The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Thirty-One
Fia’s jittery the whole way there, her mind zigzagging in all sorts of different directions even as the Friday evening traffic crawls. What’s happened? And when and how and with what precise result?
It seems to take an absolute age to get back into Dublin and across the city, and when at last she makes it through the doors of Accident and Emergency, the whole place is rammed. All human life appears to be here – plus, in the far corner, a border collie, to boot. Several red-cheeked toddlers are screaming their heads off; the phone rings shrilly in reception, medical and domestic staff tripping over one another all the while. That there might be any actual healing going on in the middle of this seems so unlikely. But then, Fia supposes, that’s hospitals.
It takes at least another fifteen minutes just to make herself known, to establish Benjamin’s whereabouts.
‘Round the corner, cubicle seven,’ an orderly tells her eventually, and as Fia makes her way there, she can feel the unease in her chest ramp up another little bit.
Then, as she slips in past the cubicle’s curtain, Benjamin appears in front of her at last. She lets herself take him in from head to toe.
‘Oh my God, look at you!’ she exclaims. She isn’t sure what she was expecting – she just didn’t know what to expect, really – and she isn’t sure how to categorize the sensation that seems to flood through her entire body at the sight of him. He’s sitting up on the bed, on top of the covers, still fully clothed. ‘You look healthy as a fucking trout!’ she all but yelps.
‘Wow. Your concern is so touching,’ Benjamin replies, deadpan. ‘Honestly, dial it back a notch, will you? I can only cope with so much wifely affection from my sick bed.’
She huffs impatiently. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? I took a bus and then a DART and then I walked for fifteen minutes. If that’s not wifely affection, I don’t know what is!’
He says nothing, and Fia feels a little jolt of confusion, hearing her own words aloud. What she’d intended as a barb somehow seems to have got a bit mangled in the delivery.
‘What happened anyway?’ she continues, barking out the question, lest he seize upon any perceived weakness on her part. ‘The woman on the phone just said you’d had an accident.’
For another second, silence. In truth, the nurse barely had the chance to say much more – Fia was in such a hurry just to get here, she didn’t hang around on the phone for details. She sinks down into a hard seat at Benjamin’s bedside, taking the opportunity to reinspect him, more carefully this time. There’s a gash on his forehead, already cleaned and treated, from what she can tell – but no other injury or malady is visible to the naked eye.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Benjamin replies.
‘You don’t want to talk about it?’ Fia’s voice rises sarcastically, before dropping to a bitter chuckle. ‘Figures. There’s not much you want to talk about these days, is there?’
Benjamin ignores that altogether. ‘I can’t believe they called you,’ he mutters, almost as though to himself.
Fia feels defensiveness surge in her anew. ‘Oh, right. Charming! Magicked my number out of thin air, did they?’
‘Well, you are my next of kin,’ he grumps. ‘I guess technically you’re my next of kin anywhere, but this side of the Atlantic? Who else was I supposed to write on the form?’ He pauses for breath. It would seem that he, too, feels somewhat on the defensive. ‘They said they don’t like to send people home alone with head injuries, and I said I was fine. I definitely didn’t ask them to summon you. I’ve been here for like two hours and the first I heard of the whole thing was ten minutes ago when Janette said you were on your way.’
‘Well, I’m here now,’ Fia replies, the sentence superfluous even to her own ears. Of course, she thinks, Benjamin has managed to reach first name terms with the hospital staff in double-quick time. Of course, his appearance and his accent and his manner would combine to ensure that someone decided, entirely unbidden, to take him under her wing.
She says none of that aloud. In fact, neither she nor Benjamin say anything at all for a long moment. The silence stretches out between them as they each look here and there, anywhere to avoid one another’s eyes.
He does not ask her to leave, though. And she doesn’t make any move to. If Fia were asked to explain that, she’d be stumped on both fronts. Perhaps it is just that, as she said, she’s here now.
‘You weren’t at the conference today,’ she offers eventually, letting her gaze settle on him at last.
‘Oh.’ He sounds a little taken aback, as though it’s odd she would even raise such a subject, as though his response is the most obvious, prosaic thing in the world – as though he surely could never have been expected to be there in the first place. ‘No, I skipped it.’
‘You skipped it?’ she repeats dumbly.
‘Well, it was pretty obvious when we arrived at the hotel last night to find literally hordes of lawyers – I don’t actually think anyone is staying there who doesn’t work at ZOLA – that I wasn’t exactly going to be missed.’
On this point, he is entirely correct. Still, though, Fia’s brain seems to be struggling to compute the concept.
‘So, what? You just took off?’
‘Pretty much. I mean, it’s different for you – you’re from here – but I’m probably never going to be in Ireland again in my life. Am I going to spend my day watching a bunch of presentations – most of which could have been emails – about a law firm I don’t even permanently work for? Or am I going to get out and explore?’
And there was a time, long ago – and maybe even not so long ago – when Fia might have tutted at this, less because she actually disapproved than because it served to put Benjamin Lowry ever more squarely into the box that she’d assigned him: the pleasure-seeker who proved himself more irresponsible by the day.
And, in the present scenario, it is true that, one way or another, he does seem to have landed himself in A&E. But, nonetheless, listening to the rationale for his truancy, she cannot help but think that he probably has the exact right idea. Last year, at the Summer Summit in San Francisco, she could perhaps have simply taken herself off to Alcatraz one afternoon. How has that not occurred to her before now? She wishes she had gone to Alcatraz. Certainly, the time she spent staring at profit projections in some conference room instead has left no impression, been of absolutely no benefit.
Her attention is caught, then, by some movement behind her. Fia twists in her seat to see a doctor emerge through the curtains, at least six different clipboards clutched in the crook of his arm. He looks barely more than 25, and – judging by the paleness of his face, the rings under his eyes – he’s thoroughly exhausted. This whole environment frankly strikes Fia as one in which he could hardly be anything but thoroughly exhausted – harried. By comparison, the fifty-eighth floor of Zelnick, O’Leary and Abbott’s Manhattan office actually feels like an incredibly soothing workplace.
‘You must be Ben’s wife,’ the doctor says, extending a handshake.
And, as her hand closes around his, Fia decides – for both their sakes – to go with the path of least resistance here. Just this once. ‘Uh … that’s right, yeah,’ she says, resolutely not looking anywhere near Benjamin. ‘Hi.’
Already, the doctor has stepped forwards to peer at the wound on Benjamin’s head. ‘That’s looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. You were lucky not to need stitches – it was a deep enough little wound. But the surgical glue seems to be holding grand there. How does it feel?’
‘Fine,’ Benjamin replies. ‘A little sore but fine.’
‘I’d hate to see what the other fella looked like, eh?’ the doctor jokes. ‘Or should I say the—’
‘Tell me about it,’ Benjamin interjects, with a laugh of his own.
And, from her seat beside him, Fia just about restrains the urge to shake him. It would be poor form, in front of the doctor and all – but if there is one thing (among many and various other things) that Fia does not enjoy, it’s being out of the loop.
‘So, I had a chat to the registrar there, and I think we will give you a tetanus jab, just to be sure,’ the doctor continues. ‘One of the nurses will be along asap to administer it. Obviously, things are a bit busy this evening, so if you could …’
‘Got it,’ Benjamin fills in. ‘No hurry. I’ll just sit tight.’
The doctor nods gratefully. ‘There are vending machines down the corridor if you fancy something,’ he says, and he’s on his way back out of the cubicle when he tosses another glance in Fia’s direction.
‘Don’t worry. A good night’s sleep, a few painkillers for the headache, and your husband will be back to his old self in no time.’
Fia raises an eyebrow. ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she offers drily, looking not at the doctor now but at Benjamin himself. The moment they’re alone, the white curtain dragged closed again, her voice drops to a dramatic hiss.
‘Oh my God! Did you get in a fight with someone?’
‘Come on, Fia. I’m a lover not a fighter. You know that.’ His lips twitch with what might be irritation, but she thinks it’s something else: amusement.
‘… Debatable,’ she hears herself reply, a certain lightness in her own voice now, too.
And, within those ten seconds and the ten that follow, something in the atmosphere seems to shift between them – just fractionally. In the strangeness of the scenario in which they now find themselves, they appear both to have given up the fight to be the one who ignores the other hardest, longest.
‘Look, I’m sorry about … God, I don’t even know what day it was, I’m losing track,’ Benjamin begins, and there is suddenly something insistent about his voice, like he just wants to get this said. ‘But … the thing in the office – about the messages. I’m sorry.’
Fia scrambles to adjust to the sudden change in subject, to adjust to what seems like sincere repentance and regret coming from the mouth of Benjamin Lowry.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she replies. ‘That’s how the whole thing started – with me trying to say I was sorry about not picking up the messages before now. And, somehow, we just … got off-track.’
‘That sort of seems to happen with us, doesn’t it?’ he replies, with a sheepish sort of smile.
Agreement is on the tip of Fia’s tongue. But then she thinks about it – for real – and offers a little shrug. ‘Sometimes,’ she says instead. Because the strange thing is that, at other times, she’s found that the two of them seem to be quite remarkably in sync. Like the night up on the roof at ZOLA – and the thing that he said to her, when they were hailing cabs at Bryant Park, the thing they’ve still not talked about and, knowing them, perhaps never will.
Given everything that’s happened between them, before this summer and in the course of it, there are undoubtedly ways in which Benjamin Lowry knows her – the real her – better than any of the co-workers she’s just spent the day with. And, in truth, there may even be ways in which he can understand her – can understand her life as it is now – better than the family members she’s on her way home to later this evening.
‘We don’t have to talk about it,’ she says then. ‘I shouldn’t have pushed you on it.’
He shakes his head. ‘It was my fault. I did think you were just ignoring me, back when I first sent you all those messages. And I was pissed. So, then, when you started to reach out to me, I was … let’s say disinclined to get back to you.’
Fia stays silent, squashing the instinctive urge to jump in.
‘I guess at this point, it’s not a spoiler to say that we’re not still together – me and Jessy, I mean. Kind of an unceremonious ending, to be honest. By the time I started to hear from you, it was over. You caught me right at the intersection of angry and heartbroken.’
She sucks a breath in through her teeth. ‘Not fun.’
‘No. I know that’s no excuse though. I shouldn’t have just ignored you.’
And, of course, he shouldn’t have just ignored her. At another time, she wouldn’t hold back in telling him so. But, faced with his own acknowledgement of that fact … there doesn’t seem much need for her to underline it again.
Added to that is the reality that has revealed itself to her, unavoidably, over the past five weeks. Before then, she told herself that she’d done her darnedest. What else could she have done, she asked herself incredulously, in the face of his radio silence, his unreasonableness and cruelty? Hired a PI to find him?
But, in truth, of course she could have hired a PI. She’s arranged it for clients in the past. And she probably wouldn’t even have needed to go to such lengths. She could have easily found Benjamin’s mother’s name and work phone number, made contact with him that way. In short, this could all have been handled a long time ago, had she been absolutely minded to handle it – had it been someone else’s divorce.
And yet, that was not how it went. A part of her, she has to concede now, has perhaps actually enjoyed feeling like the wronged party. Loath as she is to admit it, Benjamin might have had a point about that, last week. In a certain kind of way, action and avoidance may have suited her. They have allowed her, for almost a decade, to avoid confronting the biggest, most embarrassing, most expensive mistake she’s ever made.
It’s for all these reasons that Fia, staring across at Benjamin in A&E now, doesn’t overly feel the need to stick the boot in. She is curious about other things, though.
‘Okay. But, so, I still don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me about Jessy – about your messages – at the start of the summer. Why not just say you’d tried to contact me – get angry with me, even?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he replies, as though the notion is so ludicrous as to be almost comedic. ‘So, I show up at ZOLA, that first day. I’m shocked to see you – every bit as shocked as you were. I’m basically your intern, which, I don’t mind telling you, was not exactly my dream situation. And you made it pretty clear, pretty fast, that all my attempts at communication had somehow passed you by. At that point, what was I going to say? “Hey, also, take a look at some ridiculous, lovestruck nonsense I sent you about a girl who subsequently dumped me”? Not if I could help it, no.’
Fia just nods, taking that in. She still isn’t sure that everything Benjamin has done or failed to do, across the past eight years and across the summer, makes total sense to her. She’d wager that not all of his logic would stand up to cross-examination. But then, the same is true of herself. And life is not a court of law.
All around them, there remains a steady cacophony of noise: footsteps and conversations, fractious children and drunken adults, trolleys being wheeled across linoleum floors. But between Fia and Benjamin, there’s quiet for a moment.
‘So, I don’t want to pry,’ she says, carefully. ‘But can I just ask – with Jessy, was that ’cause of me? Like, ’cause you had to tell her you were married to me, or ’cause it seemed like I was never going to divorce you or whatever?’
‘No,’ Benjamin replies simply, and Fia seems to feel every muscle in her body loosen, just a little bit. She’s told herself over and over, this past week, that even if she once managed to destroy the love of Benjamin’s life, she didn’t do so on purpose. She could hardly be blamed. Nonetheless, it’s a profound relief to realize now that, in fact, he doesn’t blame her.
‘So, what happened?’ she asks, and she knows she’s skating on ever-thinner ice here. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
Benjamin sighs. ‘You know what? There’s a long answer to that, obviously, but the short one is probably just as true. I think she just … didn’t love me as much as I loved her – which is really a shitty thing to wrap your head around, let me tell you.’
Fia lets herself absorb that, properly, for a moment. The very simplicity of the statement suddenly strikes her as kind of revelatory, kind of profound. ‘Wow. Yeah. It really is, isn’t it?’
‘Are you … speaking from experience?’ he asks then.
Fia’s slightly lost in her own world, so it’s almost a little surprising to hear his voice again. ‘What? Oh, no. Well, kind of. Maybe this is stupid.’
After all, in the years since Vegas, she has never been on the verge of issuing or receiving a marriage proposal. Far from it.
Meanwhile, Benjamin just raises an eyebrow. ‘You know what, Fia? One benefit of getting married drunkenly – and also, like, just kind of stubbornly – in Las Vegas? We’ve each had a front-row seat to the stupidest thing either of us ever did. And I’m gonna go ahead and say we haven’t exactly outdone ourselves since then, either. I think it can be pretty much radical honesty from here on out, don’t you?’
She tilts her head a little, as if in consideration. When he puts it that way … ‘All right, well. It’s not the same. I know it’s not the same. But when you said that, about Jessy – about her maybe just not caring as much as you did … do you know what I thought about?’
‘What?’
Fia hesitates, figuring out in her own mind whether to proceed or reverse, here. What she thought about, of course, was George.