by Lia Louis
Lucas smiles at me, puzzled, and slowly shakes his head. “You’ve lost me, Em.”
“Seriously? You put it on one of the CDs. The Dear Balloon Girl CDs.”
“Oh. God, ’course. Yeah,” he laughs, then he taps his finger to my forehead. “You and your elephant memory. No doubt you know the—”
“Volume two, track five,” I say, and Lucas smiles. “Knew it,” he says.
* * *
Mix CD. Vol 2.
Dear Balloon Girl,
Track 1. Because your dad was probably in Whitesnake
Track 2. Because you snort when you laugh
Track 3. Because you said you’d never heard of this one
Track 4. Because none of what happened to you is your fault
Track 5. Because I should have asked you to dance in Berck
Balloon Boy
X
It was here, in Amanda and Jean Moreau’s kitchen, that I realized I was in love with Lucas. It was six years ago, two weeks before Christmas, and we had been out for dinner and drinks with Lucas’s friend from work. The friend was leaving to start his own business and had found out after years of IVF that he and his wife were expecting a baby. He gave a speech in a private room he’d hired out in a local bar and Lucas had translated parts of it for me afterward, saying, “Listen up, Paul McCartney, you might learn something here.”
We’d taken a taxi home, giggly but not drunk, and there was a thunderstorm so bad, we let ourselves into his parents’ house, not wanting to stay out in it a minute longer to walk the tiny but torrential distance to the bottom of the garden to the guest cottage. We whispered, tiptoed our way around the huge, dimly lit kitchen like teenagers home too late, laughing, shushing each other, making coffee, and trying not to rustle the packets of cookies Lucas pulled from the cupboard in case we woke his parents.
At the black marble of the breakfast bar, we’d hunched, opposite each other, hair wet, cheeks flushed with cold, and I watched him sip, and eat, and look over at me, gray eyes and golden lashes, the spattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks, and I felt it. This tug. This sickening pull in my stomach, like nausea, like excitement and fear all balled into one fizzing, burning orb in my gut. And it threw me. I was standing right there, opposite him, in the calm of the kitchen, rain battering the windows, but the realization felt like I’d been flung across the room. I knew. I knew right then.
He smiled at me, powder-blue shirt speckled with raindrops. “Where you at, Emmie Blue?”
“Nowhere.” I swallowed, the dead silence of the house intimidating, goading me to tell him. “Nothing.”
“You sure?”
I nodded once, hesitated. “That… speech,” I’d said instead, hands cradling my mug. “Patrice’s wife, when she cried. I keep thinking about it.”
Lucas put his coffee mug down, forearms leaning on the counter, hands balled together, the silver watch at his wrist tapping on the marble. “The poetic, soppy bit. About how they met?”
“Yeah,” I said. “About how they knew each other as kids yet it took them twenty years to find each other again.”
“Yep.” Lucas smiled warmly, light catching in his eyes. “And two marriages. Imagine that. You’ve already met the person you’re meant to be with by the time you’re twelve, but it takes you twenty years to realize it. Depressing in a way.”
“But worth the wait.”
He’d nodded, eyes fixed on me. And in that moment, for the first time in our whole friendship—of sleeping beside each other, of passing towels through ajar bathroom doors, of meeting my boyfriends and his girlfriends—opposite him on that counter, I felt too close to him to bear. Because I knew I loved him; had always loved him. And there was no way I could tell him.
Seven weeks later I met Adam, who quickly became my boyfriend, and three weeks after that, Lucas had started dating a woman at work. And I was relieved, really. It was an excuse to say nothing. To push it down, as if it were something shoved to the back of a wardrobe, closing the door quickly, before it had a chance to jump back out at me again. And it worked, at least for a little while. Adam numbed the longing; distracted me from having to look properly at the feelings that tumbled free from somewhere inside me, that rainy night at the kitchen counter.
Tonight, that same kitchen counter I leaned across six years ago is laden with platters and cake stands of exquisite-looking desserts, each handmade by Lucas’s mum, who’s just finished her first year at a renowned French cookery school. She’s hosting a dessert party—something that sounded flippant and casual, but actually looks more like a home-hosted black-tie event.
“It’s the caramel I keep tripping up on,” says Amanda to Ian and Athena—the Moreaus’ expat neighbors, and the final guests to arrive tonight. “It’s one of those things, I think, Athena, you take your eye off it and poof, it’s ruined. Like jam. Like a béchamel.”
“Well, I think you are a talent,” says Athena, tiny white plate in manicured hand. “I wouldn’t know where to begin. Would you, Ian?”
“Oh, I am but a mere apprentice,” Amanda laughs, and her eyes scrunch up the same as Lucas’s when she smiles. “And have you ever tried these? These are made with rose water, Ian. Now, even if you’re not a rose water fan, I have to insist you try. Go on. Pop it in. That’s it.”
I stand a few feet away, by the sink, a glass of wine in my hand. There are far more people here than I expected—although I don’t know why I’m so surprised. The Moreaus bloody love a party—always have—and every one they throw, even the casual-sounding ones, look like the sort of parties I had only ever saw on TV as a child. Plates of canapés, olives, and people in shirts and heels and proffering gifts at the door that wouldn’t look out of place at a wedding gift table. There are even cocktails being made by a man hired from a local catering firm.
“I was going to wear a T-shirt,” I’d whispered to Lucas earlier. “I only went for this blouse in the end because I realized my T-shirt had a smudge of Nutella on it and it looked proper dodgy.”
Lucas laughed. “You know what Mum and Dad are like.”
“That woman over there is in pearls.”
“She’s a mayor.”
“Of course she is.”
“What?” Lucas chuckled.
“ ‘Just the family and a few friends,’ your mum said. A little get-together. Rosie had one of those last month and we were beside ourselves because we had the posh dips from Marks & Spencer and her neighbor with the mustache actually came.”
Lucas had laughed into his glass of orange juice. “I’m going to insist you give me more on the neighbor with the mustache later, please,” he said, “but now I’ve got to go and get Marie.”
And I’ve been standing here, waiting for Lucas to return ever since. I don’t know anyone else well enough (besides Jean and Amanda) to elbow my way into the conversation, and the only person who’s spoken to me is the mayor, and when I tried to tell her—in terrible, loud, exaggerated English that resembled Neanderthal dialect—that I didn’t understand, she laughed confusedly and walked off, looking over her shoulder to check, I suppose, that I wasn’t about to jump her with a club. But despite not knowing anybody, I feel comfortable here. It’s like a second home in a way; more constant than any other home I’ve had, actually. My room at Fishers Way doesn’t really feel like home just yet, and the flat in which I lived with Adam never really got there either, somehow, although it had all the ingredients for it. But here, I can help myself. Here, I am looked after. And maybe that is why it feels more like home than anywhere else has ever felt. Maybe home isn’t a place. It’s a feeling. Of being looked after and understood. Of being loved.
“So, have we got to just stare at it, or are we allowed to actually eat it?”
I know the voice before I turn around, and it’s like my body does, too, because I feel my shoulders stiffen, my skin prickle. I turn around. Eliot. A hand in his pocket, another holding a green bottle of beer to his chest, token teasing smile on his face.
“Oh. Hi.”
“It is a dessert party, right? Nobody’s touched anything yet.”
I nod, and gesture with my glass to the table on the other side of the kitchen. “I think everyone seems to be on the canapés at the moment. There’re salads over there too—”
“Yeah, sorry, no, I am not about leaves tonight. Pastry, though. Different story.” Eliot smiles, dark eyebrows lifting along with his bottle of beer as if to toast. “It’s good to see you, Emmie. How’re things?”
I find it hard sometimes to believe that Lucas, Eliot, and I were once so close. I remember the day Lucas told me about Eliot. It was during one of our first phone conversations, just a few weeks after that first email.
“Yeah, I’ve got a brother. Eliot,” he’d said. “Almost three years older than me.”
“I always wanted a brother or a sister,” I’d told him, and Lucas had told me they had different fathers. Jean and Amanda got together a year after Eliot’s father, John, passed away—Jean and Amanda worked together—and got pregnant with Lucas, a surprise, quickly. “I forget he’s a half brother,” he’d said down the line, proudly. “He’s my best mate.”
And that’s how it was. They did everything together back then, and when I’d visit, we’d go almost everywhere as a threesome, with Eliot, being the older brother and the owner of a driving license before either of us, driving us for miles—to the beach, to the park, to parties, and to pick us up from the cinema after he’d finished work.
“I’m all right, thanks,” I say to Eliot now. “How about you? Did you come on your own?”
“I’m good.” He nods, hand at the dark stubble on his chin. “And no. My girlfriend Ana’s here.” He cranes his neck, scanning the room for her. “Somewhere.”
Ah yes. Ana. The new girlfriend. Eliot got divorced a couple of years ago, and apparently Ana was his divorce counselor.
“Imagine that,” said Lucas a few weeks ago. “Showing someone the darkest recesses of your mind, probably crying like a twat and snotting into tissues because of your failed relationship, and someone falls in love with that.”
“The dream, surely,” I said. “Someone loving you despite and because of all the flaws and shit in your life.”
Lucas shook his head. “Well, yeah, but shagging your therapist? No thanks.”
“So, where’s Luke?” Eliot asks, shoulders back, hand shoved back in his jeans pocket. Scruffy. That’s what Lucas calls Eliot, and although I’m not sure I would go with that term, compared to Lucas, I suppose he is. Where Lucas always looks waspy—smart, clean-shaven, his hair styled—Eliot is never without a smattering of stubble, and looks as though he’s always on his way to watch a band in Camden town. Jeans, T-shirt, Converse, sometimes a hat. Tonight he looks very much the same, less the hat, and plus the dark-blue blazer he wears over the top of it.
“He went to pick up Marie,” I say. “She doesn’t have a car today or something.”
“Ah. The fiancée.”
I say nothing, just smile and nod, and neither does he, but he watches me, waiting for a response.
“Yep,” I say. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“Yeah?” he asks, eyebrows raising in surprise, as if he was expecting me to say something else. “Mum says you’re best woman.”
“Yes,” I say. “I am. And you’re…”
“Brother of the groom?” A smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“Right,” I say. “Exciting.”
The smirk is still on his face. “Yeah. You said.”
We both drink, silence stretching between us. It ate me up, once upon a time, that Eliot and I went from friends to people who could barely hold a conversation. I’d lie awake at night, torturing myself by replaying memories, like film clips in my mind: Eliot and I laughing hysterically at the dining table after Jean would scold Lucas over dinner for swearing; Eliot holding a tissue to his nose, clutching his chest, mock-crying as he waved me off on the ferry, as Lucas pretended to console him, the pair of them holding on to each other like they were waving their husbands off to war. The times I couldn’t sleep and would creep out into in the garden for fresh air, at midnight, to find Eliot out there too, hunched over his phone, texting a girlfriend, or with his earphones in, singing softly to himself. “Welcome to the insomni-club,” he’d always joke. “Pick a life crisis to mull over and take a seat.” I missed Eliot desperately for a while. But I had to remind myself that it was on him why more memories ceased to be made. And that turned the missing into anger, which eventually fermented into a sort of indifference. I didn’t have Eliot anymore, but I had Lucas. And he was the only friend I needed.
“A bit mad, though,” says Eliot now. “Not that I can judge—but, I dunno, it’s…”
“Quick?” I suggest, and he bows his head in a nod.
“Yeah, I guess that’s what I meant. But then that’s Luke, isn’t it? Mr. Haphazard. Thinks it’s something he should be doing ’cause everyone else is doing it.” I say nothing. “I mean, come on,” Eliot carries on, leaning in. “We’ve been here before. He got engaged to that poor girl at uni. Holly.”
“He was a kid then, though.”
Eliot cocks his head as if to say, “Yeah, but still.”
I look around to check nobody is listening, but I don’t react. I want to. I want to agree and add loads of other things to the list too—like when he went backpacking because a few friends at university did and came home after four weeks because he “couldn’t hack hostels”; like the time Lucas moved in with Joanna, the ten-years-his-senior barrister, after knowing her six weeks, only to move out five weeks later—but I don’t, because Lucas is my friend, and Eliot, divorced at almost thirty-three, is probably jealous. I might be too, if I were him. And the truth is, I don’t trust Eliot. I can’t. Yes, it was eleven years ago now, the night of Lucas’s and my nineteenth birthday, but he has never apologized for what he did. He was why the three of us never had a single car ride together again, or bundled under one blanket for films and drinking Jean’s beer concealed in coffee mugs. He broke the trust we spent two years weaving between the three of us.
“Yeah, well, Marie is different,” I say. “She’s lovely. Truly.” And she is. Despite everything, despite myself, and the heart in my chest that’s barely holding it together, it’s impossible to call her anything else.
“Yeah, no, don’t get me wrong,” says Eliot. “I just—well, put it this way, I don’t think I’ll be buying my suit just yet. I mean—”
“Canada.” I swoop in changing the subject. “Lucas says you lived in Canada for a year. Working. How was that?”
Eliot pauses, eyes narrowing just slightly at the sudden change of topic, but he goes with it. “Y-Yeah, with a friend. Mark. He’s a joiner, in the same game as me, and he had loads of work over there. And to be honest, I needed to get away.”
“Your divorce,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says matter-of-factly. “Perfect place, really, for pulling your head out your arse. It’s beautiful where he lives. Quiet. Far enough to feel like you’ve actually got away.”
“Do you miss it?” I ask, and he nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “Thinking of going back soon, to be honest. Mark’s starting up his own business—” And at that exact moment, Ana appears. I recognize her from a photo Amanda uploaded to Facebook last year of the whole family out for Jean’s sixtieth. Tall, heart-shaped face, and a wide, glittering smile. One that fades quickly at the sight of me.
“Hey,” says Eliot as Ana’s hand snakes over his shoulder and rests flat on his broad chest. “Ana, this is Emmie.”
“Emmie?” says Ana, stone-faced. “Lucas’s Emmie?”
“Yes,” I say, smiling wider than usual, as if to coax one onto her lips, but she gives me nothing. I hold out my hand. She takes it weakly, barely shaking it, then drops it.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, and she says simply, “Yes,” then turns and says something to Eliot in whispered French. His cheeks flush, and he
looks at me with a flash of embarrassment.
“Emmie, we just have to go and say hi to some friends, but—”
Ana cuts in again with something I don’t understand, pulling at his shoulder, and as Eliot opens his mouth to speak again, I put him out of his misery.
“See you later,” I say. “Think I’ll go and… eat some leaves,” and I whisk off in the opposite direction. You are the company you keep; that’s what they say, don’t they? I’m not sure I ever expected Lucas’s brother to date a bitch, but Cold Ana and Jealous Eliot belong with each other, I am sure.
I meander through guests to the kitchen, and stand eating a little square plate of balsamic vinegar–soaked tomatoes. I watch Eliot and Ana, all hand-holding and big grins, and then Jean, marveling proudly to anyone who will listen, about Amanda’s dedication and incredible pastry skills, and I scan the room, from happy couple to happy couple to happy couple, and… I can do this, can’t I? Can I be the best best woman for Lucas, stay positive, and trust it’ll work out how it is meant to? They may even get married. God. They might. But I suppose I just have to keep trusting. Maybe we’ll end up like Patrice and his wife. Maybe it’ll take us twenty years and two marriages for us—well, him—to realize it. That it’s me. That it’s us.
I place my empty plate in the sink and move into the hallway, heading to the little cubby of an under-stairs loo, when the front door clicks and opens. Lucas and Marie appear in the doorway, Lucas wrangling free his key from the door with one hand, the other holding on to hers. The ring on Marie’s finger glitters like the hallway’s chandelier.