chapter eighty
‘Sorry,’ said Clementine to the teacher. ‘I’ll just go and check on my husband. I think he’s not feeling well.’
‘Of course,’ said Jan. She added, hopefully, ‘Let me know if you need me.’
Clementine left the classroom and looked to the left. He was already nearly at the far end of the corridor. ‘Sam!’ she called, half-running past classrooms filled with adults bettering themselves.
He seemed to pick up his pace.
‘Sam!’ she called again. ‘Wait!’
She followed him to a quiet, deserted passageway with a glass ceiling that connected two buildings. The walls were jammed with grey lockers. Sam suddenly stopped. He found a narrow column of space in between two blocks of lockers, the sort of hidey-hole the girls would gravitate towards, and he sat down, his back against the wall. He rested his forehead on his knees. His shoulders heaved silently. There was a round patch of sweat on his shirt. She went to touch his shoulder, but her hand hovered uncertainly for a few seconds before she changed her mind.
Instead she sat down opposite him, on the other side of the passageway, her back against the cool metal of a locker. There were squares of sunlight all the way along the corridor, like a train of sunshine. She felt strangely peaceful as she waited for Sam to stop crying, breathing in the nostalgic fragrance of high school.
At last Sam looked up, his face wet and puffy. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Well, that was dignified.’
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘It was the compressions,’ said Sam. He ran the back of his hand across his nose and sniffed.
‘I know,’ said Clementine.
‘It felt like I was there.’ He used his palms to rub his cheekbones in a circular motion.
‘I know,’ she said again.
He looked up at the ceiling and did something with his tongue as if he were trying to get food out of his teeth. The sunlight shone on the wall behind him and made his eyes look very blue in the shadowiness of his face. He looked simultaneously very young and very old, as if all the past and future versions of himself were overlaid on his face.
‘I always had this idea in my head that I was good in a crisis,’ said Sam.
‘You are good in a crisis.’
‘I thought if I was ever tested, if there was a fire, or a gunman or a zombie apocalypse, I’d take care of my family. I’d be the man.’ He made his voice deep and contemptuous on the word ‘man’.
‘Sam –’
‘It wasn’t just that I took my eyes off Ruby. It wasn’t just that I was trying to open a jar of nuts to impress a bloody stripper, of all things, while my little girl drowned right next to me …’ He took a deep, shaky breath. ‘But I didn’t move. I watched another man drag my little girl from that god-awful fountain and I just stood there, like a stunned mullet.’
‘You did move,’ said Clementine. ‘It’s just that they got there first, and they knew what they were doing. It was only a split second. It just feels like longer. And then you did move, I promise you, you did.’
Sam lifted his shoulders. An expression of complete self-loathing crossed his face. ‘Anyway. I can’t change what I did or didn’t do. I’ve just got to stop thinking about it. I’ve got to get it out of my head. I keep replaying it, over and over and over. It’s stupid, pointless. I can’t work and I can’t sleep, and I’m taking it out on you, and … I just need to pull myself together.’
‘Maybe,’ said Clementine tentatively, ‘you could, or we could, talk to someone. Like a professional sort of person?’
‘Like a shrink,’ said Sam with a strained smile. ‘Because I’m losing my mind.’
‘Like a shrink,’ said Clementine. ‘Because it sounds like you are losing your mind. Just a little bit. I was thinking when the teacher mentioned post-traumatic stress earlier –’
Sam looked appalled. ‘Post-traumatic stress,’ he said. ‘Like a war veteran. Except I didn’t come back from Iraq or Afghanistan where I saw people get blown up, no, I’ve just come back from a backyard barbeque.’
‘Where you saw your daughter nearly drown,’ said Clementine.
Sam closed his eyes.
‘Your daughter nearly drowned,’ said Clementine again. ‘And you feel responsible.’
Sam raised his eyes to the ceiling and exhaled. ‘I don’t have post-traumatic stress syndrome, Clementine. Jesus. That’s humiliating. That’s pathetic.’
Clementine took her phone out of her jacket pocket.
‘Don’t Google,’ pleaded Sam. ‘Trust me. You’re always telling me to stop Googling. It never tells you anything good.’
‘I am so Googling,’ said Clementine, and she felt her breath quicken, because she was suddenly seeing all his behaviour ever since the barbeque from a different angle, through a new lens, and she thought of her father saying the other night, ‘He isn’t quite right in the head’, and how she hadn’t listened, not really, not the way you’d listen if somebody had said, ‘Your husband is sick.’
‘Symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ Clementine read out loud. ‘Replaying the event over and over. You just said you do that!’
‘I’m glad you’re so happy about it,’ said Sam with a ghost of a smile.
‘Sam, you’re like a textbook case! Insomnia. Yes. Irritability. Yes. Solution? Seek treatment.’ She was speaking facetiously, ironically, kind of idiotically, as if all this was a great joke, as if none of it really mattered, as if her stomach wasn’t twisting, as if she didn’t feel that this was her only shot, because lately his mood could change in an instant, and in another hour he might refuse to talk about this at all, and he’d be gone again.
‘Look. I don’t need to seek treatment,’ began Sam.
‘Yes, you do,’ said Clementine, her eyes on the phone. ‘Long-term effects: divorce. Substance abuse. Are you abusing substances?’
‘I’m not abusing substances,’ said Sam. ‘Stop reading that stuff. Put your phone away. Let’s go back to class.’
‘I really think you need to talk to someone, to a professional someone,’ said Clementine. She’d turned into her mother. Next thing she’d be suggesting ‘a lovely psychologist’. ‘Will you please talk to someone?’
Sam tipped his head back and studied the ceiling again. Finally he looked back at her.
‘I might,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Clementine.
She rested her head against the lockers and closed her eyes. She felt a sense of inevitability, as if her marriage were a giant ship and it was too late to change its course now – it was either going to hit the iceberg or not, and nothing she said or did right now would make any difference. If her mother had been observing this interaction, she’d tell Clementine she was wrong, that she needed to keep talking, to say everything that was on her mind, to communicate, to leave no possibility for misinterpretation.
If her father were there, he’d put his finger to his lips and say, Shh.
Clementine settled for two words.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
She meant, I’m sorry this happened. I’m sorry I didn’t see you were going through this. I’m sorry I maybe haven’t loved you the way you deserve to be loved. I’m sorry that when we faced our first crisis, it showed up everything that was wrong in our marriage instead of everything that was right. I’m sorry we turned on each other instead of to each other.
‘Yeah, I’m sorry too,’ said Sam.