Still Waters Run Deep

Sensitive content: miscarriage

Tom isn't a bad husband.

He's dependable, consistent, and uncomplicated. He's generous with his time and attention. We do a lot together. I have an album by my bedside table. It's only a kraft paper scrapbook, tied with a yellow satin ribbon, but it's full: smiling photos, glued grains of sand, pressed flowers, plane and train and cinema and museum tickets, post-it notes peeled off the fridge, hotel brochures too small for all the tender memories they carry, and a lot of words. I copy down the text messages I don't want to forget.

There's a lane we like to walk down, not far from our house. It leads to the woods. He seems to see the magic there the way I see it, the magic in the way the sunlight glows lucent green in the moss of the forest floor, or in the way the wildflowers down the lane bob their coloured heads. We're like a couple of kids, peering at the caterpillars on the flower stems, trying to spot the birds in the hedge. My favourites are the tiny wrens. They'd fit in the palm of your hand if they'd only stop flitting about for a minute to make friends.

One day, Tom picked a flower and stood in front of me, I'd say solemnly, only there was a cheeky glint in his eye. ‘Please accept this token of my everlasting love,’ he said. I looked at him, at his square jaw covered in dense, dark beard, at his pale, earnest eyes underneath his thick forehead, at his immense shoulders, like a lumberjack's, and at his big bear paws holding the tiny yellow flower and I laughed, and he laughed, and I accepted the flower and let my head fall on the wide expanse of his chest, pressing my cheek into the worn flannel and drawing the smell of old tobacco and old-fashioned sandalwood cologne deep into the depths of my lungs. Later, I pressed the flower and added it to my album.

He's not a bad husband. But sometimes, something shifts.

And this shift happens more often now that I am grieving. Tom is calm. He's always there, with a kiss or squeeze of my shoulder, or some practical response like taking on my share of the chores. But sometimes I want him to meet me in the dark, rather than hold up a lantern for me. Instead of drying my tears, I want him to let his own flow.

I'm past the messy stage. I no longer spend my days, unwashed and bloated, watching without flinching the bloodiest scenes of beating or flogging or torture that Netflix has to offer, only to somehow finally drag myself out of the quicksand and melt into hot, frustrated tears when the lid on the new jar of marmalade won't yield. But still, the grief is there, under the surface. Some days it doesn't take much to make it swell out of my skin.

And that is when the shift happens. It's not a tangible thing. It's as if an invisible pane of soundproof glass comes between us. You can't see it, but when you try to talk through it the feeling of your words won't carry. And it's hard to say which of us erected the pane: are the words not clear enough at source, or are they clear, but bouncing back towards me? It's like when a video call breaks up and neither caller believes their Wi-Fi to be the weak one. ‘It must be your end,’ they each say.

Yesterday I planned to take our dog, Willow, to the woods. A late-spring heatwave was building momentum. When I got to the lane I stopped and stared. They'd mown down the waist-high wildflowers, leaving only dry, decapitated stubs. I bent down to check the ground was not too hot for her paws, and, as I touched it, I saw a single striped caterpillar, lost on the hard surface. We turned back. The tarmac was like hot coals.

At lunchtime I told Tom about the flowers.

‘Don't they know the insects burn in June without vegetation?’ I said.

Tom didn't seem very concerned about the annihilated flowers, so I cranked it up a notch, told him about the caterpillar.

‘It looked so lost, so vulnerable, on the tarmac,’ I said.

And there it was, the soundproof glass. No great physical distance separated us, but he drifted miles away. My voice was getting higher, and my throat felt tight.

‘There was nothing left,’ I said. ‘That place that was supposed to...to nurture it, shelter it... oh whatever, just feed it. It would have grown wings, found other flowers. They didn't give it time.’

My words ran into each other, flinging themselves at the glass.

Tom had put down his fork, his lips were clamped together in apprehension.

‘It would have been so pretty. Don't you see how sad it is?’

‘You're not in a good place,’ he said.

I don't like it when he does that. He can't feel what I'm feeling, so he says something which implies there is something wrong with me. Still, he wasn't a bad husband then, only he wasn't really a good husband either, because, from behind the pane of glass, he felt more like a stranger. A stranger who would stand next to me in the bathroom, naked and sweaty. A stranger who'd snore in my bed. A stranger who'd leave hair on my soap, share my dirty laundry basket, whilst my husband watched from a distance.

I tried harder to close the gap, to outrage him with the caterpillar's plight, but the harder I tried, the harder he grew, until all I could see opposite me was an unmovable menhir of a man, with shoulders that were only wide, not protectively strong, and a chest that was only thick, not welcomingly cushioned. What had I found so comfortable about that spot? It was just a chest.

‘Well, never mind,’ I said. ‘It's really not that important.’

But I lied, and he knew it, and we ate in silence.

In the afternoon he said he had to go town.

‘Try to get some rest,’ he said, placing a dry kiss on my forehead.

‘I'm sorry,’ I whispered. I knew I'd weighed on him.

‘Hun, please remember it wasn't your fault.’

I nodded mutely. If I spoke I wouldn't have been able to hold back the tears. I waited until the pick-up wheels crunched on the gravel, and I submitted. I let the sobs shake my body. There's much less shame to crying alone, nobody sees your face distort itself, or hears the weird little wails that escape you. My grief relaxed its reins after a while and my breathing slowed. But still, it wasn't crying with closure, not the cleansing kind where you feel at peace afterwards. I was just exhausted, so I slept. And as I lay on the sofa I wandered back to the lane and picked up the caterpillar. I saw one flower, growing through the tarmac. I looked back down at my hand to tell the caterpillar I had found it a home, only to see my empty palm. Ahead of me Tom walked towards the woods, Willow followed with a wagging tail. I tried to call to him but I couldn't make a sound with my throat so I ran to catch up. He kept walking at a steady pace, and the tail kept wagging, but I couldn't get any closer. I looked down at my hand again and the caterpillar was back but bleeding now in a small caterpillar-sized pool of blood, and I called to Tom again and this time my voice rang clear. He stopped, and turned, squinting in the sun, looking through me, not at me. I woke with a start then and sat up. My heart was pounding and I was breathing through my mouth. I looked down at my empty palm and with a shaking finger traced the shape that, weeks ago, had lain from my wrist to the beginning of my fingers: a perfectly formed, tiny jelly human, grey and shining, with blue hollows for eyes.

I lay back with my hands on my vacated womb.

‘I'm sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I so wanted you to make yourself at home.’

The light had changed whilst I slept. The clock said Tom had been gone four hours. He needed his space. I have a memory from our beginning, when there was only lightness, spontaneity. He's driving back from my sister's, imitating my brother-in-law, talking in an exaggeratedly pompous voice about GMOs being a great solution for developing countries:

‘Nature is not all rainbows and unicorns. It's a vicious fight for life out there...’

‘Fool!’ I answer, and then I put my head out of the window. ‘Fools!’ I shout into the wind. We laugh loudly and turn the music up. It's us against the world, and we do not intend to be sucked down into the quagmire of ordinariness that we believe almost every other human chooses to live in.

And yet there I was yesterday, dragging him down, pulling him into the current of my grief. I wouldn't have blamed him then if he stayed away. Or found someone else who could still shout into the wind.

He came home eventually with pizza and beer. That's his way of looking after me when I'm tired. I chewed without talking whilst the little men on tv kicked the ball around the green rectangle.

‘I'm going up,’ I said, when the square cardboard boxes were empty. ‘Take Willow out after the match?’

‘Yes, hun. You ok?’

‘I'm ok.’

I listened in bed. The front door opened and closed, then a while later opened and closed again. Willow trotted up and slumped into her basket by the bed. The tv came back on, quieter than before. I went down in my dressing gown.

‘Can't sleep?’ he asked from the sofa.

‘No. Come up and chat with me, would you?’

Upstairs, an eagerness shone in his eyes as he lay down next to me, propping up his head on one arm. He seemed relieved to have some instructions, as if he finally knew what to do about me.

‘So, what do you want to talk about?’ he asked.

‘Anything. Give me your stream of consciousness.’

‘My what?’

‘You know, everything that's going through your mind.’

‘Oh. Ok.’

With tender willingness he told me about the part he needed for his truck, about Willow chasing a cat, about the new drill he wanted. And I nodded, and I smiled, and then I laughed, and then I answered in short words, and then full sentences, and our words and our smiles blew like gentle bellows on warm embers between us. Talking about nothing, it seemed, was a better idea than talking about something. He was quiet for a moment then and we lay on our backs holding hands.

‘I didn't just go to town today,’ he said after a while to the ceiling.

‘Oh?’

‘I had something to pick up. Something I've had made. Wait there.’

I listened as he went back downstairs. Even if he didn't feel the loss the way I did, he was still there, and he hadn't tried to shake off the weight of me. That was something.

He came back upstairs with a shoebox.

‘Shoes?’

‘No. Not shoes.’

He opened it and handed me an intriguingly heavy slab of something wrapped in pink tissue paper.

‘I hope you like it,’ he said as I pushed back the paper. ‘You know that cross we made won't last forever, it's just twigs.’

My dependable, uncomplicated rock of a man had been grieving all along. He'd had his sadness carved in stone.

Aurora-Wren, the engraving read. Our angel flown too soon.

A little cherub looked up at the letters.

I pressed my face into the softness of his chest. His heart beat in my ear.