fic: FORGIVE THE KIDS (another happy day) (3/3)
T H R E E :
t h e
p r e s e n t
Wherein Alice is wed:
1.
“So what’s the groom do for a living?”
“He’s a lawyer,” Lynn says, a hint of tired caution to her voice.
Elliot considers it for a moment. “Defense or prosecution?”
Lynn sighs, “Neither, Elliot. He does contracts over at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.”
Elliot sputters in laughter. “What? She meet him there during one of her relapses?”
Lynn spins to face Elliot. “Jesus,” she mutters. “No. No, she didn’t meet him like that, and no, she hasn’t relapsed.” She sighs again. “For god’s sake, Elliot. Don’t be an asshole. Don’t do this to her. She is happy. Alice is happy. And don’t you dare, don’t you even think of trying to ruin that for her.”
“Why would I do that?” he asks lazily.
“Because despite all your protestations to the contrary you can be incredibly and deliberately cruel to her.”
“‘My protestations to the contrary,’” Elliot mimics. “God, Mom, listen to you. What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t talk to me like that. And you know. You know exactly what I mean. Alice has always been . . . your favorite.” Lynn’s voice tightens. “Alice has been the only one of us you’d dare look out for -- don’t you even argue with it. You’d think you were the older brother and she the younger sister the way you act with her. But despite that, despite all of that, you know how to hurt that girl in ways none of us could imagine. Don’t you dare do that today. Don’t do it, Elliot, I swear to god.”
“Yeah, well, what if she can hurt me too. You ever consider that?”
“I’d say, if I were to believe you, that you probably deserved it.”
2.
For as far back as she can remember, Lynn has seen a therapist.
For a long time, she saw a Dr. Redding. She visited him once a week in the lead up to Dylan’s wedding. They talked about Paul and they talked about Lynn as a mother, and more often than not, they talked about Elliot.
“I always,” she said during one session; her voice cracked and she started again. “I never feared that Elliot, that he’d hurt himself. I just, I always worried about everyone else.”
“Everyone else hurting your son?” Dr. Redding had a habit of referring to Elliot as “your son,” as though he was trying to reinforce the idea that Elliot was indeed hers.
Lynn looked up, a kleenex crumpled in her hand, and a surprised, stricken look on her face.
“No,” she said, as though this much should have been obvious. “I worry about him hurting everyone else.”
Dr. Redding did not say anything and waited for Lynn to continue.
“You remember, you remember a few years back when there were all those school shootings? Columbine, or whatever,” she paused, her fingers crushed into a fist around the used tissue. “Every time I got a call from his school, every single fucking time -- there was my first thought. ‘Oh my god he’s found a gun and gone and used it. Oh my god he’s finally done it.’”
“Did you keep guns in your house?”
“Never,” she said, her voice edging closer to a sob.
“Your son’s violence, however,” Dr. Redding said, “always seemed, seems,” he corrected and Lynn visibly flinched, “to be rooted in the more personal, uhm, hair-trigger situations.”
“What is that even supposed to mean?”
Dr. Redding had leaned forward, his forearms braced on his knees and his hands clasped together. “Your son does not plan to be angry. He does not plan his violence. In fact, one could say your son is a victim of his own violence just as much as whoever he acts upon.”
“One could say that if they’ve never been a victim.”
“You feel you have been a victim of your son.” It was not a question, but Lynn waved a hand in the air as though to bat the statement away.
“I’m not worried about me,” she said.
“Then who do you worry about?”
“Alice,” Lynn whispered. She looked Dr. Redding in the eye.
“I worry about Elliot, my son, hurting Alice.”
3.
“Do you even want me there?” Elliot asked Alice over the phone. He sounded wounded but as though he was trying to hide it, like he was too fucked up to pull off the trick and instead he had gone clumsy, he had gone and revealed his sleight of hand, gone and revealed the dark bird hidden up his sleeve, and now she was recognizing that bird as hers and now it had gone and flown from him -- one less thing to keep inside his control.
“Elliot,” she whispered.
“That’s not an answer,” he said, but he bit each word. He had gone defensive, anger easier to cradle than whatever hurt she had filled him with.
“Yes,” she said, softly, barely audible, but he heard her. “Of course. Of course I want you there.”
“You’re a liar but I’ll accept it.”
“If you already assumed the answer then why ask?”
“Curiosity.”
The other dark bird hidden up his sleeve: I wanted to see if you would lie.
4.
Alice has never romanticized Elliot as he does her. Her fragility is always a surprise to him. He has built her up as something different in his head. Something broken still, but shockingly with a note of hope and strength.
This is a difference between them. This is one of many things that set the two of them apart.
The Things That Set Them Apart:
Their biological fathers and their respective relationships with the aforementioned men.
The year and season in which they were born: Alice was born in the winter three and a half years (40 months) before Elliot, a brutal February where a cold snap blanketed the entire eastern seaboard in a sheet of ice. This was when Alice and Lynn lived with Dylan and Paul and this was when they lived in Annapolis; this was when they lived on the eastern seaboard and this was when it was brutal and covered in ice.
Another difference: Alice was born in the winter three and a half years before Elliot at the civilian hospital in Annapolis.
Elliot was born in an Indian summer, the start of October, the leaves orange, the sun blood orange, his first true memory is his sister peeling an orange (not an apple) with her clawed fingers. He was born in Kalamazoo. This was when Alice and Lynn lived with Lee and then Elliot (and then Ben) and this was when they lived in Michigan.
The things that set them apart: Alice has always craved normalcy while Elliot has never known what to do with that.
5.
Alice is to get married at a fancy Maryland country club just outside of Annapolis proper.
Before Elliot arrives, she tries on her dress again.
“Is Elliot coming?” she asks in a delicate voice, her fingers just as delicate as she picks at the netting and lace of her veil before placing it carefully back in the closet.
“He says yes,” Lynn says slowly.
“Okay,” Alice breathes.
He does come, but so does Paul.
6.
The summer after Dylan’s wedding Lynn made them all attend therapy, together, as a group. Family therapy: in her words, they had been “through a shock” and should talk their way through it. Elliot knew this meant Lynn lacked the words herself, didn’t know what she wanted to hear least of all wanted to say, so why not bring in the big guns, the pros.
So they went to therapy. So Elliot, Alice, and Ben all sat in a row on the couch, Alice in the center.
And so they talked about Paul.
“He looked exactly like I imagined,” Ben said, too serious, and Alice pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
“He wore a lot more flannel than I expected,” Elliot said, just as serious.
“Do you hate him?” The therapist asked Elliot exclusively, picking up on the undercurrent of resentment. Alice wouldn’t look at Elliot but Lynn was watching him in open earnest.
“Sure,” Elliot said with a shrug. “Why wouldn’t I.”
“Why don’t you tell me why you hate him.”
“Well, if fucked-upness is a gene you can trace, I’d say Paul is the very genesis of our own little familial fucked-upness, even though his DNA has got nothing do with Ben and me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, like. Dylan absorbed all of Mom’s sane genes, and the three of us got stuck with the rest. And I fucking know, okay, that’s not how science works or whatever, but it’s a . . . it’s a fucking metaphor, just roll with it. Alice was born when Mom, our dear Lynn, was already super fucking stressed because she married a Lifetime movie of the week villain, and then Alice got to experience his . . . villainy first-hand, ergo, the thread of Paul-rooted fucked-upness. I was born after Mom left and she obviously had all kinds of residual bizarro faux-PTSD shit going on where it comes to this flannel-wearing asshole, so that’s what I am born into: some unacknowledged abyss of self-loathing and mild terror, which, you know, really explains a lot -- sorry, Dad. And then Ben, Ben just got whatever was leftover. Which was apparently autism. Cool!”
“Elliot . . . ” Alice said quietly. Lynn meanwhile looked close to tears.
“Or, I don’t know. Maybe it’s all on Grandma, I don’t know. That bitch is fucking nuts.”
“Elliot,” Alice said again, more warning to her tone, but Elliot bulldozed straight through her. He was monologuing. In another life maybe he would have been a Shakespearean stage actor. Maybe not.
After all, he always needed to be the focus of his message.
7.
Elliot arrives at the wedding,
and everything goes quiet.
He sees Alice as changed -- smoothed and polished, as though someone took a stone to all her faults and irregularities and buffed them out
Her hair is silky and sleek, pulled back in a chignon at the nape of her neck. It makes her look severe, her face too exposed, her mouth wide and pink and bordering on the grotesque. She is neat and mannered, but then she has always been neat and mannered: it is the context that has changed.
It is the context that has rendered her behavior all the more alien.
She has always been all bird bones and brittle and blonde, and when he hugs her he can feel the sharp fold of her shoulder blades under her thin linen dress.
“You came,” she says, just under his jaw as he holds her.
“You expected otherwise?” he says and smirks.
8.
At the rehearsal dinner, Elliot punches Paul.
(For most of the guests gathered, it’s the highlight of the weekend. By most accounts, the two men were spotted mid-conversation, when suddenly, inexplicably, Elliot had hauled back and returned with a raised fist).
Elliot punches the man in the jaw, but Paul is quick, bigger than Elliot and more on balance, and he punches him back, splitting the skin at Elliot’s cheekbone.
Elliot stumbles backward, knocking into the buffet table. “Mother . . . fucker,” he sputters, incredulous and amused, but not angry.
Alice walks him away. It is her wedding but it’s as though she need not be present.
She shuts the bathroom door and rummages around in the medicine cabinet without saying a word. She cleans him up, gets blood on the hem of her dress, doesn't ask once why Elliot punched Paul, and when she is finished she holds his face in her hands. She bumps her forehead against his chin and she says, “Fucking . . . goddamnit, Elliot.”
“You know me,” he murmurs, and his hand skates over the subtle curve of her waist, “always gotta make a scene.”
He can’t remember the last time he was this close to her.
9.
The year after Dylan’s wedding, the entire family -- Lee and Lynn, Alice and Elliot and Ben -- went down to Florida and spent a week on the Gulf.
They played Yahtzee that first night on the back screened-in porch. Alice’s nose was sunburnt from the day at the beach and there was a new crop of freckles sprinkled across her cheeks. Elliot’s shoulders ached pleasantly from the laps he swam that morning at the pool.
Elliot had stolen a beer after dinner, chugged it in the small laundry room off the bathroom he shared with Alice and Ben, and leftover sand had stuck to the soles of his feet as he stood in place and swallowed as quickly as possible. He snagged another bottle while Alice and Lynn washed the dishes and when Lee asked, just before the game was to begin, why there were only four beers in the six-pack he had bought that morning, Alice, without missing a beat, said that she had drank them earlier, while everyone was showering for dinner. If there was a discrepancy to be found in that story (and there was), Lee did not comment on it.
Lynn had not heard what Alice said. Lynn would have commented. If there was a discrepancy, Lynn would have commented.
Lee won each game of Yahtzee they played, and after his fifth win, Elliot had leaned back heavy in his wicker chair and scoffed, “You’re not even going to let someone else win, huh, man?”
Lee had pushed his glasses up the sweaty bridge of his nose and eyed Elliot with a sly smile.
“I see no point in turning my back on the spoils good fortune has blessed me with. Luck speaks, and I merely listen.”
Elliot looked around the table at everyone assembled there, at his family, and they all were smiling. They all were happy, and, he found that so was he. They were happy out there on that old screened-in porch facing the Gulf. They were happy, but Elliot could sense it: this good moment would not last. There was a sense of doom pervading even this good and happy moment, and Elliot could taste it same as he could taste the dank and choking humidity that lingered in the air. That sense of doom was echoed back in the distant crash of the dark surf against an even darker shore, no moon in the sky that night, but the cicadas buzzed in earnestness, a bird would call, yet through it all, they were smiling. They were smiling, but Elliot knew they could feel it too. That they knew it with each crash of the dice onto the table that there was one less good hand to be dealt. That this game would end eventually, dawn would come, and with it a new set of spoils blessed by fortune, be it good or bad, and that the day might be silent and unlike Lee, there would be no luck to listen for.
Lynn would scream and Alice would cry and Lee would sit silent and Elliot -- Elliot was never quite sure what he would do, but he did know that it would not be good, he did know it would match and meet the gloom that spread up like the Spanish moss clinging to the side of the condo, wrapping itself around the back porch.
The next night they played mini golf at a small pirate-themed place off the causeway, clearly a product of the 1980s. The mini golf course was muggy, teeming with mosquitoes, and Ben had gone off on a long litany of facts pertaining to malaria. It was clear even then that good fortune had abandoned them and the mood was tense and suspicious the entire night. Or perhaps the mood was not tense and suspicious for all parties involved but merely Elliot, as earlier that day he had convinced the female bartender at the Purple Parrot to give him a fifth of whiskey after telling her a long, and earnestly false, tale involving leukemia, a lost dog, two dead parents, and an autistic sister. She gave him the whiskey on the condition he not return and he had thanked her kindly and then proceeded to drink in silence under a palm tree in the middle of a parking lot facing the beach. The asphalt was too hot and his black t-shirt absorbed the midday sun and when the whiskey and the asphalt and the black t-shirt became too much he stumbled drunk back towards the condo and hid the whiskey bottle in Alice’s bed.
She had approached him alone while everyone else was cleaning up for dinner (“We’re going to a crab shack, I don’t understand what there is to exactly clean one’s self up for”) and stood in front of him, one hip cocked, the bottle cradled at waist height and merely raised her eyebrows.
“For me? You shouldn’t have, sis.” The words were garbled by the toothbrush hanging out of his mouth and Alice’s hair was still wet, dripping down her bare shoulders, which Elliot thought was rather brave of her, but then he realized this was the first time the entire trip he had seen her in anything without sleeves to hide her wrists.
She thrust the bottle out at him and arched an eyebrow, a weak mirror of his own expression of condescension and dismissal. “Find a better hiding place, asshole.”
That night, the night of the golf course and the night of the mosquitos, Elliot met Alice in her small bedroom. She was staying in a former sunroom -- the floor still terra cotta tile, still all shuttered windows that overlooked the crystalline blue of the Gulf.
Alice had opened all the windows and she sat in the dark on her bed. Her room was sticky and warm, a thick twilight blue; the moon lit the curve of her face, lit the sharp angular bend of her shoulders and the boyish cut of her hips.
When he kissed her, her mouth, her skin, the space between her breasts where with his tongue he could count her ribs, he tasted her sweat. She tasted salty and sweet, like an animal, and he painted her in his own sweat.
The old bed in the sunroom was noisy, but the ocean was louder, the windows were open.
That night, that beat of a second before he sank inside of her, he let himself think that this could be a thing that would last. That sense of doom was absent, he could not feel it, see it, in all that blue, all that humidity, all that skin she laid out before him.
He would be right, in a way.
He thought this could be a thing that lasted, a thing free from doom.
He was right about the first part.
10.
In the bathroom, the night before her wedding, Alice pushes Elliot away.
“You shouldn’t have come if you planned on causing trouble.” The voice she uses is tight, professional. Elliot imagines that this is how she speaks to her clients.
“I thought you wanted the entire family here,” he says, picking at her, needling at her armor.
“Not if it’s like this,” she says quietly.
“That’s right. Well, it’s not like you’re even really my sister anyway,” he says and Alice rears back from him. Her eyes are wet with tears and she looks as though she might slap him.
"How dare you," she mutters, "how dare you, how -- I am all you have!” she shrieks, her voice shaking, her hands clutched in tight fists, her arms braced and straight, the tendons in her neck standing out stark against her pale skin. “I have always -- it’s always me, Elliot. It has always been me I am all you fucking have.”
“Then where have you been?” he asks her, practically a growl.
He pushes her back against the wall, right next to the towel rack, his thumb pressing into her throat. She grabs at his wrist. “Where were you?” he asks.
“I never left,” she says. “I never left you.”
He raises his hand from her throat to her mouth. He passes the pad of his thumb over the swell of her mouth and her mouth parts open to him.
It makes sense to kiss her then. It makes sense, so he does it. He kisses her, and she’s still holding onto his wrist, her fingers digging in tight, but she is kissing him too. The blood on his cheek smears against her face, the blood from his knuckles stains the front of her dress. He pushes her panties to the side. He pushes her up the wall, he pushes inside of her.
“You’re all fucked up,” she whispers into his mouth. She kisses him. “You’re all wrong,” she breathes.
“Shut the fuck up,” he says, “shut the fuck up.”
He snaps his hips, his pace ruthless, and he can hear it, hear her, how wet she is, how each movement of his hips is winding her up that much more.
Before he had kissed her, she murmured against his mouth, “Please don’t ruin this.”
11.
She gets married to a man named Michael, a lawyer who works at a Chicago hospital --
When are you going to grow the fuck up? she had asked him --
she gets married,
and Elliot lets it happen.
He lets this stranger keep her.
In his head, he believes he could have controlled this. But he lets it happen. Maybe that’s growing up. Maybe that’s letting go. He thinks about getting married himself, but he knows it would only be out of spite. He knows Alice would see through that. She has the same eyes as him, at least in terms of what they see.
It’s funny though how he can hear Lynn’s voice in his head.
I just miss her so much I just want her to come back.
12.
The first time Alice leaves Michael she goes to Elliot in Brooklyn.
He’s working as a bartender, and when he’s not tending bar he’s dealing on the side, and when he isn’t doing either of these things he’s passed out on the futon right next to the door in the small walk-up he rents from a Ukrainian drug lord who speaks only in menacing broken English.
He’s been listening to a lot of Springsteen since he moved into this shit hole, a lot of Darkness on the Edge of Town on repeat, and he’ll bump lines in the dingy bathroom and songs like “Factory” will make him almost wish he was capable of nostalgia for a childhood he never had.
He tried to tell Alice about it one night over the phone at two in the morning, and Alice had been barefoot in the kitchen of the house she shared with Michael, and Elliot couldn’t put it into words what he meant about Springsteen and the Americana childhood he and Alice never shared, so he got angry with her and Alice got impatient in return. “Streets of Fire” was playing when she hung up, playing off the record player left behind by the girl who had been squatting here with him before she left, before she hung it all up, too.
She said her name was Marigold and he said that was a stupid name but he fucked her on that futon next to the door and she made banana pancakes in the morning and for a good three weeks they were both domesticated, feral only with each other, and he was glad her hair was dark, her eyes matched and black in the dim light. He told himself that not once did he think about Alice or her stringy blonde hair or her eyes, one blue one green, like nature itself couldn’t decide what to do with her, or how she used to try and persuade him out of bed with breakfast -- plain buttermilk pancakes or bacon their mother cooked, never Alice. He had no place for sentimentality -- this another thing he told himself -- and he had never understood the draw.
Alice arrives after, after Marigold. Alice leaves Michael.
She doesn’t belong in that apartment, doesn’t fit with the organized squalor Elliot surrounds himself.
He finds her to be all mean curdled attitude, a hand on her hip, her mouth turned into an unfamiliar and unattractive sneer. It makes him want to ask what Michael has done to her, but he doesn’t want to know. He wants to see himself as the root of this. So when she goes to her knees, when she sucks him off, it’s with that same sneer on her face, it’s her sad mean eyes looking back up at his own. And after she has swallowed him down, when she goes to move from him, he won’t let her. He gets her off on his fingers, her panties already wet but he wants them soaked through, and she is drunk and he is all kinds of fucked, but she is here, she has left Michael, and what he doesn’t know is that a week later she’ll leave Elliot and she will return to Michael. What he doesn’t know is that she’ll leave.
But she’ll come back.
He brushes her hair out of her face when she comes.
Her eyes have never been his, they have never shared that, but looking at her, looking into her eyes, he thinks he can see a bit of himself there.
She’ll always come back.
13.
Neither learns any lessons here. Neither grows from their mistakes. Alice gets shriller with age, their mother’s hunted look in her eyes, the same persecution complex keeping her spread on a cross of both circumstance and her own design.
Elliot has never belonged to anyone, not in a creationist sense. Not like Alice and not like Ben and certainly not like Dylan. Where he sprung from, it is difficult to tell.
It’s Doris. It’s their grandmother. It’s that lonely ancestor who shot himself in the head on account of the Great Depression among other factors of a suffocating nature.
“You’re all wrong,” Alice had whispered to him, but she said it while he was inside her, and if he was wrong, then that made her wrong too. He was inside her, he was making her entire body tremble, her knees fight to close but his own hips, his thighs, were in the way. He was inside her, he had always been inside her and she had always been in him. That made them both wrong.
That made them both all wrong.
14.
“What’s wrong with Elliot?” Alice asks at twenty-one.
She asks the question defensively, she asks as though she and her brother have been challenged, as though to challenge one is to challenge both -- as though they are the same.
So she asks: what’s wrong with Elliot?
So she asks as though to say: there’s nothing wrong with him at all.
15.
She left the ruined pink bridesmaid’s dress. She left the ruined dress from her rehearsal dinner. She left a trail of ruin and Elliot followed, a dark bird pecking at the breadcrumbs. Hansel and Gretel, but there is no witch; the witch’s house, her oven, is of their own creation.
It’s a house in Annapolis. A house in the suburbs of Chicago. A house just outside of Kalamazoo. It’s a walk-up in Brooklyn, the desert to the west, the sea to the east, a transatlantic telephone call in the middle of the night.
Round up, and it’s called home.
Round up, and they’re the villains to their own heroes in this story.
Round up and call him a whole. Round up and say he’s filled her heart.
If Elliot had the words, he would say the same.
F I N .
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