Chapter Eleven Sadie
Chapter Eleven Sadie
‘Not long to go now,’ Jonah said, hoisting my bag down from the overhead compartment and then reaching for his own.
‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had some sleep.
’
That was fundamentally untrue, but I didn’t have the energy to argue.
I’d tried to doze on the two-hour flight to Hobart, but my mind wasn’t kind enough to let me.
Every bone in my body felt like it was melting.
And we were supposed to show up to campus tomorrow, two scholars finally delivered to the promised land of secure employment.
God.
‘I don’t think anyone will be expecting big things of us tomorrow,’ Jonah said, reading me as easily as if I were written by Shakespeare.
‘They’re hardly going to make us lecture three hundred students and draft a grant proposal on our first day.
’
I nodded, turning off airplane mode on my phone as the people a few rows ahead of us started to file off the plane.
Nothing from Chess.
It’s late , I told myself.
She’s probably asleep.
She’ll feel better in the morning too.
It wasn’t a convincing story, but I clung to it.
My knees creaked as we walked across the tarmac and into the terminal.
‘Let me just find our driver,’ Jonah said absently, craning his neck to look, ‘and – oh God, Sadie, I’m sorry about this.
’
‘There he is!’ someone exclaimed.
Two cannonballs slammed into him, wrapping their arms around his waist.
‘Uncle Jonah! Uncle Jonah!’
‘Hi girls.’ Jonah’s eyes met mine apologetically over their heads.
‘What are you doing here?’
Two identical sets of wide brown Fisher eyes looked up at him.
‘Mummy said we could stay up late to pick you up!’ one declared.
‘It’s way past our bedtime,’ the other one said.
‘Well, then, hello Rosie, hello Georgia.’ He smoothed their hair down, one hand on each head.
‘How nice to see you.’
‘Are you Auntie Sadie?’ the first one – Rosie?
– demanded of me.
My mouth was suddenly dry.
Auntie was not a word I had been prepared for.
‘I, um…’
‘Yes,’ Jonah said.
‘This is Auntie Sadie.’
‘We made a sign for you!’ Georgia (?
) exclaimed.
‘Then you made Mummy carry it,’ Fiona said, coming up behind them.
‘And Mummy did not consent to being covered in so much glitter. Hi, Jonah.’
She leant over her daughters’ heads to kiss Jonah on the cheek, hugging him one-armed, a pink piece of cardboard with WELCOME UNCLE JONAH AND AUNTIE SADIE written in big glittery letters in her other hand.
‘I hope you don’t mind us turning up like this, but we were all so excited to see you.
’
She turned her attention to me.
‘And to meet you!’ Fiona handed the sign to her third, older child and wrapped her arms tight around me.
‘Hi, Sadie!’
I nearly burst into tears.
All I wanted was my sister.
All I wanted was Chess to have somehow made it to this airport before me and to be here with a big glittery sign saying WELCOME SADIE, I LOVE YOU TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE AND BACK AGAIN AND EVERYTHING IS GOING TO GO BACK TO NORMAL BECAUSE I DID THAT ETERNAL SUNSHINE SURGERY AND EXTRACTED THE MEMORY OF WHAT YOU SAID TO ME STRAIGHT OUT OF MY brAIN and to put her arms around me until I complained about not being able to breathe but still not let go.
‘It is so nice to meet you properly.’ Fiona drew back and beamed at me.
‘You… you too.’
‘This is Lex.’ She ushered the tweenager now holding the sign forward.
‘Hello,’ Lex said, their tone a mixture of polite and prickly.
‘Nice to meet you. I use they/them pronouns.’
Jonah had warned me Lex could be a little touchy around new people – Matt didn’t react as sensitively as he could have to them coming out , he’d told me, which in retrospect, maybe should have been a warning sign – but they were coming in with about a tenth as much energy as their sisters, and I felt immediately grateful.
‘Nice to meet you too, Lex. She/her is fine for me.’
Lex gave me a look that was uncannily like one of Professor Fisher’s when he was watching me give a seminar paper, a penetrating stare designed to find the weaknesses in my arguments.
But then, unlike their grandfather’s, it morphed into approval.
‘Cool. Hi Uncle Jonah.’
‘Hi kiddo.’ Jonah bumped Lex’s proffered knuckles with his own.
‘I hope this is okay, but I sent your driver away,’ Fiona said.
‘I figured you’d be starving after your flight.
I thought we could get some late-night fast food and then I’ll run you over to your hotel.
’
My bones, which had felt like they were dissolving, suddenly felt like they were made of iron.
Jonah put his arm around my waist.
‘Food sounds great, Fi. But we’ll have to make it quick.
I really want to catch up properly, but we’ve got a big day tomorrow, and I need to get Sadie to bed.
’
‘I’m sure you do.
’ Fiona’s eyes sparkled.
Jonah immediately turned crimson, but, ‘That would require a level of energy neither of us currently possess,’ was all he said.
‘Girls, how do you feel about pulling our bags for us?’
Rosie and Georgia, it turned out, were very excited about pulling our bags.
‘Look, I’m Daddy, off on a business trip!
’ one of them declared as we made our way through the car park, which made Fiona look nauseous, and Lex make a scoffing noise, deep in their throat.
Jonah, though, kept his arm tight around my waist, holding me to him and holding me up simultaneously.
I looped my arm around his waist too, anchoring myself in the fight against my creeping exhaustion.
To sell the scam, I would tell him, if he asked.
He didn’t ask, though.
He just let me lean on him.
He did the same in the fast-food place Fiona drove us to, arm resting on the back of the booth behind me, fingers brushing lightly against my shoulder as he ate fries with his other hand.
He carried the conversation too – asking Fiona questions about the kids and what it had been like having Elias stay for a fortnight – while I drooped against him.
‘You all right?’ he asked me quietly, when Fiona got up to chase down Rosie and Georgia, who were sugar-high on soft-serve.
‘Not really,’ I murmured, cognisant of Lex sitting in the corner of the booth, engrossed in a book.
Jonah turned his head.
The kiss he pressed to my hair was a whisper, so gentle I might have imagined it.
‘I’ve got you, okay?
’
I leant into him.
‘Thank you,’ I said, so quietly that I might have imagined that too.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry for keeping you out so late,’ Fiona said, coming back to the table with the twins in tow.
‘Let’s get you two lovebirds to bed before you turn into pumpkins.
’
Even with only about a twentieth of my brain working, I could see the tiredness carved into her face too, under the excitement.
The university was putting me and Jonah up for a fortnight in a hotel in the city centre as a stop-gap while we found a place of our own.
Fiona dropped us off after making us promise that we would come to dinner on Friday and also send her our wedding pictures as soon as we got them: ‘I love Elias, but he’s no videographer.
’
‘Well,’ Jonah said, as we watched the tail-lights of her SUV pull away.
‘Well,’ I echoed.
He kept his hand on the small of my back as we walked inside, as if he somehow sensed that without something tethering me to reality, I would disintegrate.
‘Dr and Mrs Shaw?’ the receptionist asked.
‘Close enough,’ Jonah said.
‘I’m Mrs Shaw.
’
I could barely manage a laugh.
We took the lift up to our floor.
The inside was mirrored, an infinite number of Sadies and Jonahs reflected in an endless line.
Hopefully, some of those Sadies and Jonahs lived in that other, better world.
He had to swipe the keycard three times before it worked.
‘Here we are,’ he said, smiling encouragingly at me, the way he had smiled at his nieces.
‘Home sweet— Oh.’
There was only one bed.
We’d been promised a one-bedroom apartment, with a bedroom and a separate living room.
I’d been saving the last vestiges of my energy to overrule Jonah when he insisted on taking the pull-out couch.
What we had, though, was a studio: a single large room with an ensuite bathroom, a tiny kitchenette with a dining table and two chairs in one corner, two uncomfortable looking armchairs in another – and one king-sized bed.
I wanted to cry until I laughed.
If Chess read this in a book, she would throw it out the window of her twenty-sixth-floor office.
That’s a ridiculous coincidence.
And what, they couldn’t just go back to reception and get the mistake corrected?
What hotel are they staying in, the inn on Jesus’s birthday?
‘I’ll go downstairs and get this sorted out,’ Jonah said.
‘No.’
‘It’s okay, Sadie, I can deal—’
‘No, I mean…’ I took my hair down from the topknot it had been in all day, shaking it loose around my shoulders so I could tie it up again.
‘I’m tired.
You’re tired.
Let’s just go to bed.
’
He looked at me for a long moment.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m going to pass out within the next eight seconds, Fisher.
I think your virtue is safe from me.
’
Something in me wanted to make him blush that brilliant crimson colour, but his cheeks only went a little pink.
‘Do you want to grab a quick shower and wash the plane off?’ he asked me.
‘You can go first.’
The hot water should have finished the job that the physical and emotional fatigue had started.
I fully intended – and expected – to be fast asleep by the time Jonah got out of his own shower.
But, it turns out, there are different kinds of exhaustion.
There’s the exhaustion you’ve earned.
The exhaustion they write about in fantasy all the time, a sort of wholesome tiredness, where it’s been a hard day’s march on your quest, and you’ve got another hard day’s march tomorrow, but you’ve dined simply on the bread and cheese that always sounds so delicious on the page and sunk into a deep, dreamless slumber.
Mine was the other kind.
The kind that feels like a parasite, robbing you of your energy, robbing you of your will, even as it forces you to keep going.
There was a brief flash of light and burst of steam as Jonah came out of the bathroom.
He was briefly illuminated – hair standing up at weird angles from being towelled dry, wearing those same pyjamas as on the night I proposed to him – before he turned the light off, plunging the room into darkness again.
He swore under his breath as he tripped on something.
There was another brief flash of illumination as he sat down on his side of the bed and plugged his phone in, a soft clunk as he put his glasses on the bedside table, a rustle of covers as he lay down next to me.
‘Night, Sadie,’ he said softly.
He clearly thought I was already asleep, so I didn’t reply.
I looked over at him.
In the dim light coming from the strip under the apartment door, I could just make out the outline of him.
Jonah Fisher liked to sleep on his front.
His head was turned towards me, hand resting beside it on the pillow.
The air-conditioning had not caught up with our presence, so he only had the covers pulled up to his waist.
His back was a long, smooth line in the darkness, a straight line that was somehow also a perfect curve, a line that, in that other, better world, his other, better wife would surely be unable to resist tracing with her fingers.
‘Shaw,’ he murmured, ‘go to sleep.’
‘I am asleep.’
His chuckle came from a place low in his belly, pressed against the mattress.
Silence.
We breathed together.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked.
Yes.
No.
‘I don’t know how to,’ I whispered.
How could I put into words what it felt like, this hole in my chest where the ties that bound me to Chess had been hacked away?
And how could I explain to him – this man who had held me up and held me together and had turned his entire world upside down to help his sister – that I had cut the ties myself?
‘I’m really sorry,’ Jonah said.
‘It’s not your fault.
’
‘It is, though.’
There was a rustle of bedding as he shifted slightly.
‘I know your sister is angry with you for marrying me,’ he said.
‘And I know how important she is to you, so I’m sorry, Sadie.
I’m really, really sorry.
If there’s anything I can do to help make it right – anything at all – please tell me.
I’ll do it.
In a heartbeat.
Even if—’ He paused for a moment.
‘Even if you decide you want to end this – this marriage, that’s completely fine.
The ball’s in your—’
‘Stop.’
He stopped.
‘Jonah, none of this is your fault. Really. You haven’t done anything wrong.
And…
’ There was a lump in my throat so large it was difficult to get the words out around it.
‘After everything we’ve gone through to get here, do you really think I’d ditch you?
Just like that?
Especially after meeting your sister?
’
‘We’re not talking about my sister,’ he said softly.
‘We’re talking about yours.
’
I sniffed.
‘If you want to talk about her, that is,’ he added.
I swallowed several times, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t go away.
‘We had a fight. I… I said some things. Awful things. Things I don’t think she can forgive me for.
’
Silence again.
My breath felt like it was caught behind the lump in my throat, like I might suffocate, right here in bed in the middle of an air-conditioned room.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Shaw,’ Tweed Jonah snapped.
‘That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me.
Including when you tried to convince me there was a direct line between nineteenth-century bardolatry and BookTok.
’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your sister loves you unconditionally.’ The tone in his voice was sharp.
‘Any fool can see that. You are, theoretically at least, an intelligent woman. Do you really think you could fuck that up in one fight?’
‘You don’t know what I said to her!
’
‘It doesn’t matter what you said to her!
She loves you.
She’ll get over it.
Do you really think people march into airports and shirt-front the husbands of people they’re planning to wash their hands of forever?
’
She…
had done that, hadn’t she?
She hadn’t replied to any of my messages.
She hadn’t wanted to talk to me.
But Chess had still marched into the airport and delivered what I was sure were some extremely detailed threats to Jonah.
She had come.
‘You’re underestimating how much she loves shirtfronting people,’ I said, because it was easier to fight than to concede.
But Jonah gave no ground.
‘You’re underestimating how much she loves you .
’
A tear leaked out of my left eye.
I sniffed, wiping it away with the heel of my hand.
His tone was gentler when he spoke again, tweed giving way to cardigan.
‘I said some awful things to my sister too, once upon a time,’ he said.
‘Things she absolutely shouldn’t forgive me for.
But…
well, you’ve met her.
’
‘It took you years to get past it, though. Years and years.’ The thought of this ache in my chest lasting more than a decade made me want to scream into the pillow and never stop.
‘Yes, it did, because I was young and dumb and didn’t apologise.
Surely you of all people remember what I was like when I was younger, Shaw.
’
I sniffed again.
‘You’re much smarter than I was,’ he said.
He wasn’t wearing his glasses, but somehow, unerringly, the pad of one of his fingers found the space between my knuckles in the dark, a feather-light touch.
‘If Fiona and I can sort out our shit, then you and Chess can definitely sort out yours. Just give her some time to calm and down and adjust to’ – his finger tapped between my knuckles, once, twice, three times, making my heart skip a beat in its haste to match his rhythm – ‘this.’
A long breath escaped me.
It felt so urgent, the need to fix things, the ache in my chest so awful – but of course, along with everything else, I owed Chess what she’d asked for.
Time.
Alone.
Without me.
I inhaled and exhaled again, long and slow.
Then I turned my hand over on the pillow, so I could lace my fingers through Jonah’s.
Hopefully, he would understand why – but if not, I’d come up with an explanation in the morning, once my head was clearer.
‘Thanks for yelling at me, Fisher,’ I said quietly.
‘I needed it.’
His fingers clasped mine, dextrous and certain.
‘Any time, Shaw,’ he murmured.
‘Any time.’