The Husband’s Ghost

"They call it recovery, but all I’ve ever recovered is my ability to fake being whole."

The Valium made everything soft at the edges, like looking through gauze, like being underwater, like being wrapped in cotton wool that was also made of distance. I knew Noah was there before I opened my eyes—could smell his aftershave (Old Spice, the same since we met), could hear his breathing (careful, measured, the way he breathed when praying), could feel the weight of his presence disturbing the air molecules around my bed.

I didn't want to open my eyes, but the medication had stolen my ability to feign sleep convincingly. My breathing was wrong, my eyelids fluttered, my fingers twitched against the hospital sheets that felt like sandpaper and silk simultaneously.

"Heather?" His voice came from very far away and very close at once. "Love, I know you're awake."

Love. The word sat between us like a stone thrown into still water, ripples spreading outward, disturbing everything. Did he love me? Did I know what love was? Had anyone ever loved me, or had they loved their idea of me—the quiet poet, the damaged girl they could save, the wife, the mother, the vessel?

I opened my eyes and there were three Noahs.

One was sixteen, kneeling on the worn lino of the chapel hall while the record player sulked and the dance stalled around him. I was on the edge of the room where I always stood, where you could watch everyone's hands at once, and I watched his move—patient, certain, coaxing the needle back to life without once looking up to see who was watching. When the music came back he just stood and stepped away, already forgetting it. But I'd seen hands that mended things instead of taking them, and I'd felt the strangest thing: I wasn't braced. He would never remember that night. It was the night I chose him.

One was twenty-one, spinning me around our kitchen two years ago when the pregnancy test showed positive, tears of joy streaming down his face while I died inside.

One was now—however old now was—sitting in the visitor's chair with shadows under his eyes and his mother's cross clutched in his hand like a lifeline.

"Hi," I said, or thought I said. My mouth was full of wool, my tongue was made of paper, the word came out wrong. Everything came out wrong with me.

"The doctors say..." he started, then stopped. Started again. "The baby... Luke... he's..."

Luke. The name floated between us, between the three versions of Noah and the multiple mes lying in this bed. I was Heather at twenty-two, cut open and sewn shut. I was Heather at seven, learning silence. I was Heather at fifteen, writing poems about birds with broken wings not knowing I was writing about myself. I was Heather at nineteen, thinking marriage might mean safety, thinking Noah's clean hands and temple garments meant he was different from the hands in the dark.

"Three pounds, four ounces," Noah continued, filling my silence with statistics. "They say that's good for thirty-four weeks. His lungs are working. He's breathing on his own."

Breathing. We were all breathing. Even when we didn't want to, we kept breathing. That was the trap of it—your body kept going even when your mind had stopped, even when your soul had fled, even when everything inside you was screaming to just stop, please stop, let me stop.

"Do you want to know what he looks like?" Noah asked, and suddenly he was leaning forward, eager, like sharing this information might bridge the canyon between us, might make what happened unhappen.

I didn't want to know, but the Valium made my head nod, or maybe Noah saw what he wanted to see. He always had.

"He has your eyes," he said. "That same green. The nurses say it might change, babies' eyes do, but I don't think so. They're exactly yours."

My eyes. My mother's eyes. Eyes that had seen too much, that had learned to look without seeing, to see without telling. Poor Luke, bearing witness already, carrying the family curse of green eyes that knew too much.

"And his hair," Noah continued, warming to his subject like this was a normal conversation, like I hadn't tried to cut our baby out of my body with glass. "Sandy brown, quite a lot of it actually. The NICU nurse said he's got more hair than most full-term babies."

I could see him in my mind suddenly—not Luke, but the idea of Luke. A small creature with my eyes and Noah's hair, suspended between us, belonging to both and neither. The Valium made the image shift and blur. Sometimes he was a baby, sometimes he was seven years old standing in a doorway, sometimes he was grown and asking why, why, why.

"Heather." Noah's voice changed, became careful, became the voice he used when he thought I was being "difficult" about something. "What happened? Can you tell me what happened?"

What happened? Which time? When I was seven and learned my body wasn't mine? When I was nineteen and thought marriage meant ownership would transfer to someone safe? When I was twenty and got pregnant with Paul and felt the first stirrings of occupation? When I was twenty-two and got pregnant again and knew I couldn't bear another colonisation?

"I broke," I said, the words thick and slow through the medication. "Like the glass."

Noah flinched. I watched him age five years in five seconds, watched the boy who'd believed in happy endings disappear completely, leaving only this tired man holding his mother's cross like it could protect him from the truth of what he'd married.

"The doctors say it might be post-partum psychosis," he said, grabbing onto medical words like life rafts. "Even though it happened before... before the birth. They say hormones can cause... episodes."

Episodes. Like my life was a television programme. The Heather Show, where today's episode features a woman cutting herself open because it's the only honest thing she's ever done. Tune in next week when she pretends to be normal again.

"It wasn't hormones," I said, but the Valium took the edges off the words, made them soft when I wanted them sharp. "It was memory."

Noah's face crumpled slightly, then reformed itself into determined incomprehension. He didn't want to understand. Understanding would mean admitting he'd married damage, had children with damage, had built his perfect Mormon family on a foundation of fractures.

"You need to rest," he said, retreating to platitudes. "You need to heal. We can talk about everything later, when you're better."

Better. As if this was a cold I'd caught, a fever that would break. As if I hadn't been sick since I was seven, just high-functioning, just performing wellness so convincingly that everyone believed it, even me sometimes.

"Have you told your parents?" I asked, though the question came out sideways, like I was asking about the weather.

Noah shifted in his chair, and I knew. Of course he'd told them. His mother was probably at our house right now, cleaning and praying and making casseroles, doing all the good Mormon woman things while secretly thinking she'd warned him about marrying me, warned him I didn't have the proper foundation, warned him that temple marriage couldn't sanctify what was already broken.

"They're helping with Paul," he said carefully. "He misses you."

Paul. My firstborn. The one I'd managed to love, somehow, before the weight of it all became too much. Did he miss me, or did he miss the performance of me? Did he miss his mother, or did he miss the woman who'd pretended to be his mother while dying inside?

"Don't let them..." I started, then lost the thread. Don't let them what? Tell him stories about his mother? Raise him to be ashamed? Teach him that women who break are weak? The Valium made it hard to hold onto thoughts, they kept sliding away like mercury.

"The Bishop came," Noah said suddenly. "He performed a blessing. For you and for Luke."

A blessing. Holy oil on my forehead while I was unconscious, words said over my sedated body, men deciding I needed God's intervention when what I'd needed was God's absence, God's looking away, God's admission that He hadn't been watching when I was seven in a pink bedroom learning that prayers don't stop hands in the dark.

"Did it work?" I asked, and there must have been something in my voice because Noah flinched again.

"Heather, you can't... you can't blame God for this."

But I could. I did. I blamed God and Noah and my mother and the man in the dark and myself and the baby—Luke—for existing, for forcing me to exist, for making existence mandatory when all I wanted was to dissolve.

The Valium was pulling me under again, or maybe I was pulling myself under, using the medication like an escape hatch from this conversation, from Noah's hurt eyes, from the weight of his expectations that I would get better, would come home, would be his wife and Paul's mother and Luke's mother and continue the performance that had been killing me slowly for years.

"I saw the glass," Noah said suddenly, urgently, like he needed to say this before I disappeared completely. "Before you... before. I saw you looking at it. You knew what you were going to do."

Yes. I'd known. The glass had called to me like a poem I hadn't written yet, like a door I hadn't known existed, like the first true choice I'd made since I was seven years old and learned that choice was something other people had.

"It was beautiful," I said, or thought I said. "The way it broke. Like stars."

Noah made a sound—sob or sigh or prayer, I couldn't tell. Through the Valium haze, I watched him struggle with something, watched him choose his words like picking stones from a quarry.

"They won't let you come home unless..." he paused, gathered himself. "Unless you can prove you're not a danger. To yourself. To the boys."

The boys. Plural now. Two sons I was supposed to mother, to love, to not damage with my damage. The weight of it pressed down on me like a physical thing, like hands, like history repeating.

"I know," I said, though I wasn't sure what I knew anymore.

"So you have to try," Noah said, leaning forward again, earnest and desperate. "You have to get better. Take the medication. Talk to the psychiatrist. Show them you can be safe."

Safe. I wanted to laugh but the Valium wouldn't let me. I'd never been safe. Safety was a lie parents told children, that husbands told wives, that doctors told patients. Safety was a performance, like everything else.

"I'll pretend," I said, honest for once. "I'm good at pretending."

Noah's face did something complicated—relief and hurt and fear all at once. He knew I was telling the truth. He'd seen me pretend for two years, had benefited from my performance, had built his family on the foundation of my pretence.

"That's not..." he started, then stopped. Because what could he say? Don't pretend, be real? He didn't want real. Real was me with glass in my hand, opening myself like a book that had been forced shut. Real was too much truth for anyone to bear.

"I should go," he said finally. "You need rest. I'll come back tomorrow. You can maybe see Luke, if you want."

I didn't want, but I didn't say so. The Valium was already pulling me back toward that soft, edgeless place where I didn't have to want or not want, where I could just float, suspended between being and not being.

Noah stood, hesitated, then leaned down and kissed my forehead—careful, gentle, like I was made of the same glass I'd broken. The touch burned and soothed simultaneously. This was Noah's love—well-meaning, careful, completely missing the point. He loved the idea of me, the possibility of me, the me I might become if I could just get better, just heal, just forget, just forgive, just pretend hard enough that the pretence became real.

"I love you," he said.

I wanted to say it back, to give him that comfort at least, but the Valium had stolen my lies along with everything else. Instead, I watched him leave—all three versions of him, the hopeful boy, the joyful father, the broken husband—walking out of my room, out of my reach, but never out of my life. We were bound now by more than marriage, more than Paul. We were bound by Luke, by blood, by the secret of what really happened that would have to be buried under medical terms and sympathetic looks and careful forgetting.

The door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded like a lock turning. But was I locked in or was he locked out? The Valium made it impossible to tell, made all boundaries fuzzy, made inside and outside the same place.

I closed my eyes and felt myself scatter—into the white sheets, the beeping machines, the fluorescent lights, the walls that had heard so many women's screams they'd stopped listening. Somewhere in this hospital, Luke was learning to breathe with my eyes. Somewhere, Paul was playing with blocks, missing a mother who'd never really existed. Somewhere, seven-year-old Heather was still frozen in a pink bedroom, still holding her breath, still waiting for morning.

But here, now, in this medicated space between consciousness and unconsciousness, between living and leaving, I was nothing. No one's wife, no one's mother, no one's victim. Just a collection of chemicals and memories held together by sutures and sedatives, pretending to be a person, pretending to heal, pretending that tomorrow would be different from today when we all knew it would be exactly the same—just another performance, another day of breathing when breathing was the last thing I wanted to do.

The Valium carried me down, down, down, to that place where Noah couldn't follow, where his love couldn't reach, where his God couldn't see. In that darkness, I was finally, briefly, free.

Until tomorrow, when I would have to wake up and pretend again. Always pretending. Always performing. Always breaking and being forced back together. Always, always, always.