Sonali Deraniyagala - Wave

I can’t look, I pull the quilt over my face, yet I can see the four of us, crowded into this bed early on a Sunday morning. The boys have tiptoed into the room to announce at the tops of their voices that it is a sunny day. When I ignore them, Malli asks, “Why do humans need to sleep so much?” Humans was his word for adults, and we didn’t correct him, just added it to that set of garbled words that was only ours. Now those words hover in this room, unuttered. And I am alarmed, not wanting to reawaken these memories, not here at night in so much quiet. I am now thankful for these dusty sheets, at least I have my sneezing to distract me.

In the morning I hear the squeak of floorboards. It is Sarah, already awake. I would get annoyed when Steve creaked about at six a.m. as he went between the bathroom and the study, turning on the computer, checking the NBA results from the previous night. I’d have thought this sound would unnerve me now, but this morning I find myself clinging to its familiarity, which soothes me somehow.

It is early light, and I step into the garden. Walking barefoot on dew-sodden grass, I always loved this. Autumn is the spider season, and the shrubs are aglitter with webs. Steve and the boys would feed the spiders. They’d carefully place a live ant on these silken threads and marvel as the spider trapped it between its legs and squeezed it into pulp. “See, it sucks up the ant juice like a milkshake,” Steve told the boys. If there was an especially elaborate web, they’d implore me not to destroy it when I watered the garden.

And there is a lovely web on the climbing rose this morning, very showy and intricate. But they can’t see it. So is it because I am hazy from sleep that I still feel a stab of wonder when I do? My desolation of last night is now dissolving, but is this just the cheer of the early sun? I wonder, but I am also certain that, for some time at least, I will keep returning to this house and to its warmth and comfort. There is a small snail edging across the table on the patio. The heat from its tiny body is thawing out the beads of frost that have studded the table overnight. It leaves a watery trail. They would be so stirred by this.

I cower in a corner of my bed. I can barely raise my head. My stomach is clenched, my heart races, my right hand grips my left arm so tight it hurts. I shake all over, or at least it feels that way. Imagine if they could see me. They would be inconsolable.

I stay indoors alone for days on end in my apartment in New York, where I have been living these past few months. I can’t face the sudden wintry brightness in this new city. I can’t tolerate the happy scatter of children coming out of school. I can’t bear a dimple on a small boy’s cheek. Bloody hell, Steve, I sob into my pillow, how useless are you, wherever you are, why can’t you sort this out. Just get me killed, I’ve more than had enough.

I am as I was in those early months when I was collapsed on a bed in my aunt’s house in Colombo. But it’s four years later now, and I am startled by the intensity of this fear in me. It came upon me all at once, when I was at our home in London recently, in late October. I felt one night, with a new and terrifying force, the way in which I was flung out of our life, just like that.

It was blustery, that night when I rifled through some papers on Steve’s desk. The windows behind me trembled, I could feel a draft on my back. Our office was tidier than it used to be, but the computer screen was tilted as always, so that in the daytime the branches of the silver maple that spread outside the window wouldn’t reflect onto it and make you squint. I always had Jazz FM turned up loud when I worked in that room. But that night there was no music, only the wind.

The desk was piled up with Steve’s usual stuff. Pages and pages of econometric models with some coefficients circled in blue ink, a book on chess, the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack , an appointment card for a haircut. I thumbed through Steve’s checkbook, which was in the drawer. He’d written three checks on our last day in London, for the gardener and the milkman and for the boys’ school dinners. Those two words, school dinners, were all it took. I shattered.

For one thing, my mind had not even murmured those words in all these years. How could I have forgotten? How could I have shut this out? I could now hear our daily conversations. Vik telling me that he’d had sausages again at lunchtime, Malli shrugging his shoulders and walking away when I ask if he’s eaten any vegetables. And I could see Steve sitting right where I was, signing that check with the pen that is still on the desk, tearing it off and putting it in Vik’s schoolbag. I would have seen that dinner bill lying around for days and left it for him to deal with. I would have picked it up when I sat at that desk reading a chapter of a student’s thesis, stopping too frequently to read a film review on the Guardian website or to gaze at a shaft of late sun firing the redbrick chimneystacks of the houses across the street.

But it was not simply that I had forgotten about something as commonplace as school dinners that got me that night. As I stared at the stub in Steve’s checkbook, I was held for a few moments in the coherence and safety of the life we had, when so much seemed predictable, when continuity was assumed. There would be more bills for Steve to sort out, more sunsets for me to get distracted by while he did just that. And as the wind gusted against those windows, I saw how, in an instant, I lost my shelter. This truth had hardly escaped me until then, far from it, but the clarity of that moment was overwhelming. And I am still shaking.

They would indeed be aghast to see the mess I am now. This is not me, this is not who I was with them. I can see that me as we left London for Colombo exactly four years ago today, the eighth of December, the day Steve wrote that check and we flew out of Heathrow’s Terminal Four. Things couldn’t have been better. I had it sorted. Steve and I were impatient for the three days we would spend in a small hotel on the coast, leaving the boys to be indulged by their grandparents. We’d have the room with enormous windows that open to the ocean on three sides so the din of quickening waves smashing against rock even enters your dreams. Then the four of us and my parents would go to Yala, where the soundless feet of a baby elephant hiding under its mother’s belly as she brushes past our jeep would enthrall the boys. Steve and I were grateful our kids didn’t want to go Disneyland.

None of that assurance now as I shudder on this bed. I recoil at my desolation. How I have fallen. When I had them, they were my pride, and now that I’ve lost them, I am full of shame. I was doomed all along, I am marked, there must be something very wrong about me. These were my constant thoughts in those early months. Why else did we have to be right there just when the wave hit? Why else have I become this shocking story, this wild statistical outlier? Or I speculated that I must have been a mass murderer in a previous life, I was paying for that now. And even as I have discounted such possibilities over time, shame remains huge in me.

It is nearing Christmas, and I can’t join in my boys’ giddy enthusiasm. I don’t have my boys at the kitchen table writing Christmas cards to kids they’ve not spoken to all year or making greedy lists for Santa. I can’t do all those things that were normal for us and still are for countless others. And I balk at the failure that I am. Quite separate, this, from the more obvious agony of missing them.