Aftershock

by Alison Taylor

  That was one good thing I had to say about David. In the years before he left, he never missed a game or a school concert, and even managed to drag Jules out to one once. It wasn’t his fault she answered a work call at full volume in the middle of Marci’s trumpet solo; he still got major points for effort. After that, I figured it was better if she didn’t come. But it still hurt that she never even wanted to. Then David had just left. Jules was in another world, and now he was on the opposite end of this one. At first he wrote, called, tried to keep up regular contact, but after a couple of years of my tepid responses, he’d basically given up, his efforts tapering off to Christmas and my birthday. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. He was supposed to read into my silence, sense my anger and pain, and respond to it. But he didn’t. I’d been sulking and it backfired. And now I had become peripheral. A stranger in his house. An intruder in his life.

  WITH A RUSTLE of cloth and the soft scrape of a zipper, Lance emerged from the tent at the back of the yard. He approached the house, re-triggered the security light and shielded his face from the glare. He was fully dressed. He dropped his hand as his eyes adjusted, saw me and nodded.

  Ready already? His voice was low and rough, misshapen from sleep. He had a knapsack over his shoulder, smokes in his hand.

  Couldn’t sleep.

  Lance nodded, dropped his smokes and knapsack on the table, went into the house. He reappeared with a brown bottle and two glasses.

  One for the road, yeah? He poured us both some beer.

  Bit early. But I took a glass.

  Heh. Heard that before. Could be part of the problem, I s’pose.

  He moved to sit beside me. I side-eyed his profile. I wondered if he had nightmares about his wife dying. When I’d re-entered the pub the night before, swaying to yet another aftershock, Amanda had been telling Lance it was time to get his shit together.

  You seem fine to me.

  He did his customary half-snort laugh, like things were equal parts funny and sad and he couldn’t believe no one else saw it.

  Yeah. Well.

  His gaze fixed in an outward-inward stare of psychic scab-picking.

  We all deal with loss in our own ways, I said. This was the main thing—really the only thing—I remembered from grief therapy. But it was a big one.

  Lance’s eyes flashed, but I couldn’t tell where he looked or what he saw. You know something about it?

  I thought about Lizzie, and how much of my life was scaffolded around her memory, and nodded.

  Anyway. You should meet my mum. Cheers.

  Lance tapped my glass with his, swallowed a mouthful of beer. Your mum’s a boozer?

  Among other things. When I was a kid, she was a real mess. After Lizzie.

  Lizzie?

  My baby sister. She died.

  He looked at me for a long moment, I could see him in the corner of my eye, but I kept staring into the depths of the garden.

  I did not know that, he said.

  Yeah. What I didn’t say was that after David left, it seemed like Jules had managed to put some of her pieces back together, to become more functional as a person if not as a parent. But when I got home from university, I was alarmed at how quickly she had reverted. Now it seemed that maybe the intervening years had been just that—an intermission from a life of sedation, rather than a period of sedation in an otherwise engaged life. But I didn’t get into that with Lance.

  Nor did I mention the guilt that weighed me down, even now.

  A whispering crowd of flower heads on skeletal stems shifted in the night garden, pockets of deep black darting through with the breeze. It was time to get out of there.

  So . . . Where’s your boat?

  Aw, Kiri’s boat, yeah? ’Bout an hour’s drive. You sure you wanna come?

  After a quick imagining of how Jules would have reacted (Oh, an overnight ocean sail with a virtual stranger in a foreign country? That sounds safe.) I’d packed my bags before going to bed.

  Oddly, the one thing that gave me pause was Char. She would probably be disappointed, but I reasoned she was better off without me.

  So I told Lance: Oh, I’m sure.

  Aw, go on, then. Grab your gear.

  Bed.

  I’m tired, said Jules. My neck hurts.

  Alright. Rod slid his hand out from under her shirt, rolled over, took his glasses off and turned out the light on his side of the bed.

  Jules was left in the light from her own bedside lamp, a circle of yellow cut out of the dark hotel room, making the walls seem close, the shadows cavernous.

  Already, Rod appeared to be asleep. She shouldn’t be surprised. He had worked an eighteen-hour shift before heading to Drew’s. And her saying she was tired and aching was a clearly defined signal that they would not be having sex. She didn’t even feel like being touched right now—by him—and she knew he was just respecting that. All the same, she felt let down by his half-hearted effort.

  She turned off her own light, slid down in the bed, lay with her eyes open and space between her and Rod.

  Declan had set her on edge, at first, with his unpressed button-down, his nicotine-stained fingers, his too-easy laugh. But then something had shifted, and she’d glimpsed depths behind his veneer. The warmth from the edge of his hand had spread up her arm like a blush, into her cheeks, her chest.

  Then Rod had arrived, saying, Did you get my text?

  And Jules had said, No, because her phone was in the front pocket of Declan’s jeans, which she wasn’t about to explain, and anyway she’d given up on Rod hours before, when she’d gotten his first text, saying he couldn’t make it.

  Promised you a hotel date, didn’t I? He’d smiled as he walked across the back porch to where Jules, feeling caught, stood leaning against the railing next to Declan. He kissed her on the lips, right there, a foot from Declan’s face, and Jules felt like two people trying to occupy one body, she was both in the moment and watching it from the outside.

  But she kissed him back. That was what he expected, what was expected of her. You greet your lover with a kiss. But she kept it short, a cursory brush of the lips. She could feel Declan watching.

  As Jules pulled back from Rod and looked over, Declan flicked his glance away, turning around to look into the empty swimming pool and the dappled darkness of the garden. Rod kept his hands on her hips, searching her face as he pressed his lips together, analyzing flavours.

  We smoked some pot, Jules said.

  They spent the last hour of the evening back in the house. Drew and Farzan sent Jules significant looks she tried to ignore, while she and Declan made periodic eye contact, taking turns at being the first to flinch away. And Rod did not let go of Jules’s hand until Jules said she wanted to go. She felt hyper-aware of Rod’s hand in hers, his presence shadowing her. She knew he was uncomfortable, could see him starting to compensate by espousing “expert” knowledge on every subject that came up, and she knew the others could see it too.

  I’ve been to Ireland, he told Declan. Couple times. Frankly, I think the whole country is overpriced for what you get.

  Oh yeah? Declan drawled over a cigarette. This was one of the times he raised an eyebrow at Jules, his response and his disbelief clearly less about what Rod was saying than about the fact that Jules was with him.

  I mean, it’s pretty enough. And the whiskey is okay. But I paid five hundred bucks for a room in a hotel that didn’t even have an elevator. If they’re going to stay competitive, they’ll have to update all those old buildings.

  And to Drew he said:

  You know your house is right near that slaughterhouse that burned down. Said matter-of-factly, not as a question. Now that was a big mistake, zoning for new residential right beside a pork factory. No wonder someone torched it. And I guarantee it was someone living on your street. Had to be. But I guess you don’t mind having an arsonist for a neighbour?

  It was all true, but Drew was not to be baited.

  For all you know, Rod, it co
uld have been me who started those fires. And where is it you live again?

  Which is when Jules said she wanted to go. After all, it was 3 a.m.

  On their way out, Declan embraced her, slipped Jules’s phone into her purse and said, It was nice meeting you, Julie, right into her ear. His breath gave her goosebumps.

  And so they left, took a cab back to the hotel. Alone together, without a group, Jules could appreciate Rod more, was able to remember: she did love him. At least, she thought she did. She had no reason not to.

  He waved off the doorman so he could open the door for her himself, held her hand as they walked to the elevator, put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her on the temple on the ride up.

  I’m glad you had a fun night, he told her as they got ready for bed.

  Did I?

  Seems like you did. With Drew and Farzan. That Declan fellow’s kind of off.

  Jules’s heart jumped like she’d heard a bump in the night.

  You sure seemed to get along with him, though.

  What’s that supposed to mean? She spoke to the almost closed bathroom door, behind which Rod was doing whatever his private nighttime ritual was. Flossing his teeth? Having never witnessed it, she could only assume it was something so benign.

  It means, it seems like you had fun. It was nice to see you making friends.

  I have lots of friends.

  She pulled on her nightshirt and slid under the covers. Rod didn’t answer her. They both knew it wasn’t true.

  Then Rod came out of the bathroom, got into bed and started kissing her. And though she could occasionally feel the mechanical needs of her body, it was more often hard to reach herself through the numbness. On the rare occasions she did feel desire, it felt important. But this was not one of those times. Kissing Rod felt inert and lifeless, his hands on her butt and belly nuisance groping.

  So she said, I’m tired. My neck hurts. And he left her alone. When he started his quiet snoring, Jules took another Oxy, then tried to read a novel on her tablet while she waited for the pill to kick in.

  She knew she was probably self-sabotaging again, taking this perfectly acceptable thing she had with this basically presentable and decent guy and doing what she could to turn it into complete shit. Acting out in irrational ways, testing to see how much damage her life, her relationship, could take.

  Old habits resurfacing. She’d been in love, once.

  She sighed under the weight of that resident ghost, the pocket of anxiety and regret that never actually left. That had started, temporally, with the birth of her second child and the postpartum depression that came with it. And that six years later, five years after Lizzie’s death and the grieving, the heartache and the long, slow spiral of depression had only ended, finally, when David left. It ebbed, stopped descending, stopped taking her all the way down with it, but it didn’t go away, not really, just withdrew and took up quiet tenancy in a backroom of her brain.

  She rolled towards Rod, snaked her arm around his bony back to his concave tummy, settling her forehead on the back of his neck. But his antiseptic hospital scent put an acrid, chemical taste in her mouth, so she rolled away again and went to sleep with her back lightly pressing against his.

  Minke.

  The drive up the coast was a series of hairpin turns along cliff edges, the rocky coast and booming surf hundreds of metres below, and Lance casually yanking the steering wheel back and forth. He was six-four and folded into his vintage Bug so his knees hugged the wheel; he used them to steer while he rolled a joint, reaching out a hand to jerk the car around each turn. I was sure we took some of the curves on two wheels, I felt them cutting like skate edges. I was high and awestruck, the world rushed in at me, and I grinned to taste it.

  A friend of Lance’s had a place on a river, and the boat was moored there. Lucky, he said, as the first quake had torn up the Christchurch marina and left sewage hemorrhaging into the surf.

  A thirty-foot cruiser with a reddish wooden hull and a metre-wide steering wheel of polished steel, Minke creaked her ropes in greeting and rocked gently as we climbed aboard.

  We motored along the river, past landscaped shores, riverside houses and flats of pale-green farmland, until we finally surged over a rushing, watery speed bump at the river’s mouth and emerged onto the ocean. We hauled up sails, cloth snapping and glaring in the sun, and Minke came alive underneath us. We tacked north, sometimes skimming across the tops of waves, sometimes slicing and pounding through them, as Minke hammered on the ocean with a force of her own. I stood with Lance behind the wheel, buoyed and flying.

  We might run into some orcas, Lance said, tapping the face of the compass in the steering post. The analog dial looked like an old watch, all carved wood and brass inlays. Beautiful like an antique, which it probably was. I wondered if he had a GPS.

  Wait till you hear ’em sing. Touch you right here, believe me.

  As he said it, he reached out and prodded my chest gently, over my heart.

  I nodded. It was like he’d punched me in a bruise. Suddenly all I could think of was Jill.

  WE’D MET AT my first hockey party. Not that Jill would be caught dead playing hockey. But her sister, Marci, played centre. I’d been the only tenth grader on the team, and I was awkward and shy and possibly a bit unusual to begin with. So, faced with a room of clamouring eleventh- and twelfth-grade jocks and “cool kids,” I’d edged into a corner by the punch bowl. The sugar in the fuchsia drink coated my teeth, something in it burned my throat, but out of boredom or anxiety or both, I kept drinking it down.

  Then she’d appeared, black plugs in each of her ears and black hair straight out of anime, a shock of turquoise down the middle of it, like a skunky Smurf, or a Smurfy skunk. She’d walked right over and sat on the straight-backed chair beside my own.

  You’re Chloe Wright. Jill Proust. She stuck out a hand, fingers splayed wide.

  Chlo. I know who you are.

  We shook: up, down, up, staccato movements that made me blink, amused.

  Jill motioned for my glass of punch and, armed with an imp grin and a silver hip flask, set about turning us into friends.

  When Jill’s flask was empty, we went upstairs to refill it from her mum’s liquor stash, locked in the master bathroom for the party, and then went down to Jill’s room in the basement to look at her comic books. Somewhere over her first-edition Ghost World we started kissing. We never agreed, later, who kissed whom but decided it must have been our souls colliding, willing us together with unseen force. And it made sense.

  I was where I was supposed to be. Everything else fell away.

  After that, holding her hand, and being out and known as one of the queers at school, that made sense too. Some people gave me strange looks, or made comments, but when hadn’t they? Some people seemed to hate me more, but others, oddly, less. I was still That Goalie. I had more friends on Socialink, and people said hi to me in the hallways. And I had Jill: my best friend, my soulmate. My anchor. It all made sense.

  Then, three years later, just as our first university assignments were coming due, one night over video chat, Jill had called it off. It was too hard to be together but apart, she said. She just needed to devote herself to her studies, she said. Which was so completely out of character that even if I hadn’t had my suspicions, I’d have known she was avoiding some kind of truth. I came right out and asked if it was because of Rachel, but she denied it, looked me in the camera lens and said they were just friends. When I saw the pictures on David’s computer, I knew she’d lied to me, and somehow that made sense too, a horrible, sick-feeling sense.

  I was hunched over in a bolted-down, low-slung chair on the foredeck when Lance dropped sail and anchor, sat down beside me and handed me a beer.

  I popped the tab and we touched cans.

  To the beginning of your great adventure.

  To saying Fuck It.

  I drank in the salt air, the warmth on my face. Closed my eyes and yelled wordlessly into the w
ind.

  Lance nodded. Shake it off, mate. Exactly why I come out here.

  We were a couple miles offshore, with mountains in the distance to port, ocean forever to starboard. The beer rinsed away the bad taste in my throat, and now the rocking relaxed me, the rise and fall, rise and fall, slow and deep planetary breathing, my own chest moving in sync.

  Kiri—my wife, yeah? This was her boat. She would have liked you.

  Yeah, I’m pretty fucking great, I said, understanding: he was as alone as I was.

  Tacking in and out of the wind up the coast, I’d been goosebump cool, but now, drifting under the noon sun, I felt smothered and hot. Shedding my hoodie was like emerging from years in the dark, the pores in my skin hungrily opening to the light.

  Lance handed me a bottle of sunscreen and asked if I wanted fish for lunch. Next thing I knew, he was showing me how to remove the hook from the mouth of a flopping silver body as I tried not to see accusation in the steel-grey eyes that couldn’t blink. Lance put the fish out of its misery with a hammer blow to its head, and then put the knife in my hand and walked me through slitting it along the belly (shiny skin splitting to wet red flesh), scooping entrails (long spiny bits, globs of intestine) overboard.

  Just the thing to take your mind from your troubles, he said. And he was right. Feeling the wetness, the slippery blood and fat and skin on my fingers, even the way it made me gag a few times, shifted my position in relation to reality. I was in it. Really in it. I’d been numb for weeks, everything distant and remote, my own movements underwater slow. An intestine curling over my wrist and sliding across the deck of the boat was a moment of sharpness, cutting through, placing me there, where I was.