fic: Hey Jude (title to possibly change)
Summary: After the death of his wife, Jude Langley slips into a deep depression. In order to help, his sister buys him a brand-new Android Series Companion 3.
This isn't edited yet, but I"m just posting the first section to see what you think.
----
Hey Jude
You haven’t gotten out of bed in three days. Well you’ve gotten up to pee; you’re not so far gone that you’re going to piss the bed, and then there was right after the funeral where you laid on the carpet by the window in your suit. Now you’re just down to the pants. The shirt, coat and tie discarded between the bed and the connecting bathroom, socks and shoes long gone and sitting by the front door.
Birds outside the window sing and you want to snap all their tiny necks, but that involves getting up. So you just lay there watching the digits of your clock change time, your head pressed into the pillow that still smells like your wife’s sweet shampoo. Fresh rain water or something it’s called. There’s a green leaf on the bottle and she buys it from a specialty store. Well she bought it. Because she’ll never buy anything again, because she’s dead.
The grandfather clock in the hall strikes and you count the three cords. You hate that thing, but it was her mother’s. You suppose that now you can get rid of it, but as soon as the thought passes your mind you want to shoot yourself for it. All of her things sit where they are, all over the house, untouched. The dirty dishes in the sink you promised you’d put in the dish washer when you got home, clothes in the dryer. Her flowers (which you haven’t watered, because you can’t be assed to get out of bed), her clothes hanging haphazardly out of the dresser, her still wet towels in the corner of the bathroom because she couldn’t really bend down. She’s a tiny woman, eight months pregnant and couldn’t bend. And yeah, the baby is dead too.
You left the room that was supposed to be nursery as-is too. The half painted walls; you were in the middle of a mural. Curtains that she sewed, a pile of plastic and wood that was meant to be a crib. You had locked the door on your way from the front to your room at the end of the hall.
So yeah, you think that you’re just gonna stay in bed for the foreseeable future. You ignore the phone calls, the messages that are left. Louise’s voice speaks soft and happy on the machine, Hi, we’re not a home right now. Leave a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can! Have a blessed day!-BEEP. It’s someone else telling you how sorry they were, crying and sniffling. You ignore calls from your friends and colleagues. Ignore calls from close and extended family. Your father has been dead for years but your mother keeps calling in tears, deep sobs. She’s worried about you, she’s devastated about Louise and the baby. But she’s hundreds of miles away at the house, nay, the mansion. You live in the woods in Washington, because Louise wanted to be away from the city, the crime. Wanted to have wide open spaces for your little family.
There’s knocking at the front door and you ignore that too. People have been coming by, admirers of your work, friends from town twenty miles away. They leave food on the porch, flowers and cards. The knocking increases and you just pull the pillow over your head to stop the noise.
But the door’s opened and only three people have keys. There’s rustling in the kitchen, some sniffling and someone is walking down the hall. A bag drops at the door and she moves across the carpet.
Your older sister crawls into bed with you and wraps her arms around you. She tells you she loves you and how sorry she is. She’s been by your side every moment since it happened, but has given you this space.
“You can’t just lie here forever,” she whispers into you ear, her breath so hot that it gives you goosebumps all over your body. She’s smaller than you, tiny, like a too small shell on a hermit crab’s back. Sadie has taken care of you your whole life, protected you. Like in the ninth grade when Robert Moore called you a faggot, she punched him in the face. The next day he called you a faggot again for having a girl fight your battles. And then Sadie kicked him in the balls and he hit the ground like a ton of bricks. Yeah you like to suck cock, but Robert Moore got his ass kicked by a girl half his size. Twice.
But you don’t want her right now. You don’t want anyone. You just want to lie on this bed smelling your dead wife’s pillow for the rest of your life. And you hope that it’s not for that much longer. “Try me,” you growl. Maybe she’ll leave. But she doesn’t. She just holds you.
At five she gets out of bed to answer the phone and then starts to make dinner. You don’t get out of bed for it. You don’t get out of bed when she comes back to eat with you and then takes her plate back out to the kitchen. As she brings in the baskets from the porch and starts deleting the messages on the phone, you get the good whiskey from the cabinet above the fridge, your feet feeling odd and hot against the cool stones of the kitchen.
Sadie sees you from the couch with baskets in her lap, a trashcan by the coffee table as she dumps the food that’s been sitting on your porch for a few days. She watches you as you move through your own house like a ghost, a memory. You drink until you can’t feel and stumble to the bed, flopping on those cool sheets and that still smell like Louise.
Sadie sits next to you and dabs your head with a cool rag, and takes the bottle from your loose grasp.
*
After six weeks and three days, you’re thinking of killing yourself. And you know that Sadie knows you’re thinking of it, because she’s hidden every type of pill you could OD on, took your razors and the spares. You don’t have the energy to go looking. So you just lie there on your side of the bed, head in Louise’s pillow. Bit by bit the scent is fading, but you can’t bear not holding it when you sleep.
Mostly, Sadie sleeps on the couch in the living room. She comes in the bedroom in the mornings to make sure you’re alive and she doesn’t leave until you give her some sing of life. A groan, a kicking leg. You rolling over to give her the finger. She makes you eat toast which you pick at from a paper plate, sitting on the floor by the window.
You stare into the forest, bright and green this time of year. Waxy leaves, flowers ready to bloom. The air will smell of blossoms and rain. Fresh and wet dirt and bark. Louise was the one who wanted all this. Living in the woods where you two could do as you pleased. She could have her precious garden, you could paint. The child would know nature and see the stares. But you let her garden die and haven’t touched a brush in weeks.
Today after your forced breakfast, you take the handmade quilt from the trunk at the foot of the bed and wrap it over your bare shoulders. It’s light and smells of cedar.
A few weeks ago you changed out of the dress slacks and left them on the floor by th window, and into a dirty pair of jeans, covered in paint stains and ripped at the knees. No shirt, no socks or underwear either. Ideally you’d be naked, or still in those slacks, but Sadie wouldn’t allow it.
The house smells like blueberry muffins and bacon, fresh brewed coffee. She’s been trying to lure you out of your room with foods from your childhood for days now and you’ve been tempted, but the thought of enjoying great food while Louise is rotting away sickens you.
As the yellow haze of morning bleeds through the large windows, you contemplating going to sleep, but that’s where the terrors have been plaguing you. In your ‘dreams’ you see Louise laying slumped on her side, crimson rain all over her face, her mouth gapping open and closed like a fish. You woke up crying and sweating at about four and have been up ever since.
So you stop looking at the lush forest and walk out of the room, down the long hall and shuffle to the kitchen, pulling the quilt over you tighter, like a shawl, and sit across the table from Sadie.
She’s eating a muffin and drinking from a white mug with hammers painted around the rim. She stares as you put your hands around the mug she’s set out for you. Every morning she sets a place for you and you hear her dump it down the drain as you’d walk away from her with your toast.
“Morning,” she says, shifting. She stretches her legs under the table, pressing her cold feet against yours. You shudder from the warmth of her soles, the warmth of the coffee.
She mixes milk into her coffee, sugar. The spoon clinks loudly against the glass as she stirs seven times, her favorite number. You don’t have a favorite number, you don’t have a favorite anything anymore.
“So.” Sadie stops stirring and places the spoon on a folded napkin. “I have to get back to work.” She works for some company upstate with advertising or something. It’s never been quite clear, but she talks about billboards and clients. Run-time for commercials and colors.
You finally look up at and she’s staring at you; it’s a bit unnerving. Like she’s just waiting for you to leap across the table to get to the butter knife that’s sitting closer to her than it is to you, and you’re going to stab yourself in the gut. “So?” You answer.
She sighs your mother’s sigh. They are both more alike than either of them would care to admit. Her brow crinkles in the middle and her feet slide down to your ankles. “So,” she enunciates. “I’m worried about you.”
You scoff and shrug. “I don’t need-”
“Don’t give me that,” she snaps. “You barely move, you’ve been living off liquids and eyeing all the glass in the house…I want to know that when I come back next week I’m not going to find you in the shower strung up by your ties.”
“You took all my ties,” you grumble. You’d checked your drawers last week when being alive had finally become too much. When your lungs burned and your limbs had become too heavy to function.
She slams down the mug, shaking the bale. You lean back a bit. “Goddamnit, Jude.” Her voice cracks and there are tears in her eyes. “I love you so much and I miss her too, and I want to take care of you…but I can’t take off anymore time and I am petrified to leave you.” She weeps and pulls into herself, her feet off yours, her hands to her chest.
Your gut twists into a different kind of guilt. Sadie is your savoir, the light in your very dark life. If it weren’t for her, you probably would have driven your car into a building or walked into the ocean right after the accident.
“I’m sorry,” you tell her, and you are. The thought of her finding your body after everything she’s done for you since you were kids would be a pretty big ‘fuck you’.
She gets up to come to the other side of the table to hug you and you promise that you won’t kill yourself even though you really, really want to.
*
Sadie leaves on a Tuesday. You get out of bed with that quilt around your shoulders and follow her to the front door like a kicked puppy. She drags her suitcase on wheels and stops just outside on the porch. The baskets and flowers have stopped coming. A sprig of baby’s breath lay on the concrete floor, the petals all brown and curled inwards like a dead spider.
“You have my numbers.”
“Yeah.”
“And Mom.”
You laugh a bit and she smiles. Mom has enough problems.
“I’ll be back on Sunday.” She cups your face with both hands and has to tilt her head to see you clearly; you’ve been taller than her since you were fifteen and she was seventeen.
“You don’t have to,” you tell her.
She smiles sweetly and kisses your cheek. She’s warm and smells like pumpkin spice and you never want to let her go. When you were young, you starting cling to her like a barnacle after your mother had wandered away from you at the mall. You sat on a bench for ours with your teddy, just watching the crowd until you saw her shoes again. She was frantic and smelled funny and sweated. After that day, Sadie always held your hand, always held you.
Now she kisses your neck and squeezes tight around your waist. “Yeah I do. I’ll be here Sunday morning,” she promises and pulls away. The wind blows her red hair wild in all the directions. She wipes under her eyes, then grabs her suitcase and walks as fast as she can to the car.
You watch as she slowly drives away. Then it’s just you.
This isn't edited yet, but I"m just posting the first section to see what you think.
----
Hey Jude
You haven’t gotten out of bed in three days. Well you’ve gotten up to pee; you’re not so far gone that you’re going to piss the bed, and then there was right after the funeral where you laid on the carpet by the window in your suit. Now you’re just down to the pants. The shirt, coat and tie discarded between the bed and the connecting bathroom, socks and shoes long gone and sitting by the front door.
Birds outside the window sing and you want to snap all their tiny necks, but that involves getting up. So you just lay there watching the digits of your clock change time, your head pressed into the pillow that still smells like your wife’s sweet shampoo. Fresh rain water or something it’s called. There’s a green leaf on the bottle and she buys it from a specialty store. Well she bought it. Because she’ll never buy anything again, because she’s dead.
The grandfather clock in the hall strikes and you count the three cords. You hate that thing, but it was her mother’s. You suppose that now you can get rid of it, but as soon as the thought passes your mind you want to shoot yourself for it. All of her things sit where they are, all over the house, untouched. The dirty dishes in the sink you promised you’d put in the dish washer when you got home, clothes in the dryer. Her flowers (which you haven’t watered, because you can’t be assed to get out of bed), her clothes hanging haphazardly out of the dresser, her still wet towels in the corner of the bathroom because she couldn’t really bend down. She’s a tiny woman, eight months pregnant and couldn’t bend. And yeah, the baby is dead too.
You left the room that was supposed to be nursery as-is too. The half painted walls; you were in the middle of a mural. Curtains that she sewed, a pile of plastic and wood that was meant to be a crib. You had locked the door on your way from the front to your room at the end of the hall.
So yeah, you think that you’re just gonna stay in bed for the foreseeable future. You ignore the phone calls, the messages that are left. Louise’s voice speaks soft and happy on the machine, Hi, we’re not a home right now. Leave a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can! Have a blessed day!-BEEP. It’s someone else telling you how sorry they were, crying and sniffling. You ignore calls from your friends and colleagues. Ignore calls from close and extended family. Your father has been dead for years but your mother keeps calling in tears, deep sobs. She’s worried about you, she’s devastated about Louise and the baby. But she’s hundreds of miles away at the house, nay, the mansion. You live in the woods in Washington, because Louise wanted to be away from the city, the crime. Wanted to have wide open spaces for your little family.
There’s knocking at the front door and you ignore that too. People have been coming by, admirers of your work, friends from town twenty miles away. They leave food on the porch, flowers and cards. The knocking increases and you just pull the pillow over your head to stop the noise.
But the door’s opened and only three people have keys. There’s rustling in the kitchen, some sniffling and someone is walking down the hall. A bag drops at the door and she moves across the carpet.
Your older sister crawls into bed with you and wraps her arms around you. She tells you she loves you and how sorry she is. She’s been by your side every moment since it happened, but has given you this space.
“You can’t just lie here forever,” she whispers into you ear, her breath so hot that it gives you goosebumps all over your body. She’s smaller than you, tiny, like a too small shell on a hermit crab’s back. Sadie has taken care of you your whole life, protected you. Like in the ninth grade when Robert Moore called you a faggot, she punched him in the face. The next day he called you a faggot again for having a girl fight your battles. And then Sadie kicked him in the balls and he hit the ground like a ton of bricks. Yeah you like to suck cock, but Robert Moore got his ass kicked by a girl half his size. Twice.
But you don’t want her right now. You don’t want anyone. You just want to lie on this bed smelling your dead wife’s pillow for the rest of your life. And you hope that it’s not for that much longer. “Try me,” you growl. Maybe she’ll leave. But she doesn’t. She just holds you.
At five she gets out of bed to answer the phone and then starts to make dinner. You don’t get out of bed for it. You don’t get out of bed when she comes back to eat with you and then takes her plate back out to the kitchen. As she brings in the baskets from the porch and starts deleting the messages on the phone, you get the good whiskey from the cabinet above the fridge, your feet feeling odd and hot against the cool stones of the kitchen.
Sadie sees you from the couch with baskets in her lap, a trashcan by the coffee table as she dumps the food that’s been sitting on your porch for a few days. She watches you as you move through your own house like a ghost, a memory. You drink until you can’t feel and stumble to the bed, flopping on those cool sheets and that still smell like Louise.
Sadie sits next to you and dabs your head with a cool rag, and takes the bottle from your loose grasp.
*
After six weeks and three days, you’re thinking of killing yourself. And you know that Sadie knows you’re thinking of it, because she’s hidden every type of pill you could OD on, took your razors and the spares. You don’t have the energy to go looking. So you just lie there on your side of the bed, head in Louise’s pillow. Bit by bit the scent is fading, but you can’t bear not holding it when you sleep.
Mostly, Sadie sleeps on the couch in the living room. She comes in the bedroom in the mornings to make sure you’re alive and she doesn’t leave until you give her some sing of life. A groan, a kicking leg. You rolling over to give her the finger. She makes you eat toast which you pick at from a paper plate, sitting on the floor by the window.
You stare into the forest, bright and green this time of year. Waxy leaves, flowers ready to bloom. The air will smell of blossoms and rain. Fresh and wet dirt and bark. Louise was the one who wanted all this. Living in the woods where you two could do as you pleased. She could have her precious garden, you could paint. The child would know nature and see the stares. But you let her garden die and haven’t touched a brush in weeks.
Today after your forced breakfast, you take the handmade quilt from the trunk at the foot of the bed and wrap it over your bare shoulders. It’s light and smells of cedar.
A few weeks ago you changed out of the dress slacks and left them on the floor by th window, and into a dirty pair of jeans, covered in paint stains and ripped at the knees. No shirt, no socks or underwear either. Ideally you’d be naked, or still in those slacks, but Sadie wouldn’t allow it.
The house smells like blueberry muffins and bacon, fresh brewed coffee. She’s been trying to lure you out of your room with foods from your childhood for days now and you’ve been tempted, but the thought of enjoying great food while Louise is rotting away sickens you.
As the yellow haze of morning bleeds through the large windows, you contemplating going to sleep, but that’s where the terrors have been plaguing you. In your ‘dreams’ you see Louise laying slumped on her side, crimson rain all over her face, her mouth gapping open and closed like a fish. You woke up crying and sweating at about four and have been up ever since.
So you stop looking at the lush forest and walk out of the room, down the long hall and shuffle to the kitchen, pulling the quilt over you tighter, like a shawl, and sit across the table from Sadie.
She’s eating a muffin and drinking from a white mug with hammers painted around the rim. She stares as you put your hands around the mug she’s set out for you. Every morning she sets a place for you and you hear her dump it down the drain as you’d walk away from her with your toast.
“Morning,” she says, shifting. She stretches her legs under the table, pressing her cold feet against yours. You shudder from the warmth of her soles, the warmth of the coffee.
She mixes milk into her coffee, sugar. The spoon clinks loudly against the glass as she stirs seven times, her favorite number. You don’t have a favorite number, you don’t have a favorite anything anymore.
“So.” Sadie stops stirring and places the spoon on a folded napkin. “I have to get back to work.” She works for some company upstate with advertising or something. It’s never been quite clear, but she talks about billboards and clients. Run-time for commercials and colors.
You finally look up at and she’s staring at you; it’s a bit unnerving. Like she’s just waiting for you to leap across the table to get to the butter knife that’s sitting closer to her than it is to you, and you’re going to stab yourself in the gut. “So?” You answer.
She sighs your mother’s sigh. They are both more alike than either of them would care to admit. Her brow crinkles in the middle and her feet slide down to your ankles. “So,” she enunciates. “I’m worried about you.”
You scoff and shrug. “I don’t need-”
“Don’t give me that,” she snaps. “You barely move, you’ve been living off liquids and eyeing all the glass in the house…I want to know that when I come back next week I’m not going to find you in the shower strung up by your ties.”
“You took all my ties,” you grumble. You’d checked your drawers last week when being alive had finally become too much. When your lungs burned and your limbs had become too heavy to function.
She slams down the mug, shaking the bale. You lean back a bit. “Goddamnit, Jude.” Her voice cracks and there are tears in her eyes. “I love you so much and I miss her too, and I want to take care of you…but I can’t take off anymore time and I am petrified to leave you.” She weeps and pulls into herself, her feet off yours, her hands to her chest.
Your gut twists into a different kind of guilt. Sadie is your savoir, the light in your very dark life. If it weren’t for her, you probably would have driven your car into a building or walked into the ocean right after the accident.
“I’m sorry,” you tell her, and you are. The thought of her finding your body after everything she’s done for you since you were kids would be a pretty big ‘fuck you’.
She gets up to come to the other side of the table to hug you and you promise that you won’t kill yourself even though you really, really want to.
*
Sadie leaves on a Tuesday. You get out of bed with that quilt around your shoulders and follow her to the front door like a kicked puppy. She drags her suitcase on wheels and stops just outside on the porch. The baskets and flowers have stopped coming. A sprig of baby’s breath lay on the concrete floor, the petals all brown and curled inwards like a dead spider.
“You have my numbers.”
“Yeah.”
“And Mom.”
You laugh a bit and she smiles. Mom has enough problems.
“I’ll be back on Sunday.” She cups your face with both hands and has to tilt her head to see you clearly; you’ve been taller than her since you were fifteen and she was seventeen.
“You don’t have to,” you tell her.
She smiles sweetly and kisses your cheek. She’s warm and smells like pumpkin spice and you never want to let her go. When you were young, you starting cling to her like a barnacle after your mother had wandered away from you at the mall. You sat on a bench for ours with your teddy, just watching the crowd until you saw her shoes again. She was frantic and smelled funny and sweated. After that day, Sadie always held your hand, always held you.
Now she kisses your neck and squeezes tight around your waist. “Yeah I do. I’ll be here Sunday morning,” she promises and pulls away. The wind blows her red hair wild in all the directions. She wipes under her eyes, then grabs her suitcase and walks as fast as she can to the car.
You watch as she slowly drives away. Then it’s just you.