My Wife's Li'l Secret (2 page)

I awoke at 3:00 a.m. to the sound of my phone ringing. It was Liefie. “Ritchie?”

“Hey, baby, how …how are you?” I said in a sleepy voice.

“Ritchie…I …I…Ritchie, I lost the baby!”

“What?” I scrambled to sit up.

“The baby came early and …it was stillborn.”

It took a while for me to process what she was saying. “Liefie…how…?”

“I don’t know. It just happened, Ritchie. Last night.” Her voice was croaky.

I put my hand on my head, not knowing what to say.

“You there, Ritchie?”

“I’ll get on the next flight to Ukraine, Lief –”

“No, don’t bother! I’m coming h…home. My flight is already booked and I wanna come home.” Her voice sounded hoarse, like she had been crying a lot.

“Well, let me come and see the baby at least, Liefie. Where is he?”

“We buried him in our family plot.”

“You buried Gareth already?”

“It was a quiet burial. My mother and father did it. I couldn’t handle it. In a couple of months, we can return and handle …
things
.”

“Okay,” I said in a voice as weak as my body. “Okay.”

After hanging up, I stumbled into the nursery and eyed the blurry, framed ultrasound photo of Gareth. Carefully and with a leaden heart, I removed the photo from the wall and pressed my lips to it. “Sorry boy. I was really looking forward to meeting you. I’m so sorry daddy couldn’t be there to save you.” Gingerly, I ran my hand over the photo. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

That night, shrouded in despair, I fell asleep with the only photo I had of my son on my chest.

*****

Liefie arrived back in Sydney withdrawn, distant, and even a little angry. I understood; people grieve in different ways.

My girls were unusually quiet, obviously affected by their mother’s grieving. When they tried to hug their mother, to my absolute surprise she pushed them away. I’d never seen her do that before. 

“Tell me what happened to the baby?” I said after I put the girls to bed and we were alone. “Was there something wrong with the …?”

“Yes. The flight. They think it was the travelling; it affected the baby and …” she lifted and dropped her shoulders, then turned her back on me.

The flight. I nodded slowly. If she hadn’t travelled to see her sick brother, our son would be alive.

Her
sick
brother who is just fine now. Her sick brother who wasn’t that close to her.

Resentment for her brother bubbled inside of me.

“Can we put a little tombstone on Gareth’s grave?” I asked. “Fly down and –”

“Please!” she cried, turning away from me. “Must you torture me this way? Haven’t I been through enough? Can’t you at least wait for all that?”

Holding up both my hands, I quickly said, “Okay, okay! You’re right.”

After that, any talk of little Gareth made Liefie furious, so I backed off, not wanting to upset her. But I still wanted answers, still wished I could give my son a proper burial.

My son was almost twenty-eights weeks old. That would make it a viable fetus. According to the research I did with the help of Google, 90 percent of fetuses born during twenty-six to twenty-eight weeks survive, so I had even more questions.

Did they resuscitate? Even try to save him?

Liefie had flown before while she was pregnant; how could a flight cause a stillbirth?

Would he have survived had he been born prematurely in Australia? If I had been around?

What did he look like when he was born?

I got no answers, because I never got to ask those questions (never dared to ask) and quietly, I stymied my thoughts about baby Gareth. Tried to.

I tried my best not to go into the nursery and poke around, not to peer into his blurry, black-and-white ultrasound image and try to make out his features, not to open his closet and see his little blue, white, and yellow outfits.

Grieving alone was the hardest part for me.

Actually, that was not the hardest part. The hardest part was Liefie’s pushing me away, refusing to let me into the place she had gone to. It didn’t have to be that way; we should have been leaning on each other, but …

Liefie stayed in bed most days, ignored our daughters, ignored me, stopped cooking, stopped taking care of the kids, lost interest in everything.

She seldom changed out of her night clothes and often wore the same clothes three days in a row.

My sister Arena (who happened to love Liefie) stepped in and helped around the house. Together, she and I did our best, clinging to hope that time would heal my wife and bring her back to us.

Things changed in the bedroom too.

Liefie slept on the far end of our king-size bed, not in my arms like she used to. Not entwined  like we always were. She wouldn’t even spoon with me, something she always enjoyed, even during hot summer nights.

We used to be in tune with our sleeping habits. If I turned in my sleep, she turned too. When her eyes opened in the mornings, my sleep usually broke shortly thereafter.

All that changed. She took sleeping tablets, slept during the day, and was awake during the night talking on the phone to family in Ukraine.  She stacked giant pillows between us on our bed like a huge
Keep Out!
or
No Entry!
sign.

Patience
!

“It’s a lovely Sunday,” I said one glorious day. “Why don’t we take the kids out to the beach? The fresh air, the sun, it’ll make you feel so much –”

“I have a splitting headache,” she mumbled and turned her back on me. “You go.”

If I walked up to her and hugged her, she shrugged me off. Soon I stopped touching her.

“Why don’t we see a therapist, Liefie?”

“Leave me alone, Ritchie,” she snapped. “Just butt out. Quit nagging me!”

It was clear my wife was severely depressed, and all I could do was give her the space she needed. In the meantime, I was a single dad doing my best. I worked a full day, then came home and took care of my kids. It was exhausting and I quietly longed for the day my wife would return to me and to our precious daughters.

****

One afternoon, I returned home from work to find my wife out of bed, dressed in a pair of jeans, a strappy top, her hair shiny and blow dried and …she was wearing red lipstick!

My wishes had come true – my wife was back! I was ecstatic.

“What’s going on?” I asked, looking at my wife in awe.

“Ritchie, Viggo, he’s coming to visit me!” She was almost shaking with excitement.

Viggo. The brother who had suffered a heart attack and caused me to lose my son
and
my wife, but who went on living and was well enough to travel to Sydney, Australia?

That Viggo.

“Oh, yeah? When?” I asked, pulling off my tie and throwing it onto a couch.

“In three days!”

“Three days? Well, that’s …
good
.”

“It was the soonest I could get him a plane ticket.”

“Oh.”

So we bought him a plane ticket then? Sweet.

Thirty-one-year-old Viggo was a year younger than me, even though he looked more weathered. We shared a lot of similar features, the same six-foot frame, the same grey-blue eyes. Girls marry men who look like their fathers, but Liefie had married a man who resembled her brother.

Because he didn’t speak much English, Viggo and I hadn’t communicated much. I didn’t dislike him, but we just didn’t click.

“How long will he be staying for?”

“For six weeks.”

“Six weeks? You are kidding me. What about his work?”

With a dismissive wave of her hand she said, “Oh, he lost his job a long time ago.”

“Did he now? So we have to supp – ?”

“I’m so excited. You want a drink?”

She was offering me a drink? I was stunned. She hadn’t done that in months.

“I’d love one,” I said, and gave her a hug. This time she didn’t shy away from me.

That thrilled me even more. I thought to myself, if her brother can bring back my wife, my best friend, the mother of my two girls, what’s a few thousand dollars for a plane ticket? Might be cheaper than therapy. I ought to curb my resentment toward him and welcome him with open arms.

And I did.

Chapter Four 

“Make yourself at home,” I said to Viggo as I swept my hand across my home.

In hindsight, uttering those four words was one of my biggest mistakes I had ever made in my life, and I vowed never again to say those words.

Make himself at home he did, and took total advantage of my hospitality.

He slept till about 11:30 a.m. every day, and when he opened his eyes, a cup of espresso, courtesy of my wife, greeted him while he was still in bed. At around 11:45 a.m., he was served a second cup of espresso by my wife, which he enjoyed on my patio overlooking my pool while having a cigarette. (I seldom saw him without a cigarette in his hand.) Then at 11:55 a.m., he’d have his first beer and he didn’t stop drinking till he went to bed, which was around 2 a.m.!

His routine seldom wavered, except when he got to bed at around 5 a.m. some mornings.

A few months prior to his visit, I had a state-of-the-art, Beechwood bar custom built in my home. It had down-lights, glass racks, a sink with a tap, a larger than average built-in bar fridge with an ice-maker, mirrored-backs, two television sets, a coffee machine, three beer kegs, and many other features – everything a bar could need. It was my pride and joy.

Shopping for drinks was a delightful task and I took great pleasure in stocking my bar with a huge variety of colorful and expensive liquor.

“It’s my aim to stock this bar with just about
every
drink sold in Australia,” I announced, even though I only drank whisky and sometimes lager, and Liefie only drank sparkling white wine at social gatherings.

Liefie laughed. “Then you need to convert this entire house
and
your garage into a bar, my love.”

Everybody loved my bar and presented me with rare bottles of wine, cognac, whisky and novelty items.  We had a few good stock-the-bar parties.

Viggo was no exception; he too loved my bar.

He loved it so much, he never wandered far from it.

Whisky and cognac – that was his first choice. With great excitement, he attacked my Remy Martin Louis XIII Cognac, then every drop of whisky. Drank it as if it were tap water – eight glasses a day and more.

When that was finished, he glugged beer – local, international and even those spicy beers that nobody really drank, including the beer from the kegs.

When he was tired of that (I actually overhead him say he was
tired
of beer), he
progressed
to vodka, siphoned it all, (even the fruit-flavored ones men don’t usually care for). Then he helped himself to all my fancy and colorful liquors – Baileys, Cape Velvet, Sambuca, Midori. (He made cocktails using my cocktail booklets – a minimum of six different liquors at once.)

He also slammed shot after shot of tequila until he was swaying on his feet. And to top it off, he quaffed all my precious wine; red, white, sparkling – every fucking thing in my precious bar!

In less than two weeks my bar was bare. I was fuming.

“Didn’t your brother just suffer a heart attack a few months ago?” I demanded in a surly voice from my wife who was making him a six-egg ham, cheese, mushroom, tomato and olive omelet, because that’s what he liked to have for breakfast when he wasn’t eating out.

“How the fuck does his liver handle all of this booze?  Drinking
and
chain-smoking after a heart attack?”

With a flick of her wrist, she said, “He can handle his liquor. It’s his Russian blood!” Her voice brimmed with pride, which pissed me off even more.

He
could
handle his alcohol, I grudgingly admitted to myself. Could drink a whole bottle of vodka, a couple of shots of tequila, a dozen beers and would still know all the words to "Korobushka," a Russian folk song he and Liefie would sing and do some weird Russian or Ukrainian gypsy dance to.