‘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.’
chapter eight
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 grey 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 on her back which seemed to be the size of ping-pong bats. 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 this kind of sensation, like I’d been slammed –’
‘It’s probably better if you don’t talk,’ said the therapist.
‘Oh. Is it?’ said Frances. I was about to tell you a very interesting story, scary lady. She’d told the story a few times now, and she felt that she told it quite well. She was improving it with each telling.
Also, she didn’t have long before she had to stop talking for five days, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to cope with so much silence. She’d only just avoided that terrifying abyss of despair in the car. Silence might tip her over again.
The therapist pressed her giant thumbs on either side of Frances’s spine.
‘Ow!’
‘Focus on your breathing.’
Frances breathed in the citrus-scented essential oils and thought about Paul. How it began. How it ended.
Paul Drabble was an American civil engineer she met online. A friend of a friend of a friend. A friendship that turned into something more. Over a six-month period, he sent her flowers and gift baskets and handwritten notes. They talked for hours on the phone. He’d Facetimed with her and said he’d read three of her books and loved them, and he talked expertly about the characters and even quoted his favourite excerpts, and they were all excerpts that made Frances feel secretly proud. (Sometimes people quoted their favourite lines to her and Frances thought, Really? I thought that wasn’t my best. And then she felt weirdly annoyed with them.)
He sent her photos of his son, Ari. Frances, who’d never wanted children of her own, fell hard for Ari. He was tall for his age. He loved basketball and wanted to play it professionally. She was going to be Ari’s stepmother. She’d read the book Raising Boys in preparation and had a number of brief but pleasurable chats with Ari on the phone. He didn’t say much, understandably – he was a twelve-year-old boy, after all – but sometimes she made him laugh when they Skyped, and he had a dry little chuckle that melted her heart. Ari’s mother – Paul’s wife – had died of cancer when Ari was in preschool. So sad, so poignant, so . . . ‘convenient?’ suggested one of Frances’s friends, and Frances had slapped her wrist.
Frances was planning to move from Sydney to Santa Barbara. She had her flights booked. They would need to get married to secure her green card, but she wasn’t going to rush into things. If and when it happened, she planned to wear amethyst. Appropriate for a third wedding. Paul had sent her photos of the room in his house that he’d already set up as her writing room. There were empty bookshelves waiting for her books.
When that terrible phone call came in the middle of the night, Paul so distraught he could barely get the words out, crying as he told her that Ari had been in a terrible car accident and there was a problem with the health insurance company and that Ari needed immediate surgery, Frances didn’t hesitate. She sent him money. A vast amount of money.
‘Sorry, how much?’ said the young detective who carefully wrote down everything Frances said, his professionalism slipping for just a moment.
That was Paul’s only misstep: he underplayed his hand. She would have sent double, triple, quadruple – anything to save Ari.
And then: terrifying silence. She was frantic. She thought Ari must have died. Then she thought Paul had died. No answers to her texts, her voicemail messages, her emails. It was her friend Di who made the first tentative suggestion. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Frances, but is it possible that . . .?’ Di didn’t even need to finish the sentence. It was as if the knowledge had been lurking away in Frances’s subconscious all along, even while she booked non-refundable airfares.