Holy Palmers' Kiss
By Dimgwrthien
"It's no accident that the church and the graveyard stand side by side. The city of the dead sleeps encircled by the city of the living. "
- Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
As usual, Mac Taylor drove a compact, black car to the front of a building. As usual, the sidewalk held some cracks along the curb, causing an uneven walk to the door. The green-eyed man opened the door and glanced over his shoulder to find Don Flack standing a few feet behind him, running onto the curb.
"Bit earlier than you usually come in," Mac noted, holding open the door as Flack entered.
"Half past seven? It's late to you, then." Flack waited for Mac to close the door again and walked with his supervisor.
"I was dropping Claire off at work. She hates going on the subwayit's too crowded. Today she has a meeting down at the Trade Center."
He remembered Claire spending half of the night and most of the morning choosing the exact outfit to wear. The pretty brunette chose a green suit with a long jacket over her cream blouse. Mac had even helped drape a long overcoat on her shoulders because she had worried so much about mussing up the sleeves. The all-night venture to find the outfit (including a particularly exciting outing to three stores to find a pair of size eight high heels with the silver buckling on the outside) led to Mac commenting in the morning how she would need makeup to hide the dark circles under her eyes. Claire only responded with panic until Mac kissed her forehead as a sort of nonverbal blessing.
She worked with stocks. Today was the first presentation she had to give, and it was to a group of men who had seen good and bad pass under their noses since the Great Depression itself. The presentation had meant the world to her lately, cutting into all of her time that she usually spent drawing and painting.
(Which reminded Mac that he still had a smear of green paint on his arm from the night before when he had tried to get Claire away from the closet.)
"Presentation today, right?" Flack asked.
Mac searched his mind for when he had mentioned it. He didn't recall. However, Claire had stopped by for a few minutes the week before and talked to Stella. Mac supposed she told everyone she could find.
"Yeah. She's been panicking for weeks now."
"If you talk to her, tell her good luck." Flack glanced at the walls of Mac's office. "Any files yet?"
"He came in late. Of course there's nothing right now." Mac turned to see Stella walking forward, wearing a blue shirt and a thicker jacket than usual. "Mac, get the heat on or something. I think I'd rather work outside if you're keeping the place at this temperature."
"Hey," Flack greeted. Stella smiled and raised a hand slightly.
"I'll try and find the heater. Meanwhile, you two can try and find some way to contact someone at the DA's Office this early in the morning. They've been on my back for a while, and no one's been answering."
"Enemies already?" Stella joked, smiling and taking the keys from Mac's open hand to unlock his office.
Mac walked down the hall, unbuttoning his overcoat as he went. The heater was controlled from one of the room near the DNA lab, which he would unlock to save the trouble of someone forgetting their keys and having to ask him.
Once the heater was working, the building seemed to start thawing the ice frozen over the floors and walls. Mac finally felt comfortable enough to take off his overcoat and unbutton his jacket. Stella seemed comfortable with the temperature enough to show off the long-sleeved shirt she wore, which Mac was sure he had never seem before.
At least an hour passed as more workers trickled into the building, including two of the new detectives, Daniel Messer and Aiden Burn. Aiden was part of the department longer than Danny, who seemed to take a shine to her. Mac took that as a good thing to help the two with the unfamiliar cases.
Mac was shook out of his reverie when he smelled the slight trace of smoke. His years as a crime scene investigator taught him to sniff out the details: lead, mercury, asbestos… Just smoke from a building. He jumped out of his chair, unconsciously putting a hand to the cell phone at his waist as he crossed the hall to see clearly out of one of the windows. It only showed him a bright blue sky with a few white clouds and a reflection of the sun that hadn't graced the peak of day yet.
Across the hall was the door that led to the break room, which Mac trotted over to, hand still near his phone. Several voices came from inside, and Mac had to fight his way across James, one of the DNA lab techs, and Danny. When he got to the window, he couldn't quite bring himself to speak.
In church, he had heard mentions of the apocalypse. It was one of human's worries, being left alone on the God-forsaken earth. He saw what the apocalypse would look like if it wasn't already the thing in front of him. The sky was on fire, burning heaven, burning hell, burning everything in between. It tore at the slate grey sides of one of the tallest buildings along the New York skyline.
He finally took a hold of the cell phone at his waist and dialed before bringing it slowly to his ear and praying Please answer me, Claire.
Hospitals weren't meant to be loud. A loud hospital is the sign of too many sick people, moaning, yelling, calling out for people who either didn't care or were already dead.
Mac blocked out the sounds, concentrating on the breathing on the woman on the bed before him.
Claire's phone had rung and rung and rung when he called her, but as soon as he hung up to try again, Danielle called him. Danielle was one of Claire's closest friends that always visited for dinner parties with her husband, Alec. The woman sounded desperate, yelling over the other screams to Mac, telling him, "It's horrible…. It's like a thousand pounds of smog over us…. Claire's there. She was close to the stairs when I saw the building go down, and oh God, she's right there, and oh God she's going into the ambulance and please God let her be okay and come to the hospital I'll call you." Her phone clicked off and Mac stood there for a full minute before processing it.
The respirators on her face were the only thing that stopped Mac from lying down in the bed with her, thinking she was fine and just sleeping. Her brown hair sat in a pile behind her head, short and clean-cut as usual. She still wore faint traces of the blush she put on only hours ago, and the red lipstick, and the pale blue eye shadow and oh God she's never looked so beautiful, even if there was a bloody gash that's been quickly patched up across her forehead and there's dirt and dust on her cheeks and chin.
She looked as she had done back in Chicago on the day that the two of them took a trip up to Lake Michigan. The sun had already given them enough grief with the humid heat stifling them. However, Claire had managed to be blinded by the sun for long enough to trip and fall into one of the muddy holes along the bank. She raised herself slowly in a pushup, pushing enough mud off of her face to glance at Mac. Then she laughed.
Mac almost cleared a few strands of hair from her face, but didn't. There was a difference between touching a dead body for work and touching the near-dead form of his wife of twenty years.
He couldn't help but fall asleep within the next four hours. The view of nurses passing by, checking the machines hooked up to Claire and the doctors asking him quick questions because he was the only person in the world with enough time to watch over the woman turned into a blur of faces. Walk in, walk out. Leave a glass of water on the table. Leave.
"Pillow?" Mac opened his eyes and took a moment to focus on Stella, standing over him with a thick jacket on one arm and a pillow nestled in the crook of the other.
Mac nodded and took the white pillow before fixing himself in his seat. "Thanks," he whispered, feeling how scratchy his throat had gotten. He cleared it and winced as his bent neck muscles pulled. "When did you get here?"
"A few minutes ago." Stella pulled a second chair closer and looked at a spot behind his head as though afraid to meet his eyes. "Mac… she left about a minute ago."
He almost asked what Stella was talking about when his mind wrapped around the incident of the whole morning. Mac glanced at Claire's deathbed and knew that it was three in the afternoon on the eleventh day of September of the two-thousandth and first year of the creation of the world that she left him.
His hands tightened around his pillow, clawing wrinkles into the white fabric. A burningly hot lump sat in his throat, impassive, unmovable. His legs felt cold and his head felt warm while the rest of his body seemed to be in the limbo.
"I'm sorry, Mac," Stella whispered. She paused for only a second before, reaching and taking Mac's resisting body and pulling him toward her own body. "I'm so sorry."
Mac would never remember crying or being sad on that day. Once his mind shuddered under the weight of grief, he just numbed out completely. All he understood was to keep sitting there, listening to the thudding of Stella's heart compared to the heavy beating of his own, and watching one of the nurses move the body out of the room through very wet eyes.
He damned himself for missing the last seconds he had with Claire. Even if her eyes weren't open and there were no words he had left to say to her, he damned himself.
"Funeral," Mac murmured from Stella's shirtsleeve. He had already moved his grip from the pillow to his chest, where they brushed lightly on her arm.
"What?" Stella asked into his hair.
"Have to plan the funeral," Mac answered. "I'll go talk to the doctor to do something."
"I" Stella began, but Mac spoke over her with a short, "It's my job." He stood slowly, giving Stella the closest thing to a smile he could manage and said, "Thank you."
Stella gave him a small nod before he left the room.
"Are they alright?" Flack asked, pulling himself away from a folder on the table to a very grim-looking Stella.
"Claire died about an hour ago," she told him shortly.
Flack's face fell slightly as he mumbled, "She - oh no. God." He stared at the folder as though guilty before asking, "How's Mac?"
"He's staying at the hospital to plan out her funeral. He said he'll be back here in an hour or two." She shook her head and covered her eyes with one hand. From under the hand came a sad smile. "Won't even take the day off work for his wife."
"I'll call him -" Flack started, but Stella stopped him.
"Let him deal this out alone. I'll talk to him after he gets here and take him home."
Mac arrived at the building as usual, even if the sun was on the wrong side of the sky and his eyes felt dry. He wrapped his coat around himself tighter, almost as though the cold day had intensified.
Stella met him at the door, holding her bag. "Turn around," she told him, waving to the door. "Move. C'mon."
Feeling himself being ushered backwards to the doors, Mac asked, "What?"
Stella pursed her lips for a moment. "Mac. You're taking the day off whether you want it or not. You can't tell me that you're perfectly fine."
"I can handle working"
"I know. You can handle working all the time. You're going home, though."
"It's hardly right for you"
"Don't even call me your coworker, Mac. I'm your friend today. That's what you call people who take the time to drag you home to get over things."
Mac almost tried resisting, but decided to follow Stella out to her own car, a compact blue one. He did feel tired and depressed, which led him to the even worse feeling of helplessness at work. It was the only place he felt he could function anymore.
With Claire, Mac had always tried to split his time between work and home. Sure, the hours of his job were rough along the edges, and he wasn't always positive when he would be called somewhere. However, if he made a bit of careful planning, his schedule seemed normal. It was close enough to normal to match Claire's. They had their evenings together most of the time, which Mac usually used as an event to go out. Sometimes he would take her out for pizza, while, on some nights, he would make a reservation over at one of the restaurants where the two could sit for hours at a time, enjoying the view and the food and each other…
"I'll just drive myself. I don't want to stop you from doing anything tonight," Mac told her, fishing his keys from his jacket pocket.
"No," Stella answered, opening her door. "I'll drop you off and even pick you up in the morning if I have to."
Mac got into the car. Normally, he wouldn't give in so easy, but he figured that there was no other way for him to manage to get all the home without breaking down. He waited until Stella pulled out of the spot before talking to her.
"You okay?" she asked before he could start.
"StellaI can understand what you're saying. However… you have to understand that there's a reason why I came back to the office." He noticed that Stella raised her eyebrows, so he faced the dashboard as he spoke. "Some people deal with this sort of thing by sitting around their houses, moping over everything that they had ever touched. I've seen them do it. In Chicago, when Claire's dog died…" He broke off, then tried to continue, ignoring the slight crack in his voice. "She spent all of her time with the dog's collar, cried over his pillow. She even set the pillow out for two months, every night, patting it to let an invisible dog sleep on it.
"I don't do that. Even when my mother died, and my father gave me half of her belongings…" Mac couldn't remember ever speaking about this. "I just threw it away. I gave her back the pictures and trashed the rest. It's a cleansing ritual." He stared at her profile. "It doesn't feel right to have a dead spirit in your house."
Stella didn't seem to react. Mac turned to look out the window when he heard her say, "I get it."
"Just let me stay. I have some power over you. You can't drag your"
"We're both Detectives, First Class," she reminded him sternly. "Our duty is to solve the crime and to protect the evidence. No bias, no contamination." She gave him a small smile before turning back to the road in front of her. "Let's just pretend I'm saving the evidence."
When Mac didn't respond, she told him, "Alright. Go to my apartment. God knows it's glad to finally see a male body." Mac gave her a half-smile. "Feel free to stay until you're reading to do your… cleansing ritual."
Even if Mac didn't say it, Stella knew it was more to him that that. She imagined him, for just a moment, looking through the bedroom, the front room, the kitchen, just giving a final glance to Claire's private things before they left for good. She had known Claire well in the years she worked with Mac, and it pulled at her heart to think of him erasing her.
Stella pulled into the parking space outside of her apartment, leading Mac up the metal stairs until they reached her door. The crunching of the metal key in the lock seemed reassuring, as though it were an anchor to the real world, and she led him in.
"Feel free to stick around. Mi casa es su casa, right?" She lowered her voice, as though speaking of the dead was a cursed thing to do. "I promise that there're no memories here."
Mac didn't seem to pay attention. He stood staring at the painting across from the door, a painting based off of Rodin's The Cathedral. The two hands intertwined, forced together by shadows and highlights.
"The one time Claire came over here when you invited her… she fell in love with this painting. She begged me for at least two months to get a painting just like this, until you finally told her that one of your friends did it. She always said that it reminded her of Romeo and Juliet. 'For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.'"
One more time that day, Stella put her arms around Mac's shoulders and allowed him to collapse into her.
Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.
- Hippocrates