Author's Note: Title is a lyric from the song "Laundry Room" by The Avett Brothers.
Twitter: AlbatrossTam14 (Protected tweets)
I don't own Degrassi.
"Split yourself down the middle, make one side the past. And you're left with the future, and maybe that will last. Split yourself down the middle, take one half away. Make one seem the bad so the least can have its way." – "The Middle", Katie Herzig
"Do you ever wonder what would have happened?"
They're sitting in Clare's family room, eating cold leftover spaghetti and watching a rerun of Curb Your Enthusiasm, something Jake loves and Clare tolerates. Their parents are at a play for the night. Clare's mother would never have left her in the house alone with a boy before, but now she's encouraging it – she wants Jake and Clare to "get to know each other better".
"Huh?" Jake says after a moment, eyes still on the screen. He spears a piece of cold meatball with his fork and pops it in his mouth.
Clare stares at the television. It's on mute. The ordinary looks like the bizarre with no specific explanation to the gestures and exaggerated faces. People talk without saying anything, movements louder than their voices. It's a play on words. It's a circus of the absurd.
"Like, if your parents never split?"
Jake looks up from his plate, surprised. Spaghetti he is twirling on the end of his fork dangles and falls off.
Clare stares at him, waiting expectantly for his answer. Jake twirls the pasta back on his fork, stuffs it in his mouth, and gives her a shrug as he chews.
"No," he gulps, swallowing it down.
Clare raises her eyebrows. "Never?" she presses.
Jake shakes his head. "Never," he repeats.
Clare bites her lip, folding her hands in her lap primly.
He laughs a little at her expression. "What? You look surprised."
"I just don't see how you could never think about it," she says. "Never be curious. Wonder what your life might have been like."
Jake just shrugs again.
This is something they hardly ever broach anymore. The past. It's a part of who they are now, but not exactly something either of them feels like reliving and acknowledging. So she pretends that she didn't end up here because she loved someone too much, or because she failed to love them enough – she's not even sure which one it is anymore. But it's not something she can afford to think about. They've spent these past weeks together happy enough, and it's been good to leave the baggage behind.
Besides, she tries to remind herself, it's not who she is now. Not anymore.
"Why?" he asks. "What's the point?"
Sometimes she wonders how much he might pretend, too. If he's pretending just as much as she is these days, or if it's so habit-forming that he doesn't even realize he's doing it. Pretending that he wasn't left behind while the two people who were never supposed to abandon him lost him in their wreckage; pretending he was saved, pretending that he's happy with the way the chips have fallen. Pretending to be okay, because Clare's realizing it's just too fucking exhausting to try and be any other way.
He takes another forkful of spaghetti, the metal edges of the fork sending unpleasant shivers down her spine as the prongs scratch the ceramic.
"I don't know how different my life would have been," he reminds her in between mouthfuls. "What's the point of thinking about it?"
He turns back to his pasta bowl, taking a stab at what little there is left.
"I can't change it," he resolves. "I'm not gonna drive myself crazy with it."
He turns and gives her a smile, one that she tries to reciprocate.
"What brought that on?" he asks. "We never talk about stuff like this."
Clare shrugs. She looks away.
She turns back to the screen. The TV cuts to commercial, something about house cleaning.
Remove stains from any surface! Hardwood, tile, granite, even that pesky grime in the shower!
Make all those stains disappear!
Everything washed away in an instant!
At least, that's what she thinks its saying. She's just making up the words in her head.
Jake's still digging through his spaghetti with the fork.
"A year ago," she tells him, "I thought that my life would be…"
She grapples for an answer.
"Right" she finishes. "Somehow."
Jake quirks an eyebrow.
"Right?" he asks.
Clare sighs. "No." She puts her palm on her forehead. "That's not what I meant to say."
She starts again. "I thought I had the idea of what my life would be like now. I could picture it like it was real. Because I never thought it would BE any way else."
Jake almost smiles.
"And this isn't it?" he jokes, gesturing around the dark room.
Clare snorts. "Sitting in my family room, eating cold spaghetti with you while our parents go out on a date? Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I pictured my life would be like."
Jake grins. Clare has to, too. It makes things spin less. Or at least, makes it feel like it does.
He takes another stab at his pasta, then sets his fork down and leans closer to her.
"Look," he says, "I don't know what to tell you to make you feel any better. But Clare…"
He pauses, weighing his words.
Clare fiddles with her napkin. The silence in the room is too heavy. She wants to take it and shake it until the words spill out of him like loose change, the kind she tuck into her pocket and make a silly, half-believing wish on it when she finds it shiny-side up at the bottom of her bag later on.
"Whatever happened," he says finally, "happened. You can't change it, you can't go back to it. So what's the point of thinking about it any differently?"
Clare stares back at the television. She's a little stung at his words, but not sure what else she expected him to say. He's not exactly the dark and mysterious type. He's always been up front with her.
"So," she says after a silent, awkward minute, "that's it? Just, the way it is, is the way it is."
Jake shrugs. "Pretty much," he says.
When she doesn't look at him, he sighs. "I knew that wasn't the answer you wanted."
Clare bites the inside of her cheeks. "Not really," she mutters.
He leans closer to her on the couch.
"What do you think it would be like?" he asks.
She turns to stare at the window, watches the rain drops chase each other drunkenly down the sill like tear drops.
"I have no idea", she admits. "Still the same, I guess."
Jake nods.
"And was the same happy?" he asks.
Clare follows the path of one raindrop as it tears down the window, unstoppable in its kamikaze drop out of sight.
"I thought so," she sighs.
Her raindrop falls out of sight.
Jake grabs the remote and clicks the TV off. He pulls her close and slides an arm around her, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze. There's a quilt draped over the couch, and he pulls it over the both of them, wrapping them in blues and greys and oranges, in scratchy wool like warm arms. He smells like woodchips, like sawdust and wood varnish, garlic and spaghetti sauce. It makes her want to curl up into the comfort and fall asleep. It's safe to do that here, because there are home-cooked meals and soft rain and quilts. It's like a dream of something nice back home.
"When my mom left after the split," he said, "I used to think about them getting back together all the time. Cause my life had never been any other way. I wanted everything to go back to 'before'."
Jake air-quotes that last word. He raises his head from their tiny enclosure and looks out the window, fingers still laced with hers. From somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbles, an oncoming storm and primal fury.
"What changed?" Clare whispered.
He's still looking out the window, the shadows from the storm outside flashing across his face. She has no idea what he's thinking. It's probably a wild trick of the darkness, because she has to be imagining the look on his face – blurry and unsure, the eyes flat and blank, capped with bottomless dark.
"What was the point when there was never a 'before' to go back to?" he says finally.
He turns to look at her. The shadows criss-cross his face, slivering and scarring him as they cut across his skin.
"I didn't go looking for answers," he says, "because there wasn't anything to find. Lots of things get left behind. You can just tell yourself, 'no, don't think it', and pretty soon, you will."
Clare wonders if that's the truth, if it's really that simple.
"It's not a ghost, Clare. It's just a time. It was just over."
Or if that's even truth; his truth.
The rain begins to pour. Clare can't count separate rain drops anymore, just a rapid-fire downpour. It sounds like noisy, inelegant sobs; someone's restrained sorrow breaking through the cracks in the foundation, unstoppable until finally reaching the abyss beneath the tears and tiger eyes.
"So just leave well enough alone," Clare verifies.
Jake gives her hand another squeeze.
"I think your life would be a lot easier if you did," he tells her.
"Is there a handbook for all divorce kids?" Clare jokes wryly. "With chapters on Trying For Closure Remembering To Forget?"
"Mmmhmm," Jake nods. "It's right before the chapter on How To Deal and Coping With Denial."
Clare laughs. But then she thinks she notices Jake's smile slide off his face like he's said something he wishes he hadn't. Thinks she does.
Suddenly, he jumps off the couch and grabs her dirty dishes.
"It's okay," he tells her when she reaches for them, and heads to the kitchen. "I got it."
He stands at the sink, his back to her, and turns the water on high. Steam begins to curl around him. Clare watches him from the couch, rinsing their dishes under the faucet and running them dry with a dishrag hanging from the refrigerator handle.
"And anyway," he calls after a moment, like an afterthought. It's a little hard to hear him, over the splash of the sink and the chaos around them.
"My mom would still be dead."
He pauses, ringing his hands dry on the washcloth. "So how much would really be different?"
Dead. Mom.
The words are electric. Clare's insides jump at them, even though Jake is drying the plates unconcernedly.
Jake has never once spoken of his mother. Both of them are absolutely certain of this. And he's never broached her death, even in passing.
Neither, Clare realizes, has Glen.
She wonders if Glen has told her mother about her. If Jake talks to his father about his mother. If he talks to anyone about her. Or if he just shut down that part of him a long time ago and let it whither.
Does her mother wonder if Glen still loves a dead woman?
Does Jake?
"I'm guessing you think about it a lot," Jake says.
Clare stares at him. "What?"
"The divorce," he supplies. He comes back to the couch with two glasses of Sprite, and chugs his before he even sits beside her. "You sound like you think about it a lot."
She sits back in his arms, combing through his words to find something else. Finding nothing, she shrugs.
"Sometimes," she admits vaguely.
"It helps if you don't," Jake replies, tugging the quilt back over them. "Impossible as it sounds."
The rain outside has quieted. The abyss has been reached, the nothing between torrential sorrow and dropping into all-consuming, dreamless exhaustion. The kind of sleep that lies in bed wrapped in its anguish and welcomes the numbness, because taking one more step is just too much before the world shatters and everything falls apart.
He pauses. "I made my peace with it a long time ago."
More like pieces, Clare half-wonders, half-believes.