As the last hour of the year began, Lissa stood in front of a mirror. Balancing against a wardrobe, she gingerly slipped her good foot into her shoe. It made her leg appear long and elegant. Sleek like a panther in a silver heel that matched her dress. Her bad foot, on the other hand, was grotesque. She could not put weight on it, and made her look dumpy—swollen toes poking out of the bandages, and purple bruising over the bridge.
On the bed, Joshua laid out a tie. A tie. What kind of man wore a tie to a house party? Sometimes she feared he took fashion inspiration from Norman Rockwell paintings and aspired to look as square as possible. She resented that, and she supposed he resented her. They had been arriving at this for months. If she were honest with herself, she would have admitted she had chosen her New Year’s dress to spite him. It was short and low-cut and had the potential to stir up an argument ferocious enough to channel her rage.
He turned to look when she asked him what he thought. “A bit much, don’t you think?” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“How’s your ankle?”
“It still hurts.”
“Lie down then, if you can’t handle it. What’s with the shoes?”
“I’m fantasizing about the complete outfit.”
“Right. Will you be using your crutches?”
They were propped against the wall. Matte medical grey. “No,” she said. “I’ll stay sitting down all night.”
“Brilliant plan.” He slung a towel over his shoulder. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Alright,” she said.
In his absence, she started her makeup. Frosty silver eyeshadow, glittery blush. She wanted to be an ice queen. Joshua hated lip gloss and the way it stuck to his face. She added a second layer in rebellion.
The shower hummed in the ensuite, and even the sound of him washing himself annoyed her. In there, shampooing, thinning at the temples already.
She loved him, didn’t she? Then why was she always convincing herself?
His phone was going off on the bed, set to vibrate. She let it ring out. Ran her fingers through her hair and brushed it over her shoulders. It went off again, one brief buzz for a text message, and this time she grabbed it.
1 New Message: Albert
Was phoning to wish you a happy new year. Everything fine at hospital. Sending Nuala home tomorrow, all going well. Ring tomorrow and we will catch up with all your news. Mum asking for you. Hope you are enjoying France.
Ring tomorrow.
Not tonight. Not for the entire hour that Joshua paced, voice low through the ceiling.
So who had he been talking to?
The phone was a grenade in her hand.
Drop it. Something within her urged. Put it down now.
But she couldn’t. She thumbed the buttons on it—his stupid, corporate BlackBerry thing that she could never figure out how to work, but with shaking hands and brute force of will, she located his call log.
And there it was.
31/12/05 - 11:45am - Carley - 1hr 46mins
30/12/05 - 10:03pm - Carley - 1hr 17mins
30/12/05 - 2:15pm - Carley - 43mins
29/12/05 - 8:47pm - Carley - 2hr 04mins
29/12/05 - 11:23am - Carley - 1hr 32mins
Carley, Carley, Carley. Pages and pages of Carley, going back through autumn, summer—a stark record of Lissa’s stupidity. There were so many logs her thumb ached from the button.
And naturally, Lissa appeared occasionally—a two-minute call, a twenty-second one, like a gnat in Joshua’s ear, interrupting his hours on the line with Carley with insufferable buzzing. Hey! Remember me? Call me, baby!
She dropped the phone and sat with it on the blanket beside her. The bedroom was very quiet. Downstairs, someone laughed.
She grabbed his wallet, splayed open on the bedside table. Rifled through it indiscriminately, yanking MasterCards and visas out onto the bed. Out came his golf club membership, a Barbour gift card, a receipt, tucked conspicuously into the coin pocket with its corner sticking out. The euros he kept for the driving range flew out with it, rolling onto the floor and around her thighs.
WEIR & SONS
Custom Silver Necklace
Engraving: CB. With Love.
€450
Date: 12 December 2005
Lissa went still. The receipt crinkled in her hands, and without a notion of what else she was supposed to do, she simply dropped to her side on the bed, staring at the wall. She felt as though she’d died.
The shower stopped.
Footsteps, and Joshua opened the bathroom door wearing a towel, steam all around him.
“What are you doing?”
Lissa just lay there surrounded by his cards and coins, unable to think of a sufficient response.
“Lissa? Hello?” His voice was sharp. “Have you gone through my wallet?” Snatched the gutted thing from the floor. “What on earth? I would never do that to you. Go through your purse…”
She opened her hand to reveal the receipt, and his face paled. “Carley Bennett?” she said, her voice hollow. “You’ve bought her a necklace?”
He stood for a long moment, looking at the crumpled thing in her palm. “Oh, it’s not what you think.”
She was aware that she was smiling. Strangely serene on the bed, gazing up at him while water trickled from his hair. “Carley Bennett? The drip from school?”
“We’re friends. We’ve gotten close, sure, but it was—”
“You call her for hours every day. I saw it on your phone.”
His face twitched.
“You’ve obviously been seeing her, Joshua, so I don’t know why you’re bothering to lie. It’s boring.”
“Can you let me—” he gestured to himself, naked under his towel. “Give me a minute.”
He turned away and dressed himself. She heard the rustle of clothing, zippers, and belt buckles. She knew she should leave and take a minute for herself, but found herself unable to move. Downstairs, Diane’s party thrived. Voices rising, music thumping.
Joshua returned in stockinged feet and tossed his towel into the bathroom, where it landed atop his trail of wet footprints.
“You should pick that up,” Lissa said. “It’s rude to leave things on the floor at someone else’s house.”
He didn’t move. “Why are you being weird?”
“I’m being weird?”
“Yes, the things you’re saying are weird. And you’re just lying there.”
Lissa sat up obediently, and more coins slid onto the floor.
“So, go on then. You’re seeing her,” she said.
He watched her distrustfully. “We’ve been spending time together.”
“Since when?”
“The summer sometime.”
“You’ve been seeing two women at the same time, then.”
“God, no, Lissa. It wasn’t like that. Carley needed time. She didn’t want me to—” he stopped.
“To what? No, go on. To break up with me until she was ready to commit?”
He said nothing.
“So you kept me around as backup, in case she changed her mind.”
“Lissa…”
“Have you slept with her yet?”
Joshua scoffed. “What? Why is it always about that for you?”
“What does that mean?”
“See, this is the problem, Lissa, your mind always goes there. Asking me questions like that–”
“Well, have you? It’s a simple question.”
“No,” he said, and Lissa enjoyed a slight moment of relief—or was it something uglier—vindication, before Joshua added: “She wants to wait.”
A laugh burst from Lissa. “Sorry, she wants to wait? What, until marriage?”
He scowled. “And that’s funny because?”
“Joshua, are you serious?”
“She’s a Christian, and so am I.”
“Oh, come off it. You’re not a Christian. Not in that way.”
“I am!” he cried. “I’ve realised I am because Carley’s helped me to see it. You’re the one who suppressed that side of me. For years.”
Now she was quiet.
“You were always pushing for it, pushing for more, interested in trying new things,” he spat those words as though experimentation was an unutterable sin. “I didn’t think you were like that. If I’d known it from the start, I wouldn’t have gotten involved with you, but you were so much different back then, I…”
“When I was thirteen?”
“You really were sweet,” he said. “Everyone was laughing at me last night when I said it, but you were. Then at some point you changed.”
“And when did I change?”
“I don’t know. But I realised you weren’t who I thought you were.”
It occurred to Lissa that it would have been preferable if he’d just punched her in the guts and packed his bags. But this was how they were going out—with her entire being, her personality and her values strewn across the floor while she fought to keep her face in check. Her stomach convulsed. She might throw up if she said anything else.
She inhaled and waited for the wave to pass. “Let’s be honest, Joshua,” she said. “You haven’t felt the same about me since we started having sex. That’s when you began to hate me.”
“I never hated you.”
“Okay, then you hated that I wanted it, even though it was to your benefit, wasn’t it? You wanted it too.”
“I don’t—”
“And you liked it. You used to say that.”
He glowered at her. “Wanting and liking something doesn’t make it right. I went along with it because I thought that’s what boyfriends did—I was sixteen. It’s all the other boys in school were talking about. And you were, and all the other girls and—”
“And Carley’s not like other girls, basically. She’s not a slut.”
He said nothing.
“That’s how you’ve thought of me, is it?”
Lissa thought of the summer before it happened—Diane in the window with the vineyard behind her, whispering as if at a slumber party about boys and kissing and sex. She told Lissa what she might expect, how it might happen, and there she was at her mother’s feet, listening on with anxious anticipation. Then there was the parcel that arrived in Dublin that autumn—a care package with condoms, though her French doctor had already fitted the implant, expensive chocolates, a scented candle, and a CD of romantic songs. They’d waited until the right moment—when Jarlath was in Geneva and Alexander was with the babysitter. The house was quiet, and everything about it was perfect.
But now Lissa saw that what had been a cherished girlhood memory for her had been shameful and morally wrong for Joshua.
He took in her makeup, her dress. “Well, you’re always trying to… I don’t know. Seduce someone. It’s not appropriate.”
A knock on the bedroom door made Lissa jump.
“Lissa, darling?” It was Anika. “Sorry to disturb you, but do you have hairspray?”
She couldn’t think of how to respond.
“Um, no,” she called back. “Sorry. Ask my mum.”
“Your mum’s on the wine. I don’t think she can help me.”
“Go look in her room. You can just root around. She won’t care.”
“Yeah okay. You alright?”
“Fine, thanks.”
And she continued down the hall. Another knock followed—three quick raps as someone passed.
“Half an hour,” that was Nick. “Don’t miss the countdown, folks.”
The party was picking up below—voices louder, music cranked higher. As Nick and Anika’s voices faded down the stairs, Lissa knew what Joshua was about to say to her.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “The two of them. They basically represent the person you’ve become.”
“Oh, come on. There’s nothing wrong with them.”
“Anika—you pretty much want to be her, from what I can tell, running around naked and sleeping with every man who asks, and as for Lynott…”
“What about him?”
“The way you go on about him. It’s obvious you’ve got some sort of weird fascination.”
“What are you on about? There’s no weird fascination. Why do you say things like that?”
“He’s just waiting for you to make it easy for him. That's all.” Joshua looked satisfied now that he’d come up with an appropriate cosmic punishment.
And now there were tears of rage in the corners of her eyes. “Why don’t you end it then?”
“I’ve been waiting for the proper moment.”
“The proper moment wasn’t the second you had feelings for someone else?”
He looked at her. “I’ll pack my bags tonight, and I’ll be gone in the morning. I’m going to call my dad and then arrange an early flight.”
He opened the wardrobe and began taking his things out of it. “This is for the best, really,” he said in a measured voice. “You can focus on your studies. Keep doing your college work, spend time working at the hotel. And I can—”
“You’ll be with Carley Bennett.”
“Yeah.”
She waited for an apology, or a flicker of regret, but his face was blank. He folded his clothes into a neat pile.
“So what?” She pressed.
“So, I’m breaking up with you now. It’s over.”
She felt herself split into before and after—a guillotine cleaving her life in two, and a series of years rising up into the future ahead. Frightening, unknowable years in which she’d become the woman she couldn’t yet imagine.
And now, what was she supposed to do? Sit there? She had the sense that if she didn’t do something useful, some hideous, unpredictable emotion would come surging out.
In her palm, the receipt was mangled to death. Ruined with the sweat of her hand, but she smoothed it anyway and slotted it back inside Joshua’s wallet. Then she took the visas, the MasterCards, the golf club memberships, and put them back one by one.
“What are you doing?” he said. “Leave it. Just—here,” he took it from her and tossed it onto the bed. “Go have your party. Leave it.”
“The party?” Absurd.
“Yeah, just go. I want to pack.”
“Right. Okay.” She stood, and her ankle screamed. With one inelegant hop, she grabbed her crutches and hobbled out of the room.
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