She stood up so she was now standing over me. “How can you say that, how can you even think that?” She started to cry, and I reached for my vodka and poured myself a glass. Could I tell her? Could I tell her now? That I thought about it every day. What if, what if? What if Nev and Dr. Sladkovsky had been right about Jack? Because Nev knew better than anyone how to save a life—in Josh, he had living proof. But Anna refused to listen, thought she knew best.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t just pretend it’s not there. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s the truth, whether you like it or not. Jack had a chance, yes, a small chance. But it was something. It was all he had.”
Anna took a deep, resigned breath and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “Rob, I’m not going to argue about it again. But can I ask you something? Do you not think that I don’t think about it? That I don’t lie awake at night, thinking that perhaps it would have made a difference, that maybe I made the wrong decision?”
I shrugged, drank my vodka.
“Well, I do, every day if you must know,” Anna said, her voice cracking.
“You should,” I muttered under my breath.
“What did you say?” Anna said. I looked away from her, like a sulking child.
“No, go on, tell me what you said,” she said, jabbing at me with her fingers. “If you’re such a big man.”
“I said you should. You should feel guilty about it.”
Suddenly, Anna grabbed the bottle of vodka and quickly walked into the kitchen. I jumped up off the sofa, stubbing my toe on the coffee table, and ran after her, skidding on the kitchen tiles and crashing into the fridge. She opened the cap of the vodka and held it over the sink.
“Please, Anna, please give me the bottle back.”
Her chest and face were bright red, and she spoke through clenched teeth, her words a whispered hiss. “That was a disgusting thing to say. The most disgusting thing you have ever said to me. How dare you judge me. How dare you! Your father would be ashamed of you. Ashamed, Rob, because you’re half the man he was.”
I grabbed the vodka from Anna, but the bottle slipped out of my hand and smashed onto the kitchen floor. We watched as the vodka spread across the tiles, the splinters of glass sparkling in the afternoon sun.
Anna said her words with such poise, such clarity, I knew they must be true. “I hate you, Rob,” she said. “I fucking hate you.”
* * *
Maybe this was the booze talking, but you think you know a person, though you never really do. You bury the bad things, keep them out of sight. I remembered the first time I noticed Anna’s coldness. A group email she had sent after her family dog had died, just after we had moved to London. A eulogy that was so awkward, so unfeeling, it was as if she had only sent the email out of a sense of duty, because she thought, in those circumstances, that was what one did.
I saw that coldness again, a few times over the years. Her curt and final “we were never that close” after her grandmother died. Her insistence that she would never give money to beggars, because there were charities for that. While her lack of empathy sometimes bothered me, it was mitigated by the fact that it wasn’t ever directed at me.
Anna’s intransigence. The rules are there for a reason. That’s what she always said. The rules are there for a reason. Because in Anna’s world, there was a proper way of doing things. You didn’t cheat on your tax return, or even try to get out of a parking ticket, because what if everyone did that? You didn’t sneak in to watch a second movie in the theater, when you had only paid for one. You didn’t go to unregistered cancer clinics in the Czech Republic, even if it meant your dying son would be given a chance.
I cleaned up the broken glass in the kitchen and got another bottle of vodka from my backpack. Through the French windows, I could see Anna in the backyard. She was frantically digging in the flower beds with a spade. I watched her as she bent down, scooped out soil with a trowel and flung it over her shoulder.
* * *
“Can we talk?” Anna was dressed for work, in pinstripes, her hair tied back. It was two or three days since we had argued, and we had barely spoken. I nodded, confused, unable to remember what happened last night. There was a large purple bruise on my forearm.
“I made you a coffee,” she said, placing a mug on the table.
“Thanks.”
“I wanted to speak to you now, while you’re sober.” She took a deep breath. “I can’t do this anymore, and I’m leaving.”
I did not feel anger but a sense of relief. Relief that I wouldn’t have to hide my bottles anymore, that I could sit here in the living room and drink in peace.
“Okay,” I said.
“We should work out what we’re going to do with everything,” she said, “but let’s do it through lawyers. I can’t deal with that right now.”
“Okay,” I said, and Anna bit her lip as if she had something she wanted to say but couldn’t. I lay on the sofa and heard her carry a suitcase downstairs and then quietly close the front door.
* * *
Six weeks later, after I had drunk through our wine collection and our drinks’ cabinet, I left. I couldn’t be in that house anymore. There was nothing left; Anna had taken everything. No little shoes by the door, no dinosaurs or Lego for me to trip on in the hall. I could no longer hear the sound of Jack’s songs as he sat in the bath or hear his little
