She tidied her face in the hallway mirror, not wanting Owen to see her in a mess. Or did she? She wondered even as she wiped up mascara on a tissue. No. She would behave with dignity and not dissolve into a black-teared monster. She smoothed the hair back from her face, gave her ash-blonde pony tail a yank to tighten it, and opened the door, mentally preparing for a continuation of the conversation with Owen. They would talk about it, get to the bottom of the problem, have sex and it would all be...
“Oh. Daniel.” The disappointment was crushing.
Owen’s friend from university, Daniel, flushed, hectic points of colour on his cheeks. “Hi Em. I guess I can’t say it is nice to see you. I am sorry. I am just an errand boy. Owen thinks it is better if it is a clean break for a few days, so… I am here to get some stuff he has forgotten.”
“Oh,” it was like a knife to the heart. “He really doesn’t want to see me, at all, then?”
“It is not that,” Daniel was apologetic as he edged past her and down the hallway. “I don’t know, really,” he added, reading the expression on her face. “It is no use asking me, Em. We are blokes, we don’t talk about stuff like that. My friend asked me to pop next door to pick up some stuff after a break-up, I don’t ask the details, I just do it.”
“It is a break-up?” Emily’s voice trembled. “Not just that we are not getting married?”
Daniel reached under the bed and came out with Owen’s spare guitar and a shoe box. “Em…” He grimaced. He really did not want to get involved.
She sighed. “You don’t know the details.”
“No, I am sorry.”
“Has he said anything at all to you about this? You know… in passing, before?” She wondered, grasping for anything, anything at all to explain where this heartbreak had come from.
He stepped around her and paused in the doorway, his back to her. “Maybe a bit here and there,” he admitted, his pity for her written all over his face and posture. “It wasn’t entirely… unexpected.”
“It was to me.” She said tightly, her chest tight and her stomach in her throat. Tears threatened to overflow again, and she fought them back pridefully. The tremble of her bottom lip betrayed her. “What did he say?” It was so painful to plead for the information.
“Em,” he did not want to say anything. “Just, you know… You have both been sort of perfect. No drunken binges and one-night stands, no major relationship dramas, no adventures. Just what is sensible, all the way from childhood through to now. He has sort of said he is going to be thirty in two years, and he is the only almost thirty-year-old he knows who has no stories to tell. That he thinks he is dull.”
“I don’t find him dull,” Emily replied, woebegone.
“Em, I have already said more than I should,” Daniel winced and flushed, embarrassed to be caught in the middle of a breakup. “Forget it.”
As she closed the door behind him, Emily wondered how she was meant to forget it when in one afternoon her entire life had been uprooted.
She stood by the kitchen sink, the window looking out upon the neat and tidy galvanized iron fence with its prettily blooming honeysuckle that divided the two properties and thought it a fitting view. Divided was how she felt. Divided in half.
She heard music start - the volume turned right up. Rock music, the bass of it shaking the glass in the windows, and distance distorting it into a crash of sound and drumbeats. Not a band she recognised, but then, she had never understood rock music. Oh, some of it was alright, but most of it was just… noisy. Owen had always liked it though. Whenever she borrowed his car, there was something in the cd player, and she knew he listened to it in his ear-pods when they ran together, same as she listened to opera.
It was one of those quirky things about them as a couple, that their musical tastes were so opposite, something that had always been a source of amusement. A prime example, they had said, of how opposites attract. But it had made choosing a wedding song a nightmare… She gripped the edge of the bench as she realised that after all that too and fro-ing, the song they had picked to share their first dance as Mr and Mrs would not be played.
They would not have their moment, on the vintage dancefloor, strings of fairy lights overhead, in the pretty garden they had booked for the venue, in their wedding finery, gazing into each other’s eyes as Mrs and Mrs… “Oh, god.” She spent fifteen minutes crying into the dishwater and washing the same coffee mug over and over before she pulled herself together.
She made herself a pot of tea and took it into the lounge room, but every show seemed to be a romantic comedy, and that was just salt in the wound. In the end she just sat there, in the silence, with the tea growing cold before her, untouched, and stared at the pictures of Owen and herself laughing down at her, waiting to wake up from the nightmare where Owen did not want to marry Emily and had moved out of the house they shared.
She considered calling her mother, but quickly discarded the idea. She loved her mum, beyond all things, but her mother would interfere. She would call Owen’s mother, who was her best friend, who would then call Owen, and both mothers would probably end up coming around together, to go speak to their respective child and things would just get unpleasant with four people involved in something that really just concerned two… No. Calling her mother was a bad idea.
She realized that she had left her phone in the spare room when she had answered the door to Daniel. What if Owen had messaged…? She retrieved the phone, her heart hammering in her chest. No messages. Not a single one. No quick sweet: “Thinking of you” as normally kept her phone busy. No “Do we need milk?” or “Did you pay this bill?” Or “Shall I grab takeaway on my way home?” Nothing. The silence was deafening.
She sent a quick message to Megan. “Don’t tell mum. Don’t tell anyone.”
A reply came swiftly. “As if I would.”
Emily held the phone in the palm of her hand. It would be pathetic to message Owen, she told herself. The screenshot was a photo of them, laughing together. She touched his face. He had been happy there, his dimple on full display, his laugh wide and his eyes dancing. What had happened in the interim, she wondered, to make him want to end what they had together? Surely Megan couldn’t be right… Could she?
She felt at an utter and complete loss for what to do, who to reach out to for help and support. Every other time she could remember in her life where she had been this upset, he had been there for her. When she had lost her first pet. When the girls at school had been mean. When she’d had her first car accident. When she had not gotten the honours mentor she wanted. Her first rejection letter from a literary agent. When she had not gotten the job position that she had wanted…
The biggest thing in her life had happened to her, now, and she did not have his shoulder to cry upon. His absence when she needed him, and the fact that she needed him because of his absence, rendered her impotent, unable to take action, almost numb from the shock.
She typed: “I miss you.” And then deleted it.
As the sun set, the music turned off next door. She went to the loungeroom window, pressing up against the curtains that they had picked together and that she had hemmed to length during a movie marathon whilst he had sanded back the skirting boards in the room, looking out across the front lawn they had sown together, to the other house. After a moment, the lights inside turned off, and the porch light on. He stepped out the front door, pausing to lock it. He did not look like Owen. His hair was styled differently, and the clothing he wore… All of it she recognised having bought, or washed at some time or another, but the way it was assembled on him was somehow… different. A contrived casual dishevelment with the cuffs folded back on his jeans, collar arranged just so, buttons open to show a snug white t-shirt below. He put the keys into his pocket and strolled casually to the car, his long legs covering the distance in no time. Where was he going? She wondered as he pulled away. B
Emily put the notepad back as she had found it, the beat of her heart painful against her ribs, seeming to pound in her throat, and her ears filled with a rush of white noise. On automatic pilot she made her way back through the house, erasing any sign that she had been there, and turning out the lights, until she stood on the front porch, locking the door, much as Owen had done over an hour before. She made her way back to her house - the tears dry now as dread began to set in. Was Megan right? The neighbour across the road was at his letter box. She was certain that he had checked his mail three times already, and Mrs Essen next door was watering very late, standing on her driveway with her hose pointed away from Emily’s house, her back to her, as if determinedly not watching. Snooping, she thought with embarrassed anger. They had obviously seen Owen’s move during the day. She and Owen had become the street’s entertainment, as good as any soap opera, she thought angrily as she let
“People in your sensible world, Em, don’t do that. I don’t care about my job. Designing carparks,” he snorted in disgust. “It is bullshit. This isn’t living, Em, it is… beige.” “Beige?” He laughed, and it was no longer a happy sound, the opposite in fact. “Yes, beige, Em. It is humdrum. It is just existing. It is doing the sensible and expected because it is responsible. It is smothering.” She stared at him, her face pale. “You have never said you feel this way.” “I didn’t want to…” he paused and raked his hand through his hair. “I didn’t want to hurt you Em. But I have to, or I’m hurting myself. My life, my job, my clothing… It’s all just bullshit. Not what I want, to do, to wear. This person,” he threw a hand towards the photos of them laughing on the wall, “is not the person I want to be.” “I love you, Em,” he said. “I love you, but I don’t think I am in love with you. I want to be. But there is no… fire to it. I want more.” He drew in a sharp breath, as if shocked by what he
“No, I do know it says non-refundable,” Emily closed a window to block out the music from next door. Owen’s band was using the house to practise in again. Cars had been rocking up all morning, and the street was lined with beaten up, paint-challenged vans and Utes. Surely there was not so many people in the band? What were the rest of them there for? “But it says, non-refundable unless you manage to rebook the venue on that day. “Now, I know for a fact you have waiting lists because I was on one. The date is still six months out. I am sure if you call one of the brides who were also on that waiting list, someone will want the venue on that date. Hell, if you give me the list of phone numbers, I will call them for you.” As she moved through cancelling the many bookings that they had made for the wedding, Emily was learning to be pushy. People who had been only too happy to be helpful and answer any question they had, who had been always cheerful and pleasant to deal with, showed anot
By the time the ugly, beaten-up cars that crowded the pretty little street began to pull away, and Owen knocked on her front door, she had ordered pizza, opened a bottle of wine, and had two lists lined up on the coffee table. “Wow,” he said, shrugging out of the leather jacket as he entered. “We could use your skills for the band.” “Shall we start at the top?” She was curt as she took her seat, pressing herself tightly against the arm of the couch, her knees tight and her ankle bones digging into each other, physically holding herself together as if doing so would hold her emotionally intact. “Sure,” he said warily, sitting on the couch next to her, sitting close not out of desire for proximity but because it was practical in order to go through the lists with her, she knew. “You seem… mad.” “Mad?” She repeated. “Why would I be mad? I have just spent twenty-two years of my life believing I loved someone and was loved back, only to find out that it was a lie, and now the future we
The doorbell rang and they both jumped, looking automatically towards the hall, guilty as teenagers caught making out on the couch by parents coming home unexpectedly. “Shit, the pizza,” he realised the source of the doorbell first, his laughter shifting as he lifted from her and closed his jeans. He paused a moment, looking down at her, his eyes smouldering. “You look f-king sexy like that Emily,” he commented, and she flushed, pleased despite the offhanded crudity of the comment. He went to answer the door, and she sat up, waiting until the door closed again and pulling her clothing as much to order as she could with her underwear and skirt in rags, feeling exposed and vulnerable, and sluttish. Owen, fully dressed and looking nothing like he had just f-ked her stupid on the couch, joked with the pizza delivery man, as he accepted the pizzas and bid him to have a good night, before using his elbow and hip to close the door. “I will be just a moment,” she told him from the couch.
Emily took the pizzas out to the garbage bin and threw them away, and then returned to the lounge room and drank the rest of the wine, before drunkenly falling asleep on the couch. In the morning, nursing a hangover to accompany her broken heart, she called the real estate agent, and put the other house on the market, as Megan had told her to do from the beginning. She was starting to think that she should have followed Megan’s advice. She eyed up her hair speculatively in the reflection of the laptop. Well, maybe not all her advice, she decided. “What the f–k are you doing, Em?” Owen demanded the following evening, catching her as she returned from work and made her way down the garden path, his blue eyes blazing with anger and his cheeks flushed with it as he strode across the lawn. “What do you mean, what am I doing?” She was taken aback by his aggressive approach, snapped out of thoughts of the latest book she was reviewing with surprise. She backed up a step, suddenly wary. Wh
Emily tried to focus on the screen, but the words seemed to slip in and out of her mind without their meaning registering. She had read the same paragraph four times, without being able to recall one word of it, or what the meaning behind the words was. She suspected she was going to need a strong black coffee to get through the afternoon. Maybe two. And it was barely past lunch. But her attention was so divided she might as well give in and go home as she was not going to achieve anything significant like this – except that Emily never gave in and skipped work. It wasn’t in her work ethic to do so. In truth, though she didn’t want to admit it to herself, she had gone home mentally weeks ago, but she kept to the routine of work because staying all day in an empty house echoing with the ghost of Owen was far worse than coming to her office and fighting her way through another meaningful day of drudgery. And every dollar she made now, would be useful for when she quit her job and moved