Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel (6 page)

I move across the room to him, all anger gone. I wrap my arms around him, the bottle, his symbol of remorse, still between us, separating our hearts.

“There’s something I meant to say to you earlier,” I tell him, trying to bridge the gap.

“Yeah?” he asks, still clutching the bottle between us.

“It’s a little weird that we both forgot,” I said.

“Forgot what?”

“It’s our anniversary.”

He closes his eyes, exhales deeply. “I did forget. With work and everything … I’m sorry.”

“I forgot, too,” I remind him. “If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have gone to dinner with a lot of other people tonight. I only remembered as we sat down to eat.” I lower one of my arms, and with my hand I find the space on his body reserved just for me, that only I am allowed to touch in this way. “We could always make it up to each other.” I flatten my hand more firmly against him, but there is no response, his body hasn’t replied that he wants what I am doing to him. I continue talking, keeping my voice low, a suggestive smile on my lips—if I can get him to respond it will be fine. We’ll be fine again. “You know how good we are at making things up to each other.” Nothing. Absolutely nothing from his body. Absolutely nothing from his face: his eyes stare blankly down at me, as though I am a person he does not recognize, as though I am speaking a language he does not understand nor wants to learn. My fingers find his zipper and slowly draw it open. He shifts away from me then. Only a fraction, but it tells me his answer very clearly: no.

“I forgot,” he repeats, fumbling with his free hand to redo his zipper.

“Happy anniversary, Mal,” I say, and with a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I keep the tremble of tears out of my voice and off my face.

“Steph, happy anniversary.” His lips are brief and distanced as he touches something approximating a kiss on my forehead. He carefully untangles himself from me and leaves me to stand rejected and humiliated in the darkened kitchen.

My fingers curl into my hands, my nails dig into my palms and I close my eyes to stop the panic.
Breathe.
All I have to do
is stand here and breathe. It will be fine, it will be OK if I can breathe.

I know he means it. I know he means it when he says he’d make the same choice again. Between Nova, his oldest friend, and me, he would choose me. Between his son and me, Mal would choose me. Always, he’d choose me.

I know this. But I also know that at no point in the last eight years has Mal said he doesn’t regret the choice he made with every bit of his guilt-heavy heart.

H
e’s been good as gold,” Nurse Melissa says as we return to Leo’s hospital room.

She has switched on the lights and is thumbing through my book—
Methods in Experimental Psychology.
I wonder for a moment if she finds it interesting or if, as is most likely, she thinks it’s dull.

“Thanks, Melissa,” I reply, and then I realize she is looking at, and talking to—in fact, completely focused on—Keith. I roll my eyes as I take my seat and start to examine Leo for any signs—no matter how small—of change. I often wonder if Nurse Melissa is so eager to watch over Leo because she fancies my husband. A disproportionate number of women do; Nurse Melissa is simply a shade more unsubtle than most.

Over the years, I’ve watched otherwise sane, rational and professional women lose their minds and, frankly, their self-respect around Keith—it happens all the time, in shops, in banks, in restaurants, at airports, in this hospital. It’s his looks, his height, his job, his persona, and his presence. He is like a fantasy. Even if you didn’t know he had once been in the Army, you only have to look at him to know he’s the type of guy who would take a bullet for one of his men in battle, and would go on to lead a group of villagers to safety by putting himself between them and life-threatening danger. You spoke to him and
his voice would turn your knees to mush; he smiled at you and you felt like the most beautiful woman in the world. He might not be someone you would normally fancy on paper, but in the flesh he would make you turn a little bit silly. I know, because that’s exactly how I felt about him when I first worked with him at the bar. I had a huge crush but I got over it. Then two years later he asked me out. And the fantasy became an altogether different reality.

The first time I’d seen him naked, the anniversary we’d just been “celebrating,” I had become frozen. His body had been carved from the most perfect block of dark mahogany, every line of him smooth and unblemished. I’d lost my nerve at that point, and my eyes started scanning the room for the clothes I’d already shed, as I decided
not
to take anything else off. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. Not when he looked like that, like a Michelangelo statue, and I was ordinary and, up until that moment, more than happy with myself. He’d taken my wrist and, gently but firmly, had placed the flat of my hand just left of the center of his bare chest, held it there. I’d immediately felt the rhythm of his heart: strong, steady, fast. Incredibly fast. “You’re the only person who’s ever been able to make my heart beat that fast without trying,” he’d said. “Do you understand now why I love you?” In his dark eyes, in his smooth voice, rang sincerity. Plain, simple, honest. I’d smiled, he’d grinned back and the roller-coaster feeling that swelled and plummeted inside me told me I was going to fall in love with him. I wasn’t then, not like he was with me, but it would happen. It would absolutely happen.

“You’ve arrived quite late,” Melissa says to Keith. I don’t have to look at her to know she’s probably twirling a lock of hair around her fingers, sticking out her chest, just-so to sit in his
line of sight, while she simpers up at him from under her eyelashes.

“I suppose I have,” Keith replies. “I didn’t really notice the time.”

I have no real need to be bothered by the women who flirt with my husband, even if I was the jealous type. He’s aware of their attention—he’s a man, after all—but he isn’t interested. In his post-Army, bar manager days, he slept with any woman who looked in his direction, and had no shame about it. He was like a sugar addict let loose in a world full of every variety of cake, and he did not restrain himself. He sampled, devoured, indulged in—basically gorged himself on—every crumb that came his way, so by the time we went on our first first date, he had decided he wanted steady, filling home cooking. He had lost his taste for sugary, empty goodies and was ready to settle down, get married and have children. Even though I wasn’t, he was very open about being willing to wait for me to catch him up.

During the breaks in our relationship, I expected him to go back to his old ways but he never did. And that was why he never flirted with any of these women: he really had lost his appetite for cake.

“Did you just come off shift?” Melissa asks him.

“Yeah,” Keith mumbles uncomfortably. Keith doesn’t talk about his work—not even to me. I know he works in the police force and that he sometimes wears a uniform and walks the beat. I also know he, more often than not, doesn’t walk the beat. Once a year, I don my finery and accompany him to the annual police ball, which is held up in London. But I couldn’t tell anyone his job title, I couldn’t give even a basic answer to what he does on a day-to-day basis. He leaves work behind when he leaves work. He refuses to carry the weight of what he has seen
and experienced with him into our lives. (It’s this secretiveness that makes Leo think he’s a spy.)

“Do you think Leo will want to be a policeman when he grows up?” Melissa asks. “Take after his father in more ways than one?”

There is a puzzled pause from Keith. “Leo’s my stepson, you know that, right?” Keith asks her, his tone serious and slightly concerned. “He might act like me sometimes, but he doesn’t take after me. Not genetically.” I feel him look from her to me. “I’m right, aren’t I, Lucks, he doesn’t take after me?”

“Apart from the PlayStation obsession and the fascination with farts and fart jokes, no, he doesn’t take after you,” I supply without looking away from Leo.

“If anyone, he’s more like you, and your dad, isn’t he?” Keith says to me.

He’s more like his father
, I think as I say, “I suppose.”

“Nova would never go into the Army or join the police, can’t see her father ever doing that either, so I doubt Leo would join the police, because he’s not like me.” My husband, steadfast and practical and romantic, is oblivious to the fact that Nurse Melissa obviously wishes the ground below her feet would open up and swallow her.

Any irritation I feel toward her is replaced with pity, because I know what’s coming: a riveting lecture on Keith’s theories about the types of people who feel compelled by their personality to serve their country and society, as opposed to those who find themselves forced into those jobs. I’ve heard the theory several times, but that’s what I get for living with the fantasy—along with his inability to watch a soap without judging the characters because they are flawed and he has a strong sense of right and wrong that he cannot suspend even to watch fiction;
him dismissing my strong belief in the esoteric world; and him secretly believing I should be responsible for the housework because I’m a woman. Even though Nurse Melissa has been flirting with my husband, right in front of me, I decide to rescue her. No one deserves the lecture if they’re not at least going to get a shag out of him. “Thanks, Melissa, for staying with Leo,” I cut in, “we’ll see you later.”

“Oh, yes, yes, see you later,” she says eagerly and dashes out of the room.

Keith takes his seat on the opposite side of Leo’s bed. We always sit in the same places, even when the other one isn’t here; we wouldn’t dream of sitting in the other’s seat, just like at home we wouldn’t sleep on the other’s side of the bed. It would feel like an invasion, trespassing on someone else’s sacred space.

“Does he take after him?” Keith asks, tearing his eyes away from our boy to focus on me. “Does he take after his father?”

He’s never asked me this before, and it’s not something we ever talk about. When we got back together for the final time after the breakup of five years, I told him that I had a son and that he was four years old. Keith knew immediately whose son he was. It had been the reason he left me that last time: when I told him what I was going to do, Keith had thrown in the towel. It was not something he could understand, and he couldn’t watch me carry a child only to give it away, so he left me.

“Yeah,” I say to Keith, “I suppose he does.”

He never questioned why I ended up with the child when we got back together. He assumed that keeping Leo was a choice I made; that I had come to my senses and realized what he suspected about all women who agreed to have a baby for someone else: that you could never live with yourself afterwards; the guilt
and the loss would be too much, so you would almost always choose to keep the baby. I never felt compelled enough to enlighten him as to what really happened.

Keith shrugs. “I suppose that’s no bad thing,” he says. “Leo could do worse than take after him. He’s a good man.”

I nod.
You can believe that
, I think at Keith,
because you don’t know what he did.