The therapist wanders lazily out of the hospital and I follow behind her. I feel a swirling beneath my navel. A mixture of arousal and fear. She steps into the street without so much as a glance and I call out to warn her but of course it’s deserted. It will remain so for a long time, likely until the wilderness reclaims it.
She slips into the back seat of my car and I get behind the wheel. I look at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘What do you want?’ I ask.
‘I want you to drive,’ she says, picking at one of her cuticles. So I drive. We are alone in the world now. I wind the window down and hear nothing but the steady thump of rubber on asphalt.
‘Is there anything more terrifying than the absence of sound?’ I ask.
‘Is there anything sadder than spending your days longing for it?’ she responds.
In the back seat I watch her recline.
‘Am I sick? Is any of this real?’ I ask.
She sighs heavily, leaning her head back to stare at the sky through the rear window. ‘All of this time and you’re still asking the wrong questions.’
‘I don’t understand what you want.’
‘Let’s try a memory exercise,’ she says, clapping her hands together in frustration. ‘What’s the first thing you can remember about the day Phineas died?’
Outside I can see the last rays of sunlight filtering through the treetops and am surprised to find that we are no longer on the highway at all but a winding mountain road bordered by pine trees on both sides.
I search my mind desperately. ‘I don’t know. I got up with him. We made breakfast. Simone slept in. She’d been away at a conference and got in late.’
‘That’s good. What else?’
The act of remembering is physically exhausting, like working an atrophied muscle. I feel the sting of memory. ‘When Simone got up she suggested we go to the beach, since we hadn’t seen much of each other lately.’
‘You’re paraphrasing.’
‘This is pointless.’
‘I want to hear you say the words,’ she says.
The memory is distant. I pull it through the pink of my mind and it sinks in, like dental floss against gums. The taste of iron fills my mouth. ‘She said she dreamt we were at sea. She wanted to spend the day by the water.’
Outside the trees grow immeasurably tall, their tips reaching as if to pierce the sky. The sides of the road now walled off completely by endless woodland. There are no road signs, no houses. No parked cars. Everything we pass is swallowed by darkness. I see the world a few feet at a time, illuminated by my headlights.
‘Who does this help, this endless repetition?’ I ask the therapist.
‘Close your eyes,’ she says. ‘Tell me something good.’
I think of the first time I kissed Simone. How my stomach cramped and the room simmered and my heart beat so heavily it felt like my body was oscillating. And what was it I said? ‘So that’s what lips are for?’ And how she laughed. But it felt revelatory.
And though I haven’t spoken aloud the therapist says, ‘Tell me how the two of you met.’
‘We met through work. Separate companies, but our offices were in the same building. We ran into each other from time to time at lunch. She’d tie her hair up with these beautiful ribbons. I thought it was cute. I’d watch from my office window for a woman with ribbon in her hair.’
I have had my eyes shut for what feels like minutes. When I open them I find that I am no longer driving, but being driven. The car barrelling forward, snaking round the bends of the mountain path of its own accord.
‘Did you blame her for his death?’
‘A part of me did. A part of me hated her. But I could see that she blamed herself more than I ever could, more than I had any right to. It was a hot day. She was exhausted. She closed her eyes for a second.’
‘Did you argue about it?’
‘About culpability? No. We actively avoided discussing it. It simply became “the accident”. But her feelings were clear. To her it was indefensible.’
‘But that wasn’t entirely the case, was it?’ the therapist asks.
I grip the steering wheel until my knuckles turn white. In the dark of my mind I feel brief bursts of light. I remember shaking her awake on the beach towel. I remember the ambulance arriving and pronouncing him dead. I remember the police taking statements at the hospital.
But more than anything I remember waiting desperately for her to ask me where I’d been. Why I’d wandered off and left them both there. Because I could see that she was tired. It haunted me. In the darkness of our bedroom I would lie next to her and try to build the courage to admit that I’d wandered off because I needed a break. She’d been away all week at that stupid conference, and I wanted desperately to spend the day at home. To be rid of him. To be alone with myself. But the longer I remained silent the greater the injustice became, the more apparent my selfishness.
‘When Simone told me she was pregnant I remember thinking: this is it. It was time to rise to the occasion. To become the man she deserved. But I stayed the same and she grew. Throughout the pregnancy she’d chart her progress in the bathroom mirror. I’d brush my teeth and she’d say, “Today he’s the size of a sesame seed.” Then a blueberry, and a few weeks later a grape. She bought him clothes and furnished his room. She stocked talc powder and baby wipes in preparation. “He’s the size of an aubergine,” she’d say, and hand me cases of nappy rash ointment.’
I put my foot on the brake but the car fails to stop. I take my hands from the wheel entirely and find it turns on its own. We continue to skulk up the steep incline of the mountain. I feel the pull of gravity in my stomach.
‘I came home from work one day and her feet had swollen so badly she looked like a cartoon. She told me he was the size of a honeydew melon and that he had a favourite song. I didn’t believe it until she put it on the stereo and let me feel him bouncing around in there.’
I sob openly, resting my head against the driver’s side window. Searching desperately in the wing mirrors for any sign of flashing lights. A routine traffic stop. An authority figure.
‘She carried him for nine months. He grew inside her. What did I do, besides paint his room a pea green and put together a couple pieces of flatpack furniture? She gave herself to him. She became his home. Can you imagine anything so intimate?’
When it was time I drove her to the hospital in the dead of night. She panted in the passenger seat, clutching her belly. I told her hold on, just hold on. Sometimes at night I close my eyes and I can still see the streetlights swaying in the storm winds. The car a life raft in the darkness.
‘We got him home and everyone who came by the house said he was beautiful but I couldn’t see it. It felt like a conspiracy. He was this pink, ruined thing. He ate with his eyes screwed shut. He slept that way too. And in the night when he woke and called out he looked just the same. We gave him everything we had but it still wasn’t enough. I felt suffocated. I felt broken. But not Simone. At some point we switched roles. When it became too much she took the wheel. She told me hold on, just hold on. She knew that it would come right, and it did. Being his father was the great privilege of my life. But it remained difficult. Perhaps more difficult than it should ever have to be.’
I’m quiet for a moment.
‘Every time I saw myself in him it made me want to run. You know how kids put their hands to glass and smear it? That’s how it felt. He was this beautiful, pure thing. And my fingerprints stained him. It was like looking into a black mirror.’