Part 1

Duncan, my love,

I put sleeping pills in your drink, and I’ll be gone when you wake. I’m leaving Luna with you because I trust your parents to help you recover and give her a life I cannot.

The room is dark and cold, and streetcars rumble outside. Luna grunts, wrapped in your purple sweater, sleeping in the cot you fashioned from the wooden wine case. My heart is broken over how crazed you have become. I wanted to believe that there were footsteps and people whispering in the attic, cameras in the walls, gossip at work, and people hurting you. I believed it the first time; I believed it the second time. I wanted to believe. I love you so much. I can’t make you seek help. You are lost in your mind, beyond my reach, my poor, lost soul.

I pity you so much, my lovely boy. I see you lie there, your face pale and your stomach empty because of your fear of being poisoned by someone, with copper wire and metal tape around you – a thin curtain of tinsel and a boundary to another world.

I’m angry. Three years together. You were so happy when you received the university acceptance letter. With tears of joy and two dozen of my favourite egg tarts, you opened the door naked. We ate egg tarts until our bellies ached, laughing the whole night covered by music and candlelight. Your degree was nearly finished when you disappeared in front of me.

You were so particular about the birth arrangements. I saw you, the playful boy, become a calculating businessman fighting for his family, bearing gifts from the government, friends, social support, everything lined up for the new member of the Stone family. You were like a knight fighting for his God, your heart opened and bled for me as you saw my body turning from a scallion into a sponge cake. I loved how you looked at me and after me. I loved you so. I still do. A red carpet of effort because you denied your parents.

We were so happy in our old apartment, but you moved us here. You calculated the square footage advantage up to an inch. “It is the right footage,” you said with obsession in your eyes, and I didn’t know what you meant. And then we returned from the hospital with our precious Luna straight here, to this human kennel on Queen Street, with its filthy walls, barred windows, crazed eyes in the hallways, and screams from the asylum across the road. “It was the right size for the baby. A whole hundred-and-fifty square feet more,” you said. I thought it a joke at first, leaving our clean and cozy apartment for such a dangerous place. It’s no place for a baby, but we had to stay because you screamed madly for the first time. “The right size for the baby,” you screamed. I didn’t know what it meant.

Two months since Luna was born, and you have been unhinged for four. It started with that look. The blank expression in your eyes, as if the world around you ceased to exist. The look came with the twitch and the twitch with the fidgeting fingers, thumb and its accomplices coming together relentlessly: thumb-and-index, thumb-and-ring, thumb-and-middle – index, ring, middle; index ring, middle – as if calculating, your mouth moving, grumbling, giggling, cursing. What cursed the middle finger I do not know.

After your eyes and fingers started to fidget, your work changed. Your colleagues, those good, simple people, started scheming against you because you somehow threatened their job. You claimed they schemed to hurt you, planted evidence so you would get fired, planned to kill you. Suddenly, they all watched your every step, followed you home, set out to hurt you, me, and the baby.

My baby sleeps in her wine case, you in your tinsel fortress, and my heart is breaking. This is not a home, my love. This is a crazed man’s delusion, a hiding place for an ill mind. I leave now. I’ll call your father before I leave. I hope he comes before you wake.

Forever yours,

Jean