“Didn’t stop me being in a relationship with him for nearly two years, though,” James was saying now, and he shook his head.
“Well,” Catherine began, “Everyone—”
He looked at her. “Everyone has to start somewhere, is that what you were going to say?”
“No, I meant—” she said, and stopped; this was, in fact, pretty much what she had been going to say. She chewed on her straw.
“Because I didn’t start with Nate, did I?”
“No,” she said, into the straw.
“Did I, Catherine?” he said, his voice more urgent.
She lifted her chin. “No.”
“I’ve wanted—” He sighed. “I’ve wanted to be in touch with you. For a while now.”
“Oh,” she said, and her heart seemed to be trying to elbow its way out through her chest. They were nearing a park bench; if she suggested that they sit down, would that make things better or worse? Was it better to be moving? Better for your legs to be out from under you?
“I shouldn’t have cut off contact the way I did, Catherine,” he said, his voice jumping. “That was the wrong way to go about it. Whatever ‘it’ was.”
“Well,” Catherine said. “‘It’ was Liam. What happened with Liam. What happened to Liam, because of what I did.”
James nodded slowly. “I’m still in touch with him, you know. Facebook, needless to say.”
“Oh,” Catherine said, more brightly than felt appropriate. “How is he?”
He nodded again. “He’s good. He teaches in Belfast now. He has a partner.”
“That’s nice.”
James said nothing.
“And is he—” She stopped. What had she even been going to ask? “What does he teach up there?”
“History,” James said, with what could have been a beat of irony in his tone, but the word had come and gone too quickly for Catherine to tell.
“That’s nice,” she said, and immediately winced. “He was always so smart.”
“The scarring is not really visible anymore,” James said then, as briskly as though he was delivering test results. “At least I don’t think so from the photographs he puts up now. A bit”—he put his hand up to his jawline—“a bit of something around here still, maybe, where it was bad, but nothing major. The doctors up there, you know.” He nodded. “He looks good. He looks much the same, actually.”
“Good, good,” said Catherine, in the same tone of absurd brightness. Tell him I was asking after him, she almost said, so efficiently had she whipped herself up, now, into this state, into this welter of refusal and pretending. This was not happening. This was not real. She was not on a scrap of scrubland off the coast of East Harlem, gripping a ridiculous plastic beaker, sweating into her fancy clothes, being pulled by the quiet, serious voice of James Flynn into the summer of fourteen years before.
“Catherine,” James was saying now. “You know, what happened was terrible.”
“Yes,” she said faintly.
“I don’t just mean Liam. I don’t just mean”—he cleared his throat—“that day. I mean the whole thing.”
“Your photos, the photos you took that day, were unbelievable,” she said. “They were so moving.”
He shook his head. “What was I doing, taking fucking photographs?”
“James.”
“No. What was I doing? Taking photographs in a hospital, for fuck’s sake?”
“They were important. They were very powerful. They still are.”
“I don’t know. I can’t look at them. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at them.”
“You should be proud of them.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m proud of them for you,” she said, and she reached out to him, and she touched his arm, but it all seemed to happen in slow motion, and it all seemed stilted, stunted; it all seemed strange. James drew back a little at her touch — she did not think she was imagining this — and so the sentence that she was already rolling out to follow the first one, the one in which she said it to him, the one in which she told him, seemed ill-judged now, seemed like an ugly, distasteful flare. But, “I’m proud of you,” she said it anyway, had said it, before she could stop herself, and in response to that, James actually stopped in his tracks; James froze, and James looked at her.
“Don’t, Catherine, please,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, horrified, mortified, not even sure what she was apologizing for. “Never mind me, never mind me.”
“It’s not that it’s not nice of you to say something like that.”
“No, it was stupid. Of course it was stupid. We don’t know each other anymore. It’s not my place.”
“No, it’s not that,” he said, walking again now, shaking his head. “I mean, yes. Of course yes, we don’t, you know — it’s true. We don’t know each other anymore.” He sighed. “Which makes me sad, actually.”
“Me too.”
“But, you know,” he said, “this is how it is. Time moves. It takes you with it. Life changes. You know?”
There was far more to it than that, Catherine thought, but she did not say this. She nodded. “I’m sorry about what happened, James,” she said. It seemed hopelessly inadequate, but it had to be said. It should have been said many years previously. She had tried; she had started the letters. But his own letter, written to her a week after what had happened, had been clear. No more. No contact. No way; no explanations; no point. It had been unfair to keep Baggot Street from him, to keep the girls from him — they had been his friends first, after all — so she had found a flatshare with some other people from college in Ranelagh. Zoe had come home from Italy; Zoe had been her friend. Emmet had come home; Emmet had been more than she could ever have believed Emmet could be to her. Heartbreak, in the end, too; heartbreak enough to make up her mind about moving to London; heartbreak, in its way, far worse than it had been, a year previously, with James; was that irony? Was that a justice somehow served? Was that just life?
Yes, yes, probably that was just life.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “It’s not enough, it’s not even a beginning, but it’s true, James.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
She stared at him. “What?” she said, and she almost laughed. “Of course it was my fault. If it wasn’t for me—” She shook her head. “You shouldn’t even have been up there. Either of you.”
“No,” he said firmly. “You see, that’s not true. We should have been able to be anywhere we felt like being, anywhere we wanted to be. Everybody who was there that day should have been able to be there. Without that. Without being blown to bits by a bunch of fucking psychopaths.”