7. MARGAUX

I COULDN’T SLEEP. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t do anything. I scoured my computer for updates of stolen cars and cats, but there was nothing. There was no word from Lyndon. I walked around the Rocks, watching people come and go from the large cruise ship docked in the harbour. I sat on the grass outside the Museum of Contemporary Art while acid sloshed around my belly. I couldn’t sit still for long. The didgeridoo player’s music felt like an assault on my splintered nerves and I had to leave. I paced the streets, wandering into stores, picking things up and putting them down. I could see shop assistants talking to me, but I couldn’t hear a word they were saying.

How could he do this to me after thirty-five years of marriage and two kids? How could he just up and leave?

Granted, a part of Lyndon had always been inaccessible to me, but he was a good husband: funny, good looking, and a good provider. We’d met when we were both so young. But I had never regretted our youthful marriage or the decision to have children early on. A family was the only thing in life I had ever wanted. And I knew Lyndon wanted that too.

I had always known that his job meant a great deal to him and that he was terrified by the chasm of change into which he’d been flung. And I also knew, which the children did not, that aging felt increasingly like a road race run on spavined feet and the words “weight-bearing exercise,” simply meant making the effort to stand up. This was why I had suggested the trip. And yet it hadn’t only been for Lyndon’s sake but for mine as well. Did Lyndon think getting old was easy for me? Wait, Lyndon’s motto was, Don’t think about it, remember? Just don’t think about it. Like that would fix everything. But I was a thinker. I thought about everything and I’d thought that this trip would be good for Lyndon and me. It would shake us out of our little Oakville lives and kick-start us into a new future together.

All I had wanted was to feel the optimism of having something to look forward to. To know that there were new adventures in the world that would push bone density scans, middle-age hearing loss, and weakening vision to the back of my mind. I had wanted to feel alive, not decrepit. And now Lyndon had thrown me into a terrible limbo where time and place lost all meaning.

I picked up a paperweight at an outdoor market stall in Paddington. A blue peony lay unfurled in the round, solid clear glass. Somehow the weight of thing in my hand reassured me. It was a ridiculous purchase, this irrelevant heavy glass ball, but I needed it. The weight made me feel grounded. As long as I held onto it, the fragments of my mind wouldn’t scatter into the wind like so many dandelions gone to seed.

I clutched the ball in both hands and held it against my belly as I walked. A semblance of calm replaced the floaty restless fever of my confused railings at Lyndon and cleared the way for a quiet, white-hot, seething fury.