It was Frank’s text that set Edie off. From the empty spaces between his understatements, she knew instinctively what Maggie had done. She has known Maggie for even longer than Frank has, and for the last few months she has expected this. She tried to get through to Maggie, to them both, but it was impossible. The curtains were closed, the doors locked, and they never answered the bell. It reminded her of the pictures in her school history textbooks of the quarantine zones set up to contain cholera in the 1800s. But there is no sickness like that of a mother desperately trying to reach out to her only child.
At reception, she tells them she is Maggie’s sister. A lie, but a forgivable one, if such a thing exists. She is directed down the intensive-care corridor, but they haven’t given her a room number, assuming she must have it from another member of this most imaginary family. She sees a man with his head between his knees and is drawn to him like a moth to a dying flame.
She doesn’t say a word when she reaches Frank. Instead she rubs her hand slowly up and down his back. It reminds him of what Maggie used to do, but there isn’t the same comfort in that linear motion as there was in the perfect circles his wife would trace. After half an hour, maybe a little less, the nurse comes out with a blanket. It is the same one that Frank has slept with for the past three nights, but she has folded it so it is almost as good as new. Together they prop Frank up so he can rest his head on Edie’s shoulder and his knees are free for the blanket. Every muscle of his body is trembling, even with the woolen covering.
In the doctor’s office, the prognosis is directed at Edie, despite the fact that she has only just arrived. He apologizes for not being able to provide a full update earlier, but his attentions have been focused on stabilizing Mrs. Hobbs. Maggie is being woken, slowly, with the help of their catalogue of increasingly serious-looking technology. There will be a whole team of doctors continuing to work on her for the next twenty-four hours—visitors strictly prohibited, he’s afraid—so they need to head home until the following afternoon at the very earliest. The period until then will be critical. Of course, if there is an urgent development, someone will call.
Edie has to drag Frank back to her car. He is like a child playing dead. It is as if the fight has gone out of him, but she doubts that can be true. Frank has always been ferociously loyal to Maggie. If there is anyone with the sheer force of devotion to safeguard a recovery, it is him.
At the house, Edie rummages in his pockets for the keys, which feels a rather obscene thing to be doing to your best friend’s husband, even in the circumstances. She takes out his phone while she is at it so she can charge it and make sure he has no excuse for ignoring her calls and texts again. Once she has the door open, Frank finds his own way to the sitting room, his gait uneven, as if one leg has somehow shortened during his hospital stay.
Edie heads off to the freezer to find something she can reheat for him. Frank has always been skinny, one of those men who never quite fill out their beanpole teenage self, but now he is positively concave, every bone in his upper body jutting into her when he sat with his head on her shoulder in the hospital.
She sets a dish of nondescript casserole in front of him and offers to stay. She really means it. She is Maggie’s friend, but she has always liked Frank. He was good enough for Maggie, perhaps too good, and she cannot stand to see him like this. No, he doesn’t want the company. There is a mumbled thank-you and then he looks out the window so that Edie doesn’t see him cry. This is not her cross to bear, much as she has tried to take some of the weight.
When Frank is alone, when he has heard the car door shut and seen the reversing lights flashing in the glass, he stands up and heads to the door. On the way, his eye is drawn to a photo of the three of them, in pride of place on the mantlepiece. In it, Eleanor is dressed as a dinosaur, a costume he’d bought for her fourth birthday. It was hot, and they all came home light-headed and rosy-hued. It feels like yesterday, so recent that, subconsciously, he reaches up to touch the back of his neck, as if there is a burn still radiating its heat.
It’s all too much, and he turns the photo facedown. Frank stumbles through to the kitchen; he wanted to go in there the moment he arrived back, but it was something he had to do by himself. He is struck by how normal it looks, aside from the chairs strewn about in the paramedics’ frenzied attempts to keep her alive. There is the usual tidy collection of food waste, a glass, an abandoned tea towel.
He takes the seat where he found Maggie, almost expecting it still to be warm from her body, with all the will of a man entrenched in his habits and crazed with grief. He wants to relive her last moments here. He wants to know what she was thinking. Some of it he already knows, however much he has tried to suppress the thoughts—the feeling of having been let down, of being alone and desperate to speak to him. For some people, their pain is a space to retreat into; a slow-setting solitude away from everyone and everything else in life. For others, it is an itch that triggers a ceaseless need to speak. If Maggie could just . . . could just have . . . verbalized it all—wouldn’t that have offered some sliver of relief?
It is whilst Frank is lost in his reverie that his hands drift over the vinyl tablecloth. He picks up the brightly colored stone that is weighing down the bills. It is oddly familiar, but at first he can’t quite place it. Then he turns it over in his palm; on the base the word mum has been painted, the wobbly letters painstakingly drawn out in different sizes, a faded pencil guide beneath. It is enough to sear, and he drops it back on the papers, instead running his fingertips across the red leather planner that has been sitting on the table ever since they bought it together over a decade ago, in a tiny stationer’s shop in Paris on one of the rare trips abroad that they took, just the two of them, after Eleanor was born.
It is a beautiful book, even for a man with no head for aesthetics. In the main, it is a journal, thick A5 pages with faint lines like the sort snails leave on the paving stones after the rain. On the right, there is a narrow section for lists, barely three inches wide. At the recommendation of the shopkeeper, who took himself terribly seriously, they’d had Maggie’s initials embossed on the front, even though it had felt like an indulgence.
Frank has never been nosy. What would be the need? He just wants to feel the last thing her hands held. Prior to this week, the planner has only ever been used for perfunctory household matters. Lists, mainly, the odd page torn out to leave a note for whoever had come to fix the sink. He opens the book, expecting to see the last shopping list. Instead he sees his name. He shuts his eyes and opens them again, blinks heavily a few times, like they instruct you to do at the optician’s. A bead of sweat drops from his forehead into his eye. He rubs it, blinks, looks again.
Frank.
She wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. Why had he ever thought that was a possibility? Perhaps because he hasn’t had a chance to think, besides keeping Maggie alive, that’s why.
Frank.
Those five little letters should bring relief, but in reality all Frank feels is panic. He has spent the best part of half a year dwelling on what he has to say. In the churning cesspit of his mind he has managed to forget that maybe, just maybe, Maggie had something to say too.
Something every bit as urgent.
He begins to read.
Seven days to go
Frank, how long do you think it would take you to realize I wasn’t speaking to you? You never have been the most observant man on the planet, so, what, say a day? Two, tops, if you were engrossed in some particularly important project, I’d say.
It took me a week, if I remember correctly. I had an inkling before then, sure, but that was when I knew for definite. Quite remarkable, huh? Then again, no one has ever described you as verbose, nothing even close, and after forty years of marriage, there is so very little that requires us to speak. I know you by heart. Better than the back of my hand—silly phrase that, anyway. Some days I feel as if we have spent decades rehearsing a day-to-day dance that we perform, each action and decision and movement honed to perfection.
I suppose that says a lot about what happened to our relationship, when Eleanor began to spiral. I often wonder whether, if we had spoken more when it started, when we began to realize this wasn’t a phase, that it was something deeper and darker and so much more unsettling, we could have avoided all this. On the other hand, I of all people know that it is so much easier not to speak about something than it is to tackle it head on. Is that what you are doing now, Frank? Is it?
The day I clocked that you weren’t speaking to me, I told myself I would give you six months. It was after Edie had been round and, instead of making our supper, I took every last item in the fridge and smashed them all on the tiles at my feet. When you found me, sodden with sauce, mid-destruction mission, I screamed at you. You can’t have forgotten that.
Why? Why? Why won’t you speak to me?
It was the first time I verbalized it.
Why?
I hated myself for wailing. I never wanted to be that wife. The shrill harpy with the nagging and the whining. I hated myself so much for that, but I couldn’t hold it in.
Why?
Something about the noise managed to hurt my ears after a week in the quiet.
Why?
How many times did I ask that? Ten? Twenty? And each time—nothing from you. Not verbally, at least.
You ran me a bath, silently. I sat on the edge of the tub, watching as you tested the temperature with your fingertips and fiddled with the tap accordingly. I studied every motion in your wrist and the way your eyes wouldn’t move from the flow. I wanted a clue. Did this go beyond the obvious? If not, what the hell was it, Frank? I couldn’t stand to have you retreat from me too.
You dried me off, and I felt myself go limp in your arms. I was so exhausted, by everything, and I thought that I had finished myself off with my outburst. Then, when you tucked me into bed, I found just enough energy to grab for your hand. You always did say that I never ceased to surprise you. I hoped I could get through to you then, that I could press my message into your palm somewhere between your heart line and your lifeline.
It was so tender, holding hands like that, and so like the old days when things were happier and easier that I began to cry. I cried so much that I was sick, right on the pillowcase. I couldn’t move to change it. You came round to my side of the bed, propped my head up with one arm, and disposed of the wet bedding with the other. I thought you might say something then. Don’t, perhaps. Even being chided like a child would have been better than nothing.
Silence. With your arms around me, I told myself I would give you six months to find your voice. That would be enough, surely. In the face of forty years of marriage, what is six months? The blink of an eye. A long, torturous, stinging blink. But a blink nonetheless. And if six months wasn’t enough? Well, I didn’t think I would have to deal with that possibility.
And yet here we are. Five months, three weeks, and still nothing. I can’t do this anymore. I said I would never leave you; I must have said that a thousand times over the course of our marriage. I meant it every time. But I never imagined it would come to this.
Now we are into my last week, the last seven days I promised myself, and I know that I cannot go without leaving a clean slate. Or the cleanest one I can manage under these conditions. If you won’t reach out to me, I can still find a way of reaching out to you.
There is so much I always meant to tell you but somehow never could—my confessions, Frank, if you will. These are my secrets, everything I couldn’t say over the course of our married life. There are reasons why I didn’t tell you at the time, you’ll see that, but if it boils down to just one thing, it is this: I didn’t want to lose you. I don’t want to leave you now either, but it’s better this way.
I hope you can absolve me with that huge heart of yours. If not, then at least you can see how much I loved you, with everything that I am.