‘If there’s somewhere you need to be—’

He waves me away, watching the television. ‘She wants me to do a grocery store run, if you can believe it. She’s got a craving for popsicles, she says. In this weather.’

I smile politely.

‘I don’t envy you,’ I say. I lie.

XVI

Simone never had cravings, but the pregnancy caused her terrible heartburn. I remember countless late-night drives for antacids and ingredients for other homemade remedies, like the apple cider vinegar she would sip or the baking soda she mixed with water. She took ginger and tried liquorice supplements, but nothing ever worked. It was his hair, she said. Something about the unique mixture of hormones that caused its excessive growth and upset the digestive tract. An old wives’ tale, I thought. But she was always so apologetic when the pain became too much and she had to wake me in the night. She would rub circles into the small of my back as I fumbled in the dark for my wallet and keys.

And though I acted as if it were a great hardship, some valiant effort, I secretly enjoyed those late-night drives, when the roads were quiet and the world seemed vacant and uninhabited, as if it could be mine.

It was an escape from the monotony that had befallen the house, the strange gravity that had developed and turned us both into a satellite for the child. And though I was elated, it was difficult not to view the pregnancy as an act of reduction. I felt the beginnings of a great paradox in which I saw the reality of my own existence but also the absence of it. The more the child grew, the more I felt myself shrink.

I would stare out towards the city lights on those long drives, towards the shimmering of brake lights suspended on the freeway, and I would imagine Simone was beside me. That we were returning to our old apartment, to our old lives, our old bodies. As if we had woken up from some elongated fever dream, some stupor, and realised that we had betrayed ourselves. I felt the lights calling to me, but the effect was fleeting. The sudden blindness from the headlights of a passing car was enough to snap me back to reality.

I kept my growing disenchantment with the suburbs, with the changes we were experiencing, largely to myself because I knew that they would be temporary. That we would, in fact, return to ourselves, to our old lives, our old bodies, at least in part. That given time we would ultimately grow to inhabit better versions of ourselves.

I knew this because I saw a vision of our future in Phil and Helen. And on the weekends, when we would meet with them for drinks, I would stand outside on the patio with Phil, the two of us hovering over their exposed fire pit, and he would rub my shoulder and whisper me his counsel.