And Then We Fall

by Bryce Taylor

  I want to tell Mam or Leigh or someone that this is ridiculous. That Leigh has no reason at all for all this.

  None that makes sense.

  I don't go to Leigh's house that night because I can't. Not the next night either because the thought of it is too much.

  Instead I ring Katie for a sanity check. She tells me I'm being an utter fool, that she knows I still love Leigh and if I ever needed more proof that Leigh is in love with me I only need to consider the fact that my mother and idiot brother are living at her house.

  I can feel myself bristling at her words, that I'm furious that she called my brother an idiot.

  Immediately followed by an internal collapse, an avalanche, because Katie only calls him an idiot because that's how I always referred to him. That I've never thought of him being really real, let alone loved him till now. That I do love him and he has been waiting his whole life for just one person to understand him and that person was Leigh.

  That it could have been me if I'd cared enough.

  The next day I go over, with an apology in the form of a casserole. I find that Mam has taken over the coach house, her things everywhere, the magazine cover perfection gone with a carelessly flung coat over the back of a chair, a slipper poking out from under a chair and a mug not on a coaster on the table.

  "Moving in?" I ask Mam sarcastically as I watch her go through her exercises with a physical therapist in Leigh's living room.

  "Well, I can't walk up my stairs yet," she tells me tartly.

  "I'm surprised you didn't kick Leigh out of the main house," I tell her.

  "Leigh offered, but Daniel and I are very happy in the coach house," she says, oblivious to my sarcasm.

  I'm not really listening, I'm making space in Leigh's once empty fridge for the casserole, so the implications take a moment to sink in.

  "You aren't planning on going home," I tell her, aghast and angry and I don't even know what.

  Mam shrugs, her eyes concentrating on her legs, carefully shuffling her feet, left, then right, then left again and my heart is pained at the angle of her foot, slightly turned in.

  She looks up, gives me that look, the one she used to give me when I asked for something I wanted at the shops as a child, when I asked why she wouldn't send Daniel away, why I couldn't have more dinner because I was still hungry, why we couldn't be normal.

  I can feel my eyes childishly filling with tears, that I want to let it all go for once, tell Mam to get the hell out of here, that I want Leigh to myself without all of this burden of my family.

  Instead I close the fridge door and leave before I regret it.

  In the back-garden Em, Daniel and Leigh are launching a small model plane, all three of them frowning in concentration as the plane speeds up down the go-kart track, wobbles, Em at the controls.

  "Now," yells Daniel and the plane takes off, up and up and up.

  Leigh and Em cheer and Daniel stares up at the sky, watching the little plane intently.

  Em walks over to Daniel and hands him the controller, stands at his side as he brings it into tighter circles.

  Leigh catches sight of me, the broad smile fading and her face becoming sober.

  "Hey," she says uncomfortably , as if she has done something wrong.

  "Hey," I say in return as she comes and stands next to me.

  "Are you ok?" she asks after a moment, eying me sideways.

  "Yeah," I tell her, wanting to say no, that I hate this, that I feel responsible for dragging her into this.

  "You?" I ask.

  "Never happier," she tells me.

  I turn my head slowly to take her in, incredulous because she is clearly telling the truth, but she must be mistaken somehow.

  There is a lightness about her, in the blue of her eyes, in her body that is free of tension, her face that is open and not tinged with worry.

  I take a step towards her, wanting to just hold her, to take her in my arms but we don't do that. I don't know how to get past it, the barrier that has appeared. So, we stand side by side on the back steps and watch Em and Daniel land the plane, Daniel at the controller, Em running to pick it up and we talk of Mam's progress and my day and Leigh's day and it all feels so completely surreal and normal all at the same time.

  Chapter 24

  A few days later I am fortunately watching the feed of Leigh and Daniel's conversation between patients.

  Daniel: Joseph?

  Leigh: Wednesday. 2pm.

  Daniel: Joseph. House?

  Leigh: Joseph. England.

  Daniel: Joseph. Ireland.

  Leigh: Mam. Aednet. Ireland.

  Daniel. Yes.

  Daniel: Family.

  I've never seen the image before, three people holding hands and a house, but I can only assume that is what it means.

  Daniel: Em. Family.

  Leigh: Yes

  Daniel: Daniel. Joseph. Family

  There is a long silence here and I can only assume that Leigh is talking to him outside of the app. My imagination is stumped how. I have to let the next patient in, I can't pretend that I'm still writing up the notes from my last one.

  Impatiently grabbing my phone when she leaves, the next message in the chain from a few seconds ago.

  Daniel: Aednet. Leigh. Family

  Oh, Christ.

  Then the next message appears.

  Leigh: Yes

  I'm staring at my phone in disbelief, wishing I knew what exactly he means, more importantly what she means.

  Daniel: Daniel. Sick.

  Leigh: ?

  Daniel: Daniel. Sick. Now.

  Oh, shite.

  I pick up my phone.

  "Dana, when my brother gets here can you show him straight through?" I say shortly to the receptionist.

  Then far too professionally, with none of the chit-chat about village gossip, I rush through one appointment, check my phone, take the next.

  Ushering Mrs Deakin out with unseemly haste.

  Stopping, watching Daniel's location on my phone get closer, frantically making my office look neat and tidy.

  "Hi," Leigh says uncomfortably, pausing in the doorway as I've been pacing, expecting her every second for the last five minutes.

  "Hiya," I say only a little less awkwardly.

  Wondering if I should tell Leigh that I read all of the conversations she and Daniel have.

  "Daniel is not feeling well," she tells me dryly after a short pause.

  We both look to Daniel.

  "I'm fine," he says triumphantly, his words directed at the opposite wall, awfully pleased with himself. He half-turns towards us, waiting expectantly for something to happen.

  Instead Leigh glances around, her eyes catching on the out-dated charts on the walls.

  I sigh, regretting having let her in. That most of the time I can forget that Leigh, would be, if I worked at the hospital in Cork, she would be my boss's, boss's, boss's, boss.

  "It's unbelievable the volume of patients that get through here and the quality of care they get, these regional clinics make the hospital look like a waste of resources," she says musingly after a long pause.

  "Are you saying I'm cheap?" I ask Leigh mockingly, feeling relieved that she isn't thinking I'm not good enough.

  "Yes," Leigh says with feeling, "you do the same job as a GP for less than half the pay."

  This is true.

  I smile at her.

  Daniel is standing stiffly, not quite looking at us, not that, but clearly thinking about us, about this. That he has got us this far and surely, we can go the rest of the way ourselves.

  Eventually he opens his mouth.

  "Joseph says, you should use your words," he tells us and there is a hint of recrimination, a shade of his frustration at our lack of ability to deal with this situation as adults.

  Leigh laughs silently and shakes her head at herself. She catches my eye, looking amused at getting advice about girl troubles from Daniel.

  She shut her eyes for a second
and draws in a long breath, opens them again, stares at me thoughtfully.

  "Will you go on a date with me?" she asks, the look in her eyes telling me that she expects the answer to be no.

  "A date?" I ask incredulously before I can stop myself.

  She winces and I can see the conflict in her face, that she wants to apologise and take the words back.

  "Yes," she says firmly instead, at the same that I also say 'yes'.

  We smile at each other, in relief, both of us pleased suddenly to have confirmed all that sexual tension that has been building between us.

  I can tell from the way that Daniel is flicking his wrist reflexively, that having done this thing, that the mission has been accomplished and it is now time to go. That if they don't leave right now, there will be a horrifying meltdown here in my office.

  I wonder if Leigh and I have any hope at all between my generally well-behaved toddler and her very dangerous one.

  Leigh doesn't look at all perturbed, she glances around the room, sees the pile of toys I have for children, picks up the Rubik's cube, irrevocably confused and goes to stand near Daniel, to the side of him.

  "Daniel," she says quietly and he turns his head slightly towards her, his attention catching on the thing in her hands.

  She takes an antibacterial wipe and cleans all of its surfaces while he watches, knowing that Daniel won't touch it, can barely look at her touching it, if it is unclean.

  She starts to click the pieces into place, faster and faster, blocks of colour appearing and disappearing and, in a minute, or not even the puzzle is returned to perfection.

  She passes it to him and he stares at it, amazed, so fully absorbed and focused on what to do with it that the building could fall down and he wouldn't notice.

  She turns back to me, and I raise an eyebrow, both at the trick with the puzzle and at her ability to calm Daniel so easily.

  She shrugs, still smiling just a little, looking happy and my heart is filling with pleasure because she so rarely looks genuinely happy, her smiles hardly ever reaching her eyes.

  She is thinking, Leigh who never can ask a question like this without having a complete answer of where and when. Only she knows that my schedule is filled with the mundane but the necessary. That unless she comes to my house after Em is asleep I don't actually have the spare hours for a date, a real date and hopefully everything that comes after.

  "Next Thursday afternoon?" she asks, "we could go,"

  She trails off. There isn’t anything to do in Mallow and there are too few hours to make the time to go somewhere else. It will be too early for dinner and too late for lunch. The weather too crap for anything outdoors. That my mother lives at her house and I can't even smile at the irony that somehow my mother has moved in with Leigh.

  "Go for coffee," she says eventually and unsatisfactorily.

  "Uh, so?" I start wondering if it is too forward and rather unromantic to ask her to just come over tonight. That the dating side of things isn't really necessary.

  "We need to talk," she clarifies, misreading my look.

  "When was the last time you had sex?" I ask her quietly, glancing at Daniel to make sure he is fully absorbed in the puzzle.

  She laughs again, a small laugh, disbelievingly shaking her head.

  "Only you," she tells me, looking amused, "only you can ask something that is so left-field it never even occurred to me that you would ask that right now."

  She pauses and sees my expression, mistaking it for confusion, not annoyance.

  "It's one of those things that made it so hard to resist you," she says, explaining, "the kind of thing that made me laugh when I thought I'd never laugh again."

  I'm still frowning at her.

  "Seriously, when was the last time, Leigh," I ask her, flatly this time.

  "Oh," she says, realising that she is digressing and I am serious. "It's been a while."

  "A while," I repeat, not satisfied with this vague answer.

  "Yeah," she says and glances away, draws in a long breath and lets it out. "Maybe a year?"

  Her fecking statements that sound like questions.

  "What you couldn't find some hot young thing dying to be screwed by you?" I growl sarcastically, in a low whisper.

  "Uh, no?" she says and shrugs, her eyes widening, not understanding why she is in trouble.

  I don't understand either.

  Except Diarmuid has been dead for maybe a year.

  "Sorry," I mutter, not sounding very apologetic.

  "How about you?" she asks carefully.

  "What?" I answer shortly.

  "I mean, how long?" she asks even more uncertainly.

  As if I need to really answer this question.

  It had been a rhetorical point to start with.

  "Two years," I tell her emphatically anyway. It's more than two years but I don't want to seem weirder, that I know down to the day of the last time I had sex.

  In my defence it was the night after Em's second birthday, so I am reminded of the event regularly, each time I think in my mind of each milestone in her life.

  Her eyebrows are rising involuntarily in surprise.

  She thinks about it for a moment, probably running through the practicalities of Diarmuid’s treatment and drug regime. That I am a single mother with a toddler now and a grieving widow.

  She nods thoughtfully and then looks back to me, still clearly wondering about the point.

  "And you want to talk," I remind her, flatly.

  "Oh," she says finally getting it, looking startled. "Right."

  Tapping her index finder against her leg thoughtfully.

  "You don't masturbate?" she queries, as if I am now some sort of participant in a medical study.

  "Leigh."

  She looks back at me, fighting back a smile.

  "That is an awfully long time," she observes.

  "I hadn't noticed," I tell her, flatly.

  It isn't till I get home that night that I realise that Leigh is right, that we do need to talk. Because there is a hell of a lot going on here that we need to talk about.

  So, after dinner I buckle Em into her child seat and we drive over to Leigh's house. Then I'm standing in her manor house drive and wondering what the fuck I am doing here. Except that out on this lonely road it was perfectly obvious to all the inhabitants of the house that we are here from the lights of the car.

  Mam is opening the front door and she is smiling.

  "I didn't expect you tonight," she says as I greet her with a hug.

  Leigh steps out at that moment and it seems only reasonable that I hug her too. It probably isn't reasonable that I am hugging her far more tightly and for far longer than I did my mother.

  I look down at Em who has decided to join in and is hugging both my leg and Leigh's and I feel a tear prick at the corner of my eye.

  "What are you doing here?" Mam is asking as I'm letting go of Leigh but somehow still holding her hand.

  Then she glances at our entwined hands and smiles at us, a smile of wry happiness.

  "I've got to go and check on Daniel," she says abruptly, "and then I'll be off to bed."

  "Jesus Christ," I curse under my breath.

  Only I could end up in a situation like this.

  Mam looks down at Em. "Come here, darling," she says and traitorously Em runs to her side.

  "Em can stay with me tonight," she says, taking Em's hand and taking her down the side path to Daniel's barn, leaving Leigh and I standing in the driveway hand in hand.

  I look across at her and let out a short laugh and shake my head. Leigh eyes me quizzically, confused.

  I smile at her and rub my thumb across her hand, I should drop her hand but I don't and as if Leigh can tell what I'm thinking she smiles back at me sweetly, looking happy.

  As we walk inside, I look across at her. "You wanted to talk?" I ask.

  Leigh's hand tightens on mine and she takes a breath.