Free The Life of the World to Come by Dan Cluchey Page B

wrong?”
    â€œWhat?!” she called out, startled, and I knew I’d spoken indiscreetly—too loud and too intimate for a late night with company.
    â€œIs—” I started, then shut my mouth and watched her, watching me.
    â€œFiona,” chimed in Emily with sweet concern, “have you been crying? Are you okay?”
    She stiffened up, and searched, and I knew that she was searching.
    â€œOh!” she answered, distantly but with a volume suggestive of nonchalance. “I was just—the show. The show is over, you know?”
    â€œOf course,” said Emily.
    â€œOf course,” I said.
    â€œThe show is over,” she continued, “and that’s an emotional thing … that gets pretty emotional, naturally, and—”
    â€œOf course it does,” I said.
    â€œThat’s all,” she said.
    â€œThat can’t be easy,” offered Gracie.
    â€œIt’s—no,” Fiona replied, “it’s, you know … unemployed again. Ha! And all that.”
    She smiled her on-camera smile for my inebriated friends, and dabbed at her wet eyes with the hem of her loose T-shirt.
    â€œWell, obviously you’re going to be working again soon,” Emily responded on behalf of the room, a sentiment echoed by the lot of us.
    â€œThanks—seriously,” Fiona said, adding, “let’s just … this is your big night to celebrate, you know, take a load off and just—can we … let’s just all go back to celebrating.”
    We did, and Fiona kept quiet until everyone had slipped away from the apartment—and even after, when the two of us were alone, she kept quiet still. She had not had much to drink by the time she followed me into the silent bedroom; I was still feeling drunk. Something is wrong, is what I knew then as she wriggled vacantly into the covers. And the bug in my blood made a hole in my heart.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I whispered right that second. I was staring at where I knew that the ceiling was, but it was much too dark to tell that there was anything up there at all.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” she answered after fifteen seconds of quiet.
    â€œWhat do I mean?” I whispered back, incredulous. “I mean, you’re being shifty.”
    â€œI’m not.”
    â€œAwfully shifty, Fiona, and it’s weirding me out.”
    â€œI’m just tired,” she said, sounding every bit like it, and I felt her turn away from me in the darkness, felt the top sheet shift from the berth of my thrumming chest.
    â€œAre you sure?” I asked, still whispering.
    â€œYes,” she said, and there followed consecutive hours of no speaking. And through that time, which felt like infinitely more time than it had to have been, no one slept. Fiona was all twists and whimpers in Our bed, making a big show of being quietly disturbed, pretending to try to hide it, jerking about like a fallen power line. I didn’t try to talk, and though I must have been after a certain point completely sober—perhaps more so, I thought, than I’d ever been before—there were times when I couldn’t distinguish the pitch black of the room from my eyes being closed. Which was it now: the dark of the bedroom or the dark within my head? I’d catch myself closing them, fling them open wide again, and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. The clock was on her side; I couldn’t see it, so I don’t know when it was that she shot straight up, but she did, as abruptly as though she’d heard in the stillness a shotgun blast. She produced her phone from the nightstand and typed out something—some message. It must have been sufficiently late to be wholly tomorrow, comfortably Saturday morning, because there was just enough clarity—just enough of the faintest implication of light—for me to watch her rising away. And then she spoke softly from a standing position,