Chapter 25
Nick arrived at Marcus and Heather’s place to find Heather having a friendly argument with Alice.
“Absolutely not,” Alice was saying as she washed a wine glass and handed it to Izzy, who wiped it dry and put it in the plastic rental case. “Sit down and eat your cheesymite scroll and don’t even think of helping.”
“I can’t just sit here while you clean up my wedding,” Heather objected.
“Yes, you can,” Izzy chimed in. “You planned the whole thing, at least let us clean it up for you. And she’s right about the scrolls. Will says these are a failed batch, but he’s crazy, because they’re perfect.”
“Just let me—” Heather stood and reached for a dirty glass.
“Sit!” both women said, and she sat, smiling and shaking her head at her friends.
“We’ve got this handled. The guys are going to take down the tables and the lights, and when Carly arrives we’ll put her to work as well,” Alice said, and Heather bit her lip.
“Uh, Carly’s not coming,” she said, her eyes darting towards Nick.
“Is she okay?” Nick asked, before he could stop himself. Alice and Izzy asked the same thing at precisely the same time.
“Not really. She’s not hurt or sick, but she was pretty upset when I spoke to her this morning.” Heather was looking at Alice and Izzy, but Nick had the distinct impression that her words were meant for him. “This obviously isn’t public yet, but it sounds like NYB isn’t going to renew her contract, and she’s devastated.”
“Oh, shit,” Alice said, her hands stilling around a soapy wine glass.
Oh shit was right, Nick thought. Why hadn’t Carly told him about this? Because she doesn’t trust you, you idiot. And why would she, after he lied to her? After their project, her project idea, won him the chance of a professional lifetime?
He glanced over his shoulder, towards the front door. “Where is she?” he asked Heather.
Heather paused, chewing on her bottom lip. This time, when she spoke, she wasn’t looking at Alice and Izzy. She looked right at Nick, her expression a mix of helplessness and sympathy.
“She’s gone. Her flight back to New York just took off.”
“But … I thought she wasn’t leaving for a few more days?” Nick objected, not bothering to conceal the pleading note in his own voice. Alice and Izzy looked at him, surprised, but he ignored their synchronized raised eyebrows. He’d thought he had more time. More time to explain, to apologize, to make her understand why he’d done what he’d done. To make clear how he felt about her.
“I’m sorry,” Heather sighed, giving him a knowing look. “I wanted her to stick around, too. She should land in about twenty hours if you, uh, want to call her.”
He didn’t want to call her, he wanted to kiss her. Wanted to hold her as she fell asleep and watch her argue with her pillow and win.
“It’s fine,” he muttered. “Hope she has a safe flight. I’m going to go help Davo.” Without waiting for Heather’s reply, he strode across the kitchen and yanked the back door open.
The backyard was strewn with the remnants of last night: A napkin had blown into the bushes, and there were a few wine glasses lying on the grass. The white linen tablecloths had been left out overnight and bore scattered wet patches where the dew hadn’t dried yet. In the corner of the garden, Davo was on a large stepladder, pulling the fairy lights down from where they’d been fastened to a pole lashed to the fence.
“G’day,” Davo grunted, giving Nick a curt nod before returning to the string of lights.
“You want a hand?” Nick asked. Moving would help. Doing something, completing a task, would make it feel less like his chest was cracking in two. He remembered this feeling, from when Delphine had dumped him, but he didn’t remember it being this disorienting, like he could barely remember his own name.
“Nah, I’m right. Can you pull up the dance floor, though?”
Nick nodded and got to work.
Half an hour later, he’d pulled the three heavy sheets of painted plywood off the grass and carried them over to the back gate, ready for loading onto Davo’s ute. He’d folded the tablecloths and collapsed the tables and had just started collecting the abandoned napkins and glasses when the back door slid open and Marcus appeared with a glass of water in each hand.
“Finally, the married man emerges,” Davo called, his arms full of tangled fairy lights. “How does it feel? You miss your freedom yet?”
Marcus looked at Nick and rolled his eyes, then did a double take and frowned. He elbowed the back door shut, walked over to Davo and handed him a glass, then crossed the garden to talk to Nick.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, quiet enough that Davo couldn’t hear.
“I’m fine,” Nick said, taking the water from his friend’s hand.
“You’re full of it,” Marcus said, looking at him closely. “Heather said something about Carly leaving in a hurry? Do you know anything about that?”
Nick took a big gulp of water and took his time swallowing it. Marcus watched him patiently, with an expression that clearly said he wasn’t having it. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Nick lied.
Marcus watched him for another moment, then seemed to decide something.
“Oi, Davo, we’re going on a coffee run. You want your usual?”
Davo grunted in response, and Marcus gave Nick a decisive nod. “Let’s go.”
They were around the block before Marcus tried again.
“What happened with Carly? She disappeared last night, and now she’s on the first flight back to New York?”
Nick sighed. He needed to tell his friend the truth, at last.
“Things haven’t been going that well for me lately. With Delphine, and with retirement, it’s been a hard year. And, well, the photography thing wasn’t going that well, either,” he said to the concrete three feet in front of them. “I know it looked like I was doing okay, and I didn’t say anything when you all thought I was making it work, but the truth is I wasn’t. I was floundering. And when I came home from Paris, I had no idea what I was going to do next. If I’d have to figure out something else entirely, because dance photography wasn’t working out.”
“I’m sorry, mate. Why didn’t you just tell us that? Or tell me, at least?”
“Because you were handling retirement so well. You have a new career lined up, you’re married now, you’re … You’re moving forward, and I was just flailing.”
Marcus didn’t stop walking, but he did turn to stare at Nick. “I got fired. After a year of recovering from surgery, and right after my dad died. You think I don’t know what flailing feels like?”
“Right,” Nick agreed, “but then you figured it out.”
“Yeah, mate, I figured it out with help. From Shaz and the physio team at the company, from Alice, from Heather, even from Davo in a weird way. I couldn’t handle it all on my own.”
“I know, I just … I didn’t want to add more stuff to your plate.”
“Bullshit,” Marcus said flatly. “That’s crap and you know it.”
They stopped at a crossing, and Nick forced himself to look at Marcus. It was crap. He’d been insecure, and jealous of his friend’s new life.
He swallowed hard and told himself that Marcus would understand. “I’m sorry. I should have told you the truth, but I hated the truth. I don’t want to be jealous of you. You deserve everything you have, everything you worked for.”
Marcus was quiet for a long moment. “They make you take a liberal arts class if you want to be a physio, don’t ask me why. I ended up in a poetry seminar, and I thought I would hate it, but one day we read this poem that made the last couple of years make sense to me. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. I really needed to hear that.” He put his hand on Nick’s shoulder, just like Nick had done before they’d walked down the aisle the day before. “No feeling is final. The shit ones, the depressed ones, even the great ones, they’re all temporary. You have to remember that, or they’ll swallow you whole. There are only a few things in life that are truly forever and truly unfixable. Everything else, you can get through. And you can get through the unfixable stuff, too. Trust me.”
Marcus’s eyes glittered with tears, and Nick felt his throat thicken with emotion. Marcus gave his shoulder another squeeze, then he dropped his hand and they crossed the road together. Nick turned the words over in his mind as they walked. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. He thought about the famous Australian poem he’d loved as a kid. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel sea. Her beauty and her terror, the wide brown land for me. He thought about Carly, how she’d stormed into his life, stunned him, and stormed out again. How she’d happened to him, all beauty and terror and delight and confusion. Chaos. Control. Contentment, for a few precious moments there, before they’d allowed their insecurities to destroy it all.
No feeling was final. He wouldn’t feel rootless forever. He wouldn’t feel insecure forever. He wouldn’t miss Carly forever.
“You didn’t really answer my question, though,” Marcus said, after another block. “What happened with Carly?”
Nick sighed. Might as well come all the way clean. “The photos we were taking? I got a job offer out of them. A big one, from Vogue. They want me to go all over the world photographing dancers for them. I found out the day before the wedding.”
“Mate, that’s huge, congratulations.”
“Thanks,” Nick replied quickly, “but that wasn’t what was supposed to happen. The whole point was to help Carly get promoted, and it didn’t work. They’re not renewing her contract, and she found out I’d been lying about my own work, and, well.”
“She did a Carly,” Marcus finished.
“Big time,” Nick said. “Which I deserved, because I should have told her the truth, too, but the thing is—”
“You’re crazy about her.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I—How did you know?”
Marcus laughed, and Nick stared at him in surprise.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” Marcus grinned, sounding frankly delighted that he got to be the one to break the news to Nick, “but it was super fucking obvious last night. The way you were looking at her? Like she was holding your heart in her hands? Anyone watching you would have known in two seconds that you were head over heels for her.”
Nick opened his mouth to argue, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. Marcus was right. He was head over heels for Carly Montgomery. The problem was, the woman who was holding his heart in her hands was on a plane, headed for the other side of the world.
“I don’t know what to do,” he sighed. “The Vogue thing is such a huge deal, and I should be happy about it. And being back here just makes it more complicated, because it’s home, but it’s not, and I’m from here, but I don’t live here, and I … I just feel unmoored, you know? And now, she’s gone, too.”
“My mum still doesn’t want to sell the house,” Marcus said, as they approached the coffee shop, and Nick frowned at the sudden non sequitur. “We tried for a while, Davo and me, to get her to give it up, but she’s still so attached to it, because of Dad, because of us. And one day I asked her why she couldn’t make a home somewhere else, an apartment or something without stairs and stuff. You can make any place feel like home. Home is where the heart is, right? And she said, ‘No, home is wherever it hurts the most to leave.’
“And I don’t know if I agree with that, but maybe home doesn’t have to be a place. Maybe it can be a sound, a taste, a feeling. A person. Maybe it’s where you feel the most like yourself. Or maybe it’s more than one thing at once. You can still call Australia home,” Marcus said, gesturing over Nick’s shoulder at the beach, “but I think the luckiest people get to call multiple places home.”
Nick nodded, his throat too thick with tears to say anything, and let Marcus order his coffee for him. They walked back in silence, down the frangipani-scented street and towards the salt spray wafting off the beach.
He had left home a long time ago, and now, it didn’t hurt to leave any place. But it sure as hell hurt to be left.