The Missing Wife by Sue Fortin

Author:Sue Fortin [Fortin, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

‘There you go, dotes,’ says Rory, placing the supper he’s prepared for his wife, Maureen, on the table. He sits down beside her. ‘Do you want me to help you?’

‘No. I’ll do it myself,’ replies Maureen. Her hand trembles as she attempts to pick up her cutlery. Even lifting her arms is an effort for her.

Ahern resists the urge to grab the knife and fork and wrap her fingers around the wooden handles. It breaks his heart to see her trying to feed herself. She’s not having a good day today.

ME is a bastard and it’s robbed his wife of her life and him of his wife. There’s no treatment according to the doctors here in Ireland. It makes Ahern mad. He’s seen articles online about new treatments in the US. He’s researched it and even taken it to their own doctor, but he’s told no every time. It’s not been medically proven to help and there’s no money in the system for it.

‘Let me help you,’ says Ahern.

‘No. I can do it. I want to do it,’ she says.

Maureen does her best, God love her. He knows he should encourage her to be as independent as possible, but it’s hard for a man such as himself. He was brought up the old-fashioned way. He’s the provider and he’s the fixer. Always has been. That’s why he became a guard – to make sure everything happened as it should. And that’s why it’s so frustrating he cannot fix his wife. What sort of man is he?

He gets up from the table and leaves Maureen to eat her supper. She’ll call him if she needs him. The stairs creak under his weight as he goes up to the box room at the back of the house. When they’d first moved here all those years ago – when they were newlyweds, when Maureen was well – they’d earmarked this room as a nursery. They had been so excited at the thought of starting a family, but, alas, it wasn’t to be. God must have had other plans for them, Maureen said. He was fecked if he knew what those plans were. If it was Maureen getting ill with a virus ten years ago that left her a shell of the person she once was, then he didn’t understand God at all.

In the box room, he reaches up to the top shelf and lifts down the locked tin. He twiddles the combination dials and the lock springs open.

From his pocket he takes the brown envelope he’d been given earlier and withdraws the used notes. Five hundred euros. He slips it into the tin alongside the many other bundles. He keeps a card in the tin with the running total and he marks it up to include the latest deposit.

He’s not far off his total now. Once he’s hit the magic number, he can take Maureen to America – Chicago, to be exact – and the private clinic where she can take part in the trials of the new drug to cure her ME.

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