we ache, like children, for love
He's leaning against the wall, watching proceedings with a wry smile on his face. The little boy, his face a picture, is front and centre, as is right on his birthday, watching with wide eyes as the cake is brought towards him and the assorted friends and family sing an off-key version of happy birthday.
He's both with and without, there but not quite, a spectator, surveying proceeding as they unfold and he is good with that. He is fine with watching from afar. He enjoys the idea that he is with his family, for years he could not have said that, and it makes him happy. He knows his own track record with his marriages and children is a desperate, sorry mess, and he likes to think he at least got it right once.
Jess is floating around, tending to ten year olds, who are downing juice like shots, and engaging their parents in brief bouts of conversation here and there. The kids are running around like mad things, making him feel his age. He feels glad that Jess seems to him to be happy; his daughter, the one time he didn't manage to mess up quite as spectacularly as he did with his other children. He knows that there was a time, years ago now, where he wasn't quite sure if that would be the case, but the years have healed the wounds that once stood, fresh and painful between them.
'You look happy,' someone says, and it takes him a long moment to realise it is he who the words are addressed to. He looks up and into two dark eyes set in a face he hasn't seen for twenty years or more.
'Anna,' he says, surprised, but not quite as much as he should, given the years between now and their last meeting. 'I thought you and Jess...' he trails off, leaving his implication hanging.
'Yeah,' she replies, shrugging. 'And then one day, I thought, I'm not going to die without speaking to my daughter for twenty years. I mean that's terrible, isn't it?'
He doesn't know what to say to that, and Anna continues, saving him the reply.
'So I tracked her down, and we've been... rebuilding.'
He nods.
'She never told me what happened, you know,' he says, slowly.
'I doesn't matter now. I'm not proud of it,' Anna says, shaking her head. 'So, how are you? It's been a while.'
He shrugs. 'The years could have been kinder.'
'I know what you mean.'
'How's John?'
Anna frowns at him. 'John?'
'The man you left me for. You married him I seem to recall.'
'Oh, John, he was a right-' She stops herself, swear caught on her tongue, her eyes caught by the small children running past. 'You get the picture. No, John left me a long time ago.'
He nods.
'And what about you? You were with that young thing, weren't you? No, I remember - Diane or Denise or something who was half your age. I take it she didn't stick around.'
He stares at his feet, remaining quiet. He can hear the buzz of children, the murmur of conversation.
'Didn't end well, then?' Anna asks.
He doesn't reply.
'Oh, dad, there you are.'
He looks up. Jess stands before him.
'Sorry I didn't tell you mum was going to be here. I've been rushed off my feet all day and then...' She trails off, sensing that something's wrong.
'You haven't managed to argue already have you?' she says, tiredly. 'I don't need another headache.'
'No,' he says.
'I was just reminding your dad of his age. I reminded him the last time I saw him he was seeing that girl who was twenty years younger than him. You remember Jess - I think you met her.'
He looks away again, out the window - anywhere but here, but he can feel Jess' gaze lingering on him as she struggles to find what to say.
'Oh,' she finally says.
'What?' Anna says, looking between her daughter and her ex-husband. 'Touchy topic?'
'Oh, look Mum, Jacob looks like he could do with some help,' Jess says, her tone jovial but forced, hollow. Anna frowns, confused, as Jess shuffles her away, leading her towards her grandson.
He watches them go, thankful for Jess' quick thinking.
After a few minutes, he sees Jess heading back towards him. He kicks his heels on floor. He doesn't want to have this conversation.
'Dad,' Jess starts. 'I'm sorry. She doesn't know, of course, but still.' She pauses, gauging his reaction. 'I know it was hard for you.'
He shrugs, his eyes still fixed somewhere beyond Jess' shoulder.
'It was a long time ago.'
'She meant a lot to you, dad - you don't have to pretend she didn't.'
'Jess,' he says, wearily. He rubs his eyes, suddenly worn-out. 'It doesn't matter.'
He thinks, for a moment, that she'll leave it, but he knows his daughter, knows how stubborn she can be.
'Dad, she-'
'I said leave it Jess.' His words are snapped, and rather too loud for their surroundings. Everyone around them turns to look, parents and children alike, staring with frowns and disproving glares.
'I'm sorry, Jess,' he says, quietly, after a long moment.
She mutters something under her breath, something that sounds suspiciously like 'bloody hell, dad' and he finds his eyes are glued to his feet again.
'Come through here,' Jess says, tugging on his sleeve, and he entertains the idea of saying no, and walking out of here, going home, anything to avoid what he knows is coming, especially now he has lost his temper with her, but he doesn't. Instead he lets her lead him like a child away from the looks and the stares.
They go through a set of double doors, out into the cool evening air.
'Want to explain what that was all about?' she demands.
'It was years ago. It isn't important anymore, Jess.'
She looks at him, almost but not quite open mouthed at his dismissive words.
'Your ex-girlfriend parks her car in front of a train because you're marrying another woman and you say it doesn't matter anymore? The ex you still loved, remember?'
He closes his eyes.
'Don't be so flippant, Jess.'
'I'm being deadly serious.'
'It was-'
'If you tell me it was a long time ago again I swear I'm going to lose my temper with you, dad.' She looks like she might already be at the end of her tether, but he doesn't say anything more. 'Things that happen in the past,' Jess says, 'they matter just as much as what's happening now.'
She pauses, her eyes searching his face.
'Do you think if I pretended that Leo wasn't dead, it wouldn't hurt? If I pretended that my son wasn't dead?' Her stark words hit him and he cannot look her in the eye. 'Because it doesn't work, dad. Losing people, it bloody hurts and they say all that crap about time making it better but in my experience it does nothing. I have Jacob, I'm happy, but that doesn't change what happened.'
'It's-' he starts. 'It's hard to talk about it. About her.'
'I know, dad. But it's better than bottling it up, pretending that she meant nothing to you.'
'But what good does it do? Talking about it? Now it's all over, done with.'
'Is it though? Is it over, done with? Can it ever be?'
'She's dead. That's it.'
'Grief is a funny thing, dad. It doesn't work like that.' She pauses, then - 'Sometimes I remember his little hands. How small they were. And it hurts me every time. And don't you go saying that this is different, because it's not. You loved her, even I knew that.'
He swallows. 'Sometimes-' He screws up his eyes, kicks his feet again. 'There's just so much that I wished I said to her.'
'I know, dad. I know.'
'There's so much regret, Jess. I have- so much regret.'
Jess moves towards him, pulling him into a hug.
'Oh, dad.' She buries her head in his chest. 'Life can be so crap, can't it?' she mumbles into his chest.
He nods even though she can't see him.
He feels like something is on his shoulder, like shadow but not quite, the whisper of a monster, big and terrifying and overwhelming. He struggles to place it, and then, all of a sudden, he sees its face, and he knows.
It's grief, his familiar hands clawing their way inside again.
...
He is sitting at the table, watching again.
Anna comes over, hesitantly, and slides into a seat beside him.
'She died,' he says, haltingly, in the face of Anna's unspoken questions.
'Who?' she pretends, unable to look at him.
'Diane. The woman you were talking about earlier.'
She doesn't say anything, and Ric is reminded that she was always a woman who used silence as a tool. He can remember the silence the day he asked her to marry him, teasing and light, a pause here, and false look of considering her options, then a yes, quiet, but there. She was unusually quiet in the days leading up to the moment she handed him a positive pregnancy test, of course mute. And of course, the day she left him for another man there was a lot of silence.
He can remember well that she always liked to make him talk. She told him once that she liked hearing him speak, liked his causal authority, the low timbre of his voice. He wonders where that woman, young, carefree, went. He doesn't like the fact that he can see the evidence of time on her face, across from him. It reminds him of his own mortality, of the slow progress of the something he can't fix, can't save, unlike all the patients he saves day in, day out - like Diane, all those years before.
'Ric,' she says, and in that one word - his name - he can hear her apology and she knows he does. They did once know each other well, though now they are strangers.
'I need a cigarette,' she says, suddenly, her fingers drumming on the table.
He hasn't smoked since the last time he was in Ghana, fifteen years ago. His father's cigars, smoked beside Abra puffing away on his cigarettes, talking about how they were killing themselves slowly. A time when she was there, alive - breathing and angry and oh so alive. Fifteen years ago.
How things have changed.
He joins her for a smoke.
They stand outside, leaning against the wall outside the hall with the all the people who are younger than them, all the harried parents and kids full of unbounded energy.
Anna takes a long drag on her cigarette.
He watches her hand, remembers that she used to do this sat at their kitchen table and he used to hate it, because it made Jess mad when she'd come home and smell the smoke, even when she was young. It was something they were all always arguing about. Ric didn't smoke then, never has, not properly, the odd one here and there, and his father's cigars. It's strange, given that he deals with people like Anna, heavy-smokers, people who given themselves lung cancer, often, knows the affects of such a diagnosis, on the patient, on their family.
He puts out his cigarette.
Anna doesn't say anything as he crushes it under his foot, raising an eyebrow. More silence.
Then, quietly, 'I think people just want to be loved.'
He frowns.
'Me - I just want Jess to love me. Jess wants Jacob to love her, wants me to love her, you to love her. And you - well Jess always was the apple of your eye.'
He shrugs.
She takes a long breath in, blowing out the smoke before she continues.
'Did you love her? Your dead girl who was half your age, who made you feel young?'
He kicks his heels, staring away into the distance.
'I think you did. Maybe still do.'
He doesn't look up. Even after all this time, Anna understands him, and she knows it.
He thinks back to the first moment he held Jess, so very long ago now, how small her hands were, how he could hold her in one arm - how he smiled so much his cheeks ached for weeks. He thinks back to the moment Anna told him she didn't love him anymore, that there was someone else. He thinks back to the moment Elliot pulled him to one side after surgery, told him that it was Diane, that she was dead.
He suddenly wants the cigarette back, or maybe a drink.
'I loved her very much, Anna.'
His dead girl who was half his age, who made him feel young. His ex-girlfriend who parked her car in front of a train because he was marrying another woman. The woman he wants to say so much to but never can.
He turns away from her. Anna continues smoking.
Then, 'And did she love you?'
He doesn't even think about the answer. They wouldn't even be having this conversation if she hadn't.
'Very much.'
...
a/n The Title is from Noble Aim by Sleeping at Last