Five months before the driveway, my body began sending messages I could not ignore. Tingling in my feet after work, every night like static. Leo said I was sitting wrong at my desk. Fatigue that arrived like a wall, leaving me sleeping straight through to dinner. Freya heard about it and told Leo that young women these days had no stamina. A blurred vision episode at work, the screen going soft for forty seconds before clearing, scared me enough that I tried to book a doctor’s appointment, at which point I discovered that Leo had forgotten to add me to his health insurance after switching jobs four months earlier. He said he would handle it. Weeks passed. He did not handle it.
I understand now that this was not forgetfulness. A wife without insurance is a wife without medical records, without a documented paper trail of her own deterioration.
My legs buckled in the shower with no warning. I went sideways into the tile and caught myself on the grab bar. Leo said I probably slipped on conditioner. I started keeping a flashlight by the bed in case my legs gave out at night, which sounds paranoid until it is the thing that keeps you from splitting your head open on the nightstand at two in the morning.
The numbness spread up past my ankles. My feet felt like they belonged to someone else. I finally stopped waiting for Leo to fix the insurance situation and made my own appointment, paid two hundred and eighty-five dollars out of pocket from a small emergency account I keep at a separate credit union, two thousand one hundred dollars that nobody knew about. My grandmother had told me when I was nineteen that every woman should have money that belongs to her alone in a place nobody else can touch. I had never understood that advice as viscerally as the day I handed that cash to the receptionist.
The doctor ordered blood work. The results were not back yet when I hit the driveway.
One more thing about those five months. My evening tea.
I had been drinking chamomile tea before bed for years. About five months before the collapse, it started tasting slightly different. Not bad, just off. A faint bitterness that had not been there before. I mentioned it to Leo. He said he had switched brands because the old one went up in price. That made sense. I shrugged it off.
For those entire five months, Leo made that tea for me every single night. Never missed a night. I had thought, at the time, that this was sweet. My husband, who had forgotten our anniversary twice and could not remember to buy milk without a text prompt, somehow never once forgot my evening tea. I thought it was his love language.[]
