Aftershock

by Alison Taylor

  I never brought it back. She thought about her beloved Benz, repaired and waiting at the dealership.

  Drew flapped the papers again. I know that, Jules. Want to know how I know it? Because we also got a notice, at the office, from the po-lice, saying that that same car has been impounded and, for a not so small fee of fifteen hundred dollars, can be retrieved from the pound. At which point we can return it to the rental company, who, by the way, are threatening to sue us for the price of the entire car.

  I’m . . . Shit. I parked it at the pharmacy . . .

  Jules had never seen Drew this worked up, and it scared her. He was the one person who made her feel rooted. She worried that if he let go, she might float away.

  The other partners want me to fire you. You’re going to have to do a program, Jules.

  She knew what he was saying. They all—Drew, Marc, Farzan, Morrow—thought she should do one of the court-recognized recovery programs, with support groups and urine samples and so on. It sounded like summer camp for junkies.

  I just forgot, with the cops and everything . . . Give me those, I’ll deal with it—

  She stood to take the papers, but Drew pulled them out of her reach. Sorry, sweetie.

  But I’m clean. And I’m seeing Dr. Morrow.

  I know. Drew shrugged. But it landed on the wrong desk, and I had to tell him something. Raj and I have been partners too long.

  Jules rubbed her thumb on the cheap brass lock on the diary, stared at its plain black cover, damaged by her frustration.

  But listen.

  Jules listened.

  Stay clean till your court date, see what the judge says and we’ll go from there. It could be just a relaxing couple weeks in cottage country.

  The diary was so understated. Utilitarian. Chloe was doing what she needed to do in a world so separate from Jules’s but so entangled in it, silent threads of memory stretched thin between them. She remained silent. Drew shifted his bulk slightly.

  Farzan, you know. He’s just trying to help.

  Yeah. I know.

  So don’t be such a bitch, Jules. Make nice.

  Masculinity.

  After stewing for a solid twenty-four hours, Jules tried to make amends with Farzan in the same way she’d first started to be friends with him: she went down to bum a smoke. She wasn’t planning to make it a habit, but a few times in the past few weeks when the withdrawal, the anxiety, the captivity, had driven her mad, she’d instinctively zeroed in on the nearest life form, and the closest thing to a drug.

  You’re interrupting my work, he’d protested weakly, the first time, and Jules had finally come out with it: How could watching hundreds of hours of football games possibly be . . . “work”?

  Masculinity Studies.

  What?

  It’s called a dissertation?

  He didn’t seem to mind the distraction, though, and usually went out to the back porch with her. And she’d started to really like him, which wasn’t something that happened to her often.

  She went down to the second floor, leaned on the door frame of the sitting room where Farzan sat amidst stacks of open books and stapled printouts, computer on his lap and remote in his hand. He paused the image on the massive television when he saw Jules, a life-sized huddle of three men in muddied jerseys and tights left frozen on the screen, their shoulders padded out to caricatures, their helmets touching intimately. One could clearly see that they all had their hands on each other’s asses.

  Hey, she said.

  Farzan didn’t say anything, just looked at her and waited, his jaw set, impatiently bouncing the remote.

  Any updates on the Christchurch earthquakes?

  The bouncing hiccupped, resumed. I’m sure your TV gets the news.

  Right. She wanted to ask for a smoke but felt herself chickening out. Okay. She turned to go.

  What kind of person are you?

  She turned back, saw on his face a familiar hostility, only this wasn’t her teenaged daughter, she wasn’t his mother. But she knew what he was talking about.

  Her diary, Jules?

  I was looking for clues—

  You violated her privacy—

  What choice did I have?!

  In seconds, it had escalated, a sudden violent storm that rolled away, left the air heavy. She stood still in the doorway. The remote continued bouncing in his hand.

  Was it worth it?

  It didn’t make me feel better, if that’s what you mean.

  The remote slowed to a stop as he sized her up for several seconds. Then Farzan stood and grabbed his coat from the arm of the couch. Going for a smoke, he said, pushing by her, making her stand back. You coming? But he didn’t turn, didn’t wait.

  After a moment she followed him down, out into the glaring day.

  WHAT DID YOU find? Farzan flicked the filter end of his cigarette and catapulted ash into the bush. Is it going to help? His heavy eyelids hooded his eyes protectively in the bright sunlight, the actual hood of his black sweatshirt shadowing his forehead.

  Help, she said, examining the word and its connotations. She took a long, deep haul off her cigarette and exhaled a mushroom cloud of smoke and frosted breath. I still don’t know where she is. But maybe I’m starting to fill in some blanks. Or maybe figure out where the blanks are in the first place.

  She had no words for how responsible she felt, how deficient reading Chloe’s diary—both the act itself and the information she gleaned there—made her feel as a person and as a parent. And even if she found the words, how would this young guy, barely thirty, with no kids of his own, have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

  Farzan studied her from under his cloaked brow. Uncomfortable in his gaze, Jules crushed out her smoke, intending to go inside. But then she stayed, trying to keep her back in the narrow rectangle of direct sun, tucking her hands into her armpits to keep them out of the wind. Farzan turned away, stared out at the world beyond the backyard fence, patchily snow-covered garages with netless basketball hoops, the top branches of naked trees.

  I used to play soccer, back in Washington where I grew up. Right through my teens. I even got a scholarship for North Carolina, which—well, they don’t give out many.

  You must be really good. Jules was more impressed than she thought she sounded. She’d never, ever played team sports except under duress.

  I was. Very good.

  Chloe plays hockey. She had a whole bunch of trophies in her room. I didn’t even know she’d won that many.

  Farzan glanced sideways at her. Oh yeah? You go to her games?

  Sometimes.

  She tried to remember one.

  Farzan had smoked his cigarette right down to the filter, and now he ground it, hard, into the grimy plate that served as an outdoor ashtray. See, that’s my point, Jules. That’s my bloody point.

  That I should have gone to games?

  Farzan faced her, his eyes fierce. That you could have. That you’re such a cool person in so many ways, you could be amazing, but you just—you don’t care. You just don’t fucking care. He made a frustrated grunting sound and went into the house, leaving her there in the dazzling, frigid day.

  She perched on the edge of a plastic chair, already grey-brown with wintry residue, and stared into the empty swimming pool. Wet snow had drifted into the deep end, and a bird or squirrel had made tracks across it that the sun had warped into shapeless holes.

  She did care, she told herself. Of course she did.

  But the truth was, she’d never really wanted to be a mother. At least, never planned on it. And once it had happened, never committed to it in the way she probably should have. And the second baby, well. That nearly sank her.

  JULES HAD BEEN seeing David for over a year when, somehow, despite ample precautions, she got pregnant. She was on the fence about what to do about it, but David, in an uncharacteristically proactive move, went and got a job at a newspaper, and then proposed. They sat on a picnic table in the park across the street f
rom the grad pub, and it was in that moment, looking into his familiar brown eyes, both of them bundled up against the biting February wind, that she saw it all. Everything her mother had never had, everything Jules had never even considered available to her: a husband, a so-called normal life. Maybe a home, together. Maybe more than one child. She’d always known with unwavering foresight that she would have a career. Math had been her beacon since childhood, showing her a way out. This, though, David, down on one knee in the snow, this was something else. In that one moment, as her fingers and cheeks went numb and her toes started to ache from the cold, she wanted it. She wanted it, and she said yes.

  Three months later they were married, with no one but David’s parents, Nan and Elliot, in attendance. Chloe came in October, and if Jules remembered one thing about that day at the hospital, it was the tidal wave of new understanding that crashed over her as she looked at her newborn daughter’s slightly squashed-in face, red with an imminent scream.

  She looks like an angry alien, she said, and she could sense the nurse tensing up, but she didn’t care, she was laughing and crying as love and loss overwhelmed her. This little person, at the same moment she became the centre of Jules’s emotional universe, had become her own discrete entity, separate from her and all the more powerful for it.

  Jules finished school and worked from home for a couple years, writing code for the cash, and almost inadvertently producing some of the pioneering algorithms in a then infantile field called data mining, her twin master’s degrees in computer science and information management finding their perfect union in her work.

  Their marriage was not such a perfect union, however. And working at home, with an infant, who then turned into a toddler, turned out to be her private version of hell. Chloe was amazing, she understood that: a natural athlete, walking at ten months, talking at thirteen, insatiable curiosity and an insane laugh. Jules wanted to stare at her while she slept, to walk around with her in the stroller and play with her in the park. To watch her encounter the world and be amazed by it. But Jules didn’t recognize herself. She struggled to concentrate, to work for more than ten minutes without interruption. David wasn’t home to help enough, and when he was, he drove her crazy too. Slowly, at first, his dirty breakfast dishes forgivable as he rushed off to work, and the socks he shed like leaves all over the house a seemingly small nuisance. He was always late for a deadline, always apologizing for the mess he left behind him, but never found the time to clean up, never noticed her tension and exasperated sighs. Previously, Jules had believed herself incapable of loneliness, but now she missed their adventures and their adult conversations. She waited in desperation for Chloe to start daycare, thinking it would help. When David started going away on more assignments, she found herself looking forward to his absences.

  She managed to get pregnant again—again, despite ample precautions—and then she let David convince her a baby was what they needed, a new life form running around to bring them closer together. But six months into the pregnancy she was miserable with regret, and the baby seemed to know it. Lizzie seemed to know. She fought to keep the baby alive and managed to carry her to term. But less than a year later she was dead, and Jules was never able to shake the feeling that the thoughts she had never uttered aloud had somehow poisoned her baby.

  And now it seemed she might have poisoned Chloe too. She took a cheerful, smart, relatively well-adjusted child and turned her into a tormented, drug-experimenting insomniac. Good work, Self.

  THE SUN GAVE way to a cloud and Jules shivered, realizing her hands and butt were numb with cold. Back inside Drew’s house, she headed upstairs with the vague notion that she might do some laundry. It was probably time to stop turning her underwear inside out for the clean side.

  On the second floor, the sitting room door was open, the groping huddle of footballers still frozen on the television. Farzan sat sideways on the couch, massaging his stump of a leg, his prosthetic on the floor beside him.

  She stood in the doorway trying to think of what she wanted to say. There was no denying that he’d hit a nerve.

  My therapist asked me a question last week that I couldn’t answer.

  Yeah? What was that?

  His tone suggested he’d already heard a lot of answers to a lot of questions and no longer expected anything but disappointment. The sadness of it moved her forward into the room.

  We were talking about when Chloe was a, not a toddler but, you know, a kid. Little.

  It felt jarring to differentiate between Chloe as a child and Chloe now, although to call her an adult didn’t feel right either.

  Anyway, she asked me where Chloe was when . . . on this one particular day, and I realized . . .

  She paused as he started to strap his shortened leg back into the prosthetic. He glanced up at her, saw her watching him.

  You didn’t know?

  No, I knew.

  He looked back down at his leg, grimaced.

  Is that why you don’t play soccer anymore?

  He coughed out a bitter half laugh. Not according to my father. He thinks it’s because I’m . . . how did he put it? Oh yes. A “fucking pansy-assed fairy faggot.” Nothing to do with the drunk cabbie ploughing into my motorbike.

  Jules sat down beside him on the couch. Farzan rolled his eyes and wiped it all aside with a broad sweep of his hand.

  He sees me as broken, and he wants someone to blame.

  He pulled his pant leg down and shrugged.

  So, fateful day, you can’t remember where Chloe was. Shrink asks and you can’t answer, plus you don’t know where she is now, plus you read her diary and found out what teenagers really do these days, so you’re freaking out. ’Bout right?

  It was about right. When Dr. Morrow had asked her where Chloe was the day the baby died, Jules had known without much thinking she’d been at home with the babysitter, knew she’d seen her playing with her animals when she got back from the hospital, and that somehow, several hours later, under the anaesthetic of a half-bottle of Scotch, Jules had sat on the kitchen bench and watched her leave with Nan and Elliot. She could remember Chloe’s face, tight and pale, her refusal to cry or complain as she bumped down the stairs with her little suitcase, a stuffed animal dragging from one hand.

  But there were hours in between, hours she spent losing her shit, calming down, losing it all over again, with Nan and Elliot trying to comfort her, trying to make practical decisions, trying to take Chloe home with them and Jules refusing to let them, over and over and over until her strength was gone and she finally relented. She spent hours on her bedroom floor, the bedroom she shared with David when he was home. Hours when she didn’t lay eyes on Chloe.

  Did reading her diary clear up that little mystery for you?

  She leaned her head on the back of the couch.

  No. It just made me think I’m a terrible mother for not thinking about it earlier.

  Farzan looked at her with half a smile.

  Well. At least you care that much.

  Piha.

  The shape of things to come.

  Two dream-state days on buses, a ferry and more, very indirect, buses until the beach shuttle dropped me here, on this long curve of beach with its resident surfers, who lounged and laughed, waxed and waited. Standing on the damp side of the wavering line in the sand, surf coming at me in an endless procession of water walls, wonder walls, breaking, collapsing and finally crumbling into cool froth around my ankles, my feet burrowing as the ground washed away.

  Surfers were practising out on the break. My backpack still on, boots in hand, I watched a figure slice up a great curl of wave and cut down the moving mouth of its tube, barely escaping as it collapsed behind them.

  A cocktail of admiration and fear, like pre-game jitters, bubbled in my belly as I remembered those two seconds of flying, time stretching and suspended under my board, before the crash.

  I had hurt the ocean, and it had hurt me back, and I craved reconciliation.

 
I TURNED, SQUINTED, and everything was only backdrop to Lee, walking towards me, the rage of her hair in the noon sun. We made eye contact at a hundred metres, and even if people cut through our line of vision, it was always there when the way cleared, steady and waiting.

  She stopped a few metres away, glanced at the bus-height swells.

  Maybe we’ll start you out with somethin’ more wee, yeah?

  She pushed her aviator glasses up on her head as we stood there smiling at each other. She wore a grass-green wetsuit with the top hanging down around her waist, a long-sleeved T-shirt in the same colour. Sponsor logos curved around her muscled legs. I pictured dropping my pack and boots and running towards her in a slow-motion Hollywood embrace. Apprehension made my feet wriggle deeper into the sand.

  Hey, I said.

  You came.

  I came. I felt a need to apologize, so I said, You gonna win this thing or what?

  Lee took a step closer. You gonna be my cheerleader?

  I thought you were mad at me.

  Another step. Why would I be mad?

  Cuz of what I said.

  Yeah. That was nasty.

  You’re really nothing like my mother.

  Oh, that. I thought you meant about Talda.

  You were mad.

  More like frustrated. It seemed like you didn’t trust me.

  I was shitty.

  Yeah. You were.

  But I’m here now. I took another half-step towards her, my insides quivering.

  You’re here. She smiled. And in case you didn’t notice, Talda is with that bloke over there.

  She pointed, but I didn’t even look.

  I don’t care about Talda, I said. You were right about that Jansen guy, though. Fucking thief.

  Aw, Chlo. I’m sorry, mate. I shouldna left like that. He was such a con.

  Lee took another step, and now we stood very close.

  Sorry, she repeated.

  I’d been holding my breath but could smell the perfectly balanced mix of salt and sweat and sunscreen that was fundamentally Lee. You didn’t do anything wrong, I told her.

  Lee’s smile widened. Not yet, she said. She took the final half-step.