Claire has decided she likes the feeling of dirt on her skin, under her nails, in her hair.
There was a time when the idea of stepping into nature without running her feet under tap water immediately afterwards was unthinkable. She used to run home from the fish and fry, finding her roughest loofah and scratching her skin raw, pool shampoo in her palm and lather, rise, repeat until the water ran cold and she didn't smell like grease. She wouldn't even let Thomas kiss her until she'd showered.
But she's discovered she likes the chafe of sand sticking to her legs, of soot on her forearms, or grass on her knees.
She can roll on the ground and smile at the stains.
She was ready for a change.
Life after rescue isn't that different than it was on the island, Claire discovers, because the colors are still muted and the fear never really goes away.
She drives more than she had before, buys a tiny compact that's easier to parallel park and a car seat. The salesman had offered her airbags, said they were top of the line and cutting edge technology. She'd refused and he didn't understand. There was no way to explain to him the odds of wrecking again. She'd been in enough crashes for her lifetime.
The work is the same as she'd remembered it, unpacking and refrigerating, deep-frying and battering, serving and smiling. The smell she can get used to and tiny spatters of grease burns on her wrists and palms don't bother her that much, especially since she kind of revels in the sting.
In the end it doesn't matter because they promote her to manager, she suspects out of pity, and nothing changes. Except that the pay is better and her voice hurts more at night.
After awhile she's bored, a problem she hadn't had before the island because she'd never experienced life and not on the island because there she experienced too much of it. Before long she just needs to feel the thrill of something new and unworn.
The vinyl gloves feel foreign on her skin, even if she'd done this before. The crimson goes on smooth and slick. Claire finger-combs it through her hair, avoiding her scalp, and sits perched on the bathroom sink, ignoring the thump-thump against her shoulders. It's an old T-shirt anyway.
She steps into the shower carefully, her foot landing with purpose on the tile floor. The water runs red as she passes under the spray and it reminds her of blood, but she quickly tries to forget how she knows about such things.
She knows it's lucky that Aaron doesn't remember. He's still small, too tiny to ride on roller coasters or sit in regular seats at restaurants, but she can already tell he doesn't shiver at the sound of waves and that he can have a teddy bear tea party with Sun's daughter without getting nauseous. He's not like her, and she's grateful for that. But Claire has decided he will know one thing from the island.
He asked her once who his daddy was, and even though she had known from the beginning that the question would come, it doesn't soothe the dull ache in her gut. She decides to take him to the record store down the street and not the struggling art studio across town to answer his question. In the end the name or the face is of no consequence because this story can only end with the space by her side abandoned and she playing all the parts in her baby's life. Claire never really wanted to be a mother, and now she has to be a father too.
Claire is the eternal widow, just like in the sepia broken movies that never seemed to make any sense to her, waiting for her sea-born husband to return. He won't and she knows it, but her eye is always turned toward the crashing ocean, hair whipping around her face the manifestation of her own self-deprecation.
She's resigned herself for waiting her whole life for a reality that has never existed and never will.
It aches, but she gets used to the pain.
Like most only children, she thinks, Claire had wanted a sibling. Someone to carry her lunch box to the school bus and promise to beat up the bullies if they picked on her. By the time her mother was in the hospital and she learned the truth about her father, she couldn't help but feel the same need as she went through the tears and the tests alone. Her aunt was too bitter and her friends too busy being carefree to guide her, prop her up long enough to gain back her strength. She wished she wasn't the only one to turn to.
Claire doesn't think of him as her brother. Or at least not exactly. On the island Jack played the protector role nicely, as if it was born for him and he for it. He shepherded the helpless and not so helpless in the direction of safety while staying behind himself, fixing even the wounds far more than skin deep.
When they find out during the routine blood tests after the rescue, she's less surprised than he is. It doesn't change much, except that she chooses him as her emergency contact and now Aaron has more family than those that she remembers under a thatched bamboo roof or huddling in the rain.
He was real and solid, except that as soon as he could be her shoulder to lean on he wasn't any more. It hurt her to see him drunk and alone, more so because she wished she could join him, but she leaves on a breath and only the trace of her flowery shampoo remains.
It may have been selfish, but in all her fantasies she wasn't ever the strong one.
There was time, when sex was still something exciting and she was designing the pattern for the tattoo she was going to get straight out of high school, that she thought she would become something.
Her world was small, like the space inside of a glass globe, and in retrospect it threw her dreams out of proportion. Claire could laugh at the stupidest jokes for a month, could be satisfied with dying her hair the color of shadows, dropping matches in empty liqueur bottles and watching the burn.
She finds that she's not that different now, only she's got a baby not a tattered messenger bag on her shoulder and she's reached the edges of the universe and swam back.
Her world is shrinking and she's letting it. Soon maybe she'll be satisfied with the same tired old shit and she'll forget what it's like to have no hope because there wasn't a time when she'd had too much of it.
It fills up her head like water. And she's sinking.
Claire likes the view better from here.
This nameless thing she has with him had begun uneventfully and she is sure it would end the same way.
Claire's relieved she'd let go of the romantic image of candlelight and satin sheets so long ago she barely remembers, because this never falls into anyone's category of amorous ideality.
He's shoving her into the chain-link fence behind the restaurant, one knee parting her legs, as she tries to forget the clang of registers opening and the hum inside that she can never shake out of her ears.
The fence bounces back but neither of them really notices.
She buries her fingers in his hair, shorter than it was on the island but still long enough for her to grip. His teeth are pulling at her bottom lip and he's pushed her skirt up to her hips, the one she'd bought last week because it looked professional and it was cheap. She'll have to dry clean it now, she thinks as she shifts her hips and wraps her legs around his slender waist to allow him better access.
Claire rests her chin on Sawyer's shoulder as he thrusts inside her to avoid looking him in the eyes, fearing what she'll find there.
Emptiness. Fear. Uncertainty. The reflection of herself.
She may not know when, but she knows why it began. Because they both know he's the only one that would ever understand the tremor in her pale hands and she was the only one to understand why he can't look at himself in the mirror anymore. No one else would, no one else could.
So as he's zipping up his pants and she's finger-combing her cherry tresses, they look at each other. Just for a moment.
"Love the new look, carrot-top." It's the careful collision of their defense mechanisms and they both know it.
She thanks him sweetly and shyly, like she's still the little girl and he's the one too dangerous for her, and he leaves just like every time before and every time after.
Because it may not be perfect but at least it's not a lie.