Page 6 of Pas de Don't
The buzzer squawked again, and Heather groaned. Was she still drunk? Was she still drunk and also already hungover, somehow?
Carly stumbled out of her bedroom and past the couch, Heather’s blanket snagging on her thigh as she made her way to the kitchen. She put her elbows on the counter and leaned her shoulder against the buzzer.
“Who is it?” she groaned. It sounded like the wine hadn’t quite worn off for her, either.
“I know she’s up there, Carly,” came an unmistakable voice.Jack.Heather sat up on the couch, suddenly wide awake, and her head throbbed in protest. Carly looked over at her, eyebrows raised. Heather shook her head as vehemently as she dared. She didn’t wantto talk to Jack. What would she even say? She didn’t want to give him the chance to talk her out of her decision.
“She’s not here, Jack,” Carly declared into the speaker. “And I wouldn’t let you in if she was.”
“Yes, she is.” Jack sounded angry and exhausted, and Heather’s skin prickled. She knew that tone. It usually meant there was an explosion coming. “Let me up, I want to talk to her.”
“Don’t you have a girlfriend to go home to?” Carly snapped.
Heather’s heart twisted in her chest at the idea of Jack going home to Melissa. Or worse, of him bringing her home to the apartment they’d shared, the place where they’d planned to live together as husband and wife.
“Goddammit, Carly!” There was a loud thud, and static crackled into the kitchen. It sounded like he’d slammed his hand against the glass on the intercom panel. “I have a right to talk to her!”
Before Carly could respond, Heather pulled herself off the couch and crossed the living room quickly, a little unsteady on her feet but one thought perfectly clear in her mind. She leaned close to the intercom box.
“You have no rights here. Goodbye, Jack Andersen. And fuck you, forever.”
Chapter 2
Sydney, twomonths later
Kirribilli.Kee-ree-bee-lee? Kai-ri-billai? Heather stared at the address in the email on her phone. She turned the word over in her mind, wondering how badly she was about to butcher it aloud.
“Where you headed?” the cab driver asked, tossing her suitcase into his trunk. The still morning air was chill and damp, as though it had rained overnight.
“Uh, Kirry-billy?” Heather ventured, wincing and shrugging inside her denim jacket.
“No worries,” the driver said, sliding into the front seat and starting the engine. Apparently, she hadn’t butchered it so badly as to make herself unintelligible to an Australian. She shrugged again, opened the car door, and climbed inside.
It wasn’t until the driver had pulled out into a line of cars that she realized the car was on the left side of the road. Her stomach flip-flopped as she stared at the oncoming traffic, then at the driver,who was sitting on the right-hand side of the car. She knew intellectually, of course, that Australians drove on the left, like the English. But after a full day in transit, she had to remind herself through her fatigue that she was not destined for a head-on collision.
“Bad traffic this morning,” the driver said over his shoulder, “but it’ll be better once we get through the city.”
Heather nodded, gazing out the window at streets lined with eucalyptus trees, their long leaves hanging down lazily over the sidewalks. It was still early—she had gotten through immigration and customs by 7:30—but the sun was already high and bright in the pale and cloudy blue sky.
“How far is it to Kirry-billy?” she asked, wondering how long she would have to wait until she could wash twenty hours in an airplane off her skin and fall into bed. She’d managed to sleep a little on the flight from Los Angeles to Sydney, but she’d been wearing the same clothes for more than thirty-six hours, and she felt grubby and exhausted.
“Kirra-billy,” he corrected.
“Kirra-billy,” Heather repeated. “Kirra-billy, Kirra-billy. It’s pretty when you say it right.”
“Yep. It’ll be about twenty minutes, maybe thirty.”
A crowded high-rise skyline soon came into view. As the taxi wound through what looked like the outskirts of a downtown area, Heather took in a strange statue planted in the middle of a sloping green lawn. There were two massive matchsticks sticking up out of the ground, at least twenty feet high. One was new and straight, all gleaming blonde wood with a perfectly round red top. The other was blackened and shriveled, slumping next to its pristine neighbor. Burned out and broken down. Heather could relate.
The last two months had been the hardest of her life. It was one thing to end a seven-year relationship with the man you thought you were going to marry. It was another to have to work with him, his shiny new girlfriend, and all your colleagues who knew exactly why the relationship had ended. The blazing rush of power she’dfelt at leaving Jack and the reflected glow of Carly’s undisguised pride in her had faded quickly. She’d been left with a heartbreak that felt like a physical injury, like the time she’d pulled the muscles between four of her ribs doing a lightning-fast renversé a few years ago. Heather knew she’d made the right decision, but some mornings, when the alarm went off and she remembered where she was and what she’d done, she had to lie in a ball on Carly’s couch and recite a mental list of all the reasons that was true.
After that first night at Carly’s, Heather waited until Jack left for his weekly dinner with his parents across the park—thank God she’d never have to attend one of those again—before she and Carly went back to the apartment to collect her things and move most of them to a storage unit. Jack had already dumped some of her stuff haphazardly into boxes, and the ZZ plant that had once thrived on her bedside table looked as though it had been watered only with vodka and piss since she left.
As Carly cleaned out her shelves in the medicine cabinet and Heather scooped the little plant up, wondering if it could be salvaged, she noticed an empty spot in the gallery wall next to the window. He’d taken down the framed photo of the two of them, taken by the company’s official photographer from the wings the night they’d gotten engaged.
When the company returned to work after a short summer break, Jack made it clear to everyone he was moving all the way on. On their first day back in the theater, he and Melissa walked into company class hand in hand, and Heather had felt multiple sets of eyes swing across the room and land on her. She kept her face impassive and her gaze fixed on her feet as she sat on the floor wrapping her toes, wishing she could melt into the marley floor and disappear forever.
It continued on like this all summer. Jack and Melissa stood next to each other at the barre, whispering and giggling in between exercises like infatuated teenagers. Mr. K, who usually demanded silence in his classes, didn’t seem to care, and Heather spent everymorning holding her humiliation at bay, trying desperately to focus on her dancing.
