Read Online This Is How It Ends by Kathleen MacMahon - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Kathleen MacMahon
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talked about was riding. How Della reveled in all that unlovely language!
Even now, Della loves to reminisce about her colorful past. She delights in remembering all her conquests, the seedier the better. She remembers the roadies and the visiting businessmen and the college lecturers. She remembers the where and the what and the how and she laughs out loud at the memory. Her wild days, it does her good to remember them. Now that they’re well and truly behind her.
How different it is for Addie. Addie remembers her past intimacies with horror. She’s haunted by them, degraded by them. She has flashbacks. Things she said, things she never should have said. Oh, things she suggested in a moment of passion. Impulsive things, things you could never live down.
Like the time she went to meet a boyfriend at the airport. She wore a long winter coat with nothing on under it. No knickers, no bra, just a pair of high suede boots and the coat belted tightly around her waist. She’d been planning it for days. The whole time he was away she’d been imagining how she would whisper into his ear in the arrivals area. How he would slip his hand inside her coat, just to check. How she would let the coat fall open as she was driving, and he wouldn’t be able to stay in his seat. She would be forced to push him back over to his side of the car, just so they wouldn’t crash.
Only it didn’t work out that way. His bags never came through and they had to wait around the airport for hours and she kept worrying that her coat would open and by the time they finally got to the car they were squabbling and she was freezing cold and covered with goose pimples. She dropped him off in town. They kept seeing each other for a few more weeks after that, but they both knew it was over. From time to time now she bumps into him in the supermarket. They make small talk while his two kids sit there in the trolley and Addie wants to die.
They bubble up, these memories. They simmer away in her mind like a toxic stew. A proposition that was turned down, a misunderstanding about a Valentine’s card. A suggestive text message, sent to a client by mistake. Do these things happen to other people, or is it just Addie? Do other people get over these things?
It’s a form of hemophilia that she has. The wounds just don’t seem to heal.
IT’S ALWAYS THE distant past that she dwells on. It’s the little things rather than the big things. Perhaps because the recent past is too painful, she can’t even bring herself to talk about it yet.
Even the mention of it makes her feel queasy, as if she’s standing on a ship and the ground is tilting up to meet her. She doesn’t know what vocabulary to use to tell the story. Nothing she tries to say tastes right in her mouth. Any words she does manage to produce seem too hard and too sharp, like pebbles on her tongue.
In her mind, it’s still a silent movie.
There she is, lying straight as a mummy in the hospital bed, her head resting on a stack of pillows, her bare arms on top of the covers. She’s pinned down by tubes, a thick plastic drain is feeding gunk out of the wound in her abdomen, a thin line pumping antibiotics into her through a needle they’d inserted in the back of her hand. An ugly bruise spreading up towards her wrist like a stain. The surgical tape that’s holding the needle in place is stinging her, it’s all puckered and uneven. She longs to peel it off but she’s afraid of dislodging the needle. She doesn’t want to be a nuisance. She tries to think about something else, anything to take her mind off it.
To the left of her bed, a wide rectangular window. A row of empty vases lined up on the sill. Outside the window, endless rain. If she turns her head to the right, she’s facing her bedside locker. Crowded on top of it, the yellow roses Della had brought, the lilies from her dad, the homemade cards from the girls.
There had been no flowers from David, just a series of breathless
Even now, Della loves to reminisce about her colorful past. She delights in remembering all her conquests, the seedier the better. She remembers the roadies and the visiting businessmen and the college lecturers. She remembers the where and the what and the how and she laughs out loud at the memory. Her wild days, it does her good to remember them. Now that they’re well and truly behind her.
How different it is for Addie. Addie remembers her past intimacies with horror. She’s haunted by them, degraded by them. She has flashbacks. Things she said, things she never should have said. Oh, things she suggested in a moment of passion. Impulsive things, things you could never live down.
Like the time she went to meet a boyfriend at the airport. She wore a long winter coat with nothing on under it. No knickers, no bra, just a pair of high suede boots and the coat belted tightly around her waist. She’d been planning it for days. The whole time he was away she’d been imagining how she would whisper into his ear in the arrivals area. How he would slip his hand inside her coat, just to check. How she would let the coat fall open as she was driving, and he wouldn’t be able to stay in his seat. She would be forced to push him back over to his side of the car, just so they wouldn’t crash.
Only it didn’t work out that way. His bags never came through and they had to wait around the airport for hours and she kept worrying that her coat would open and by the time they finally got to the car they were squabbling and she was freezing cold and covered with goose pimples. She dropped him off in town. They kept seeing each other for a few more weeks after that, but they both knew it was over. From time to time now she bumps into him in the supermarket. They make small talk while his two kids sit there in the trolley and Addie wants to die.
They bubble up, these memories. They simmer away in her mind like a toxic stew. A proposition that was turned down, a misunderstanding about a Valentine’s card. A suggestive text message, sent to a client by mistake. Do these things happen to other people, or is it just Addie? Do other people get over these things?
It’s a form of hemophilia that she has. The wounds just don’t seem to heal.
IT’S ALWAYS THE distant past that she dwells on. It’s the little things rather than the big things. Perhaps because the recent past is too painful, she can’t even bring herself to talk about it yet.
Even the mention of it makes her feel queasy, as if she’s standing on a ship and the ground is tilting up to meet her. She doesn’t know what vocabulary to use to tell the story. Nothing she tries to say tastes right in her mouth. Any words she does manage to produce seem too hard and too sharp, like pebbles on her tongue.
In her mind, it’s still a silent movie.
There she is, lying straight as a mummy in the hospital bed, her head resting on a stack of pillows, her bare arms on top of the covers. She’s pinned down by tubes, a thick plastic drain is feeding gunk out of the wound in her abdomen, a thin line pumping antibiotics into her through a needle they’d inserted in the back of her hand. An ugly bruise spreading up towards her wrist like a stain. The surgical tape that’s holding the needle in place is stinging her, it’s all puckered and uneven. She longs to peel it off but she’s afraid of dislodging the needle. She doesn’t want to be a nuisance. She tries to think about something else, anything to take her mind off it.
To the left of her bed, a wide rectangular window. A row of empty vases lined up on the sill. Outside the window, endless rain. If she turns her head to the right, she’s facing her bedside locker. Crowded on top of it, the yellow roses Della had brought, the lilies from her dad, the homemade cards from the girls.
There had been no flowers from David, just a series of breathless
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