Unfixable

by Tessa Bailey

  “Well don’t bowl me over with compliments.”

  “I compliment you all the time. You’re just not listening.” While I’m absorbing that, he rummages through a few black-and-white shots sitting on my dresser. “The photograph that won you the contest. Do you have it here?”

  I nod once, bending down so I can drag my suitcase from beneath the bed. My neck feels hot, but I can’t tell if it’s from his interested gaze or my nerves over sharing this particular shot. I’d submitted it to the contest through the mail, not actually being required to show it to anyone in person. The subject matter of the shot was controversial, to say the least. I have no idea how he will judge it. Or me.

  Hesitating the barest of moments, lest Shane notice my anxiety, I draw it out of the plastic portfolio and hand it to him. To keep myself busy while he looks it over, I thumb through the other photos, stopping on one of Derek and Ginger smiling at each other over their coffee mugs. It’s a picture that always comforts me.

  “Where was this taken?”

  Bastard. I can interpret nothing from his tone. Placing the picture I’m holding carefully back into the case, I shift my attention to the one in Shane’s hands. “One day last spring, I convinced Derek to take me on a ride-along. It was actually Take Your Daughter to Work Day but I didn’t tell him that until after we got back to the station.” I laugh to myself, thinking of his baleful expression when I told him. My brother-in-law really is way too easy to mess with. “The day started slow. Then we were called to a homicide in Chinatown. A man had killed his business partner over something trivial, then climbed onto the roof, threatening to jump.” I point to the subject of the photograph. Not the main event, never the main event. “This is his wife, leaning out the window trying to talk him out of it.”

  I remember the day I’d taken the photograph. Derek had commanded that I remain in the car, but I hadn’t been able to stop myself from climbing out of the passenger side. Since the man’s wife had been speaking in Chinese, I couldn’t understood a single word she said, yet she’d had such horrible desperation on her face, I’d somehow known. She’d cried and pled, refusing to listen to any officer intervention from below. Then, just as her husband appeared ready to leap to his death, she’d reached behind her and picked up a sleeping baby, holding him out the window for the man to see. She held the baby so securely, I’d never once considered she meant to do anything but use him as motivation for her husband to remain alive.

  That’s the picture I’d taken. A desperate woman holding her child out a high-rise window to convince her husband to come back inside. To choose them over the relief of death. The shutter had gone off before I’d registered a conscious thought. Just muscle memory and a need to capture that raw emotion on film. Miraculously, the man had gone back inside immediately after that, carefully inching his way off the ledge toward the window. If he’d jumped, I never would have submitted the photo to the contest. Even so, some people found it horrifying that I would take a picture of something terrible like that, but to me, it’s just the opposite. Love can save people’s lives. To me, that woman’s expression, her words and actions, are goddamn beautiful.

  “Did he jump?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not sure what to say.” Shane drops down on the bed beside me. “Except they probably should have sent you to a better inn.”

  My laugh is so unexpected, that for a fleeting second I’m unicorn girl. I don’t have the time or the ability to shape the laugh. It just flows out of me, and it feels unbelievable. When Shane simply watches me, like he’s finally figured me out, I force it to die down.

  His thoughtful eyes are locked on mine, and I can’t shake the certainty he knows exactly who he’s looking at. I’m not some social experiment or a troubled girl with a smart-ass remark for everything when he looks at me. Even more, I don’t feel like one. I want to lean forward and kiss him so bad, it’s like a drumming need inside me, but I would dissolve. I’d dissolve under that look and his lips at the same time. His eyes soften in understanding, as if he can read that thought entering and leaving my head.

  “Do you want to get out of here?” I ask.

  “You read my mind.” He brushes a thumb over my bottom lip. “Grab that camera of yours and meet me out front. I’m going to take you somewhere.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Shane pulls up outside the Claymore Inn, he’s in a different car than the night he picked up Faith and I at O’Kelly’s. This one is candy-apple red, sleek, and low to the ground. A sports car. It’s also a convertible, but I suspect the retractable roof doesn’t get a lot of use in this rainy country. When he steps out of the driver’s side and rounds the car to open my door, I feel a wicked little hum kick up in my belly. In faded jeans and a bomber jacket, hair finger-mussed, he might as well be wearing a sign that says, I’m bad. But in a way that will make you feel really good. It does nothing to calm the category-five hormone storm taking place inside me when his gaze slides over my body like he’s planning on making a meal out of me at the earliest opportunity.

  Feeling a little bit like I’m heading to my own funeral, I sink into the plush leather passenger seat, unable to keep myself from watching him through the windshield as he returns to the driver’s side. A moment later, we’re both enclosed in the car, the purr of the engine vibrating beneath us. It’s just after ten o’clock and the street is illuminated by streetlamps. Since the day’s warmth has lingered into the night, people stroll down Baggot Street, looking positively elated to be free of their jackets and umbrellas.

  “Where have you been hiding this car?”

  His hand slides over the steering wheel like a caress. “In a garage down the road. The attendant lets me store it there in exchange for a free pint now and again.” He throws the clutch into first gear and eases away from the curb. “Although I think he uses it to pick up girls by telling them he’s the owner.”

  “And that works?”

  He glances at my tightly crossed legs. “Worked on you.”

  I should be annoyed or embarrassed by that arrogant statement. Or both. Instead, his confidence is ridiculously attractive to me. It’s drawing me closer, making me want him even more. Tonight alone, I’ve seen him surprised, regretful, grateful, and humorous. Now…now he is working his swagger. And shit, I like it way too much. The way he drives the car, capable hands working the gearshift like he’d been born inside of it, is sexy as all get-out. His thigh muscles shift each time he applies the break, the seat hugging his body like it had been customized for his muscular frame.

  With a deep breath, I finally accept where this night is headed and admit I’m going there willingly. I’m done pretending I have the willpower to stay away from Shane. It’s a pointless waste of time, and I’ve never been a procrastinator. I just have to hope like hell when it comes time for me to get on the plane back to Chicago, I’ve got my damn head on straight. That after I satisfy this hunger inside me, I’m able to walk away and see this for what it is. A diversion. A passing attraction that might very well eviscerate my last relationship from my head, but one that can’t become a relationship in itself. As corny and old-fashioned as it sounds, we’re two ships passing in the night. Which makes my desire to know more about him rather inconvenient. What I should do is ask him to pull over so I can drag him into the backseat. But there it is again, that niggling curiosity that is far from satisfied, rearing its nosy little head.

  “I overheard what Faith told you tonight,” Shane says, before I have a chance to ask.

  “I thought as much,” I murmur, shifting my attention out the window.

  “I also heard what you said back to her.” He waits until I’m looking at him. “Thank you for that.”

  “Okay.” Uncomfortable with the gratitude softballs being lobbed in my direction tonight, I change the subject, wishing I was well-adjusted enough to simply say you’re welcome. “So, did you have this car before you left Ireland to race?”

  Shane slants a look at me, as if to
determine my motivation for asking. Finally, he shakes his head. “I bought it at an auction with the money from my first win. I’d come home for Faith’s birthday.” He pushes the car into fifth gear. “It was an impulsive buy, but I thought…”

  When he doesn’t continue, I prompt him, sensing he’s going to open up. “What did you think?” If he overheard what Faith told me, he already knows his rocky relationship with his father won’t be news to me.

  “I thought if he could just see I’d been successful, that the time I’d spent away from the inn had paid off in some small way, it would change everything, but he wouldn’t even let me in the door.” He clears his throat. “I don’t drive it very often anymore.”

  “You should,” I blurt, hating the defeat in his voice. “You should be proud of it even if he couldn’t manage it. Maybe buying the car was impulsive, but he should have seen it for what it was. Not a boast. An explanation…an apology. He should have known you better.”

  Even though Shane isn’t looking at me, I can tell by his posture I’ve surprised him. I’ve kind of surprised myself at the close attention I’ve been paying without realizing it. When he doesn’t say anything for a long time, however, I’m starting to wonder if I was wrong. Or worse, I’ve overstepped my bounds.

  “Look, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my place to say anything.” I pull my messenger bag higher against my chest. “I skipped Tact 101 in high school.”

  A small smile playing around the edges of his mouth, he shakes his head. “How do you manage to see the best in everyone, Willa, but only the worst in yourself?” His statement lingers between us, as if I could pluck it out of the air. When I realize my mouth is hanging open, I snap it shut. That’s not true. Is it? “What you said about my father, this car…you’re right, I think. I’ve just never thought of what happened in those terms.”

  “I’m an outsider looking in, that’s all. It’s easier to see a situation clearly without messy emotions, like guilt, in the way.”

  “I don’t know. A moment ago, you seemed pretty outraged on my behalf.” I stare resolutely out the window and Shane sighs. “You wouldn’t be, if you knew the whole story.”

  “Do you want to tell it to me?” I ask softly.

  Our eyes meet across the console. “I don’t know.”

  Ignoring the stab of hurt, I nod. “Okay. I get that.”

  “No, you don’t.” He turns onto the highway, slipping into the fast lane with expert ease. “I liked the way you looked at me when you defended me. Maybe a little too much. When you realize I’m not worth your outrage, I run the risk of never seeing that again.”

  The pain remains, but it’s transferred to him now. “It can’t be that bad,” I whisper.

  We drive in silence for a few minutes. I sit very still in the passenger side, afraid if I move, it will sway his decision to confide in me. I want to know what put that note of sadness in his voice and I think I’ll be crushed if he decides against telling me. When I got off the plane in Dublin, I didn’t want to get close enough to anyone to feel this emotionally invested. I came here to repair myself and my broken heart, not this family. Just this one final thing, I tell myself. Just to put the curiosity to rest.

  Shane’s voice startles me, cutting through the darkness. “I was in Malaysia in March, getting ready for the second race of the Championship. Hadn’t spoken to my father in months. But he called me. Just as I was suiting up for the qualifying round. I didn’t even look at the caller ID, just answered, assuming it would be anyone but him.” Shane isn’t completely there with me in the car anymore, his voice sounding far-off. “He’d hadn’t even let me past the front door of the inn last time I was in Dublin, so when he asked me to come home immediately, I didn’t understand. I asked if Kitty and Faith were all right. He said yes, but I needed to come home and see to my legacy. It had to be that same day.”

  As he gets further into the story, a bad feeling settles on my shoulders, tingling in the back of my neck. Before I can analyze my actions or tell myself it’s a bad idea, I settle my hand over his on the clutch. He looks at our touching hands a beat before continuing.

  “When I think back to the phone call, I don’t know how I missed it. He kept calling me by my name, which he never used to. Shane, it’s important that you listen. Shane, your mother and sister need you. No mention of him. None.” He steers the car off the highway and takes a turn, beginning the ascent of a semi-steep hill. “The next day, I placed in the top three. Not my first time, but it was a difficult track. I had a voicemail from Faith…”

  He has to stop. The moment feels so fragile that any misplaced word or movement will shatter it like glass. I don’t want to hear the rest. I’ll die if I don’t.

  “I went out celebrating. Didn’t even listen to the voicemail until the next day.” His voice has turned bitter, full of self-hatred. “He died during the race. He was trying to tell me to come home. Must have known what was coming. It was so obvious, I just didn’t want to fucking hear it.”

  My chest rises and falls rapidly, every breath I manage to draw into my lungs more painful than the last. I try to imagine the guilt that goes along with what he’s telling me and I can’t even fathom it. I feel that I can at least partially relate, because as awful as my nonrelationship is with my mother, if something similar had happened with Valerie…if she died after begging me to come home, I would still be swamped with self-loathing. I can only imagine the magnitude of Shane’s. It’s visible now, in every line of his body, the white-knuckled grip he has on the clutch.

  “So? Am I still the type of person you would defend?” Finally, he looks at me and I want to wither under the haunted expression he hits me with. “Or are you wishing you’d never gotten into this car with me?”

  I inhale slowly, ordering myself to think clearly. Maybe I wanted to avoid this position, but my curiosity has landed me here and now I get the sense that I’m needed. That my response is important. More than that, it’s important to me that it leaves no room for doubt. “Yes, I’m defending you, Shane. I’m saying your father didn’t make it clear enough. He was too stubborn to come right out and tell you what the hell he wanted to say. He didn’t say, ‘Shane, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m dying and want you to come home.’ Instead, he left you with a lifetime of guilt. That’s shitty. And you’re making it shittier by imagining hints he probably never dropped.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re the one that’s still alive.” I realize I’m practically shouting and lower my voice. “Someone has to shoulder the guilt you both felt. It didn’t die with him.”

  He stares at me hard for long, torturous seconds where I worry my honesty went too far. Then he leans back in his seat, staring out the front windshield. “I have to go back to racing. I have to win or it was all for nothing. I will have alienated him, my family, for nothing. Can you understand that?”

  Better than I thought. “Yes,” I say, even though the word feels like it’s being scraped from my throat with a spoon. It’s a complicated and difficult goal, but that’s Shane. Complicated and difficult. People like us, he’d said to me the night we kissed in the office. We must be cut from the same cloth, because this quest he’s on is something I fully grasp. Maybe even something I would do in the same position.

  “Selling the inn will ensure Faith and Kitty don’t have to work anymore. That we can afford care for Kitty. I can help them far more that way than staying behind, slowly turning into my father.”

  He pushes open his door before I have a chance to respond. I feel anchored to my seat by what he said, but when he pulls open my door, I force myself to climb out of the car. Shane takes my hand without asking for permission and leads me up a path. It’s dark, and I have no idea what remote location he’s brought me to, but I can smell moss and saltwater. I open my mouth a little, and I can even taste it on the drifting wind. Trees line either side of the path and I sense we’re getting closer to the water the more the wind picks up, rustling the leaves. It’s
dark, but the moon is enough to see where we’re walking. Shane’s hand tightens around mine when we come upon uneven earth. I trust him, I realize. In this moment, after the way he opened himself up to me…I trust him.

  I can feel the tension in his grip, left over from our conversation. Part of me wants to bring it up again, talk it to death. Talk until he stops feeling pain over something he couldn’t prevent, until no more words exist on the subject. It’s so unlike me. I’m the type to ignore a pebble in my boot until it gives me a blister. I’ve made ignoring problems an art form. Maybe it’s his own reluctance to talk about it that’s giving me the urge to create balance. Balance him.

  “Where are w—” The words die in my throat when we reach the end of the path and I see Dublin Bay spread out below us. Boats bob on its calm surface, land surrounding it, lit up houses nestled into the hillside along the shore. Somehow the sky doesn’t seem as dark from here, more of a purplish-gray, reflecting the water below. We’re on top of a hill, which didn’t seem so large when climbing it in the car, but from where I’m standing, it feels like we’ve scaled Everest. In the distance, I can see Howth Harbor, where I’d spent the day. This afternoon suddenly feels like a thousand years ago. So much has happened since I dangled my legs over the side of the dock.

  It’s so beautiful up here, I can’t stand it. I couldn’t capture this perfect feeling of isolation with my camera if I tried.

  Mist. When I read about it in books, I always thought it was a myth. Something to set a tone or create a mood. But it’s real, and it’s curling around our ankles like a cat begging to be petted. It’s not eerie, it’s comforting. It’s like a balm, enclosing us and taking away the ugliness we both carry around on our shoulders.

  “Killiney Hill,” Shane says softly, answering my unspoken question. His voice sends goose bumps coasting down my neck. I rock back on my heels and come up against his chest, closing my eyes when he folds his arms around my middle. After the difficult emotions dredged up on the car ride, it feels like a relief to be held. To focus on something else. The way it feels to touch each other.