Page 85 of Dark Ink

They’d come with normalcy. With goofiness and stupid, silly, meaningless arguments. They’d come with school and work gossip. They’d come with hot whiskey toddies and a fresh pair of sweatpants and enough blankets to keep a small village warm. They’d come without judgement. Without questions. Without prying eyes or awkward silence. They’d come as simply friends.

When I started crying halfway back to Dublin, Rachel wrapped her arms around my chest from the backseat and Aurnia took one hand off the wheel to interlace her warm, petite fingers with mine. The tears came fast and heavy and hot, a dam finally broken after weeks upon weeks of the cracks widening, splintering, stressing. I didn’t bother wiping at them and neither Rachel nor Aurnia offered anything with which to dab them away, anything with which to soak them up. The tears fell from my cheeks, from the tip of my chin, from my lips and soaked the sweatshirt they’d brought me.

Without a word, Aurnia turned up the heat in the car to keep me from getting cold, but said nothing as I cried. When I leaned my head against the condensation-streaked window, the glass cool against my cheek, Rachel just squeezed me tighter. A few of my tears were for them, these two girls who I hardly knew, who I’d hardly allowed myself to get to know. Their kindness was something I wasn’t used to, their understanding something I didn’t think anyone else could have for me. But me.

But they knew. They knew as I knew. That when something was over, dead and gone, finished, there was nothing to say. No words could fix it. There were no answers to be brought forth with the right question. When you came to the realisation that you couldn’t love someone, there was nothing but a hole, a hole that no kind sentiment could fill. It was a wound to the heart and the pressure of Rachel’s arms and Aurnia’s fingers was all that could staunch the bleeding.

I cried for a long time. The blackness of the rolling hills slowly became dotted with more and more lights and still I cried. The two of them coming for me had been what had finally made it click for me: I needed to move on from Stewart. I needed to leave Rian. Once that decision was made, I didn’t know what else to do but cry.

I still loved him. And I was fairly certain I always would. Maybe Aurnia and Rachel understood that, too. Understood that doing what was right sometimes hurt. Understood that making the best choice was sometimes hard. Understood that breaking your own heart was sometimes the only way to heal it.

At some point, I rested my cheek against Aurnia instead of the window. I don’t remember deciding to do it. I just remember wanting something softer, something warmer and her hand there, guiding me toward her. Rachel stroked my hair and nestled a blanket tighter against me. I thought it might be something my mother might have done. Not the whore my father called her, but my mother. Gentle. Loving. Kind. Maybe I cried for her, too. The mother I never knew. The love I missed out on. The woman I’d let myself become without her there to tell me I was worth more.

We arrived back in the city and pulled up outside Dublin Ink.

“I guess we should go inside,” I said, sniffling.

The glow of the neon, though a soft, diffused pink, burned my already stinging eyes. It was like a dawn I wasn’t ready for. A new day I was afraid to face alone.

What would my life look like without someone to take care of? I’d made that my whole reason for existing: Stewart, Rian, uncurable men. What else was there for me except someone else? Who was I without that weight? Would I still be able to breathe when the boulder was removed from my chest?

“I don’t know,” Aurnia said, nestling deeper into her seat instead of reaching for the door handle, “it’s pretty comfy in here.”

Rachel held up the thermos in the backseat. “And we still haven’t finished our whiskey.”

Without saying anything further, Aurnia reached over and turned up the radio.

I guess nothing further needed to be said.

Rian

Alan wasn’t going to press charges.

Liam met me in the lobby of the local police station and acted like this was some great kindness that they’d bestowed upon me. A mercy. An olive branch extended toward familial reconciliation. Liam smiled at me as if to say, “Well, now, he took the first step toward being the bigger man. Are you?” He tried to hug me as if the past was in the past and not right there between us like a fucking brick wall, electrified, topped with barbed wire.

“Rian,” he called after me as I shoved open the rickety old door into the frigid night. “Come on! Alan just wants to make things right!”

But I knew better. I knew goddamn better. Alan had declined to press charges because he knew I couldn’t self-destruct in a jail cell. He wanted me to fall apart, to break, to shatter into a million pieces, and that wasn’t possible under the watchful eye of a guard. No, for Alan to get his revenge I had to be out. On my own. With access to my phone. With access to drugs. With the full weaponry of my self-hatred.

If I’d been stuck in that tiny cell there was no way I could have dialled Eithne’s number more than just the one time I was allowed a phone call. If he’d pressed charges and I’d been stuck inside, I could have convinced myself that she just missed the call, the one chance I got at reaching her. I could have come up with a dozen different excuses for why she hadn’t picked up: her battery died, she was taking a shower, she just stepped out of the room, whatever room she was in, wherever she was.

But since Alan had declined to press charges and since I’d been released, I was free to dial her number as many times as I wanted as I stumbled down that dark country road, swaying like a drunk, weaving back and forth like a car skidding on ice. The excuses dwindled with each redial.

Between calling, I texted, but these were ignored as well. They stacked up in the messaging app like bricks, the tower growing higher and higher. They were laid out across the screen like railroad ties, each one taking me farther and farther away from her. They kept going till one more seemed like a drop in the ocean.

I wandered along that road, not knowing in which direction I was going, till dawn crept up on the distant hills. The rain kept falling and the cold burrowed deeper into my bones. And Eithne still did not answer.

I pleaded with her over voicemail. Begged her over text. I just needed to talk to her. Just needed to explain. If only I could explain…

But…explain what? My thoughts were hazy. My mind unclear. That was Alan’s retribution at work, too. I was certain of it.

If I’d been left in jail, forced to await the judge at the county courthouse on Monday morning, I would have been dry, warm, fed. The cot was hard, but it was something still to lie on. I could have stared up at the grey ceiling and thought through what I was going to tell Eithne: why I was sorry, how I was going to make up for it, how I was going to make everything better, why we had to stay together.

As I snuck onto my family farm and crept into my car, exhausted and feverish, ignoring the way the curtains moved aside then fell back, I could come up with only one reason why Eithne should call me back, why she should give me a chance to explain. One selfish reason: I loved her. Desperately.

But as I drove myself back to Dublin, all I could think about was how I’d hurt her. How all I’d ever done was hurt her. How she was better off without me.

I squeezed my eyes shut in a mad fury. So Alan knew how to fight with more than his fists. I’d underestimated him. He wasn’t an animal: pure instinct and violence. He was a human like me: cruel and cunning, wicked and selfish.

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