Come See About Me (37 page)

Marta raps at my
door the very next morning at twenty to eleven, on her way to work, and asks
how I’d feel about Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. O’Keefe’s isn’t open as
late during the week as it is on Fridays and Saturdays, so she’ll only need me
from about one-thirty—when she’ll take her lunch —to six o’clock. I’m glad for
the extra hours, which will also translate into extra money for Christmas
gifts, and tell her I’ll see her Wednesday afternoon.

As I close the
front door, I hear my cell phone ringing in the living room and snap it up,
expecting it to be one of my parents or Katie or Yunhee. But it’s Liam’s number
flashing across the screen. I stare at it, frozen, and wait for the ringing to
stop. There’s nothing I want to hear from his mouth anymore and nothing I want
to say to him.

We’re done. We
were finished five days ago.

That’s so clear
to me that I jump in surprise when Abigail’s landline starts to ring. Again, I
let it continue and I don’t check to see if Liam’s left a message afterwards
because there’s no point; words from him will only make my anger and sadness
fresher.

But at ten
o’clock that night, while I’m watching
Little Britain
and playing with
Armstrong, a text message from Liam comes in.

“I’m
sorry it took me so long to get in touch. I need to talk to you and left a
message on your home phone. Please ring me as soon as you can.”

I instantly hit
delete but as the night wears on can’t fight the gnawing urge to drift over to
the cordless and listen to the message he left earlier. Hearing Liam’s voice
makes me miss the person I thought I knew so much that I dig my fingers into
the counter and squeeze my lashes together as he says, “Leah, I know I probably
should’ve been in touch sooner and I’m sorry. But I was in the middle of a
fucked
up
situation and I needed time to clear my head afterwards. To be honest,
I’m not in much better form now, but I still really want to see you. I want to
make the most of the time we have left. I’ll explain everything in person,
okay? I can’t…I don’t…
want
to say it all over the phone like this. Let
me know when we can see each other. Bye.”

I hang up,
feeling worse than before I picked up the phone. Clearly things didn’t work out
with Natalie, but I can’t leap back in time and pretend it doesn’t matter that
I’m Plan B or that Liam’s likely been hooking up with someone else the entire
time he’s been involved with me. I didn’t think or care about those things that
night on the pier, but now it’s impossible to forget them. Now he can’t leave
town soon enough.

***

I don’t sleep well. On top of my
Liam problem, I appear to be coming down with Marta’s cold. My throat’s sore
and I’ve exhausted my facial tissue supply; I have no choice but to take a trip
to Shoppers Drug Mart and buy more. Outside my window the clouds look heavy and
threaten snow. I pull on my leather boots, matching wool gloves and scarf and
my long coat and begin marching up the street. My nose is intermittently runny
and I miss having access to a car or decent public transportation. Where
Bastien and I used to live on Eglinton, a TTC bus coasted by every few minutes.

My cell phone
rings as I’m hurrying up Allan Street towards the drugstore, and I know without
slipping it out of my pocket that it’s Liam again. When we first got involved
he seemed so concerned about me being “confused”, but now he doesn’t seem to
care that I want to be left alone.

I turn off my
cell and hope it won’t mean facing a second phone message at home. If Liam’s
that desperate for sex he can call someone else. Maybe that same person will be
interested in hearing his useless justifications or his sob story about Natalie
cheating on him.

At Shoppers Drug
Mart, I stock up on tissues and pick up lozenges and a non-prescription cold
remedy for my nose. As I stride up and down the aisles I grow angrier with
every step, thinking about how close I felt to Liam the afternoon we
masturbated in front of each other and he told me that he and Natalie couldn’t
have been right. I would’ve sworn that he felt close to me too, and by the time
I’ve paid for my items and am walking home my gloved hands are forming fists
and my already sore throat feels ragged and raw.

I begin to hope
he’ll call again simply so I can continue ignoring him and make a statement.

But that would
be too easy because when I’ve nearly reached home again, and am only two houses
away, I see Liam’s car swerve into Abigail’s driveway. At such close range he
couldn’t have avoided spotting me. I’m trapped.

And I don’t want
to do this.

Liam gets out of
the car and turns swiftly in my direction. I square my shoulders and head
directly for him. If we have to play out this scene, I want it over with
quickly.

“Are you going
to pretend you’re not avoiding me?” Liam says, his eyes zeroing in on mine.

I shake my head.
“I’m not pretending anything—I don’t want to talk to you.”

Liam’s face
falls. He pulls his chin in close to his chest and stares into the wind.

“I don’t want to
listen to you lie anymore,” I continue as I stand three feet away from. “And
from what I’ve heard of it so far, I don’t think I want the truth either. It’s
not going to be easy with me anymore like you wanted. It’s over. You need to
go.”

“I never lied to
you,” Liam says in a bewildered voice. It’s beginning to snow, like I knew it
would, and a downy flake catches in his eyelashes, fluttering up and down as he
blinks.

“I met Natalie,”
I declare, digging into my shopping bag to reach for the tissues. My fingers
clutch a wad and raise them to my nose.

“When?” Liam’s
face is ashen. Without the sun to brighten his eyes his pupils appear nearly
gray.

“Last Wednesday
before I had a chance to read your text message. I had some things to do in
downtown Oakville and went by your apartment hoping to pick up my earrings.” I
pull my scarf to my mouth to cough into it.

“Are you sick?”
Liam asks. I nod dismissively but he adds, “You shouldn’t be out here. Let’s
talk inside.”

“No.” I raise my
gloved hand. “You’re not coming in.”

Liam lowers his
shoulders, his mouth falling open. “At least hear what I have to say before you
decide who’s lying.”

I don’t repeat
myself. I stand motionless in place, feeling anger flood my face.

Liam swears and
glares at the ground. “This isn’t fair,” he adds. His hands clamp onto his hips
as he chews the inside of his cheek. “Would you at least get in the car for a
minute, or are you going to make me tell you my life story in the front garden
where your neighbors can hear it?”

My gaze shifts
to Marta and Deirdre’s living room curtains. They’re closed and there’s no
other sign of movement from within. Marta would be at work now but Deirdre’s
car is in their driveway and Liam’s right about one thing: I don’t want her to
hear what he’s about to say.

“Fine,” I snap,
walking around the front of the car and pulling open the passenger door.

Liam climbs into
the driver’s seat. The car’s still warm from his drive over and it makes my
nose run worse. I press a tissue to my nostrils and shake my head, bracing
myself for more well-told lies.

“Why didn’t you
tell me you saw her?” Liam says.

“Why didn’t you
tell me she was here?” I fire back. “You said it was over. You said you
couldn’t be with her again.”

“I can’t.” A
patch of red is creeping up Liam’s neck. He faces forward, as rigid as stone.
“Is that what she told you? That we were back together?”

“That you were
going to try, at least.” My heart’s thudding painfully in my chest. I don’t
want to be this close to him. I felt stronger out in the cold.

“That was her
idea, not mine.” Liam barely looks at me as he continues. “She showed up on my
doorstep on Wednesday morning. At first I didn’t want to hear a word she had to
say. I walked out on her and left there. And when I got back that night after
the play she said it was over with Shane—that when she saw that picture of you
and me on the Internet something clicked and she knew she’d made a terrible
mistake. She said she didn’t really know until that moment and then she
couldn’t stay away.”

Liam’s voice is
weary. He presses his head back against the car seat and says, “But it wasn’t
just that. She’d lost the baby.” He eyes me briefly as he adds, “I didn’t tell
you about that part, that they were having a baby. She rang me to tell me about
a month ago. She wasn’t sure when it would hit the press and she wanted me to
know first. And when she lost it, I don’t know…” Liam shrugs, his face long.
“Maybe what she and Shane had together didn’t seem as solid anymore. She was in
bits. Really depressed. Probably more because of the miscarriage than anything
else, but I couldn’t just toss her out in the state she was in.”

I stare out the
window, watching the snow. I don’t doubt that he’s telling the truth about the
baby and Natalie’s depression. No one would lie about those things.

“How is she
now?” I ask.

Liam tells me
that they spent a lot of time talking and that she seemed a bit more together
by the time he took her to the airport on Friday. “But it wore me out,” he
says. “The emotional rehashing of our relationship. I couldn’t walk straight
from that back to you. It was doing my head in—it was everything I’d wanted to
get away from.”

I drag my
fingers across my forehead and glance at Liam from the corner of my eyes. He
was the one that said he didn’t want an ounce more confusion in his life, but
now I’m the one who wants this to stop. “She said other things too,” I tell
him. “She said you always have a few women on the go at the same time—that
you’re just like that—and she was sure I wasn’t the only person you were
involved with over here.”

Liam’s face
whips around so we’re staring directly into each other’s eyes. His are a
furious ice blue. “Do you believe everything anyone tells you, Leah?”

I raise my chin
and will my nose to stop running so that I can do this right. “We never said we
wouldn’t sleep with other people.”

“No, we didn’t.
And you didn’t seem to care about that the night down by the lighthouse. You
didn’t
ask
. So it’s a bit hypocritical to bring it up now, isn’t it?”

That’s not a
genuine question and I don’t answer him.

Liam slumps in
his chair. “But Natalie lied about that too. And I never cheated on her either;
I wasn’t with anyone else until I found out about her and Shane, and if I’d
known she said those things to you I wouldn’t have been as sympathetic to her.
I should have never let her in the door.”

Hearing him deny
it should be a relief, but there’s no proof that Liam’s telling the truth, and
after spending the past six days believing that he deceived me, I’m worn out
too. Blistered and bruised. This was only supposed to be physical with a little
room for casual friendship, and now I’m wound up in it with a gravity it was
never meant to possess. My throat tightens as I look away from him.

“You don’t
believe me?” he asks.

“I don’t know,”
I admit, my voice wavering. “I don’t know what to believe. I read some things
online and they’re not good.” The press and Liam’s former fiancée have done a
decent job of making him sound like a womanizer. “After I talked to Natalie,
part of me kept thinking it shouldn’t really matter whether there were other
people because it was always going to be over soon and it was only supposed to
be sex, but”—this is the last time I’ll see him and so I tell the absolute
truth—“it still felt like it mattered.”

Both Liam’s
hands slide into his hairline. “Those things you read in the press are history,
mostly things I told you months ago. I was gutted when I found out about
Natalie and Shane and went off the rails, but that doesn’t have anything to do
with the present.” Liam’s chin arches up as he stares imploringly at the
ceiling. “Leah, I don’t know what else I can do. You either believe me or you
don’t. And nothing can ever
only
be sex, can it? Otherwise it wouldn’t
matter who you were having it with. And I
like
you. We’ve been friends
too, haven’t we?”

I nod slowly. We
had some great times together and I’ll never forget how he stayed the night
with me when Yunhee was in hospital. For that alone, maybe I should’ve given
him the benefit of the doubt despite Natalie’s harsh words. He’s made me smile
so often over the past couple of months, broken down my resistance so that I
allowed him to get close to me at a time when I thought I wanted to keep
everyone away.

“But you still
look unhappy,” Liam says.

The cold’s
beginning to seep into the car and I keep scrunching up the tissue between my
fingers and then neatly refolding it, wishing that somehow we could start over
minus the bad feelings we dragged into this with us. But any idea of ‘us’ feels
intensely complicated now. I can’t climb back into bed with him like the past
six days didn’t hurt. We’ve evolved past that into some relationship stage of
injured discussions and wounded trust, but without the actual relationship.
This isn’t fun anymore. Neither of us are distractions from real life any
longer; we’re in the middle of each other’s mess.

The silence
crowds in on us until Liam, his head tilted tiredly, says, “Can we go
somewhere? Someplace we don’t have to think about any of this shite? A film or
something—wherever you want, wherever you say.”

“I don’t…think
so, Liam.” I feel raw enough just sitting next to him; I can’t let myself in
for whatever might happen next. “I’m sorry.” I want to believe him about there
not being anyone else, but I can’t toss aside my doubts that quickly, and
either way I can see that Liam’s so drained by the days he spent with Natalie
that there isn’t enough of him left for me. And he’s going in less than two
weeks. It doesn’t make sense to try to work this out. He’ll either disappoint
me again or I’ll end up more attached to him than I was before.