When I Lost You: A Gripping, Heart Breaking Novel of Lost Love. (23 page)

A
t first
, married life seemed amazing – just as I knew it would be. When Leo was home, everything felt right in my world – and when Leo
did
leave, he did so with obvious reluctance. In those early months I felt more adult than I had ever felt in my life to that point. I was a wife, with an amazing husband, and a house to renovate and a charity to run and laundry to do – by myself. No more dumping dirty clothes on the floor, knowing the housekeeper would sort it for me while I was out. I was finally – belatedly – a ‘grown-up’.

Some nights, Leo and I would sit up late and talk about the future. I’d known him to be ambitious but I watched his determination to build his career take a leap to new heights as soon as we were married. He was
constantly
talking about the next big story.

‘This could really build my career, Molly,’ he’d say.

‘Your career seems to be going pretty well already,’ I’d assure him, but quietly, I was confused. His career
was
built. He was already world-renowned in the industry since he won the Pulitzer – what greater heights did he think he could achieve after
that
accolade?

‘It’s about making a name for myself,’ he’d tell me, as if that was the explanation I was missing. We had the conversation often enough that I came to wonder if Leo was just trying to justify the constant travel to me, or the dedication he displayed towards his work. We were newly-weds, and I knew I had a lot to learn before I’d really understand my husband – that was part of the beauty of standing hand in hand and facing a life together. We had endless years to sort these confusing little things out. I was still finding my way with the Foundation in those days too, and I’m sure he was just as bemused by some of my ideas for my own work.

Sometimes, particularly in the intimacy of our dark bedroom late at night, we’d talk in whispers about the family we’d raise one day. It said a lot about our courtship that we hadn’t even discussed kids until the early months of our marriage. I just assumed we’d agree on the subject, and we almost did.

‘We’d never fit a kid in here,’ I warned Leo, the first time we talked about it.

‘No,’ he sighed. ‘We probably wouldn’t. Although I reckon you could fit one of those little baby beds next to the bathroom?’

‘Leo!’

‘Okay, okay! But we can figure that out later, can’t we?’

‘Would you ever move into my apartment?’

He sighed and shrugged, but I already knew he didn’t feel comfortable with that idea. I wished I could understand better why he hated my place so much. The Bennelong Apartments was one of the most sought-after locations in the country.

‘We could buy something new,’ I suggested. ‘Well, something
old
, I mean – like this – I know you prefer this style. But bigger. With another bedroom.’

‘Just one kid, then?’

‘How many were you thinking?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it before… I didn’t expect to find myself in a position where it would be a possibility. Maybe a few? Maybe we could mix our family up? Some of our own kids, and maybe foster some others?’

‘I think we could do that.’ I smiled at the thought. Leo was going to make an amazing father.‘So maybe one day we find an old place with
loads
of bedrooms. That way we’re covered no matter what happens.’

There were so many things to learn about each other and so many compromises to be made – but still, my world with Leo felt close to magical. In that first year, I woke up every morning feeling amazed, and every night – even if Leo was somewhere godforsaken dodging bullets – I’d get some kind of communication from him, even if it was just a text or a note left on the pillow before he flew out. He was always home for longer between trips than he was away, and he was rarely away for more than a week or two at a time.

If that first year had been a taste of what the rest of our lives looked like, I would have been the happiest woman on earth.

‘
T
ea
?’ I offer Molly as we step inside the terrace after dinner.

‘Oh yes,’ she says, and she kicks off her shoes and sighs as she wriggles her toes. ‘That would be lovely. Would it be terribly unromantic of me if I change while you make it, though? I can’t tell if it’s the baby or too many carbs back in Rome, but this dress is definitely tight around my middle.’

‘Go for it,’ I say, and she disappears up the stairs. I shift myself towards the counter – and I instantly feel like a complete idiot as it belatedly occurs to me that I can’t actually reach the tea bags
or
the kettle. Even if I could, I couldn’t carry the cups anywhere while I operated the wheels on my chair.

If there’s ever been a time in my adult life when I want to throw a tantrum this is it. I groan, but I take a few deep breaths and get the mugs out of the cupboard and sit them up on the bench near the kettle. I stare at the mugs, and then I try to pull myself up on the counter with my hands. If there’s water in the kettle, I might be able to knock the ‘on’ switch. I can kind of lift myself, but I need both arms to do so, and my balance is terrible – I can only do it for a few seconds at a time before the room tilts. On my third attempt, I almost fall out of the chair and I realise I need to stop because if I do wind up on the floor, Molly is going to have to help me back up.

That is not going to happen.

Molly quietly joins me in the kitchen a few minutes later. I straighten in my chair, and point to the kettle. ‘I can’t reach,’ I say, unnecessarily, because I can see from her shocked expression that she’s just realised this too.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘I just wanted to make you a cup of tea,’ I say. My words are forced – tightly wrapped in frustration and anger.

‘Leo,’ Molly says calmly. ‘It’s fine, we’ll adjust.’

But I do not feel fine. I feel a thunderous sense of outrage that tempts me to run and hide from her. God, if she was already about to divorce me, what chance do I have of holding onto her now? I take myself to the couch and leapfrog onto it, but I have to adjust my thighs with my hands and this is so maddening that I want to give up altogether and just fall into a puddle on the floor. I see my wife approaching and I shake myself mentally.
Get your shit together, Leo. Be better than this, at least for Molly’s sake.

‘You’re okay?’ Molly prompts, as she rests the two cups on the table and sits beside me.

‘I’m fine,’ I say.

She reaches under the coffee table and withdraws the photo album, and she gently places it on my lap. There’s no dust on the cover, only fingerprints around the edges – and I realise that she’s looked at it recently. I stare down at the image on the front for a moment before I can speak.

‘God, Molly,’ I breathe, ‘look at you! How the hell could I forget
that
moment?’ I run my fingers over the page and let them come to rest near her face. Molly and I are embracing in the photo, standing in a park somewhere with the sun setting behind us. She’s staring at the camera and beaming that mega-watt smile. Her eyes are alight with love and happiness.

‘It was a good day,’ she murmurs. She’s not looking at the album.

‘What was your favourite part?’ I ask her.

She shrugs and very briefly glances at the cover – but I notice the way that her gaze does not linger on it for long. The crease is back between her eyes and when she speaks, she’s a little short with me again. ‘The ceremony was beautiful. The reception was a lot of fun.’

‘Where did we go on our wedding night?’ I ask her.

‘We stayed at a suite in the city right near where we were tonight. It seemed a bit silly seeing as our house was only a ten-minute drive away, but it was nice.’

‘Did we…?’

‘Did we
what
?’ she asks pointedly, and when I just grin at her she laughs. ‘Go on,
say
it!’

‘Did we…?’ I waggle my eyebrows at her in response and then say as suggestively as I can, ‘order room service?’

She laughs and her frown disappears. ‘We
did
order room service. And then after we ate it, we immediately fell asleep.’ She’s smiling again now. These memories amuse her. ‘We had such grandiose plans for that night. I spent a fortune on lingerie that didn’t even come out of the suitcase until we went on the honeymoon. But by the time you unhooked all of the tiny buttons on that dress, the most energetic activity we could manage was to climb into bed to sleep. We
did
make up for it on the honeymoon, don’t worry.’

‘We went to the Maldives,’ I realise this as I’m saying it, and she nods enthusiastically.

‘You remember?’

‘I think I’m starting to,’ I murmur. ‘I remember several days where we barely left the hotel room at the resort.’

She laughs again. ‘That’s right. We didn’t leave the villa for the first four days. We barely sobered up in that time, either. I seem to recall that when all of the fun slowed down we were both hung-over for days, and I think our room service bill was more than the accommodation in the end.’

I look back at the album and open the first page, and then gradually begin to make my way through the other photos. The whole album looks like something from a glossy magazine, bright bursts of colour and flawless skin in every perfectly framed shot.

‘I remember
that
look,’ I say quietly, and she follows my gaze. It’s a photo of us staring into each other’s eyes. For a while, we gaze at the image together and I slip back into the memory as easily as if it was never lost. I remember the scent of cut grass and the eucalyptus in the park around us – the feel of her soft skin in my arms – even the taste of mint on her lips when I’d kissed her. She’d been too excited to eat lunch, she told me, but she was starving after the ceremony and so she’d been devouring the only thing in her purse that was edible – a little box of breath-freshening mints. I remember the overwhelming sense of love, pride and amazement and – moments of pure intimidation.

I wait, wondering where that last bewildering thought comes from, and gradually, that thought clarifies too. Molly looked perfect that day, like a living portrait: she would stare at me as if I was a hero, and I both loved and was terrified by the expectation and hope in her eyes. She was the best blessing I’d ever known, but her happiness was now in my hands and the task of being worthy of that responsibility had seemed dizzying.

We talk for quite a long time before I can bring myself to ask Molly the question that now sits impatiently at the tip of my tongue. As soon as the conversation hits a lull, I ask her very gently, ‘So, when did it start to go wrong, Molly?’

She’s gradually moved closer and closer over the course of the chat until she’s stretched herself along the lounge and now lies flat, with her head resting on my thigh. This position is familiar; I can remember her lying like this with me even in our earliest days together.

She stares up at me when I prompt the shift in the conversation’s tone and the smile fades from her face. Then she looks beyond me, to the ceiling, then tentatively back to my eyes.

‘Promise you won’t get defensive?’ she whispers.

‘I
can
promise I’ll try,’ I whisper back.

‘I actually think it started when you missed that first anniversary. You had good reasons for staying, but it was the start of a shift between us.’

She’s told me about the anniversary when she told me about the motorbike. I still don’t remember it though, and I hesitate to ask her, but the time has come for these painful conversations. Just like some nasty wound sustained in the field, sometimes some painful cleansing has to be done before things can heal.

‘Tell me what happened?’

She shifts, and I watch the way her hands rest over her belly, as if she’s protecting our baby from overhearing this discussion. I like that a lot, and I am momentarily taken by thoughts of the fantastic mother my wife is going to make. The distraction does not last long, because when Molly starts to talk, the stiffness has returned to her voice. I can see she’s fighting it – fighting to stay warm and open to
me
.

I reach down to stroke her hair gently back from her face and she looks into my eyes again.

‘You were coming home. You were going to get back the day before. I’d booked us a retreat, up in the Blue Mountains, and I thought we could ride the new bike up there.’

‘So did I at least call you to tell you I wouldn’t be there?’ I ask her.

‘You did let me know, but it was very last minute. I mean – God – we were on the phone the night before you were due to fly back and you didn’t say a word about staying longer.’

I don’t connect with this at all – it feels like she’s telling me about the actions of a deranged lunatic, which clearly a man would
have
to be to voluntarily miss such an occasion with this woman. My memories still refuse to come to the fore. I know I can’t force them – I spent a lot of time doing that when I first woke up and all fierce concentration seemed to do was give me a headache. Molly is my gateway to these memories. I try to focus only on her.

‘So I didn’t tell you on the phone that I wasn’t coming back?’

‘No. Actually, it was very late here, and I was lying in bed talking to you. I accidentally told you about the retreat, and you were laughing at how I had chatter-boxed my way into ruining the surprise. You told me you couldn’t wait to see me. I went to sleep and woke up and you’d emailed me to say you weren’t going to make it back.’

But I
know
this story only enough to know that she is missing the point. I don’t know it well enough to know what ‘the point’ actually is. I keep my hand in her hair, winding the silky locks around my fingers, watching the chestnut lengths against my hand. But then I remember the retreat and in an instant, the story stops being nonsense too and I understand it completely. My first reaction to the flood of memories that return is to lie and pretend that I am still clueless – I don’t want to tell her the truth about why I did not come home. The truth would show an insecurity in me that I’m not sure I would ever have been able to admit aloud before – not
even
to Molly.

I am all but squirming at the memories that arise because it is mortifying to recognise that I have allowed a weakness within myself to hurt my wife in such a brutal fashion. I can picture her waking up the day before our anniversary and smiling, and maybe checking her email on her phone as she rested in bed and finding the pathetic one-liner that I had sent.

I remember that too, now. It said something like
sorry, Molly, something has come up. Can you reschedule the trip?
– as if we had been talking about going to the grocery store together but now I was stuck at the office.

I remember too the punch of guilt in my stomach when I did make it home and she showed me the motorbike, and the automatic but dastardly resentment I felt at the very sight of it. I had wanted that bike forever and it was such an exorbitant purchase, but Molly could make it with a single phone call and not much thought at all. Instead of feeling blessed, I felt angry – and powerless, because this was just the reality – she was wealthy, I was not, and there was nothing at all that I could do about it. I knew that when I married her. I didn’t need it rubbed in my face every anniversary – and yet, to say anything at all would make me a bastard.

These things about me are ugly and I feel shame, and I also feel defensive. There were genuine reasons to stay in Iraq at that stage too; a ground swell of dissent against the Iraqi Prime Minister was beginning, and even now as I look down at my beautiful, hurting wife I want to focus on
that
because it makes me seem noble. But that is not why I stayed. And if I really want to fix things with Molly, I have to do what I have promised her and avoid the defensiveness that is my automatic reaction to these difficult conversations.

‘Molly,’ I say. ‘I remember that day.’

The pain in her eyes is heartbreaking – a stark contrast to the easy laughter and joy that I’d shared with her just minutes earlier. I realise that I am entirely responsible for the change and I feel sick.

‘It is a small thing, in the scheme of things,’ she says, obviously trying to console me, which only makes it worse. ‘I mean, I know you had genuine reasons to stay, and I felt bad… I actually felt really bad for resenting your decision. You wrote some great articles on that trip, but…’

But I can’t stand to hear this for a moment longer. I shake my head, and the slight pain in my skull as I do so is perhaps a fitting punishment for what I’m about to say. ‘I need to tell you something, and this is really hard for me to admit… but I hope that you will see how committed I am to us fixing this. Okay?'

I’m talking too much – prolonging the moment, putting off what I need to say because I’m so utterly mortified to have to say it. The patient acceptance I see in my wife’s gaze does nothing to bolster my courage. I raise my chin and I look at the television on the wall above the fireplace. It is huge and it does not belong in my house; it belongs in
her
house. This is
our
house, and that makes it
my
house. Every aspect of this moment pulls at me and I am torn up in knots inside that seem to be getting tighter as I procrastinate with thoughts instead of telling Molly the truth.

‘I had planned a trip for us too, Molly,’ I admit eventually. ‘I was going to surprise you too.’

‘You
were
?’ I glance at her only long enough to recognise the shock in her wide eyes.

‘I had hired a little cabin on the south coast. I couldn’t wait to see you,’ I admit. ‘I missed you so badly, even talking to you on the phone was painful for me. I had visions of this love-fest in a sleepy village I’d found online. I Googled something lame like “
most romantic getaways, driving distance of Sydney
”. It was a simple little place, secluded – no bells or whistles, just a big bed and a balcony over the water on this little inlet. I’d even booked a car so we could take Lucien with us.’

‘You should have told me, that’s so sweet…’ she says, but then she shakes her head against my thigh. ‘In any case, the “sweet idea” is all very well and good, but it doesn’t make any difference because you didn’t come home anyway.’