Fic: It's Not Forever (The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon/Penny, PG)
Title: It's Not Forever
Author: Jen (jazzfic)
Rating: PG
Pairing: Sheldon/Penny
Word Count: 3,100
Summary: Marriage is hard. Years after the fact, Sheldon is still trying to figure it out.
Notes: Saturnalia gift for dontbitethesun. The prompt was marriage!fic. I took a slightly open-ended approach to this. Big thank you to notalwaysweak for beta reading.
Buy milk. That was the last thing she said to me. I was late-uncharacteristic, certainly, but that's another story and not relevant to this one, let's just say it happens-and running out the door that morning, so I had barely heard her voice. It must have stuck in my head and stayed there though, because something made me stop on the way home at a quarter past six and grab two cartons plus a loaf of rye from the local deli. By that time driving myself, in my own car, had been an actual and very real thing for a good while, but it still worried me to the point of distraction, and most days I weakened and took the longer route to and from work that involved less lane changes and cumbersome left hand turns. As I pulled out of campus her words came back to me and I headed grim lipped for the busier main road and the awful peak hour commuters. I hated counting myself as one of them, except here I quite obviously was, and the older I got the more I came to accept that.
She would twig onto my cowardly plan anyway, and give me that look only she could perfect, and shake her head, just a little. I could never hide anything, not really back then, and absolutely not now.
But when I opened the door I found the apartment empty. My immediate thought was she'd gone to class, but I knew that wasn't right. She had class on Thursday nights and today was Monday. I noticed the cereal bowls from breakfast still sitting at the sink and a twinge immediately ran through my body. It was like a fragment of a scene, something in your periphery, that pulls you up short for the simple reason that you know what you are seeing is wrong, but you can't say what it is or how it is or why. I was so tuned to little differences that it wasn't out of the ordinary for me to spot a grammatical error hidden in a block of text on a tablet screen some six feet away; the fact that she hadn't rinsed out two pieces of crockery from ten hours ago was like a blazing klaxon going off inside me. I shoved the milk and bread in the fridge (the bread bin was right there before me, but of course I wasn't thinking straight) and called into the darkened hall.
"Penny?"
I must have spoken her name a dozen times at least, then sat silently in the living room for a further fifteen minutes before I came to reason and took out my phone. Her name was the easiest and most immediate thing that sprung to my lips. I suppose it had always been. I didn't know, or maybe I was beginning to know, that it wouldn't have mattered anyway.
The first of several messages blinked at me, colorful little speech bubbles waiting to be displayed. I read them without reaction.
She was gone.
We'd been married for five years. Had this always been coming? I wondered, as I lay on my side on the couch, our old couch we'd been meaning to replace but hadn't because neither of us-meaning me-wanted to change. Who programmed that escape mechanism into the code?
I couldn't find my charger. I lay there as my phone battery seeped low, the white bar disappearing, as my brain yelled shrill and loud: Sheldon, it was you.
Bernadette knew. Howard, too. That didn't really surprise me; it had always been that way. They came as a package, murmuring words and offering comfort like a well-oiled act, exchanging pre-arranged glances as I peppered them with questions. I don't recall which of them succeeded in finally getting me to sit, but eventually I felt my knees give way and found myself sandwiched between two crocheted pillows in the shape of clamshells, staring down at my hands, believing I could still see the puckered skin at the fingertips. Soft red marks, hidden confusion, the result of scrubbing madly at a sink full of dishes in scalding water without gloves.
I was not like myself at all.
"I don't suppose you have any Calendula cream in your bathroom cabinet?" I asked numbly.
She looked at me carefully from behind her glasses. The frames were bright red, making the blue of her irises pop out against her skin. Her gaze was unwavering. I had entered their living room demanding answers they plainly couldn't give me. Or wouldn't. I think the latter was more correct, but right then the pain that had shifted far away the previous night was beginning to surface and claw at my chest with a steady intent. It took on the form of her name, and emerged in a feeling so sudden that for a moment I couldn't label it, all I could do was push my hands away beneath one of the pillows, stare back at her and choke out, "I don't understand. Help me understand. Please."
I wondered, with an edge of desperation, if there was a stitch unraveling inside me. The thought was ridiculous. In my mind I never asked for help. Never. I never needed to know.
"I'm sorry, honey," she said.
Bernadette bit her lip; I think she was going to say something more. It sounded too final, she was being too nice. Holding back sympathy for what she'd seen coming. I gripped at the armrest, ready to propel myself away so I could face this thing on my own.
But then I heard Howard moving around their kitchen, clinking mugs and filling the kettle loudly, making a hash of subtlety in trying to replace the obvious discomfort with noise. I blinked and turned away as they shared glances over the top of my head, staring to the door, bracing myself for the moment I would have to leave them without answers and even more ashamed that I had to ask them in the first place.
And then the thing I'd been unable to name came at me again, and I knew quite suddenly what it was, because I'd been feeling it emerge since the day Penny had smiled at me and out of nowhere told me yes. Yes, Sheldon.
Yes to what?
She'd taken my hand in both of hers. We were alone, literally and figuratively; we'd both wanted for a long time what neither of us could manage to say. Maybe she'd seen it then, too, but knew no way around it.
I knew. The feeling was guilt.
They expected me to call her, and there was a part of me, small and selfish, that felt heckled, caught in the short beam of what was right and what was expected. I fell prey quickly to my own predictability, uncomfortable that it had to somehow be implied first by a third party in order for me to unfreeze and take action, however small. There was no answer, of course. I left several messages on her voicemail, and I realized the moment the words left my mouth that they weren't mine, not really, and if she listened she'd pick that up in an instant. By not saying what I wanted to say, I was giving her an out; I might as well have run away myself.
I did call another number, though. Midnight in California meant an obnoxious hour on the other side of the country, but I knew he'd be awake.
"Sheldon. Hey."
My guess was on Howard telling, and I was a little angry at this. I took a breath and plunged in.
"Nobody's surprised," I said shortly. "Why is that?"
He sighed. I heard a murmur in the background, Leonard moving the phone away, shuffling, part of an exchange that wasn't meant for my ears. I waited, picturing him putting on his robe one handed, elbowing the bedroom door open and padding out into the hall, glasses askew.
"Do you really want me to answer that, Sheldon?"
I rubbed the space between my eyes. Sometime in the past year a crease had formed there. I saw it every morning in the bathroom mirror, every morning at 6.45 when I would be finishing up and Penny would just be starting. Our routines never quite managed to harmonize, as it were, so we'd end up performing a staggered dance in the space between one doorway and another. We had adapted, though, knew which way to turn and what to say, when to swap a mug of herbal tea (mine) for coffee (hers), and were no longer so separate, so black and white in our ways. A grey strand mixed with the brown above my forehead, a line like a pinch at my brow-these things didn't alarm me so much anymore. But left to my own devices I was surprised at how quickly I had reverted back to obsessive worry, and I pressed my thumb into the skin as I listened to my former roommate form a response, and wondered if there was any point to this call if I could just replicate it word for word in my mind, as I well suspected I could. If I wanted to.
"It isn't true," I said, plunging in anyway. I waited, so did he. I think he knew where this was going. "What you all thought."
"Sheldon..."
"I wasn't a choice. She didn't marry me out of pity."
I heard him take in a breath. I pictured the two of them, the classic failed prototype: Leonard and Penny, as they'd been all those years ago, edging around each other, half miserable, half lost. Blindly optimistic, neither prepared to settle. It was dangerous of me to say these things to him now, I knew that, but I held onto the call because he was my oldest friend, and his capacity for understanding me was maybe the best quality he had ever possessed. I still felt the debt of this, despite our distance, and of what we now shared.
"This is my fault," I said, staring at the floor.
Tiredness breached his voice. We'd had this conversation before, and not always about Penny, and my finger hovered over the screen as I tilted the phone from my ear, ready to hang up, already instinctively hating the answer before it was said.
"Yeah, Sheldon. It is."
There was a solution underneath all the mess. I just had to find it. So I started by making lists. I made lists about things I wanted to tell her but hadn't properly figured out how. I left out explicitly stating the last but reasoned she'd pick up the meaning well ahead of me anyway, as she always did. Always had.
One week, and already the past tense was rearing its seriously ugly head. This wasn't good.
I missed her.
I called, she didn't answer, so I left messages. I told her I'd bought milk and there was a new variety of that cereal she liked and there had been great vats of cherries on sale at the farmer's market, but I hadn't bought any because there wasn't room in the fridge for them to keep.
Penny had an adoration of cherries that I had never been sure was a deserved one. The expression on her face when I reluctantly brought home a tub of ice cream with the prized fruit front and center on the garish packaging was one I felt for certain could never be replicated, even if all scientific and technological feats were met at once at some imaginary, hallowed date. I knew nobody else who managed this, nor any way to explain the strange feeling it left in me.
Bernadette was playing avoidance to a masterly level. I was pretty sure she and Penny were conversing, and it took most of my resolve to not obsess over this and keep myself focused on what I was going to do. What this was, seeing as normal paths of communication were seemingly blocked, I wasn't yet sure. Hence my lists, which did little to chip away at things, but freed my mind somewhat.
But only to a point. Guilt was problematic, hovering over me in bed, where I lay prone and tucked in like a cocoon, resenting the unruffled sheets that covered the other side.
I missed her, and it hurt.
I didn't know what to do.
The afternoon she finally called, it seemed too mundane, too unremarkable, as if she were asking me to pick up a prescription or some dry cleaning. And I wasn't prepared for it at all. "Sheldon," she said, and I cradled the cellphone to my ear and stood at the kitchen window, the frame digging into my shoulder as I peered past the concrete buildings to where a scrap of blue cut into the clouds, wondering which satellite was relaying her, and from where. Words formed in my throat but I had to let her speak.
"Please don't call me. Okay? Just-can you do that for me?"
"Yes."
It was immediate, a response I had no control over. A sigh filled my ear. "Thank you."
"Penny...Penny, where are you?"
"Somewhere I don't really want to be. It doesn't matter. It's not forever." She took in a breath. Everything sounded flat, vacant, her voice, her inflections. There was no background noise. "Don't pester Bernadette, either. I need a friend."
The clouds thinned and sunlight beat down on my neck. I wanted to step back, rise to my own defense, but I made myself stay put. I would be old Sheldon in this conversation. Blissfully unaware, analyzing empathy from a distance, cool and collected. "Aren't I your friend, too?" I asked.
No answer. A breath in my ear, followed by another, and another. My brain began to play tricks. She was not so far away, no, she was right here...
When the dial tone came I turned from the window, and in the shadow of the kitchen I saw white buildings, silhouetted on my eyelids.
It wasn't the face I was hoping to see. It shocked me into silence, until she rolled her eyes and edged past me to drop her purse onto the couch, and then, almost in the same step, turn back on six-inch heels to fold me into her arms. She smelled of perfume, warm, exotic. Her lips tweaked into a smile. She murmured against my ear, "Oh, Shelly. What have you done."
My twin sister, as flamboyant as ever, even in admonishment. She let me go and propped both hands on her hips, looking me over with a shake of her head. The movement set her hair swinging across her shoulders. I closed the door and stood there, waiting for her to answer her own question, knowing it hadn't been posed as one. Wanting to answer it myself, even if it were only to say I don't know, that's the whole point.
"Everything." There was the guilt again, and I was spitting it out in small, bitter lumps. My stomach twisted. I stared at Missy. "Excuse me, I think I'm going to-"
I flew to the bathroom and clutched at the toilet. Nothing came up. I swallowed over the bowl, my hands shaking badly. I was shocked at my body's reaction.
Missy tapped on the door. She squeezed my shoulder gently. "Honey, I'll make us some tea."
There was our mother in her voice. I nodded.
I stayed in the bathroom while my sister turned on the radio and fussed about the living room and kitchen, singing softly. Acoustic guitar. The sound was odd, but not entirely. I never listened to music on my own; every note that had ever originated in this apartment belonged to somebody else. Some things I found I liked, almost intrinsically, though I had never tried to ask myself why.
The shaking had stopped. I pulled a hair that had caught in the sink, held it up, unbroken and pale. Then I washed my hands seven times.
Later, television switched off and what little talk I could muster gone, she sat by my side and looked me over with an expression I couldn't read. She reached out, touched the hem of my t-shirt with her long fingers. Her hands were like mine. To our thirty-seven years, ignoring biology, perhaps we were identical, after all. "It's marriage, Shelly," she said. "Ain't never easy."
Penny came home without announcement, four weeks and three days after she'd left. Curled into the sheets in the early hours of a Thursday morning while I was dead to the world and nestled her face into my arm.
"Would you drive me to campus today, Sheldon?" she asked. The words were soft and I could barely hear them. It was just after sunrise. Pale shadows criss-crossed the carpet, up along the length of her body. She lifted her head. I lay still, very still, and I could feel her eyes on me. "I know you have work, and I could go alone, but I... missed a lot of stuff, and I guess they're not real pleased with me. I really don't want to drop out again. I need you there."
"Okay," I said. I fought the urge to turn towards her. "I can make notecards." I stopped the words, rearranged them quickly. "I mean, we can. Together."
"Okay."
Her eyes closed. We slept.
She hadn't missed me. She spoke carefully and clearly as I changed lanes and watched the rear view mirror. She told me how she had driven her old car until she couldn't drive any more, and still she hadn't missed me. I told her about the guilt, of not knowing what to do.
Engine off, parked beneath the shade of a tree, we undid our seatbelts and sat there. As I opened my mouth to speak she turned and pressed her lips to mine. But I didn't move, and neither did she, so we simply broke apart, one following the other. "Yeah," she said. "Same here."
She let me go. I realized as we got out of the car that there was no surprise or anger in her voice-there was maybe a smile-
Only everything I saw as I looked at her came from sadness. I understood my sister then, and Leonard, too; and I erased the next five years from my mind and replaced it with a day.
Penny stood back, her face half dappled in light. She watched me take her bag onto my shoulder.
"Let's go," I told her, and we did.
Author: Jen (jazzfic)
Rating: PG
Pairing: Sheldon/Penny
Word Count: 3,100
Summary: Marriage is hard. Years after the fact, Sheldon is still trying to figure it out.
Notes: Saturnalia gift for dontbitethesun. The prompt was marriage!fic. I took a slightly open-ended approach to this. Big thank you to notalwaysweak for beta reading.
Buy milk. That was the last thing she said to me. I was late-uncharacteristic, certainly, but that's another story and not relevant to this one, let's just say it happens-and running out the door that morning, so I had barely heard her voice. It must have stuck in my head and stayed there though, because something made me stop on the way home at a quarter past six and grab two cartons plus a loaf of rye from the local deli. By that time driving myself, in my own car, had been an actual and very real thing for a good while, but it still worried me to the point of distraction, and most days I weakened and took the longer route to and from work that involved less lane changes and cumbersome left hand turns. As I pulled out of campus her words came back to me and I headed grim lipped for the busier main road and the awful peak hour commuters. I hated counting myself as one of them, except here I quite obviously was, and the older I got the more I came to accept that.
She would twig onto my cowardly plan anyway, and give me that look only she could perfect, and shake her head, just a little. I could never hide anything, not really back then, and absolutely not now.
But when I opened the door I found the apartment empty. My immediate thought was she'd gone to class, but I knew that wasn't right. She had class on Thursday nights and today was Monday. I noticed the cereal bowls from breakfast still sitting at the sink and a twinge immediately ran through my body. It was like a fragment of a scene, something in your periphery, that pulls you up short for the simple reason that you know what you are seeing is wrong, but you can't say what it is or how it is or why. I was so tuned to little differences that it wasn't out of the ordinary for me to spot a grammatical error hidden in a block of text on a tablet screen some six feet away; the fact that she hadn't rinsed out two pieces of crockery from ten hours ago was like a blazing klaxon going off inside me. I shoved the milk and bread in the fridge (the bread bin was right there before me, but of course I wasn't thinking straight) and called into the darkened hall.
"Penny?"
I must have spoken her name a dozen times at least, then sat silently in the living room for a further fifteen minutes before I came to reason and took out my phone. Her name was the easiest and most immediate thing that sprung to my lips. I suppose it had always been. I didn't know, or maybe I was beginning to know, that it wouldn't have mattered anyway.
The first of several messages blinked at me, colorful little speech bubbles waiting to be displayed. I read them without reaction.
She was gone.
We'd been married for five years. Had this always been coming? I wondered, as I lay on my side on the couch, our old couch we'd been meaning to replace but hadn't because neither of us-meaning me-wanted to change. Who programmed that escape mechanism into the code?
I couldn't find my charger. I lay there as my phone battery seeped low, the white bar disappearing, as my brain yelled shrill and loud: Sheldon, it was you.
Bernadette knew. Howard, too. That didn't really surprise me; it had always been that way. They came as a package, murmuring words and offering comfort like a well-oiled act, exchanging pre-arranged glances as I peppered them with questions. I don't recall which of them succeeded in finally getting me to sit, but eventually I felt my knees give way and found myself sandwiched between two crocheted pillows in the shape of clamshells, staring down at my hands, believing I could still see the puckered skin at the fingertips. Soft red marks, hidden confusion, the result of scrubbing madly at a sink full of dishes in scalding water without gloves.
I was not like myself at all.
"I don't suppose you have any Calendula cream in your bathroom cabinet?" I asked numbly.
She looked at me carefully from behind her glasses. The frames were bright red, making the blue of her irises pop out against her skin. Her gaze was unwavering. I had entered their living room demanding answers they plainly couldn't give me. Or wouldn't. I think the latter was more correct, but right then the pain that had shifted far away the previous night was beginning to surface and claw at my chest with a steady intent. It took on the form of her name, and emerged in a feeling so sudden that for a moment I couldn't label it, all I could do was push my hands away beneath one of the pillows, stare back at her and choke out, "I don't understand. Help me understand. Please."
I wondered, with an edge of desperation, if there was a stitch unraveling inside me. The thought was ridiculous. In my mind I never asked for help. Never. I never needed to know.
"I'm sorry, honey," she said.
Bernadette bit her lip; I think she was going to say something more. It sounded too final, she was being too nice. Holding back sympathy for what she'd seen coming. I gripped at the armrest, ready to propel myself away so I could face this thing on my own.
But then I heard Howard moving around their kitchen, clinking mugs and filling the kettle loudly, making a hash of subtlety in trying to replace the obvious discomfort with noise. I blinked and turned away as they shared glances over the top of my head, staring to the door, bracing myself for the moment I would have to leave them without answers and even more ashamed that I had to ask them in the first place.
And then the thing I'd been unable to name came at me again, and I knew quite suddenly what it was, because I'd been feeling it emerge since the day Penny had smiled at me and out of nowhere told me yes. Yes, Sheldon.
Yes to what?
She'd taken my hand in both of hers. We were alone, literally and figuratively; we'd both wanted for a long time what neither of us could manage to say. Maybe she'd seen it then, too, but knew no way around it.
I knew. The feeling was guilt.
They expected me to call her, and there was a part of me, small and selfish, that felt heckled, caught in the short beam of what was right and what was expected. I fell prey quickly to my own predictability, uncomfortable that it had to somehow be implied first by a third party in order for me to unfreeze and take action, however small. There was no answer, of course. I left several messages on her voicemail, and I realized the moment the words left my mouth that they weren't mine, not really, and if she listened she'd pick that up in an instant. By not saying what I wanted to say, I was giving her an out; I might as well have run away myself.
I did call another number, though. Midnight in California meant an obnoxious hour on the other side of the country, but I knew he'd be awake.
"Sheldon. Hey."
My guess was on Howard telling, and I was a little angry at this. I took a breath and plunged in.
"Nobody's surprised," I said shortly. "Why is that?"
He sighed. I heard a murmur in the background, Leonard moving the phone away, shuffling, part of an exchange that wasn't meant for my ears. I waited, picturing him putting on his robe one handed, elbowing the bedroom door open and padding out into the hall, glasses askew.
"Do you really want me to answer that, Sheldon?"
I rubbed the space between my eyes. Sometime in the past year a crease had formed there. I saw it every morning in the bathroom mirror, every morning at 6.45 when I would be finishing up and Penny would just be starting. Our routines never quite managed to harmonize, as it were, so we'd end up performing a staggered dance in the space between one doorway and another. We had adapted, though, knew which way to turn and what to say, when to swap a mug of herbal tea (mine) for coffee (hers), and were no longer so separate, so black and white in our ways. A grey strand mixed with the brown above my forehead, a line like a pinch at my brow-these things didn't alarm me so much anymore. But left to my own devices I was surprised at how quickly I had reverted back to obsessive worry, and I pressed my thumb into the skin as I listened to my former roommate form a response, and wondered if there was any point to this call if I could just replicate it word for word in my mind, as I well suspected I could. If I wanted to.
"It isn't true," I said, plunging in anyway. I waited, so did he. I think he knew where this was going. "What you all thought."
"Sheldon..."
"I wasn't a choice. She didn't marry me out of pity."
I heard him take in a breath. I pictured the two of them, the classic failed prototype: Leonard and Penny, as they'd been all those years ago, edging around each other, half miserable, half lost. Blindly optimistic, neither prepared to settle. It was dangerous of me to say these things to him now, I knew that, but I held onto the call because he was my oldest friend, and his capacity for understanding me was maybe the best quality he had ever possessed. I still felt the debt of this, despite our distance, and of what we now shared.
"This is my fault," I said, staring at the floor.
Tiredness breached his voice. We'd had this conversation before, and not always about Penny, and my finger hovered over the screen as I tilted the phone from my ear, ready to hang up, already instinctively hating the answer before it was said.
"Yeah, Sheldon. It is."
There was a solution underneath all the mess. I just had to find it. So I started by making lists. I made lists about things I wanted to tell her but hadn't properly figured out how. I left out explicitly stating the last but reasoned she'd pick up the meaning well ahead of me anyway, as she always did. Always had.
One week, and already the past tense was rearing its seriously ugly head. This wasn't good.
I missed her.
I called, she didn't answer, so I left messages. I told her I'd bought milk and there was a new variety of that cereal she liked and there had been great vats of cherries on sale at the farmer's market, but I hadn't bought any because there wasn't room in the fridge for them to keep.
Penny had an adoration of cherries that I had never been sure was a deserved one. The expression on her face when I reluctantly brought home a tub of ice cream with the prized fruit front and center on the garish packaging was one I felt for certain could never be replicated, even if all scientific and technological feats were met at once at some imaginary, hallowed date. I knew nobody else who managed this, nor any way to explain the strange feeling it left in me.
Bernadette was playing avoidance to a masterly level. I was pretty sure she and Penny were conversing, and it took most of my resolve to not obsess over this and keep myself focused on what I was going to do. What this was, seeing as normal paths of communication were seemingly blocked, I wasn't yet sure. Hence my lists, which did little to chip away at things, but freed my mind somewhat.
But only to a point. Guilt was problematic, hovering over me in bed, where I lay prone and tucked in like a cocoon, resenting the unruffled sheets that covered the other side.
I missed her, and it hurt.
I didn't know what to do.
The afternoon she finally called, it seemed too mundane, too unremarkable, as if she were asking me to pick up a prescription or some dry cleaning. And I wasn't prepared for it at all. "Sheldon," she said, and I cradled the cellphone to my ear and stood at the kitchen window, the frame digging into my shoulder as I peered past the concrete buildings to where a scrap of blue cut into the clouds, wondering which satellite was relaying her, and from where. Words formed in my throat but I had to let her speak.
"Please don't call me. Okay? Just-can you do that for me?"
"Yes."
It was immediate, a response I had no control over. A sigh filled my ear. "Thank you."
"Penny...Penny, where are you?"
"Somewhere I don't really want to be. It doesn't matter. It's not forever." She took in a breath. Everything sounded flat, vacant, her voice, her inflections. There was no background noise. "Don't pester Bernadette, either. I need a friend."
The clouds thinned and sunlight beat down on my neck. I wanted to step back, rise to my own defense, but I made myself stay put. I would be old Sheldon in this conversation. Blissfully unaware, analyzing empathy from a distance, cool and collected. "Aren't I your friend, too?" I asked.
No answer. A breath in my ear, followed by another, and another. My brain began to play tricks. She was not so far away, no, she was right here...
When the dial tone came I turned from the window, and in the shadow of the kitchen I saw white buildings, silhouetted on my eyelids.
It wasn't the face I was hoping to see. It shocked me into silence, until she rolled her eyes and edged past me to drop her purse onto the couch, and then, almost in the same step, turn back on six-inch heels to fold me into her arms. She smelled of perfume, warm, exotic. Her lips tweaked into a smile. She murmured against my ear, "Oh, Shelly. What have you done."
My twin sister, as flamboyant as ever, even in admonishment. She let me go and propped both hands on her hips, looking me over with a shake of her head. The movement set her hair swinging across her shoulders. I closed the door and stood there, waiting for her to answer her own question, knowing it hadn't been posed as one. Wanting to answer it myself, even if it were only to say I don't know, that's the whole point.
"Everything." There was the guilt again, and I was spitting it out in small, bitter lumps. My stomach twisted. I stared at Missy. "Excuse me, I think I'm going to-"
I flew to the bathroom and clutched at the toilet. Nothing came up. I swallowed over the bowl, my hands shaking badly. I was shocked at my body's reaction.
Missy tapped on the door. She squeezed my shoulder gently. "Honey, I'll make us some tea."
There was our mother in her voice. I nodded.
I stayed in the bathroom while my sister turned on the radio and fussed about the living room and kitchen, singing softly. Acoustic guitar. The sound was odd, but not entirely. I never listened to music on my own; every note that had ever originated in this apartment belonged to somebody else. Some things I found I liked, almost intrinsically, though I had never tried to ask myself why.
The shaking had stopped. I pulled a hair that had caught in the sink, held it up, unbroken and pale. Then I washed my hands seven times.
Later, television switched off and what little talk I could muster gone, she sat by my side and looked me over with an expression I couldn't read. She reached out, touched the hem of my t-shirt with her long fingers. Her hands were like mine. To our thirty-seven years, ignoring biology, perhaps we were identical, after all. "It's marriage, Shelly," she said. "Ain't never easy."
Penny came home without announcement, four weeks and three days after she'd left. Curled into the sheets in the early hours of a Thursday morning while I was dead to the world and nestled her face into my arm.
"Would you drive me to campus today, Sheldon?" she asked. The words were soft and I could barely hear them. It was just after sunrise. Pale shadows criss-crossed the carpet, up along the length of her body. She lifted her head. I lay still, very still, and I could feel her eyes on me. "I know you have work, and I could go alone, but I... missed a lot of stuff, and I guess they're not real pleased with me. I really don't want to drop out again. I need you there."
"Okay," I said. I fought the urge to turn towards her. "I can make notecards." I stopped the words, rearranged them quickly. "I mean, we can. Together."
"Okay."
Her eyes closed. We slept.
She hadn't missed me. She spoke carefully and clearly as I changed lanes and watched the rear view mirror. She told me how she had driven her old car until she couldn't drive any more, and still she hadn't missed me. I told her about the guilt, of not knowing what to do.
Engine off, parked beneath the shade of a tree, we undid our seatbelts and sat there. As I opened my mouth to speak she turned and pressed her lips to mine. But I didn't move, and neither did she, so we simply broke apart, one following the other. "Yeah," she said. "Same here."
She let me go. I realized as we got out of the car that there was no surprise or anger in her voice-there was maybe a smile-
Only everything I saw as I looked at her came from sadness. I understood my sister then, and Leonard, too; and I erased the next five years from my mind and replaced it with a day.
Penny stood back, her face half dappled in light. She watched me take her bag onto my shoulder.
"Let's go," I told her, and we did.