The Last Love Note(87)

He nods, as I imagine more about how it would really be. This is all very romantic and ‘whirlwind’ now, but it’s not real life. Not when you have a five-year-old.

‘When we’re competing over whose work is more important or which one of us is taking school holidays off, is this going to feel so charming?’ I ask.

‘It’s got to be better than sitting together in Emergency Departments and at death beds,’ he observes.

‘Lots of couples fall apart when life gets hard. We wouldn’t, because we’ve already made it through the worst. But, Hugh, you haven’t met the woman I want to become. I haven’t met her yet. I’m forty, and I’ve loved one man my entire adult life. I don’t know who I am without Cam, other than the woman who lost her husband. And I don’t want to be that woman any more. I have to stop looking back.’

I haven’t felt this level of clarity, ever. A radically different picture of how my life could be has fallen into view. I can’t un-see it.

‘You’re lit up,’ he says, his eyes a clear grey. ‘This is what I want for you, obviously.’

This is heartbreaking. But unavoidably so. To pursue this with him now, while we’re aware of this pull towards true independence, would set us both up for failure.

‘You need to go,’ he says. ‘Probably as soon as possible.’

Already?

‘Can I take some leave?’ I ask. ‘Organise the house? Shouldn’t I see this film project through?’

He taps my foot with his, on the grass. ‘Look, I know I said you were crucial, Whittaker, but I’m sure I’ll be able to bumble through it without you.’

He makes me smile as we pull ourselves to our feet.

‘Hugh, tell me you understand this is not—’

‘About me, I know. It’s about you. And it needs to be.’

‘Can I have another hug?’ I ask, bereft already without him.

‘Aren’t you terrified of where it might lead?’ he asks, teasing me, as he pulls me into one of those hugs you settle right into, until your breathing and heartbeats sync. With my cheek to his chest, closer than ever, inhaling the scent of his skin with his arms wrapped tightly around me, I want to revoke this entire conversation. I could devote myself to loving him so easily. And that’s exactly the problem.

Neither of us wants to be the first to pull away. In the end, it’s a mutual action and, in the disentanglement, he somehow ends up holding my hand. He brings it to his lips and kisses it, holding the kind of eye contact that conveys a primal connection for the ages.

Find your way to someone who’ll love you just as much as I do.

I think we can consider that done, Cam.





39





The last things to go are the neon sticky notes Cam had used to label things when he began losing his words. I remember the day I came home from work to a house covered in coloured notes. ‘Toaster.’ ‘Clock.’ ‘TV.’ ‘Mirror.’ They were on everything. It must have taken him all day. When I walked in, he searched my face, probably hoping it wouldn’t set me off – we’d learnt that, with grief, the little things are the big things. It certainly winded me, but I held it together.

‘You’ve redecorated,’ I said, and he pulled me into his arms as we looked at the vibrant labels around us and I tried not to cry. There’d been a time years earlier when I’d come home to rose petals scattered all over the house.

After a while, the labels hadn’t worked any more because, in addition to forgetting what things were called, he forgot how to read. I remember him standing in our bathroom after a shower, towel around his waist, hair glistening, studying the toothbrushes.

‘What are these?’ he’d asked me.

‘Read the word,’ I’d prompted.

‘What word?’

It was like selective blindness. Objects right in front of him were invisible. There were no words for him any more and no words for me. I couldn’t see how any person could get by without the alphabet – let alone a literature professor – but gradually words left him altogether and we could communicate only by my imagined ESP. Sometimes I liked to think he understood my thoughts as we looked each other in the eyes. Mostly I hoped he didn’t. The dark circling in my brain by the time Cam had lost the power of speech was not for innocent minds. It would have broken him.

I take a quick breath now and pull the label off the hearth of the fireplace. After he died, I’d Blu-Tacked and sticky-taped the notes to everything because they were all falling off, and I couldn’t bear to throw out his handwriting. But now it’s like ripping off a bandaid and I feel my resolve slipping.

Even harder are the longer notes where Cam would capture fragments of his mind the way the rest of us might jot down a shopping list. They were innocuous at first: ‘Kate is at work.’ ‘Have a shower then lie down.’ One day, I found one that said, ‘The boy’s name is Charlie,’ and it utterly destroyed me.

Grace and Mum had tried to remove the notes a few days after the funeral and I’d dissolved. They thought I was clinging to something upsetting, but I wasn’t. These were the last fragments of Cam’s decaying mind. The last thoughts he put enough weight on to want to record. Maybe it was the writer in me, but they seemed important. Late at night, beaten by insomnia, I’d sometimes pick one up and trace the letters. I was like a forensic linguist, marking the exact point in his disease when he would have written something down in this style. I could tell by the shakiness of the handwriting. The spelling. Whether a word was held intact by the alphabet or had descended into a string of nonsense symbols.