falling—just the kind that seems to happen in all those interior spaces of the mind, the places he can’t access.
“Great day, huh?” he says, smiling benignly at her. She looks ahead. He nods over at Gaia, who is playing with a couple of kids. “Glad we found this park, too. Looks like Gaia’s made friends already. We could set up some playdates. Be good for her to get some Scandinavian friends.”
Aurelia’s lips move. She’s speaking, but he can’t hear. He leans closer. Closer. She doesn’t flinch. All this time he’s kept his distance because he thought she’d leap away from him if he touched her, and he couldn’t handle being rejected. This thought winds up from the depths of his subconscious, and with it a memory of his father dropping him off at boarding school. Hands in his pockets. And how much that stung.
Very slowly, he puts an arm across her shoulders. She doesn’t move. He breathes a long sigh of relief. Happiness stirs in him. Maybe it’s not him that’s making her so sad. Maybe it’s something else.
“I feel . . .” she’s saying. He tilts his head toward her lips. She’s crying. Tears are sliding down her cheeks and she doesn’t swipe them away.
“Aurelia . . .” he says. “It’s OK.”
She nods. Intellectually, she’s aware everything is OK. OK, in the sense that right now they’re sitting in a park, and she can hear one daughter laughing and her other daughter snoring against Tom’s chest. But the reality is that everything is not OK, and certainly not today. Today she is not in a park but in a void that’s midnight black. She is not a mother, not a wife, but a speck of nothingness floating in that vast, empty void. There is no horizon, no chink of light, no end to the nothingness. And she has no words to communicate this.
But when Tom slides his arm across her shoulders, the sudden human contact restores her words just long enough for her to frame the terror she’s living inside.
“I feel like I want to die,” she says.
Tom stares at her, mouth open. He doesn’t know what to say.
“Mumma! Look! Look what I can do!”
They both watch as Gaia hooks her legs from a bar on the climbing frame and dangles upside down, laughing.
“That’s great, pudding,” Tom calls out, his voice breaking. “Careful you don’t fall. That’s enough now.”
Coco jerks awake as he shouts, her pale eyes flinging open and glancing around in shock. She sees her mother, feels the thump-thump of her father’s heartbeat beneath his sweater, and promptly falls back to sleep.
“Why did you do it, Tom?” Aurelia asks.
He starts. “Do what?”
“The build.”
“Is that why you feel like this?”
She nods. Then, realizing this isn’t the cause at all, shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she whispers. “I don’t know what’s wrong.” A chink in the darkness to admit it. Within seconds the darkness engulfs her again in its smothering, measureless terror.
“How long have you felt like this?” Tom asks gently.
“Since . . . since you cut down the tree. And then all the animals dying after drinking from the river. It’s just got worse every day. I can’t bear it.” Another tear rolls down her face. This time she wipes it away. “I can’t bear being alive.”
He nods, processing this. His wife is suicidal. In a park, while their older daughter laughs and plays with new friends, and their baby girl snoozes adorably against his chest. He figures he knows the real reason. Two days ago, Basecamp was destroyed during a storm. The storm was only half of it—the river was the real cause. When he’d redirected the river, it had actually dispersed through the site, turning the ground soggy and collapsing the foundations. The house they dreamed of, designed, built, and got into serious debt for, is destroyed, and he’s not even sure they can claim anything on the insurance for it. Maybe fifty percent, but they’ll still have a black hole in their finances and nothing to show for it.
Building a summer home out here was Aurelia’s dream. But now it has become a nightmare. He pressed her to come straight after the baby was born, even though he knew she wasn’t feeling up to it. But we’ll spend Christmas here, he said. It’ll be magic. It’s his fault she feels suicidal. He has done this.
“I’m so, so sorry,” he says, and she feels something in her heart give, a hot, tight knot come undone.