I absent-mindedly move to twirl the silver wedding band on my ring finger, forgetting it’s in my bedside table. It’s been three years since I last wore it, the day the decree absolute was granted in Melissa’s and my divorce hearing. Right up until that morning, I’d clung to the hope she might yet change her mind, might wake up to the realisation that she’d made a huge mistake and still wanted to be my wife.
She didn’t. Still hasn’t. She won’t.
I first sensed something was troubling her months before she finally sat me down in our (now merely my) flat. The first red flag I chose to ignore was our dwindling sex life. We hadn’t even reached our second anniversary when it virtually dropped off the radar. She’d blamed her lack of libido on the final stretch of her paramedic training, a course I’d tried to discourage her from pursuing. She claimed the stress of revision and on-the-job training left her exhausted. I’d tell myself it was fine, that all couples went through this, that it’d pick up. And then I’d have a sneaky stealth wank in the bathroom so she wouldn’t feel I was putting any pressure on her. And on the rare occasions we were intimate, she’d become more aroused using the sex toys I’d bought us to spice things up than by my presence in the bedroom. It didn’t matter that we no longer kissed or held hands as often. Romance was for teenagers. We were perfectly fine.
Later, when I lost the charger for my tablet and used her laptop, red flag number two appeared: I discovered what she’d really been looking at on the nights she said she was studying in the spare room. She’d regularly been visiting gay porn sites and chat rooms.
‘You’ve always known I’m bicurious,’ she told me by way of an explanation. ‘I’ve never hidden it from you. Looking doesn’t mean I plan to do anything about it.’
Up until then, I hadn’t felt threatened by what I took to be her passing interest in the same sex, nor had it turned me on thinking of her with another woman like it might some men. She’d always felt comfortable mentioning if she found someone attractive. I’d tease her about her girl crushes on Blake Lively and Margot Robbie, and I joked I’d consider going gay for Timothée Chalamet or Harry Styles. She told me I’d be punching above my weight. It was all in fun.No, I told myself,her fantasies are nothing to worry about.I was lucky to have an open-minded wife. And I convinced myself with little trouble that her curiosity was a phase – and phases, by and large, passed.
The ‘we need to talk’ conversation came weeks later. No conversation beginning with those words is ever going to end positively for one of the two people involved. And it finished with her tearfully admitting she wanted ‘to explore her sexuality further’.
‘Explore what, exactly? Sleeping with other women?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, soon followed by an admission: ‘Yes.’
‘Is this because of what happened with the—’
‘No,’ she replied, quickly shutting down that line of questioning.
We fell silent for a moment.
‘And what about us?’ I said eventually. ‘What am I supposed to do while you’re “exploring”? Or is this your way of saying you no longer want me?’
‘No, no, not at all.’ She’d taken my hand in hers. ‘I want to, I guess, press pause on us. Who we were when we met at thirteen isn’t who we are at twenty-four.’
‘I’ll change,’ I said, failing to conceal my desperation. ‘I’ll do better. I’ll find a better job, I’ll explore your sexuality with you, I’ll do whatever you need me to do.’
‘You need to let me do this by myself,’ she said gently. ‘With the best will in the world, I can’t do it with you.’
Melissa moved back in with her parents that weekend and we would never spend another night together under our roof, until the days following my drowning. Having her there, close by, felt terrific, even if she was wrapped in a duvet and sleeping on the sofa in the next room. I even allowed myself to fantasise this might be a turning point in our relationship. That almost losing me might make her fall in love with me all over again. But life doesn’t offer happy endings like so many of the movies we watch.
Besides, she now has Adrienne. And while it kills me to admit it, I’ve never seen her more in love.
Chapter 11
Damon
This clinic pulsates with the essence of life and what could be, yet I remain consumed by death and that boy and whatever the hellhas been. I rub my thumb against a tattoo of a semicolon on my wrist, a habit I’ve developed when I’m distracted, like when I play with my absent wedding ring.
Three days have passed since the boy last appeared to me, and I’m on tenterhooks, awaiting his return. I still haven’t mentioned it to Melissa. She’d only tell me what I already know, that I’m imagining him. But in the moments the lad is here, he feels so very, very real. Like if I stretched out my hand, I could touch him. And as much as I want to believe that, even if he existed and his death is real, it has nothing to do with me – I can’t shake how I felt as I was kneeling by his side.
Like I wanted him dead.
Thinking those words sets me thrumming in my chair. I concentrate on trying to take deep, silent breaths that Melissa and Adrienne can’t hear. Stay calm and get this morning over with.
Our appointment at the clinic is for a mandatory counselling session to ensure none of us are being coerced and that we allunderstand the journey we’re about to embark upon. It’s a formality, because we are all on the same page.
It’s been eight months since Melissa and Adrienne first approached me out of the blue over dinner at their house, to ask if I’d consider co-parenting a child with them. Melissa and I had miscarried our baby not long before we split up. I was devastated by losing the opportunity to become a dad – the father I never had – but it was hard to gauge how that loss affected Melissa because she never talked about it. Still hasn’t. But I think it frightened her off trying to conceive again. Adrienne, however, had always wanted to experience pregnancy. And since a uterine fibroid condition meant she’d be less likely to conceive without the help of IVF, and neither wanted to pick an anonymous sperm donor from a catalogue, they turned to me.
‘You can have as little or as much involvement with the child as you feel comfortable with,’ Melissa was quick to establish. ‘All we’d ask is that you don’t dip in and out of their life. Kids need consistency.’
She knows I’m not that kind of man. I have only mental snapshots of my dad, at best an irregular presence throughout my childhood. Stolen moments here and there, more absent than present. Never a proper explanation of where he was or why he’d gone. I will never understand why,how, any parent would play little to no part in their child’s life. When they first asked me, I was afire with the chance to make that right in our child’s life. They suggested I take some time to consider their offer, but I agreed to it there and then.
Which is why we are here today for the next stage in our journey. The girls have saved hard and chosen to go private rather than wait on an NHS-funded list for the next two years. Once we get the go-ahead, STI and genetic tests will follow, before checks to see if my sperm is fit for purpose.
By the time the clinic’s receptionist invites us to follow her up a narrow set of stairs, I’m calm again. But it isn’t to last. Because the dead boy has reappeared. And I’m transfixed by him. His face is contorted in pain, his black mouth wide open. I want to point to him, shout what I’m seeing to the receptionist, Melissa and Adrienne, but I hold back because I know this is not real. I don’t see dead people, I imagine them. I reanimate them. His pleading eyes bore holes into mine; his arms are outstretched as if he’s begging me to help him. And then he moves towards me, so close that I see my reflection in his corneas. Only it’s not me here, now, in this room; it’s me kneeling over him, watching and waiting for him to die.
