By will_4_rp and
SecretEpiphany
***
And here she is.
I stare at the screen. After a few moments of stillness, I realise I am actually holding my breath. I let it out. Slowly.
She's found me. OK, so, not such a miraculous act to perform nowadays, although there was a time when I was in hiding from her, and from the world, and when hiding was almost straightforwards. But that's just not an option anymore. "Join Facebook, have a MySpace, do some Tweeting, get some Friends and Followers: it'll all help the book, you know", my agent had enthused. Had I known even then, when I'd relented to his request, what would happen? Had this all been a bid, secret unto myself - well, maybe not so secret, given the topic of my novel - to find her or to have her find me?
Well, through the wonder of social networking, here she is: Sheila Quinn Covey, 33, I quickly guess. Or maybe 34. In one guise, Sheila has become a Fan of "Will Schumann - author"; in another, Sheila wants to be my "Friend".
Sheila wants to be my friend.
A line of text and a few pixels passing for a photograph. It's hard to tell it's her, I kid myself. It's obviously her: even at this poor resolution, I can see her rosy lips, the tantalising arch of her brow, the blur, perhaps, of freckles bursting out instead of a tan. She's still beautiful, then. Of course. Damn.
I move the cursor over to the picture and circle her face, the arrow tip brushing her lips, tracing a raised eyebrow, the curve of her jaw. Some kind of caress?
At the thought, I catch my breath again and close my eyes, images rushing my mind in a flurry: snapshots of companionship, openness, the endless tease of anticipation, and then the rapture of sudden release - before the cold smack of shock, numbness, guilt and rejection. And then flight. My flight.
I remember her mouth, _feel_ her mouth, crushing into mine, breaking that last barrier as our hands sought a dozen refuges, all at once, from the rain in that dark, secret alleyway, hidden away in the night of another city, another decade, another life. And then that same mouth, days later, thinning and then hardening as I said goodbye, forever. At least, it was meant to be forever.
I move the cursor closer to "Accept?".
Accept. What does that mean, in this context? Accept what I did, what it meant, what it's always meant to me, if truth be told? Accept the possibility that my world will turn upside down, once again, if I let her through this crack into my life? Accept the possibility - far worse - that my life probably won't turn a backflip and that, instead, like so many "friendships" one renews online, a few nostalgic messages down the line and all there will be left is the acknowledgement that we're strangers with nothing to share but the recognition that we're not the people we once knew, and perhaps we never were - and, by the way, in the time we've just wasted working that all out, we're getting even closer to death?
Yet I already know what I'm going to do. The mind makes decisions about six seconds before one's actions actually take place, carrying out calculations far more intricate that the conscious machinations of a guilt-ridden Facebooker thinking, once again, about the face that changed his life. The face, and the woman, I'd wanted to share that life with, to have children with, maybe, to see the world with, to love a thousand and one times over, to grow old and die with. The one I'd known that, save for that single, lightning-torn night, I could never really have.
I click 'Accept'.
***
It's a pretty well known fact that drunken e-mailing is a bad idea. In the new age of social networking, drunken facebook-ing is also a bad idea. "What have I done?" I whispered when the notification came through on my blackberry. The message read 'Will Schumann accepted your friend request.'
Will Schumann. I had a death grip on my phone now, and I swallowed hard against the surge of nausea that hit me from just looking at his name—at least from looking at his name while I was sober.
"Sheila, are you okay?" Melinda, one of my co-workers, stared at me with concern. "Bad news or something? Is it Steven?"
I shook my head and snapped out of my panic. "No, no. It's nothing. Just... something I wasn't expecting. Nothing's wrong. Steven's fine. I'm sorry to give you a scare." I pasted on my calm and professional smile and picked up the stack of papers I needed for this afternoon's presentation. "Ready to get to our meeting?"
Melinda still cast suspicious looks at me throughout the three hours we spent in the boardroom, but I was determined not to give anything away. No one at work knew that my marriage was on the rocks. No one at work knew much about my personal life at all. And I liked it that way.
The one time I'd let myself get personal with a co-worker... Well, I still bore the scars from my mistakes with Will Schumann. So I didn't get personal with anyone at work anymore. I kept my personal life personal and my professional life professional. I didn't even think about personal things while I was at the office. Now, the opposite wasn't exactly true. I did deal with professional stuff at home—much to Steven's chagrin. My husband resented my job.
And my husband would resent the fact that I had sent a facebook friend request to a man I had an affair with a decade ago. He would resent that very much. Even more so if he knew I'd sent the request after downing a half a bottle of wine to try and numb the raw emotions ripping through me after we'd had yet another baby argument. Alcohol was not my friend. It never had been. Drinking the wine was stupid. Getting on facebook after drinking the wine was stupider.
"So, do you and Steven have big plans for the weekend?" Melinda asked as we walked down the corridor after the meeting.
"No, nothing big. Just relaxing at home. I'm sure he'll go play a few rounds of golf."
Melinda nodded. "John and I are taking the girls to the aquarium on Saturday. I can't wait. I'll show you all the pictures next week." She winked at me. "You know, you and Steven better get busy on having a couple of your own or mine will be too old to be playmates with yours."
I smiled weakly. "Maybe someday."
Melinda blushed and seemed to realize she'd overstepped her bounds. "Well, it's past five and I'm ready to get out of here. I'm sure you are too. See you Monday!" She waved and hurried to her office.
I collected my things, but paused before shutting down my computer. "Personal stuff belongs at home," I told myself. But I sat down anyway, and within seconds I had logged into my facebook account.
I poured over Will's pages. I'd done the same last night, but then I'd read everything through a wine-induced fog, and I'd only been able to see what he had set to public access. He looked good in his pictures. Older, with shaggier hair, but still good. He had the same piercing green eyes. They showed up especially well on his book jacket photo where he posed in front of a window draped with green velvet curtains. His expression seemed...soulful? Sad even. I didn't remember him being a sad sort of person.
But then time changed things. It had certainly changed me. And maybe I was just projecting my own sadness on his picture.
His book was titled
The Broken
. A sad sort of title. Suddenly, I was desperate to read it. I made a mental note to run by the bookstore on my way home and see if they had a copy.
I found myself clicking the message button. It was a bad idea. I had several people friended on facebook whom I'd never messaged. I'd never even written on their walls. Will was best left in that category, I knew that. But I wrote him a note anyway.
"Will, it's been a long time. Your book looks interesting. I'm glad you followed your dream. I hope to read it soon. --Sheila"
***
I went to the bookshelf and found the remains of my best single malt, sandwiched between some dog-eared favorites and other books that had belonged to Emma-Louise, and that I'd kept long after she'd gone, even though I still hated some of the novelists she'd liked the most. How we'd argued. Then, I'd read those books obsessively in the months after it had happened, searching for clues. Failing to find them.
The dirty upturned glass capping the bottle would do for tonight's drinking. The whiskey would sterilize anything creeping therein. The first sip coating my mouth and throat with a warm fuzz, I turned back to the glow of my laptop screen. I raised my glass: "To Shelia Quinn. Oh, sorry - Quinn
Covey
. Now fuck off and leave me alone."
Wow. Where had that come from? The bitterness in my own words and tone caught me off-guard. It was me who'd been most deeply in the wrong, back then, and she who had the right to be the angry one now. Yet I was kidding myself, of course, once again. I knew exactly why I'd felt that surge of anger. I'd written a book about it, after all, and paid my therapist several thousands to scrape the bottom of that barrel. Can a single mistake subtly re-engineer the universe, causing it to topple in on its occupants, breaking one and all? In my novel, the hero has a fling that ignites at the precise moment his partner discovers a lump in her breast: she dies, but as a result of what? The cancer, or his cheating, even though she never discovers it? For a while, in the hallucinatory depths of my grief, when I was most deeply lost after Emma-Louise's suicide, I'd felt that my affair with Sheila -- my half-hour, knee-trembler, life-changer of a fling with Sheila -- had started a chain of events that had led to my wife taking her own life, even though she'd known nothing about Sheila and me, and never would. Her death was, I'd come to accept, entirely her own concern, like so much else in her life. Writing the hallucinations out in the book had helped me rationalize them, like reporting a nightmare to a friend in the morning and revealing it to be ridiculous. But sometimes, I relapsed into bad, old habits. Like grief, those habits died hard.
I took a longer drink.
Now that I'd allowed myself to be Friended, I figured there was no harm in accessing Sheila's profile. No longer working at the same firm, I noted immediately: two or three upwardly mobile moves had occurred since we'd last seen each other. I felt glad for Sheila, but also disappointed. Hadn't we clicked, back then, because I'd felt something she wanted to release in herself: an escape from the rat race realm into something purer? Hell, I guess not. Her status updates were the usual depressing assortment of upbeat boasts and faux-modesty. Ooh, a big presentation coming up and she's nervous; phew, it went well, 'as you always knew it would', her friends/colleagues mock-protest in the comments). All the correct kinds of safe Likes and Pages seem present, alongside various trivial apps and silly gifts. It read like an online extension of her CV. "Hey, you could suggest a few more Likes for her", the baser part of my brain chipped in. I couldn't help smiling at that one.
