The Forgetting(54)

Stephen breathes slowly. ‘Henry’s death . . . it almost destroyed you. It almost destroyed both of us.’ He pauses, swallows, takes another deep breath. ‘In the past few months there’s been a glimmer of hope that you were starting to feel better. Not recovered – I know neither of us can ever fully recover. But better than you had been. I was worried it would set you back months in the grieving process. I hated the idea of you mourning all over again, from the beginning, just when things were starting to improve. You’re already dealing with so much.’ He cups a hand over the cap of my knee and I do not shift away, even though it feels alien, unfamiliar.

Neither of us speaks for a few moments. There are so many questions circulating in my head I do not know where one ends and another begins.

‘There’s something else I haven’t been honest with you about.’

The air stills, like the hush of birds before a storm.

‘You didn’t get made redundant a year ago.’ His eyes dart towards my face and then away again. ‘After Henry died, you took extended compassionate leave and then decided not to go back. You haven’t worked since.’ He glances at me once more, so brief I would have missed it had I blinked. ‘I’m sorry. I just couldn’t bear to dredge it all up for you again. I knew I’d have to tell you at some point, but I just wanted to protect you a bit longer.’

I try to compute this new information, to locate the neural pathways along which it needs to travel to become part of my history, but it is like trying to navigate my way through a maze without a ball of string to guide me home.

‘It’s why we’re a bit isolated. You haven’t wanted to see much of friends for the past couple of years. We’ve lost touch with quite a few people.’ He pauses, and I sense him balancing on a wire, assessing whether he can make it to the other side without falling. ‘We’ve just tried to support each other through it.’

I think about the silent house phone, the lack of friends paying visits, the absence of a social life, and suddenly the insularity of our marriage makes sense: the contracted lives we must have been leading since the death of our son. I imagine what the past two years must have been like, wonder how we have managed to survive with our sanity intact. ‘How old would he be now?’ The question springs from my lips without any warning.

Stephen closes his eyes slowly, then opens them again. Time feels thick, as if we are traipsing through dense fog. ‘Almost two and a half. Twenty-eight months.’

My breath catches in my throat and something inside me seems to come undone.

There is another question, one I know must be asked, but courage stutters in my chest and I have to breathe deeply against the fear. ‘How did he die?’

My words hang heavy in the air like a cumulus cloud before the first deluge of rain. Outside, the street lamp flickers, plunging us into a split second of darkness.

‘He had meningitis.’

I wait for Stephen to say more, but he looks down at his hands, kneads his knuckles as if grinding them into submission.

Thoughts swirl in my head, each eager to be noticed. ‘What happened? Most children recover from meningitis, don’t they?’

Again, Stephen darts a swift glance at me as though there is danger in holding my gaze. ‘He deteriorated very quickly, overnight. You weren’t to know.’

‘What do you mean, I wasn’t to know?’

Stephen’s eyes widen. ‘I mean we weren’t to know. Neither of us could have done anything. He’d had a fever. He’d been tired and irritable and off his food, just for a day. He didn’t have a rash or anything when you put him down for the night.’

I try to imagine it – my baby, hot, tired, irritable – but cannot unlock the memory. ‘And then what happened?’

Stephen blows a stream of air out through a small circle in his lips. ‘When you woke up in the morning . . . he was already dead.’

His words are hazy, as though I am viewing them through extreme desert temperatures. ‘But he was only four months old. Surely he needed a night feed?’

‘No. He was tired and poorly. You wanted to let him rest. You did what you thought was for the best.’

I am struggling to absorb it all, but I need to know more. ‘What happened in the morning, when we found him?’

Stephen avoids my gaze, and it is there, writ large in his evasion: a chapter of the story he is reluctant to share.

‘What is it? What aren’t you telling me?’

He looks at me and I see it in his expression as clearly as if it were tattooed on his skin: the pre-emptive apology for what he is about to say. ‘I wasn’t there. I was away for work that night. I wasn’t there to help you.’

The words tilt in my head, unable to find their balance. ‘So it was all my fault?’

‘Of course not. It was my fault for not being there. You told me before I left that he wasn’t well and I still went away. I should have stayed.’

‘But that doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t check on him all night. What kind of a mother doesn’t check on their baby when he’s sick?’

Stephen takes hold of my hand. ‘You wanted to let him rest. You thought that’s what he needed. He had a temperature and was a bit off-colour, that’s all. No parent would have sat vigil by their child’s bedside all night just for that. And anyway, you were exhausted. You hadn’t slept properly for weeks by then.’