CATHERINE
London, United Kingdom
Day 62
Catherine.”
Anthony never calls me by my full name. I immediately get up from the floor, where I’m trying to play with Theodore without touching him or being less than three feet away from him, and go to the hallway where Anthony is hovering. He doesn’t come near Theodore at all anymore. Hasn’t for days. The Christmas lights from Christmas are still up behind him, twinkling incongruously, almost insulting in their cheerfulness.
“I have a temperature.”
On instinct I put my hand to his forehead. It is burning with the kind of heat that in a different life would have inspired a swift call to a GP and, if not better within a few hours, a frantic trip to A and E.
“I’m so sorry,” he says to me and my heart cracks a little more in the slow process of its breaking that began last week when we agreed that if Anthony had a fever, that telltale sign It Was Here, we would not see each other again. Not in this life, at least. It is the only way to keep Theodore safe and prevent the spread of this vicious disease. We discussed it calmly last week before bursting into tears and holding each other, despite the danger, the mere thought of what it would involve too horrifying for words. A slow, painful death alone for him. The torture of my husband being close, and yet unreachable, in this house as his body fails him. No more kisses, no more hugs, never again feeling the touch of his warm, broad shoulders under my fingers, or seeing his frame walking into the kitchen, before he looks up at me with a smile. It will be a bereavement in slow motion, knowing he is dying just feet above my head in the bedroom upstairs.
The moment is here but I’m not ready. Give me another week, another day, another hour. We haven’t had long enough. We were meant to have a life together, grow old together, have more children together. It can’t be ending yet. Please.
“You have to stay away from me, keep Theodore safe,” Anthony says, his voice cracking within three words. His forehead already has a sheen of sweat. I have been strong for so many weeks, smiled through Christmas, but now, on the darkest day of my life, I have to say good-bye to my husband and I’m not ready. I’m never going to be ready to live without him.
“I’m not ready.” I burst into shaking sobs, the awfulness of this washing over me. We are living a nightmare so painful it never even would have occurred to me to fear it. I’m meant to be with him in sickness and in health, not saying good-bye, abandoning him. Anthony reaches out to me instinctively and then drops his arms. The pain of proximity without being able to touch each other.
“Why is this happening?” I ask him, such an unfair question. He doesn’t know any more than I do.
“I don’t know, darling. I don’t know. Just know I love you. I have always loved you.”
I don’t know what to say, wanting the last moment together to last forever. We stand, looking at each other in the hallway. So many memories of us in this place. Anthony opening the door carefully as we brought Theodore home from the hospital. Hundreds of blissful, ordinary days of putting wellies on our rosy-cheeked toddler, shrieking instructions at each other as we try to leave for a flight, rushing out the door with a quick kiss, waving good-bye to the babysitter as we leave for an anniversary dinner with the excitement of teenagers. How can it all come to this? It can’t end like this, with a good-bye, at the bottom of the stairs, with tears and not even a kiss.
And yet it is. Theodore is calling me from the living room.
“Mummy, I want the blocks.” The blocks are on the third shelf in the living room. He can’t reach them on his own. If I don’t go in, he’ll come out here and the danger is too great.
“I love you,” I say and he nods, smiling sadly.
“I know.”
“Do you feel loved?” I ask, desperately elongating this good-bye, reminding us both of a back-and-forth we would whisper at night under sheets or on buses or walking around Oxford, wrapped up together when we first fell in love.