Cleo

Her bird-hunting skills shifted to new levels. The shoes in my wardrobe were stuffed with tiny corpses and clusters of feathers. After persistent begging from the kids, I dug a hole in the corner of the back garden and fitted it with a fishpond and water plants. The resident goldfish became a voyeuristic fixation for Cleo. I doubted they’d survive past Christmas. Fortunately, they were wily enough to spend most of their waking hours up to no good under the lily pads. They made so many babies I wondered if there was such a thing as goldfish contraception.

Cleo demonstrated how good manners and charm can coexist under one skin, along with backstreet resilience. Following her example, I tried to shrug off embarrassing moments at work (for example, when I took too long to realize the man panting on the other end of the phone line hadn’t been for a run but was indulging in a less wholesome activity. Or the time I had to field dozens of calls after getting the names of two fashion models confused and captioning a classy one with a slutty one’s name.) Like Cleo on the rare occasions she slipped off a fence to tumble into the hydrangeas, I endured the humiliation, shook it off, hoped I wouldn’t be stupid enough to repeat the mistake—and prayed lawyers wouldn’t be involved.

Over the following year, Steve and I settled into a pattern of avoiding each other when he was at home. According to statistics, women are far more likely to end a relationship than men. I’ve never been a fan of statistics. Another theory is that men who want to end relationships make themselves impossible to live with, so the woman is forced into ending it.

Our marriage was like a bowl of egg whites. We’d both sweated over it, whipping air through, occasionally working it into peaks. At times it looked like we might make a decent meringue out of it, but as any cook knows, if you whip egg whites too long, if you try too hard, they simply go flat.

Things came to a head one afternoon when I arrived home from work. He was standing in the driveway. I can’t remember exactly what the conversation was about, probably something trivial, like who’d left the butter on the bench so Cleo could get it. It escalated into an argument—and we never argued. Suddenly we were talking about divorce.

We both knew he couldn’t go on sleeping in the sunroom the rest of his days. Nevertheless, it was shocking to finally have the D word out in the open.

Steve looked sideways at a red bottlebrush flower and said he wanted to keep lawyers out of it as much as possible. The flower nodded agreement. A car backfired farther down the street. The front garden seemed an unlikely place to be having such a conversation. But where do people talk about divorce? Certainly not candlelit restaurants or incense-scented bedrooms, as far as I knew.

He said he’d move out next week. He wanted to take the painting of yachts that was in the hallway if I didn’t mind, and some other things as well. I was shocked at how carefully he’d thought it through, though realistically he’d had years to mull it over. He wanted the kids fifty-fifty and suggested we’d sort the money out later.

Oh, and I could keep the cat.

Openness

The only people less enlightened than those who claim not to be cat people are those who swear they’re strictly dog people.

The house was hollow as a cave at night without children sighing and turning in their beds. I worried if Rob needed help with his English homework, if Steve was watching Lydia closely enough. At two and a half years of age, she was all confidence and no sense. Cleo wasn’t happy about it, either. She carried their socks around and slept on their beds.

I made excuses to see them during Steve’s allocated week, collecting Lydia from daycare, driving Rob to Sea Scouts. I tried to make the most of the empty hours, rearranging the bathroom cupboards, reworking feature articles, but my imagination refused to rest. It hovered like a giant telescope in the sky, trained on their every move—was Rob watching for cars before he climbed on the school bus? Was Lydia catching a virus? I wondered if they sensed my presence.

Sam’s photo beamed at me from the mantelpiece. A cheeky smirk. I thought about the Ford Escort woman. Her memory of Sam would be different. I accepted now she wasn’t at fault. I wondered what I’d have done in her shoes. Moved to another country, tried to bury myself in a new identity. Out late one night with Rob, collecting him from a Sea Scout meeting, I’d run over a cat. It’d happened so suddenly. A flash of white fur, a thump and a grinding thud as the wheel crunched into bone. There was no way I could’ve stopped in time. The woman would’ve felt the same. Shocked, sick with remorse, I stopped the car. The animal was crushed, lifeless. I felt wretched enough running over a cat. Killing a child would be infinitely worse.