Chapter 52

Eve folds the credit card bill up tight and puts it in the back pocket of her jeans, as if she’s hiding it from her mum. She goes into their bedroom and hops into bed. She always puts herself to bed whenever she is upset. Apparently she did this when she was a toddler. Back then it was Aww, Evie, so adorable. Now it probably means she has an actual disorder.

She has to wrench on the top sheet with all her strength just to get in. Dom always makes their bed and he does a great job. He pulls the sheets super tight, as though he’s a soldier, although he also carefully positions the throw cushions just so, which is very cute. It was his dad who taught him to make a bed like this.

Dom is an only child brought up by a single father, and Eve is an only child brought up by a single mother. They discovered this in that fateful French lesson back in Year 10. In pairs, they had to get up and describe the other person’s living situation in French. “Dom lives with his dad. He has no sisters or brothers. He has a dog called Tilly.” “Eve lives with her mum. She has no sisters or brothers. She has a cat called Tilly.” Oh my God, they were so bad at French, their French teacher hated them, but it was obvious, to, like, everyone in that class, except the teacher, because she had no soul, that Eve and Dom were two halves of a whole, two matching jigsaw pieces, two people whose pets, although different species, shared the SAME NAME, who were clearly destined to be together forever.

And now, here they are, married, living happily ever after.

They’re so, so happy!

And then, bizarrely, a cruel, malicious thought appears in her head without her permission: But, Eve, there is nothing to look forward to in your life.

For the last eighteen months it has been nothing but wedding, wedding, wedding. Lists and appointments, so much to do, and a constant feeling of momentum, as if she has been sliding toward something, faster and faster, the wedding is a month away, it’s a week away, it’s tomorrow! And then: it’s happening! She’s walking down the aisle, she’s doing the wedding dance, toasts, speeches, photos, and her face is aching from smiling so hard. And then the flight from Hobart to Sydney. No, let’s not think about the flight. Think about the honeymoon: sex and cocktails and swimming. Coming home to their new apartment! Opening all those beautifully wrapped gifts and finding places to put them and going to the shops to exchange gifts from guests with crappy taste. Writing the thank-you cards: not quite so fun, but still, another task that needed to be done. And then picking up the photos, staring at themselves, feeling kind of pleased at how good they looked, watching the video with their friends!

Now what?

Now, nothing.

Nothing as big and glamorous as her wedding will ever happen again in her whole life. She’ll just go to other people’s weddings and, yes, she will hopefully have babies, but how will they ever afford babies? And what if she can’t train them not to cry like that awful baby on the plane? She’ll have to work two jobs and make her kids dinner and do their laundry and get old and die and what is the actual point of her whole life?

Is this what people mean when they say “existential crisis”? She didn’t think she was complicated or cool enough for one of those.

She will not panic. She will work this out.

She googles: Why am I sad after my wedding?

The internet offers an instant diagnosis: Post-wedding blues.

Very common. Like postnatal depression but without the hormones or sympathy. Nobody is going to bring her a lasagna. The solution, according to the internet, is to make plans. Date nights and whatever. They are too young for date nights. She shudders at the thought. Budgets. Date nights. What next? Orthotics?

Anyway they can’t afford to go out. Their credit card will explode.

She puts her hands behind her head and wonders how Dom will react to their financial crisis.

She will have to make sure he doesn’t come up with a secret stupid solution like getting divorced, or worries all through the night, like he’d done on their honeymoon, fretting over what the lady said on the plane.

He promised her that he would stop thinking about it, but she knows it’s still on his mind because just last night he sat upright in bed and said, very clearly, “I would never hurt Eve. Never in a billion years.”

She said, “I know, Dom. I know you wouldn’t.”

She knew he was sleep-talking and that he would have no memory of it in the morning. His sleep-talking voice is very fast and mumbled, kind of sedated.

Fortunately he fell straight back to sleep. Sometimes when he sleepwalks she has to follow him around, gently suggesting he come back to bed.

The sleep-talking and sleepwalking started when he was six, which was when his mother left Dom and his dad. (She lives in Bali now and teaches yoga. Dom has forgiven her for disappearing from his life for ten years, but Eve has not.) One night Dom’s dad got a knock on the door at three a.m. It was a neighbor, who had realized he’d forgotten to take his garbage cans out and rushed out into the night in his pajamas, to find little Dom, also in pajamas and bare feet, walking down the dark footpath, insisting to the neighbor that he was late for school.

After that his dad had to find ways to make sure Dom couldn’t get out of the house. It got harder as he got older and kept sleepwalking. They locked windows and put a bell on his bedroom door. Occasionally his dad would catch him having a shower, fully dressed. Sometimes he made himself toast in the middle of the night, ate it, went back to bed, and woke up with no memory of it: just the plate with the uneaten crusts on the kitchen table as evidence. Sometimes months would go by and Dom and his dad would think he’d grown out of it, but then it would happen again. He couldn’t go to sleepovers or camps, he was too embarrassed about what might happen, and his dad was worried that he’d walk off a cliff or in front of a car.

Once, when he was a teenager and had gotten his driver’s license, Dom drove in his sleep. He woke up after he turned off the ignition and got out of the car in the moonlit empty parking lot at the local shops. He’d parked perfectly, but he had no memory of getting there. It terrified him. At Dom’s request, Eve hides the car keys before they go to bed. It was his dad’s job when he lived at home and sometimes his dad would forget where he’d hidden them the next day, which drove Dom crazy.

Mostly, it’s not a big deal. He sits up in bed, says something nonsensical, and then lies straight back down. Since he started personal training most of his sleep-talking is about correcting someone’s form. “Don’t lock your elbows,” he’ll say in his sleep-slurred voice. “Focus on your core.”

Sometimes he becomes a little agitated, but mostly he’s calm. There was only one time that he’d sounded angry, which was on that camping trip in the Huon Valley in the stuffy caravan. Eve has noticed that his sleep disturbances are always worse in an airless room, and if he’s been drinking.

That night they were sleeping on two bunk beds side by side in the on-site caravan. Eve and Liv had the top bunks and the boys had the bottom bunks.

Eve doesn’t know what time it was when she opened her eyes to find Dom on his feet, standing next to her bunk, looking directly into her eyes.

He said, “I will kill you.”

“You will what?” said Eve.

She sat up, and she never told him this and never will, but it terrified her. His face was illuminated only by the spooky green light from Riley’s phone charger. She couldn’t quite make out his features. His eyes were like black holes.

“I will kill you,” he said again, and she could hear pure fury and conviction in his voice, and she scrabbled back so that she was up against the caravan wall and held her pillow in front of her, like that was going to help.

“Dom,” she said. “Babe. Wake up. You’re asleep.”

He got really close to her face. She could smell his red-winey breath.

He said, “I have a very particular set of skills. I will look for you. I will find you, and I will kill you.”

At which point she’d laughed out loud with recognition and relief, because now she understood. They’d all been quoting lines from movies that night, and that one was Riley’s favorite: Liam Neeson’s famous phone conversation with the kidnappers in that old movie Taken.

“You haven’t got any skills, mate.” Riley spoke up from the bottom bunk. “And your Irish accent is shit.” He knew all about the sleepwalking and -talking, so he understood right away what was going on.

Dom dropped the accent and began muttering, “Let’s stop here and buy some water. Pull over here, babe, I need water, you thirsty, babe?”

Riley got up and gave Dom a bottle of water, which he drained in one long gulp, spilling some on himself, which obviously woke him up because he said, in his normal voice, “Sorry. Was I sleepwalking?”

They all laughed about it. It was funny. Just another crazy Dom sleepwalking story.

That was until the lady on the plane made her prediction, and then, on their honeymoon, Dom woke up in the night, remembered the incident in the caravan, started researching, and discovered something truly terrible: a phenomenon called “homicidal sleepwalking.”

“What if I do that to you?” he said, and he’d showed her all the news stories he’d found. A man who claimed he was dreaming about “aggressive ostriches” when he killed someone while asleep. A husband who killed his beloved wife and was now in jail with no memory of what he’d done. “I will miss her until the day I die,” he said, which was extremely tragic.

“You won’t kill me,” Eve had said. “Anyway, I don’t believe in psychics.”

“Forget the psychic. I just think we should be aware I might hurt you in my sleep.”

“You’ve never touched me when you’ve been sleepwalking,” Eve comforted him. It wasn’t technically true. Sometimes he’d kind of pushed her hand roughly away when she was trying to convince him to come back to bed, but she’d never once felt in danger.

Oh, gosh, it was all so silly!

He’s still Dom when he’s asleep.

Things that happen on the internet never happen in real life.

She picks up the framed wedding photo from their bedside table. She chose a “vintage-style” effect for this photo—it’s in moody black-and-white, with a yellowish tinge—and this, combined with the fact that she’s wearing a vintage dress, and Dom is wearing classic suspenders and a bow tie, makes it seem like their wedding took place decades ago.

Eve thinks about the first bride who wore her dress. Did she get post-wedding blues? Did she know that multiple affordable expenses add up to one big unaffordable total? Probably. Probably everyone knows that. This photo print cost forty-five dollars and the frame cost sixty dollars. She’s been throwing her money around like a Kardashian.

What’s that phrase people keep using? “Cost of living crisis.” She didn’t think it applied to them. She thought it applied to people with mortgages and school fees.

She remembers overhearing her mother talking to Dom’s dad at their engagement party. “They’re like babes in the wood, those two.”

“I know,” said Dom’s dad sadly. “They don’t know what they don’t know.”

Well, why didn’t they just tell them what they didn’t know?

“You’re so, so stupid,” she says out loud to her own smiling stupid face in the photo.

“Who’s stupid?” says Dom from the bedroom door.

She drops the photo. “What are you doing back so early?”

“Last two clients canceled.”

“You’re kidding me,” says Eve. “That is unbelievable, those people are so—”

“Oh, well, I got Thai for lunch.” Dom lifts up the plastic bag looped around his wrist. “But it’s maybe got a bit cold, because, I need to tell you, I had—”

“Not from the expensive place?” Eve sits up so fast she bangs her head against the wall. “Ow.”

Dom looks alarmed. “Which one is the expensive place? I went to the one with the fish cakes you like.”

“That’s the expensive place!” wails Eve.

Dom puts down the bag. “What’s going on?”

She pulls the credit card bill from the back pocket of her jeans and hands it to him.

Dom looks at it. “This is our bill? We owe that much money?”

“Yes,” says Eve. “I feel like we’ve maybe kind of fucked up, babe, I didn’t—”

“I smashed the car on the way home,” says Dom. He sits down heavily on the bed. There is no color in his face. “And I think I forgot to pay the car insurance.”