Page 63 of Here One Moment

She has to wrench on the top sheet with all her strength just to get in. Dom always makes their bed and he does a great job. He pulls the sheets super tight, as though he’s a soldier, although he also carefully positions the throw cushions just so, which is very cute. It was his dad who taught him to make a bed like this.

Dom is an only child brought up by a single father, and Eve is an only child brought up by a single mother. They discovered this in that fateful French lesson back in Year 10. In pairs, they had to get up and describe the other person’s living situation in French. “Dom lives with his dad. He has no sisters or brothers. He has a dog called Tilly.” “Eve lives with her mum. She has no sisters or brothers. She has a cat called Tilly.” Oh my God, they were so bad at French, their French teacher hated them, but it was obvious, to, like, everyone in that class, except the teacher, because she had no soul, that Eve and Dom were two halves of a whole, two matching jigsaw pieces, two people whose pets, although different species, shared the SAME NAME, who were clearly destined to be together forever.

And now, here they are, married, living happily ever after.

They’re so, so happy!

And then, bizarrely, a cruel, malicious thought appears in her head without her permission: But, Eve, there is nothing to look forward to in your life.

For the last eighteen months it has been nothing but wedding, wedding, wedding. Lists and appointments, so much to do, and a constant feeling of momentum, as if she has been sliding toward something, faster and faster, the wedding is a month away, it’s a week away, it’s tomorrow! And then: it’s happening! She’s walking down the aisle, she’s doing the wedding dance, toasts, speeches, photos, and her face is aching from smiling so hard. And then the flight from Hobart to Sydney. No, let’s not think about the flight. Think about the honeymoon: sex and cocktails and swimming. Coming home to their new apartment! Opening all those beautifully wrapped gifts and finding places to put them and going to the shops to exchange gifts from guests with crappy taste. Writing the thank-you cards: not quite so fun, but still, another task that needed to be done. And then picking up the photos, staring at themselves, feeling kind of pleased at how good they looked, watching the video with their friends!

Now what?

Now, nothing.

Nothing as big and glamorous as her wedding will ever happen again in her whole life. She’ll just go to other people’s weddings and, yes, she will hopefully have babies, but how will they ever afford babies? And what if she can’t train them not to cry like that awful baby on the plane? She’ll have to work two jobs and make her kids dinner and do their laundry and get old and die and what is the actual point of her whole life?

Is this what people mean when they say “existential crisis”? She didn’t think she was complicated or cool enough for one of those.

She will not panic. She will work this out.

She googles: Why am I sad after my wedding?

The internet offers an instant diagnosis: Post-wedding blues.

Very common. Like postnatal depression but without the hormones or sympathy. Nobody is going to bring her a lasagna. The solution, according to the internet, is to make plans. Date nights and whatever. They are too young for date nights. She shudders at the thought. Budgets. Date nights. What next? Orthotics?

Anyway they can’t afford to go out. Their credit card will explode.

She puts her hands behind her head and wonders how Dom will react to their financial crisis.

She will have to make sure he doesn’t come up with a secret stupid solution like getting divorced, or worries all through the night, like he’d done on their honeymoon, fretting over what the lady said on the plane.

He promised her that he would stop thinking about it, but she knows it’s still on his mind because just last night he sat upright in bed and said, very clearly, “I would never hurt Eve. Never in a billion years.”

She said, “I know, Dom. I know you wouldn’t.”

She knew he was sleep-talking and that he would have no memory of it in the morning. His sleep-talking voice is very fast and mumbled, kind of sedated.

Fortunately he fell straight back to sleep. Sometimes when he sleepwalks she has to follow him around, gently suggesting he come back to bed.

The sleep-talking and sleepwalking started when he was six, which was when his mother left Dom and his dad. (She lives in Bali now and teaches yoga. Dom has forgiven her for disappearing from his life for ten years, but Eve has not.) One night Dom’s dad got a knock on the door at three a.m. It was a neighbor, who had realized he’d forgotten to take his garbage cans out and rushed out into the night in his pajamas, to find little Dom, also in pajamas and bare feet, walking down the dark footpath, insisting to the neighbor that he was late for school.

After that his dad had to find ways to make sure Dom couldn’t get out of the house. It got harder as he got older and kept sleepwalking. They locked windows and put a bell on his bedroom door. Occasionally his dad would catch him having a shower, fully dressed. Sometimes he made himself toast in the middle of the night, ate it, went back to bed, and woke up with no memory of it: just the plate with the uneaten crusts on the kitchen table as evidence. Sometimes months would go by and Dom and his dad would think he’d grown out of it, but then it would happen again. He couldn’t go to sleepovers or camps, he was too embarrassed about what might happen, and his dad was worried that he’d walk off a cliff or in front of a car.

Once, when he was a teenager and had gotten his driver’s license, Dom drove in his sleep. He woke up after he turned off the ignition and got out of the car in the moonlit empty parking lot at the local shops. He’d parked perfectly, but he had no memory of getting there. It terrified him. At Dom’s request, Eve hides the car keys before they go to bed. It was his dad’s job when he lived at home and sometimes his dad would forget where he’d hidden them the next day, which drove Dom crazy.

Mostly, it’s not a big deal. He sits up in bed, says something nonsensical, and then lies straight back down. Since he started personal training most of his sleep-talking is about correcting someone’s form. “Don’t lock your elbows,” he’ll say in his sleep-slurred voice. “Focus on your core.”

Sometimes he becomes a little agitated, but mostly he’s calm. There was only one time that he’d sounded angry, which was on that camping trip in the Huon Valley in the stuffy caravan. Eve has noticed that his sleep disturbances are always worse in an airless room, and if he’s been drinking.

That night they were sleeping on two bunk beds side by side in the on-site caravan. Eve and Liv had the top bunks and the boys had the bottom bunks.

Eve doesn’t know what time it was when she opened her eyes to find Dom on his feet, standing next to her bunk, looking directly into her eyes.

He said, “I will kill you.”

“You will what?” said Eve.

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