We climb the mountain but the mountain does not end. The cape of night hangs over us, but there are no stars. They are elsewhere tonight.
‘I can’t do this,’ I say.
There isn’t an ounce of energy left in my body. I feel as though my feet are sinking through the floor.
‘You’re free to leave at any time,’ the therapist says and she looks briefly surprised when I open the driver’s side door and roll myself out of the car, landing on the asphalt and pulling myself up weakly.
I watch the headlights of the car disappear into the darkness and for a moment I enjoy the silence. I imagine the therapist sitting calmly in the back seat as the car teeters over the edge of the mountain and then plummets, crashing to the ground and erupting in a plume of smoke and fire. But then the headlights catch me from behind, illuminating the silhouette of my body, and the car pulls up beside me once again.
‘You of all people should know it’s possible to leave without truly leaving,’ the therapist says as I slide back into the driver’s seat. The car pushes forward again undeterred, casting us into darkness.
‘What do you want from me?’ I ask.
‘I want you to tell me why you decided to go home,’ she says.
‘I missed Simone,’ I say. ‘I didn’t want to be without her.’
That’s the partial truth.
The reality is that I knew I could exist without her.
But as what?
As whom?
‘So you went home? You made reparations?’
‘Yes,’ I say. We took it a day at a time. We agreed to visit a therapist.
‘It’s a nice story,’ the therapist says. ‘But it’s not the truth.’
I begin to feel as though I’ve fallen down a staircase in my mind. I see the bouquets dug out of the compost bin, laid out in a neat row at the foot of the garden. Each bound by beautiful lilac ribbon – the way she kept her hair.
‘You heard running water,’ she says. ‘When you got home you thought a pipe had burst. It was coming from the hall landing.’
I hear the plumber’s voice ring out in my mind. You had a leak here at one point.
I close my eyes and find myself at the foot of the stairs. I climb forever, treading water. The carpets sodden. The wallpaper pockmarked and peeling from water damage. I follow the sound of running water to the master bathroom. It spills out from beneath the crack of the door.
How long had it been running?
‘I called out to her but she wouldn’t answer,’ I say. ‘So I started hammering on the door. Begging. Pleading. Please, Simone. Please, no.’
I drove my shoulder into the door repeatedly. Over and over and over again. I can still hear the sound of my footsteps falling heavy against the hardwood flooring like distant thunder. Until finally it came loose with a sickening crack.
I think of the hairline fracture in the doorway of the master bathroom.
The fresh screws affixing the hinges.
‘I found her in the bathtub,’ I weep, swallowing panicked breaths. ‘They said she must have been there for days.’
Her head bloated as if from some horrific allergy.
The whites of her eyes shot red and inflamed beneath the water.
At the coroner’s inquest they reconstructed her final hours with a precision that felt slanderous, the pathologist reducing her life to a series of line items. She left no note. No explanation. But her purpose seemed self-evident. She had drawn a bath and taken pills. She had waited patiently for them to take her away, for her body to slip beneath the surface of the water so that she could finally be with him. It was only when the dosage proved ineffective that she made a deep incision along her inner thigh. A violent act. One final, misguided punishment.
I remember being surprised by how clear the water had been when I found her. My horror when I looked closer and realised that parts of her had settled at the bottom of the bathtub as a sort of black sediment. It was the darkest colour I had ever seen. Not a colour at all but rather a total absence of light.
They were both there now, beneath the black water. She had gone to find him. Her arms outstretched. Her fingers straining to hold him one last time.
I remember the ambulance arriving in the street.
I remember men in uniforms storming up the driveway.
I remember them carrying her out in a bag.
And that night in my dreams I remember standing at the edge of a lake. The water black, but unbroken. Reflective as if made out of polished glass. A perfect mirror.
From the shoreline I watched as birds dove from trees and careened along, their wingtips mere inches from the surface. I felt a great anxiety watching them, as if piercing the water would somehow amount to a terrible disaster. A great flood, perhaps. Or a famine. Something biblical.
So I resolved to sit at the water’s edge like a guardian, to ward off any evildoers. To dance and shout and holler when any such attempt was made. But as I waited I felt myself drawn closer and closer to the edge. Until I was close enough to crane my neck and see my own reflection.
But when I looked I saw that I was changed.
No longer a man at all but a blanket of the same crystalline water. And upon seeing myself I wept, my tears rippling out across the surface of the water. Across the surface of my own body.