When I got home, Anna was somewhere in the house. We moved around like ghosts, rarely speaking, wordlessly passing each other on the stairs. We did our crying alone, in the shower, the car, at the sight of a lone robin sitting on Jack’s favorite tree.
We did try to come back to each other. We attempted to eat together on the weekends, as if Icelandic scallops or an aged rib-eye steak would help us forget Jack’s empty place at the table. Once, on a Saturday, we went to the cinema together, but Anna had to leave after seeing a trailer for a children’s movie.
There were boxes in the hallway, things from Jack’s room, things I assumed she wanted to clear out. It shouldn’t have been like that. Because when your child dies, you are meant to leave their bedroom untouched. A shrine to the before. A sanctum for those quiet moments, which are now so achingly frequent. A place where you go to smell their clothes, to lie down in their rocket bed, to stack away their toys again and again.
I told her this, asked her why she was clearing out his room, but there was no point in reasoning with her. So instead, one day, when she was at work, I took the remainder of his things—his backpack, his camera, his sticker books—and snuck them away in one of the cupboards in the spare room.
I lay on the sofa in the living room, happy that Anna was upstairs, that I could drink my vodka in peace. This was now where I spent most of my days, on my laptop, my phone, staring at the wall. Scott had finally sold the company and I didn’t have a job, not that it mattered anyway. I withdrew, like a wounded insect, coiling and curling into a ball. Once, I played a little mental game, to see if I could remember who the prime minister was, or where the last World Cup was held. I had no idea. Nothing. I no longer lived in the world.
* * *
I woke on the sofa to find Anna staring at me.
“Rob, we need to talk.”
“Okay,” I said. The vodka bottle was still on the coffee table.
“We can’t go on like this. You can’t go on like this.”
“Like what?”
“The drinking. What you’re doing to yourself.”
I didn’t say anything. “Sorry,” I finally managed. “It’s just my way of getting through it. I’ll be fine.”
“I know,” Anna said, putting her hand on my leg. “It’s a horrible time, but you can’t keep on like this. You have to start doing something. Maybe doing some work again, taking on a new project...”
“I can’t just jump back into work like you, Anna,” I said.
She had gone back not long after Jack’s funeral. A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in the kitchen listening to the news on the radio. Suddenly Anna’s voice was echoing around the kitchen, talking about the likelihood of an interest-rate hike. I listened to her tone, her intonation. It wasn’t the voice of someone who had just lost their son.
“And does that mean I don’t care, Rob, because I went back to work? Should I do what you’re doing? Sitting around drinking every day.”
“Thanks for mentioning it again,” I said, turning my head away from her. “What do you want me to say? Yes, I’m drinking too much. I know it’s not ideal, but it’s my way of...”
“Rob, look at me. You’re not just having an extra whiskey at night. You think I don’t notice the vodka bottles? Sometimes you can hardly stand when I get home from work. And you wet yourself the other night on the sofa.”
I thought I had covered it up, invented some excuse that I had spilled a drink, but perhaps she had seen me, or noticed my wet boxers in the wash.
“What are you talking about? I told you, I spilled a drink.”
“Jesus, Rob, I saw you. I came down in the night to check you were okay, and you had wet yourself. I saw it with my own eyes.”
A blush of shame, and then anger. Wet yourself. It was how you would speak to a child. She was loving this, her chance to humiliate me, rubbing my nose in it.
She sighed and then chewed her lip a little, as if she was contemplating something.
“You probably don’t remember what you did the other day, do you?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“You came home drunk, and you were stumbling and then you went into the backyard and urinated all over my flowers.”
I felt a strange sense of relief, as I had expected worse. I smiled, more out of nerves than anything else.
“You think it’s funny, Rob?”
I shrugged and looked away from her.
“It was my sunflowers, Rob. My sunflowers.”
The significance, the cruel symbolism of what I had done began to sink in. But what of it? What did it matter now? The sunflowers would be dead soon enough. They would be gone, their remains ground into the unforgiving soil.
“And you’re so perfect, Anna.”
She shook her head and sighed. “Of course I’m not perfect, God, far from it.” Then she knelt next to me and put her hand on my chest. “Rob, I’m not telling you all this to shame you. I take no pleasure in this. I think you have a problem, and I just want to help you.” It reminded me of her mother, how she spoke to the strays she was trying to save.
“It’s a shame you didn’t want to help Jack.”
“What?”
“You heard.”
Outside I could hear the caw and scratch of a magpie walking across the
