Chapter Ten Sadie
Chapter Ten Sadie
The morning after our wedding, Jonah made me breakfast.
His fingers were dextrous around the handle of the frying pan.
His wrists flexed as he flipped the pancakes expertly, sleeves pushed up to his elbows.
His attention to detail as he poured syrup and fanned out carefully-cut strawberries was mesmerising.
The plate he slid in front of me looked like a magazine cover.
In another, better world, where Jonah set this plate in front of another, better wife, this would be a perfect epilogue.
Obstacles overcome.
The promise of the marriage plot fulfilled.
The first day of a happily ever after.
‘This looks beautiful,’ I said, throat scratchy.
‘Thanks, Fisher.’
He didn’t blush, but his cheeks went a little pink above his beard.
‘I was going to make you eat cold pizza, but Elias ate it all when he got in last night, the arsehole.’
He slid into a chair opposite me.
‘Besides, you know my opinions on combining pizza and coffee, and starting the day off with a fight seemed like a terrible idea.’
Sun was streaming in through the kitchen window.
It winked off the gold finish on his wedding ring.
Even though I’d just about cried myself hoarse, a tell-tale lump started to grow in my throat again.
This was not that other, better world.
I’d done it.
I’d gone through with it.
I was Mrs Jonah Fisher.
He was Mr Sadie Shaw.
The rings might be fakes, but their significance was not.
No matter how many of our collection of spare wedding bands we went through – no matter if every piece of cubic zirconia fell out of my engagement ring – we were still bound together now, in a very real way.
And Chess hadn’t been there.
Hardly anyone had.
We’d asked Van and Annie to be there as our witnesses, but we’d invited the rest of our housemates as well, current and past.
None of them had been able to make it.
We’d invited some colleagues from the various universities we’d worked at too.
None of them could make it either.
That’s academic culture for you, Jonah had said to me, shrugging, when we realised just how small our small wedding would be.
Everyone’s always working.
Tuesday afternoon isn’t exactly the most convenient time.
But Jonah’s brother had come.
The brother who lived and worked in Germany, the brother who he’d been raised to fight instead of fight for, the brother he had freely admitted he didn’t know particularly well – Elias had come.
And Chess hadn’t.
There was a theorist called Zygmunt Bauman who wrote about ‘liquid love’, the idea that late capitalism had ‘liquified’ a lot of connections between people.
When the world is a marketplace, he argued, we don’t want to tie ourselves tightly and permanently to people.
Instead, we always have one eye on the market, always on some level considering trading people in for a better, newer, shinier version.
Mostly, when I used Bauman in my work, it was to critique him.
The enormous ongoing popularity of the marriage plot and the happily-ever-after, I’d contended in an article in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, signified a strong attachment to the idea that we could find someone we would never want to trade in, and who would never want to trade us in.
But maybe I’d been a bit unfair to old mate Zyg, because, when I looked at my life, he clearly had a point.
I was thirty-one years old, and Chess was the only constant in my life.
Everyone else was impermanent.
Whether I untied the ties that bound us together or they did, the threads always came undone in the end, unravelling and drifting free.
It had never been something I’d minded.
I’d been laser-focused on my career, not my interpersonal connections, and no one had ever made me care enough to mind.
When my first boyfriend had tried to talk me into being in love with him – Don’t you love me, Sadie?
You love hanging out with me and going out with me and having sex with me.
I think you are in love with me, and you’re just too scared to say it – I’d cut the thread right there without a moment’s regret.
Did you love those things?
my therapist had asked me.
Sure, I’d replied, but I didn’t love him.
How do you know?
Because I know what love feels like , I’d said.
I love Chess.
That was the one great unshakeable truth of my life.
People would come.
People would go.
Mothers would die and fathers would leave and friends and boyfriends and housemates would drift in and out, but Chess was always there.
It didn’t matter that all the other bonds that bound people to me were liquid, tied loosely, destined to come undone.
She was my anchor.
I was tied tight to her.
Then I’d said those awful, unforgiveable things.
I hadn’t just cut the thread.
I’d hacked through it with a machete, frayed ends all over the floor.
No wonder no one had turned up to my wedding.
No wonder the closest thing I would probably ever have to a real partnership was this fake, temporary sham with my long-term nemesis.
Why would anyone want to be tied to me?
‘More coffee?’ Jonah asked.
This, now, was the only tie I had binding me to another person.
This, a tie solemnised with a three-for-$12 piece of costume jewellery, consecrating fifteen years of animosity with only a thin veneer of civility over it, his desperation to help his sister drizzled on top like he’d drizzled syrup on those pancakes.
‘No.’ I stood.
‘I’m going to pack.
’
Everything I owned was in a carry-on suitcase.
He knew that.
He’d wheeled it across the park for me yesterday.
He knew that the upstart overrated nobody he’d tied himself to was a coward and a liar.
Upstairs, sitting in the desk chair that had once been Fiona’s, I sent a stream of messages to Chess.
Chessie, I’m sorry.
I’m so, so sorry.
It was the heat of the moment,
and I said things I didn’t mean.
I love you.
I’m in Watsons Bay for the rest of the day –
I’ll drop you a pin with the address.
Our flight’s at 7pm.
I already emailed
you my flight details, but I’ll forward
them to you again just in case.
Please come by.
I need to see you.
I love you.
None of them were answered.
And Chess didn’t come.
Elias insisted on driving us to the airport.
‘It’s not a very good wedding present, but it’s the best I could do on short notice,’ he said, kissing me on both cheeks in farewell as Jonah got our luggage out of the boot.
‘Us not having to pay cab fare is a great present,’ I said, only half paying attention.
‘There’s still a couple of weeks before that steady pay cheque kicks in.
’
Elias slapped Jonah’s back in one of those aggressive hugs that men give each other where they simultaneously want to express affection and are terrified of doing so.
‘Be good, little brother.’
‘Thanks so much for coming.’
Jonah’s voice was gravelly, in a way I’d only heard once before: that night in the kitchen.
Elias and Fiona and I aren’t like you and your sister.
Sometimes I’m so fucking jealous of you, Shaw.
Chess should be here.
She should be here.
Elias slapped Jonah’s back again.
‘I wouldn’t have missed it.
’
I took my phone out again.
At the airport now.
Please come.
We can’t leave it like this, Chessie.
‘I might, um…’ I was dimly aware of Jonah saying.
‘At work. If I run into… do you want me to…?’
‘No,’ Elias replied.
‘Let those sleeping dogs lie.’
Then he slapped Jonah’s back a third time.
‘Look after Fi, okay? Tell the kids Uncle Elias said hi.’
‘I will.’ Jonah turned to me.
‘Ready to go?’
I wasn’t.
Not even remotely.
I nodded, pulling the handle of my carry-on bag up.
The security line was moving at a glacial pace.
I was probably the only person who was glad about it.
Every step forward felt like a piece of bamboo being jammed under my fingernails, right into the veins that led to my heart.
‘I think we should get a car,’ Jonah said abruptly.
I glanced up at him.
‘What?’
‘I know we decided not to.’ We shuffled forward another few increments in the line.
‘But I think we need to revisit the conversation.’
Conversation was a euphemism.
It had been an argument, one of the more intense ones we’d had during our month-long engagement.
If our housemates had overheard it, they would have assumed we were either on the verge of breaking up or ripping each other’s clothes off.
‘Hobart’s not like Sydney,’ he said.
‘There’s so much less public transport, especially when you get out of the city centre.
I’m telling you, Shaw, it makes sense to buy a car.
’
‘Have you magically found some buying-a-car money lying around? Because I sure haven’t.
’
‘We could get a loan together. What if Fi needs us to pick up the kids or something? How are we going to do that without a car?’
The line moved forward a few more steps.
Suddenly, I was completely, utterly exhausted.
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘What?’
I held up the finger with my engagement and wedding rings on it like I was flipping him the bird, the closest thing to resistance I could muster.
‘In for a penny, right?’
He ran a hand over his beard.
‘I, um, thought that would be harder.’
I didn’t have the energy to respond.
There was still no sign of Chess by the time we’d cleared security, no matter how hard I craned my neck looking for her while Jonah got pulled aside for a random bomb check.
‘I’m just going to go to the gate and sit,’ I told him when he’d been given the all-clear.
Surely, if Chess did come, that would be the first place she’d go.
‘Feel free to wander. I can look after your luggage, if you want.’
‘That’s okay.
I’ll come with you.
’
‘Suit yourself.’
We were running early – despite my earlier attempts to delay in the hope that Chess would turn up at the house, the Fisher brothers had overruled me on the importance of beating the traffic, two to one – so our gate was mostly empty, but I guided us to seats as far away from the boarding area as possible.
If we had our backs to the wall, I theorised, we’d be able to see everyone that walked towards us.
What was I going to do if Chess didn’t come?
How was I supposed to get on this plane with you love me too much being the last thing I’d said to her?
Chessie, please, I texted her.
If you won’t come, please call me.
I need to hear your voice.
This was the longest I’d ever gone without talking to her.
Even when I’d been overseas for conferences, or she’d been working monstrous hours, Chess and I talked every single day.
I jammed my thumb into my engagement ring, scraping it against the unfamiliar pressure of my wedding band.
What the fuck was I going to do?
Jonah nudged me with his elbow.
‘I’ll be back, okay?
’
I barely registered it.
My body nodded automatically in acknowledgment.
He got up and walked away.
And I was alone.
Just me and our luggage and the pressure of the spikes of cubic zirconia against the pad of my thumb, and the horrible, horrible weight of what I’d done.
How could I leave if she didn’t come?
I couldn’t.
I couldn’t.
Chess would be furious with me.
You’ve worked your whole life for this opportunity!
she’d shout.
What do you mean, you threw it away?
But it would be a different kind of fury.
A familiar fury.
There was nothing in the world that made Chess angrier than the thought I might not achieve my dreams.
It would be a fury I knew how to manage, a fury we could find our way to the other side of.
Unlike this.
This horrible, pointed, suffocating silence that I had no idea how to manage at all.
I bit my lip, hard enough to draw blood.
When Jonah got back from the bathroom, I was going to tell him.
I’m sorry, but I can’t , I’d say.
You go.
I have to stay.
Lyons only wanted one Level B lecturer anyway, right?
You’ll do as good a job as me.
He’d protest, but I’d insist.
Good luck with Fiona.
I hope you two can get close again, I really do.
And don’t worry, I’ll get Chess to help us figure out the legalities of a quickie divorce.
I pressed my thumb harder into my engagement ring.
I’d gotten used to wearing it, this past month.
It would feel strange not to have Jonah’s ring on my finger – naked, almost – but there was nothing that would make me feel as utterly and entirely stripped bare as having this awful, awful hole in my heart where Chess should be.
I almost jumped out of my skin when Jonah tapped me on the shoulder, ricocheting wildly between surprise and hope that he was Chess and disappointment that he wasn’t and guilt for feeling disappointed because he had done nothing wrong, nothing at all.
All he’d done was treat me kindly and carry me to bed and make me the world’s most beautiful pancakes and be the most cardigan-y version of himself and I was going to pull the rug out from under him anyway.
‘I got you something,’ he said, sitting down beside me, just as I was opening my mouth to tell him that I was sorry, but I couldn’t.
He handed me a white paper bag with the logo of the airport bookshop stamped on it in navy ink.
‘A wedding present. Sorry about the lack of wrapping.’
I took the book out of the bag.
It was Codename Charming by Lucy Parker.
‘I hope I read the paratext right,’ he said, tapping his finger against the two cartoon figures on the front cover.
‘If this is actually some kind of heart-wrenching saga where everyone dies horribly in the end, I can take it back and exchange it. I kept the receipt.’
‘You read the paratext exactly right,’ I replied numbly.
I had a copy of the exact same book in my handbag, intended to be my plane reading.
‘Um—’
‘And I got some snacks. It’ll probably be too late for dinner by the time we get to Hobart.
’
He handed me a bottle of water and a packet of nacho cheese Doritos – my junk food of choice when I was either deeply stressed or on my period.
Oh God.
Oh God.
‘Jonah,’ I said.
‘Jonah, I…’
But he wasn’t looking at me anymore.
His gaze was fixed on a point over my left shoulder.
I turned to see what he was looking at, and—
‘Chess,’ I breathed.
I was on my feet before I was conscious of it, propelled towards her as if by gravity.
‘Chessie,’ I said.
‘I’m so glad…
I’m so sorry…
I’m—’
‘Not you,’ Chess snarled, striding straight past me.
‘You. Private school boy. With me. Now.’
My heart fell out of my body, landing with a wet splat on the terminal floor.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything as Chess towed a clearly unwilling Jonah away, fingers fastened around his wrist like a manacle.
She yanked him to a halt in front of the bookshop – the same bookshop where he must have bought Codename Charming for me – and jabbed her finger into his chest, once, twice, three times.
She was facing away from me, and her voice didn’t carry, but it didn’t matter.
Her body language and Jonah’s facial expression did not require years of study in close reading to interpret.
Chess curled her fingers into Jonah’s lapels and yanked him into her, like a mafia boss in a movie seizing someone by the collar and telling them that if they didn’t deliver in one hour, they’d be thrown off a bridge in concrete shoes.
I had done the same thing yesterday.
The celebrant had told us to kiss, and I had clutched at his lapels as the weight of what I’d just done collapsed onto me – I got married, and Chess wasn’t there – and his lips had brushed against mine, and even though it felt like the ground had turned to the ocean beneath my feet, Jonah had held me up.
I’d crushed the rose of his boutonniere when I’d grabbed at his lapels.
I had not taken enough care, interested only in what I wanted, what I needed, and the delicate flower had been ruined.
Chess let him go suddenly.
Jonah stumbled back a few steps, face white, and she turned on her heel.
I thought she was going to walk straight past me – she didn’t slow down – but then she stopped abruptly, looking at me.
I couldn’t say anything.
After sending her flurries of messages all day, now I was completely frozen.
‘Good luck, Sadie,’ she said.
And then she was gone.
She was nearly out of sight by the time I managed to galvanise myself into action, the book in its paper bag falling to the floor.
‘Chessie, wait!’
She stopped.
I wanted so badly for her to say something.
Anything.
Even something combative – don’t you have a plane to catch?
– would be something, a place to start.
She didn’t say anything.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘I’m so, so, so sorry.
’
Nothing.
Nothing and nothing and nothing, nothing to use as a springboard, nothing to cling to, nothing left.
‘Chessie, please.’
Francesca Shaw, who always had something to say, said nothing.
Panicked, I scrabbled in my handbag.
‘Please,’ I said, pressing my original copy of Codename Charming into her hands, the one I’d brought to read on the plane.
‘You’ll really like this author.
This one has fake dating but when she’s done that before there’s always been a really good reason so maybe it’ll be okay.
’
Chess said nothing.
She held the book like I’d handed her a too-hot cup of coffee and it was burning her fingers.
‘I’ll send you more.
As many as you want.
Every day.
’
‘No.’
One word.
One syllable.
A knife, directly into my heart.
‘I’m so sorry, Chess.
’ It was a plea.
‘I love you so much. I didn’t mean it.
’
She put the book into her handbag, snapping the clasp shut decisively.
‘I know you’re sorry,’ she said.
‘And I love you too. To the end of the universe and back again. Always.’
I had one split second of molten, golden relief before she looked me in the eye.
‘But you meant it, Sadie,’ she said.
‘And I need some time to work out what that means for me. Alone.’
I don’t know how long I stood there, frozen, staring after her as she disappeared into the distance, before there were gentle fingers on the small of my back.
‘Come on,’ Jonah said, propelling me forward, out of the path of a family with an absurd number of wheelie bags.
‘Let’s sit down.
’
He bent down to pick up the copy of Codename Charming I’d dropped as he led me back to our seats.
‘Do you want this?’
I nodded, taking it from him and clutching it in white-knuckled fingers, so hard that I would probably bruise the pages.
He sat me back down.
‘Here.’ He took the lid off the bottle of water he’d bought and offered it to me.
I shook my head wordlessly.
‘I’m so sorry, Sadie.
This is all my fault.
’
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to scream right in this man’s face, this man whose face I had screamed in plenty of times before, this man who was being so fucking nice to me.
I wanted to scream and scream and scream, and I wanted to never stop screaming.
‘Just shut up, Jonah,’ I said hoarsely.
‘Please.’
He should have got up and left.
Instead, he hesitated.
Then he put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.
I should have pushed him away.
But this was the only tie I had left now, the last bridge I hadn’t burnt – so I reached up and, even though I had no right to, even though there was no one watching, I clung to my fake husband’s hand like a lifeline.