In a Moment

by Caroline Finnerty

  “I’m fine, Mam,” she said curtly. Her mother was always harping on about her weight and it irritated the hell out of her.

  “But you’re a bag of bones, love! Look at your collarbone, jutting out, and your cheekbones – you look almost, well – almost malnourished!”

  Emma automatically put her hand to her collarbone.

  “Jesus, Mam, will you give me a break!”

  “Well, I’m just saying every time I see you you’re thinner than the last time – a few sausages will do you all the good in the world!”

  Oh yeah, a few sausages will solve everything.

  “I said I’d have a fry, didn’t I?”

  Her mother looked at her, hurt by her harsh tone.

  “Sorry, Mam,” she said contritely.

  “No problem, dear.”

  “So, any news?”

  “Well, I got new shrubs in the garden centre, that’s what your father’s doing now. He’s going to plant them in the rockery – you know, there beside the laurel bush at the front of the house.”

  Emma tried to feign interest. “Oh really?”

  “Yes, it’ll look lovely when it’s all done. Then I met your Auntie Wendy afterwards and we went for coffee. I had a slice of apple tart with cream but Wendy’s on a diet so she wouldn’t have cream on her rhubarb crumble. I said, Wendy, if you’re going to have the crumble you might as well have the cream but she wouldn’t hear any of it!”

  Emma groaned inwardly. She could imagine her mother giving her younger sister Wendy the same lecture about not eating.

  While the fry hissed in the pan, Anne moved away from the cooker, placed two mugs of tea on the table and sat down opposite her daughter. They sat in silence for a few moments.

  “So how’s Adam?” Anne Fitzpatrick broached cautiously.

  Emma felt herself tense up at the mere mention of his name. “He’s fine.” The words felt prickly and awkward coming from her throat.

  “Oh love, it’s not easy, God love you. I pray for you both every night. It’s going to take a while but time is a great healer.” Her hands fluttered anxiously towards her throat and she began to fidget with her gold cross.

  If one more person says that to me, I won’t be accountable for my actions.

  Time wasn’t helping. She knew her mam meant well. When she considered things calmly, everyone meant well.

  Her mother stood up from her chair and walked over to where her daughter was sitting and wrapped her in a warm hug. Emma was glad she couldn’t see her face because she was afraid what might happen if she looked her in the eye. She wished she could stay in her mother’s arms forever where things like this didn’t happen. Even though a year had passed, some days it all seemed so fresh, the hurt so raw, that every day she felt like she was reliving it all over again. Time wasn’t helping.

  5

  When Emma got home from her parents’ house that evening, she was relieved to find that Adam had gone out. She went up to the spare room and drew the curtains. She kicked off her boots and flopped onto the bed. As she lay there her hand automatically reached out and she found herself opening the drawer beneath her bedside table and taking out the book which fell open at the pages where the photo had been slotted in the last time. Even though she knew it wasn’t going to do her any good, she couldn’t help herself. It was a compulsion; she needed to see his face. She held the photograph firm in her hands and just stared at it like she had done so many times since. She pored over the face, her finger tracing the outline in a well-worn gesture. The smile beaming back at her made her feel like someone had twisted her heart with both their hands and then wrung it out again, leaving it void.

  The longer she stared, the more her eyes were starting to play tricks on her and the photo didn’t look right. She held it away from herself and stared hard at it to see if that helped but it still looked wrong. She began to panic. She forced herself to try and recall the face as she remembered it but it wouldn’t come to mind. She told herself to stay calm, she tried to breathe in but it wouldn’t come. Please, please, please let me remember. She noticed that the pillow under her cheek felt damp and she realised that fat tears were running down the side of her face, dropping onto the brushed-cotton pillowcase beneath her. She chastised herself. What am I doing thinking about these things? It was futile. Crying wouldn’t change anything.

  She heard the key twist in the lock downstairs and started. She listened as his boots thudded across the wooden floorboards of their hallway, making their way across the kitchen tiles. They then walked back down the hallway, thud, thud, thud, and made their way upstairs, getting ever closer until the thuds were right outside her door. The continuously present feeling of dread that haunted her every waking moment intensified until she could feel it rising up from her stomach and burning the inside of her throat.

  The door opened inwards and his head appeared around it.

  * * *

  Adam had noticed her coat hanging on the stand and her keys on the hall table. As he climbed the stairs he saw a soft light coming from underneath her bedroom door. He knocked softly. No answer. He took a deep breath and pushed it back. His wife was lying in her usual position on her side under the glow of her lamp. He noticed that the photograph lay beside her. It caught him off guard, a wobble that he wasn’t expecting. He had to stop a moment to catch his breath and swallow back hard.

  “Hi there . . . How are you doing today?”

  “Hi,” she said back, tilting her face at an awkward angle because she couldn’t quite make eye contact with her husband.

  Her voice was unsteady and he knew by her face that she had been crying. He watched her eyes move towards his rolled-up shirt sleeves until they fixed upon the pinky-red keloid scar that ran vertically down the inside of his left forearm – a lumpy mass of knitted skin, still raw. It only stopped where his wrist met the soft flesh of his palm. His eyes automatically followed Emma’s and he rolled down his sleeves self-consciously.

  “Are you hungry? I’m going to get a takeaway.” He tried to divert her attention from his arm but his voice sounded shaky and was a tell-tale sign of his desperation.

  She shook her head. No words uttered.

  “Right.” The silence filled the space between them. “Okay, well, I’ll be downstairs if you want me, yeah?” Jesus, this is bad.

  He turned and left the room, pulling the door behind him, thus effectively sealing them into their separate quarters of the house. He made his way downstairs and, storming into the kitchen, jerked open the fridge and reached for a can of Heineken. He put it up to his lips and gulped a large mouthful back before swallowing hard. He wiped a dribble from the edge of his mouth. Fuck dinner, he was no longer hungry. Things were getting worse, if that was possible. He had believed that by now the pain of the last year should be starting to ease for her – but no.

  He went into the living room and threw himself wearily onto the sofa. He flicked through the channels and eventually stopped on a Top Gear re-run. Sometime later he nodded off in the armchair, still with the remote in his hand, but no sooner had he drifted off than he was jolted awake again. It felt as though he had been asleep only for minutes. His neck was stiff – he stretched it out. The dream had been back again.

  He forced himself to recall exactly what had happened. He could always remember the start of it – it always started off the same way. He was driving along with one hand on his grey-leather steering wheel and the other hand resting on the gearstick. The sun was always strong, almost white with brightness. He knew it was chilly because the frost had covered the evergreen trees in its velvety white coat and there were patches of ice here and there on the road. But this time there was more, he had remembered more. There was a house too: a two-storey white-washed farmhouse with old-style wrought-iron gates marking the start of the path leading to the red front door. He remembered a bend in the road and a crossroads beyond. He needed to remember more but somehow his body managed to wake him up at just this point each time.

  I
t was really starting to get to him now; the dreams were becoming too frequent. They were getting in under his skin and leaving him with an uneasy aftertaste each time, a constant reminder from which he couldn’t escape.

  He went up to bed a while later, tip-toeing past Emma’s bedroom door. He lay in bed alone, desperately wishing she was beside him. He needed her. He longed for the closeness of holding her; it had been so long since they had even touched. He needed to tell her about the dreams. They needed to talk but when he had called into her room earlier on, he had been a coward as usual. Confrontation had never been his strong point – in fact, that had been Emma’s forte. If there was something to be said, she wasn’t one for beating around the bush, but now it was as if she didn’t care enough to fight for what they had. One of them was going to have to do something to get things back on track between them and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Emma.

  6

  Emma poured herself a glass of red wine, allowing it to fill up the glass almost to the top. Taking a sip, she instantly started to relax. She had arranged to meet Zoe for a drink in Taylor’s Bar. As per usual Zoe was late but for once Emma wasn’t looking at her watch – in fact, it was nice to sit and people-watch while sipping her glass of wine in a dark, wooden-clad alcove.

  After a little while a blur could be seen making its way down towards her at the back of the bar.

  “Here, pour me some of that, I’m parched,” Zoe said, out of breath, while she took her coat off.

  Emma filled Zoe’s glass and Zoe grabbed it from her and knocked it back like water.

  “Sorry I’m late – I won’t even bore you with the reason,” she said. “Let’s just say, who knew that some shades of cream could be cheaper than others?”

  Emma laughed. They chatted easily about work and other things before Zoe broached the awkward question.

  “So how’s Adam? Are things any better?” she asked softly.

  Emma could feel herself bristle at the mere mention of his name.

  “Well, we’re still not really talking,” she said quietly.

  “Still? I hoped things might have improved a little?”

  Emma shook her head. “It’s not easy, Zoe – whenever I look at him I feel like shouting at him, lashing out at him.”

  “But it wasn’t his fault, Emma.”

  “I know but what if he hadn’t gone or if he had done something differently? I can’t help it, that’s all I can think about.”

  “You shouldn’t think about things like that, it won’t change anything.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “But the ‘what ifs?’ will just consume you – they’ll eat you up!”

  “I know all this,” Emma said wearily. “I know . . .” She paused. “I’m just so angry – so angry. I want him to feel like I do. To hurt like I do. How is he just able to move on like that, as if nothing has happened and life still goes on?”

  “But why don’t you try talking to him about your feelings?” Zoe kept her tone gentle, as she always did, though at times she felt weary to the point of exasperation – they had been over this ground so many times.

  “I can’t,” Emma whispered, shifting uncomfortably under her friend’s gaze.

  “I don’t think he has forgotten, Emma – he’s just coping the only way he knows how to – everyone reacts differently.”

  “I can’t help it, Zoe, I really can’t. I’m trying so hard but the rage builds up inside me and it just takes over.” She started to cry. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. God, don’t be sorry at all. Here –” Zoe took a tissue from a packet inside her bag and passed it to Emma. “You know I’m here for you, you know that, don’t you?” She put her arm around Emma’s shoulders and hugged her hard.

  “Sometimes the pain is so awful and Adam is just like this looming reminder of everything that has been taken away from me.”

  “It’s only natural, after all you’ve been through. It is so unfair and nothing you can do will change it. I can only imagine how you’re feeling.”

  When they left Taylor’s bar, they walked home together. Reaching Emma’s gate, they stood there chatting for a few moments under the street-lamp.

  “Talk to him, Emma.”

  “I’ll try,” she said half-heartedly and Zoe knew she wouldn’t.

  7

  Summer, 2000

  Adam and Emma had first met in San Francisco. It was the year of the millennium and they had both come over on J1 student working visas. It seemed that the entire student population of Ireland had decamped to California that summer, spreading themselves out across infamous cities such as San Diego, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz.

  Emma had come over with two of her friends and, after searching the city high and low, they had found a bijou apartment on the top floor of a three-storey slatted wooden house right on Union Square in the heart of the city. The rent was a bit on the steep side but it was their first time living away from home and they had wanted to do it properly. They had been saving up for this trip for the last year, using the money they earned from their part-time jobs. They wanted to experience real city living – the buzzing streets, being able to walk everywhere, having myriad shops and cafés on their doorstep – so they had overlooked the astronomical rent and signed the lease.

  Before they even came over, Emma and her friends had jobs lined up in a call centre that handled the customer-service operations for several large corporations. The company was going through a period of rapid expansion. It could not keep up with the volume of new business coming its way and the disposable workforce of students was perfect to meet their needs.

  They had been working there for a month when Adam joined. He had come over with a large crowd of the lads from college. Rather than waste money that could be used for beer on renting an apartment, they had gone for the cheaper option and were staying in a live-in hostel in the Tenderloin district. Every day when they stepped outside the hostel they were met with the stench of urine rising up off the street in the heat and they had to step over drunks and homeless people to get outside their door. The four of them had squashed into a double room, so small that the door couldn’t be opened fully because there wasn’t enough room between the wall and the ends of the bed. They had to squeeze through a small gap to get in and out. Their room was next door to a guy called Mike who had been living in the hostel since the sixties and was growing a small garden-centre worth of marijuana in his room – sometimes he had to sit outside in the hall in a canvas deckchair because he couldn’t move for the amount of plants in the place. But the novelty of the free grass soon wore thin when they realised that they and their room permanently smelt of weed. When all the money that they had come over with was spent and they finally had to face up to the fact that they needed to get jobs, they had heard about this call-centre that was in desperate need of more bodies, so that had been their first port of call. The human resources manager, who was coming under pressure from the directors to get more bodies to fill the short-term requirements of their clients, decided to overlook the fact that they all smelt of grass and no one was more surprised than they were to find themselves hired that same day.

  On his first day they had paired Adam up with Emma. She was to be his ‘buddy’ but within five minutes Emma had already shown him everything he needed to know about the job. They had clicked straight away. She told him that all they had to do was follow a flowchart which had every conceivable answer built into a script so you could do it with your eyes closed.

  Adam was intrigued by this willowy girl, with skin so pale that it was almost translucent, showing a network of bluey-green veins underneath. Her white-blonde hair was long with small springy curls and she had a fine, delicate bone structure. Only for her striking height, she would have almost seemed fragile. When she smiled her whole face was illuminated and her eyes lit up. The more he got to know her, the more he liked her cool and calm demeanour. She was so different to the usual girls he went for, with their fake-tanned
midriffs permanently on show, voluminous hair extensions and gel-nails. Emma was classy, the antithesis of the other girls, and for some reason he couldn’t help but be drawn to her. She was all he could think about and the more he got to know her, the more he found himself needing to know.

  When Emma was finished training him in, he had pretended to their team-leader that he was still a bit unsure of how the whole thing worked and would feel more confident if he knew that his ‘buddy’ was nearby. Their team-leader had given him a despairing look and had made a mental note to speak with HR about the calibre of the candidates they were taking on recently. Reluctantly she had put him sitting at the desk beside Emma’s.

  By choice the students worked late most evenings. There were no supervisors on duty so they got paid time-and-a-half and would sit around drinking cans. So that they wouldn’t be disturbed, they would push a button on their phone to divert incoming calls back to the end of the queue again. Then they would clock off around nine and head to whatever bar was running a dollar-a-beer promotion that night. Adam and Emma would always spend the whole night talking together, with everyone else blending into the periphery. Their focus was on each other but he was still too afraid to make a move on her. He knew she wouldn’t be one for his usual charms.

  Emma couldn’t wait to get into work every day to see Adam; she had never enjoyed a job so much. They spent all day talking around their partition and taking the mick out of customers on the other end of the phone. Of course it helped that he was good-looking: six foot one and broad-chested, with messy dark hair. He had a cheeky smile and white even teeth but he always had girls fawning all over him and she didn’t want to be just another one of his conquests. Her friends had told her that he looked at her in ‘that’ way but she wasn’t sure. They were very different people. He was a complete alpha-male, always the centre of attention, whereas she was quieter and was more comfortable with one-on-ones than large groups.