(no subject)
Title: This Is A Song For The Genius Child.
Author: Armchair Elvis, AKA joe_pike_junior
Pairing: None.
Rating: A couple of swearwords. Teen.
Warnings: None, unless you don't like parental angst.
Summary: One-shot. Blythe House POV. A perspective on the House/Stacy breakup, among other things. Rather angsty.
Disclaimer: I don't own House.
Notes: Please R & R. Recently edited, and as such I owe a huge thanks to nomad1328 from the House Fans forum. Thinking about adding this to the Fan Fiction Archive.
Con-crit would be hugely appreciated.
THIS IS A SONG FOR THE GENIUS CHILD
This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild.
Sing it softly as ever you can ---
Lest the song get out of hand.
Nobody loves a genius child.
Can you love an eagle,
Tame or wild?
Wild or tame, Can you love a monster
Of frightening name?
Nobody loves a genius child.
Kill him - and let his soul run wild
- Langston Hughes.
This time she is warned. He hints on the phone one night just above the murmur of the television and the imposed blankness of his moods that he might have a break, and that this break might just coincide with a trip to their place. I’ve gotta visit you sometime, he says.
So she waits, grateful to have been somewhat warned of the visit that he intends to spring upon them. Four days later, around six, the phone rings and he is talking on the other end, transit noises behind his voice, which holds a shadow of something more than a controlled telephone call in the living room. He is standing up, she can tell that much.
This time she hears the knock at the door, hears him knock again and call out, Mom? He sounds urgent, somehow, not unlike the times he has come home running from something. Running from a bad term, running from a spate of bad parties and bad hangovers.
She opens the door, slightly breathless because she was just rushing from the living room, she was there, and she is sure that he thought she wasn’t. He stands there in the doorway, tall, sticking out like a pimple on a pumpkin. Not looking panicked, but not exactly calm either.
He looks like a moment ago he was worried that they weren’t there, perhaps kicking himself that he hadn’t given more details, kicking himself because he’d have to park his behind on their cold stoop. Perhaps worried because this was one time John wasn’t away on assignment or golfing.
She hugs him, not minding that he is awkward and stiff in her arms as always, bringing his arms up to hug her at the last minute. She is very careful of overbalancing him, coming from the left side, because he seems to be trying to project a sort of air of strength and bravado, and she can see, as his mother, that he isn’t really succeeding.
He looks good, better by far than the last time, but he still looks sallow, sick, tired.
He must be tired from the travel. He smiles without showing his teeth.
It’s been a long time. A very long time. The last time he visited he drove. With Stacy. The first time since he was in grad school that he’d brought a girlfriend home. She guessed that it was her idea, and she was proud that he’d finally found someone and stayed in a relationship long enough to have her badger him about his family. It hasn’t been longer than any other time in between visits, far shorter in fact, because she is the first to admit that he isn’t the most regular of people, but the past eighteen months has been very stressful. They’ve been very worried. There’s been a lot of long-distance calls, a lot of calling-to-check-up.
She knows what’s up. Sons should never underestimate the meddling power of mothers when they have a mind to it.
Greg thinks that Stacy is leaving him. She is becoming more and more frustrated at his moods, at the wall that he has built up around himself, not the old wall, but something thicker, more isolating. They fight more than they used to, but now it’s different, now it’s not that they’re two very loud and sarcastic people, now it’s that there is something more in their relationship, resentment and anger, and Greg can’t handle it.
Greg says nothing out of the ordinary when she calls routinely to chat and inquire about his well being, other than that they are fighting. But she knows. He still doesn’t understand that.
Then, a week later she gets another call. Greg, saying that he needs a break. He breathes quickly into the phone, his voice pleading and hurried, and says that he will catch a taxi from the bus depot to their house, hanging up before imparting the exact details of where he is. That’s how he got here. That’s why she was sitting in the living room staring at her cup of tea while it cooled, listening to John grumble in the kitchen, waiting for him to call again or knock at the door. Sometimes she makes him really tired. He’s been doing that for forty years.
And here he is, on their doorstep, wearing a crumpled t-shirt and jeans, a long coat, a driving cap on his head. He looks down at the doormat and the new, but scuffed, vividly striped running shoes on his feet until she comes close, bringing his eyes up like he is ashamed. He hasn’t shaved. She gives him a ‘what are we going to do with you’ look, but she is gentle.
Funny. He never looked ashamed coming home with blood down his shirt or with the hem down on his trousers or with a black eye. Not even the time he clattered arrogantly through the door at lunchtime on a schoolday as John sat at the kitchen table in his boots, carrying a bulging book-bag, an official-looking Suspension Notice crumpled in one travel-sweaty hand.
But he looks apologetic now, almost like he is afraid she will say something.
She doesn’t say anything.
He has taken a day or two off on either side of the weekend. His coat is cold, and she can feel the handle of his cane at her back when he finally brings his hands behind to hug her, awkwardly, stiffly. He smells of fire-smoke and cold and whatever the deodorant is that he wears.
After they’ve hugged for a second she brings her hands up to his face to brush against his stubbled cheeks, to hold the side of his face, to hook her thumbs behind his cold ears. He doesn’t wriggle away until she has a chance to have a good look at him, four or five seconds.
If he is still smoking he conceals it well. He’s lost weight. His eyes are the same as ever, clear blue, opaque.
John stands just down the hall watching. He comes closer, takes the taller man by the hand, biting back the old welcome (an invitation to share a game of golf). Instead he asks Greg to smoke a cigar later, because there must be something to replace the standard hello, and Greg says yes, probably more out of custom or conditioning than a desire to smoke with his father. Their greeting is brief, awkward, and Greg nods and turns away as quickly as he can.
He walks down the corridor apprehensively, looking around, treading carefully. It’s awkward walking beside him.
He takes a short tour around the house, is shown where to put his small bag. He sees the new shower head in the bathroom, the new fence they had to put up on one side of the yard, the chip in the paint on one of the kitchen cupboard doors. He nods, and chuckles sardonically, runs his hands over things.
He is quiet, and tired, and she also senses that he is in a bad mood and trying to keep it contained, anger or resentment just present in his voice when John has to ask him something twice, when she asks if he is cold. Maybe he’s just cranky, she thinks, cranky because he’s spent all day traveling and his feet hurt and the bus was full of annoying kids.
John fishes beer out of the fridge and then they drink at the small kitchen table, Greg slumping as usual. Stacy is working on a big case. She understood that he might want to get away for a break. Work is fine. So is rehab. They’ve paid off the credit card now he’s back at work full-time. They’re fine with insurance. Everything is fine.
His response to anything remotely personal is usually monosyllabic, and mostly consists of ‘good’ or ‘okay’. He picks at the edge of the Laminex with one fingernail, and sips slowly at the beer, twisting the cap between an index finger and a thumb. He’s tired but he still fidgets non-stop. That hasn’t changed. Neither has John’s attitude: he clears his throat irritably when Greg taps the bottle cap a few times too many.
He shifts occasionally to straighten his back like it hurts or to move his legs slightly, mostly ignoring John’s ham-fisted non-verbal communication.
After the requisite beer he moves into the living room. He is quiet, very quiet, and he ends up falling asleep there while John reads the newspaper benignly. The only sounds are his soft breathing, the rustle of the paper.
She wakes him when dinner is ready. He eats ravenously, like he hasn’t eaten all day, hunched over slightly with his elbows poking out to the side in haste, and she thinks that that is a good thing, because he looks like he needs building up.
She doesn’t quite know what to do after dinner. Greg seems to understand that whatever they do tonight, it will be his responsibility to start it. Perhaps he’s just lazy. He sits on the couch, lifts his leg onto a footstool and sits quietly by as they watch Wheel Of Fortune. He guesses the phrase.
As the commercials run there is a lot of throat-clearing and tentative conversation.
What is he doing at work? This and that. Any new hobbies? Nope. He’s more fluent in Italian, now, he says. Buonasera, ma,. It’s not like Arabic.
When she asks about his rehab and how things are at home, he shrugs and looks at the carpet, and then to his large, fine hands on the armrest of the chair, absentmindedly tracing over the pattern in the fabric. They look back to the TV, but five minutes later he looks up from his feet and says I’m doing my best, Mom, you know?
That’s pretty personal, for him. He has said this just like that, sitting in the living room.
She wonders. She wonders just how fine everything is. She wonders why exactly he has come home, how she will be able to help. How he thinks they can help.
She thought that she was ready for anything that he had to say after eighteen months, but now she doesn’t know. It seems like he is between a rock and a hard place, stuck between being distant and being cast afloat in the incomprehensible ocean of being able to work things out, to talk about himself.
She nods. She waits for him to say something more, but he doesn’t. She readies herself to rescind any tactless comment that John might make after such a personal announcement, but he doesn’t say anything either. That hangs in the room. Greg puts his head back, and his eyes close occasionally. He’s tired, and he’s letting himself sleep here. That counts for something.
After Wheel Of Fortune is over Gregory grunts up and lurches forward to retrieve the remote off the coffee table in the middle of the room. She leans forward and makes a slight noise to offer help, and John shoots her a look behind Greg’s shoulders.
They are looking at each other when Greg turns around, perhaps sensing their non-verbal communication through some shuffle of clothing, or maybe through the odd silence that they have adopted. When he sees that they are exchanging a parental look, completely unguarded, he raises his eyebrows.
He taps the remote against one hand as he sits, to signal that he saw that, that he wasn’t born yesterday, but he doesn’t say anything. He points the remote at the television and clicks through the channels fast, and John doesn’t say anything about that either. She turns her head slightly to look at him, his gaze focused firmly on the television, brow slightly wrinkled, white noise rising as the channels change and flicker on his face.
See! It’s amaz- adding to the- Explosions I think A news bulletin With a high in the- hurt me, Jake!- the meercat-
He stops flicking the channels and settles on something, gesturing his head slightly to enquire if this choice is Okay. He tries to look at the television but she isn’t fooled. She knows he can concentrate on more than one thing at once. John sighs pointedly.
He goes to bed not long after that, but this isn’t so out of the normal. He arrives on their doorstep, spends one night in silence sleeping, gradually emerges to explain why he is at home in the middle of term, why he has stitches on his knuckles, why he’s so tired. And he does look very tired.
She looks in and he has fallen asleep reading, awkward in the single bed, one hand hanging over the edge with the fingers curled, the paperback just over his eyes. This isn’t the home he grew up in. He looks comfortable, though, dare she say it. He looks like all his energy has very suddenly drained away. Like it was very hard for him to get here, but now he doesn’t have to worry about anything, and all the tiredness, the sleep, is catching up.
She and John murmur softly in bed, just like they’ve done a hundred times before about what they’re going to do with that boy.
John says, he looks different,, the soft timbre of his words almost completely swallowed by the bedspread. They speak softly because their son has ears like a bat and they know it. She doesn’t say anything, waiting for him to elaborate.
Has he noticed that he is thinner, that his face is pale? That he hasn’t shaved? She doesn’t know if he means this in concrete terms, or if he has seen the change in his demeanour and just doesn’t want to say. She thinks, and is about to open her mouth and say that it doesn’t seem to have -mellowed- him as such- (because they might be able to talk about this, now), when John says:
Those sneakers.
She turns and starts to say, yeah, they’re different, maybe they’re-
John turns onto his back abruptly, reaching behind to adjust the pillow, and amidst this interruption and the rustle of the bedsheets he says: expensive… running shoes. He was always buggin’ us for new runners, wearin’ em out and growing.
The next day he emerges from the bedroom long after breakfast, padding around in pyjama bottoms and a plain white t-shirt. He looks a little better, and with the radio assiduously tuned to a radio station she thinks he would like and a strong coffee he emerges gradually from his morning funk, leaving behind little or no trace of the black mood he tried not to drag onto their doorstep yesterday. They talk. He nods. He smiles at something, the breakfast spread they have, something on the radio, and she does too. He goes back to his room.
She knocks on the door, asks Greg darling, can I come in?
He grunts in affirmation, and she cracks open the door.
He is standing with his back to her, arms, shoulders and back working as he finishes slipping his t-shirt off. One leg is slightly bent, and his cane leans casually against the bedside table, the old spare-room cupboard with one squeaky drawer that was in their bedroom for a long time. He has his jeans on but no belt yet, so they hang low and reveal the waistband of his boxers.
He folds the t-shirt and places it on top of his bag, probably just for her, and turns around slowly, one hand on the bed. Stiff. She still finds his movement unnatural, but she tries to keep that off her face.
He looks so much like her brother. She’d forgotten that. The same long face, the same bony shoulders, even the same smarts and brow-wrinkling concentration. Her brother was the first of her family to go to university. He didn’t have the mind that Gregory has, though, the fierce intelligence and the quiet misunderstanding to go with it.
The hair on his chest is greying slightly. His face is open, puzzled, as he reaches for a t-shirt and quickly pulls it on, a sweatshirt over the top, shivering slightly as he does it. He has two little white scars high on his chest near his collarbone, from some kind of needle or something, she assumes.
She wants to know if he wants anything at the shopping centre, and would he like to come? He says that he won’t come this time, but could she buy some Pop-tarts?
She tells him to be careful, whatever he does around the house, and he nods, turning away slightly, signalling that the conversation is over, but he snags his cane and follows her out of the room when she leaves, and goes to the door to see them off.
When they get to the centre she realises that he probably didn’t want to come because it is Saturday, and the mall is full of loud noises and jostling people. She buys pop-tarts. She buys every single foodstuff that she knows he likes, junk food, some beer.
When they return from the shopping centre he looks better, rested, more talkative. He is stretched out on the lounge, watching an action movie on TV, reading one of John’s National Geographic magazines.
He emerges from the living room, delving into the bags, looking at what she’s bought approvingly.
Now his presence in their house is different. It isn’t his tall silence; he has been silent and sullen before. It isn’t his voice, that’s the same. It isn’t the way he sleeps or the time he showers or how he takes his coffee. It isn’t what he reads or watches on television. He’s still just as smart.
It could be the heavy irregularity of his steps, or the pill-bottle rattle that she hears in the kitchen and behind the bathroom door, but surely those things aren’t enough to change him.
They have his favourite for lunch, but Greg doesn’t eat much this time. He sits at the kitchen table grating and chopping vegetables, a fine spray of potato juice across his knuckles, banging his knees occasionally on the low metal crossbar.
He rises to rinse his hands at the sink and wipe them on a tea-towel, and not his pants. He nods accordingly when she tells him all her news and picks at the vegetables he’s cut up. But when the meal is served he barely finishes half.
He is very quiet. He almost seems shocked.
She didn’t ask him if he wanted to come to church with them in the morning, because she knew that he wouldn’t, but John wants to ask him anyway. They end up leaving it until it is a quarter to nine and the service starts at half past and they need to leave time to drive over and park the car, and John is grumbling about how long it will take him to get ready, anyway, how long will he need?
She pokes her head into the bedroom and he is still in bed, awake, but trying to doze. He has his feet poked out through the sheets at the bottom, and he has messed up the bed in his sleep as usual. The book is still on the bed. She asks him, and he softly says No, Mom, his voice still apologetic, his eyes sad.
She gathers her hat and the plate she has for the morning tea and John and shepherds him out to the car.
Mary Jenkins from church says, oh, your son is visiting, is that little Greg? She hasn’t told her about her son’s injury, and she thinks that it might not be such a good idea if she came around, considering that the last time she saw Greg he was in college, and the last time Greg saw Mrs Jenkins (whose husband was an air flight controller who built model trains) she was at least two stone lighter.
She remembers one of the things he quietly said to her over his scrupulous attention to the peeling in the kitchen (you know Mom, once a jerk, always a jerk), and thinks that it would be like tempting fate to invite Mary Jenkins over today. She nods, says that he is still working at a hospital in New Jersey, leaves it at that.
That night he talks a little bit more, but he is still quiet, still silent and wide-eyed and shocked, so she thinks that his silence must be a little more permanent than she had thought, not just the travel or his father’s stern looks or the colour of the wallpaper or the acoustics in the house. He draws in breath suddenly and says:
“Did you talk to James?”
Of course he knows very well whether or not they have talked to his friend. He is asking what they know and if they want to know more, opening up and saying that he’s ready when they are, if they want to talk about it; because he knows that she would never ask anything until he told her it was OK.
He seems to be more interested in his chest, in his hands on the tabletop, but in saying this he has opened up, finally signalled that he is ready to talk, at least for now.
Back in New Jersey in the hospital everything was a thousand miles high over their heads, and happening too fast to focus on more than the fact that their son was very, very ill, so she has a lot of questions. A lot of things to ask.
He sketches it out for them, ends up doing a little ad hoc medical diagram lecture session on the back of an envelope and a sales docket from Woolworths. In the same way, he has advised them copiously and a little condescendingly since he was a third-year med student- (hell, since he was twelve, since he was six and his little-boy voice would ring out among the shelves at the library: Mom, mom, did you know? Mom, mom, what’s that?)- and she would ring to ask about this, that so-and-so’s son had, that, that the doctor had prescribed.
He talks on the phone to Stacy.
He’s masking something in his voice as he hangs up and bites his lip. He wants her to be happy. He doesn’t want her to worry. He’s trying to brush off her concern.
She stays where she is in the kitchen, with her back to the humming fridge, and thinks don’t cry, don’t cry now, until she is sure that he won’t hear the tears in her voice or see her glistening eyes.
She doesn’t want him to see that, and she doesn’t want to think that this is it, that this is the end of the line, that it ends with him.
He is angry on Monday. Her son has a powerful anger in him.
In a way it is a relief. She can see recovery.
They sit, eating lunch. Greg has spent the morning with Blythe, apart from the obligatory poke around in the garage with John. He has his head down chowing in her Chicken Noodle Soup, and John says “How about those Giants, eh?” He just raises his eyebrows and continues eating. John says “What, not interested in sport?” Greg lifts his head up deliberately and glances at John, before reaching forward to snag another piece of toast, paying great attention to the way he dips it in his soup. The tension at the table is so real that she thinks, well, at least he’s trying, but we should back off right now.
John still has the caring-fatherly tone to his voice, and he says well?
Greg places his spoon by his plate and says very simply “I don’t want to have this conversation.” He pushes his chair back slightly and wipes his mouth. Politely, a strange in-your-parent’s-house addition to his usual indifference to table manners.
John leans forward slightly and says: “Well, we’re having it”.
Greg’s face changes slightly. Oh, Boy, she thinks. He pushes his chair back with a scrape, dumps his plate in the sink, runs the water, turns around roughly. “What the hell is your problem?!? I don’t want to talk to you now, about this.” He is that close to shouting, and his voice rings in the kitchen as it is. He turns back to the sink, breathing heavily, and lightly brings one hand down to tap on the metal draining plate.
John leans farther forward in his chair in Greg’s direction and tells him to turn around. Pushing it. When he doesn’t, he starts on his spiel, the one she has heard enough from him to almost know off by heart. He talks over it a lot, when he seems to be confused about Greg.
Yes, he has been worried lately, but perhaps for different reasons than she has.
Greg doesn’t know how lucky he is. He isn’t helping anyone, least of all himself, sulking the way he is. He just doesn’t know how lucky he is.
John finishes, and Greg is still standing by the sink, now with both hands braced on either side, his shoulders high. There is a pause, and he just nods his head. John says, No, Turn Around, and Greg does so, probably because he understands that he won’t be able to leave the room until he does. John says Do you hear me? Greg makes a humourless laugh and makes to leave. No yes, no yes, sir.
John is sitting in the chair closest to the doorway, and as Greg makes to pass his chair he stands up and grabs his arm gently. Up close John has to reach up a tiny bit, and he takes hold to the middle of his arm, four or five inches up from the wristwatch they gave him for his 25th birthday. DR G.J.H. With love from Mom and Dad.
Even though it’s gentle, just a tug, Greg gets a fearful look on his face and stumbles backwards slightly, off balance.
He’s just getting the hang of it. She thinks that that was a cheap shot.
He says “What’s your problem, boy?”
He pulls away, not weak in his arms at all, and says I’M ANGRY! I’ve had enough of people’s bullshit, and I don’t have to hear it here, from you.
There’s a cane-clatter and the squeak of his shoes against the lino, and he’s gone.
John opens his mouth to call something out but the she steps in and says to his retreating back, I won’t allow anger in this house, Greg. He stalks to his room as best he can. But he doesn’t leave.
It’s not because he can’t, she knows that. She knows that if he was in the right frame of mind he would have staggered out of their house and hailed a taxi or caught a bus even if it was raining out and there was ice on the road.
No. He’s angry, but that doesn’t mean he wants to leave. Maybe he needs somewhere to be angry. Maybe he has to carry being angry around.
He doesn’t bring up the argument again, which tells her that he was deeply affronted, and that he felt very uncomfortable with the conversation. She silences John when he opens his mouth.
Later she corners him in the kitchen when he comes in to get a beer (only one, she notices), and says, “Don’t say any more. You’ve already done enough damage, don’t you think?”
He takes part in the requisite activities with John, but their relationship is strained, and he spends much of his time hanging quietly in her company, or where the both of them are. Comfortable. He dozes a lot.
Around midday on Monday he disappears. She hears the click of the front door, thinking that maybe he was going out to check for the mail or have a look at the front of the house, but he completely disappears. Forty-five minutes later she’s just starting to get worried, just thinking about getting John to drive around the block, when he tramps in the back door carrying a shopping bag in one hand. He comes through the side gate and in the back door because there are three less steps that way.
He is strangely cheerful, breathing deep from the cold and the exercise. His cheeks are red and he chafes his hands together as he rustles paper, then draws a packet of microwave popcorn and a video cassette from the depths of the bag. “Of course you don’t have a DVD player.” he grouses, before microwaving the popcorn. He deposits himself on the couch, and the trailers for whatever he’s watching start. He cracks open the popcorn, lifts his leg onto the coffee table and settles back.
She waits. She knows. When she hears the music of the opening credits, followed by some sort of gunfight heavy on automatic weapons, she strides into the living room and pauses the video.
Greg has that little yellow pill bottle in his hand, and he palms one dry into his mouth before quickly depositing the bottle back into a pocket, the whole procedure lasting about five seconds after she comes into the room. She doesn’t hesitate.
“Where were you?”
His voice is even. He doesn’t seem especially fazed, apart from the fact that his movie is paused, and he still has that strange -merriment- in his aspect.
“I went to the store.”
“You didn’t think of telling me? I could have driven you.”
He shrugs. “Felt like walking.”
“And what if it had started raining? Or you got lost?”
“Then I would have started back. Or called a taxi.” He doesn’t say anything more, but he gives her an eyebrow raise, saying No need to worry, Mom, I got it on this end.
He shovels in a handful of popcorn and offers her the bag. She makes a ‘no thanks’ hand gesture, nods, and leaves the room.
The next day he goes home. She wants to go shopping, so they drive him to the bus-stop together. They offer to drive him home. He tells them not to be stupid.
He looks out the window, his face carefully blank. They say goodbye, then there is the slam of the door, a crunch on the ground. John hands him his bag and he’s gone.
A week later she calls.
The pamphlet that she stealthily picked up in one of the waiting-rooms at the hospital suggest that she can support her family member by ensuring that some routine remains in his/her life, while one of the quack books she glanced at in the library suggested that her son may not want to be smothered at this stage in his recovery. Most of these publications make everyone sound like drug addicts. She knows her son, and so she tries to call him regularly. If he is out, she leaves a message. He might not return the message for a week or more, but he does. The most important thing is that they talk.
When he picks up the phone and says hello, he is panting slightly, like he might have run to pick up the phone, except for the fact that that is no longer an option for him, and she has barely been on the line for ten seconds. His voice is slightly hoarse, and he speaks quietly and deliberately, as if he has just been shouting. He sounds distracted.
As she announces herself she hears him grunt as he lowers himself onto a chair, and the conscious change in his tone of voice. He says, Hi Mom, and she hears a sort of sighing laugh in the silence of the room behind him, Stacy, the sort of noise you make when you’re frustrated and you’ve got no way of expressing it.
Because your lover’s mother is on the phone, probably, meddling in something she doesn’t understand. Ten seconds later something rattles in the kitchen.
She is sure they’re breaking up. She hears the hollow desperation in his voice, saying it’s all over, even though they only talk about stupid things like whether he has worn the clothes she sent down for his birthday/Christmas. When she hangs up the phone John turns to her, and something on his face tells her she probably looks shocked or down. She goes to sit on the couch, and he lowers the volume on the TV, one of those really loud ads for warehouse clearances. It’s still too loud, she thinks, and then his arm is around her and she sighs heavily. She sits there and thinks, I love him. I love Greg, I love John. Why is it that he’ll never have what we have?
“Three weeks, I guess”. (She is wrong, incidentally. Four weeks. Four weeks and two days from that date they split up).
Of course she doesn’t know that now. She will, although not until a week after the fact when she calls to find Wilson answering the phone, Wilson telling her that her son has spent the last three days drowning his sorrows in the rubble of their apartment. She doesn’t get details. She’s glad. As he hangs up the phone she hears him say You see?
But they don’t know that now.
That night the silence in their house is loud, so loud. She cries below the sound of the shower. John spills coffee all over the counter and says Jesus!, mopping at it savagely.
That night in bed he says Greg, and she makes a sort of comforting mumbling noise, but it still takes them a long time to fall asleep, just lying there. They both hurt, she can feel it. She thinks that she can only just fathom how her son feels now.
Like she had thought, but hadn’t wanted to tell him: it ends with him. He knows that now, is probably just starting to feel it.
She remembers Greg tripping lightly down the stairs at the back of the hall at graduation-running and pulling his tie off at the same time, the soles of his slightly ratty shoes slick and tapping on the stairs, his hair impossibly unruly and messy.
She tries not to blame anything, to lay it on one thing, but she lies there and thinks why can he never have what we have?
.- .
Author: Armchair Elvis, AKA joe_pike_junior
Pairing: None.
Rating: A couple of swearwords. Teen.
Warnings: None, unless you don't like parental angst.
Summary: One-shot. Blythe House POV. A perspective on the House/Stacy breakup, among other things. Rather angsty.
Disclaimer: I don't own House.
Notes: Please R & R. Recently edited, and as such I owe a huge thanks to nomad1328 from the House Fans forum. Thinking about adding this to the Fan Fiction Archive.
Con-crit would be hugely appreciated.
THIS IS A SONG FOR THE GENIUS CHILD
This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild.
Sing it softly as ever you can ---
Lest the song get out of hand.
Nobody loves a genius child.
Can you love an eagle,
Tame or wild?
Wild or tame, Can you love a monster
Of frightening name?
Nobody loves a genius child.
Kill him - and let his soul run wild
- Langston Hughes.
This time she is warned. He hints on the phone one night just above the murmur of the television and the imposed blankness of his moods that he might have a break, and that this break might just coincide with a trip to their place. I’ve gotta visit you sometime, he says.
So she waits, grateful to have been somewhat warned of the visit that he intends to spring upon them. Four days later, around six, the phone rings and he is talking on the other end, transit noises behind his voice, which holds a shadow of something more than a controlled telephone call in the living room. He is standing up, she can tell that much.
This time she hears the knock at the door, hears him knock again and call out, Mom? He sounds urgent, somehow, not unlike the times he has come home running from something. Running from a bad term, running from a spate of bad parties and bad hangovers.
She opens the door, slightly breathless because she was just rushing from the living room, she was there, and she is sure that he thought she wasn’t. He stands there in the doorway, tall, sticking out like a pimple on a pumpkin. Not looking panicked, but not exactly calm either.
He looks like a moment ago he was worried that they weren’t there, perhaps kicking himself that he hadn’t given more details, kicking himself because he’d have to park his behind on their cold stoop. Perhaps worried because this was one time John wasn’t away on assignment or golfing.
She hugs him, not minding that he is awkward and stiff in her arms as always, bringing his arms up to hug her at the last minute. She is very careful of overbalancing him, coming from the left side, because he seems to be trying to project a sort of air of strength and bravado, and she can see, as his mother, that he isn’t really succeeding.
He looks good, better by far than the last time, but he still looks sallow, sick, tired.
He must be tired from the travel. He smiles without showing his teeth.
It’s been a long time. A very long time. The last time he visited he drove. With Stacy. The first time since he was in grad school that he’d brought a girlfriend home. She guessed that it was her idea, and she was proud that he’d finally found someone and stayed in a relationship long enough to have her badger him about his family. It hasn’t been longer than any other time in between visits, far shorter in fact, because she is the first to admit that he isn’t the most regular of people, but the past eighteen months has been very stressful. They’ve been very worried. There’s been a lot of long-distance calls, a lot of calling-to-check-up.
She knows what’s up. Sons should never underestimate the meddling power of mothers when they have a mind to it.
Greg thinks that Stacy is leaving him. She is becoming more and more frustrated at his moods, at the wall that he has built up around himself, not the old wall, but something thicker, more isolating. They fight more than they used to, but now it’s different, now it’s not that they’re two very loud and sarcastic people, now it’s that there is something more in their relationship, resentment and anger, and Greg can’t handle it.
Greg says nothing out of the ordinary when she calls routinely to chat and inquire about his well being, other than that they are fighting. But she knows. He still doesn’t understand that.
Then, a week later she gets another call. Greg, saying that he needs a break. He breathes quickly into the phone, his voice pleading and hurried, and says that he will catch a taxi from the bus depot to their house, hanging up before imparting the exact details of where he is. That’s how he got here. That’s why she was sitting in the living room staring at her cup of tea while it cooled, listening to John grumble in the kitchen, waiting for him to call again or knock at the door. Sometimes she makes him really tired. He’s been doing that for forty years.
And here he is, on their doorstep, wearing a crumpled t-shirt and jeans, a long coat, a driving cap on his head. He looks down at the doormat and the new, but scuffed, vividly striped running shoes on his feet until she comes close, bringing his eyes up like he is ashamed. He hasn’t shaved. She gives him a ‘what are we going to do with you’ look, but she is gentle.
Funny. He never looked ashamed coming home with blood down his shirt or with the hem down on his trousers or with a black eye. Not even the time he clattered arrogantly through the door at lunchtime on a schoolday as John sat at the kitchen table in his boots, carrying a bulging book-bag, an official-looking Suspension Notice crumpled in one travel-sweaty hand.
But he looks apologetic now, almost like he is afraid she will say something.
She doesn’t say anything.
He has taken a day or two off on either side of the weekend. His coat is cold, and she can feel the handle of his cane at her back when he finally brings his hands behind to hug her, awkwardly, stiffly. He smells of fire-smoke and cold and whatever the deodorant is that he wears.
After they’ve hugged for a second she brings her hands up to his face to brush against his stubbled cheeks, to hold the side of his face, to hook her thumbs behind his cold ears. He doesn’t wriggle away until she has a chance to have a good look at him, four or five seconds.
If he is still smoking he conceals it well. He’s lost weight. His eyes are the same as ever, clear blue, opaque.
John stands just down the hall watching. He comes closer, takes the taller man by the hand, biting back the old welcome (an invitation to share a game of golf). Instead he asks Greg to smoke a cigar later, because there must be something to replace the standard hello, and Greg says yes, probably more out of custom or conditioning than a desire to smoke with his father. Their greeting is brief, awkward, and Greg nods and turns away as quickly as he can.
He walks down the corridor apprehensively, looking around, treading carefully. It’s awkward walking beside him.
He takes a short tour around the house, is shown where to put his small bag. He sees the new shower head in the bathroom, the new fence they had to put up on one side of the yard, the chip in the paint on one of the kitchen cupboard doors. He nods, and chuckles sardonically, runs his hands over things.
He is quiet, and tired, and she also senses that he is in a bad mood and trying to keep it contained, anger or resentment just present in his voice when John has to ask him something twice, when she asks if he is cold. Maybe he’s just cranky, she thinks, cranky because he’s spent all day traveling and his feet hurt and the bus was full of annoying kids.
John fishes beer out of the fridge and then they drink at the small kitchen table, Greg slumping as usual. Stacy is working on a big case. She understood that he might want to get away for a break. Work is fine. So is rehab. They’ve paid off the credit card now he’s back at work full-time. They’re fine with insurance. Everything is fine.
His response to anything remotely personal is usually monosyllabic, and mostly consists of ‘good’ or ‘okay’. He picks at the edge of the Laminex with one fingernail, and sips slowly at the beer, twisting the cap between an index finger and a thumb. He’s tired but he still fidgets non-stop. That hasn’t changed. Neither has John’s attitude: he clears his throat irritably when Greg taps the bottle cap a few times too many.
He shifts occasionally to straighten his back like it hurts or to move his legs slightly, mostly ignoring John’s ham-fisted non-verbal communication.
After the requisite beer he moves into the living room. He is quiet, very quiet, and he ends up falling asleep there while John reads the newspaper benignly. The only sounds are his soft breathing, the rustle of the paper.
She wakes him when dinner is ready. He eats ravenously, like he hasn’t eaten all day, hunched over slightly with his elbows poking out to the side in haste, and she thinks that that is a good thing, because he looks like he needs building up.
She doesn’t quite know what to do after dinner. Greg seems to understand that whatever they do tonight, it will be his responsibility to start it. Perhaps he’s just lazy. He sits on the couch, lifts his leg onto a footstool and sits quietly by as they watch Wheel Of Fortune. He guesses the phrase.
As the commercials run there is a lot of throat-clearing and tentative conversation.
What is he doing at work? This and that. Any new hobbies? Nope. He’s more fluent in Italian, now, he says. Buonasera, ma,. It’s not like Arabic.
When she asks about his rehab and how things are at home, he shrugs and looks at the carpet, and then to his large, fine hands on the armrest of the chair, absentmindedly tracing over the pattern in the fabric. They look back to the TV, but five minutes later he looks up from his feet and says I’m doing my best, Mom, you know?
That’s pretty personal, for him. He has said this just like that, sitting in the living room.
She wonders. She wonders just how fine everything is. She wonders why exactly he has come home, how she will be able to help. How he thinks they can help.
She thought that she was ready for anything that he had to say after eighteen months, but now she doesn’t know. It seems like he is between a rock and a hard place, stuck between being distant and being cast afloat in the incomprehensible ocean of being able to work things out, to talk about himself.
She nods. She waits for him to say something more, but he doesn’t. She readies herself to rescind any tactless comment that John might make after such a personal announcement, but he doesn’t say anything either. That hangs in the room. Greg puts his head back, and his eyes close occasionally. He’s tired, and he’s letting himself sleep here. That counts for something.
After Wheel Of Fortune is over Gregory grunts up and lurches forward to retrieve the remote off the coffee table in the middle of the room. She leans forward and makes a slight noise to offer help, and John shoots her a look behind Greg’s shoulders.
They are looking at each other when Greg turns around, perhaps sensing their non-verbal communication through some shuffle of clothing, or maybe through the odd silence that they have adopted. When he sees that they are exchanging a parental look, completely unguarded, he raises his eyebrows.
He taps the remote against one hand as he sits, to signal that he saw that, that he wasn’t born yesterday, but he doesn’t say anything. He points the remote at the television and clicks through the channels fast, and John doesn’t say anything about that either. She turns her head slightly to look at him, his gaze focused firmly on the television, brow slightly wrinkled, white noise rising as the channels change and flicker on his face.
See! It’s amaz- adding to the- Explosions I think A news bulletin With a high in the- hurt me, Jake!- the meercat-
He stops flicking the channels and settles on something, gesturing his head slightly to enquire if this choice is Okay. He tries to look at the television but she isn’t fooled. She knows he can concentrate on more than one thing at once. John sighs pointedly.
He goes to bed not long after that, but this isn’t so out of the normal. He arrives on their doorstep, spends one night in silence sleeping, gradually emerges to explain why he is at home in the middle of term, why he has stitches on his knuckles, why he’s so tired. And he does look very tired.
She looks in and he has fallen asleep reading, awkward in the single bed, one hand hanging over the edge with the fingers curled, the paperback just over his eyes. This isn’t the home he grew up in. He looks comfortable, though, dare she say it. He looks like all his energy has very suddenly drained away. Like it was very hard for him to get here, but now he doesn’t have to worry about anything, and all the tiredness, the sleep, is catching up.
She and John murmur softly in bed, just like they’ve done a hundred times before about what they’re going to do with that boy.
John says, he looks different,, the soft timbre of his words almost completely swallowed by the bedspread. They speak softly because their son has ears like a bat and they know it. She doesn’t say anything, waiting for him to elaborate.
Has he noticed that he is thinner, that his face is pale? That he hasn’t shaved? She doesn’t know if he means this in concrete terms, or if he has seen the change in his demeanour and just doesn’t want to say. She thinks, and is about to open her mouth and say that it doesn’t seem to have -mellowed- him as such- (because they might be able to talk about this, now), when John says:
Those sneakers.
She turns and starts to say, yeah, they’re different, maybe they’re-
John turns onto his back abruptly, reaching behind to adjust the pillow, and amidst this interruption and the rustle of the bedsheets he says: expensive… running shoes. He was always buggin’ us for new runners, wearin’ em out and growing.
The next day he emerges from the bedroom long after breakfast, padding around in pyjama bottoms and a plain white t-shirt. He looks a little better, and with the radio assiduously tuned to a radio station she thinks he would like and a strong coffee he emerges gradually from his morning funk, leaving behind little or no trace of the black mood he tried not to drag onto their doorstep yesterday. They talk. He nods. He smiles at something, the breakfast spread they have, something on the radio, and she does too. He goes back to his room.
She knocks on the door, asks Greg darling, can I come in?
He grunts in affirmation, and she cracks open the door.
He is standing with his back to her, arms, shoulders and back working as he finishes slipping his t-shirt off. One leg is slightly bent, and his cane leans casually against the bedside table, the old spare-room cupboard with one squeaky drawer that was in their bedroom for a long time. He has his jeans on but no belt yet, so they hang low and reveal the waistband of his boxers.
He folds the t-shirt and places it on top of his bag, probably just for her, and turns around slowly, one hand on the bed. Stiff. She still finds his movement unnatural, but she tries to keep that off her face.
He looks so much like her brother. She’d forgotten that. The same long face, the same bony shoulders, even the same smarts and brow-wrinkling concentration. Her brother was the first of her family to go to university. He didn’t have the mind that Gregory has, though, the fierce intelligence and the quiet misunderstanding to go with it.
The hair on his chest is greying slightly. His face is open, puzzled, as he reaches for a t-shirt and quickly pulls it on, a sweatshirt over the top, shivering slightly as he does it. He has two little white scars high on his chest near his collarbone, from some kind of needle or something, she assumes.
She wants to know if he wants anything at the shopping centre, and would he like to come? He says that he won’t come this time, but could she buy some Pop-tarts?
She tells him to be careful, whatever he does around the house, and he nods, turning away slightly, signalling that the conversation is over, but he snags his cane and follows her out of the room when she leaves, and goes to the door to see them off.
When they get to the centre she realises that he probably didn’t want to come because it is Saturday, and the mall is full of loud noises and jostling people. She buys pop-tarts. She buys every single foodstuff that she knows he likes, junk food, some beer.
When they return from the shopping centre he looks better, rested, more talkative. He is stretched out on the lounge, watching an action movie on TV, reading one of John’s National Geographic magazines.
He emerges from the living room, delving into the bags, looking at what she’s bought approvingly.
Now his presence in their house is different. It isn’t his tall silence; he has been silent and sullen before. It isn’t his voice, that’s the same. It isn’t the way he sleeps or the time he showers or how he takes his coffee. It isn’t what he reads or watches on television. He’s still just as smart.
It could be the heavy irregularity of his steps, or the pill-bottle rattle that she hears in the kitchen and behind the bathroom door, but surely those things aren’t enough to change him.
They have his favourite for lunch, but Greg doesn’t eat much this time. He sits at the kitchen table grating and chopping vegetables, a fine spray of potato juice across his knuckles, banging his knees occasionally on the low metal crossbar.
He rises to rinse his hands at the sink and wipe them on a tea-towel, and not his pants. He nods accordingly when she tells him all her news and picks at the vegetables he’s cut up. But when the meal is served he barely finishes half.
He is very quiet. He almost seems shocked.
She didn’t ask him if he wanted to come to church with them in the morning, because she knew that he wouldn’t, but John wants to ask him anyway. They end up leaving it until it is a quarter to nine and the service starts at half past and they need to leave time to drive over and park the car, and John is grumbling about how long it will take him to get ready, anyway, how long will he need?
She pokes her head into the bedroom and he is still in bed, awake, but trying to doze. He has his feet poked out through the sheets at the bottom, and he has messed up the bed in his sleep as usual. The book is still on the bed. She asks him, and he softly says No, Mom, his voice still apologetic, his eyes sad.
She gathers her hat and the plate she has for the morning tea and John and shepherds him out to the car.
Mary Jenkins from church says, oh, your son is visiting, is that little Greg? She hasn’t told her about her son’s injury, and she thinks that it might not be such a good idea if she came around, considering that the last time she saw Greg he was in college, and the last time Greg saw Mrs Jenkins (whose husband was an air flight controller who built model trains) she was at least two stone lighter.
She remembers one of the things he quietly said to her over his scrupulous attention to the peeling in the kitchen (you know Mom, once a jerk, always a jerk), and thinks that it would be like tempting fate to invite Mary Jenkins over today. She nods, says that he is still working at a hospital in New Jersey, leaves it at that.
That night he talks a little bit more, but he is still quiet, still silent and wide-eyed and shocked, so she thinks that his silence must be a little more permanent than she had thought, not just the travel or his father’s stern looks or the colour of the wallpaper or the acoustics in the house. He draws in breath suddenly and says:
“Did you talk to James?”
Of course he knows very well whether or not they have talked to his friend. He is asking what they know and if they want to know more, opening up and saying that he’s ready when they are, if they want to talk about it; because he knows that she would never ask anything until he told her it was OK.
He seems to be more interested in his chest, in his hands on the tabletop, but in saying this he has opened up, finally signalled that he is ready to talk, at least for now.
Back in New Jersey in the hospital everything was a thousand miles high over their heads, and happening too fast to focus on more than the fact that their son was very, very ill, so she has a lot of questions. A lot of things to ask.
He sketches it out for them, ends up doing a little ad hoc medical diagram lecture session on the back of an envelope and a sales docket from Woolworths. In the same way, he has advised them copiously and a little condescendingly since he was a third-year med student- (hell, since he was twelve, since he was six and his little-boy voice would ring out among the shelves at the library: Mom, mom, did you know? Mom, mom, what’s that?)- and she would ring to ask about this, that so-and-so’s son had, that, that the doctor had prescribed.
He talks on the phone to Stacy.
He’s masking something in his voice as he hangs up and bites his lip. He wants her to be happy. He doesn’t want her to worry. He’s trying to brush off her concern.
She stays where she is in the kitchen, with her back to the humming fridge, and thinks don’t cry, don’t cry now, until she is sure that he won’t hear the tears in her voice or see her glistening eyes.
She doesn’t want him to see that, and she doesn’t want to think that this is it, that this is the end of the line, that it ends with him.
He is angry on Monday. Her son has a powerful anger in him.
In a way it is a relief. She can see recovery.
They sit, eating lunch. Greg has spent the morning with Blythe, apart from the obligatory poke around in the garage with John. He has his head down chowing in her Chicken Noodle Soup, and John says “How about those Giants, eh?” He just raises his eyebrows and continues eating. John says “What, not interested in sport?” Greg lifts his head up deliberately and glances at John, before reaching forward to snag another piece of toast, paying great attention to the way he dips it in his soup. The tension at the table is so real that she thinks, well, at least he’s trying, but we should back off right now.
John still has the caring-fatherly tone to his voice, and he says well?
Greg places his spoon by his plate and says very simply “I don’t want to have this conversation.” He pushes his chair back slightly and wipes his mouth. Politely, a strange in-your-parent’s-house addition to his usual indifference to table manners.
John leans forward slightly and says: “Well, we’re having it”.
Greg’s face changes slightly. Oh, Boy, she thinks. He pushes his chair back with a scrape, dumps his plate in the sink, runs the water, turns around roughly. “What the hell is your problem?!? I don’t want to talk to you now, about this.” He is that close to shouting, and his voice rings in the kitchen as it is. He turns back to the sink, breathing heavily, and lightly brings one hand down to tap on the metal draining plate.
John leans farther forward in his chair in Greg’s direction and tells him to turn around. Pushing it. When he doesn’t, he starts on his spiel, the one she has heard enough from him to almost know off by heart. He talks over it a lot, when he seems to be confused about Greg.
Yes, he has been worried lately, but perhaps for different reasons than she has.
Greg doesn’t know how lucky he is. He isn’t helping anyone, least of all himself, sulking the way he is. He just doesn’t know how lucky he is.
John finishes, and Greg is still standing by the sink, now with both hands braced on either side, his shoulders high. There is a pause, and he just nods his head. John says, No, Turn Around, and Greg does so, probably because he understands that he won’t be able to leave the room until he does. John says Do you hear me? Greg makes a humourless laugh and makes to leave. No yes, no yes, sir.
John is sitting in the chair closest to the doorway, and as Greg makes to pass his chair he stands up and grabs his arm gently. Up close John has to reach up a tiny bit, and he takes hold to the middle of his arm, four or five inches up from the wristwatch they gave him for his 25th birthday. DR G.J.H. With love from Mom and Dad.
Even though it’s gentle, just a tug, Greg gets a fearful look on his face and stumbles backwards slightly, off balance.
He’s just getting the hang of it. She thinks that that was a cheap shot.
He says “What’s your problem, boy?”
He pulls away, not weak in his arms at all, and says I’M ANGRY! I’ve had enough of people’s bullshit, and I don’t have to hear it here, from you.
There’s a cane-clatter and the squeak of his shoes against the lino, and he’s gone.
John opens his mouth to call something out but the she steps in and says to his retreating back, I won’t allow anger in this house, Greg. He stalks to his room as best he can. But he doesn’t leave.
It’s not because he can’t, she knows that. She knows that if he was in the right frame of mind he would have staggered out of their house and hailed a taxi or caught a bus even if it was raining out and there was ice on the road.
No. He’s angry, but that doesn’t mean he wants to leave. Maybe he needs somewhere to be angry. Maybe he has to carry being angry around.
He doesn’t bring up the argument again, which tells her that he was deeply affronted, and that he felt very uncomfortable with the conversation. She silences John when he opens his mouth.
Later she corners him in the kitchen when he comes in to get a beer (only one, she notices), and says, “Don’t say any more. You’ve already done enough damage, don’t you think?”
He takes part in the requisite activities with John, but their relationship is strained, and he spends much of his time hanging quietly in her company, or where the both of them are. Comfortable. He dozes a lot.
Around midday on Monday he disappears. She hears the click of the front door, thinking that maybe he was going out to check for the mail or have a look at the front of the house, but he completely disappears. Forty-five minutes later she’s just starting to get worried, just thinking about getting John to drive around the block, when he tramps in the back door carrying a shopping bag in one hand. He comes through the side gate and in the back door because there are three less steps that way.
He is strangely cheerful, breathing deep from the cold and the exercise. His cheeks are red and he chafes his hands together as he rustles paper, then draws a packet of microwave popcorn and a video cassette from the depths of the bag. “Of course you don’t have a DVD player.” he grouses, before microwaving the popcorn. He deposits himself on the couch, and the trailers for whatever he’s watching start. He cracks open the popcorn, lifts his leg onto the coffee table and settles back.
She waits. She knows. When she hears the music of the opening credits, followed by some sort of gunfight heavy on automatic weapons, she strides into the living room and pauses the video.
Greg has that little yellow pill bottle in his hand, and he palms one dry into his mouth before quickly depositing the bottle back into a pocket, the whole procedure lasting about five seconds after she comes into the room. She doesn’t hesitate.
“Where were you?”
His voice is even. He doesn’t seem especially fazed, apart from the fact that his movie is paused, and he still has that strange -merriment- in his aspect.
“I went to the store.”
“You didn’t think of telling me? I could have driven you.”
He shrugs. “Felt like walking.”
“And what if it had started raining? Or you got lost?”
“Then I would have started back. Or called a taxi.” He doesn’t say anything more, but he gives her an eyebrow raise, saying No need to worry, Mom, I got it on this end.
He shovels in a handful of popcorn and offers her the bag. She makes a ‘no thanks’ hand gesture, nods, and leaves the room.
The next day he goes home. She wants to go shopping, so they drive him to the bus-stop together. They offer to drive him home. He tells them not to be stupid.
He looks out the window, his face carefully blank. They say goodbye, then there is the slam of the door, a crunch on the ground. John hands him his bag and he’s gone.
A week later she calls.
The pamphlet that she stealthily picked up in one of the waiting-rooms at the hospital suggest that she can support her family member by ensuring that some routine remains in his/her life, while one of the quack books she glanced at in the library suggested that her son may not want to be smothered at this stage in his recovery. Most of these publications make everyone sound like drug addicts. She knows her son, and so she tries to call him regularly. If he is out, she leaves a message. He might not return the message for a week or more, but he does. The most important thing is that they talk.
When he picks up the phone and says hello, he is panting slightly, like he might have run to pick up the phone, except for the fact that that is no longer an option for him, and she has barely been on the line for ten seconds. His voice is slightly hoarse, and he speaks quietly and deliberately, as if he has just been shouting. He sounds distracted.
As she announces herself she hears him grunt as he lowers himself onto a chair, and the conscious change in his tone of voice. He says, Hi Mom, and she hears a sort of sighing laugh in the silence of the room behind him, Stacy, the sort of noise you make when you’re frustrated and you’ve got no way of expressing it.
Because your lover’s mother is on the phone, probably, meddling in something she doesn’t understand. Ten seconds later something rattles in the kitchen.
She is sure they’re breaking up. She hears the hollow desperation in his voice, saying it’s all over, even though they only talk about stupid things like whether he has worn the clothes she sent down for his birthday/Christmas. When she hangs up the phone John turns to her, and something on his face tells her she probably looks shocked or down. She goes to sit on the couch, and he lowers the volume on the TV, one of those really loud ads for warehouse clearances. It’s still too loud, she thinks, and then his arm is around her and she sighs heavily. She sits there and thinks, I love him. I love Greg, I love John. Why is it that he’ll never have what we have?
“Three weeks, I guess”. (She is wrong, incidentally. Four weeks. Four weeks and two days from that date they split up).
Of course she doesn’t know that now. She will, although not until a week after the fact when she calls to find Wilson answering the phone, Wilson telling her that her son has spent the last three days drowning his sorrows in the rubble of their apartment. She doesn’t get details. She’s glad. As he hangs up the phone she hears him say You see?
But they don’t know that now.
That night the silence in their house is loud, so loud. She cries below the sound of the shower. John spills coffee all over the counter and says Jesus!, mopping at it savagely.
That night in bed he says Greg, and she makes a sort of comforting mumbling noise, but it still takes them a long time to fall asleep, just lying there. They both hurt, she can feel it. She thinks that she can only just fathom how her son feels now.
Like she had thought, but hadn’t wanted to tell him: it ends with him. He knows that now, is probably just starting to feel it.
She remembers Greg tripping lightly down the stairs at the back of the hall at graduation-running and pulling his tie off at the same time, the soles of his slightly ratty shoes slick and tapping on the stairs, his hair impossibly unruly and messy.
She tries not to blame anything, to lay it on one thing, but she lies there and thinks why can he never have what we have?
.- .