subtraction
The first time she leaves, Forrest isn't entirely sure of what it is he's seeing, exactly. There is Maggie, of course, up too early, heavy bags under her eyes suggesting yet another sleepless night, the spark in her baby blues gone, snuffed out, as if it had never been. Her shoulders are weighed down by some invisible burden, her hands shake as she lights a cigarette and takes a nervous puff. And at her feet is a suitcase. Poking out of it is the sleeve of a red sweater. She hadn't even bothered to pack neatly, throwing everything in haphazardly. He looks between her and the suitcase and has no idea why they are together there in his vision, two things that should be separate, that had no right to be standing before him.
"I'm leaving," she says and she stares at him, waiting.
He doesn't know what she's waiting for so he waits too. After a moment of silence, she takes another drag of her cigarette and exhales deeply, and she shakes her head, puts the cigarette out, picks up the suitcase and leaves.
The screen door quietly closes behind her. He is rooted to the spot, staring at the space of old wooden floorboards where she had been standing moments ago. The sounds of her Ford coming to life, and then driving away, he hears as though from the other side of a long, winding tunnel. And then she's gone.
Time passes and Forrest realizes that his legs are stiff and he really should move but he can't. Jack arrives, rubbing his eyes and sidestepping Forrest, going straight for the cooler. Howard comes in a few hours later, his eyes bloodshot and his face pale. He looks at Forrest for a good minute before pulling a jar full of clear liquid out of nowhere and handing it to him. Forrest accepts it and he takes a long, hard gulp. Fire burns through him, in his throat and down to his stomach, freeing him from the numbness he has been standing in. And with feeling comes the awareness that Maggie is not here anymore. She is probably out of Virginia by now. Probably thinking about getting a hotel for the night. He should have offered her some more money. Or at least offered to fill her car with gas before she left. A cold dread builds in his stomach, fills him like the drink in his hands, until he is sure that if he doesn't sit down, he will worry himself unconscious.
As though reading his thoughts, Howard, the presence of whom Forrest had forgotten completely, grabs his arm and sits him down on the nearest chair.
"Maggie?" The question comes out softly, quietly, at odds with the haggard look on his brother's face.
Forrest grunts in the affirmative, and Howard places another jar of moonshine on the table before him and retreats.
That night, Forrest gets as drunk as he has ever been in his entire life and passes out right on that chair. He awakens sometime in the night to the sound of the door of his room closing and is aware of his bed underneath him for a second until he passes out again. When he next finds consciousness, it is to a headache the scope and magnitude of which he will never be able to fully understand. Automatically, he reaches for Maggie, for a touch of her soft skin or a lock of her hair, for reassurance and comfort, for a smile or a glimpse of those blue eyes, but his hand falls on empty sheets and he remembers why he is so hungover.
Next comes several days of numbness, an endless cycle of drinking, sleeping, waking up, nursing a hangover with more liquor, and then sleeping some more. His brothers do not question his sudden reclusiveness and he assumes they are running the shop but doesn't bother checking because leaving the room will destroy any of the detachment he feels. He is hyperaware of the room next door and that the sheets will probably still have her scent clinging to them but he doesn't enter it. He won't defile it with his inebriation, won't disturb the memories lingering in the dust coating everything. He won't destroy the haven she had made her own when the violence around her became so severe that she had to pack her bags and take off, because if she comes back, this is where she will live, and it has to remain just as it is.
And she does come back, sometime later. Forrest doesn't know how long she has been gone but when he sees her in the doorway of his room, looking as fresh as a raindrop, he is suddenly out of his bed and pressing her against him without care of her fragility or delicacy and when he breathes in her scent, like cigarettes and old perfume and air and life, it's like she never left.
.
The second time she leaves, he runs after her and throws himself in front of the car so she has no choice but to come out and confront him.
"You cannot die right in front of my eyes and expect me to stay and watch you do it again!" she yells, pounding on his chest with her tiny fists and it's so feeble a motion that he hardly feels it at all. "I will not endure something like that again. I've said that before, but this time I mean it!"
He doesn't respond- all his energy is focused on standing upright, his walking stick tossed on the floor of the porch in his haste to reach her, to stop her. His broken leg aches, throbs, screams for him to sit down. This is exactly what the doctor warned him against. Words bubble on the tip of his tongue like champagne but he swallows them back and they leave a bad taste in his mouth. Maggie looks like she wants to scream but she composes herself and settles for a dry sob instead.
Forrest wants to press her face to his chest and kiss her head and tell her that it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay, but she shoves him roughly and jumps into her car, her shoulders hunched as she braces herself.
"Move," she shouts.
He won't.
"I will run you over, Forrest!"
He knows she won't and indicates as such with a raised eyebrow. And she bursts into tears, pounding on the steering wheel with such force that the entire car shakes. He stumbles to the driver's side, using the hood of the car for support even as it burns his hand from the heat of the motor underneath and the merciless summer sun above, and he reaches the window, his skin pale and clammy, his teeth gritted against the pain. He is sure he has stretched the stitches under his cast because hot blood trickles down his leg and maybe he really will bleed to death this time instead of halfway but Maggie has to be stop, he needs her to be stopped.
"You will die and I will be alone, and I can't take that," she chokes out. "I can't watch you try to stretch that immortality shit, don't ask me to!"
He wants to say something but the words won't come out. He wants to say, "I love you," and "please don't go," and "I will change," and "what the hell do you even want from me," but all that comes out is a strangled grunt that doesn't convey anything except maybe irritation at the blatant betrayal of his own tongue against him.
Maggie hits the gas hard and accelerates, half dragging Forrest with her. He falls onto his leg and is sure it is broken again from the blinding, hair raising pain it causes him, and he gets into his car and drives to the hospital to get it looked at and when he comes back home, he goes into her room and demolishes it. A voice in his head says to him, severe and insolent, "This is what happens when you fall in love and this is exactly what you deserve," and it is right, he decides. This is what he has been protecting himself against and now he gets what he deserves for breaking this one rule that he has never broken for anyone before. Maggie gone is the worst pain in the world and he sits in the ruins of her room and basks in it, and he tells himself that this will never happen again.
Two days later, Jack finds him in the office squinting at the ledger. He's taken to looking through it a lot lately. The numbers alleviate the turmoil inside. They're constant, reliable, consistent. Jack has to clear his throat to drag Forrest's attention from the numbers. He gives the boy an inquisitive glance, and immediately, Jack squares his chin and raises himself to his full height and says, "Forrest, I am going to go ask Bertha to marry me now, and if I don't come back by nightfall, you should send someone to come look for me 'cause her father might've murdered me."
Forrest thinks through the statement and of responding but Jack's eyes are hard and they dare him to tell him to back off, to reconsider. Jack is too young to be married, Goddamn it, but the youth will not back down and Forrest knows that. But he also knows the ache in his chest, the hollow cavity where his heart used to be before Maggie took it with her, and he thinks that if Jack has to go through that then he will die.
"Have you thought about this?" he asks.
Jack crosses his arms and nods firmly. "Yes, I have, and I'm gonna do it, and you can't stop me."
Forrest wants to say, "You are an ass," but turns from Jack with a sigh and a promise that if he doesn't appear by nightfall, he will go look for his body.
Jack comes back at sunset alive and well and brimming with a newfound confidence that Howard dims down with plenty of hard liquor "for our own sakes," he says. Forrest grabs the opportunity and drinks himself asleep, and is roughly awoken sometime in the night when, he sees as he brings his face to peer past his slightly ajar door into the hall, that Jack has apparently decided to try and sneak Bertha into Maggie's room.
They are giggling and whispering and shushing each other, and then there is a silence when Jack pushes the door open and they behold the wreckage of her room.
"What happened in here?" Bertha's voice, small and diminutive, whispers.
"Forrest," Jack replies, and he closes the door. "He's out of sorts. Maggie's up and left him again. Don't look like she'll be coming back, either."
"Why?" Bertha presses.
Forrest thinks that Jack will shrug and they'll drop the subject and go find another room to fool around in, but Jack surprises him with his response.
"He's too much for her," is the youth's reply. "It takes a lot to watch him walk out the door, and even more to wait for him to come back, because he might not. He thinks he'll live forever, that nothing can kill him, so he can get reckless, and it did a number on Maggie's nerves. She used to be something. Now she's just... a ghost. Just waiting for someone to come tell her he's died."
"So she left," Bertha finished for him.
Jack confirms with a nod.
Forrest closes his door and hears them jump at the sound. And he tries to sleep that night but his youngest brother's words echo in his ears until the sun breaks over the horizon and he has to get up again.
It's about a month this time, he knows because he's been scratching the days into the wall behind his bedpost where no one can see, until she comes back. His leg has set and healed, mostly, so he had them take off the cast because it itched, and he is trying to pull on a pair of pants when she suddenly walks into his room and sees him on one leg, in his underwear. She laughs, and then cries, and then she hugs him and they fall onto the floor and there's pain, a lot of it, from his leg. But there's a lightness he hasn't felt in a long time and that's all he really feels.
.
The third time, it's different. He can't dissuade her, or even try, because of the brace they make him wear around his neck and his concussion makes everything strange and dimmed, like he's drunk even when he's stone cold sober. Maggie doesn't even take everything, as though all she wants is to be away, gone, and clothes and accessories, none of that even matters. He watches her go from his window and then falls asleep, and when he wakes up, he searches the property for her for half an hour, even though the doctor specifically told him not to exert himself. Things are hazy, and he is disoriented, and twice through his search, he has to sit on something and remind himself what he is looking for. And then, an hour after he left his room, he goes back to Maggie's, the space still smelling like paint from when he had it remodeled, but there is the scent of perfume and cigarette smoke hanging to a sweater she left in her wardrobe and he holds on to it until his fingers are numb and the image of the sweater in his hands is crisp in his mind, thrown into sharp focus amidst the fuzziness of everything else around him.
Months pass. He locks the door to her room and buries the key, and he tells himself she has died, but it doesn't work.
Howard has a baby, and the little thing is so small that Forrest wonders how he could once have been like that. He watches Howard bring the child close to his face and it makes his chest tighten until he can't breathe, and he excuses himself from the ward with a grumble and goes outside for some air.
He thinks about dying for real this time. He must have used up his nine lives by now. Maybe that's what Maggie really needs. Stability. Peace of mind. Not hanging over the edge of a cliff, between falling and not falling. If he dies, there is nothing more concrete, more stable, than that.
Jack and Bertha have a little engagement party and Forrest leaves after twenty minutes because he can't take the sight of the two gazing at each other over the table. He sits out on the porch and rocks himself on the rocking chair and swigs from the bottle on his lap and feels his mind cloud with that welcoming haze.
He digs the key out and sleeps in her room a few times, but wakes up early so no one can see him emerge from it.
The ledger tells him business is picking up, but Prohibition will not last forever and Forrest begins to draft out alternative lifestyles. He likes looking at the ledger, at the simple math that will never change. Add something, the number will go up. Subtract, the number will go down. It is nothing like life, he muses, nothing like what he feels. Subtract one person, and a person a fourth his size, which in numbers would hardly be of any significance, and he is somehow less of a person. He is not a whole Forrest. He is a fraction of a Forrest, and it baffles him.
Most nights, he lies in her bed and covers himself with her blanket and drapes the sweater over his face and thinks that she is damned and that the day he met her was a curse and that he would invent some contraption that would take him back in time and kick her right out when she came to ask for a job. She was a coward, he decided as he clutched at her sweater and tried to erase the image of her wearing it from his mind. She was a coward and whatever she was doing right then, it wasn't living, because people couldn't make a life from just running whenever something went wrong.
And with a start he realizes that he would do it again, just as before, if he could go back, because she was the bane of his existence just as she was the best thing that ever happened to him.
And he still hasn't wrapped his mind around that when she comes back, snow collecting in her hair as it falls in earnest outside. She is blown in with the draft she lets in when she opens the door. He wants to throw the ledger on the floor and run to her but the room is full of people so he waits for her to cross it and sit beside him at the table.
"I'm back," she says. Her eyes are alight, the sparkle is back. He hasn't seen it in so long that for a while he was terrified he'd forgotten what they looked like, when they weren't ringed with dark circles and dulled with worry. She is different, more alive than he has ever seen her. She has discovered something too. She cut her hair, he hears that everybody's doing it now, and he reaches forth to touch a curl that dangles over her forehead teasingly.
"I went back to Chicago, but it wasn't the same," she tells him. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a navy blue lump of knitwear. "I got you a new sweater. I know how much you love those horrible things."
He doesn't even spare it a glance, his eyes on hers, his hand tangled in her hair. She looks like she wants to say something else, but her mouth closes and tears like diamonds glitter in her eyes and she whispers, "I'm back, Forrest."
"You are not to leave me again," he whispers, and once that is out, the rest follows like a dam in him has broken and everything he has ever wanted to say is finally coming out in one, shining moment. "To make sure you don't, I will marry you. That's that."
A laugh bursts out of her mouth and fills the air around him like the scent of the land just before it rains. "Alright, then, let's get married."
He gives an approving grunt, and sits back to better take her in, and then flattens the tire of her car while she's asleep, just to take leaving out of the equation. But she doesn't leave again, and he doesn't almost-die again for at least another year, and he thinks that it's just simple math, Maggie added again, only there's nothing simple about it. And that is perfectly okay.