Page 10 of One Step Behind
‘I want to. Are you sure you’re …?’
‘I’m fine. Thanks.’ I slide into the driver’s seat. My hands are shaking as I push my key into the ignition and start the car.
I drive away, giving a quick wave to Thomas, who is standing where I left him, just as he said he would.
Traffic is light and fifteen minutes later I’m home. It feels like it was in another lifetime that I unlocked the door and took Archie and Beth to school. I repeat the process in reverse, clipping the chain into place, before sliding the bolt across at the top. When it’s done, I lean against the wall and take a breath, calm and steady as if it’s anything like how I feel.
My feet, the small of my back, my whole body, ache with the heavy exhaustion of a twelve-hour shift, of back-to-back patients, of the heavily pregnant woman who almost died and the eighty-year-old man with the stroke who did.
‘Hey,’ Stuart calls from the kitchen.
‘Hi,’ I reply, slipping out of my pumps and heading down the hall. My clothes feel sticky against my skin. I long for a cool shower and the sleep I know won’t come.
Stuart is slouched on a stool at the breakfast bar reading one of his battered sci-fi books that I’m sure he’s read ten times before. There are hundreds of themaround the house – lining bookshelves in blacks and reds and yellows, stacked under the bed, boxed in the loft.
I bought him a Kindle for Christmas. It sat in its box untouched for a month before he gave it to Beth. ‘There’s something about holding a physical book. I like the weight of it in my hands and the smell of it,’ he tells me anytime I moan about the growing piles of dog-eared paperbacks.
The first thing I see when I step into the kitchen is the stack of dirty plates beside the open dishwasher. I’d like to say I don’t mind, but I do. It’s one of the things we used to bicker about – Stuart’s messy side. That, and my long hours at the hospital. The who-does-the-most fight I’m sure all couples have.
I can’t remember the last time we argued about the mundane stuff. You have been a sledgehammer to my life – you’ve stolen my ability to sleep, to laugh, to have fun, but with all that has come a wider perspective. And despite the destruction you’ve caused, my marriage is stronger than it’s ever been. You saved it, in fact.
Stuart was trying to call it quits on our marriage before you came along.
‘I don’t want to fight with you any more,’ he said one night in early December.
Of course you don’t, I remember thinking.You never do. It’s far easier for you to snipe your hurtful remarks, pile on the guilt and ignore what’s going on, than it is to face it.
‘This isn’t working for me. I want a trial separation and I want the kids to stay with me.’
‘What?’ My head span from Stuart’s bombshell. He was leaving me and wanted to take my childrenwith him. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. ‘I know we’ve been arguing a lot—’
‘All of the time.’
‘But things aren’t that bad. This is Beth and Archie’s home. You can’t make them move.’
‘So you move out, then. You’re never here, Jenna. It’s me that stays home with them when they’re sick, me that takes them to play dates after school, me that knows what they like, far more than you do.’
It was a comment aimed to hurt and it did. ‘Because you’re a builder, and I’m a doctor. My job is always going to mean longer hours than yours. You knew that when we decided to have kids.’
‘Why don’t you just say it? You think your job is more important than mine.’
‘What do you expect me to say to that, Stuart?’
‘I want you to agree that the kids are staying in this house and they’re staying with me. I’m their main caregiver.’
But I couldn’t agree. I couldn’t leave my children. So round and round we went until I called a truce. ‘Let’s give the kids one more happy family Christmas and try to get on,’ I said. ‘If you still want to separate in January then I won’t fight about it any more. We’ll do whatever’s best for the kids.’
It didn’t feel like a truce. It felt like a stay of execution. But then the following week I opened my front door and there you were in the park, throwing that doll at me. And somewhere amidst the terror, you allowed us to see what matters. You brought Stuart and me back together and we stopped seeing the worst in each other.
So now when Stuart leaves a job half done because he wants to read for a while, I shrug off the annoyanceand think of it as typical Stuart. Instead of the first words that leave my mouth being filled with sarcasm and bitterness, I remind myself that he collected the kids from Christie, he cooked their dinner, he bathed them, he read to them, he kissed them goodnight. So if the kitchen is only half tidy, if the water has been left in the bath to stain the rim, if the towels are laying damp on the carpets, then I try not to mind.
‘How was your day?’ he asks, looking up at me with a face tanned a deep brown, apart from the lines around his eyes, which remain a stubborn white. I can picture him so clearly, standing in the dusty heat of a building site, paperwork bunched in his hand, laughing or smiling with the men who work for him.
When he looks at me and takes in the deepening pinch between my eyes, I wonder if he thinks of what my days are filled with. I doubt it. Stuart is happy and warm. He makes time to play with Beth and Archie whenever they ask. An eternal optimist is what I called him on the night we met, when we were both queuing at a bar in town; Diya and I had been sick of dating doctors and went out one night in search of something different, and I laughed at Stuart’s attempt to catch the barman’s eye.
But – and it really is a tiny, tiny but that I try very hard to ignore – he lives in a happy bubble and rarely thinks beneath the surface of anything. It’s taken me a long time to accept this about Stuart and to see this trait as a quality. To understand it’s why we fit. My whole life is spent looking beneath the surface. With patients, I look beyond what they say to the tests needed. With Beth and Archie too, I second-guess their emotions. I read beneath the mumbled ‘fines’,the ‘OKs’, and search for the things they don’t tell me. The bad days, the mean friends, the effects of a mother who is too often not home.
‘My day was horrendous,’ I reply. ‘How are the kids?’ I lean in to kiss his cheek. His skin is warm and he smells of lime shower gel.
