After a long time I managed to get to my feet and drag myself inside, stumbling, hunched over like an old man. I lit the fire—old ash whirling up, sending me into a painful coughing fit—and huddled in front of it, as close as I could get.
It came back to me bit by bit, falling into my mind with a slow, irrevocable, wintry calm. It had seemed like a heroic thing, at the time; it had seemed to light the whole sky with its own savage blaze of redemption. In the bleak morning all that was gone. Rafferty was dead and I had killed him. Not to save Leon or Susanna, like I had believed I had killed Dominic, or even to save myself, but simply because my brain was fucked enough that I had thought it was a good idea. And now he was dead. Somewhere not too far away, someone was starting to wonder where he was, why he hadn’t called, hadn’t come home.
Moving flame-shadows making the walls ripple and buckle. Ragged heaps of books and dirty plates on the coffee table, spider bustling purposefully along the floorboards by my knee.
My face had thawed enough that I could feel it was coated with something; when I fumbled at it, pain went everywhere. I made my way to the bathroom, stopping a few times along the way to lean against a wall until the surge of dizziness subsided and I could see again. In the mirror my nose looked weird, lumpy and off center, and my face was crusted with dried blood and dirt like a mask. I rubbed at it with a wet towel for a while, but it didn’t seem to make much difference and it hurt too much to keep going. My legs folded under me and I sat down on the bathroom floor. I sat there for a very long time, cheek throbbing against cold tile.
I was waiting for the thing Susanna and Leon had talked about, the grand transformation. Well yeah there was that too. The steely power that had come to Susanna, no one will ever fuck with me again, I’m a superhero now; I’ll haul in the burglars by the scruffs of their necks and throw them at Martin’s feet, I’ll spin some Machiavellian web that will have the shitbird neurologist sobbing at my feet and begging my forgiveness. The airy weightlessness that had risen in Leon, none of it matters, none of it can hurt me; I’ll let this damaged life drop from my shoulders like a stained jacket, and off I’ll go to find something new and perfect. In the firelight they had shone as if they were made of some strange element, unknowable and indestructible. I waited to feel my own flesh transmute, to rise from the floor with my wounds healing themselves and my scars vanishing and everything at last making sense.
Nothing happened. All that came to me was the thought of Rafferty’s wife or girlfriend or whatever he had had, starting to be frightened, wondering whether to ring Kerr; his kids, maybe, dark rumple-haired boys thrumming with energy, dashing in from playing to ask where Dad was.
Small stirrings in the house as the wind nosed in. Cracks and damp-stains patterning the wall like the shadow of a great moss-draped tree. Dim light shifting across the grimed window, shower curtain drooping from a broken ring.
I remembered the emails to Dominic. Or I thought I did, for whatever that was worth; but it was clear as day. Sprawled on my bed at home supposedly studying, restless and itchy with unseasonable spring heat, one of those weekends when everyone was a pain in the hole: Susanna had gone off on me because I made an unflattering comment about some hambeast friend of hers, Leon kept going into long bitter rants about how we were all slaughterhouse sheep plodding obediently from school towards college and then straight into the corporate maw, and my ribs were killing me where Dominic had given me a just-messing punch the day before. Sean or Dec could have pulled me out of my foul mood, but Dec was working some shitty part-time gig to save up for college and was never around, and Sean was off somewhere with his hand up Audrey’s top or whatever, not answering his phone. I wanted to piss someone off.
The email address Dec and I had used on Lorcan was ifancyyou@ something, Hotmail or Yahoo. The password was sucker.
Susanna had been in a flap the week before about Dominic trying to hook up with her. At the time it had seemed kind of endearing—for someone so smart, Su could be such a total kid, losing her mind because a guy came on to her—but that day it just seemed like annoying drama, an excuse for self-righteous outrage. If she wanted one of those, she could have it.
Hey I know I went off on you when you grabbed my arse the other day but actually it turned me on soooo much ;-)
I didn’t sign it—plausible deniability if it all came out and Susanna came gunning for me, my best injured face, What? I never said it was from you! Dom would put two and two together, and if he didn’t, I didn’t really care. Either way, his head was all over the place enough that he would totally fall for it. One more move on Susanna and she would rip his arm off and hit him with the wet end, or lecture him into a coma about consent and bodily autonomy. They deserved each other. I just hoped I was there when he did it.
Then something more interesting came up, I snapped out of my bad mood and forgot all about the whole thing for a few days. When I remembered and checked the email account, though, sure enough, Dominic had swallowed it whole. So why did u act like such a bitch?
I snorted and forgot about it for another while, till the next time I was bored. I don’t know I was embarrassed!! Like in case you were just messing with me. Anyway this way is fun too right? ;)
A big grinning smiley back from Dominic. :D That’s so hot
And then? What had I said to him? How many emails had there been? Those were all I could remember, but a handful Rafferty had said. Enough; more than enough.
Great big satisfied grin, like he’d done something clever and he was expecting a medal, Susanna had said. He went, “Happy to see me?”
Probably the memory should have hit me with a rush of shame, guilt, horror, but all I could feel was an immense, bottomless sadness. It had been such a small thing to do. Kids pulled worse pranks on each other every day, thousands of them. I had thought it meant nothing at all; it should have meant nothing at all. And yet, somehow, here we all were, and everything was ruined.
My bedroom looked like it had been abandoned for years, crumpled clothes in corners, dusty cobwebs swaying from the lampshade, weak slant of light through the crack between the curtains. I found my Xanax and my painkillers, tucked away at the back of a drawer, and spread them on the bed. There was a surprising amount of them left.
I had thought about it before, of course I had—in those terrible weeks pacing my apartment I had thought about practically nothing else. But when it came down to it I had never gone through with it, never even tried. I had believed it was because of Melissa, because of my mother, my father—I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing them again, couldn’t bear the thought of any of them finding me. But it had never been that. It had been because of that tiny ludicrous spark, somewhere deep in the core of my mind, that had still believed things could turn around. Somewhere on the other side of that sheet of trick glass, my own life was waiting for me, warm and bright as summer, beckoning.
Always one more miracle, always one more chance. Pull me from the earthquake rubble, weeks in, dust-coated to a white statue and just one hand lifting feebly, parade me high in triumph. Pull me from the river streaming like a merman, work on me past hope, till the cough and splutter finally come. I’m lucky, my luck will hold.