on the serving tray, held together with an “old, slightly rusty safety pin” (258), is and is not the bracelet Claire recalls stealing from Amber/Taylor’s home during a sleepover when they were 10. When Claire’s mother found the bracelet, all the lies Claire told to explain it infuriated her mother, and she yanked the bracelet off Claire’s wrist. When she recovered it, Claire used the safety pin to hold it together—a detail that suggests Claire has in fact survived the poisoning and the house fire and now lurks somewhere along the periphery of Amber’s happiness. Claire becomes like one of the mutant killers in a slasher flick unable to be killed. The bracelet, however, is engraved, like Amber’s, but the engraving is different. It is not the loving message from Amber’s mother but rather Amber’s birthdate. It is and is not that bracelet. The bracelet symbolizes that any tidy closure to this novel is dicey and fragile at best, like that bracelet held together with just a safety pin. Is it a going-away gift from Paul? Unlikely given the rusty safety pin. Is it from Edward? Maybe—his body was never recovered—but again why a safety pin? Maybe Claire did not die in the fire; the last thing that Amber notes is Claire’s shallow breathing before she sets the house on fire. She would understand how the bracelet would affect Amber, but how did she change the engraving, and why?

The point must be that Amber—and the novel—is plunged once again into the unsettling world of uncertainty. The bracelet provides the final mystery in a plot that is filled with them.