Liar Liar

by Donna Alam

  The thought alone is enough to make a man feel like he could fly, I reflect as I take a step onto the passerelle, my hands gripping the aluminium railing. As far as thoughts go, it’s not so bad to be the last thought I ever have as the metal beneath my fingers vibrates, a rending sound filling my ears, reverberating into my flesh. I don’t have another moment to process what’s happening. One second, I’m gripping the barrier, the next, the LED lighting under my feet blur. My head suddenly feels like it’s been cleaved in two as I follow the railing into the water. Colours around me meld. Blue. Grey. White. The moon like a smear of paint up above.

  Death is only dangerous in a lie lived without love.

  A flash of cruel clarity quickly followed by another.

  I would’ve been happy living a life that simply lingered between her kisses.

  I see colours no more. There’s not time to be philosophical as I sink into the dark, empty void, the bitter taste in my mouth not water but regret.

  35

  Rose

  I need to be inside you.

  His voice is somewhere between a breath and a groan, his hand sliding up my thigh.

  Oh, yes please. My voice is breathless as I grasp the edge of the sink, grounding myself as my body begins to tremble.

  My whole body.

  Aching.

  Shivering.

  I want him so badly I can almost taste it.

  His eyes track up my body, his gaze full of heat and promise.

  Rain on mullioned glass. A house with honeysuckle and a view. Children playing in the pool, their hair lightened and skin kissed by the sun, kisses in the kitchen, arms wrapping around my waist as I rinse a glass at the sink. The scent of bergamot and spice and the musky scent of his skin. The feeling of happiness radiating from my chest, so bright and so large, I feel like I could burst.

  Bees buzzing around pink honeysuckle.

  Buzz Lightyear lying in the grass.

  Buzzing.

  Incessant buzzing. Like a bluebottle flying around my ear.

  I come up from my pillows until I’m sitting up, ramrod straight in bed. Amber’s whisper drifts from my ear. Rich or poor, a good man is his own reward.

  My phone is ringing—it’s already in my hands, but that isn’t what’s dragged me from sleep. I blink, brushing the hair from my face as my mind begins to whir. It can’t be Amber because she wouldn’t be at my front door. Unless I’m about to be faced with two emergencies. One on the phone, one in my face.

  Throwing back the covers, I prod my phone as I note the time. It’s not even four thirty yet. The number is local but not one I recognise.

  ‘’Lo,’ I croak, my feet already trotting across the cool floorboards. I guess I can add champagne to the list of things that make me sleep like the dead.

  ‘Thank Christ. It’s like waking the fucking dead.’ I bustle along the hallway, pulling the shouty voice away from my ear as it then commands, ‘Open the fucking door.’

  ‘Who is this?’ The words are out before my mind grasps that there’s only one man alive who would speak to me in this tone. Everett. My brain skips from one name to another as I unlock and pull open the front door. A fist instantly squeezes my heart as I take in his creased T-shirt and the way his hair is literally standing on end. But more than that it’s his forbidding expression. ‘What’s happened. It’s Remy, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you on the way.’ I step into the communal hallway when his large hand cups my shoulder. ‘It’s best you put some clothes on first. We don’t want to worry the rest of Monaco.’

  ‘Not until you tell me what it is,’ I reply as I try unsuccessfully to shake his hand off.

  ‘He’s okay.’ His eyes are soft and kind, but tired too, as he gives my shoulder a little shove. ‘Go on. I’ll wait here.’

  I nod and step back, and I’m still nodding as I skitter along the hallway to my bedroom because if he’s making jokes, it can’t be all that bad, whatever it is.

  ‘You can start now,’ I yell, stabbing my legs into a pair of jeans because, despite my internal reassurance, I’m freaking the fuck out. My whole body shakes, the only thing stopping my ass from hitting the floor is stumbling to the bed.

  Get a hold of yourself, I intone, reaching for my abandoned bra and almost simultaneously whipping my nightie, okay, T-shirt, up and off my head.

  Inhale.

  Stand.

  I shove my phone into my back pocket, grabbing a hair tie from the top of the chest, and a clean sweater from the drawer beneath. I make my way out into the hallway, still pulling it on.

  ‘Talk now. Tell me, please.’

  Rhett frowns, his gaze cutting to the slice of skin between my waistband and sweater. I yank it down.

  ‘There was an accident,’ he says.

  ‘Up at the house?’ The door slams behind me, and I realise I haven’t brought my key.

  ‘With Amélie? Was he there this evening?’

  ‘No!’ My head rears back at his suggestion, almost as though he’d dealt me a slap. ‘The other house. The one up in the mountains.’ I wave in the vague direction that the house may or may not be. ‘I don’t really know where the hell it is. But tell me, what happened?’

  We pause at the elevator, and Rhett pokes the call button. ‘All I know is I got a call from the crew of Le Loup to say he was dragged out of the water at the marina at one thirty this morning. They said he was unconscious and that he was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.’

  The elevator doors slide open and almost close again as I try to process what he’s saying. It’s like I understand the words, but the whole moment feels surreal. Like I’m here but not really part of it.

  ‘But he’s okay? You said.’ And also because he has to be.

  ‘I’ve seen him.’ The words seem to leave his chest in a whoosh of air. ‘He’s alive and he’s talking, but he looks like death.’

  I nod as though I understand, but I so don’t. What I do know is that looking like death is something I can deal with. But being dead . . . no.

  A shiver runs through my entire body. Someone isn’t walking across my grave so much as breakdancing on it.

  ‘What was he doing at the marina?’

  ‘He didn’t tell you?’ I wonder if anyone has ever told him his frowning system seems to be a whole other language on its own.

  ‘Tell me what?’ I ask.

  ‘That he was staying there.’

  My attention is pulled as the elevator door jerks, trying to close against the bulk of his shoulder, but I don’t have the bandwidth to comment.

  ‘At the marina?’

  ‘On the yacht.’

  I knew he had a yacht. I think. I guess he has a lot of things he hasn’t spoken of. Like houses.

  ‘I wonder why?’ I realise I’ve spoken aloud, but Rhett doesn’t offer any response. It strikes me as strange because, tonight aside, Remy hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to give me any space since we broke up. His “win her back” strategy has been a full-on frontal attack. Apart from setting up Charles. He wouldn’t have moved out of the building, deferring to my wounded sensibilities. Not when he was calling me into his office multiple times a day. I guess that’s why he insisted I go home alone, not because he couldn’t trust himself but because he wasn’t going the same way.

  ‘But he’s okay, isn’t he?’ I ask again, sending out a plea to the heavens, please, please, please let him be okay as my stomach clenches, unease stirring like the silt from the bottom of a river.

  ‘He came around.’ He nods grimly. ‘And he looks like shit, but he asked for you.’

  ‘Who’s with him now?’

  ‘Come on, stop that.’ In an uncharacteristically tender action, he reaches out, obliterating a fallen tear with his thumb. ‘He was being sent for a CT scan when I left.’ I step into the elevator at his urging. ‘How can I put this?’ He eyes the panel before selecting the button for the subterranean parking lot. ‘As he left, he impressed upon me very strongly the idea that
he’d like you near.’

  ‘That’s crazy formal,’ I reply through a bubbling, wet-sounding laugh. I use my sleeves to wipe away more tears.

  ‘You got the crazy part right, at least.’

  At any other time, I might’ve made some retort, some quip about bats and exiting hell when Rhett begins weaving the black Range Rover in and out of the sparse traffic at some speed. If it weren’t for the thought of Remy being in the hospital alone, I might even have managed, but I don’t speak, my fingers gripping the sides of the seat as Rhett gets us to the hospital in the shortest time possible. We’re shown to a waiting room shortly after, the kind they put families in when they have something terrible to tell them.

  ‘How long had he been in the water?’

  The chairs make the back of my thighs itch through my jeans. I try not to squirm, but as I raise my head, I’m struck by the full force of Rhett’s gaze. I’d never really noticed before, but his eyes are grey, a potent mixture of gunpowder and broken glass.

  ‘We don’t know. What we do know is Hénri took him to the marina a little before one a.m., and that he was found floating face down by one of the deckhands around twenty minutes later.’

  Oh, God. I think I’m going to be sick. People die from being in the water for that kind of time, or suffer life-altering brain injuries. What if he—

  No, I refuse to consider the possibility that anything other than a full recovery is waiting for him. Rhett said he’d asked for me, so if he’s speaking . . .

  ‘Did you call his mom?’

  ‘She’s in the Bahamas. He doesn’t want her called.’

  ‘Well, thank you for coming to get me.’

  ‘He’s got a nasty gash on his head,’ he answers, disregarding my words. ‘And a concussion that’s making him talk shit. There was some discussion of brain injuries after he was resuscitated.’

  ‘Resuscitated?’ The gravity of his words suddenly sinks in. That means he stopped breathing. For all intents and purposes, he died. What if that had been it for him? What if I never got to tell him that I loved him because of my stubborn pigheadedness?

  ‘Resuscitated, yes. Keep up. They’re worrying about other shit now. He hit his head, stopped breathing, and nearly drowned.’

  ‘Your bedside manner sucks.’

  ‘Good thing I’m not a doctor then.’

  ‘You’re tellin’ me!’

  ‘Stop crying, Heidi.’ Though his voice is gruff, it’s not a command.

  ‘I’m not crying. You are.’

  ‘We’ll all be fucking crying if he doesn’t get well and get his arse out of here soon,’ he mutters with an unhappy huff.

  ‘He’s not just your boss, is he?’

  ‘I’m talking about these chairs. Christ, they’re uncomfortable.’

  I angle my head and keep my watery smile to myself when the door opens, and a young doctor in blue scrubs steps in. I jump from my seat like a jack-in-the-box as Rhett stands more sedately, the pair shaking hands before he introduces me as Remy’s girlfriend. By his manner, I assume he and Rhett had spoken earlier.

  ‘The CT scan results are back,’ he begins without preamble, ‘and they are good. No skull fracture, as was the concern. No swelling, and no signs of haemorrhage or a hypoxia brain injury.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I find myself interrupting because I don’t speak doctor. ‘What exactly is that?’ I get the no swelling and a haemorrhage is a brain bleed, both of which I’m super relieved to hear about.

  ‘A hypoxia brain injury is when the brain goes without oxygen for a period of time. It’s often associated with serious head injuries.’

  I feel relief, but more than that, I’m confused. ‘Was he knocked out before or after he fell in the water?’

  ‘That is the question,’ he say with a very Gallic shrug.

  ‘How did he fall in the water in the first place?’ My gaze flicks back and forth between the men, my mind brimming with questions.

  ‘We think he was getting onto the yacht and the railing gave way,’ Rhett supplies. ‘Maybe he hit his head on the way down.’

  ‘It is possible that he was knocked out as he hit the water from that height, water being an incompressible liquid.’

  ‘He means it can be like hitting concrete,’ Rhett adds. ‘Except for the gash to the back of his head. That had to have come from something else.’

  ‘Like debris in the water?’

  ‘I do not think so,’ the doctor answers. ‘There was some force to the impact to cause that kind of laceration.’

  ‘Force?’ I feel like I’m wading through glue, yet my thoughts won’t stick.

  ‘Whatever he hit his head on, or whatever hit his head.’ This from a stern-faced Rhett.

  ‘Do you think he was attacked, or that he bumped his head? That he almost drowned?’ Do I sound a little hysterical?

  ‘To the latter, the short answer is yes.’ I can almost feel the blood leeching from my face and reach out to steady myself by grabbing the back of a nearby chair. ‘This, in addition to the initial head injury, could have caused what we term a secondary brain injury from cerebral hypoxia. In other words, lack of oxygen to the brain. It does appear, however, that the chill of the water may have assisted Remy’s brain injury in the minutes he was immersed. It may have resulted in an increase in peripheral vasoconstriction, or a narrowing of the vessels in his limbs, shunting his blood and providing an increase in the flow of blood and delivery of oxygen to his vital organs.’

  Brain injury. Almost drowned. That’s almost all I hear. ‘But he’s okay, right? Rhett said he’d spoken to him?’ My head swings between the two. I know I keep asking the same question but I’m yet to receive a definitive yes.

  And I need one, desperately.

  ‘While we might not be able to say what exactly happened, it may, in time, come back to him. But what we can say with absolute certainty is that he is a very lucky man. Thanks to the vigilance of his crew and their knowledge of Expired Air Resuscitation, the care performed was enough to trigger Remy to cough the water from his airways and begin to breathe on his own. We’re extremely lucky they found him when they did. We will be admitting him for observation. I am still concerned that his period of immersion could cause aspiration pneumonia, and that is why we will need to observe him for a while yet. But if you’d like to see him now, you may.’

  I can’t speak for the knot in my throat and the fear in my belly. I manage to nod because, yes, I’d like to see him right now more than I ever have.

  His skin is the colour of wax paper as I stand at the doorway. The lights in the room are low, and his eyes are closed, his head resting against a pillow, the head of the bed almost upright.

  ‘He looks awful,’ I whisper as I make a path to his bed, almost surprised to find his hand is warm to the touch. My gaze slips over my shoulder to where Rhett stands like a guard at the door. Where were you when he fell into the water? I quash the thought immediately.

  ‘I think we’d all look pretty shit after what he’s been through.’ Rhett answers in his normal register. In other words, loud.

  ‘Shush. Can’t you see he’s sleeping?’

  ‘He won’t be sleeping for long.’ His expression twists. ‘Not in here, at least.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean you have to talk like a foghorn,’ I retort . . . like a foghorn.

  ‘Ah, there she is.’

  At the sound of Remy’s voice, I pivot.

  ‘Hey, there.’ Tears prickle against my lids, but I refuse to let them fall. ‘You know, we really ought to stop meeting in places like this.’ I tighten my hand on his as though crushing his fingers might make him understand my fear. My love. ‘Like, really.’

  ‘You mean in hospital.’ He winces as he turns his head my way. His eyes are rimmed red and swollen, a spectacular bruise forming on the left side of his face.

  ‘Yes.’ I choke back the threatening deluge of tears. ‘Let’s meet somewhere else next time you want me to hold your hand.’

  ‘Like din
ner?’ His mouth kicks up in the corner in an attempt at a smile.

  ‘Dinner is better. Only don’t turn up looking like this. Because you really look like shit.’ I choke a little on the words.

  ‘Are you saying you wouldn’t have taken me home in March if I looked this terrible?’

  I throw my arms around him as best as I can and smother my tears against his hospital gown as I shake my head. ‘I would’ve been frightened of breaking you.’ His chest vibrates under my ear as he laughs, the sound turning to a groan just as quick. ‘Get me some clothes, and I’ll take you home and show you exactly how unbreakable you make me feel.’

  ‘Jesus,’ comes a grunt from behind me. ‘I was gonna tell you to get a room, but you’ve already got one. I’ll be outside. Give me a shout when you’ve stopped with the dirty talking.’ With that, the door opens and closes in very quick succession without either of us looking once Rhett’s way.

  I straighten and dash the backs of my hands across my cheeks. ‘If you had died, I would have been very, very angry. And you know what else?’ I take his hand in both of mine, pressing my face to his until his features become indistinct. I can’t believe I almost lost him. He would’ve died without knowing the strength of my love. ‘I would’ve been very, very sad because I love you too much to let you go, you stupid ass.’

  If there are better ways to express it, I can’t find the words. But it doesn’t matter, not as his smile becomes the flame of a lit wax candle. Mainly because wax is still the colour of his skin.

  ‘Your hold was fortifying. I feel like a battery recharged. Where are my clothes? We need to leave.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ More tears, this time through smiles.

  ‘I’m alive and the woman I love loves me. If that’s not cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.’

  ‘The only bed you’ll be seeing me in is this one. As for battery, you look like you’ve experienced the wrong end of assault and battery.’

  He has no time to complain as the door to his room opens, and two nurses file in.