I want Hugh to argue with me. Tell me I’m wrong. That I’m exaggerating. That this isn’t as bad as I think.
Instead, he says, ‘I know, Kate. I’m sorry.’ And it feels like I could lose consciousness from the pain. As if everything that makes up my biology is weakening. As if I could die, too.
There’s a knock at the door and the nurse introduces me to the man who will take Cam’s body from here. I can see a gurney with sheets on it parked in the corridor outside the room. I’ve been here before when a body has been wheeled out – it’s a reasonably common occurrence in a place like this, but they always shut the emergency doors to the dining room, so residents won’t see anything. I hear the doors being shut now. For us.
I’m encouraged to say my final goodbyes. I look at Hugh, scared, and shake my head.
‘Would you like some privacy?’
‘No.’
‘Have you said everything?’
Said everything? We’ve lost thousands of conversations. Millions of words.
‘We might go, first,’ he explains to the undertaker and the nurse. He picks up my handbag from the floor and helps me with my coat. I stand at Cam’s side for another couple of seconds, put my hand on his arm, think one final goodbye, and then wrench myself away.
We walk into the corridor, and my ninety-year-old bestie, Barrie, stands in his doorway in pyjamas and a dressing gown, having overheard the nursing staff. We share a momentary glance, during which he communicates his empathy at my loss, and I communicate my acknowledgement of this awful struggle.
Hugh deals with the code at the exit. It’s all locked down in here because the residents wander, and I’m struck by the fact that Cam won’t do that, ever again. Won’t wander into the world. Or feel the crispness of the night air, which makes me shiver as it hits my skin. How does my body even know to continue on? To respond to the cold. To feel. To be?
Hugh’s car is parked in a visitor’s spot right near the door. The drive home passes in a blur. He asks me for the keys, unlocks the front door and pushes it open for me.
I don’t want to walk over the threshold. Cam carried me over it when we first moved in, even though we’d lived in various places before that. Such an old-fashioned, romantic moment.
‘Kate?’ Hugh says. ‘Let’s go inside where it’s warm.’
It’s not warm, though. I’m hardly ever home. Mum picks up Charlie from school each day and I visit Cam and we have dinner at Mum’s place. I really only come here to shower and sleep. I’ve even moved Knightley to Grace’s temporarily, because I was worried the poor dog was being neglected.
Hugh turns lamps on and makes me sit on the lounge and puts a blanket over me while he lights the fire. He brings me another glass of water, and a glass of wine, and says to keep my fluids up, even if I can’t control anything else.
‘Will I call your mum?’ he asks. ‘And Grace?’
I nod.
‘What about Cam’s parents?’
‘Yes, I’ll have to . . . What time is it in the UK?’ They’re not well themselves, and they’re going to be devastated.
Hugh wants to lift all these burdens but can’t. He should be out of his comfort zone but isn’t. After he’s coached me through making the few essential calls, he tells me there’s nothing more I need to do tonight. He sits across from me beside the fire. There’s total silence, except the crackling of the wood in the flames and the sound of my heart breaking.
‘Is there something wrong with me that I’m not crying?’ I ask after a while. I feel sick about it. I have a physical ache in my chest, as if my heart is clinically breaking. That’s an actual thing that I read about. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Broken heart syndrome. It happens to a lot of widows.
Widows. Old women in black, wailing. Grey-haired ladies on their own at the nursing home. Women from the two world wars. Not me. Not at thirty-eight. Not with a three-year-old.
‘Why can’t I cry?’ I ask again. Maybe if I did, the pain in my chest would ease.
‘The times I’m saddest,’ Hugh says, ‘it’s so deep it doesn’t come to the surface at all. When I—’ He falters.
‘When you what?’
He looks at me and shakes his head. ‘I’ll tell you another time,’ he says, and he glances at his watch.
The thought of him wanting to leave horrifies me. He stands up and I reach out and grab both his hands.
‘Please stay!’ I’m aware that I’m begging, but this feels like an emergency. It is one.
He squeezes my hands and lets them go. ‘I’m just getting you some paracetamol,’ he explains. ‘For the broken heart.’
Oh, yes. Why didn’t I think of that? If he chooses the rapid ones, this should all be over in about twenty minutes.
‘Grief is a physical thing as well,’ he says from the kitchen. ‘Painkillers can help with the impact on your body.’
Of all the people I could have asked to sit with me during this horrible, defining experience, I seem to have chosen the Indiana Jones of grief. I take the tablets. Wash them down with a gulp of wine.
I need to go to the toilet, but don’t want to be alone. Obviously, I’m not asking Hugh to come with me. But what if I go in there, freak out in the solitude and lose all emotional control? Are these the weird thoughts I’ll have now?
I find the courage and go in and shut the door. I can’t believe Cam is dead. Can’t believe it. How can this be true? He was just here! Even with all the time I’ve had to get used to the idea that this day would come, I’m not remotely prepared for its reality.
I wash my hands, go back to the lounge room, and curl up under the blanket again. Hugh stares into the fire.
‘I am alone in this,’ I say, after a long while. ‘Completely alone. Even with you and Mum and Cam’s parents and Grace, it’s just me, really.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Until I drag Charlie down into this hell with me in the morning.’
Sweet, happy, inquisitive, carefree, pre-schooler Charlie. I’ve never dreaded anything more.
37
I have pulled Hugh over my line in the sand on the beach in the storm and now I don’t know what to do with him.
‘I didn’t think this through,’ I divulge honestly, now he’s just inches away from me, the fabric of his shirt still twisted in my fingers, which won’t seem to let him go. In truth, I didn’t think at all. Just couldn’t leave him standing there in the rain for another second.
Wanted him standing here in the rain, instead. With me. Despite the fact that I’ve just outlined all the reasons why this will never happen – particularly the fact that he won’t bend on Cam’s secret – and it’s a watertight case.