We Own the Sky(79)

“Okay,” I said. The vodka bottle was still on the coffee table.

“We can’t go on like this. You can’t go on like this.”

“Like what?”

“The drinking. What you’re doing to yourself.”

I didn’t say anything. “Sorry,” I finally managed. “It’s just my way of getting through it. I’ll be fine.”

“I know,” Anna said, putting her hand on my leg. “It’s a horrible time, but you can’t keep on like this. You have to start doing something. Maybe doing some work again, taking on a new project...”

“I can’t just jump back into work like you, Anna,” I said.

She had gone back not long after Jack’s funeral. A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in the kitchen listening to the news on the radio. Suddenly Anna’s voice was echoing around the kitchen, talking about the likelihood of an interest-rate hike. I listened to her tone, her intonation. It wasn’t the voice of someone who had just lost their son.

“And does that mean I don’t care, Rob, because I went back to work? Should I do what you’re doing? Sitting around drinking every day.”

“Thanks for mentioning it again,” I said, turning my head away from her.

“What do you want me to say? Yes, I’m drinking too much. I know it’s not ideal, but it’s my way of...”

“Rob, look at me. You’re not just having an extra whiskey at night. You think I don’t notice the vodka bottles? Sometimes you can hardly stand when I get home from work. And you wet yourself the other night on the sofa.”

I thought I had covered it up, invented some excuse that I had spilled a drink, but perhaps she had seen me, or noticed my wet boxers in the wash.

“What are you talking about? I told you, I spilled a drink.”

“Jesus, Rob, I saw you. I came down in the night to check you were okay, and you had wet yourself. I saw it with my own eyes.”

A blush of shame, and then anger. Wet yourself. It was how you would speak to a child. She was loving this, her chance to humiliate me, rubbing my nose in it.

She sighed and then chewed her lip a little, as if she was contemplating

something.

“You probably don’t remember what you did the other day, do you?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“You came home drunk, and you were stumbling and then you went into the

backyard and urinated all over my flowers.”

I felt a strange sense of relief, as I had expected worse. I smiled, more out of nerves than anything else.

“You think it’s funny, Rob?”

I shrugged and looked away from her.

“It was my sunflowers, Rob. My sunflowers.”

The significance, the cruel symbolism of what I had done began to sink in.

But what of it? What did it matter now? The sunflowers would be dead soon enough. They would be gone, their remains ground into the unforgiving soil.

“And you’re so perfect, Anna.”

She shook her head and sighed. “Of course I’m not perfect, God, far from it.”

Then she knelt next to me and put her hand on my chest. “Rob, I’m not telling you all this to shame you. I take no pleasure in this. I think you have a problem, and I just want to help you.” It reminded me of her mother, how she spoke to the strays she was trying to save.

“It’s a shame you didn’t want to help Jack.”

“What?”

“You heard.”

Outside I could hear the caw and scratch of a magpie walking across the patio.

She stood up so she was now standing over me. “How can you say that, how

can you even think that?” She started to cry, and I reached for my vodka and poured myself a glass. Could I tell her? Could I tell her now? That I thought about it every day. What if, what if? What if Nev and Dr. Sladkovsky had been right about Jack? Because Nev knew better than anyone how to save a life—in Josh, he had living proof. But Anna refused to listen, thought she knew best.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t just pretend it’s not there. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s the truth, whether you like it or not. Jack had a chance, yes, a small chance. But it was something. It was all he had.”

Anna took a deep, resigned breath and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “Rob, I’m not going to argue about it again. But can I ask you something? Do you not think that I don’t think about it? That I don’t lie awake at night, thinking that perhaps it would have made a difference, that maybe I made the wrong decision?”

I shrugged, drank my vodka.

“Well, I do, every day if you must know,” Anna said, her voice cracking.

“You should,” I muttered under my breath.

“What did you say?” Anna said. I looked away from her, like a sulking child.

“No, go on, tell me what you said,” she said, jabbing at me with her fingers.

“If you’re such a big man.”

“I said you should. You should feel guilty about it.”

Suddenly, Anna grabbed the bottle of vodka and quickly walked into the

kitchen. I jumped up off the sofa, stubbing my toe on the coffee table, and ran after her, skidding on the kitchen tiles and crashing into the fridge. She opened the cap of the vodka and held it over the sink.