When I Lost You: A Gripping, Heart Breaking Novel of Lost Love. (11 page)

In all of the dozens of times we have argued over this we have been two opposing forces of equal strength, and regardless of how often we collided, we somehow failed to wear each other down even a little.

For a split second I ponder all of this – because right now Leo is vulnerable and open and I could take advantage of that. Instead of parroting back at him all of the excuses he’s given me time and time again, I could calmly point out to him now how unfair it all is to me, and how cruel the situation was – me waiting at home, loving him with such desperation, but always coming second to the rest of the world’s problems.

I know immediately that I can’t do it. Leo is too vulnerable, even more so than in our most intimate moments. For that reason alone, I can’t take advantage of him – as much as I’d like to.

‘Do you hate it?’ Leo interrupts my mental debate, and he asks the question with urgency. I frown at him.

‘Do I hate what?’

‘My job.’

Stunned, I stare at him, unsure how to answer. We really don’t talk about this – we argue about it, we bicker about it – but we don’t
talk
about it. In the beginning, I didn’t bother to discuss it with him. I figured it was obvious, for a start, but I also assumed we’d both change and our future would be forged from some natural compromise. I’d adjust to his job, and Leo’s drive to work so hard would ease off too.

‘It’s hard,’ I say carefully. I can’t expand on this any further because if I do, I’m not going to be able to hide my fury. Already it is starting to bubble away inside me and all it will take to unleash it is one wrong step or even another question on the subject. Leo is certainly not up to any kind of screaming match. He wheels himself to my side and places his hand over mine – and suddenly it’s just too much because this softness is
exactly
what I’ve needed from him and it’s coming far too late to make any difference.

I withdraw my hand sharply and rise. He frowns but moves back to give me space to pass him.

‘Don’t leave,’ he says, and he sounds bewildered. ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’

‘No, I really have to go,’ I say, and I slip my bag onto my shoulder and add with artificial brightness, ‘My driver is waiting in the car. But I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon?’

‘Molly,’ he says quietly, ‘did I upset you?’

I smile and shake my head, ‘No, it’s just time for me to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘We can talk tomorrow, then?’ he says, and he’s frowning at me.

‘Sure,’ I say. My tone is short, and I leave immediately – and I feel as if I’m running away. As I sit in the back of the car travelling across the city towards home, guilt settles over me because I know I will have confused Leo and he has enough confusion to deal with already.

I console myself with a reminder that his memory will soon return, and that means it’s only a matter of time before he no longer cares.

I
arrive
at the rehab clinic just before 3 p.m. the next day. I’m in a strange, prickly kind of mood. I am still a little jet-lagged and finding it hard to sleep, I’m increasingly conscious of the backlog of work waiting for me at the office, I’m even a little regretful at the awkward end to my conversation with Leo yesterday – but even with all of those things on my mind, I can’t quite put a finger on why I feel so out of sorts.

I stop at the door to Leo’s room and try to push away the lingering sense of irritation so that I can focus on the afternoon with him. Suddenly I realise why I feel so off – the word I have been looking for materialises in an instant: I feel trapped.

I am stuck in this situation for God only knows how long, and it’s forcing me to put my own life on hold. This isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing right now; I’m not supposed to be helping Leo recover, I’m supposed to be recovering
from
Leo. These are meant to be my post-Leo days – setting up my new life, preparing myself for my future without him.

Instead, I am here, and even in being here I am forced to relive the good times – cruelly being reminded of the things I have lost, instead of grieving and moving on. Now I have identified it, I’m mortified at the self-absorbed source of my bad mood and I give myself a stern mental berating before I try to get Leo’s attention. He is waiting in his wheelchair, but completely engrossed in his Kindle. This is typical Leo behaviour – when he’s reading, the house could burn down around him and he’d probably not notice.

I pause and remind myself of what I’m here to do today; I have a plan for these outings and I need to keep it in focus. Today, I’m going to take him to the
News Monthly
offices to see if we can jog some of his memories – and his work is so vital to him that I know they will be important ones – but they won’t be memories of us.

There’s so much more that is important to Leo than me, and I have decided that any approach that keeps his focus elsewhere will be much safer for both of us.

‘Hi,’ I say, and he sits up hastily as if I’ve startled him. ‘Ready to go?’

‘You were right,’ he says, and he waves the Kindle towards me. ‘This is brilliant! Do you know I’ve read over six hundred books since I got this thing?’

‘It’s never far from your hand so I’m not surprised,’ I nod. ‘Does this mean you get to read them all again? I guess that’s an upside to the amnesia.’

‘Actually, no. It’s completely bizarre – I remember what’s in the books, but I can’t remember reading them. I asked the neurologist this morning at my check-up and apparently it’s all to do with the way memories are stored. So I’ve lost my episodic memory, but my semantic memory is intact. It’s fascinating, although it’s also a little annoying that I can recall great detail from the nine hundred-page Margaret Thatcher biography I read in 2014, but I can’t remember our wedding day.’

‘Spoiler alert,’ I say lightly, ‘I looked
amazing
!’

Leo smiles and rests the Kindle on the coffee table. ‘So, are we still heading to Circular Quay today?’ he asks.

‘Actually, if you’re up to it, I thought I’d show you some other places. There’ve been a lot of changes to the
News Monthly
office that you probably don’t remember, so I thought we’d start there. I mean, you’ve probably been to Circular Quay a million times, right? And
it
hasn’t really changed.’

Leo shakes his head slowly. ‘I want to go to the office eventually, but my priority right now is remembering
our
early days together.’

I stare at him. He seems sincere, but the words he has said make no sense at all.

‘It
is
?’

‘Yeah. I mean, I still have the same job. And getting our memories back is the most important thing, right?’

For a moment I can’t even figure out how to respond. Do I tell him that he has made no secret of the fact that he values his work far more than our relationship? How do I word that without seeming cold, or bitchy, or resentful, which is what I am?

It is actually completely heartbreaking to hear Leo assume that if he married me, he must think that I’m more important than his career.

I do then contemplate telling him the truth, just so that I can assess his reaction.

Actually, no, our memories are not the most important thing. In fact, I’d fall somewhere towards the bottom of your priorities list – after adventure, adrenaline, your hero complex and even your employer.

‘Our relationship must have been a revelation to me,’ he says slowly. ‘I can’t wait to remember that, Molly. Please, take me to the places where we first fell in love so that I can learn “us” again.’

I am numb, even my lips feel numb. I nod, because no words will come out of my mouth.

‘Good,’ he smiles. ‘Let’s get going.’

I step further into his room and move to take the handles on his wheelchair. Leo shifts sharply away from me and shakes his head as he snaps, ‘God, no – Molly, don’t do that! I’m not a baby in a pram, my hands are absolutely fine.’

‘Oh – sorry.’ It’s awkward, and now I’m really not sure what to do – do I walk alongside him? Behind him but not touch the chair? In front of him? I glance at Leo and he still looks irritated, which instantly irritates me too. ‘You have to tell me what I’m not supposed to do – I don’t know the rules for how this works.’

‘Neither do I,’ he points out with a frown. ‘But don’t assume you need to baby me. I’m still the same person I was before this, you know.’

This
stubborn, independent attitude is one I know far too well. I groan at him in frustration.

‘I’m just trying to help you, Leo. I thought you might still be feeling weak.’

‘I am
not
weak!’

‘How do I know that? A week ago, you were
unconscious
.’

‘If it wasn’t for the headaches, I could almost forget my legs are stuffed until I try to get up out of this thing,’ he sighs, and he takes a deep breath then points to the door. ‘Why don’t you walk in front, until we’re in the corridor? Then walk next to me, okay? Like we’re just walking side by side, except I’m using the wheelchair instead of my feet.’

‘Okay.’

I step into the corridor, and once he’s joined me, Leo says quietly, ‘I think the key is going to be to communicate. There’s going to be lots of things like this that we don’t automatically know how to navigate. We need to talk about everything that’s going on – even these little things, so they don’t become big things.’

God!
Now
he wants to talk? Where was
this
a few months ago, when I so desperately needed it? If we had talked about the little things in the beginning, where would we have ended up? I have no idea, but the possibilities the question raises make me feel unsettled and fragile, and the defensiveness he has triggered since I arrived kicks up a notch.

‘This from the man who’s convinced his wife to help him play hooky to get out of “talk therapy”?’ I snap at him.

‘I don’t need to sit in a room with the other residents and whine about how bad my headache is. I’ve got it easy compared to most of them anyway.’

Is that humility in his tone? That’s such a startling idea that I pause, and my anger towards him recedes just a little. ‘I wouldn’t say you have it easy, Leo.’

‘I still know myself, and I can speak, see, hear and read,’ he says. ‘I’m not loving the wheelchair and the memory loss, but it could have been so much worse. Some of the other patients here have lost everything.’ He suddenly sits up higher in the chair. ‘There’s something else I wanted to say to you too – about yesterday.’

We are at the front doors, and the van is waiting right in front of us.

‘That’s our car,’ I say, hoping to distract him. Leo stops the wheelchair and takes my hand, forcing me to stop with him.

‘Yesterday, there were things you needed to say to me that you held back because I’ve been injured. I wanted to talk to you about how you felt about my job, and you shut down.’

I’m gazing at the car as if it’s there on a time limit, and trying to think of a new way to avoid looking into his eyes. Leo waits patiently, and after a while I sigh and give in, meeting his gaze.Ordinarily, Leo is just a little taller than me when he stands at his full height but today I am standing and he is sitting so I’m forced to look down at him. I instantly hate it and I wonder if he hates it too.

‘I “shut down” because it wasn’t the time, and it’s definitely not the place,’ I say, very calmly. ‘You asked me if I hate your job, and the truth is, if I let myself start talking about how
much
I hate it, I might never stop. So for now, it’s better that we just focus on getting you back on your feet and we can figure all of that out later.’

‘Is there a part of you that hopes I never go back into the field again?’ he asks quietly.

I shake my head instantly. ‘No.’

‘Not even a
little
bit?’ He is incredulous, but I am actually telling the truth.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ he seems bewildered, and I laugh at him.

‘Because your job is a part of who you are, Leo. I hate watching you spar at karate tournaments too, but I can’t wait to see you back on the mat, getting the shit kicked out of you.’

Leo offers me a half-smile. ‘I feel like that was a back-handed reassurance, if there is such a thing.’

‘It was, and there is,’ I laugh, and then tug at his hand. ‘Can we please go?’

He sighs and maintains a firm grip on my hand. Apparently Leo wasn’t kidding when he said he wasn’t feeling weak anymore.

‘I want things to be honest and open between us. I don’t
know
you, Molly, and I don’t know if you’re trying to protect me or you just don’t like to tell me what’s on your mind. But – I really want you to be honest with me. Is that okay?’

‘Yes, that’s fine,’ I say, although obviously I’m lying, because I’m still not about to dump the entirety of our mess on his lap. I need to make a plan to tell him the truth about our separation – and given how off-guard he’s made me feel today, maybe that’s going to need to happen sooner or later.

But I’m not ready yet, and neither is Leo.

M
olly released
my hand when she left the booth, and after we’d split the bill and were standing close to one another at the counter, she glanced towards me and said very quietly, ‘I want to hold your hand again, and I
would
… but every now and again paparazzi…’

‘I get it,’ I interrupted her very quietly. ‘You don’t need to explain.’

She nodded and smiled, and I put my hand gently on the small of her back and turned her towards the doors. We walked towards her apartment in silence and when we had covered the short distance, a concierge held the doors to the lobby open. Molly greeted him only with a smile and a nod.

I had been walking in step with her, conscious only of the moment – of the blood thundering through my body, and the spiralling intensity of anticipation for what might happen next between us. But when we stepped into her brightly-lit lobby, I had a somewhat startling return to reality – as if I’d sobered instantly after a night of intoxication. I surveyed gleaming tiles, plush furnishings and staff. Maybe I’d fallen down the rabbit hole during the week and only realised it when we entered her building.

I wouldn’t allow myself to feel intimidated, instead I held myself straighter and taller as I walked. When I caught a glimpse of Molly beside me in a mirror, I acknowledged for just a moment that although I might not feel at home in that place, the beautiful woman beside me in the alluring pink dress literally
was
at home, and she wanted me there with her. As I reflected on this, the man who looked back at me was strong and proud.

An attendant greeted Molly warmly at the elevator and hit a code into a security panel, and we stepped inside. The doors closed almost instantly, and as soon as we were alone, I reached for Molly as if I’d been waiting for her for decades. I cupped her face in my hands and she tilted it towards me. Our breaths mingled – ragged now, as if we’d sprinted from the restaurant. I wanted to savour her glistening lips and the dark blue storm of her eyes as she stared at me – but Molly hooked her arm around my neck and pulled me against her. She kissed me – hard and impatient – and I met the demands of her mouth against mine with demands of my own.

L
ater
, I lay on my back in Molly’s bed, staring at the blurry shadows on the ceiling. She was lying with her head resting on my chest, one leg curled over my thigh, our hands entwined against my hip.

I didn’t even try to untangle the mess of feelings in my chest. Even if I could put names to them, I wouldn’t know what to do with them. Instead, I tried to focus on Molly.

‘What are you thinking?’ I asked her. I brushed my hand along her bare back in gently sweeping strokes, and she breathed in and out slowly.

‘I was just wondering what you would do if I asked you to tell me something about yourself. Something no one else knows.’

‘You already know things about me that no one else knows.’

‘I do?’

‘About the scholarship. I’ve never told anyone else that,’ I admitted. ‘And…’ I lifted my arm and twisted it to expose the tattoos towards her. She shifted the hand from my hip to touch the inked skin, running her finger over each of the dot artworks, making her way along my arm. ‘I mean, obviously people can see I have tattoos, but no one else knows what they mean.’

‘These go over your back and shoulders too,’ Molly whispered. ‘And every one represents a death?’ She twisted to stare up at me. I met her gaze, unflinching.

‘Or deaths,’ I said. I sounded hardened, even to my own ears.

‘What about this one?’ she traced the line of a symbol with her fingernail, and I felt trapped and exposed. I wanted to retreat. I wanted to gently extricate myself from her embrace and her bed and go back to my apartment to sleep by myself. But Molly waited, and there was a gradual unfurling within my gut. I stopped wanting to leave, but I still didn’t want to talk to her about this. Then I stopped wanting to avoid the discussion altogether, and I started wanting to talk to her just a little – just enough to sate her curiosity, which was, I told myself, natural after all. But then I started talking, and the gentle flow of words became a torrent.

‘I was in Darfur in 2005. I wasn’t meant to take the assignment – I had been working in Iraq for months and I was due for a break, but Brad had been shooting there and he called me and asked me to come over. He said it was bad and that it needed more media attention, and that we should do a series together. We saw a lot of bad shit that trip – a lot of really,
really
bad shit.’

My memory bank was full of images that I wished I could erase and those from that particular trip began to stream through my mind. Brad and I had quite deliberately exposed the worst human rights abuses we could find in that crisis, in as much detail as we could – cataloguing the horror, trying to ensure that ignorance would not be an excuse for the world’s failure to act.

But I did not want to tell Molly about those things – about the mass graves and the sickening stories of abuse and the immensity of the refugee camps – the sheer scale of it bewildering and overwhelming; it was if I was living a horrifying dystopian novel. She was confident and intelligent and – I’d quickly learned
–
bold, but she was also optimistic and quite sheltered. I felt that to expose her to the detail of those moments would be to sully her somehow. So I summarised, and I sanitised – techniques my editor forced me to use when I had written a piece and the content was just too brutal for my audience.

‘That tattoo represents a refugee camp I visited.’

‘What about that long one across your shoulders? Is it a snake?’

‘Ah, that one is particularly special,’ I admitted. Her fringe had fallen over her eye and I brushed it back gently. ‘That’s the only other tattoo I have that isn’t about a piece I’ve written. It’s about the loss of my culture.’

‘As in…’ she hesitated a little, then asked carefully, ‘Aboriginal culture?’

‘Yeah. Forty thousand years of culture passed down in oral stories and songs and rituals and paintings – and within two hundred years almost all of it was lost. I wish I could understand how I
miss
that knowledge. It should have been my birthright. My mum’s family is so disconnected from our cultural heritage, so that means I have always been too, and it’s so easy to feel like I should have had a grounding and a framework to understand the world and I just never got that. I had to build my own.’

It was too much – I’d said too much. Molly was still looking at me, doe-eyed and engaged, but I felt raw and naked in a way that had nothing to do with the fact that I
was
naked. I cleared my throat. ‘So that’s the two things you know about me that no one else does.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What for?’

‘For showing me yourself.’

I paused. Now that I had finished forcing myself to be vulnerable, I was really glad I had. I liked how pleased she was that I’d made the effort to do so. I liked the way that her acceptance made me feel. I wanted more – not more sharing on my part, not yet. I wanted to know her at a deeper level too.

‘Now it’s your turn. You owe me two secrets.’

‘I don’t really have many secrets.’

‘Everyone has secrets.’ I paused, then asked her, ‘Do you do this often?’

‘
This
?’ she repeated, and she looked up at me. ‘You mean, bring men I barely know back to my apartment for several rounds of intense but thoroughly satisfying sex?’

‘Several rounds?’ I repeated, and she grinned at me.

‘Well, the night
is
young. Was that presumptuous of me?’

‘I wasn’t complaining,’ I assured her.

‘Did it bother you that I was forward?’ she asked and her eyes narrowed a little.

I laughed and shook my head. ‘Did it bother me that a beautiful, intelligent, amazing woman came at me as hard as I was planning to go after her? Let me think about that… No!’

‘When I know I want something, I don’t like to play games – I just like to go after it. I know that sounds spoilt, maybe it is. Maybe some people would think it’s unbecoming for a woman to say such a thing. You know – some people – like people from
your
generation.’ The lilt in her tone left no doubt that she was kidding, and so I made a joke about my age too.

‘Yeah, back in my day, your father would have had to offer me some cows or something to convince me to sleep with you.’

She laughed, and I touched my hand gently to her cheek. Her laughter faded to a soft, contented smile. ‘I
am
a modern woman, Leo. I find no shame in enjoying sex and I’m not the kind of girl who is looking for a fairy-tale romance and a happily ever after – I wanted you tonight, and I could see that you wanted me, and I had a feeling that you could handle it if I skipped the nonsense games. I was right.’

‘You were.’

‘I just don’t think an encounter has to end with a lifelong commitment to have been worthwhile, you know? Wherever a relationship ends, I’m always glad for the time I shared with that person.’

‘I completely agree.’ I was actually excited to hear that her thoughts on the matter aligned almost perfectly to mine. Closely aligned expectations meant that whatever happened between us, there was less chance of someone getting hurt.

‘Good.’

‘But, now that I think about it,’ I said slowly. ‘I actually asked you for two
secrets
, and I don’t think that your philosophy on romance really counts.’

Molly shifted away from me, so that she was on her side looking towards me. After a while, in a very small voice, she murmured, ‘I
desperately
want to leave TM, Leo.’

‘I already know that. You don’t really hide it that well.’

She sighed. ‘I can’t let Dad down. I don’t even know what else I’d do with my life anyway. Imagine if I left TM and just sat around doing nothing – it’s just not right.’

I wanted her closer again, so I rolled onto my side to mirror her posture and I cupped her cheek with my hand. ‘So you hate your job. That’s one secret. What’s another?’

‘I only have one more.’

‘Well?’

‘I think this was a really, really good idea.’

I laughed softly and shook my head. ‘You’re not getting out of it that easily.’

Molly’s lips curved in a coy, secretive smile – then she brought her face closer to me and tried to distract me with a kiss. I let her try for a minute or two, then I pulled away and whispered, ‘
That’s
not going to distract me either, although you’re very welcome to keep trying.’

Molly giggled and dropped back onto her pillow. ‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘But I really don’t have any other secrets. Give me some ideas; what do you want to know?’

‘What’s the best thing about being Molly Torrington?’

She rolled back towards me and rested her chin on my chest to stare up at me. ‘The best thing about Molly Torrington is that I don’t even know how lucky I am.’

‘Is that a
good
thing?’

‘Up until that conversation with you on Tuesday, it had never occurred to me that people who want to get an education would be prevented from accessing one because of money – not here in Australia, anyway. In the world I live in if you want something, you just get it. You said poverty feels like an insurmountable wall – well, so is wealth. I don’t even have a clue what’s on the other side of that wall, that’s how sheltered I’ve been, and I’d never even thought about it until I felt like an ignorant, privileged idiot talking to you the other night.’

‘I asked you what the best thing was, not the worst,’ I laughed softly, and she grimaced at me.

‘It’s both. But this definitely does meet the criteria of “things I’ve never told anyone before”, so I think we’re even.’ Molly reached up to brush her lips gently against mine, and she asked in a whisper, ‘Will you stay over tonight?’

I opened my mouth to tell her that I needed to leave but it suddenly occurred to me that the alternative was to fall asleep in her bed. I
wanted
that – I wanted to encircle her in my arms and to sleep with her body pressed against mine. And then I could wake and yes, there might be an awkward morning after to face – but the flip side of that meant that there would
be
a morning after. I would see her again – just as soon as my eyes opened. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to go to sleep, just so I could experience what it felt like to wake up beside her.

‘I’d love to,’ I told her.