about the property, while avoiding eye contact and conversation. If you must communicate with a staff member, please come to reception and follow the instructions on the laminated blue card. There will be guided meditation sessions—both walking and sitting—throughout each day. Please listen for the bells.”
She put the letter down. “This is going to be so freaky. We’ll have to eat with strangers in total silence.”
“Better than boring small talk, I guess,” said Ben. He looked at her. “Do you want to do it properly? We could talk here in our room and nobody would ever know.”
Jessica thought about it.
“I think we should do it properly,” she said. “Don’t you? Even if it sounds stupid, we should just follow the rules and do whatever they say.”
“Fine with me,” said Ben. “As long as they don’t tell me to jump off a cliff.” He scratched his neck. “I don’t get what we’re going to do here.”
“I told you,” said Jessica. “Meditate. Yoga. Exercise classes.”
“Yeah,” said Ben. “But in between all that. If we can’t talk or watch TV, what will we do?”
“It will be hard without screens,” said Jessica. She thought she was going to miss social media more than coffee.
She looked again at the letter. “The silence begins when the bell rings three times.” She looked at the clock in the room. “We’ve got half an hour left where we’re allowed to talk.”
Or touch, she thought.
They looked at each other.
Neither spoke.
“So the silence shouldn’t be too hard for us then,” said Ben.
Jessica laughed, but Ben didn’t smile.
Why weren’t they having sex right now? Wasn’t that what they once would have done? Without even talking about it?
She should say something. Do something. He was her husband. She could touch him.
But a tiny fear had trickled into her head late last year and now she couldn’t get rid of it. It was something about the way he looked at her, or didn’t look at her; a clenching of his jaw.
The thought was this: He doesn’t love me anymore.
It seemed so ironic that he could fall out of love with her now, when she had never looked so good. Over the last year she had invested a lot of time and money, and a fair amount of pain, in her body. She had done everything there was to do: her teeth, her hair, her skin, her lips, her boobs. Everyone said the results were amazing. Her Instagram account was filled with comments like: You look so HOT, Jessica! and You look better and better every time I see you. The only person without anything positive to say was her own husband, and if he didn’t find her attractive now, when she was her very best self, then he must never have found her attractive. He must have been faking it all along. Why did he even marry her?
Touch me, she thought, and in her head it was an anguished wail. Please, please touch me.
But all he did was stand up and walk back over to the fruit bowl. “The mandarins look good.”
8
Frances
“When did the pain start?”
Frances lay naked on a massage table, a soft white towel draped over her back.
“Everything off and then under this towel,” the massage therapist had barked when Frances arrived at the spa. She was a large woman with a gray buzz cut and the intimidating manner of a prison guard or a hockey coach, not quite the soft-voiced, gentle masseuse Frances had been anticipating. Frances hadn’t quite caught her name but she’d been too distracted following instructions to ask her to repeat it.
“About three weeks ago,” said Frances.
The therapist placed warm hands which seemed to be the size of ping-pong paddles on her back. Was that possible? Frances lifted her head to see them but the therapist pressed against Frances’s shoulder blades so her head fell forward again.
“Did anything in particular set it off?”
“Not anything physical,” said Frances. “But I did have kind of an emotional shock. I was in this relationship—”
“So no physical injury of any sort,” said the therapist tersely. Clearly she hadn’t got the Tranquillum House memo about speaking in a slow, hypnotic voice. In fact, she was the opposite: it was like she wanted to get any speaking over and done with as quickly as possible.
“No,” said Frances. “But I feel like it was definitely connected. I had a shock, you see, because this man I was dating, well, he disappeared and—I remember this very clearly—I was actually phoning the police when I felt