‘It will get easier the more we practise. Let’s see if we can get past that five-second mark tomorrow. If you can stand for ten seconds, we’ll start working towards a step, okay?’
Once the therapist has left, I shower and then go through to the office to do some reading. I’ve been working my way through my articles chronologically, and now I’m re-reading stuff that I wrote during our second year of marriage. It’s been an interesting exercise and I’m gradually gaining an insight into my own state of mind during that year.
I hear Molly return to the apartment and I call out to her a greeting. She comes to the office and leans against the door. I see the shadow cross her face when she sees the pile of magazines on my desk.
‘How was physio today?’ she asks me quietly.
‘Good,’ I say simply, and she nods towards the desk.
‘Any memories today?’
‘I’ve only just started reading – Tracy stayed a little longer today.’
‘Those editions are from 2014?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That was our second year married.’
I nod, and she enters the room and sits on the desk beside the magazines. She picks the top one up and surveys it.
‘Do you remember much about us from that year yet?’ she asks me.
‘Kind of,’ I murmur. ‘What I remember most about you when I’m reading these is just a sense of missing you.’
‘We were growing distant. I used to buy News Monthly so I could find out what you’d been doing while you were away. You never told me, not really.’ She closes the magazine and rests it against her thighs. ‘You know if you try to carry water in your hands, no matter how tightly you hold them, the water still runs through the cracks? That’s what that year felt like to me. Our marriage was slipping away from me, more and more as the year went on.’
‘I felt like that too,’ I say, and she looks at me in surprise, then frowns at me.
‘You pulled away. If you knew how much damage that was doing, why didn’t you just stop?’
‘I remember how I’d pause at the door as I left to go to the airport, and how hard it would be to force myself to walk through it, especially when things between us started to get rough.’
The magazine slides from her hands onto the floor. She slips off and bends to pick it up, and I see the awkward way she moves, avoiding a bend at her waist. Her pregnancy is still not showing yet – but the thickening at her stomach is obvious.
‘Well, you never had a problem leaving anyway,’ she mutters, as she drops the magazine back onto the desk. ‘And you called me less and less as that year went on.’
‘I remember times when I could have called you, but I didn’t. It was too hard to hear your voice,’ I admit, and because she’s standing right beside me, I gently press my palm to her belly. ‘I remember one time when I’d had a really rough few days, and I called you and as soon as you picked up, we had an argument because I hadn’t called you for a week. Do you remember that?’
‘That description covers quite a few of our phone calls, actually,’ she whispers, and she sits her hands over mine on her tummy.
‘Well, I can only remember one so far. I remember you were so angry with me, and I understood why, but Brad and I had seen this IED hit a troop carrier that afternoon and…’
I break off – startled as I remember exactly how brutal that scene had been. How many men died in front of me that day? Eight, I realise, as I remember the spider tattoo that I had added onto the back of my left shoulder.
‘You never used to tell me about the things that went wrong, Leo. You never told me the specifics – this is the first time I’ve heard about an IED explosion right in front of you,’ she frowns at me.
‘It was ugly and frightening, and I thought you’d worry more if you knew how close I was to the danger.’
‘I worried anyway,’ she says. ‘I never knew when you were safe, so I assumed you were at risk of death every second of every day.’
‘I called you that day because I missed you and I wanted the comfort of a conversation with you. But then as soon as I called, we were fighting and I really didn’t want to fight with you, plus you know, I’d crave the sound of your voice and then I’d hear it and I’d miss you more. So sometimes when I didn’t call you, it was because not calling you was the only way I could bear to stay away so long.’
‘That’s completely bloody stupid, Leo.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Every time we talk now, I realise how easy it might have been. If you’d just opened up to me like this…’
‘You know you’re thinking about those phone calls and those arguments and you’re thinking to yourself, if only Leo had called me more and opened up to me more, we could have stopped things from getting ugly?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, I was looking at those same arguments thinking, if only Molly supported me more in my job, then maybe I’d call her more, and we wouldn’t be drifting apart.’