Six weeks later
Napoleon sat in the waiting room of a psychiatrist he’d been referred to by his GP. It had taken him six weeks to get the first available appointment. That’s the mental health crisis problem right there, he thought.
Since returning from Tranquillum House, he’d been surviving: teaching, cooking, talking to his wife and daughter, running his support group. It was amazing to him that everyone treated him as if he were just the same. It reminded him of the blocked-ears feeling after a flight, except all his senses, not just his hearing, felt muted. His voice seemed to echo in his ears. The sky was leached of colour. He did nothing that he wasn’t obliged to do because the effort of existence exhausted him. He slept whenever he could. Getting up each morning was like moving his limbs through thick mud.
‘Everything okay?’ Heather sometimes said to him.
‘All good,’ said Napoleon.
Heather was different after their time at Tranquillum House. Not happier exactly, but calmer. She had joined a tai chi class in the park down the road. She was the only one under the age of seventy. Heather had never been the sort of woman to have girlfriends, but for some reason she fitted right in to this elderly circle.
‘They make me laugh,’ she said. ‘And they don’t demand anything from me.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Zoe. ‘They demand lots of you!’ It was true that Heather seemed to be spending a lot of time driving her elderly new friends to and fro from doctors’ appointments and picking up prescriptions for them.
Zoe had a new part-time job. She seemed busy and distracted with her university course. Napoleon kept a careful eye on her, but she was good, she was fine. One morning, a week or so after they’d got back from the retreat, he stopped by her bathroom door and overheard a beautiful sound he hadn’t heard in three years: his daughter singing off-key in the shower.
‘Mr Marconi?’ said a short blonde woman who reminded him a little of Frances Welty. ‘I’m Allison.’
She ushered him into her office and motioned to a chair on the opposite side of a coffee table with a book about English gardens and a box of aloe vera scented tissues.
Napoleon didn’t wait for the niceties. He had no time to lose.
He told her about Zach. He told her about the drugs he was given at Tranquillum House and how, ever since then, he’d been struggling with what he believed to be depression. He told her that his GP had offered him antidepressants, and he probably did need antidepressants, but he knew sometimes it was hard to get the dosage right, it wasn’t an exact science, he understood and appreciated this, he had done the research, he knew all the brand names, all the side effects, he’d put together his own spreadsheet if she was interested in taking a look, and he knew that sometimes, during that initial period, patients didn’t get better, they got worse, they suffered suicidal thoughts, and he knew this because he knew people who had lost family members in that way, and he also knew that he overreacted to drugs, he knew this about himself, and maybe his son had the same sensitivity, he didn’t know, and he was sure that those people at that health resort meant well, and maybe this depression had been going to happen anyway, but he felt that he was possibly the one person in that room who should never, ever have been given that smoothie.
And then, limp with exhaustion, he said, ‘Allison, I am terrified that I will . . .’
She didn’t ask him to finish the sentence.
She reached across the coffee table and put her hand on his arm. ‘We’re a team now, Napoleon. You and me, we’re a team, and we’re going to work out a strategy and we are going to beat this, okay?’
She looked at him with all the passion and intensity of his old football coach. ‘We’re going to beat it. We’re going to win.’
Two months later
Frances and Tony were taking a walk, nine hundred kilometres apart, in different states.
They’d got into the habit of keeping each other company as they went for walks around their respective neighbourhoods.
At first they’d walked with their mobile phones pressed to their ears, but then Tony’s daughter, Mimi, had said they should use headphones, and now their ears no longer ached when they finished and they could walk for even longer.
‘Are you on your steep bit yet?’ asked Tony.
‘I am,’ said Frances. ‘But listen to my breathing! I’m not puffing at all.’
‘You’re an elite athlete,’ said Tony. ‘Have you murdered anyone yet?’
‘Yep,’ said Frances. ‘Did it yesterday. Murdered my first character ever. He totally deserved it.’
‘Did you enjoy it? Hello, Bear.’
Bear was a chocolate labrador that Tony often passed on his walks. Tony didn’t know Bear’s owner’s name, but he always said hello to Bear.
Tony told her about his upcoming trip to Holland to see his son and grandchildren.
‘I’ve never been to Holland,’ said Frances.
‘Haven’t you?’ said Tony. ‘I’ve only been once. I’m hoping it’s not going to be as cold as last time I went.’
‘I’ve never been to Holland,’ said Frances again.
There was a long pause. Frances stopped on the side of the street and smiled at a lady wearing a straw hat, watering her garden.
Tony said, ‘Would you like to come to Holland with me, Frances?’
‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘Yes, I would.’
Their first kiss was in the Qantas lounge.
Three months later
Heather sat on the end of her bed and rubbed lotion into her dry legs, as Napoleon set the alarm on his phone for the next day.
He’d been seeing a psychiatrist, and he seemed to be doing well, but he didn’t talk much about what went on in those sessions.
She watched as he put the phone on the bedside table.
‘I think that you need to shout at me,’ she said.
‘What?’ He looked up at her, startled. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘After the retreat, we’ve never properly talked about it again – the asthma medication.’
‘I wrote all those letters. It’s on the record.’ Of course, Napoleon had done the right thing. He’d found the right contacts through Dr Chang. He’d documented it all. There was never any intent to sue but he needed to make sure that what happened was on the public record. He’d written to the authorities, to the pharmaceutical company: My son, Zachary Marconi, took his own life after being prescribed . . .
‘I know,’ said Heather. ‘But you never said anything about . . . what I did.’
‘You are not to blame for Zach’s suicide,’ said Napoleon.
‘I don’t want you to blame me,’ said Heather. ‘But I just feel like you’re allowed to be angry with me. You’re allowed to be angry with Zoe, too, but you’re not going to shout at Zoe –’
‘No, I do not want to shout at Zoe.’ He looked horrified at the thought.
‘But you can shout at me. If you like?’ She looked up at him, where he stood by the side of the bed, his brow furrowed in pain as if he’d just that instant stubbed his toe.
‘Absolutely not,’ he said, in his pompous schoolteacher voice. ‘That’s ridiculous. That achieves nothing. You lost your son.’
‘Maybe I need you to be angry with me.’
‘You do not,’ said Napoleon. ‘That’s . . . sick.’ He turned away from her. ‘Stop this.’
‘Please.’ She got up on her knees on to the bed so she could look him in the eyes. ‘Napoleon?’ she said.
She thought about the home she grew up in, where nobody ever yelled or laughed or cried or screamed or expressed a single feeling, except for a mild desire for a cup of tea.
‘Please?’
‘Stop this nonsense,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Stop it.’
‘Shout at me.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not. What next? Should I hit you too?’
‘You’d never hit me in a million years. But I’m your wife, Napoleon, you’re allowed to be angry with me.’