Breaking Through

by A. M. Hartnett

  Murray was right. It had never been about him. It had always been about Simon.

  As much as Simon had hated working for Roe, he had nonetheless looked upon it as a way to at least begin to rebuild what little of a future he had.

  Somewhere, sometime, on those long drives across the country, Simon had settled in his mind. He’d draw his salary from Taureau, Inc. for a decade or two and then he’d rest. When he’d decided to leave Jacques in anticipation of his friend’s departure from the company – and Dominic Taureau’s increasingly sleazy demands – he’d had to adjust. Things seemed to go well for a while, creeping into the lives of everyone that surrounded Martin Davis, save for the man’s nineteen-year-old son.

  He didn’t feel old as he read and reread those emails. He felt like nothing, like nobody at all, a body without a soul, doomed. He was forever in limbo, all because he had made one bad decision after another until they were all linked in a heavy chain around his neck.

  He set the papers aside, reached out and his hand hovered. Bottle or phone? That was the decision before him. Neither one would give him any sort of peace.

  He closed his fist and withdrew it. If he got drunk, he’d still be miserable and he’d also be ashamed, but at least he’d pass out at some point. If he picked up the phone, he’d have to admit his defeat sooner.

  Calling one of his friends from the support group and preaching his woes to the choir.

  Calling Jacques, he’d have to admit that he couldn’t make it on his own after all.

  Calling Miranda, he’d have to tell her that he would never be the man she needed him to be.

  The last possibility seemed to tear him from stem to stern. He squeezed his eyes shut as they began to water and pressed his fists to his forehead.

  Just as it would be so easy to take a drink, it would be easy to go to Miranda and lose himself inside her. He held his breath, because if he breathed in, he wouldn’t smell the deodoriser that was spritzed all around the room but the coconut smell of her hair. If he called her, if he heard her voice, he’d get in his car and go back. He’d spend all night lost in the high of just being surrounded by her, and in the morning he’d still have being a failure to deal with.

  Lifting his head and looking at the night table, he chose. He took the bottle and wished he knew where to get something more powerful than whiskey.

  The sun was still pressing through the curtains when he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, and so he slept. When he woke up, it was dark and there were infomercials on the television. Compulsion made him reach for the phone at his right, but memory burned the tips of his fingers at the last minute. He remembered what he had done, and his head and stomach followed suit with a nauseating wave.

  Simon got up and went to the bathroom. Once his stomach was emptied and his mouth washed out, he returned to the bed and in the white flicker of the television he started again.

  He didn’t make it to the end of the bottle like he planned. He set it aside and swung his legs over the edge of the bed and tried to determine whether he’d make it to the toilet.

  His stomach rolled and took the nausea with it and, before he could make sense of the overwhelming feeling that rushed in on its wake, he began to cry.

  Just over an hour later, Simon sat on the plastic chair outside his motel room, the comforter wrapped around his shoulders and the bottle propped between his legs. From the corner of his eye, he caught a light on the road. He didn’t look up as the truck rolled into the driveway and parked parallel to his wing of the motel, or when Jacques got out of it and stood in front of him.

  ‘I almost forgot I called you,’ Simon murmured, and took a sip from the bottle. ‘I was just sitting here wondering why I was outside when I could be in bed.’

  A figure emerged from the passenger side and moved past him into the room, and the sounds of his things being packed drifted from within.

  Jacques squatted down in front of him. ‘Of all the places for you to get shit-faced, you pick this one.’

  ‘It’s got fourteen channels, but only six of them come in without static,’ Simon said, tears coming with his laughter. ‘Better than some of the holes we ended up in.’

  ‘That is true,’ Jacques said, and gave the comforter a tug. ‘You need to get dressed. You can’t take this with you.’

  Zombie-like, Simon let Jacques lead him through the room and into the bathroom. By the time he’d dressed him, Grace had gone and taken all of Simon’s belongings with him save for the clothes on his back and driven off in his car. Jacques threw the room key on the table and took Simon to the truck.

  ‘If you have to throw up, tell me right away so I can pull over,’ Jacques said quietly as he urged Simon into the passenger side.

  Simon turned and took a breath to say something smart, but instead he just fell apart. He leaned against Jacques, face buried against his shoulder, and sobbed.

  ‘I can’t stop fucking up,’ he gurgled. ‘Why can’t I stop fucking up?’

  Jacques said nothing. He just wrapped his arms around Simon’s shoulders and let him cry.

  Chapter Twelve

  Even before he opened his eyes, Simon knew he had been dragged to Jacques’s home at The Convent House.

  The yellow light pressing through his lids told him exactly where he was: the bedroom on the lower floor with that ghastly stained-glass window over the headboard. During his long stint at The Convent House about a decade ago after the big detox, he’d taken the room and found himself waking every day as the sun rose and the room lit up with that piss-coloured film. He’d combated this quickly by using a scarf as an eyeshade.

  No such luck that morning. His head ached and his stomach rolled. He pulled the edge of the pillow over his face and tried to will himself back to sleep, but it was no use. The day had gotten into his head and there was no returning to sleep.

  Groaning, Simon lifted his head and looked around. He immediately flopped back down.

  ‘Jesus, do you have any idea how creepy that is?’ he growled, and dragged the blankets over his head.

  Jacques said nothing from his post in the chair near the door, and Simon stubbornly cocooned himself deeper into the bed. The intrusion made him bratty. It took him back to the early mornings at the Windswept Treatment Centre when he had to get up for a day of journaling and doing yard work, and his time at The Convent House when Jacques dragged him out of this very bed to go for a run on the trails.

  After a moment of simmering in the silence, Simon shucked off the blankets and glared. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s almost noon.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, it’s time to get your ass out of bed.’

  ‘Do you do this to the lady of the manor?’

  Taureau chuckled. ‘I have much more interesting ways to get her out of bed.’

  ‘Then I suppose I should be grateful I didn’t wake up with your cock in my ass.’ Simon sat up and scrubbed his aching eyes with his fists. ‘I didn’t puke in your car, did I?’

  ‘No, you puked in the driveway, and then on Grace’s foot.’ He pointed to the night table. ‘She made you a double.’

  Simon swung his gaze towards the mug next to him. For a moment his empty stomach rebelled in anticipation of the acidic brew being poured into it, but his aching brain begged for the caffeine hit. The coffee was warm and he drank half of it right away.

  He made a valley in the bedding between his legs and set the coffee in it, and that’s when the shame crept in. It was like it came from inside the mattress and moved like slime along his bare back to burrow into his brain.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, his throat constricting. ‘What the hell was I thinking?’

  ‘Obviously you weren’t. Otherwise, you would have found somewhere more interesting to get wrecked than a motel room in Sackville.’ Jacques got up from his chair and sat at the edge of the bed. ‘Just the booze this time?’

  Simon chuckled quietly and shook his head. ‘Yeah, but only because I had no idea how to ge
t anything else in this neck of the woods.’

  ‘Tell me what set this off.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t read the papers on my bed.’

  ‘I want to hear you say it out loud.’

  Shaking his head, Simon stared at his warped reflection in the coffee cup. ‘It’s like I’m in hell and I don’t realise it, like I’m going to think I’m getting my shit together and actually experience a bit of happiness, a bit of satisfaction, only to find myself hitting the same river of fire.’

  ‘Is that seriously the excuse you’re going to use?’

  Anger filled Simon’s head so quickly that for a moment he could only see red.

  It’s not an excuse.

  The argument stuck between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, then burned up and turned to ash. He swallowed hard to get rid of the taste of it, and gave his head another shake.

  ‘I’ve got no more excuses,’ he said. ‘I did it because I felt like an asshole, and so I did what I always do when I feel like an asshole.’

  Jacques laughed. ‘You’re always going to be an asshole, and that’s part of your problem. You’re constantly aspiring to be a better man than you are. You’ve been like that since we were kids –’

  Simon held up his hand. ‘Stop. Please, I hate when you do that.’

  ‘Well, I’m goddamn sick of worrying about you,’ Jacques snapped and got to his feet. He shut the door to the bedroom and leaned against it, every inch of him bristling. ‘You’re my oldest friend and I’d do just about anything for you, but this is the last time I stay up all night worrying about you. I’ve got so much on my plate this year. I’m going grey in places I didn’t even know I could go grey. I wake up every day and think of how much easier it would be to just stay here and not deal with my shit, but I do it because I have to, because after numbing myself with drugs and booze, and then hiding for almost half my life, I’ve come to the realisation that it’s just not worth it, and I have no idea how to drum that into your head, Simon. It’s not worth it, and every time you slip and fall I have to stop myself from saying the same about you.’

  The memory of weeping against Jacques’s shoulder the night before came to him in a nauseating rush. His friend had driven, girlfriend in tow, almost an hour in the middle of the night to collect him, had held him while Simon fell apart for what increasingly seemed like no good reason at all.

  The heat of shame cooled during Jacques’s spiel as loneliness took hold. Jacques hadn’t spoken the words, but the ultimatum was there: heal, or lose the friendship.

  Isn’t that what he had urged Miranda to do when it came to her sister? Find the bottom line and make it as big and bold as she could, and just take care of herself.

  Miranda.

  Christ, Miranda.

  He wiped away the tears that had sneaked down his cheeks as he absorbed the tension in the room. He’d told her only yesterday that he would be there for her if she needed him. He’d held her and bled for her, and, God damn her, he’d loved her as he tried to ease her pain.

  She doesn’t need another wreck in her life.

  The thought came to him from the part of himself that had avoided eye contact with the clerk at the liquor store the previous night. It came in the voice of a young man who could never stop moving, never find any satisfaction, who finally said, ‘Fuck it, have a drink and don’t think about it at all.’ He recognised that voice, that young Simon Reeve, as his demon, not the liquor that had trashed him the night before.

  The thought came again: she doesn’t need another wreck in her life. But this time the thought brought hellfire in its wake that incinerated the voice of young Simon.

  He looked up at Jacques, who seemed just as infuriated, his mouth tight and his thick brows pulled together. He had reached up and cupped his face, rubbing the scar that ran across his cheek.

  Once, the scars had been a sad reminder of how content to be broken Jacques was. Now, for the first time, Simon saw those scars as evidence of survival. Not only of that night Jacques was attacked in his bed, but of the last year, of going forward without knowing what would happen if he did, of being brave and reaching out for something other than the baggage of his past.

  Simon’s own scars were so pale and thin in comparison.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and set his coffee cup aside. ‘I’m so very sorry. I should have asked for your help a long time ago, but I didn’t want to seem weak and needy. Funny how that worked out – I ended up being the biggest pain in the ass by keeping you at bay.’

  ‘I don’t want an apology,’ Jacques said quietly but not softly, flint dragging across his gravel voice. ‘I want you to take a shower, get dressed and get home. Call your sponsor and have a chat. Take your woman flowers and then spend a few hours rolling her around your bed. Tomorrow morning, get up and make up your mind what you’re going to do about Roe.’

  He pushed away from the door and grasped the handle, but only opened the door a crack before he closed it again and reached into the pocket of his plaid shirt.

  ‘I was debating whether to do this or not, and I know you’ll put up a fight, but I want you to take this.’

  He pulled out a piece of paper, and Simon shook his head. ‘I told you before, I don’t want your money.’

  ‘Consider it severance. When I resigned from the company, I essentially phased out your very unique position.’

  ‘And I quit before you pulled the plug.’

  Jacques rattled the paper at the end of his outstretched hand. ‘But I knew much longer than that what I was going to do. Simon, you did a lot of shit for me that I wouldn’t have trusted anyone else with. I put you in the position you find yourself in. You earned every penny of this, and I’m trusting you’ll use it to pay off your credit cards and live on what’s left while you look for a new job.’

  Simon took the cheque, but he didn’t look at the amount. ‘You’re pretty sure I’ll walk away from Roe, aren’t you? That I won’t ransom what I found out about Murray in exchange for something?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have called me otherwise. You’d be in the hospital, or worse. Of the two of us, you were always the one who could tell right from wrong.’

  Left alone in the room, Simon lay back and stared at the ceiling, still clutching the cheque between thumb and forefinger. He felt like he needed a good cry, but aside from a slight pepper in his sinuses he couldn’t squeeze anything out. Maybe he had broken the dam the night before and there was nothing left, or maybe it was just because crying wouldn’t make any difference.

  He replayed the last 24 hours of his life, from kissing Miranda goodbye outside the science museum and feeling like he owned the world, to stinking and scolded at The Convent House.

  After what he guessed was ten minutes of putting himself back together, Simon retreated to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and used the toilet, and he was about to get under the spray when he stopped.

  He’d been avoiding mirrors as much as he could for the last six months. He never met his own gaze; he’d angle the shaving mirror so that he could prepare his appearance like he was watching another man, or he’d just keep his gaze lowered.

  ‘Well, hello there,’ he greeted the ghoul in the mirror. His hair was a wreck and he needed a shave, but the worst of it was his colour: skin green and eyes bloodshot. He looked like he felt.

  In the shower, he scrubbed every inch twice. He located a shaving kit in the cabinet. His clothes were nowhere to be found, but a small pile of Jacques’s rested on the bureau with his wallet and iPhone resting on top.

  Fresh guilt struck him as he tapped the home button on his phone and saw Miranda’s name. The last text she sent simply asked, Where are you?

  Simon set the phone aside and dragged the polo shirt over his head, and his vanity took a hit when he discovered it was on the tight side. He was a big guy, but Jacques was a monster. If he fitted into Jacques’s shirt, it didn’t mean he had developed the muscle mass his friend had. It just meant he was getting fat. />
  Still, he felt new in the clean, comfortable clothes, and ready to face the rest of his sea of messages.

  She doesn’t need another wreck in her life.

  He shoved his feet into the clean socks and took a deep breath.

  ‘I guess you’ll just have to stop being a wreck,’ he said out loud, and reached for his phone. With his head bowed and one elbow propped on a knee, he unlocked his phone and scrolled through the messages.

  His bravado quickly gave way to panic as he read backwards.

  Where are you?

  Please call me. I need you NOW.

  Still at the hospital.

  Going with ambulance. Why aren’t you answering?

  Neighbour came for Eddie. Can you meet me at emergency room?

  Help please. Juliet took pills. Can you come?

  He didn’t listen to his voicemail. He bolted from the back bedroom to the kitchen.

  ‘Shoes and keys, where are they?’

  From where she stood pouring coffee by the sink, Grace hesitated, and so he repeated himself more urgently.

  ‘Your shoes are at the bottom of the steps. Jacques has your keys.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He just went for a ride. What’s wrong? You look like –’

  ‘Then give me your keys.’ Once more, she hesitated, and his temper snapped. ‘Grace, I don’t have time. If you don’t have my keys, then give me yours. I’ll drive the car back when I can, but right now I need to go.’

  ‘All right, all right, don’t shout at me.’ She went to where her purse hung by the door, reached into the outside pocket and produced his own key ring. ‘He didn’t want you to go while he was gone.’

  Furious over the few seconds wasted, he snatched them from her. ‘Too bad, because I’m going.’

  ‘Simon, what in the hell –’

  ‘Grace, I do not have time to be interrogated, and who the fuck turned my ringer off?’

  ‘I did,’ she snarled right back at him. ‘I figured you could use at least eight hours. It’s not like you were in any shape to have a coherent discussion with anyone.’