A Single Breath

by Lucy Clarke

  Once they’re on the shore, Saul faces his brother. He is here. Alive. Standing in front of them. Saul wants to both hug him and punch him. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I fucked up . . . I’ve totally fucked up! I don’t know how to make this right.” His voice is so strained it sounds as though it is tearing.

  They can’t be out here—he needs to get Eva somewhere warm. “My house,” is all he says.

  No one talks as they move along the shoreline. Every now and then Saul glances over his shoulder to check Jackson hasn’t disappeared. He tries centering himself by listening to the nighttime sounds and the stir of the tide.

  When they reach the house, he leads Eva to the bedroom and hands her a towel while he searches for dry clothes for her to wear. He works on autopilot, not ready to think about the person pacing in his living room.

  He pulls out a long-sleeved T-shirt, a thick sweater, and a pair of wool socks. When he turns back to Eva, he finds her still holding the towel, not moving. Her clothes are sopping and her wet hair is pasted to her face. Her entire body trembles, shivering water droplets to the floor. “Eva,” he says gently, “we need to get you into something dry.”

  Her wide gaze doesn’t leave the doorway. She is watching for Jackson.

  He takes the towel from her hands and carefully dries her hair with it. When that is done, he says, “I’m going to undress you.” As swiftly as he can, he unbuttons her wet cardigan and removes her jeans and underwear. Her skin is pale and covered in goose bumps.

  He helps her on with the dry clothes. The T-shirt and sweater hang to the middle of her thighs. He finds her a pair of cotton boxers that serve as shorts, then slides the socks onto her damp feet.

  “You warm enough?”

  She nods.

  In the next room Jackson is circling the coffee table, his wet boots leaving a ring of water across the floor. He stops when he sees Eva, pain marking his face.

  Saul takes a blanket from the arm of the sofa and wraps it around Eva’s shoulders. He asks if she wants to sit, but she remains standing, her hands buried in the long sleeves of his sweater.

  Saul lights the fire, the sawdust scent of kindling filling the room. Then he fetches a bottle of whiskey and pours three glasses. He passes one to Jackson, who takes it in dirt-stained hands. Eva stands in front of the fire, which is just starting to take, while he slips into the kitchen for a moment to call Callie.

  Saul says nothing about Jackson to her, just briefly explains that Eva is with him and she’s going to stay for a while.

  “Listen, Saul,” Callie says, her voice unusually gentle. “Tell her to stay as long as she needs, but just remind her we’ve got to leave tomorrow morning by seven.” She adds, “I’m sorry, Saul. I really am.”

  Saul reaches a hand to the kitchen counter as a new pain hits him square in the chest: Eva’s decided to leave.

  ALL THIS TIME IT’S as though Eva’s been holding her breath, waiting. Her gaze doesn’t stray from Jackson. He looks so much older than she remembers, as if he’s aged years in the months she hasn’t seen him. His face is gaunt, the lower half covered by a thick, dark beard, and his eyes have sunk deep into his face. His hair has been badly shaven, some patches taken too close to his scalp, and he’s thin. Too thin. He’s wearing clothes she’s never seen before: army-green combat trousers with a tear in the knee and a heavy canvas jacket.

  His fingernails are black with dirt and his hand trembles as he lifts the whiskey glass to his mouth. Dirk, she thinks. He looks like Dirk.

  Then her gaze travels to his left hand. His third finger. “Where’s your wedding ring?” It’s the first question she has asked him.

  He lifts his hand toward his face, turning it slowly as if it’s the first time he’s seen it. “I . . . I had to take it off.”

  “Where is it?”

  His eyes close for a moment.

  Eva remembers leaning over Jackson in bed and lightly pressing her lips against his eyelids, finding something tender and vulnerable about the delicate skin there.

  “I sold it.”

  Her breath snags.

  “I had to. I had nothing, Eva.”

  “Did you sell your other wedding ring, too?”

  The question cuts through the room. A taut silence holds each of them still.

  “I’ve met her,” Eva tells Jackson. “Jeanette told me everything: about your marriage. Kyle. The bush fire.”

  Jackson blinks rapidly, his gaze shifting to Saul, who reenters the room.

  “Jeanette thinks she killed you,” Eva says.

  “We were arguing and she pushed me. I staggered, tripped. It was an accident.”

  “You let us think you’d drowned.”

  He scratches roughly at the corner of his mouth, a new gesture she doesn’t recognize. “I had no choice. Jeanette was threatening to go to the police. I knew I’d lose you, Eva. End up in jail. I never wanted you to find out about my past. I thought it’d be better if you believed I was dead.”

  “How?” she says, the word a whisper of disbelief.

  “I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head. “It was a terrible decision. But once I’d made it . . . it was too late. There was no going back.”

  “What did you do afterward?” Saul asks.

  “I left the beach once it was dark. Jumped a train back to London. I went to the apartment—”

  “What?” she says, stunned. “You went to our place?”

  “My clothes were soaked. The only dry thing I was wearing was the oilskin from the boat. And I needed some money.”

  Eva tries to make sense of this: he had been in their apartment, collected money. Had he put some money aside? Eva had been through his things and sorted out the clothes in his wardrobe, but hadn’t noticed anything was missing. She remembers how dazed she’d felt in her first weeks as a widow. The loneliness had been so overwhelming that she’d thrown open the windows and switched on all the lights and the television just for company.

  A memory from that day flashes into her thoughts. She’d gone to fill the kettle, but had frozen at the sight of a tea bag lying in the sink. At the time it had felt out of place and now she realizes why: before they drove to her mother’s for the weekend, Eva had cleaned the kitchen, emptied the dishes from the draining board, and scoured the sink.

  She lifts her gaze to meet Jackson’s. “Did you make tea at the apartment?”

  He blinks. “I was freezing. I needed to warm up.”

  She pictures the dark tea stain in the basin that wouldn’t scrub off. “You left a tea bag in the sink.”

  His eyes widen as if surprised by his mistake.

  Her voice is low and edged with steel as she says, “When the coast guard called off the search, I wouldn’t accept that you’d drowned. I couldn’t give up. So I went to the quay and begged a fisherman to take me out in his boat. It was rough on the water. Freezing. I got a flashlight and scanned the sea looking for you. I was out there in the dead of night searching for you—while you, you, were warm and safe drinking tea!”

  “Eva—” he says, stepping forward, his hands reaching for her.

  She shoves him away with a hard push, feeling his ribs beneath her hands. For a moment, she is Jeanette standing on that jetty filled with rage, watching as he staggers backward. She wishes he would fall. Disappear for good.

  Jackson looks shocked by the force. “Please! I wasn’t thinking straight! I thought it was the best decision for everyone.”

  “No,” she says, with a deadly cold tone. “It was the best decision for you.”

  “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN all this time?” Saul asks Jackson. “It’s been months.”

  “I stayed in the UK. Manchester. That’s where I ended up.”

  Manchester, Eva thinks, trying to picture Jackson there. It’s a city they’d never visited together, a huge sprawling place where he could lose himself in the crowds.

  “I found a hostel, picked up some cash work on a building site, tried to get my head straight
.”

  “And then you decided to come back to Tas?” Saul asks.

  “No. Not at first. I didn’t know where to go . . . All I knew is I didn’t want to leave the UK.” He looks over to where she stands in front of the fire, the thick heat drying her hair and easing the chill from her bones. “I wanted to be in the same place as you. Not seeing you . . . it was torture. I couldn’t bear it.” His head shakes slowly from side to side. “I rang the apartment once—just to hear your voice. But it wasn’t you who answered. It was a new tenant. She said you’d moved out. I had no idea where you’d gone, if you were okay. So I wrote to your mother.”

  “You wrote to my mother?”

  He nods. “I made out I was a friend of yours from college.”

  “Sarah,” she says. “You wrote saying your name was Sarah.”

  “That’s right.”

  “My God . . .” she whispers as she starts to see the things she’d missed.

  “When I heard you were in Tas,” he says, running a hand over his forehead, “I knew it was all gonna unravel. But I couldn’t stop it. There was nothing I could do.”

  “How did you get here?” Saul asks.

  “I flew. A guy on the building site had a friend who knew how to get hold of a passport.”

  “And when you arrived here, then what?” Saul asks. “Where did you go? Where are you getting—”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Eva shouts, her hands slicing through the air in front of her, the blanket slipping from her shoulders. “I don’t care where you’ve been, or how you got here. I don’t care about any of that. I just need to know, why? I need you to tell me, Jackson”—her voice catches on his name—“why you’ve done this to me?”

  He stares at her, his bloodshot eyes hooded with sorrow. His lips move over his teeth as if feeling for the words he can offer her. She sees him look up to the ceiling and swallow hard. He draws a breath as if to speak, but then his face crumples. His head drops forward, shoulders rounding, as a wretched sob rocks through his body.

  35

  “I need some air,” Eva says, her eyes anywhere but on Jackson.

  There is something about the set of her jaw that tells Saul not to follow as she goes out onto the deck. The floodlight trips on and he watches through the glass doors as she leans against the railing, staring out into darkness. He cannot imagine what this is doing to her.

  He glances at Jackson, who is rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. Saul feels anger thicken in his throat. “The bush fire,” he says as levelly as he can manage. “Jeanette told us. Said it was your cigarette that started it. That true?”

  Slowly, Jackson looks up and nods.

  “You never called the fire department,” Saul says, tightness spreading across his chest. “You let it burn.”

  “I was scared. Scared of getting in trouble. How fucking ridiculous, I know!” He looks directly at Saul. “That’s who I am. Someone selfish enough to let it burn.” His face twists, teeth clamped together. “When I think of Mum . . .”

  A log crackles and then falls in the wood-burning stove, sending sparks flying upward. Saul turns to watch.

  “I’ve been up there, to Eagle Cape,” Jackson says a few moments later. “First time since we scattered Mum’s ashes. I’ve been sleeping out that way—there’s an old fishing hut tucked back from the shoreline that no one ever visits.”

  Saul keeps watching the red and orange flames dance, thinking how easy it would be to hide out on Wattleboon; all the wild space empty of people.

  “I sat at the lookout—you know, where she used to go to write—and I just watched the sun rising out of the sea, remembering all those times she brought us there. All those stories she used to tell about the whales, how they’d sing to warn each other when the whalers were coming.”

  Saul remembers. He used to love her stories of the ocean—about fish that danced, dolphins that talked, shells closed tight around secrets.

  “I see her, Saul. Mum. I see her face all the time. Even now.”

  Saul turns and looks at Jackson. Guilt haunts his brother’s features and his hands are locked together in front of his mouth.

  “There were so many times I thought about telling you and Dad.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “You saw what her death did to Dad. She was his whole world. He fell to pieces. I just . . . couldn’t bear him knowing it was because of me. Then—the more time that passed, the harder it seemed to say anything.”

  Saul feels the heat of the wood-burning stove against the backs of his legs, drying the bottoms of his jeans. “So you pretended it never happened. Kept quiet.”

  “Isn’t that how we did things in our family? No one ever talked about anything,” Jackson says, his voice lifting. “There was this fucking cloud of silence above everything: Mum’s death, Dad losing the business, his drinking. We didn’t talk about anything.”

  “So let’s start now, because there’s a hell of a lot I wanna know.”

  Jackson lowers himself down onto a wooden chair. “Then ask.”

  “The night of my birthday,” Saul says, digging his hands deep into his pockets. “Why did you go after Jeanette?”

  Out of all the reams of questions that are filling his head, he’s surprised that this is the one he picks first. But then, perhaps that night was the trigger for everything that followed. Or was the trigger fifteen years earlier, the cigarette shared in the woods? There are so many possible starts, but they all lead to the same place: right here, on this night, with his brother and the woman they both love.

  Jackson leans back, the wooden bones of the chair creaking beneath him. “Because she was yours.”

  Saul blinks, surprised.

  “I turned up late to your barbecue. I was already drunk, d’you remember? Told you I’d been drinking with my boss. But that wasn’t it. I just needed a few drinks before I could face the party.”

  “Why?”

  “Seeing you surrounded by all your friends—seeing this incredible life you’d made—it was tough for me. I knew I could never have that. I didn’t deserve it.”

  Despair radiates from Jackson like a second heat in the room. He rubs a hand over his mouth and continues: “When I saw Jeanette again on your birthday, we talked about the fire. She’d been there that day; she’d lived with her own regrets. It was a relief to finally speak to someone who understood.” He shrugs. “I told myself you had everything, so why couldn’t I have her? Maybe I needed to prove to you—to myself—I was as good as you.”

  “Did you love her?”

  Jackson places his hands on his thighs. “In the beginning, when we were dating, it was pretty intense. I thought maybe it was love, but looking back, I think we were just connected by the fire. We only had each other to talk to. That made us feel close, I guess. So no, it wasn’t love. I never loved Jeanette.”

  Saul sees now the hollowness of Jackson’s victory. “You never even apologized.”

  “Because I didn’t feel sorry. I felt like I deserved Jeanette. That’s the truth. You saw us together in the club, but you didn’t confront me—you just walked away. Didn’t even fight for her. Didn’t fight for nothing. How much could she’ve meant to you?”

  Perhaps it suited Saul to walk away. His and Jackson’s relationship had been fraying for years. Maybe Jeanette was the excuse Saul had needed to leave his brother behind. “But you didn’t only take Jeanette, did you? You took my whole past. Fed it to Eva as your own.”

  “It wasn’t like that. I never planned to. It just happened.”

  “How?”

  Jackson glances out toward the deck and Saul follows his gaze. The floodlight has gone out and in the darkness Eva is a charcoal silhouette. “When I met her I just felt . . . I don’t know how to explain it. I suppose the word is hopeful. I felt hopeful about life again.”

  Saul keeps his breath steady, wanting to hear the rest.

  “I never set out to lie to her, I really didn’t. When I got on the plane I was wearing an
old college sweatshirt of yours that Dad loaned me—and Eva asked me what I’d studied.” Jackson continues staring at Eva outside. “I feel like there are these moments . . . these hinges in my life, when all this possibility hangs on what I’m gonna do next—only I do the wrong thing.”

  He turns back to Saul. “I told Eva I’d studied marine biology. Just like you. And those words—they sounded so good spoken aloud that I kept on lying. I never set out to mislead Eva. To mislead anyone. I just wanted to start again, Saul. I wanted to be a better person than the one I was here.”

  OUTSIDE, THE WIND HAS dropped and the night feels still and cool. Eva stands on the deck drawing the briny air deep into her lungs.

  Looking up at the sky, she sees that the moon is almost full tonight, its glow stealing the brilliance of the stars. She’s just able to make out the wide band of lighter sky that is the Milky Way and she focuses on it, remembering the time Jackson told her there are 200 billion stars within its galaxy. It had been their wedding night and they’d been sitting in the lantern room at the top of the lighthouse watching the sky together, and Eva had felt the excitement of their future laid before them in the stars.

  Behind her the glass doors slide open and someone steps out onto the deck. The floodlight is triggered and she closes her eyes against the sudden flare. Footsteps move toward her, coming to a stop at her side.

  After a moment, she hears Jackson’s voice: “You’re so beautiful.”

  The words are all wrong. They make her skin itch. When there is so much else to say, how can he think that’s what she wants to hear? She turns to look at him, trying to find something recognizable in the man she once loved. She had adored his smile; it was wide and open, showing the full stretch of his teeth, and his eyes would dance with light. But now his beard shadows so much of his face she feels as though she’s only seeing part of him. “I don’t know you.”

  Anguish flickers in his eyes. “Please, Eva, don’t say that! You’re the only person who really did. You made me feel more like myself than anyone else. You looked at me like I was worth loving.”