Page 67 of The Warmth of Our Closest Star

“Your insurance will start in a few weeks,” Peter said. “Is your doctor still going to switch you back to your old medication? It’s covered under your insurance, right?”

We were in bed, our backs propped against the headboard and the blankets pulled up to our waists as we read before bedtime.

“Mmhm.”

“Good,” Peter said, managing to glance at me with a smile. “You can start feeling better.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Maybe we can have Mom and Dad down,” Peter suggested, “once you feel better? I know they’d be glad to see us. Spend time with us. I’d be glad to see them.”

Exhaling heavily through my nose, I had to control myself so that I didn’t say the thing I was thinking. Peter inviting his mother and father to visit as soon as I felt better so that I could cook and clean while he was the perfect son was not exactly what I considered a great way to celebrate getting back on my old medication. For all I knew, my old medication’s efficacy would have changed after not having been on it for so long. There were no guarantees—only hope, which was harder to invest in more and more each day.

So, the suggestion annoyed me. I tried not to let it show.

“Maybe,” I said. “Once I feel better.”

“Sure,” Peter responded quickly, placating me.

I hated that. I was tired of Peter placating me. Babying me. Treating me like a delicate piece of ornamentation, yet poking and prodding at my limitations with suggestions such as having weekend guests that would require more energy than I had.

I was…exhausted.

“Things are going to get better,” Peter said.

He hadn’t said it as a statement of fact. Or a reassurance. I don’t think he was even talking to me, actually. Peter said it aloud like a mantra, as though willing better times into existence. Reassuring himself that, if he just hung in there, life would get easier. That all of life’s little molehills which had piled up to create a mountain would be brought crumbling down by an earthquake comprised of a mythical, magical pill almost within our grasp.

A pill had done this to us.

Something smaller than the nail on my pinkie finger had upturned our lives. Decimated my health and disposition. Planted a seed of bitterness in my husband that had grown into a tree whose roots had strangled the faith we had leapt from when we married.

But it wasn’t the pill that had done those things. It was Peter and me. We had allowed the power of a pill—and the inability to procure it easily and affordably—to change us. We were no longer the same two men who had spent one perfect night in Montreal together. Or had a two-week vacation of ecstasy and discovery. We were bitter. Angry. Annoyed with each other because there was nowhere else to direct it. And we were too exhausted to fix it.

I shut my book gently and laid it on my bedside table. Then I turned off my lamp and slid under the covers, pulling them up around my neck as I turned onto my side, facing away from Peter. He didn’t even try to hide the annoyed sigh that escaped his mouth.

I laid there, staring at the wall across the room, no longer enamored with the sage green that the dark wainscoting met halfway up the wall. For what seemed like hours, I laid there in silence, not quite able to fall asleep, as Peter sat on his side of the bed in profound silence. Finally, I heard him close his book and lay it on his table. Then he switched off his lamp, casting the room in utter darkness.

Peter slid under the covers and inched up behind me, but he made no move to wrap an arm around me or even touch me.

“Enzo?” he asked.

I made a noise with my throat, but my eyes were wide open.

“Do you want to…you know?”

“I’m tired,” I said.

Peter sighed.

“If we’re ever going to start a family, we have to have sex again,” he said.

It was an attempt at humor, what Peter had said. A way to make me chuckle or even crack a smile instead of staring blankly at the wall. A peace offering that maybe one day we would actually start the family I so desperately wanted for myself. However, the mere suggestion that having a child would somehow fix what was wrong with us—even if it was only implied—made my blood boil. I didn’t have the energy to process it.

“I’m too tired to clean and cook for you and your parents for three days,” I said. “I don’t think I would be able to deal with a child, Peter. Even if they’d show more appreciation for my efforts.”

Peter’s reaction should have been immediate and fierce. I expected him to throw the covers off of us and scream at me. To fight. I was ready to fight, even if I knew I didn’t have the energy for it. Maybe a fight would somehow drill deeply into the furthest reaches of me and bring forth a supply I didn’t know I had in reserves.

But Peter said nothing. Which was worse. He simply turned over, settled into bed, and stared at the wall on his side of the room.