Page 97 of Someone Else's Shoes
‘What has she said to you, Phil? About what she wants to do?’
He sits heavily. ‘We haven’t talked about it.’
Dr Kovitz’s eyebrows are raised.
‘I mean, not like this. I just – I don’t know what to say to her. I feel like I don’t know her any more.’
‘Well, it’s possible you don’t know her any more. We’re all changing. All the time. By your own admission you left your wife to cope with everything alone for a long period of time. That’s going to alter a person. It’s going to alter a marriage.’
Phil crosses his arms around his body and bends over, so that his chest rests on his knees. Some days there is such a pressure in it he feels like he has to suppress it physically.
‘Marriage doesn’t stay the same year after year, Phil. You’ve been married a long time. You know this. It’s an organic thing. It changes as both parties change. Perhaps sometimes we need to just –’
‘She’s still hiding things from me,’ Phil blurts out.
Dr Kovitz leans back in his chair. ‘Okay.’
‘I called her company two days ago because the builders wanted to know something about the insurance payment and they said – they said she didn’t work there any more.’
There is a long silence.
‘She doesn’t want to share anything with me, does she?’ Phil lets out a long, defeated sigh. ‘I count for nothing in her life any more.’ Life with Sam was once a reliable thing, the backbone of everything else he ever had to deal with. Now it feels like living with her is a series of small explosions, like he never knows what is coming next.
‘Phil,’ Dr Kovitz says gently, ‘when we’re low, it can be easy to see everything through a prism of negativity. Human beings are remarkably bad at understanding other people’s motivations, even when they know them terribly well. We write all sorts of inaccurate stories in our heads.’ Dr Kovitz steeples his fingers together. ‘May I suggest an alternative version?’
Phil waits.
‘From what you’ve said previously, your wife may well have walked out on her job – a job you said she hated. Or she could have been made redundant. We don’t know. What if the reason she kept that information to herself was that she was simply worried about telling you? What if she was trying to protect herself from that awful conversation, with all its ramifications for the two of you?’
He pauses. ‘You told me Sam has been very much aware of your mental-health struggles for some time. Have you considered the possibility that by not saying anything she was trying to protectyou?’
Phil remembers that when Sam’s phone rang he could always tell if it was her boss from the way she flinched when she saw his name. ‘So you basically think I should ignore all this. Just pretend like none of it happened.’
‘Not at all. I think it’s about time you talked to her.’
30
Nisha is so deep in her thoughts that she jumps when Jasmine approaches. She is standing on the little balcony, looking over the dark and twinkling city, Jasmine’s spare dressing-gown wrapped tightly around her against the cold, a cigarette she doesn’t even want to smoke between her lips, as if doing something as awful as smoking at 6 a.m. will reaffirm how awful everything is. Some mornings she feels so far from her son it’s as if a thread, taut between them, connects her heart to his and causes a constant, only just bearable pain. He had sounded so down again last night, so disbelieving when she said she was going to get the shoes, shewas, Ray,really, that then she could come get him. He had cut her short when she tried to describe the plan to him. He had done badly in a math test, Dad was still cutting off his money, and his friend Zoë was all over Instagram partying with some girls she knew he couldn’t stand. He sounded so lonely and flat. Yes, he was still taking his meds. No, he wasn’t hungry. No, he wasn’t sleeping. Yes, he knew everything was going to be okay. Whatever. ‘When are you coming to get me?’
‘Soon, baby. I just have to get these shoes to your father and then he’ll have to give me the money.’
‘I hate him,’ he had said vehemently, and when she tried, half-heartedly, to protest that he shouldn’t think that, he really shouldn’t, he had asked why? In what way did his dad even love him? In what way did Ray owe him anything? And she hadn’t been able to come up with a good answer.
They had both been quiet for a few long, anguishing moments and then he had said, in a quiet voice: ‘Mom? Remember that song you used to sing me? Would you sing it to me now?’
When she had sung, her voice had trembled.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …
You make me happy, when skies are grey …
‘Couldn’t sleep either, huh?’ Jasmine says, handing her a coffee.
A police helicopter has circled overhead for hours, its vibrations sending shock waves into the night sky, filling the atmosphere with a sense of vague, unspecified threat. Nisha takes the cup and shakes her head.
Jasmine sits down in the little fold-up chair she keeps on the balcony, adjusting her dressing-gown over her knees. ‘Me either. I keep asking myself if we’re nuts, trying to do this.’
Nisha knows that what Jasmine actually means is that she could lose her job. Every bit of this is a sackable offence. When Jasmine had outlined the plan to the others, Nisha had seen both jaws physically drop, as if they were characters in a cartoon. Nisha has spent hours trying to work out how to protect Jasmine: it will be Nisha who takes the key card, Nisha who removes the shoes, Nisha who, in a worst-case scenario, will hold up her hands and claim it is all down to her, that she bullied Jasmine into collaborating, that she is guilty of all of it. But it still feels like a risk.
