The End of Men(30)
“Don’t worry, love, I’ll sort it out,” I say with a level of authority I don’t feel.
“What if he kills himself?” she says, quickly as though the words have hurtled their way out of her mouth before she could think better of it.
I look at her, stunned. “He won’t do that.” My voice rises slightly at the end. It hadn’t even occurred to me. Sean? My Sean? He would never.
“I just worry,” Abi says, and then leaves the room looking stricken.
I can’t let this continue. The girls tell one another everything even though they’re at one another’s throats half the time. If Abi is worrying about this, Hannah and Lola will be too.
When Sean comes back from his walk—he walks for hours every day, round and round our town—I ask him to sit down at the kitchen table. Immediately, when I see his expression, I wonder if this isn’t a great choice of time, but when is? Matt, his best friend since we were all at school together, died a week ago. Matt’s boys, Josh and Adam, died a few days ago. People are going to keep dying. There’s never going to be a good time to ask your husband to please, please, please, not kill himself.
“You’re scaring the girls, love,” I say. He’ll probably grunt or stay silent like he usually does. I take a breath to say more but before I can, it’s as though rage explodes out of him. He’s never been an angry man. I can only remember him raising his voice a handful of times in the nearly thirty years we’ve been together.
“Jesus Christ, Helen, I don’t care if I’m scaring the girls. I’m fucking terrified.”
It’s as though he’s come alive for the first time since the fear descended. The rage, my God. It’s coming off him in waves, distorting the domestic reality of our small kitchen.
“I’m staring death in the face. I can’t act like normal. Everything is falling apart and I can’t do it anymore. I’ve been living my life for other people for too long.”
After weeks of silence he can’t get the words out fast enough, shooting them out, violent and clear. For a second the total hate in his eyes makes me wonder briefly. Is he going to kill me? Am I going to be one of those women who end up on the front of the newspaper having been stabbed to death by her husband in a murder-suicide?
“I’m bored, I’m fed up, I need to feel alive while I still have a chance to. You have no idea how it feels, Helen. It’s like I’m splintering. I can’t do it anymore.” He gets up and paces around the kitchen. “I’m going to die, maybe soon, maybe a bit later, but it’s going to happen. I’m on borrowed time.”
I sit, dumbstruck as my soulmate dismantles our life together with sharp, quick words as though he’s gutting a pig. After twenty minutes of repeating himself he charges upstairs. Another ten minutes go by and then he’s in the hallway with a suitcase, giving the girls each a perfunctory hug as Lola wails. What is happening? What the fuck is happening? He walks out the door and that’s it.
He’s gone. My husband’s gone. He’s actually gone. For the rest of the evening, I keep wandering around the house, looking at empty chairs, empty sofas, empty bed, empty kitchen table as the girls follow me around like ducklings. Nope, not there. Nope, no husband under there.
Twenty-four hours go by and we hear nothing. The girls keep checking their phones, desperate to hear from him and I think, He’ll come back, but slowly, and then all at once, I know he won’t. A sheet comes down across the hopeful part of my brain, the optimistic bit that thinks I know him, and I realize that something broke. The Sean I knew is gone. Vanished. The Sean I know would never abandon his daughters, howling in the hallway. He would never tell me he was bored and fed up and leave me knowing I wasn’t good enough. I’m not sure who said all of those things but it wasn’t my husband.
We’re inconsolable. We don’t know how to be consoled. Everyone knows how to deal with grief but how do we face desertion? In a world of men desperately clinging to their families for one more day, one more hour, we’ve been abandoned. It’s as though he’s died but worse. I try to justify it to myself that way. It’s nicer to think that he wants to save us the pain and uncertainty of dying later, even if it’s not true.
I sit, my three girls surrounding me on the sofa, reeling. It only feels like a few breaths ago that I was posting photos of us at family dinners on Facebook and planning a holiday to Rome. That was a different life, but here I am, stuck in this one. This life where I’m now a single mother and a widow? Divorced? Separated? I’m not alone, I have my girls. The girls. How could Sean do this to our daughters? How?
CATHERINE
Devon, United Kingdom
Day 68
Theodore is a deadweight, impossible to wake after the trauma of the last few days. Even though I can feel he is cool, with no fever, and just sleeping, my heart rate spikes until he emits a little whimper. Noise is proof he is alive. I bundle him into blankets. We don’t have time to waste. The Plague could be anywhere in this godforsaken house. I’ve wept through cleaning every surface, every toy, every object I think he might have touched, but what if I’ve missed something?
Anthony died in our bed, at home, as all men do now. Hospitals used to be a place of kindness and care but now they turn men away if their only complaint is the Plague with a resigned shrug of impotence, so we didn’t bother trying. I tried to imagine that it would help him, knowing his family existed in the same house as he did, even as we were separated by walls. His body was carried out in a bag by two officious women in hazmat suits. Who knows how far this virus has spread across my house? I can’t see it, can’t smell it, can’t hear it.