Epilogue
She got worse. That became clear pretty early on. And that doesn't mean the nervous breakdowns, which were not so much 'things getting worse' as they were 'inevitable.'
He first shatters so late at night that it's early, shivering and unresponsive, shrinking from her and yearning for her to close the distance herself, like it's two years ago and what they mean to each other is wholly undefined. But it's not two years ago; when she touches the grief etched into his face, he isn't flushing with embarrassment and paralyzed with nerves. When she talks to him for hours, she isn't afraid anymore that it's the wrong thing to do, an insult, a disservice. She doesn't know each and every ghost that wracks him that night, but she at least knows now what it is that he wants. He says he doesn't want to hurt her, and she doesn't look away or spark with denial, she nods and touches him and says, "Go on."
Her dam breaks on a Saturday, when he'd gone back to that site in Washington Heights to take advantage of an uncommonly beautiful day of light. The poor guy's reward for diligent work is muffled wails as he walks through the door, and boxes all huddled untouched that were supposed to get unpacked today. They would have been if not for the television. First, the creak of a merry-go-round filmed in the mist of an early morning put her in a foul mood. Then a whole hour later, fat pleats of curtains tumble from her arms when she passes by the screen again and catches sight out of the corner of her eye of an actor hurled into a mirror. Trash cans full of tissues in the living room, kitchen, and bedroom testify to the snail's pace wandering she's done, a two hour long gradual stumble from one end of their apartment to the other. When his arms first wrap around her, she buries her face in her hands. By the time sobs have evolved into sniffles, she holds him back, and speaks. It hurt, she says. I was so scared. I didn't understand. And she feels a little stupid that it was so hard, three long years hard, to articulate what he'd known the moment he'd burst through her front door.
No, she gets worse in ways that have nothing to do with all of that. She gets worse because she'd made mistakes, terrible ones. Dashing to the lake for water, dropping in old friends even as she demanded that he get nowhere near the town lines, annual flowers on the graves of strangers, she just hadn't realized the full extent of it until now. Typically human, a shadowy wisp in the Nexus sneers at her, blustering through life until disaster forces a change. If you're lucky, the disaster is yours alone. If you're not so lucky, others are caught in your blast zone too.
The migraines escalate, tearing through her with such excruciating, ravaging force that she can't even hear him through it. Her face is left smeared with sweat and tears, and it's only after the long hour and a half of agonized moaning that she can assemble the thought: God, I shouldn't have gone back.
She drops things more often, hands clumsy in ways they didn't used to be, but that's nothing next to waking up to sheer terror sometimes. Returning to consciousness and finding her chest will not rise and her lungs do not expand on command, she's simply physically incapable of articulating anything. Her hands scrabble at him, and in silence she pleads for him to give her a sign that he understands, knows what's happening to her, knows it will pass. He'd told her about those rare occasions when she'd "pause" in the dead of night, securely asleep throughout and none the wiser. But not for so long until now, long enough to urge her to struggle to awareness. As her lungs burn and blood pounds in her ears, he tells her everything will be okay, but he looks as scared as she is. Goddamn it, I shouldn't have gone back.
Now, every week for as long as he'll keep her, he'll watch this or hear of it later. All because for three years, she'd tried like hell to fool herself into thinking that if you couldn't see the wound, it wasn't there.
In the dark of a humid summer night, she addresses it simply and straightforwardly. She practices doting tenderness through kisses and fingertips wandering familiar pathways across his face as though they're uncharted and new. Reciprocity is forestalled with, "I'm sorry." Velvety confidence owes thanks to an afternoon spent mentally paring a half-hour speech down to the essentials, down to what she absolutely must tell him about her headaches, his nightmares, her vulnerability, his depression, everything. "That night you tried to leave, I said you don't hurt me. That was a lie, I guess; we sort of hurt the hell out of each other. I'm okay anyways." Her eyes well, and she looks at him with the scared and hopeless devotion that doesn't happen half so naturally in a lit room. It's socially inscribed that people are not supposed to look as though their lives are lying outside of themselves, lying next to them on the bed, with a different heart beating under different skin. "I need to know you're okay."
_____________
The information hits the surface of a pond that had otherwise been calm, its weight rippling the surface. They are not coming.
Her first thought, the first of the ripples, is what Henry will think. Will he be devastated, disappointed, untouched, relieved? Whatever it will be, she strongly suspects she'll wish he hadn't gone through it.
The second is what to do with the information. Tell him when he comes home? No, not without trying first to intervene.
The third is tricker by far. What on Earth to say to them? Today, these people feel more alien to her than anything from other worlds possibly could. They're not coming? Are they fucking serious? Why not? It's not as though she'd make them sit marooned and alone on the groom's side, the very fact of its emptiness means that she'd never divide the place by family of origin. And it's not as though they could expect to get chewed on, Henry'd been nothing but beaten down and withdrawn in their presence and she'd been nothing but back-breakingly accommodating.
Action and reaction, she winds up alone on their doorstep, ready with platitudes and sweetness and pleas. Every minute of it sends more thoughts bouncing off each other - what if she does get them to come and everyone judges Henry for it? What if they conduct themselves poorly, even spoil the whole damn day for the man? The father especially acts like a cannon of resentment waiting to explode. What if they think she's some kind of harpy for descending on them like this? What if Henry thinks they're not coming because of her? What if Henry thinks they're not coming because of him? What if trying to open the door to having them in her life just lets them carve more gashes out of his?
Then his mother tells her that they're going to be on vacation, have a safe drive back, and it's topped off with another cool sideswipe at their boy. Eileen smoothly rounds on the woman, lips thin and eyes sparking with some good old fashioned Irish indignation. "You know what?" she asks, with an air of exasperated finality: thus endeth her quest to be a good in-law. She'd tried, God help her, had called, written, visited. She hadn't budged in the face of the father's suspicious glaring, hadn't raised her voice to the mother's veiled insults, had gamely redirected conversations to fill the gaps left by hostile silences, hadn't said an unkind word to either of them. She'd tried; their turn. "That's it, I'm not going to stand around and listen to this anymore. When did everything change between you and Henry? When he was, what, five? Six? You know, that whole motherhood thing, whatever happened to that?"
___
Expertly, she bounces the kid in the crook of her elbow, pleased eyes half-lidded as she smiles and makes a kissy face at the newest second-cousin, or whatever you call your loads of cousins' loads of children. When it's only the purple wrinkly curious baby taking up her field of vision, she wanders smoothly along the edges of the room without having to consciously pull up the memory of how infants like being in motion. It's when she re-notices the other adults that she feels like an invader, a straggler on sacred ground.
She doesn't think of Walter with Danny in her arms, not really. Only of that lingering foreign feeling, that certainty not her own, that this is wrong and she's pathetic for indulging. Handing the soft warm squirming little person back to his mother, it's been three years, and she's still torn in two.
___
She walks free with no more visible marks than she had before, but the same cannot be said for him. Some of his wounds were erased in the middle of the madness, like hers were. When he wraps an arm around her stomach as they stare in awe at the gleaming hardwood floors of the apartment that will be not his or hers but theirs, the flesh beneath her knit top is unbroken and unaltered, with no sign remaining that she'd been impaled like chicken on a spit just a month ago. When they christen their empty new bedroom, the skin of his back is smooth beneath the gentle press of her nails. Not even his doctor could guess that a knife had embedded itself there.
But three of his limbs are another matter. Gashes repair themselves with weeks in which to do the work. The angry purple of healing skin resolves into dark tones of healing gone awry, of a human body that can restore itself to health, but not to the way things used to be. She kisses the notch in the hollow of his shoulder and remembers hurting for him, strokes fingertips over the new texture of his arm and remembers fearing for him. It makes her cry once (and if the resultant delayed gratification frustrated him, he concealed it like a champ). She couldn't help it, these terrible memories curled into the very fabric of him.
___
She fights valiantly against a bright smile threatening to crack her cool customer act, which she's been assured is very important to maintain when dealing with critical purchases like this. "It's pretty," she coos, smoothing satin down over her stomach. "I like the color, it's not, you know, super bright white, I think it looks good for my skin, don't you think?" Dollar signs in her eyes, the saleswoman, naturally, agrees. But so do the other women in the room who aren't being paid to be there. She holds out her arms and turns around in place, continuing blithely onward, "And it's not all full of beads and things, I like that too. Feels about as comfortable as one of these things is gonna get." When she's made a full 360, she notices hesitation in the eyes of friends, and intuits that fabric pulled too tight somewhere is not the source of it. Even through a life turned utterly upside-down, she retains all her talents for sensing things amiss, and three paranoid years have made her especially good at sniffing when this particular problem has come to the attentions of others in the room. A little crestfallen, she turns back to the mirror in the silence, eyeing the lovely neckline and thinking.
"Is the whole two showing?" she asks their reflections. They break their silences too, in a cavalcade of No and It's not so bad. They try to reassure her; she smiles over her shoulder and reassures them. "Then don't worry about it. I mean, everyone already knows they're there, it's not some big secret or anything." And she hadn't liked any of the ones that successfully covered all the evidence of the crime. High collars, stiff fabric, long sleeves, they all felt constricting.
_____________
It's a creamy summer morning. She fusses with her bangs in her new bathroom's mirror. Gone is the little round job above a yellowing sink. In an apartment for two, it's lit with daylight and wide enough to also accommodate his face, pressing a sleepy kiss to her head with his hands looking huge against her shoulders. She's not going to use this one for confrontations, for facing down the enemies, zeroes and ones and twos that spell out silence and namelessness.
What's done is done.
He first shatters so late at night that it's early, shivering and unresponsive, shrinking from her and yearning for her to close the distance herself, like it's two years ago and what they mean to each other is wholly undefined. But it's not two years ago; when she touches the grief etched into his face, he isn't flushing with embarrassment and paralyzed with nerves. When she talks to him for hours, she isn't afraid anymore that it's the wrong thing to do, an insult, a disservice. She doesn't know each and every ghost that wracks him that night, but she at least knows now what it is that he wants. He says he doesn't want to hurt her, and she doesn't look away or spark with denial, she nods and touches him and says, "Go on."
Her dam breaks on a Saturday, when he'd gone back to that site in Washington Heights to take advantage of an uncommonly beautiful day of light. The poor guy's reward for diligent work is muffled wails as he walks through the door, and boxes all huddled untouched that were supposed to get unpacked today. They would have been if not for the television. First, the creak of a merry-go-round filmed in the mist of an early morning put her in a foul mood. Then a whole hour later, fat pleats of curtains tumble from her arms when she passes by the screen again and catches sight out of the corner of her eye of an actor hurled into a mirror. Trash cans full of tissues in the living room, kitchen, and bedroom testify to the snail's pace wandering she's done, a two hour long gradual stumble from one end of their apartment to the other. When his arms first wrap around her, she buries her face in her hands. By the time sobs have evolved into sniffles, she holds him back, and speaks. It hurt, she says. I was so scared. I didn't understand. And she feels a little stupid that it was so hard, three long years hard, to articulate what he'd known the moment he'd burst through her front door.
No, she gets worse in ways that have nothing to do with all of that. She gets worse because she'd made mistakes, terrible ones. Dashing to the lake for water, dropping in old friends even as she demanded that he get nowhere near the town lines, annual flowers on the graves of strangers, she just hadn't realized the full extent of it until now. Typically human, a shadowy wisp in the Nexus sneers at her, blustering through life until disaster forces a change. If you're lucky, the disaster is yours alone. If you're not so lucky, others are caught in your blast zone too.
The migraines escalate, tearing through her with such excruciating, ravaging force that she can't even hear him through it. Her face is left smeared with sweat and tears, and it's only after the long hour and a half of agonized moaning that she can assemble the thought: God, I shouldn't have gone back.
She drops things more often, hands clumsy in ways they didn't used to be, but that's nothing next to waking up to sheer terror sometimes. Returning to consciousness and finding her chest will not rise and her lungs do not expand on command, she's simply physically incapable of articulating anything. Her hands scrabble at him, and in silence she pleads for him to give her a sign that he understands, knows what's happening to her, knows it will pass. He'd told her about those rare occasions when she'd "pause" in the dead of night, securely asleep throughout and none the wiser. But not for so long until now, long enough to urge her to struggle to awareness. As her lungs burn and blood pounds in her ears, he tells her everything will be okay, but he looks as scared as she is. Goddamn it, I shouldn't have gone back.
Now, every week for as long as he'll keep her, he'll watch this or hear of it later. All because for three years, she'd tried like hell to fool herself into thinking that if you couldn't see the wound, it wasn't there.
In the dark of a humid summer night, she addresses it simply and straightforwardly. She practices doting tenderness through kisses and fingertips wandering familiar pathways across his face as though they're uncharted and new. Reciprocity is forestalled with, "I'm sorry." Velvety confidence owes thanks to an afternoon spent mentally paring a half-hour speech down to the essentials, down to what she absolutely must tell him about her headaches, his nightmares, her vulnerability, his depression, everything. "That night you tried to leave, I said you don't hurt me. That was a lie, I guess; we sort of hurt the hell out of each other. I'm okay anyways." Her eyes well, and she looks at him with the scared and hopeless devotion that doesn't happen half so naturally in a lit room. It's socially inscribed that people are not supposed to look as though their lives are lying outside of themselves, lying next to them on the bed, with a different heart beating under different skin. "I need to know you're okay."
_____________
The information hits the surface of a pond that had otherwise been calm, its weight rippling the surface. They are not coming.
Her first thought, the first of the ripples, is what Henry will think. Will he be devastated, disappointed, untouched, relieved? Whatever it will be, she strongly suspects she'll wish he hadn't gone through it.
The second is what to do with the information. Tell him when he comes home? No, not without trying first to intervene.
The third is tricker by far. What on Earth to say to them? Today, these people feel more alien to her than anything from other worlds possibly could. They're not coming? Are they fucking serious? Why not? It's not as though she'd make them sit marooned and alone on the groom's side, the very fact of its emptiness means that she'd never divide the place by family of origin. And it's not as though they could expect to get chewed on, Henry'd been nothing but beaten down and withdrawn in their presence and she'd been nothing but back-breakingly accommodating.
Action and reaction, she winds up alone on their doorstep, ready with platitudes and sweetness and pleas. Every minute of it sends more thoughts bouncing off each other - what if she does get them to come and everyone judges Henry for it? What if they conduct themselves poorly, even spoil the whole damn day for the man? The father especially acts like a cannon of resentment waiting to explode. What if they think she's some kind of harpy for descending on them like this? What if Henry thinks they're not coming because of her? What if Henry thinks they're not coming because of him? What if trying to open the door to having them in her life just lets them carve more gashes out of his?
Then his mother tells her that they're going to be on vacation, have a safe drive back, and it's topped off with another cool sideswipe at their boy. Eileen smoothly rounds on the woman, lips thin and eyes sparking with some good old fashioned Irish indignation. "You know what?" she asks, with an air of exasperated finality: thus endeth her quest to be a good in-law. She'd tried, God help her, had called, written, visited. She hadn't budged in the face of the father's suspicious glaring, hadn't raised her voice to the mother's veiled insults, had gamely redirected conversations to fill the gaps left by hostile silences, hadn't said an unkind word to either of them. She'd tried; their turn. "That's it, I'm not going to stand around and listen to this anymore. When did everything change between you and Henry? When he was, what, five? Six? You know, that whole motherhood thing, whatever happened to that?"
___
Expertly, she bounces the kid in the crook of her elbow, pleased eyes half-lidded as she smiles and makes a kissy face at the newest second-cousin, or whatever you call your loads of cousins' loads of children. When it's only the purple wrinkly curious baby taking up her field of vision, she wanders smoothly along the edges of the room without having to consciously pull up the memory of how infants like being in motion. It's when she re-notices the other adults that she feels like an invader, a straggler on sacred ground.
She doesn't think of Walter with Danny in her arms, not really. Only of that lingering foreign feeling, that certainty not her own, that this is wrong and she's pathetic for indulging. Handing the soft warm squirming little person back to his mother, it's been three years, and she's still torn in two.
___
She walks free with no more visible marks than she had before, but the same cannot be said for him. Some of his wounds were erased in the middle of the madness, like hers were. When he wraps an arm around her stomach as they stare in awe at the gleaming hardwood floors of the apartment that will be not his or hers but theirs, the flesh beneath her knit top is unbroken and unaltered, with no sign remaining that she'd been impaled like chicken on a spit just a month ago. When they christen their empty new bedroom, the skin of his back is smooth beneath the gentle press of her nails. Not even his doctor could guess that a knife had embedded itself there.
But three of his limbs are another matter. Gashes repair themselves with weeks in which to do the work. The angry purple of healing skin resolves into dark tones of healing gone awry, of a human body that can restore itself to health, but not to the way things used to be. She kisses the notch in the hollow of his shoulder and remembers hurting for him, strokes fingertips over the new texture of his arm and remembers fearing for him. It makes her cry once (and if the resultant delayed gratification frustrated him, he concealed it like a champ). She couldn't help it, these terrible memories curled into the very fabric of him.
___
She fights valiantly against a bright smile threatening to crack her cool customer act, which she's been assured is very important to maintain when dealing with critical purchases like this. "It's pretty," she coos, smoothing satin down over her stomach. "I like the color, it's not, you know, super bright white, I think it looks good for my skin, don't you think?" Dollar signs in her eyes, the saleswoman, naturally, agrees. But so do the other women in the room who aren't being paid to be there. She holds out her arms and turns around in place, continuing blithely onward, "And it's not all full of beads and things, I like that too. Feels about as comfortable as one of these things is gonna get." When she's made a full 360, she notices hesitation in the eyes of friends, and intuits that fabric pulled too tight somewhere is not the source of it. Even through a life turned utterly upside-down, she retains all her talents for sensing things amiss, and three paranoid years have made her especially good at sniffing when this particular problem has come to the attentions of others in the room. A little crestfallen, she turns back to the mirror in the silence, eyeing the lovely neckline and thinking.
"Is the whole two showing?" she asks their reflections. They break their silences too, in a cavalcade of No and It's not so bad. They try to reassure her; she smiles over her shoulder and reassures them. "Then don't worry about it. I mean, everyone already knows they're there, it's not some big secret or anything." And she hadn't liked any of the ones that successfully covered all the evidence of the crime. High collars, stiff fabric, long sleeves, they all felt constricting.
_____________
It's a creamy summer morning. She fusses with her bangs in her new bathroom's mirror. Gone is the little round job above a yellowing sink. In an apartment for two, it's lit with daylight and wide enough to also accommodate his face, pressing a sleepy kiss to her head with his hands looking huge against her shoulders. She's not going to use this one for confrontations, for facing down the enemies, zeroes and ones and twos that spell out silence and namelessness.
What's done is done.