Breaking Through

by A. M. Hartnett

  As far as Miranda could tell, he had just been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong history.

  Poor guy.

  What really interested her was the other story in his past. It was like something out of a TV show: affluent teenagers moving towards adulthood with more excess than she thought imaginable. She came across a documentary online about one particularly juicy episode involving one of Simon’s friends, Jacques Taureau, and the attack he suffered at the hands of his gorgeous and messed-up girlfriend. Miranda started when she realised she had seen this before. She had watched it with Juliet one night when they couldn’t find anything good on television or Netflix. Simon wasn’t interviewed, but he was fingered as one of the major players in this theatre of sex, drugs and violence.

  She pressed PAUSE on an image of him standing with his cronies, hair dark and floppy and half-covering his face. The way he grinned at the camera made him appear absolutely demonic. His grin wasn’t playful but boastful while his eyes offered a challenge: I’ve got a secret, what are you going to do to get it out of me?

  Another snapshot showed him with blue hair slicked back, a girl on his arm and a drink in his hand. The punk version of Clyde Barrow.

  And then there was the blue-haired burnout. She found that picture much less entertaining. Leaning out of the window in the backseat of a car, young Simon Reeve looked like he was seconds away from passing out.

  Having mined all she could from the Internet, Miranda closed her browser and shut down her computer.

  She felt little about the knowledge she’d gleaned. Sure, Simon Reeve had been messed up in his life … but what in the hell was he doing toying around with someone as insignificant as her? What could a man who had once been punched in the nose for screwing around with a notoriously hot-headed hockey player’s woman see in someone half his age and with none of his life experience?

  Other than sex, that is.

  Yet as she collected her dirty dishes and carried them down the stairs, she thought of the funny face he’d made when Eddie had twisted his finger, and his joyful laughter as he drove her in the wrong direction across the bridge.

  Maybe he’s just looking for the same thing I am, she thought, and laughed to herself as the very thought.

  If only I knew what in the hell I was looking for.

  * * *

  When he was seventeen, the idea of attending that meeting in the church basement struck Simon almost as trendy.

  Hitting rock bottom back then meant totalling his car and having his dad, a crown attorney, threaten to let his ass rot in jail. Simon knew damn well his old man would just send him off to some place on the West Coast to dry out. No big deal.

  Then came the condition that he go to those meetings, stipulated not only by the courts but by his father. That first meeting was something novel. The cheap coffee and that acidic burn that went so well with the first smoke after the meeting, the whiff of piety that penetrated the floorboards of the chapel above, and the sense of superiority over the old-timers who had never been able to get their shit together.

  I’m young and stupid and I know it, what’s your excuse?

  It had been something for Simon to laugh about back then with his friend, Quinn, who had been his dealer before Quinn himself was arrested for assault. They’d sit on the kerb outside that all-night coffee shop and laugh about old times. Simon went along with it for a few months, until Quinn’s probation ended and he started spending all his nights working.

  Without someone to share his mocking with, the novelty wore off. He went, because it was a condition of his probation, but once it was over he floored it back to Montreal, where it would start all over again, until his next fuck-up.

  At 38, he’d used up all his fuck-ups. That last one, while not on a par with driving his car into a ditch or ending up in hospital because his mouth earned him a trio of cracked ribs, was pretty bad. He’d felt old as he stood looking down into the oily waters of St John’s Harbour, just one step away from submerging himself in the frigid water, but a chill had come along and raced up his pant legs, making him wonder if he wanted his last thought to be whether his testicles would shatter from the cold before his heart stopped beating. With a resounding ‘no’ Simon had returned to his hotel, to the woman he’d picked up earlier that night and to what was left of the cocaine they’d shared.

  These days, he was the old guy muttering about his life’s failings under the fluorescent lights. There was nothing novel about the meeting. He wasn’t there because he was forced to, counting down the days until he could go back to the party. He was there because he’d finally gotten it through his skull that he needed to be there.

  There was something different about his trek from the church to where he had parked his car at the kerbside today. Standing in that room the other night, looking at Miranda holding that baby, he’d been stripped of that last layer of self-pity.

  Who was he to feel sorry for himself when he had no goddamn good reason to? Had he ever really struggled? Not like the woman who’d taken him to bed. She wasn’t impoverished, but at 23 and taking care of an orphaned baby she had bigger balls than he’d had at that age.

  He thought about the young man he had been then, some shit with blue hair or green hair or whatever colour he had picked that month, and a tongue ring, with nicotine-stained fingers and pupils dilated from whatever he had taken that night, and he wanted to throttle his former self.

  He thought of that grown man getting ready to take death’s swim and was ashamed.

  Simon pulled out his phone and checked the time. He still had about fifteen minutes before he had to pick Miranda up in the parking garage. At this time of night, he would beat that commute by about five minutes, assuming he didn’t get lost along the way.

  And assuming the man leaning against the stone pillar where John the Baptist welcomed the flock was an illusion brought on by spending far too much time thinking about how good it would feel when he buried his cock in Miranda’s tight pussy.

  ‘Fucking hell, doesn’t the word “anonymous” mean anything to you?’ Simon snapped.

  Of course it didn’t, he realised as soon as the words were out in the atmosphere. Jacques Taureau had become a sort of Batman in the last decade and a half, minus the crime-fighting. Simon’s oldest friend in the world had no sense whatsoever of personal space unless it was his own that was in question, and privacy was something only he was entitled to.

  Jacques held up his phone. ‘Do the words “call back” mean anything to you?’

  Simon tucked his hands into his pockets and sucked in a deep breath. He could take Jacques being an entitled prick, but this he hated. He remembered that patient yet scolding look from the first time he’d dried out, when he’d raged over being trapped at the secluded house in New Brunswick that Jacques called home, with no escape to the excess he needed so badly he burned.

  ‘I’ve been busy. I have a new job that’s taking up my time.’

  ‘That’s no excuse,’ Jacques replied in the same flat matter-of-fact tone as always.

  Simon’s old friend accepted no excuses, and no arguments either. He had always been like this, but before the violent attack that left him a recluse, his authority had more to do with his popularity amongst his peers.

  ‘Not that I don’t appreciate the three-hour drive to make sure I’m not in a crack den,’ Simon retorted, ‘but I have a date.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Yes, yet. If you’re still in town tomorrow morning we can catch up, but right now I have a woman waiting for me and she won’t put up with my shit like yours does with you.’

  Jacques said nothing as he moved past Simon to sit on the stone wall alongside the church steps, and Simon wondered what would happen if he just turned around and headed to his car parked on the street and left Jacques sitting there.

  ‘You know,’ Jacques went on quietly, ‘when you don’t return calls or answer texts, assumptions are made.’

  Simon scowled
hard, not because he was angry but because his sinuses had suddenly gone all peppery to match the lump in his throat. He held it in and sat on the wall next to his friend, and cleared his throat a few times before speaking.

  ‘I’m still ashamed of myself,’ he admitted hoarsely. ‘Not just the whole embarrassing episode with having my stomach pumped, but the whole fucked-up series of events that led up to it.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I knew that Martin Davis’s son was up to no good, but I had my hands full with Davis and his rabid right-wing foot-in-mouth disease. I ignored the warning signs because I wanted so badly to prove to myself that I could do something other than your bidding. Then what happened? I get the police at my door asking me about my connections to organised crime, and the next thing you know not only am I splashed all over the news but you, too. Then …’

  Simon clenched his fists in his pockets. It was ‘then’ that brought him to this meeting, a week after the near-dip in St John’s Harbour when he woke up in the hospital, alone, feeling like hell because of all the liquor they’d taken out of him. Lucky to be alive, he was told, but it sure as hell didn’t feel that way at the time, or for a long time afterwards.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Jacques reiterated. ‘Whether you were there or not, Connell Davis still would have been caught running that rub and tug, and his whole disgusting history would have been exposed.’

  ‘Still …’

  ‘Still, why the hell would you go from the frying pan into the fire with Michael Roe? You know what kind of man he is. He hero-worshipped my father, and we both know the kind of man Dominic was.’

  ‘I have bills to pay. I have a debt, a stupid debt, to chisel away at, and no, I won’t take your money.’

  ‘I wouldn’t give you money,’ Jacques retorted. ‘I’d give you a job. If you want my money you have to earn it.’

  ‘I don’t want to work for you either, you cranky son of a bitch.’

  He returned Jacques’ sharp look and then matched the low, rolling laughter that followed. He scrubbed his face with his palms and groaned.

  ‘At least now I can appreciate the irony of having my life and career nuked by some drug-addled cock like Connell Davis. For a while there, I had myself convinced that he was actually some kind of phantom version of myself come to drag me down to hell.’

  ‘We weren’t that bad. We were bad, but we weren’t that bad. We weren’t rotten to the core. Imagine a privileged kid like Connell Davis turning pimp to make his dick look bigger than it is.’

  Jacques leaned forward and fiddled with his phone, though Simon knew he wasn’t actually reading anything. It was his nerves at being so far from home that made him twitchy.

  Simon had never really understood Jacques’ disorder until he found himself putting off leaving his apartment for two weeks straight after getting out of the hospital. Ironically, it was Jacques, on one of his first journeys from rural New Brunswick in sixteen years, who banged on his door and finally got Simon up and moving again.

  ‘So, how’s the old home?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Noisy.’

  ‘Told you that you should have leased an office front instead of converting the cottage.’

  ‘Yeah, well …’

  ‘How’s the lady of the manor?’

  ‘Noisy.’ They laughed together again, and Jacques tucked his phone back into his pocket. ‘She never shuts up, but I love her. Tell me about this woman you’re meeting who won’t put up with your shit.’

  Simon didn’t really want to talk about it, but he knew there was no escaping the subject. ‘She’s twenty-three and will probably be carrying my nuts around in her purse in a week.’

  ‘Are you sure you can handle twenty-three?’

  ‘Probably not, but it’ll be fun to try. Speaking of which, I really do need to get going. I told her I would pick her up soon and I don’t want to be the shit who leaves her waiting.’ He pushed away from the wall and looked down at Taureau. ‘How did you figure out where to find me?’

  ‘I followed you from home. I figured if I buzzed you wouldn’t let me up. It was a pain in the ass to keep up with that damned roundabout, but I made it.’

  ‘I’m actually glad you did. Are you at a hotel?’

  ‘I was going to drive right back.’

  Simon shook his head. ‘Go to a hotel. I should be dropping Miranda off at work just after lunch. We can grab lunch and then you can take off while it’s still daylight.’

  After a quick and frustrating attempt to determine the route to a quiet hotel not in the downtown core, and a promise to make a trip up the highway in the next month, the men embraced and parted.

  Simon wasn’t lying when he told Jacques he was glad to see him: it had been months since he’d seen his friend, and, now that they’d met, Simon felt lighter.

  He pulled out his phone and checked the time. Five minutes till the time he said he’d pick Miranda up. He fired off a quick and apologetic text to her, then followed in the roaring wake of Jacques’ bike from the suburbs where his group met and into the city.

  * * *

  ‘Don’t waste my lipstick,’ Juliet said as she came up alongside Miranda and leaned against the vanity. ‘You have all the right colour for red, but for some reason you can’t pull it off, you freak.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Miranda countered, but nonetheless set the lipstick aside. She uncapped another, also swiped from Juliet’s stash.

  Juliet shook her head at the cinnamon shade. ‘Are you going to a book-club meeting?’

  ‘Rather than just criticising me, do my goddamn make-up for me.’

  ‘I will if you tell me who you’ll be puckering your lips around,’ Juliet retorted.

  ‘I told you, it’s just some work get-together.’

  Juliet rolled her eyes and flounced out of the room, and Miranda rested her head against the vanity.

  Bloody Juliet.

  She’d come in snooping for a phone charger and seen the discarded condom wrapper on the floor next to Miranda’s bed. Miranda had been with Eddie at the kitchen table when Juliet waltzed in with a smirk on her face, wrapper pinched between thumb and forefinger. Big sister had spent the rest of the day up little sister’s ass, trying to get details that Miranda wasn’t ready to broadcast yet.

  ‘It’s not some work get-together,’ Juliet said as she returned, her massive palette of colours under one arm. ‘You don’t go to work get-togethers, and on the odd time you lose your mind and do go to a work get-together, you don’t dress like you can’t wait for someone to tear your clothes off of you. By the way, that dress is not happening either.’

  ‘It’s simple and black.’

  ‘That’s exactly what’s wrong with it.’ Juliet dragged the wicker hassock out from beneath the vanity and pointed at its worn seat.

  Miranda quickly switched places with her and waited while Juliet made one more trip to her bedroom. She returned with a plastic baggie of cotton swabs and foam wedges, and a lighted cosmetic mirror.

  Rather than be insulted by Juliet’s apparent deduction that Miranda shouldn’t leave the house looking like the witch from Hansel and Gretel, Miranda was excited about meeting Simon looking like she stepped out of a magazine. The black dress she’d pulled out of the closet was sexy and slinky, but Juliet could come up with something that would have him on his knees at first sight. Thank God her measurements and Juliet’s were virtually the same

  Juliet plugged in the mirror and turned it on, then angled it so the light washed over Miranda. She took the vanity seat, loaded up an angled brush with bronze shadow, and with her free hand tilted Miranda’s head back.

  ‘At least tell me if he’s someone I used to fuck,’ Juliet said as she filled the upper lid.

  ‘Probably not. He doesn’t seem like the type to hang out in noisy bars.’ She suppressed a shudder as the cotton swept across the second lid, and figured that she might as well relent. She’d never get a moment’s peace now that the cat was out of the bag. ‘He
works in the same building as I do. Sort of.’

  ‘Ah, so it is kind of a work thing.’

  ‘Not even close. He works for a politician whose campaign office is on the top floor. He wears a suit and drives a car worth more than I make in a year.’

  ‘What’s he look like?’

  ‘Gorgeous. If he had a beard, he’d pass for a Viking.’

  ‘Love those Vikings. Good in bed?’

  Miranda grinned. ‘Unbelievable.’

  ‘Nice. Finally. Good for you. All right, grab the edge of the seat and don’t flinch, unless you want to look like Baby Jane Hudson.’ She uncapped the liquid eyeliner and held tight as Miranda shuddered at the cool swipe. ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘Simon Reeve.’ She waited, but apparently Juliet was as up on current events as Miranda. ‘He was in the news a few month ago, apparently. That politician’s son who was running that prostitution ring in Ontario …’

  ‘Oh, shit, you mean that hot mess from that documentary show on that nutcase billionaire?’

  With her liner done, Miranda drew back and gawked at Juliet. ‘You actually remember watching that?’

  ‘Yes! That was better than a movie. They kept showing pictures, and one of them was this Reeve guy.’ Juliet was giddy as she fanned Miranda’s face with her hands. ‘Remember that one picture of him they showed that made me cream my panties, leaning out the back of the car, totally bombed out. The one with the stud in his tongue and blue hair.’

  Miranda wanted to roll her eyes, but now a pencil was running across her upper lid and she didn’t want to risk messing her make-up.

  It’s funny how we saw two different things in that picture, she thought to herself. Miranda had seen a sorry human being, and Juliet had seen a hot mess.

  ‘I know exactly who you’re talking about,’ Juliet reiterated, and put the pencil down. ‘You’re doing your own mascara, by the way. You flinched last time and I almost popped your eyeball out.’