The Last Love Note(48)

‘You coming? Water’s hot.’

I can’t.

He dries his hands on a towel and crosses the room. When he reaches me, I want to speak, but no sound comes out. I’m locked inside my own body, horrified by the realisation that’s crashing into my consciousness, very belatedly.

‘He stays dead,’ I whisper.

Even though they’re barely audible, Hugh catches my words. Holds them.

‘He keeps on not coming back,’ I continue, as if discovering this truth for the first time. Hearing my own words, I start to panic. So much of my grief has been about Charlie losing his dad. Nowhere near enough of it, I realise now, has been about me losing my husband. It’s like I’ve woken up on the crest of a roller-coaster I didn’t know I’d boarded, I’m not strapped in, and we’ve just come over the peak.

‘I’m so sorry, Kate.’ He’s said it before, of course. At the time. Everyone has said it. It’s the phrase we’re socially contracted to put ourselves through when someone dies, before normal interaction can continue. But this time, I feel it.

He is sorry. Deeply, empathetically, heart-wrenchingly sorry.

Through his eyes, finally, after two years of this relentless absence and half a day of space, I finally see my situation from the outside. And I feel sorry for myself, too. Achingly so.

What an inconceivable loss.

Water is pelting onto the shower floor. I follow him across the living room, into the bathroom. He checks the temperature and dries his hands. ‘Okay?’ he asks.

I drop the towel and step into the shower. Fully clothed.

Warm water runs over my face and saturates my clothes again. I back up against the tiled wall and sink slowly until I’m sitting on the floor, thoroughly miserable.

Maybe this is my rock bottom. I’m forever adjusting the measure. Once, when I was particularly distraught, I took out Cam’s X-rays and scans from various injuries over the years and laid them out on the living room floor in the shape of a person. Then I got down and lay on top of them, desperate to be close to his body. And when I put them away, in my mind’s eye, the ghostly images of his heart and lungs seemed to move and beat and breathe. I couldn’t destroy the X-rays. It would be like obliterating him all over again.

Normally I only go away for one night. Day one of three feels so much more expansive. It’s been the first opportunity to really gasp oxygen away from the child I’ve protected from the worst of my grief, all this time. Grief that is rushing to the surface safely in Charlie’s absence. I can’t upset him from here. Can’t scare him. I can fully lose it and he won’t know. I feel like I’ve never had this much space, nor this much emotion to tip into it.

I look up at Hugh through water and the steam, wondering if he regrets this. He probably wishes he’d brought the university-sponsored counsellor along for the ride. But, as our eyes meet, I realise he’s hanging in there. He’s strong.

I am fragile.

He was right. And, as the warm water thaws my skin, the unguarded tears are allowed to flow at last. He watches my face crumple and he crouches outside the shower, nearer to me. Tentatively, he reaches in and offers me his hand through the waterfall, his white shirt sleeve sodden and transparent.

I take his hand, expecting him to pull me up and get me out of here and do something sensible with me – cup of tea, perhaps – to stop whatever this is.

But this is beyond tea. He knows it. Only fragile, desperate individuals dive fully clothed into oceans and sit in showers wearing work clothes on business trips.

He lets go of my hand. Removes his watch.

‘Hugh!’

But it’s too late. He steps into the shower and sits down beside me, propping himself against the wall under the water, suit pants wet, white business shirt clinging to his body like mine is to me, water dripping off his dark hair as he looks at me in silence.

I am floored. Nobody has ever done something so incredibly, self-sacrificially kind. Hugh does not do stunts, and this definitely qualifies as one. In fact, I vaguely recall Daniel Craig doing it once, as Bond, no less.

After minutes of this, I find my voice. ‘Is this the weekend you had in mind?’

‘This is it to a tee,’ he says, leaning his head back against the tiles and closing his eyes. Then we just sit there, side by side, in companionable silence, enjoying communal water therapy, while I cry, and cry, and cry.

This is letting grief rip.

Eventually the water starts running cold and he reaches up and shuts the taps off and we’re bedraggled and dripping and I realise this is one of the most intimate moments of my life, second only to giving birth in front of Cam.

Then he suggests we pull ourselves to our feet because there’s no food in the house, and not enough dry clothes, and we should do something about both problems before nightfall.





21





‘Grace! Firstly, thank you. A million thanks. I don’t know how, but I’m going to make this up to you somehow. I promise.’

She laughs it off. ‘Pay it forward, Kate. You know I love hanging out with my favourite little person. Practice for my five-per-cent baby.’

I’m walking to an Ocean Shores op shop that we drove past on the way in. Hugh is back at the beach house, following up on the meeting cancellations with personal emails. Perhaps we both needed space, too.