Distress Signals

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  ‘Stop,’ I finally managed to say. ‘Stop talking.’

  Scenes from the last few weeks were flashing through my mind in a sped-up slideshow, looking all wrong and feeling strange. Sarah and I had been together for ten years, lived together for the last eight of them. Almost the only time we didn’t spend in each other’s company was when she was at work, and yet I hadn’t the slightest inkling that anything like this was or even could be going on.

  I thought I knew everything about her, everything about her life. How had this happened without my noticing? When had it? Was I just that stupid or was she just that good?

  Sarah’s face, framed by her new short hair, looking up at me.

  I would never abandon you.

  ‘You’re wrong about one thing, though,’ Rose said to Moorsey. ‘This isn’t Sarah’s fault.’ She looked to me. ‘Adam, you know I think you’re a nice guy. A good guy. Everyone does. But what the hell have you been doing for the last ten years? Chasing your dreams, yeah, we know. But at Sarah’s expense. And I don’t just mean financially. What about her dreams? Did you ever think about those? Did you ask her about them? Did you even consider that she might have some too? I never understood that about you. You’ve always seemed to think that you’re the only one with a dream and that everyone else is just happy to settle.’

  ‘Rose,’ Moorsey said. ‘Stop.’

  I got up from the table and went to the kitchen sink, stood looking out the window above it. We were three floors up on a hill overlooking a city that mostly liked to stick to two storeys or less. Roofs and spires spread out before me in gentle rolling hills before scrambling up the sharp rise on the other side of the river valley. How many nights had Sarah and I sat wrapped together in a blanket on our tiny balcony, looking at that same view and talking about the future, about our dreams?

  Many, many nights.

  But when had we last done it?

  We had a deal. Sarah had supported me these last few years and, from now on, in exchange for that, I would take care of her for ever. The first stage payment from the script sale would be in my bank account within a fortnight and the very first thing I planned to buy was a ring.

  And Sarah knew that. Didn’t she?

  It was Rose who hadn’t a clue. She saw Sarah maybe once a week. I lived with her. She slept in my arms. We were the ones sharing a life.

  This had to be some kind of awful misunderstanding. All we needed to do was get Sarah on the phone. She’d clear everything up.

  ‘When did you last speak to her?’ I asked without turning around.

  ‘Sunday morning,’ Rose said. ‘I sent her a text message and she texted me back. She was at the airport.’

  I saw Sarah walking in the terminal doors. Waving goodbye to me. Kissing him hello.

  I gripped the edge of the countertop.

  No.

  ‘Have you tried calling her since?’

  ‘I tried a few times after you texted me,’ Rose said, ‘but it went straight to voicemail. But then Moorsey said she told you she wasn’t going to disturb you because you were doing your rewriting thing. I think the phone is probably off. I think she turned it off. On purpose. You gave her the perfect excuse to do that.’

  ‘What am I going to tell Maureen and Jack?’

  ‘We obviously can’t tell them about any of this, so I was thinking: how about I call them and say that I’ve heard from her, that her phone is broken or something and that she’s sorry for worrying them and she’ll talk to them when she gets back? You can intercept her at the airport on Thursday and explain why we did that. You’re still planning to meet her there, aren’t you? You’ll have to. And you can’t tell her I told you this. You’ll have to make something up. I mean it, Adam. She’s my best friend.’

  There was silence then.

  When I turned around, Rose and Moorsey were looking at each other, hands clasped together on the tabletop.

  You’ve always seemed to think that you were the only one with a dream.

  But Sarah was my dream. None of the rest of it mattered without her. This was all for her, for us. She knew that. I knew that she did.

  But had she stopped wanting it?

  Another thought: Sarah, my Sarah, naked in a hotel bed, a faceless man on top of her, touching her skin—

  I shut my eyes but the image wouldn’t go away.

  I turned back around just in time to throw up into the sink.

  Thick grey clouds pregnant with rain hung over the city Thursday lunchtime, threatening to unleash a drenching shower at any moment. I parked in the airport’s multi-storey garage and followed the covered walkway into the terminal. Inside, the noise of heels and wheels meeting the hard floor and rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum that covered it mixed with indecipherable PA announcements and distant musak.

  The bank of screens suspended from the ceiling just inside the main doors flickered as I stopped to study them, changing the listing for Sarah’s flight home from ‘Expected 13:15’ to ‘Landed 13:05’.

  She’s here.

  I remember thinking that.

  I made a beeline for the coffee kiosk. I needed a caffeine fix after a second night of broken, fitful sleep, tormented by what Rose had told me the day before yesterday, unsure of what to do about it, whether or not to believe it. I’d decided just before dawn that all I could do was wait to see Sarah, wait to give her a chance to tell me herself what was going on. Maybe all wasn’t lost yet, or maybe everything had been for ages. I just didn’t know.

  I took my coffee to an empty chair in the first row of seats facing the Arrivals doors, the last barrier between airside passengers and the landside public that waited for them. Having sat down, I pulled out my phone and dialled Sarah’s number for the umpteenth time that morning.

  Straight to voicemail. Again. I didn’t leave a message. Again. When was she going to turn it back on?

  The phone vibrated with an incoming call before I could re-lock the screen: Jack. He was talking before I got the phone to my ear.

  ‘Is she there? Is she with you? Maureen saw on the Internet that her flight has landed.’

  I’d vetoed Rose’s plan to lie to Maureen and Jack about Sarah having made contact with us, informing us of a lost or broken phone. It seemed like an unnecessary evil and too good a deed to do for someone who’d lied to me, even if I was still holding out hope that there was an innocent reason for it and Rose just had an overactive imagination. Instead I’d convinced Sarah’s parents that the simplest explanation was the most likely one – Sarah had a problem with her phone – and that we should just sit tight until Thursday lunchtime and wait for her to come off the plane.

  Which was supposed to be now.

  ‘It just landed,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t come through yet.’

  ‘You’ll get her to call us as soon as you meet her?’

  ‘The second I do, I will.’

  He thanked me and ended the call.

  I meant what I said. The most unbelievable thing about all of this for me at that point was how Sarah was treating her parents. Hadn’t she realised they’d worry when they couldn’t contact her? Why hadn’t she contacted them? It was so selfish.

  Although that would make two of us, if I believed what Rose had told me.

  The coffee sloshed around my empty stomach. I dumped the half-full cup in the nearest bin and went to stand at the railing in front of the Arrivals doors.

  A minute or two later, passengers started to come through.

  Would they both be on this flight? Sarah had a window seat coming back, but maybe that was just because they couldn’t book two seats together, or they’d swapped over and he’d booked the middle one. Would I recognise him? Would he recognise me? Sarah knew I’d be waiting; they weren’t going to come through hand in hand. They’d pretend to be strangers but they’d probably struggle with the act. I studied
faces and body language, looking for clues as to which passenger was the other guy having sex with my girlfriend.

  The first one to come through was a prime candidate: an attractive man, maybe five years older than me, pulling a small trolley-case with a bulky laptop bag slung over his shoulder. As he passed me, I saw the airport code on his luggage tag: BCN. Sarah’s flight. His eyes darted around like he was looking for someone, and he moved fast.

  This could be him.

  But then he spotted someone holding a sign saying ‘G.D. Investments’ and broke into a smile, waving at them.

  What was I doing?

  Sarah wasn’t cheating on me. She would never. She loved me.

  I would never abandon you.

  The rest of the passengers came spilling out in much the same order in which they must have boarded the plane on the other end. First, first class, well dressed and relaxed. They only had carry-on because they knew how to travel, and there was no one to meet them but hired drivers. Next, harried young parents whose buggies and bags outnumbered their kids, on their last nerve after a week of round-the-clock family time. Then, the masses. A mix of travellers, holidaymakers and low-fares opportunists, sunburned but (mostly) smiling, carrying copies of the in-flight magazine, tablet computers and clear, sealed plastic bags filled with duty-free. Finally, the crew. Four men and three women all wearing bright-green Aer Lingus uniforms and an air of superiority, the men flashing their straight white teeth and the women modelling various shades of harsh red lipstick.

  None of the passengers took any special notice of me or appeared to be acting strange, and Sarah wasn’t among them.

  I waited another ten minutes, during which time no one at all came through the doors except for flak-jacket-wearing airport staff and one woman with no bags who started moaning loudly to the man who was there to meet her about lost luggage and delays.

  I waited another fifteen.

  I imagined Sarah on the other side of the frosted glass, staring in disbelief at the phone she’d just switched back on, blinking through tears at the influx of text messages, emails and notifications of missed calls. Devastated at the pain she’d inadvertently caused with her silence, wondering what the hell I must be thinking, trying to find the words that would begin her apology.

  Or confused as to why she hadn’t got away with her lies.

  Don’t.

  I shook my head as if to physically dislodge the thought.

  She wouldn’t. This is Sarah we’re talking about. My Sarah.

  I tried her phone again. Straight to voicemail. But then she could be on the phone to Maureen and Jack . . .

  I opened WhatsApp. Still only one checkmark.

  I started to feel self-conscious. I’d been standing in the same spot for ages now and I hadn’t stopped checking my phone. If there were CCTV cameras trained on this spot, whoever was monitoring them had undoubtedly picked me out as a suspected potential something by now.

  How much longer should I wait?

  Cork Airport was small. Yes, the Celtic Tiger-era architecture was impressive, but I’d been in glorified sheds in old airfields that had more gates. Every year when they announced the passenger numbers I wondered how they’d possibly managed to funnel them all through just eight of them. Here, there were no endless corridors, no warnings about leaving enough time to get to your gate, no need for a single travelator in the whole building. If you could waltz through passport control and you only had carry-on, it would be a five-­minute walk from the tarmac to the taxi rank.

  So where was she?

  I began looking around for someone who might be able to tell me whether or not Sarah had been on the plane in the first place. When a middle-aged man in a high-visibility vest with an ID card hanging around his neck walked past, I stepped towards him and said, ‘Excuse me.’ I explained that I’d been expecting someone who was supposed to be on the Barcelona flight but that they hadn’t appeared. Was there someone I could talk to?

  He pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt and barked jargon into it, then translated the squawk that came bursting back out: all the passengers from the Barcelona flight were through. They’d cleared Immigration and Customs and a cleaning crew were already aboard the plane.

  ‘You’re sure you’ve the right flight, son?’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe she missed it.’ He walked off.

  My phone rang: a blocked number.

  Here we go.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hey, buddy, it’s Dan. Goldberg. In New York. Can you talk?’

  I winced. Dan was the agent who’d brokered the script sale, the same agent who was probably wondering where the hell the rewritten script was. He wanted to see it before I sent it to the studio, and the studio was expecting it in ten days’ time.

  ‘Not just now, Dan, to be honest.’

  ‘I wanted to check in. You know, since I haven’t heard from you.’ A pause. ‘At all.’

  ‘I know, it’s just—’

  ‘It’s your first time. It’s imperative that you deliver on time.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You’re going to show it to me first?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You won’t send it directly to them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When will I see it?’

  ‘Soon. Dan, sorry, but I kind of have, ah, a family emergency going on at the moment.’

  ‘Really? Fuck. Is everything alright?’

  ‘I’m sure everything will be fine but I just can’t talk right now. Sorry. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Is there any—’

  I hung up on him.

  Then I looked down at my phone in surprise, as if I couldn’t believe that I had. I’d waited ten years for someone like him to start calling me, and now I was hanging up on him when he did. What was I thinking?

  But then my phone rang with Jack’s number yet again and I remembered that, in my list of new and pressing problems, Dan was currently sitting at number two. I’d call him just as soon as I spoke to Sarah, as soon as I knew what the hell was going on.

  I waited another ten minutes after that. I tried Sarah’s phone again on the way back to my car, slowing down the closer I got to it, hoping my phone would ring and I’d have reason to turn back around.

  It didn’t.

  I drove back to the apartment with an empty passenger seat and new company: a question in my mind, repeating itself over and over like a snippet of lyric on a gouged-out CD.

  Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?

  Jack rang me three more times during the ten-minute drive from the airport to the apartment.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say to him now or what to do next or what to think.

  I pulled into the first empty parking spot I saw outside our building, killed the engine and called Rose.

  ‘She wasn’t on the flight,’ I said as soon as she answered.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean she wasn’t on the flight. She didn’t come home. She hasn’t come home.’ There was a long silence on the line. ‘Rose? You there?’

  ‘Yeah, I . . . I just don’t know, Adam. Maybe she missed it. Is there another flight from Barcelona today?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll check. Where are you now?’

  ‘I just got home. Listen. That . . . That stuff you said. About Sarah and the American guy.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Is there any chance . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How sure are you about it? Could she have been lying or something? Making it up? Or maybe they’re just friends and you misunderstood? You said she didn’t talk about it much with—’

  ‘Adam . . .’ A long sigh. ‘I’m sorry, I really am, and I’m sorry for the way that I told you and some of the things that I said, b
ut she is seeing someone else. She met him through work and she went to Barcelona with him. That’s all I know. But she was coming back today. Of course she was. She’s getting ready to . . .’ Another sigh. ‘To leave you. God, I’m sorry. This must be awful for you to hear. I feel terrible. I do. But she is. And anyway, where else would—’

  I took my phone from my ear and pressed the virtual red button on screen to end the call. I couldn’t listen to it any more.

  Something clutched in my chest as I realised that the last time I’d hold or kiss or touch Sarah had probably already happened. I would never get to do it again.

  There goes my entire future, destroyed by a dead phone and an online banking password and a missed flight.

  Sarah, what have you done?

  What have I done to you?

  I ached for her. I wanted to hold her. To kiss her. Touch her. To have her next to me in the car, to reach over and squeeze her knee at a red light. I needed to speak to her. The list of little things I wanted to share with her, the anecdotes and observations and jokes I’d been saving up while she’d been away was already long and I wouldn’t be able to remember them all for much longer.

  I missed her. I just missed her. Had been missing her for the past four days. I hadn’t paid the feeling much attention because I knew it was temporary, that it was going to come to an end. Today, supposedly. Now, all of a sudden, there was no end in sight.