Page 90 of Dark Ink

I kicked off my heels and stood for a moment in the entryway. The one-room space with its vaulted ceiling was filled with an orange glow from the early sunset. The light seemed to pour in through the slanted windows, dirty, but large.

It hurt a little, every time I came back home when there was still some light left. A part of me feared the coming of spring, the return of longer days, of stretched hours of light. As it was now, I could leave for class or studying before dawn. And with my new job at the advertising agency, I could work till my eyes stung and the sun was long gone from the horizon. I didn’t have to face how perfect the light in this little attic room would be for painting. For real painting. For creating art. For opening my soul and bleeding it onto a simple canvas on a pinewood easel.

With a tired and somewhat sad sigh, I switched on the lamps, an odd array of whatever the last ten or so residents had found at local flea markets and erased the natural glow from the sunset. Erased those memories of the sky above Rian and me as the concrete of the roof burrowed into our skin and our love did the painting for us. Erased from my mind all the art I’d done with my professor, so wrong and yet so damn right. Erased from my future the promise he’d whispered like a serpent into my ear, “You’ll be a great artist. You’re special.”

Most days it was easy enough to lose myself in the routine. School. Work. Laundry, cooking, tea at night with three of the same biscuits: the extra buttery ones with a thin layer of chocolate on top. None of it required all that much of me. With Rian out of my life there was no one to push me, to punish me. I earned solid grades. Received good praise from my boss. Kept my apartment tidy and functional.

As the kettle warmed up on the small ancient stove, I clicked through a few more emails from work. It was a job Conor had found for me, a connection through one of his tattoo clients. After everything that had happened, walking into The Jar just felt wrong. Too many faces I knew. Too many questions. Too much guilt. It was something I still struggled with, my decision to walk away from Rian. Everything inside of me told me I was wrong, every life experience, too. Every word my father, Stewart, my own conscience had told me told me I was wrong. I had to cling to it like a weak limb in a rushing river: the truth that I was right.

I hadn’t expected anything from Rian’s friends. When Conor called, I immediately thought it was to berate me. When I dodged his calls enough and he showed up on campus, I thought for a second about running from the bear of a man. But then he wrapped his arms around me. Held me with a tenderness I didn’t think was capable of someone with such big muscles and told me in a gruff, slightly uncomfortable voice, “Everything will be alright.”

I’d resisted the urge to break down right then and there in his arms; it didn’t seem fair. To put that burden on someone. A stranger. But when he mentioned a job interview he could set up for me I barely made it through by biting my lower lip and pinching my skin through the pocket of my jeans. I planned to wait till I got home to sob like a little child, but I only made it as far as the bus. People moved away from me like I had the plague, but I’d never felt less alone, as strange as it sounds.

The whistle of the tea kettle drew my attention away from the seemingly endless stream of emails on my phone. I’d landed the job, a blessing, though a dull one: designing marketing graphics for a large packaging company. It was the kind of meaningless, rather creatively deficient work that Rian had railed against. But it was stable. My co-workers were kind, if distant. And it paid the bills, a reality Rian had never quite detailed an escape from as far as I could remember.

Mindlessly, I steeped my tea, dipping the bag in and out. It was almost hasty, almost rash, my decision to pull the application Aurnia had given me earlier that day from my purse. I felt naughty. I felt that, despite being alone, I was bound to be caught any second. I felt rebellious even, like the silly teenager I never had the luxury of becoming.

It was for a new exhibition. A call for new artists. A chance to have your work shown. Displayed. Seen. At the prestigious Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin’s Parnell Square, no less. I ran my thumb over the glossy pamphlet with a shiver as if it was porn. Tantalizing. Alluring. Wrong. The idea of submitting something, anything, called to me like a siren. The temptation to throw myself against the cliff face I’d walked away from once before nearly knocked me over. I could feel my heart start to race, a sensation close to arousal sending heat through my body.

I jumped when a knock on the door echoed through the airy space. Just as hastily as I’d pulled out the application, I shoved it back out of sight beneath a stack of bills. I took a second to reassure myself that it wasn’t some manifestation of karma standing outside my door. It was Aurnia. Or Conor. Or Mason and Rachel even, come with fluffy pink boas and white cat-eye sunglasses to try to convince me once more to join them for karaoke.

I opened the door with that easy confidence, the kind that comes when you expect to see a welcomed face. I gasped when I saw Stewart, his skin bathed a strange green from the neon light flashing.

“Eithne!” my brother said cheerily, holding up a bottle of wine. “Little sis!”

Stewart mistook my stumbling back as an invitation inside. Though I think he would have insisted either way. He made himself at home on the low couch, really more of a pile of cushions at this point than anything with a discernible structure.

“You’re—you’re…Stewart, you’re okay?”

Stewart laughed as if he hadn’t disappeared without a word.

“I’m better than okay,” he said, cosying in like this was his place, “I heard that you finally got Rian out of your life.”

I turned and closed the door, just so I didn’t have to face him. Everyone had been so careful not to say his name in front of me. To hear it thrown around the room so casually made my lungs seize.

“He threatened me, you know?” Stewart went on as I pressed my forehead against the cool wood, back turned to my brother in the lamplight. “Pretty much said he’d kill me if I came back, ever saw you again, yada, yada. Can you believe that?”

Speaking to the shadows between my feet, I said, “Stewart, I looked for you. I searched for you. I—I thought the worst.”

“Thank that asshole boyfriend of yours.”

I turned around, leaned against the door for support.

“You’re my brother,” I said, the shock of seeing him there, tapping his fingers against his knees in my apartment making me numb, “you could have tried to let me know you were alright. A letter. A phone call. Something.”

“I couldn’t,” he said. “I’m sure you know how…convincing that maniac could be.”

Stewart raised his shirt to show me a scar along his ribs.

“Did you even try?” I asked, my voice sounding distant in my cotton-stuffed ears.

Stewart hopped up from the couch with a childlike exuberance and shook me by the shoulders, wine bottle clanging against my elbow.

“Eithne, don’t you get it?” he said, smiling widely. “This is a new start. A new start for both of us! You, a new job, me, a new lease on life!”

I stared at him warily.

“Look, look, let’s just—where’s your corkscrew?”

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