The Husband’s Secret

She’d sworn each time she’d opened another card, ripping it into tiny pieces.
    ‘Mum, give them a break, they just don’t know what else to say,’ Rob had said to her tiredly. He’d been just fifteen, and his face had seemed to belong to a sad, pale fifty year old with acne.
    Rachel swept the macaron crumbs off the sheets with the back of her hand. ‘Crumbs! Christ Almighty, look at these crumbs!’ Ed would have said. He thought eating in bed was immoral. Also, if he could see the television sitting there on the chest of drawers, he’d have a fit. Ed believed that people who had televisions in their bedroom were akin to cocaine addicts: weak, debauched types. The bedroom, according to Ed, was for a prayer on your knees next to the bed, your headresting on your fingertips, lips moving rapidly (very rapidly; he didn’t believe in wasting too much of the Big Guy’s time), followed by sex (preferably every night), followed by sleep.
    She picked up the remote and pointed it at the television, flicking through the channels.
    A documentary about the Berlin Wall.
    No. Too sad.
    One of those crime investigation shows.
    Never.
    A family sitcom.
    She left it there for a moment, but it was a husband and a wife shouting at each other and their voices were horrible and high-pitched. Instead, she switched it over to a cooking show and turned the sound down. Ever since she’d been living alone, she’d gone to bed with the television on; the comforting banality of the murmuring voices and flickering images warded off the feeling of terror that could sometimes overwhelm her.
    She lay on her side and closed her eyes. She slept with the lights on. After Janie died she and Ed couldn’t stand the dark. They couldn’t go to sleep like normal people. They had to trick themselves and pretend that they weren’t going to sleep.
    Behind her closed eyelids, she saw Jacob toddling along a New York street, wearing his little denim overalls, crouching down with his fat little hands on his knees to examine the steam billowing out of the vents in the road. Was that steam hot?
    Had she been crying for Janie before, or had she really been crying for Jacob? All she knew was that once they took him from her, life would go back to being unendurable, except – and this was the worst part – she would in fact endure it, it wouldn’t kill her, she’d keep on living day after day after day, an endless loop of glorious sunrises and sunsets that Janie never got to see.
    Did you call for me, Janie?
    That thought was always like the tip of a knife twisting and turning at her very core.
    She’d read somewhere that wounded soldiers begged for morphine and their mothers as they died on the battlefield. The Italian soldiers especially. ‘Mamma mia!’ they called.
    In a sudden movement that wrenched her back, Rachel sat up and hopped out of bed in Ed’s pyjamas (she’d started wearing them straight after he died and never stopped; they didn’t really smell of him any more, but she could almost imagine that they did).
    She got down on her knees next to her chest of drawers and pulled out an old photo album with a soft faded green vinyl cover.
    She sat back up on the bed and slowly flipped the pages. Janie laughing. Janie dancing. Janie eating. Janie sulking. Janie with her friends.
    Including him. That boy. His head turned away from the camera, looking at Janie as if she’d just said something smart and funny. What did she say? Every time she always wondered that. What did you just say, Janie?
    Rachel pressed her fingertip to his grinning, freckled face and watched her mildly arthritic, age-spotted hand curl into a fist.

6 April 1984
    The first thing Janie Crowley did when she got out of bed that chilly April morning was jam the back of a chair beneath her door handle so neither of her parents could walk in on her. Then she got down on her knees next to her bed and heaved up the corner of her mattress to retrieve a pale blue box. She sat on the edge of her bed and removed a tiny yellow pill from its packet, holding it up on her fingertip, considering it and all that it symbolised, before placing it on the centre of her tongue as reverently as a communion wafer. Then she rehid the box under her mattress and jumped back into her warm bed, pulled the covers up and turned on her clock radio, to the tinny sound of Madonna singing ‘Like a Virgin’.
    The tiny pill tasted chemical, sweet and deliciously sinful.
    ‘Think of your virginity as a