‘Don’t leave,’ he says, and he sounds bewildered. ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’
‘No, I really have to go,’ I say, and I slip my bag onto my shoulder and add with artificial brightness, ‘My driver is waiting in the car. But I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon?’
‘Molly,’ he says quietly, ‘did I upset you?’
I smile and shake my head, ‘No, it’s just time for me to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘We can talk tomorrow, then?’ he says, and he’s frowning at me.
‘Sure,’ I say. My tone is short, and I leave immediately – and I feel as if I’m running away. As I sit in the back of the car travelling across the city towards home, guilt settles over me because I know I will have confused Leo and he has enough confusion to deal with already.
I console myself with a reminder that his memory will soon return, and that means it’s only a matter of time before he no longer cares.
I arrive at the rehab clinic just before 3 p.m. the next day. I’m in a strange, prickly kind of mood. I am still a little jet-lagged and finding it hard to sleep, I’m increasingly conscious of the backlog of work waiting for me at the office, I’m even a little regretful at the awkward end to my conversation with Leo yesterday – but even with all of those things on my mind, I can’t quite put a finger on why I feel so out of sorts.
I stop at the door to Leo’s room and try to push away the lingering sense of irritation so that I can focus on the afternoon with him. Suddenly I realise why I feel so off – the word I have been looking for materialises in an instant: I feel trapped.
I am stuck in this situation for God only knows how long, and it’s forcing me to put my own life on hold. This isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing right now; I’m not supposed to be helping Leo recover, I’m supposed to be recovering from Leo. These are meant to be my post-Leo days – setting up my new life, preparing myself for my future without him.
Instead, I am here, and even in being here I am forced to relive the good times – cruelly being reminded of the things I have lost, instead of grieving and moving on. Now I have identified it, I’m mortified at the self-absorbed source of my bad mood and I give myself a stern mental berating before I try to get Leo’s attention. He is waiting in his wheelchair, but completely engrossed in his Kindle. This is typical Leo behaviour – when he’s reading, the house could burn down around him and he’d probably not notice.
I pause and remind myself of what I’m here to do today; I have a plan for these outings and I need to keep it in focus. Today, I’m going to take him to the News Monthly offices to see if we can jog some of his memories – and his work is so vital to him that I know they will be important ones – but they won’t be memories of us.
There’s so much more that is important to Leo than me, and I have decided that any approach that keeps his focus elsewhere will be much safer for both of us.
‘Hi,’ I say, and he sits up hastily as if I’ve startled him. ‘Ready to go?’
‘You were right,’ he says, and he waves the Kindle towards me. ‘This is brilliant! Do you know I’ve read over six hundred books since I got this thing?’
‘It’s never far from your hand so I’m not surprised,’ I nod. ‘Does this mean you get to read them all again? I guess that’s an upside to the amnesia.’
‘Actually, no. It’s completely bizarre – I remember what’s in the books, but I can’t remember reading them. I asked the neurologist this morning at my check-up and apparently it’s all to do with the way memories are stored. So I’ve lost my episodic memory, but my semantic memory is intact. It’s fascinating, although it’s also a little annoying that I can recall great detail from the nine hundred-page Margaret Thatcher biography I read in 2014, but I can’t remember our wedding day.’
‘Spoiler alert,’ I say lightly, ‘I looked amazing!’
Leo smiles and rests the Kindle on the coffee table. ‘So, are we still heading to Circular Quay today?’ he asks.
‘Actually, if you’re up to it, I thought I’d show you some other places. There’ve been a lot of changes to the News Monthly office that you probably don’t remember, so I thought we’d start there. I mean, you’ve probably been to Circular Quay a million times, right? And it hasn’t really changed.’
Leo shakes his head slowly. ‘I want to go to the office eventually, but my priority right now is remembering our early days together.’
I stare at him. He seems sincere, but the words he has said make no sense at all.
‘It is?’
‘Yeah. I mean, I still have the same job. And getting our memories back is the most important thing, right?’