The Husband’s Secret

really don’t think he was crying. He was probably just . . . sneezing, or something,’ said Cecilia. The idea of John-Paul crying in the shower was so foreign, so weird.Why would he be crying, except over something truly terrible? He was not a crier. When the girls were born his eyes had got a shiny quality to them, and when his father had died unexpectedly he’d put down the phone and made a strange fragile noise, as if he was choking on something small and fluffy. But apart from that she’d never seen him cry.
    ‘He wasn’t sneezing ,’ said Esther.
    ‘Maybe he had one of his migraines,’ said Cecilia, although she knew that whenever John-Paul was afflicted by one of his debilitating migraines the last thing he would do was have a shower. He needed to be alone, in bed, in a dark, quiet room.
    ‘Uh, Mum, Daddy never has a shower when he has a migraine,’ said Esther, who knew her father just as well as Cecilia knew her husband.
    Depression? It seemed to be going around at the moment. At a recent dinner party half the guests revealed they were on Prozac. After all, John-Paul had always gone through . . . patches. They often followed the migraines. There would be a week or so when it was as though he was just going through the motions. He’d say and do all the right things, but there’d be something vacant in his eyes, as if the real John-Paul had checked out for a while and sent this very authentic-looking replica to take his place. ‘You okay?’ Cecilia would ask, and he’d always take a few moments to focus on her, before saying, ‘Sure. I’m fine.’
    But it was always temporary. Suddenly he’d be back, fully present, listening to her and the girls with all his attention, and Cecilia would convince herself that she’d imagined the whole thing. The ‘patches’ were probably just a lingering effect of the migraines.
    But crying in the shower. What did he have to cry about? Things were good at the moment.
    John-Paul had once tried to commit suicide.
    The fact floated slowly, repellently, to the surface of her mind. It was something she tried not to think about too often.
    It had happened when he was in his first year of university, before Cecilia had begun dating him. Apparently he’d ‘gone off the rails’ for a while and then one night he’d swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. His flatmate, who was meant to be visiting his parents for the weekend, had come home unexpectedly and found him. ‘What was going through your mind?’ Cecilia had asked him when she heard the story for the first time. ‘Everything felt too hard,’ John-Paul had said. ‘Going to sleep forever just seemed like an easier option.’
    Over the years Cecilia had often prodded him for more information about this time in his life. ‘But why did it seem so hard? What exactly was so hard?’ But John-Paul didn’t seem capable of clarifying further. ‘I guess I was just your typical anguished teenager,’ he’d say. Cecilia didn’t get it. She was never anguished as a teenager. Eventually she had to give up and accept John-Paul’s suicide attempt as an out-of-character incident in his past. ‘I just needed a good woman,’ John-Paul told her. It was true there had never been a serious girlfriend until Cecilia came along. ‘I was honestly starting to think he might be gay,’ one of his brothers had confided in her once.
    There was the gay thing again.
    But his brother had been joking.
    An unexplained suicide attempt in his teenage years, and now, all these years later, he was crying in the shower.
    ‘Sometimes grown-ups have big things on their mind,’ said Cecilia carefully to Esther. Obviously her first responsibility was to make sure that Esther wasn’t concerned. ‘So I’m sure Daddy was just –’
    ‘Hey, Mum, can I please get this book on Amazon about the Berlin Wall for Christmas?’ asked Esther. ‘Do you want me to order it now? All the reviews are five stars!’
    ‘No,’ said Cecilia. ‘You can borrow it from the library.’
    God willing, they’d have escaped from Berlin by Christmas.
    She turned into the parking lot underneath the speech therapist’s office, wound down the window and pressed the button on the intercom.
    ‘Can I help you?’
    ‘We’re here to see Caroline Otto,’ she said. Even when she talked to the receptionist she rounded her vowels.
    As she parked the car, she considered each new fact.
    John-Paul giving Isabel strange, ‘sad, angry’ looks.
    John-Paul crying in