* * *
Carmen is eating toast, tells me I should see somebody about that look on my face.
“Chronic bitch face is naturally distinct from resting bitch face, you know. It’s like a whole different ball game when you can’t turn it off.”
She’s had some good news about her eyesight, might be eligible for experimental surgery that will aim to reverse the degeneration. She squints at a triangle of toast through her glasses, spreads her free hand beside it. “My hand looks like toast. Everything looks like toast,” she says and pushes away from the table to order another coffee at the counter.
When she gets back, she is bearing a coffee for me as well as one for herself. She sets it down in front of me as a sort of peace offering.
“I’m sorry I said that about your face,” she says, quite earnestly, gesturing to her own eyes. “What do I know anyway?”
It occurs to me that I ought to apologize to her, though for what I’m not quite sure. I feel angry at nothing, ashamed at myself for using her as one of my few escapes from the flat. I look down at the coffee she’s brought me, its chocolate-dusted heart already sinking into the foam. I think about Sam and wonder why everyone seems so set on bringing me coffee.
Later on, back home, I become briefly convinced that Leah has vanished. I move from room to room, checking wardrobes, opening drawers, and upsetting piles of clothes from the armchairs on which I’ve allowed them to gather. I check the latch of the bathroom window, stare for several unhinged seconds at the drain in the base of the sink, but then there she is, of course, standing in the bathroom doorway in her floor-length dressing gown as though nothing has happened, and I can’t understand how I missed her.
* * *
“I wonder, Miri,” says the therapist, “whether you have properly taken the time to imagine what it is your wife has been through. There is a difference, of course, between understanding and forgiving and I don’t believe one necessarily prompts the other, but it might be easier for you to cope with the fact of now if you choose to contend with the truth of before.”
The therapist is tall and straight, both in the sense of her sexuality and in the sense of her everything else. When she makes notes during the session, her handwriting rises and falls without listing; her talk is long and thin; she stirs her coffee with the flat of a knife.
“I don’t understand,” I reply, looking at the side of Leah’s face with an attempt at frankness that I hope is mirrored in my tone, “because she never tells me anything. I know you went away and I know you stayed longer than you meant to and I know you must miss it now, or else why do you run the taps all night and carry your sound box everywhere you go? Problem is I don’t know what it is you miss, I don’t know what it is at all.”
“What is it you imagine,” Leah says to me, though her eyes are now on the therapist, “what is it you imagine when you think about where I was?”
I look at her for a long moment before pushing myself up out of my chair and crossing to the bookshelf by the door. I take the thickest book I can find from the shelf and carry it back to the coffee table, pull a slip of paper from my own handbag, and hold it up for a moment before sliding it between the very last page of the book and the back cover. Then I allow the whole heavy weight of the three hundred or so preceding pages plus front cover to fall shut. The slip of paper sticks out between the final page and back cover like a bookmark and I think of how I felt on the viewing deck years ago, when she left not for this last trip but for another, the thing I wished I’d said louder: I’m not sure a ship like that can take the whole of the ocean on top of it, I’m not sure they can all go down that deep and not be crushed.
“This is how I imagine it,” I say and watch as Leah’s eyes travel slowly from the therapist to rest upon the book with the little strip of paper crushed beneath the weight of its pages.
We have to catch the bus back from the therapist’s office, and on the journey back, Leah nearly loses her footing climbing up to the top deck, claiming afterward that she suddenly lost sensation in her hands.
“Just the fingertips,” she says when I press her, allowing me to take hold of her hands and examine them, though after a moment the feeling appears to become too much for her and she pulls them away. She is dressed in loose trousers, a long-sleeved shirt with a high collar. Beneath her shirt, the bones of her shoulders swing the way a hanger will when knocked inside a wardrobe. When she talks, her tongue is white, indented with tooth marks, though in truth these days she talks less and less.