A Hollow Homecoming

This won’t be the hardest part.

I remember slurring those words through clumsy, sleep-deprived lips, my stomach woefully empty. I remember Richard staring at me as if he didn’t know who I was, his fingers twitching in his lap.

What on earth could be harder than this?

The venom laced in his demand still wasn’t enough to lift me from my stupor. I willed my head to turn just a fraction to the right so I could look out the window instead, catch a glimpse of the pink and white spring petals I knew were falling from the trees beyond the glass outside. But I couldn't. I stayed slumped in the hospital bed, staring into my husband’s hollow eyes.

Leaving. Without her.

He hadn’t believed me right away. But they weighed on him, my words, the first I had uttered since the operation. They held him, glued him to the chair beside my bed until it was hard to tell where the fabric of his jeans ended and the seat began. I watched, despicably indifferent, as he sank lower and lower, his chin meeting his chest, his feet sliding slowly across the floor. A carousel of people, nurses in blue, doctors in white, family in black, drifted in and out of our room, dispensing medicine, serving food, gifting platitudes. I held each offering in my hand, heavy and painfully tangible, not knowing what to do. How could I take the medicine when my throat had closed up? How could I swallow the food when my mouth was so dry? How could I accept their apologies when, despite everything, I felt nothing?

We knew it was coming. We didn’t have to say a word, but we knew. We couldn’t stay forever. My stitches had dissolved, my wounds were healing, my vitals had returned to normal. It was time to leave.

Richard was the first to stand. I watched him as his hands moved, first from his lap, then to the arms of the chair. He carefully leaned forward, a low groan emanating from the back of his throat, as he slowly pulled himself up on unsteady legs. He stared down at me, a slight tremor in his chin as he held out his hand to me. The tears threatened to come then. Finally. It was the first time he had treated me with something other than contempt since we entered the hospital.

It took three people to lift me out of bed. One nurse on each arm, Richard holding my hips from behind, all treating me as if I were now precious cargo. In truth, I felt more like an abandoned shipwreck. Rotting artefacts, squandered potential. Only valuable when laid to rest.

The car ride was silent. I refused to look in the backseat. We stared forward, neither acknowledging the growing black hole forming behind us. I allowed my eyes to roll, sliding across each tree and house and person whipping past the window next to me without feeling, without recognition. He could have driven us off a cliff right then and there and I wouldn’t have noticed. It only occurred to me that something was different when he helped me out of the car onto a driveway that wasn’t ours, and guided me through a front door that didn’t belong to us.

I can’t go back there. Not now.

That’s how he justified bringing us to his parents’ house. He never asked me. How I felt. Where I wanted to go. How painful it would be to not see the open nursery door in our house. The house we shared together. The house we built together. The house we dreamed of expanding together. Not this house. Not this house where he immediately fell on his mother’s shoulder, leaving me gripping the bannister to keep my legs from failing.

We stayed. For weeks. No one stopped me from leaving, but walking out was not a choice. How could you have abandoned your husband, they would say, when now, more than ever, you need to stick together? I waited instead. My legs grew stronger, my skin thickened with scar tissue, and I knew what I had to do. I had to go back.

It’s been ninety-three days since I left. But now I’m here.

I stand on the threshold of my home. The bluebells bordering the uncut grass, once a deep purple in life, hung their brown and shrivelled heads. Wild mushrooms, left unchecked, had spread through the grass, feeding off the nutrients of the other plants, plants I had once had the time and strength to care for. I felt a crawling sensation down my back and turned to see a pair of eyes twitch from behind a living room curtain. Neighbours. No welcome home. No sorry for your loss. Just stares.

I walked up the garden path fraught with weeds and inserted my key into the hole in the front door. Months of wind, rain and disuse had turned it stubborn, and I had to throw my shoulder into it a few times before it burst unceremoniously open. I closed it behind me before clutching my stomach, biting down hard on my lip to stop the cries from escaping me. I am clearly not as healed as I thought I was. But I don’t need to be, not for this.

The house smelled of mildew, the hallways lined with dust. I glance into the kitchen ahead of me to see the coffee cups we had forgotten about, strewn across the countertops, granules surely left to fester at the bottom. I place my foot on the bottom step and wince at the creak of the wood beneath my feet. There’s no one here, but I feel the need to be quiet. It would be rude to disturb the dead.

Her room is a long walk down the landing, tucked into the furthest back corner of the house. We picked that room because it was south-facing and bound to get lots of light. Back in those days, we thought in those terms; what would be best, what would do well, what would shine the brightest. We were full in those days. Of optimism. Of ignorance.

I stand in this room now. Her room. The nursery. The blinds had been left open, and the unrelenting sun had bleached the room of all its colour. Yellowing spines of pregnancy books, washed-out hues of folded onesies, plush cream carpet faded almost into nothingness. I walk, touching things, careful not to move them too much. I feel like an archaeologist on an excavation of a far-off site, one belonging not to the forgotten past, but to a lost future. I need to touch, to feel, to know that this room once held promise, the promise of something, someone bigger yet so much smaller than me. The texture of her cot brings me up short. My fingertips glide across the grain in the polished wood, my eyes pick out every stitch in the tiny pillow that lies at the head of it. My vision blurs, my legs buckle, my hip hits the dull surface of the floor. I lay, one arm curled around the leg of the cot, the other fumbling in my pocket for the one thing I brought with me for this final visit. Grief blinds, but it also sharpens. I could use it, cut my hammering heart right out of my chest, but I don't have the nerve. But what I do have is just enough resolve to slow it.

Pills. That’s what I have in my pocket. Now they lay spread in the palm of my hand. Secreted away, slowly, slowly, both at the hospital and at my in-law’s. I became blind to most things, but not this. I’m glad I could see the use of this.

I take one last look around her bedroom before lifting my hand to my lips.

Just wait, sweetheart. Mummy will be with you soon.