In the Unlikely Event

“Are you trying to summon your long-lost, non-existent soul through séance?” I wonder aloud.

She lets out a breathless chuckle. “I just remember how dark the night was in your backyard from when…” She turns the two flashlights on, placing one behind me and one in front of me, then shakes her head.

From when I unknowingly took your virginity because your ex-boyfriend couldn’t finish the job and in exchange gave you multiple orgasms. Yeah.

“Anyway, I’m going to drag some of your furniture out here so I’ll have somewhere to light these candles. I can’t take a decent picture with no light.”

“Cheers, Captain Obvious.” I watch her face, looking for crumbs of emotion.

Aurora doesn’t respond. When she enters the house again, I follow her. No matter how much I’m trying to be a dick—and, in my humble opinion, my efforts don’t go unnoticed—I’m slightly above watching her drag heavy furniture outside in the middle of the night by herself.

I carry the coffee table she pointed at and put it outside. She lines it with candles and lights them. I go back to my spot between the flashlights, plucking the pen from behind my ear. I scowl at the notebook again. In my periphery, Aurora is plugging the tube adapter into her camera.

She squats down on one leg and takes a picture of me. I clench my jaw, remembering what she did with the original pictures she took of me. Her cruel confessions. Her pretty, glacier heart.

But then she collects napkins and asks me if I want something from the store and asks about Mam and Father Doherty. Something doesn’t add up.

“Napkins.” I look up, musing. One word. Five tons of history crammed into it.

“Weren’t you the one who enacted the no-mingling rule?” She bats her eyelashes, feigning innocence and taking another picture of me.

She stands up and changes the position of the flashlights, now aiming them at my face. I don’t squint. Sitting around in a garden with a notebook is emasculating enough.

“It’s a statement, not an olive branch.”

“In that case, I choose not to address the statement and tramp all over the un-extended olive branch,” she snaps.

I get sick pleasure from knowing I hit a nerve. Hate is the closest thing to love you can squeeze out of the unattainable.

I hurt her back!

I look up, and our eyes meet, just like they did all those years ago on Drury Street. Even then I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this girl was put in my life to change it. I didn’t know at the time she’d choose to derail it and lead it on a collision course with everyone I cared about.

“Sooner or later, we’ll both have to play nice. Shiny Boyfriend is leaving tomorrow,” I hiss.

“He has a name.” She lowers her camera, her eyes narrowing.

Ken. I bet it’s Ken.

“I don’t care for it.” I press the pen against the page in my notebook until it bleeds, my eyes still trained on her.

“Callum.” She lowers her camera. “His name is Callum Brooks.”

I hitch one shoulder up. “All I heard is Shiny Boyfriend.”

I scribble something in the notebook.

Can you please stop being so beautiful and real and alive all over my house like you own it or something?

Can she?

Can she kindly enlighten me as to what went through my mind when I came up with this plan? What I was hoping to achieve, other than dragging her down the miserable road I have walked one too many miles on?

Rory takes a few more pictures. I chew the tip of the pen. I don’t know how authors do it, how they bleed words onto the clinical, plastic keyboard. Seems cold and impersonal. I can barely write on a page. I bet Rory could be an author. I bet she could write on a MacBook, the mother of all fancy-schmancy technological diseases. I’m making myself sick just thinking about it.

Also, since when did I stop calling her Aurora in my mind and go back to Rory?

“Do you have a MacBook?” I blurt.

She shakes her head, but doesn’t look at me like I’m a weirdo. I’ve always loved that about her. “Why?”

“Never mind. So, napkins,” I repeat the word.

She sighs. “It means nothing.”

“Nothing means nothing; otherwise it wouldn’t exist.”

“Some people collect coasters, postcards, stamps. I collect napkins. It’s not a big deal.”

Silence.

I look down at the notepad. Back up. “I just find it quite peculiar, since I was under the impression you hated me.”

She looks up from the pictures she’s scanning in her camera. Her eyebrows pull together. “Why would I hate you?”

Why indeed.

Why?

I’ve asked myself the very same question a million times, wondering if I should buy a ticket to America, if I should send her one to Ireland, if I should rip out my heart and dump it at her door.

“I didn’t hate you then,” she whispers. “But I’m starting to now.”

Her eyes are on my face, reminding me why I couldn’t let go, even when my entire world crumbled. Some people raise you up, and some people pull you down. And Rory? She pulls me in every possible direction and angle, leaving me tattered.

I remind myself of Kathleen.

Of our families.

Of my top commitment right now, which shouldn’t be Rory.

I rip the paper and ball it in my fist.

“Wait, let me take a picture…” She advances toward me, but it’s too late. I throw it into my mouth and swallow. She stops, her eyes flaring, the orange glow of the many candles making her look like a medieval witch.

“You’re insane,” she whispers.

I know.

I write down another sentence.

 

There’s life everywhere you look. Even in objects. But there is death, too.

 

“Come take a picture of this.”

“Your Photoshopped thoughts?” She shakes her head. “No, thank you.”

Aurora Belle Jenkins hates me.

But hate is a verb.

And I’m about to prove I hate her more.

Present

 

Rory

 

The sun paints the sky lilac, its light dripping on Mal, highlighting the perfect arcs and planes of his face.

I take another picture. He hasn’t been writing a whole lot, but I’m not here to monitor his progress, or lack thereof.

I don’t know how many of them Ryner is going to use for the website, or album cover, or documentary, or whatever he has in mind for this project, but I can’t wait to upload these to my laptop and start working on them. I want to study Mal’s face alone, without him witnessing what the sight of it does to me.

I stand up and walk around his backyard, looking for my next perfect shot. Mal has been talking about the song “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette for ten minutes now, in a true Old Mal fashion.

“…literally none of her examples were truly ironic. Especially the one with Mr. Play it Safe, who was afraid to fly and ended up dying in a plane crash. It is not ironic. It would have been ironic had he died in a car accident. That’s the definition of irony. The expression of one’s meaning by using language that signifies the opposite. It’s like a bunch of people sat and worked on this song, and nobody—not one soul—bothered to tell her nothing about this song was ironic. Other, of course, than the fact that she wrote a song about irony that wasn’t ironic. Which is a big irony in itself, I suppose.”