Now
I’m better, everyone tells me so.
I’m still not talking, but they are starting to think I soon will.
There’s the same roll call of visitors: Sam almost every day, the children two or three times a week, Liv at the weekend.
My father came and I felt bad for him, getting the silent treatment after his sleepless night on the red-eye.
He sat in the visitors’ chair, talking to me in that loud, self-conscious voice they all used in the beginning, and after a while his conversation ran out.
I knew without looking that his lips would be pressed together, brow creased: his not-crying face.
I knew he’d be thinking of my mother, of my sweet, nice, unchequered childhood; he’d be wondering how, after such a glorious beginning, we’d got to here.
I’m wondering the same thing myself.
The second time he came, he brought my favourite childhood book with him and began to read.
He started on page one, Cassandra sitting in the kitchen sink using the last of the daylight to begin her journal.
I’d read this book in the weeks after my mother died, over and over, so that not just sentences but whole pages of text were imprinted on my mind.
They are still there; I can anticipate each word, each stretch of dialogue before it comes.
And I see the drawings, of course, no need to look.
Those wonderful detailed pen-and-ink drawings that remind me of you.
He reads the whole book to me before he leaves, four or five hours at a time, and halfway through, I reach out to take his hand; I feel a sort of peace.
I’m still waiting for you to visit; just a minute or two of looking would be enough.
And knowing that you had forgiven me, of course.
The big one. Sam, with his expert knowledge of his wife, knows how I long for this forgiveness.
I think he believes it’s the cure-all, the thing that would kick-start me into talking.
If he could frogmarch you here and have you deliver it, gun held against your head until you spat out the words, then he would.
Of course he’s passed all this on to Greg, and our therapy sessions now focus exclusively on that fateful night with Jack.
It’s comical, really, how I sit here like a wooden block while he tries to therapise me back into blind drunkenness.
‘You’d had four or five shots of tequila,’ he says, ‘and you were dancing.’
He mentions your name, my love; he does this a lot.
‘Lucian was watching you from the sofa,’ he says.
‘And Jack was next to him, watching you too.’
He pauses for effect so that I can feel Jack’s eyes upon me; I must allow their particular blue to burn right through my consciousness.
He describes you leaving me, going off to see your uncle; he asks me to feel the sensation of being left alone with Jack, for the first time.
‘Perhaps you felt a little turned on by him watching you. There’s nothing wrong in that.
Everyone likes to be admired, especially when we’re young.
’
‘Perhaps,’ he says, after another powerful moment of silence, ‘it was you who made the first move?’
Like I say, he’s a good psychiatrist. He knows his stuff.
He knows how to get results.
It may have taken time, but he has achieved exactly what he wants.
My mind filled with nothing but those images I spent so many years trying to avoid.
No more running. No more hiding.
Time to face my past head-on.