The Shadow Between Us

by Carol Mason

  And I wanted to say thanks for listening to me. Thanks for the friendship. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t think I’d be leaving so quickly but then again it’s probably a good time as my staying might have complicated things further for both of us . . . I think you know what I mean.

  Travel safe,

  Ned

  I stare at the address scribbled at the bottom. A PO box in Tampa.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The butterflies are back the instant I turn on to Abigail Avenue. Yet I am not as bothered as I was before about kids who might be meandering home from school, mums returning from dog walks. This is my home, and there is something liberating about wanting to come back to it. The nerves in my stomach feel like positive ones for a change.

  I am often struck by how with absence we can find much is changed, yet in other ways time stands still. The three blue hydrangeas at the front of the house have sprung up grandly since last summer and now have the bearing of belonging. I planted them the first spring we moved in, digging out some of the existing shrubs with their strong architectural lines to insert a peal of colour. Alfie from two doors down is riding his bike in the cul-de-sac and he waves at me as though he might have just seen me two hours ago, or yesterday. Everyone is getting on with their lives. No one is thinking about me. No one is monitoring what I do.

  Going inside is still a little unsettling. Without me and Jessica filling it and giving it life, with Mark at work, it’s just like it was that last time – a cavern, unlived-in, oddly silent. I set down my suitcase and travel bag by the front door, lay my purse gently on the small table. There is a pile of mail – some of it for Jessica. I see an envelope with the University of Washington State logo on it, but I don’t touch it. There are a couple of pieces for me. I walk into the kitchen that still smells faintly of the eggs and jalapeños Mark would have scrambled for breakfast. Through the half-open window I can hear Wren barking next door. For a while I stare out into the Waxmans’ backyard, waiting to see if the events of the Fourth of July barbecue are going to rush at me again, like before. Nothing happens.

  I take my suitcase upstairs to our bedroom. It smells like it hasn’t been aired out in a while, so I push the window wide open and take a moment or two to reattach myself to the space. Mark’s jim-jams, as he calls them, are splayed on the bed. When I notice them I find myself smiling a little. I realise that bizarrely I’ve missed seeing his stuff almost as much as I’ve missed him. I pick up the top and briefly press its fuzziness to my cheek. I wander into the bathroom and unpack my toiletries first, sliding some of his things along the shelf, staking my claim to the space that used to be mine. Unzipping my suitcase, I set out the neatly folded clothing in piles on the floor, then try to work out a more efficient way of arranging them in my drawers and closet than I had before. New beginnings.

  When I left Port Townsend I dropped an envelope off at the library for Nanette, containing the next month’s rent to give her a little financial leeway, and some instructions Ned gave me on how to best maintain the new deck. For Beth I left an apologetic note along with my phone number. Please let me know when you hear from Thomas.

  As I sit here on the floor – taking a breather from my inspired decision to layer black T-shirts along with white – it occurs to me that life and love are simply the endless process of letting things pass. Whether Ned had stayed or left, I don’t want to wake up every morning beside a hot young damaged guy who is trying out the process of taking steps with someone else, when his heart still belongs to his wife – though I treasure everything that happened that could well have made me arrive at a different conclusion. I want my husband, and the unremarkable everydayness of life with him again. I do. Since I came to this realisation – to something I’ve probably always known – it has made me want to push up and reach beyond my capability for it. To do the things I know are going to be difficult to do.

  I am lying on Jessica’s bed when he comes home. I don’t remember coming in here. I certainly don’t remember falling asleep. At first I’m disorientated and shrink from having to wake up. I just want to keep lying here, my face pressed into her pillow, into the smell of my daughter’s hair. But when I hear him pottering downstairs I force myself to get up and make my presence known.

  I open the bedroom door carefully so as not to shock him but it squeals anyway. Suddenly there is an audible silence from the kitchen.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says when he sees me appear at the top of the stairs. For a moment all he can do is stare at me as though I’m an apparition. ‘I thought . . .’

  He has turned white.

  ‘What?’

  His face loses its shocked apprehension. ‘There was an intruder or something.’

  ‘No.’ I emerge from a small emotional pause. ‘Only me.’

  He continues to stare at me, as though reading meaning into me. I feel we have been here before, only the layers of pain have fallen away a little and I am able to look at him and offer up a smile. ‘Sorry . . .’ I shrug. ‘I wasn’t intending some huge surprise. I don’t know what happened. I fell asleep.’ I am still groggy in my head and let out a long yawn. ‘Oh my gosh, what time is it?’

  ‘Eight,’ he says quietly. ‘I worked late.’ There is a question in his eyes that I know he’s building up to asking. And an answer I am working my way around to giving.

  We stand here, unable to do much but navigate the unspoken. He has a frying pan in his hand. A box of eggs sits on the counter. ‘Didn’t you have eggs for breakfast?’

  He looks at the box as though bewildered by it. ‘There’s not much else in the fridge. I didn’t feel like takeout again.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  He shakes his head, frowns. ‘For what?’

  I open my mouth to reach for words and something happens. Before I can answer, Mark puts the pan down and places the heels of his hands in his eye sockets. I watch him stand there like that for a moment, before he inches to a stool by the island. He lowers himself on to it, rests his elbows on the granite, and then he sighs a long breath through his mouth, like a person trying to get a hold of himself.

  And then I see Mark do the one thing I realise I’ve probably been subconsciously waiting for him to do. He cries. I have seen him cry before, when his tears were trying to be private tears. But not like this. This outpouring, this spontaneous dismantling that begins without provocation or forewarning. It goes on and on. I cannot pull my eyes away from him.

  ‘I’ll go to counselling,’ I say, as I attempt a shaky walk down the stairs. At this point I realise I would say anything to make this better, but surprisingly I actually mean it. ‘I’ll do whatever it takes. Like you said before – with you, or on my own. I promise. I’ll talk to whoever you want me to talk to. We both will. I’ll do what it takes.’ I am remarkably stoic, but in a good way. I look at the three or four flyaway strands of hair standing up on the crown of his head and my heart aches for him. ‘I’ll do this for us. I’ll do it for Jessica.’ I suddenly think of Ned’s words. ‘I’ll do it because I don’t want the alternative.’

  Still he doesn’t look up. I don’t know if he’s heard me. His head bobs gently between his hands with the force of his emotion. I lay my head between his shoulders. His quiet sobbing has no beginning and no end. I try to absorb its shuddering vibrations, as though by doing so I might have the power to take his pain away from him. I can feel his heart beating through his back. His broken heart, keeping step with mine. Together we can try to mend each other’s.

  It was all I ever wanted.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Because I didn’t tell Ned the entire story.

  So I ended up saying it in a letter.

  Dear Ned,

  My daughter isn’t in Italy. Jessica is dead.

  Her head hit the window when I hit Sarah. Not hard. Not even enough for her to remark about it when the paramedics assessed us at the scene. It was much later when we got home – about three hours later – when she complained of a blazing headache. We tho
ught it was tension, shock, but Jessica died later that evening in hospital of an epidural haematoma.

  The doctor called it a rare catastrophic occurrence. People Jessica’s age don’t normally die from a low-impact bump to the temple. But several months before, Jessica had been left with a significant concussion after a fall while skiing. The doctors thought it might have caused a small clot that wasn’t present when they performed an MRI at the time. I couldn’t make sense of it at first. But Mark explained it to me. Jessica hadn’t died because she’d hit her head when I hit Sarah – not directly. She died because there was already an abnormality in her brain.

  I have found this very hard to process. The doctors call what I have complicated grief. It is explained in a certain way that doesn’t offer me any explanations at all. Grief, apparently, can manifest itself in a form that’s so severe and debilitating that to some doctors it meets the definition of a mental illness.

  I have been dealing with shock and a rigid belief that my actions caused two deaths, and somewhere in my head the wiring gets mixed up, my circuit overloads and the breaker trips. Even though I am fully aware that Jessica is dead, sometimes I can trick myself into thinking she isn’t. The nice thing about being around strangers is there’s no need to enlighten them – like that day you and I first talked at the beach. It was so easy to speak of Jessica in the present tense. And for a moment when I’m doing it, it feels so very real. Other times I will have a sense of her presence that is not related to the five senses. It will be real to me, like a shadow through a glass door. But then I can have beliefs that are a little more troubling. I will think that Jessica lives and is travelling. That she is in Europe – staying away, to get a little freedom from me. That she knew I hit someone with my car, that I shrank so very far into myself afterwards, leaving no room for her or her father . . . And that’s the scenario I like to think of best. Jessica living her life, happy in the moment, a bit at odds with me, a little wary, but alive, living, free. I’ve even gone so far as to imagine she has sent me photos and emails. They call these benign hallucinations. They are extraordinarily real. Though I have a sense, afterwards, that they might not quite have been . . .

  Mark suffers no illusions or delusions. Mark’s grief is quite straightforward, though not less. Mark didn’t kill anyone, you see. It wasn’t Mark’s hands on the wheel that resulted in a stranger, and our daughter, dying. He doesn’t live with guilt and all that self-hatred. We are at opposite ends of the spectrum in what we think and how we feel, and I think those opposites became too extreme for us. Mark couldn’t understand why all my energy was spent on grieving for Sarah when we had lost a daughter – or why I became so fixated on her husband and two kids. I can’t even really explain it myself. Fixating on Sarah helped me not deal with Jessica. Perhaps my brain would not have stood me dealing with both at the same time. Perhaps it was a coping mechanism. As for Sarah’s family, they lost so much because of me. I felt – and still feel – so profoundly guilty about that. I have found myself drawn to them, to know about them . . . Sometimes I convince myself I have the power to change things: if only I stare hard enough at their faces I can turn back time.

  I came to that first meeting of the Correspondents’ Club with a sense that I needed to write to Sarah. To apologise. To make my peace. And then writing became a sort of medicine to me. No one was making me do it or pressurising me. I was perhaps searching for a way of untangling everything and writing helped me find that thread.

  I wish I had been able to tell you all this that night. There was part of me that still couldn’t go there – saying it would make it too real. And in a way I have wanted to hang on to my grief and not try to talk my way past it. But it is real, and it is out there now. And I am ready to take positive steps to rebuild whatever part of my life isn’t irrevocably shattered. You helped me in that, and I thank you more than I can say.

  I will never forget our friendship, nor how you listened to me, and how I was drawn to listen to you. Your story took me out of my own, and I probably needed that. I understand your decision to return home – on all fronts – and I hope your son makes a quick recovery. Whatever life has in store for you, I hope it will only be the good you absolutely deserve.

  Olivia

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  We are lying in bed, facing one another. The sun is streaming in the window, warming my bare back. We have made love for the first time in more than a year. I have allowed him to touch me without feeling like his attention is something I ought to deny myself, without feeling I didn’t deserve the comfort it gave.

  I imagined, coming home, that we would need to bare our souls to each other. That there were so many things that would have to be said, clarified, forgiven. That being back together was going to have to be this tentative thing we must shape, massage, mould. That each day was probably going to demand effort and lots of energy. But none of this has been true. We have got on with things against all odds, perhaps in the relief of knowing that all that has happened has not destroyed us, which might well mean that nothing ever will.

  It took me a very long time to realise that my strength comes from being with Mark, not without him. But I’d allowed myself to imagine the opposite of him. I tell him this now, as best as I can get it out without becoming overly emotional. ‘I actually thought that if I left and you felt free to pursue an affair with Meleni, then maybe that would be for the best – then I’d have a concrete reason for us to split up. It’s what I thought I deserved.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can think that,’ he says. ‘But I accept that you can. I accept that you did.’ He squeezes me and drops a kiss on the side of my head. ‘Whatever happened, my future is with you, as it always has been. Of everything that’s changed, that hasn’t.’

  I place my hand on his chest and feel his heart beating steadily. ‘I lost everything. I thought I deserved to lose you too. I deliberately pushed you away. I thought you blamed me for Jessica’s death, and that you always would.’

  ‘I know you did,’ he says. ‘Time to myself has made me realise that’s exactly how you saw it. But that’s behind us now . . .’ I can tell he’s on a mission to avoid too much reflection, to keep alive our fledgling positive thread. Then he says, ‘I have been thinking. I think we should consider taking a vacation.’

  I contemplate this strange concept. ‘Like where?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ he says brightly. ‘Maybe Europe at first.’

  I wait for a certain mindfulness of Jessica and Florence to alight like a butterfly, pictures to fill in before my eyes, but nothing happens.

  ‘I’m thinking of taking a one-year sabbatical . . .’

  ‘What?’ I sit up a little.

  ‘It would give us a chance to go off, have an adventure, see the world . . . We could still keep this place as our base, but who knows – maybe we’d fall in love with somewhere else and decide never to come back here.’

  I ponder this fantasy for a little while. ‘How would you ever give up your job? How could we even afford to run off and live in another country?’

  ‘Well, the one benefit of owning property in such an expensive part of the world is you can easily afford to move somewhere cheaper . . . I bet we could find a little place in Tuscany or on a Greek island where we could live quite happily and our money could go a long way.’

  I am not sure if he’s right or wrong about this, but I smile anyway. ‘Good heavens, sounds like you’ve thought this all through.’

  ‘I have in a way. Despite what you think, I’m no longer as wedded to my job as I once was, and to the idea of working like a dog until I’m sixty. I have a whole new set of values and priorities now . . . Plus there would be other jobs in other places. The nice thing is it would give us time to decide what we want from the rest of our lives and we’d get away from here.’

  We gaze at one another, and at the possibilities he has put there, that glimmer ahead, enjoying each other’s faces, and the spell of calm that has fallen on the house now that we�
�re able to look at one another and see – if only for a few minutes – what we have gained rather than what we have lost.

  ‘It’s not a bad idea,’ I say. ‘I mean . . . I’ve never really imagined it was something we’d ever do, but it does sound a little exciting in a way.’ I picture us plotting places and itineraries, and following seasons. Buenos Aires when it’s winter here, where we might learn the tango; the South of France in spring. Perhaps a side-stay in Lyon, where I would take cooking classes . . .

  ‘There’s something else I was thinking,’ he says. ‘About a change that might be good for us . . .’ He struggles to sit up, reaches across to the night table for his phone. I gaze fondly at the pallor of his inner arm that’s escaped the sun’s range, the slightly slack skin under his armpit, the tuft of blonde hairs. I watch with a degree of curiosity as he seems to be searching for something, then turns the phone to face me.

  It’s an email. At first I don’t recognise the address.

  And then I do.

  Dear Mr. & Mrs. Boyciak, Mark has written.

  You may well remember me as the person from whom you bought your current home a little over four years ago. I am writing to you with an unusual proposition. My wife and I realise that selling our house is, for several reasons, something we regret. I know this is out of the blue, but should you be looking to sell, now or in the near future, we might be interested to buy it back at a profit that would be worth your while. Please take your time to think it over; we are not in an immediate hurry. If you are interested, we would be happy to talk. And of course we would be prepared to accommodate whatever time you needed to relocate elsewhere. I hope to hear from you.