fic
goodbye, halcyon days
Lie to me; In which Sophie stays for 57 days and leaves marks long after she's gone.
.
day 57
After the door closes, she doesn’t know how long she stands in the middle of the hallway. She might have felt Alec’s hand on her shoulder, the brush of his fingers on hers, his lips on her hair, but all she knows is this : it is morning one moment, and evening the next, and all that’s in her arms is a pale yellow blanket and the feeling of phantom weights.
day 3
“Oh my god, she’s so adorable!” Emily squeals as she bends over the crib, making faces at the baby.
“Yeah, it’s one of her saving graces,” Alec jokes as he puts his arm around Gillian. “We haven’t slept a wink since the first day.”
As if on cue, Gillian yawns and covers her mouth, then frowns at her partner who is hovering in the threshold. “She won’t bite, Cal. She doesn’t have teeth.”
“Well, if you must know, I’m still scarred for life over that one,” he looks pointedly at his daughter, but awkwardly makes his way past stuffed animals and boxes to the crib.
Gillian watches the pair with a smile, leaning into her husband.
“Fancy a trade? This one asks for a car on a daily basis and runs wild with credit cards.”
“Haha, so funny, Dad.”
“One day,” Alec whispers close to her ear, “our daughter will grow up like that.”
She hides the grin threatening to blossom on her face, ducking her head and feeling a sudden giddiness at the thought, and when she looks up, Cal is looking at her across the crib with a small smile on his face, as if he knows what she’s thinking.
day 61
She calls the agency once, and never tells Alec. Her voice is calm and steady enough when she introduces herself, asks for the worker handling their adoption.
“I’d like to speak with her, the birth mother.”
The worker (Jane, she remembers, who’d smiled and told them for the first time, I found you your daughter) tells her these things are confidential, these things are kept from temporary adoptive parents (Temporary, Gillian thinks, choking), we warned you about the rules, we told you this could happen, we told you.
“Please just give her back.” She squeezes her eyes shut, and her tears leak out to her cheeks. “Give her back to me.”
These things happen, they do and I’m so sorry, ma’am. I’m so sorry.
day 21
She hears the singing the moment she opens the front door. A big smile slowly forms on her lips as she places her keys and her bag on the dining table, and follows the unmistakable sound of her husband belting out the chorus of Like A Virgin. When she reaches the threshold of the living room, she leans against the nearby wall, grinning at the sight : Alec has his back turned to her, a giggling Sophie in his arms (large green eyes transfixed at her father and probably curious of the noise akin to nails on blackboards coming out of his mouth), iPod earphones in place, shaking his hips and using Sophie’s bottle as a makeshift microphone. She’d had no idea how badly he sang, but now she has a better grasp of it.
It’s two verses before he finally does a dramatic twirl and sees her struggling not to laugh. Grinning widely, he sings even louder (like a vi-i-i-irgin), swinging over to her and, tossing the bottle to the couch, pulls her close to him and gives her a spin.
day 365
“Cal,” she calls out to him as he’s distractedly hurrying into his office.
“Yes, love?”
Gillian gives him a dazzling smile. “My friend Sally is opening her new ice cream parlor today--”
“Oh no,” Cal groans.
“And,” she continues loudly, pretending not to hear him, “I’m going. So I’m taking half the day off, leaving you with a neat pile of cases to be distributed to the junior staff,” she takes a deep breath and grins, “and drowning myself in two gallons of cherry chocolate ice cream.”
Cal raises an eyebrow and surveys his partner. “You do know ice cream rots your teeth? And does other things to the thighs that forty-year-old women should desperately avoid?”
She smacks his arm in retaliation as he halfheartedly shields himself. “Ice cream is good for the soul. So goodbye, Cal,” she says pointedly and turns around to walk away.
“Goodbye, Foster,” he grins, misses the way her smile collapses.
*
At the parlor, her table is in a far corner, far from the long lines of children and parents waiting to get ice cream. She finished her bowl long ago, the melted chocolate drying on the bottom of the glass, and though she should go she finds herself staying, her arms folded on her stomach.
“Hey there, love.”
She looks up in surprise and smiles at him. “Cal. What are you doing here? Felt like getting some ice cream after all?”
He’s standing in front of her, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, awkwardly shuffling his feet, before he sits down across her. “I was in my office, after you left, you know, and something just wasn’t right. And I thought about it for a while, and--”
She looks at him expectantly, keeping still, because she doesn’t know how to move without giving herself away.
“I may have missed it, the first time,” Cal says, staring at her intently. “but I’ve gotten a little better at detecting agony. I’m sorry I forgot what today is, darling.”
She nods, swallowing, pressing her fingernails to the material of her jacket. “She’d be one. I’d have brought her here.” She tries to smile, fails.
He reaches across the table, holds out his hand. She hesitates only for a moment before she takes it, and he grasps it with both hands tightly.
“Hey.” He ducks his head to follow her line of sight and holds her gaze. “You don’t have to hide it from me, love.”
day 67
She gets home a little later than Alec, when he’s already putting the dishes back on the shelves. He showers and she showers, and when they’re in bed, she looks up at the ceiling and says, “Today, I saw this little girl, maybe a year old, with her mother. And--and I just thought, Sophie would--”
“Stop,” Alec tells her, voice low. He shifts on his side of the bed, away from her. “I can’t.”
She pulls the covers to her chin and whispers back, “Okay.”
day 7
She and Alec have worked out a system--the baby monitor switches bedsides every night--and tonight, she’s cheating. It’s Alec’s turn, but he’d stayed up late at the office and fell asleep the moment he hit his head on the pillow; she had woken at the soft sounds of gurgling from the speaker then she’d turned it off, and made her way to the nursery.
She pads into the cold room, pulling her robe tighter around her. When she peers into the crib, Sophie is wide awake and fidgeting impatiently, her little fist clutching the soft pink blanket wrapped tightly around her body.
“Shh,” Gillian murmurs, gathering her daughter up in her arms. Sophie fusses a little before she settles her head into her mother’s chest, curling herself around the folds of her robe. Gillian closes her eyes and leans into her, burying her nose in her daughter’s hair, inhaling her smell. “Happy one-week day.”
day 80
She keeps two things : Sophie’s hospital bracelet and a well-worn pink sock with yellow bananas. The sock because Sophie was always pulling one off with her teeth and giggling at her parents when they combed the nursery looking for it (though they’d finally lost the other one at a park once and never found it again); and the bracelet because it already read Sophie Foster even before they took her home.
The rest she gives away.
day 274
She barely speaks on her first session and Dr. Wickham understands. It takes time, he tells her gently, don’t worry, and it would be good if your husband came, too. This is how it feels on the other side of the couch, she thinks, and it doesn’t help that she can read him, knows how he unconsciously categorizes her the same way she herself would have. Grieving mother.
She goes home early from the session and walks in on Alec bent over the coffee table, snorting white powder through his nose.
“You have your therapy,” he says, his dress shirt rumpled, his eyes hollow and glassy (Grieving father, a part of her thinks), “I have this.”
She nods and walks to the bedroom, cancels therapy with Dr. Wickham.
day 30
By the time she opens the door to her office she’s collected a string of interns, assistants and analysts cooing at the baby in the stroller. The traffic to her office doesn’t quite let up during the day; Sophie introduces herself to Loker, squealing delightedly as she spits a glob of milk at his shirt--
“Charming,” he’d said wryly, but she didn’t miss the way he gently ruffled her wispy blonde hair when he thought she wasn’t looking.
By lunch, Cal drops by to shoo the cluster of them around the baby carrier as Gillian just laughs at him.
“With her around here, no work’s getting done,” Cal grouses even as he peers in the carrier to make faces at Sophie.
“So you can bring your daughter to work but I can’t bring mine?” She asks, raising an eyebrow.
“She’s too--” Cal makes a random gesture. “--cuddly. It’s bloody distracting.”
“Well I’m glad you think so, Cal,” she smiles sweetly, rising from her chair with a few folders in hand as Cal’s eyes widen. “Because I have a meeting with a client in five minutes, I need a babysitter, and you just chased everyone away.
“Oh no, no,” Cal stutters and holds his hands up. “No, no. Foster. I haven’t taken care of a helpless infant in fifteen years, who knows what damage I could do--”
“Thanks, Cal,” she says, breezing past him.
She returns to her office an hour later, pushing the glass door quietly open.
“--so if you’re smart, and let’s bloody well hope your biological parents had some brains on them, you’ll figure out soon enough that neither your mum or your dad have green eyes.” Cal is sitting on her chair with his back to her, cradling Sophie awkwardly. “Also, neither of them are blonde. So I’d like to state for the record that I was first in telling you the unadulterated truth."
She rolls her eyes good-naturedly, leaning her head on the glass.They have been having this conversation a while, judging by the constant gurgles her daughter is making.
“Don’t know why you have your mum’s smile though,” he mutters, and from somewhere on his chest, Sophie coos in response.
day 59
A hush descends on the staff the moment she enters the building, but she ignores them, ignores the handful of human lie detectors analyzing the set of her shoulders, the lines around her face. She asks her assistant for all the budget reports, for all the work she has undone, all the files she has to look over, and in minutes her desk is covered so high in papers she is drowning in them.
“What the bloody hell are you doing here, Foster?”
Cal pushes the door wide open and stands in front of her, hands on hips. She blinks, looking up. It is night time, she hasn’t even noticed. When she looks back at Cal from the window, his face has softened and his stance has eased. He’s looking at her like she’s breaking, and she tries to force the muscles in her face to keep still.
“Go home to your husband, love,” he says, softer. “Please.” He truly means it, he does, but she notices he’s not coming any closer, reads the hesitance in the way he stands.
She shakes her head slowly once, then twice. “I can’t. I can’t, it’s--” she stops. “She’s everywhere.”
He opens his mouth to say something, closes it again.
“I keep smelling her, seeing her in her room. In the kitchen.” She looks down and starts to busy herself with arranging the files on her desk, but finds her hands shaking badly and puts them back down. “Her crib is still unmade, and her bottles are everywhere. On the couch, the bed, just--everywhere. Cal, I--”
She looks up to see him watching her with a pained expression on his face, and when she touches her cheek she’s surprised to find it wet.
“I don’t want to go home. Cal.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath, closes her eyes. After a moment she says, “I’m okay. You can go.”
Without opening her eyes she hears him stay for a beat, then two, hesitating, before he turns to leave.
day 545
After she loads the last of her things in the moving van, she finds herself back in the house, standing in the middle of Sophie’s old room.
She has been forgetting some things, little things like what color the carpet was (pink or lavender), what animals were carved on the crib (the one beside the kitten on the right corner, was it a duck?), the last book she read to Sophie before she was taken away.
She hears his footsteps down the hallway stop at the threshold of the room behind her, and he clears his throat, a nervous habit he’s always had.
“Was it The Velveteen Rabbit or Goodnight Moon?” She asks suddenly.
“Sorry?” Alec asks, surprised.
“What we read to her, the night before they took her away.”
He doesn’t reply, not for a long time, and she thinks it’s just one of those things she’s lost, like keys or a husband or a house or a daughter. And then finally she turns around to walk away and after she brushes past him, when she’s halfway down the hall, he says hoarsely, “Goodnight Moon. It was a Friday. I’d just made popcorn, and when I came in you were at the part about clocks and she was already asleep.”
She remembers it suddenly and the absolute clarity of the memory claws at her heart; the steady hum of the air conditioner, the distant smell of butter, Sophie’s hair tickling her nose, her head tucked under her chin. It’s like being doused in ice cold water, remembering, when everything she seems to be doing these days is losing things, forgetting things.
“Thank you,” she says, reaching for the door.
day 1095
“Hey.”
She turns around and smiles at Cal as he enters her office. “Hey.”
He plops down on the couch, his arm stretched out but not quite touching her, and after a beat, asks, “Are you okay, love?”
He hasn’t forgotten, not since the first year. He’s always been a quick study.
“Yeah,” she says softly. “I’m celebrating,” she continues, gesturing at a chocolate cupcake with a bright pink candle on the coffee table.There’s a bottle of wine beside it, and two glasses.
“Yeah?” He stares at her intently, watching her face.
He doesn’t known what to say to her about Sophie, never has. She thinks he feels guilty in some way, having his daughter while hers never stayed.
“Yeah,” she replies. She leans forward to pour wine on the glasses and hands him one. She cradles her own glass, running her fingertip around the rim. “I’ve never celebrated her birthday before.” She stops for a moment, sips her wine and says quietly, “I realized that I’ve been mourning her far longer than I’ve had her.”
She and Alec had planned Sophie’s first birthday once, and she remembers talk of layers of tulle and pink lace and a tower of chocolate cupcakes and yellow balloons. She wonders if Sophie, at three, still smiles at the sight of bright pink; if she’d scratch at her party dress, if she still kicks her socks off and leaves her mother searching for lost pairs.
When he doesn’t reply, she turns to look at him and watches the play of light and shadows on his face, unreadable; serious. He has always thought reading faces would prepare him for loss, would give him the power to fix things, and she knows it makes him feel helpless that reading agony on her face wouldn’t take it away. He’s never realized that this was something she never needed him to fix. She has never lost a mother and he has never lost a daughter; there are some places to where neither of them could ever follow the other.
“And I have a feeling she really loves chocolate,” she adds with a small smile.
Cal’s face breaks into surprise and she waits patiently while he searches her face for it--for acceptance, she thinks, because this is how it feels, sad and calm and unbearably light--while she finds herself watching him flicker through a dozen emotions, settling into one she finds familiar but can’t name in the dark of her office.
He must finally understand what it is she wants him to know, because the corners of his lips lift and his eyes soften. He rests his hand on her neck, his thumb grazing her cheek.
“That I agree with, love,” he grins, and she thinks of all the things she’s lost, and everything she thought she’d have, and finds herself missing them a little less.
“A toast then, to Sophie Foster on her birthday,” he says, lifting his glass and clinking it with hers gently, “whatever she is called today, wherever she may be.”
day 1
After the door closes, she walks slowly to the couch, the sound of Alec running around the kitchen warming bottles distant to her ears.
It is morning. The bundle in her arms stirs a little and she brings it just a little closer to her chest. The baby’s eyes are still closed, the tiny black lashes resting on her cheek, and her pink mouth is slightly open; Gillian holds still as she keeps count of the rhythm of the baby’s breathing, the rising and falling of her chest.
At twenty-one, she finally whispers, “Hello, darling,” smiling, touching her nose to hers, “Hello, Sophie.”
***
five ways to leaving bobby donnell
the practice; I think I was beginning a process of leaving you.
Step 1 : Stop expecting him to remember
anything; little things like buying milk or Bobby Jr.’s diapers, putting the toilet seat up, picking up his dry cleaning, doing the dishes for the night, remembering dates. When you were in state prison, you celebrated your anniversary with thick plexiglass between you, and a phone clutched to your ear like a lifeline.
What a way to celebrate, huh, you told him with a small smile.
He looked up a moment from his files, giving you a quizzical look. Celebrate what?
The--the appeal, you said, giving a short laugh. He smiled at you briefly, confused, his dimples deepening for a moment.
Later, when the last round of visitors were just about to leave, a disgruntled officer brought you to the visiting area and he was there, his hair mussed up, his tie loosened and his shirt untucked.
I almost forgot, he said with a sheepish grin, pressing a single daisy to the glass.
(This is what you imagine happens. Really, you just stayed up all night, your face pressed to your cot. These days, you can’t tell the difference between all the things you imagined would happen in your life with Bobby Donnell and the things that actually are. You always think it’s the daisies; it’s better that way.)
*
Step 2 : Get your own office
and start your own practice.
So I heard about your opera singer, he says when you’re on the elevator. Congratulations.
Thanks, you reply distractedly, juggling a cup of coffee and the morning paper. New case today?
Yeah, he says. You can see him trying to gauge how much to tell you. He finally goes with, It’s a pretty tough one.
Oh. Good luck.
The elevator goes up a few floors and finally there’s the ding, and you both step outside. He heads to his office and the moment he opens the door you hear voices escalating and overlapping and Bobby raising his to ask what the hell is going on here before he closes it behind him, muffling the sound. Your own door has your name, and no yelling to greet you when you open it. You smile, setting down your briefcase on your desk. You love the quiet.
*
Step 3 : Stop expecting him to touch you
at night. Once, when you were feeling horny as hell, you put Bobby Jr to sleep early, wore this black lacy wisp of lingerie with stockings and garter belts and waited for him to come home. You fell asleep around midnight after finishing half the bottle of wine and when you woke up in the morning, he was at his side facing away from you, snoring into his pillow in flannel pajamas.
There was a time long ago when your husband would wake you up in the middle of the night with urgent kisses, running his hands down your thighs. He doesn’t anymore.
*
Step 4 : Work late
to save you the trouble of talking.
You coming? He’d pop in his head in the connecting door between your offices, his face tired.
You go on ahead, you’d say, gesturing to the files on your table, I have a ton of things to go through.
Dinner these days is trying for you both; talking about cases is out, so where does that leave you? (At home, the clink of silverware on porcelain the only sound between you, and in the earlier weeks you both liked to pretend it was comfortable silence.)
Now when he closes the door to your office and heads home on his own, you don’t know who’s more relieved, him or you.
*
Step 5 : Stop listening
to him. Stop listening to him in court. You fell so badly for him the first time you heard him passionately defend a man sentenced to life in prison, and you thought since then that you’d follow him everywhere. You used to stop by and stay at the back of the court room, just listening to him speak. You don’t think you could fall in love with him anymore, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Stop listening to his excuses or to mundane stories like how Jamie yelled at Eugene the other day, what Lucy wore to work this morning, to better shield yourself from how tired he sounds at the end of the day, how you know he would rather sleep than talk; make yourself immune to him, make him undangerous, unfit to break your heart, so by the time you see him kiss another woman, by the time he sleeps with her, by the time he grips your arms and insists, I know I love you--you’re already gone.