Steven Watson - Before I Go to Sleep

There were drawers in the bedside tables. I intended to look in each, starting with Ben’s side of the bed. I opened the top drawer and rooted through its contents—pens, a watch that had stopped, a blister pack of pills I did not recognize—before opening the bottom drawer.

At first, I thought it was empty. I closed it gently, but as I did, I heard a tiny rattle, metal scraping on wood. I opened it again, my heart already beating fast.

A key.

I sat on the floor with the open box. It was full. Photographs, mostly. Of Adam, and me. Some looked familiar—I guess the ones he had shown me before—but many not. I found Adam’s birth certificate, the letter he had written to Santa Claus. Handfuls of photos of him as a baby—crawling, grinning, toward the camera; feeding at my breast; sleeping, wrapped in a green blanket—and as he grew. The photo of him dressed as a cowboy, the school photographs, the tricycle. They were all here, exactly as I had described them in my journal.

I lifted them all out and spread them across the floor, looking at each one as I did. There were photographs of Ben and me, too; one in which we are in front of the Houses of Parliament, both smiling, but standing awkwardly, as if neither of us knows the other exists; another from our wedding, a formal shot. We are standing in front of a church under an overcast sky. We look happy, ridiculously so, and even more so in one that must have been taken later, on our honeymoon. We are in a restaurant, smiling, leaning in over a half-eaten meal, our faces flushed with love and the bite of the sun.

Relief began to flood me. I stared at the photograph of the woman sitting there with her new husband, gazing out at a future she could not predict and did not want to, and thought about how much I share with her. But all of it is physical. Cells and tissues. DNA. Our chemical signature. But nothing else. She is a stranger. There is nothing linking her to me, no means to thread my way back to her.

Yet she is me, and I am her, and I could see that she was in love. With Ben. The man she has just married. The man I still wake up with, every day. He did not break the vows he made on that day in the tiny church in Manchester. He has not let me down. I looked at the photograph and love welled inside me again.

But still, I put it down, carried on searching. I knew what I wanted to find—and what I also dreaded finding. The one thing that would prove my husband wasn’t lying, that would give me my partner even if, in doing so, it would deny me my son.

It was there. At the bottom of the box, inside an envelope. A photocopy of a news article, folded, its edges crisp. I knew what it was, almost before I opened it, but still I shook as I read. A British soldier who died escorting troops in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, has been named by the Ministry of Defence. Adam Wheeler, it said, was 19 years old. Born in London… Clipped to it was a photograph. Flowers, arranged on a grave. The inscription read, ADAM WHEELER. 1987–2006.

The grief hit me then, with a force I doubt it can ever have had before. I dropped the paper and doubled up in pain, too much pain even to cry, and emitted a noise like a howl, like a wounded animal, starving, praying for its end to come. I closed my eyes and saw it then. A brief flash. An image, hanging in front of me, shimmering. A medal, given to me in a black velvet box. A coffin, a flag. I looked away from it and prayed that it would never return. There are memories I am better off without. Things better lost forever.

I began to tidy the papers away. I should have trusted him, I thought. All along. I should have believed that he was keeping things from me only because they are too painful to face, fresh, every day. All he was doing was trying to spare me this. This brutal truth. I put the photographs back, the papers, just as I had found them. I felt satisfied. I put the key back in the drawer, the box back in the filing cabinet. I can look whenever I want, now. As often as I like.

There was only one more thing I still had to do. I had to know why Ben had left me. And I had to know what I had been doing in Brighton, all those years ago. I had to know who had stolen my life from me. I had to try once more.

For the second time today, I dialed Claire’s number.

Static. Silence. Then a two-tone ring. She will not answer, I thought. She has not responded to my message, after all. She has something to hide, something to keep from me.

I almost felt glad. This was a conversation I wanted to have only in theory. I could not see how it could be anything but painful. I prepared myself for another emotionless invitation to leave a message.

A click. Then a voice. “Hello?”

It was Claire. I knew it instantly. Her voice felt as familiar as my own. “Hello?” she said again.

I did not speak. Images flooded me, flashing. I saw her face, her hair cut short, wearing a beret. Laughing. I saw her at a wedding—my own, I suppose, though I cannot say—dressed in emerald, pouring champagne. I saw her holding a child, carrying him, giving him to me with the words “Dinner time!” I saw her sitting on the edge of a bed, talking to the figure lying in it, and realized the figure was me.

“Claire?” I said.

“Yep,” she said. “Hello? Who is this?”

I tried to focus, to remind myself that we had been best friends once, no matter what had happened in the years since. I saw an image of her lying on my bed, clutching a bottle of vodka, giggling, telling me that men were fucking ridiculous .

“Claire?” I said. “It’s me. Christine.”

Silence. Time stretched so that it seemed to last forever. At first, I thought she would not speak, that she had forgotten who I was, or did not want to speak to me. I closed my eyes.

“Chrissy!” she said. An explosion. I heard her swallow, as if she had been eating. “Chrissy! My God. Darling, is that really you?”

I opened my eyes. A tear had begun its slow traverse down the unfamiliar lines of my face.

“Claire?” I said. “Yes. It’s me. It’s Chrissy.”

“Jesus. Fuck,” she said, and then again, “fuck!” Her voice was quiet. “Roger! Rog! It’s Chrissy! On the phone!” Suddenly loud, she said, “How are you? Where are you?” and then, “Roger!”

“Oh, I’m at home,” I said.

“Home?”

“Yes.”

“With Ben?”

I felt suddenly defensive. “Yes,” I said. “With Ben. Did you get my message?”

I heard an intake of breath. Surprise? Or was she smoking? “Yep!” she said. “I would have called you back but this is the landline and you didn’t leave a number.” She hesitated, and for a moment I wondered if there were other reasons she had not returned my call. She went on. “Anyway, how are you, darling? It’s so good to hear your voice!” I did not know how to answer, and when I didn’t reply Claire said, “Where are you living?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” I said. I felt a surge of pleasure, certain that her question meant that she was not seeing Ben, followed by the realization that she might be asking me so that I do not suspect the truth. I wanted so much to trust her—to know that Ben had not left me because of something he had found in her, some love to replace that which had been taken from me—because doing so meant that I could trust my husband as well. “Crouch End?” I said.

“Right,” she said. “So how’s it going? How’re things?”

“Well, you know?” I said. “I can’t remember a fucking thing.”

We both laughed. It felt good, this eruption of an emotion that wasn’t grief, but it was short-lived, followed by silence.

“You sound good,” she said, after a while. “Really good.” I told her I was writing again. “Really? Wow. Super. What are you working on? A novel?”