Funhouse
"Hey, babe," Alex's voice crackles out of the Dictaphone, out of another decade.
"I'm calling because—shit. Piper, I'm fucked over here. I don't—" the tape pops and buzzes and Alex hisses, mutters "fuck." It was the sound of a gunshot, once, but the static ate the bang years ago. "Listen baby, I don't know if I'm going to be back. I want—I love you, Piper, okay? I love you. And I hope you're—when you listen, I hope you're safe, I hope you're happy, now, then, whenever you're listening to this, I love you. For the rest of my life, cross my heart. Okay. Bye."
Piper listens to the wheels of the Dictaphone hum. Hits stop, hits rewind. Hits play.
"Hey, babe," Alex says.
"Hey, Alex," Piper says back.
"I'm calling because—shit. Piper, I'm fucked over here."
The first time Piper heard the voicemail, she screamed. She didn't sleep. She was nineteen and stupid, she swore to herself about everlasting love. She stayed in that hotel for an entire month, waiting for Alex or her corpse to tumble back into her life, replaying her last words, mouthing them with her, crying at the second "I love you."
Alex had shown up again, after three whole weeks, but not as a corpse, as a breathing, auburn woman who had slipped into the hotel room and kissed Piper so gently she saw stars."Horny?" Alex asked, after the kiss. She was smirking when she said it, and already reaching under Piper's shirt to get at the clasp of her bra. Piper was trembling under her fingertips.
"No," Piper said, and gripped Alex's warm, deliciously solid, living shoulder. Just undone.
It had been like that in the chapel, too. It had been the first time they kissed in ten years and she felt like it, like she had been starving every day of every one of those years and now she was filling up with Alex's slim fingers in a way she had been starving with Larry (but there was hollowness, too, where Larry had cradled her in his arms and Alex dug in her fingernails), and she shuddered and broke and sobbed into Alex's shoulder, sobbed about Larry, sobbed about being alone, sobbed about being herself, sobbed about the conviction and the drugs and the memories.
Her bed is emptier now that Alex has come and gone, and Piper is nineteen and twenty five and twenty nine all at once, three different eras of loss jangling in her skull while she tries to keep herself anchored to the now, but there is no now, or there is an endless plateau of nows, and they all bite. The empty hotel bed is the empty prison bed is the empty apartment bed and each is haunted by the full, full memories of Alex around and inside her in hotel, prison, apartment, car. Piper is alone but in her head she is not, in her head Alex is in tears over the drugs, or joking about Crazy Eyes, or taking off her shirt, just in the next room, just at the far end of the bed, just a touch or a glance or a thought away. But Piper glances and touches and listens, and Alex is nowhere. Empty hotel, apartment, car, cell.
Her head kept flying away with Larry, too, even the night of his proposal. He kissed her and pinned her against the wall and she had been lost in the time in Prague where Alex had done the same, instead of in him. Larry had stopped and asked her what was wrong and Piper had said nothing, but she could smell the streets of Prague just as well as she could smell the organic candles he had lit around the bed, and she wished that he had sharper hands. She kissed his lips and held his hands and hated herself for the smell of Prague, for the way her lip tingled where Alex had nipped it a world away and a lifetime ago.
And now, in this now (all of the nows?) Piper is in her cell getting dizzy with the reflections of her and Alex, her with Larry but dreaming of Alex, her without Larry and with Alex and remembering herself being with Larry and remembering Alex, during the first breakup, the second, a set of a thousand mirrors angled at each memory of a memory inside her head.
They echo so much louder without a body next to her. A body had always soaked up the noise.
And sometimes Piper thinks she should never have walked out of Alex's life the first time (while Alex cried and begged, begged her to stay), much less the second (while Alex looked at her, face set, and told her that they could never speak again). But it didn't matter, really, whether it was a wreck or a skipper that just needed a new coat of paint, Piper had smashed it for kindling just the same.
Piper would kill for that Dictaphone, but even Red couldn't smuggle it from the suburbs to her prison cot. She tries to hear it in her head, but the words are fuzzy with static and a decade and two breakups (or was it two hundred? she loses count). "I love you, Piper, okay? I love you. And I hope you're—when you listen, I hope you're safe, I hope you're happy, now, then, whenever you're listening to this, I love you. For the rest of my life, cross my heart," and Piper can't even get herself to cry anymore, Piper is heading away from the smoke, Piper is heading inland, walking on her own two feet—and she will stop smelling like salt water, eventually, and maybe be eaten alive.