Every few months I open the en-suite’s mirror cabinet and inventory the medicines we keep there. The collection seems to grow each year. There had been a time when all I seemed to need was antiperspirant and toothpaste. Now the cabinet overflows with eczema creams and nasal sprays. There are heat packs and muscle balms stacked in uneven piles, all manner of decongestants and heartburn tablets. A litany of migraine medications.
On the lowest shelf are Phineas’s old medicines. Bottles of dinosaur-shaped vitamins, plastic syringes, liquid paracetamol, tubes of antiseptic ointments. I lift each and quietly drop them into the trash can at my feet. The act feels illicit, a subtle betrayal, and I go about my work quietly, praying that Simone won’t hear me.
At the back of the cabinet, hidden in a floral bag, I find a pill bottle. I pick it up and turn it over in my hand. Simone’s initials are printed across the label and beneath it, in block capitals, is the name of a drug I don’t recognise. When I type it into my phone the results suggest they are a sleep aid, but in all the time I’ve known her she’s never struggled with insomnia.
When I hear her stirring in the bedroom I return the bottle to its hiding place and turn off the lights. I stare at her from the doorway. I consider mentioning the discovery but decide against it.
‘You’re still reading that?’ I ask as I lift the covers and slide in beside her.
She turns the book over in her hand and studies the cover. ‘I can’t seem to finish it. I read a page but nothing sticks. I try to focus on a paragraph. A sentence. But I can’t make any progress.’
‘Why not start something new?’
‘It would feel too much like breaking a promise,’ she says.
When I look at her face it seems wrong, somehow, as if the discovery of the pill bottle has altered my perception of her. I turn my bedside lamp off and watch as she does the same. We lie together in the darkness. I think about the pills. How long had she been taking them? Why would she feel the need to hide them?
I find myself unusually conscious of her presence, as if I am sleeping next to a stranger. I feel the heat of her body but it brings me little comfort. There had been a time when I considered us fundamentally the same person, but lately I feel a chasm opening between us. I consider for a moment the disquieting notion that a life need not be actively abandoned or dismantled, but simply observed with growing distance until one day it is no longer your own.
‘Do you remember the week we brought him home?’ she asks suddenly.
She rolls to face me and I can see her eyes in the darkness. They reflect a light that doesn’t exist. The flickering embers of a campfire in some imagined distance.
‘I remember.’
‘The only place you could get him to settle was here, between us.’
‘You were worried because all the books said it was dangerous.’
‘When he finally fell asleep I asked you if you loved him. Do you remember what you said?’
‘I do.’
There is a silence between us. A longing. I feel her body tense as she speaks the words. ‘Tell me again.’
I sigh, suddenly exhausted. ‘Simone.’
‘Please. Just once.’
‘I said that I did. But that it was a new sort of love. A desperate, frantic love.’
She rolls over then. I rest my hand on her back and feel her panting. The sharp, shallow breaths that only he could cause. She shuffles herself away to a cold patch of the mattress and is asleep in minutes.
I feel the veins in my neck tighten. I think of the therapist. How much are we paying her? Enough to live in that bizarre country house, to fund those ridiculous loose-leaf teas. And to what end? So that I can sit at night and listen while my wife cries herself to sleep? So that I can watch as she tosses and turns, endlessly calling his name?
Would there ever be an end to it, or was this simply what we had been reduced to? A sad story you heard whispered about at dinner parties? A page you re-read perpetually, searching for an answer that would never come?
I thrash and twist until the sheets are wrapped round my body, slick with sweat, and then I tear them off me and skulk downstairs to the kitchen, where I pour myself a glass of water.
I hold it up to the light and consider throwing it through the window. I imagine ripping the cupboard doors off their hinges, hurling dinner plates into drywall, ripping apart plasterboard. I think about reducing the house down to its very foundation, to nothing. I imagine leaving, surveying the wreckage of my life with a growing distance and feeling a great relief. The act of destruction somehow constructive.
I grip the counter and take a moment to collect myself. When I turn the kitchen faucet off I’m surprised to find that I can still hear the sound of running water.
I open the cupboards beneath the sink and run my hands along the pipework but find them dry to the touch. I wander the house tightening faucet handles and checking radiator valves, but I can’t spot any sign of a leak. When I eventually give up and slide back into bed, Simone stirs. The sound is somehow louder in our bedroom.
‘Do you not hear that?’ I ask her.
‘Hear what?’
‘I can hear running water.’
‘You were probably just dreaming,’ she says hazily.
But I haven’t been to sleep.