And Then We Fall

by Bryce Taylor

  "Yeah."

  I can see her brain registering the fact that this is months ago. That Justine didn't scare me off.

  "No," she says eventually.

  "No, what?" I ask impatiently.

  "No, I don't like you because of her," she says. "I like you because you are nothing like her at all."

  Oh.

  Leigh has her jaw clamped shut as if she has divulged some secret that she didn't intend to.

  "How do you like me?" I ask her.

  She looks like she is in physical pain, eyebrows knitted together, jaw clenched.

  "Because you turned up tonight, just when I most wanted you too," I tell her. "And I need to know if that is because you are my friend or if you are more than my friend?"

  "Please don't," she asks hoarsely.

  "Why not?"

  "Because you are hurting me," she says and I think that is true. She is holding her arms tightly around herself.

  "I don't want to hurt you," I tell her. "I just need to know. I need to know if I'm going to."

  I don't know what I'm going to do. I just know that this can't go on. I see that so clearly now.

  "There isn't anything such as only one person to fall in love with, Aednat," she says staring out at the ocean.

  "Liar," I tell her.

  She smiles wistfully.

  "So, what, you think there is some magic love faerie who comes and sprinkles glitter on star crossed lovers so that they'll never be happy with anyone else again?" she says bitterly.

  "Yes," I say simply.

  It is true.

  Leigh is the first person that I have ever felt like this for.

  She turns to me, regarding me evenly, giving me no sign of what she is thinking. The sea air is whipping a strand of my hair against my face and she looks at it for a long moment before she slowly reaches up with one hand and tucks it carefully behind my ear.

  On the way back down her fingertips involuntarily detour to brush the side of my face and I can't stop the reflex to lean in to it, pressing my cheek into the coolness of her hand. The feeling is familiar as if I've done it a thousand times before and so new that my face is tingling. I am breathing faster and staring into her blue eyes, watching her face battle with the competing desires to kiss me and to run away.

  She looks hurt and vulnerable and terrified, her fingers that are always so steady are trembling ever so slightly against my face. Her palm is so close to my lips that I am just the barest movement to the side from brushing against it.

  To save her from herself, I take one small step forward, kiss her softly on the cheek and step back and turn away so that I don't throw myself into her arms.

  "Come on," I tell her brusquely.

  We walk all the way back to the pub in silence, her hand loosely in mine.

  "I like you," I tell her at the corner, the sounds of drunken happiness leaking out of the golden lit glass doors.

  She turns to me, her face serious.

  "I like, like you," I tell her forthrightly, hoping that this might be enough.

  Her response is as if I've told her that I hate her, there is sheer agony on her face.

  "Are we still friends?" I ask her sadly, not knowing how I've read her so wrong.

  "Yes," she whispers.

  I hug her, but she doesn't hug me back, her body stiff.

  I go back inside and drink until I can't remember anymore. Until Diarmuid needs to carry me home.

  Needless to say.

  Night ruined.

  Chapter 11

  It's not till the following morning that I realise that Justine was wrong about Leigh.

  Whoever that girl had been to Leigh she hadn't been the love of Leigh's life and Leigh hadn't been scarred by her leaving or broken-hearted by her marrying someone else. Leigh had discovered that she preferred being in a relationship with someone who wasn't in a relationship with her. Someone who she could share parts of her life without everything else that goes along with a relationship, the intimacy and the commitment.

  Someone like me, but clearly not me because I wasn't playing the game right, I'd broken the first rule and only rule.

  I lie in bed, thankful that I don't have to work today, that although I'm supposed to be studying, I can just stay here and think melancholy thoughts.

  After a week of self-indulgent misery, I do throw myself into my studies. To avoid Diarmuid and Katie who are both in that perfect happiness of new relationships and don't feel awkward at all about making me a third wheel.

  I do well enough in my exams and am pleased with the results, with someone judging my abilities as satisfactory. I come home, a bottle of wine in hand to celebrate to find that Katie also has news.

  An offer of a job in Spain, in Madrid, doing actual real work at a university. It seems implausible, Spain being even more hard hit by the crisis than Dublin and I fixate on this fact most, unable to process that she is leaving.

  She is gone in a fortnight and spends most of it with the boyfriend she will be leaving behind and it is surreal. I've only been here just on five months and she can't be leaving. Diarmuid makes plans to get a smaller flat for us, not quite prepared to take the next step with his girl.

  Then Diarmuid gets a phone call, that his father is sick, a diagnosis of cancer of the liver and he too leaves, faster even than Katie, leaving me in an empty house, a lease to break and no friends in a country that I only came to because they were here.

  I don't want to go home yet, I love it here but I don't have the confidence to stay on my own. I can't sleep from the fears that surge through me at night, from the empty dreams that wake me, the sense that something terrible is going to happen any moment now but I don't know what.

  That I want Leigh but she doesn't want me back. Not in the same way that I want her anyway.

  I think about going to the cafe in the morning to see if she is still there but I stop myself, the only thing more foolish than me going would be finding that she was there too.

  Chapter 12

  I have a practical scheduled in from my university studies and I go for no reason other than I can't think of one not too. It isn't until the other students and I are being bustled into the theatre that I realise that this is Leigh's shift.

  Adding to my overall anxiety. Not that I'm here to do anything, just to watch. It's more that I've never been at this hospital before, over the other side of town and I don't know anyone in the room.

  Right now, enough to make me anxious, for a terror to wrap its claws around my heart and not let go.

  When Leigh walks in I am in on the verge of a panic attack, two fists holding my heart firmly, squeezing it tighter, blood banking up and stretching out the valves.

  Leigh doesn't look surprised to see me in surgery. She must have seen my name on the roster and she gives me a small serious smile, a hey, that lightens my heart. The sight of Leigh who hasn't held a grudge from my birthday and who just might still be my friend is enough for my anxiety to vanish on the wind.

  The relief of not feeling that uncertainty, that dread is nothing short of miraculous, a limb regrowing from nothing, a cancer disappearing.

  Then the patients start to pile in.

  A car accident has given Leigh plenty to work on and part of me is filled with horror. The realisation that Leigh is really just a highly talented butcher, sawing open bodies, meat and blood going everywhere, muscles and limbs being pulled this way and that, bodies being pulled apart like rag dolls.

  The buzz of saws, the crunch and crack of a sternum split up the middle. Nothing at all like the relative tranquillity of the delicate keyhole surgery I've seen so far.

  Then the magic happens. Bleeding stopping, wounds sealing up, heart rates and blood pressure going back to normal. Smiles all around, a job well done.

  The third patient is wheeled out and a fourth immediately replaces him. A tiny form on the bed, her hair streaming out in perfectly brushed tresses, a child hit by her mother reversing out of her driveway.

&n
bsp; Her chest is crushed completely beyond repair, that she is still living seems an impossibility. That Leigh is going to operate seems implausible, I might not know much but even I can tell from her vitals that her physical body is barely holding on. Leigh looks the girl over and frowns, nods once to her assistant and gets to work, an urgency to her actions that wasn't there for the others.

  A flurry of activity, all hands work together in synchronicity, trying to remake what has been broken.

  I can see why Leigh makes so much effort with everyone in the hospital, from her team here, to the nurses on the ward, to the staff in radiology, everything is falling together with an ease and speed that has been noticeably missing from my two other surgery experiences.

  For an hour it seems that she may be close to winning and then for no apparent reason that I can see the child is gone, as if the wind changed and took her with it.

  Leigh doesn't slump or curse, she just pulls down her mask, removes her gloves and strides out, her face blank.

  Towards the family, to tell them the news, that their child is dead, that she is being prepared for them to see her.

  Most surgeons leave someone else to do this nowadays, they might deliver the good news, if it's convenient but not the worst, after all it's enough that they have done their best.

  Not Leigh, she hasn't left the theatre for any of the patients so far, but now for this one, doomed at the outset patient she is going to face the parents herself.

  When I get out ten minutes later she is still talking to them. The father quietly weeping, bent over in his chair, oblivious. The mother, she is pissed off and Leigh is talking calmly and nodding. Saying whatever words need to be said. Until the mother, she is crying too, not dignified weeping, loud racking, devastated sobs.

  Leigh is hugging her now and I can't even.

  I can't watch this.

  I can't do this.

  I can't be here.

  I have to get out.

  I'm blindly walking down halls, lost, until I get outside, the smell of disinfectant fading.

  Leaning against the wall, breathing heavily, feeling the relief of the open sky.

  I'm crouched on the ground on my knees and it reminds me of communion. Except for the breeze and the sunshine and the bird calls and the gravel.

  Except for that.

  I'm not trembling, I'm vibrating, the spell of adrenaline fading and I'm left with just the aftershocks. Eventually, when I realise with painful suddenness that the gravel is threatening to cut through the skin of my knees and I sit back. I clutch my knees to my chest, feel the newly created indentations there and take comfort in the solid feeling of hard flesh and bone, of the brick wall at my back.

  I hear footsteps approaching and look up.

  Leigh is standing there in her scrubs looking concerned.

  I don't know how she found me, after all I don't even know where I am.

  She slides down the wall next to me.

  She is pulling something out of her pocket, a pouch of tobacco and some papers. She starts to roll a cigarette, a thin elegant cigarette appearing from slender fingers that only a moment ago were sawing open a child's ribcage.

  This thought should be making it all worse but it isn't. The horror is fading away already.

  I watch her sideways and wipe my face, just now finding that I had been crying. Not many tears, just a few streaking my cheeks.

  Leigh lights the cigarette and takes a small drag to start it, not inhaling, making a face at the taste and passes it across to me.

  I'm surprised that my hand is shaking and I snatch the cigarette from her hand so that she won't notice. She holds her hand out between us, palm up, offering solace. I edge my hand towards hers. I need more comfort than that and switch the cigarette to my other hand instead and take her hand, pull it back around my shoulders, the weight of her arm there. Lean in towards her and rest my head against her neck and rub my thumb repetitively across her palm.

  The smoke is blessedly covering the smell of blood and soap and disinfectant and alcohol that is clinging to both of us.

  The cigarette is gone all too soon. I want to ask for another but I know where this will lead. Quitting once was bad enough.

  I raise the butt towards her and an eyebrow.

  "Lucky guess," she says misreading my question. A pause before she continues on. "I am the only medical professional I know who hasn't smoked at one point in my life."

  "No," I clarify, hoarsely, from smoke, from stress, "Who?"

  "Oh, uh, Robin," she says.

  I nod, tiredly.

  "Thank you," I tell her, reminding myself to thank him later.

  We sit in silence, Leigh with her arm around me, quiet.

  "How do you do it?" I ask her eventually.

  "What?"

  "Tell the families?" I ask.

  "Oh," she says and shrugs.

  "It doesn't hurt?" I ask.

  Another shrug and she looks away.

  "I thought you said we will always tell each other the truth?" I ask her unfairly, looking up at her.

  She looks back at me flatly.

  "That's why I am not telling you anything," she says evenly.

  I put my hand on her knee and for once I am not distracted by touching her.

  "It's not a hard question, Leigh."

  She looks up at me, trapped and reluctant.

  "Leigh."

  I give her another few seconds.

  "Leigh, you promised," I tell her in a hard voice.

  A promise made only a few short months ago that seems so far away from this place and time.

  I wait her out and watching her shoulders tense and her face fall unnaturally into hardness.

  "What do you want to know?" she asks angrily. "That I don't feel anything at all. There is nothing. It's all just pretend. I'm always pissed off at the person who died on me. That they just gave in."

  Leigh believes this to be true, and she believes it wholeheartedly.

  She is wrong, she just doesn't want to examine this part of her job, that she can't do it if she has empathy for them.

  She doesn't pull back her arm though and she doesn't make any move to leave.

  "Diarmuid is going back home," I tell her my voice weak, feeling the tiredness sweep through me. "I can't afford to rent a place by myself and still send money home so I'll be going back to Dublin too."

  Her arm tightens around my shoulders and I look up at her and her face is stricken now, the emotions that haven't surfaced before are now on full display, in the pain in her eyes and the crease in her forehead.

  She stares at me for a long moment and I can see for the first time that she does care, not in the way of friends but too much, enough that she doesn't want me to leave.

  I can see her jaw working, that she is thinking of how to say something. That as is so often the case with Leigh she finds it hard to find the words she wants to say and how to phrase it when something is important to her.

  I don't mind waiting for her.

  "You could move in with me?" she asks eventually, uncertainly.

  "I could?" I ask, startled, not expecting this at all.

  "Yeah," she says firmly, sounding much surer now, her face still an inch from mine.

  "Bit soon, don't you think?" I ask, my smart mouth unable to stop talking.

  Leigh laughs, her whole face transformed, carelessly relieved.

  "I have a four-bedroom house," she replies, smiling still, "and I barely use one of them."

  I raise an eyebrow.

  "Can you think of a reason not to?" she asks very reasonably.

  I can't even think of one.

  So, I do.

  One bright sunny afternoon I take my few possessions, a suitcase, a duffle bag and a box half full of random things, and move into Leigh's house.

  Leigh has left a short note, that I can pick wherever bedroom I'd like, telling me where the linen is.

  I smile when I open the fridge and find it pristine and hollow, except
for a carton of eggs and a bottle of milk, no doubt bought specially for the occasion.

  She isn't home at all that day, either at her practice or consulting, but I sit out in the back garden with my feet in the pool and a glass of wine and it feels like I might be ok.