Our Wives Under the Sea (38)

MIRI


The phone rings at midnight and I do not answer it. Leah is in the bath and I am in the bathroom with her. The sound machine is playing its usual noises and for the first time I don’t register it as an imposition, so much as a constant element of the space we share. The phone rings again at one and we are in the same position. I’ve been reading to Leah from a book she bought me once and ignoring the way she moves her hands through the water, ignoring the thought of the way a body moves when it’s been broken, the backward drift and slip of something functioning incorrectly.

“Did you know,” she says at one point—the dreaming lecture-voice that tells me she has, for the moment, forgotten me—“did you know that we all carry the ocean in our bodies, just a little bit? Blood is basically made up of sodium, potassium, calcium—more or less the same as seawater, when you really get down to it. The first things came from the sea, of course, so there’s always going to be a little trace of it in everything, a little trace of salt in the bones.”

Shortly after this, I ask her if she wants to come to bed. “You’ve been soaking all day,” I tell her and she nods and tells me that ideally, she’d like a little bit longer. “The water’s cold,” I say and she tells me that’s fine and I think, in a peculiar way, of how similar this is to before, despite everything—the way that Leah was so often fine when I wasn’t, the way that I seemed so endlessly clenched and tense and prone to discomfort where Leah was simply happy to sit as she was. The reason you get heartburn, she used to say, is because you’re letting your whole body squeeze you too tight. She would sit me down on the sofa and hold a hand to my rib cage, mime the breaking of a grip as though someone had clenched a fist around my lungs and was wringing them.

“I still think you should come to bed,” I tell her, but she shakes her head peaceably and turns her attention back to the water. I’m not sure why I press the matter, except to say that it seems easier, in the dark, with the sound machine playing over the tops of my words, to speak and imagine the things I say might land. “I’d really like you to come to bed,” I say, and when she doesn’t respond I take her hand and try to pull it, “just for a bit,” I say, and I don’t know why I’m angry and I don’t know what it is that I want or why I pull so hard that she half stands in the bath. “I don’t want to,” she says and I tell her I think this is silly, that it’s all so silly. “I don’t want to,” she tells me again, and I’m trying to heave her out of the bath and then she is leaking water from the beds of her eyes, from the insides of her ears, from the side of her mouth, and her legs are not supporting her and my skin is screaming and I catch her beneath the arms to stop her falling and to stop this moment from being my fault.



* * *



There was a test I could have taken, you know, that would have told me whether or not I’m likely to develop the same condition as my mother. I never took it, though I meant to. The sharp end of a day and Leah asking if I thought I would do it—for your own peace of mind, she had said, and then, but only if you think it will matter. I had gone out one day with the purpose of sorting it, had booked a test and walked through town in a thin and drifting rain that settled like a layer of fabric across my shoulders and back. I had reached the place where the test was due to be carried out fifteen minutes early and, thinking vaguely that it would do to while away the time before my appointment, had simply turned around and walked home again. I’d been back on my sofa watching television several hours before I realized what I’d done.

I suppose I think about this sometimes; the reason for booking a test and the reason for missing it. It is easier, I guess, to believe that life is inexhaustible. Not so much that its opportunities are vast or that one’s personal dreams can be reached at any age or season, but rather to believe that every dull or daily thing you do will happen again any number of times over. To stamp a limit on even the most tedious of things—the number of times you have left to buy a coffee, the number of times you will defrost the fridge—is to acknowledge reality in a way that amounts to torture. In truth, we will only perform any action a certain number of times, and to know that can never be helpful. There is, in my opinion, no use in demanding to know the number, in demanding to know upon waking the number of boxes to be ticked off every single day. After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.



* * *



The phone rings again at 6 A.M. I have left Leah in the bath, the way she asked me to when her mouth drained of water sufficiently to allow her to talk. I answer the phone and the caller identifies herself as the sister of Jelka, who was on the craft with Leah when it went down. “I’d love to speak,” she says, “if that wouldn’t be too much trouble. There are some things I think we ought to discuss.”





LEAH


Things broke down—I think that’s fair to say. Not that this happened suddenly, but my recognition of what was happening still came on in the sudden way things tend to in a crisis. Things were bad, but fine, and then they weren’t fine and I’d missed some crucial point by which to fix them. We were trapped, and Jelka was suddenly hearing things that Matteo and I couldn’t hear, and there was nothing I could think of to do that didn’t involve first rising to the surface and then looking around for help.