Second chances…
It's not that she doesn't believe in them. After all, her entire existence is but a second chance, or maybe a third. She stopped keeping count a long time ago.
It's a cruel joke this universe likes to play with her, returning to her what was lost only to take it back in another time.
But even so she thinks... What if? She wants to believe, she wants to believe so much.
After all, she's lost everything. What else was left to do really but believe it gets better from now on?
She sees the hesitance in his eyes when she voices that tiny seed of hope that has taken root in her against her own volition.
He won't go there with her. Not yet, not so soon. He did once, and he paid for it by having everything he loved be ripped away from him.
But our family got a second chance. So I'm gonna take it…
Maybe it was her turn to keep the faith now. Faith that they would make it, faith that the events that had destroyed her family, fractured her marriage and pushed him to the edge of darkness could be overhauled somehow.
After all they've been here once before. Maybe twice… like she said, she's stopped keeping count a long time ago.
She's wary of rewrites. The last one took the man she loved away from her, erasing all traces of him, reached into her life without permission and wrenched his memories away from her.
She's wary, because revising history doesn't particularly solve anything. She's seen for herself. Time is always more a palimpsest than a blank slate. Remnants always linger, villains simply resurface and at the end of the day, there's always another apocalypse just around the corner.
But if this is the road down which they're headed, then she can only hope that she can get it right this time.
Or maybe she'll never get the chance… the thought eats at her like poison, maybe worries him too.
Should the plan reach to fruition, how far would the events of the past unravel? The worlds that once separated them, make them different... what if they need never intertwine in a new reality?
What if Peter lived...in a universe that was his own? What if their paths never collided?
Could she still do what was needed to keep this world from dying, from turning into this living hell, if she knew it could take away the one thing, the only thing she'd ever been unequivocally selfish about?
It's laughable that she deludes herself into thinking there's a choice. When were these things up to her anyway?
But she doesn't think she would live through it…correction she doesn't want to.
It isn't an exaggeration. Somewhere down the years, after losing John and losing Charlie and losing him and losing herself and having her memories toyed with and her life swapped and her emotions manipulated and everything else, she had lost the ability to live without him, had been left with no will to survive in a universe that didn't have a place for him.
And if it didn't, well she'd damn well make him a place.
You have no idea what you mean to me. She would whisper to him at nights while he slept, as she traced invisible patterns in his stubble and thought of the million different ways her life would be hell without him.
She needs him too much to do without…
It's the flaw in her foundation, the defect in the design of the men who made her into this…..with their drugs and their doctrines and their hubris.
They meant for her to want nothing and need no one.
She wanted and needed Peter and nothing else. Not houses or joint bank accounts or some idyllic domesticity, matching rings of metal and nurseries….
She never wanted any of that, didn't ask for it, only that he be there by her side.
But it all happened and it happened to her and she dared to believe for some time that it was all real and here to stay.
I think we're going to get our daughter back…
It's a transitive relationship that gave her her daughter in the first place. Etta was hers because she was always meant to be Peter's. His more than hers, she thinks.
The universe owed him after all. A child that was meant to be in place of one that never was. A changeling of fate that found its way into her hands to right mistakes that never ought to have been made, a restoration of order in patterns mapped across lifetimes and presents, pasts and futures.
To him, she had been absolution, a sign of deliverance.
To her, she had always been too perfect to be real, an abstraction more than an anchor, as intangible as she was corporeal.
She had reigned over them, sitting pretty and ethereal, on the pedestal they put her on, because she was flawless and she was theirs, with an imp like smile and feet like quick silver, ruling their hearts and lives with but a turn of her lips. Her smile spelt peace and every frown meant there was work to be done.
Even when the pedestal crumbled and the world changed and she changed with it, even when she was battle-hardened through loss and the need to survive and her faults were there plain as day to see as were her strengths, in eyes that had shone a long time ago with excitement and innocence and pure unbridled happiness.
She never stopped being perfect to Olivia. She never stopped being too good to be true, to be real.
But Peter was always real. Peter was flawed and broken and real. Peter had been lost and found and found again.
Peter made mistakes, Peter screwed up, and Peter broke her heart more than once.
But Peter came back.
Etta died. Etta was lost and found and Etta died and Olivia couldn't save her and somewhere, somehow that's on her.
That'll always be on her.
"I love you so much."
She wanted to make sure Etta knew, because it was absolutely necessary that she didn't leave this world not knowing what she meant, how much she meant to Olivia. No child should ever have to wonder whether she was loved by her mother. It's a dreadful question to carry with to one's grave.
Peter never needed to say it, because Etta already knew, she knew his heart like he knew hers.
Olivia never had to ask, whom do you love more? To either one of them…. Because she already knew the answer. She never asked, because to ask a child to choose is a terrible sin, a game of favorites no parent should ever play, to try and quantify affection, to compare and find oneself shorted.
But then Etta never made that decision, neither did Peter for that matter. Olivia made it for the both of them. By simply being who she was. By second guessing and doubting and never letting go and appreciating what she had, too caught up in her shortcomings to see that there were all those times she got it right. All those times when her daughter sought her and she came through…
Etta needed much, she needed attention and love and care and protection. Etta needed reassurance and Etta simply needed her….
It's difficult to imagine being needed like that, the way a child needs her mother. It overwhelmed Olivia then. It overwhelms her now too.
It also humbles her to think someone could want her so much for being just her. That she was indispensable to someone's life to such a measure.
There is something about the way Etta would look at her when she came home that always killed her a little on the inside, her expression one of relief, always anxious, always a little uncertain like somehow she wasn't entirely sure Olivia would return, before it turned into one of joy as she hugged her fiercely and buried her face against the bare skin of her neck.
"I missed you mommy." She would say earnestly, her words endearing, honest and yet slicing right through her.
Don't forsake me… don't you see you're my entire world. Olivia heard her say in her mind as she hugged her little girl.
"I missed you too baby." She would whisper back.
Maybe she understood intuitively, that Olivia struggled with it, this immense expectation her daughter couldn't help but make of her. She was always far too patient for any three year old, always too quick to forgive her absences, too understanding when she couldn't be there for her.
And it only made the guilt that much worse.
The more Etta turned to her, the more Olivia turned to Peter. The more she reached out to her, the more she clung to him. It was a chain reaction of the simplest kind. She watched over Etta and he would watch over her, over both of them. It's the pattern of their life. They took care of each other, because there was no one else who could.
He was the conduit that connected them, independent of which she would have never made it, she thinks, resisted that strange pull, that disconcerting call of duty that was so at odds with the love she felt for her child.
Peter needed her too... but then she's always needed him more.
Somewhere they met halfway and made it work, built something that resembled family and emulated happiness.
And now she could have that back or be left with nothing at all, a zero sum game if there ever was one.
What was written will come to pass...
For years she has waited.
What she was waiting for with bated breath, she didn't understand, but she did. Every night she read Goodnight Moon to Etta and every morning she kissed her husband and went to work and indulged Walter's daily brand of crazy and investigated cases.
And she waited.
Was she that kind of person? The kind of person who would wake up one night and walk out on her family to fight a battle because it was what she was built to do best.
Would she have abandoned her child to be someone else's warrior?
You did, the cruel voice in her head reminds her. She left to try and save the world while Peter stayed.
Did all her efforts, and she tried so hard, she really did, to be a good mother mean nothing if she could be so easily pulled by strings someone had attached to her so long ago.
If life were to repeat itself, would she do anything differently?
She would, she will, she will… she tells herself. This time around there will be no waiting, no second guessing, no questioning.
This time if a second chance comes her way, she'll take it.