In a mildly slighter tone: “Like the boy I pulled down to the floor, back home…”
“I—” But there was nothing else there.
Just I.
I and nothingness.
I and sinking, and the clothes hung over a chair—and Abbey wasn’t finished.
“And maybe everything else too, like I said…”
“Everything else?”
The room felt sewn together now, there to be pulled apart. “I don’t know.” She sat straighter, yet again, for the courage. “Maybe without me, you’d still be at home with all the arsehole sayers, blue singlet wearers, and the rest. You might still be cleaning that shit-heap surgery and throwing bricks up to other blokes throwing bricks up.”
He ate down his heart, and a fair share of the dark. “I came to you.”
“When your dog died.”
It hit him hard. “The dog. How long have you been waiting to unleash that?” (There was no pun intended, I’m sure of it.)
“Never. It just came out.” Now she crossed her arms, but didn’t really cover herself, and she was beautiful and naked and her collarbones so straight. “Maybe it’s always been there.”
“You were jealous of a dog?”
“No!” Again, he was beside the point. “I’m just—I’m wondering why it took you months to walk to my front door after watching and waiting! Hoping I’d do it for you—to chase you down the road.”
“You never did that.”
“Of course not…I couldn’t.” She didn’t quite know where to look now, and settled for directly ahead. “God, you just don’t get it, do you?”
That last one was like a death knell—a truth so quiet and brutal. The effort it took had weakened her, if only momentarily, and she slid back down upon him, her cheek like stone on his neck. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”
But for some reason, he went on with it.
Maybe to welcome the nearing defeat.
“Just tell me.” The taste of his voice. It was dry and sandy, and those bricks had been thrown up to him, and he swallowed them each in turn. “Just tell me how to fix it.”
The act of breathing was suddenly an Olympic final, and where was Emil Zátopek when he needed him? Why hadn’t he trained like that lunatic Czech? An athlete with that sort of endurance could surely stand up to a night like this.
But could Michael?
Again:
“Just tell me, I’ll fix it.”
“But that’s it.”
Abbey’s voice was horizontal, put there, dropped on his chest. No anxiety, no labor.
No desire to fix or be fixed:
“Maybe there is nothing,” she said. “Maybe it’s.” She full-stopped. She began. “Maybe we’re just—not right, the way we thought.”
His last gasp now, final breath:
“But I—…” He cut off; he trailed. “So much.”