A/N: So I got to thinking about endings and how complicated they are, and how we never saw the other endings, so here is the product of some of those musings. Spoilers, as usual, for 'Loss'; AO, as usual, for the sake of my sanity.
Disclaimer: The following is a piece of fanfiction. No money is made off this. There is no copyright infringement intended; all characters, episodes and backgrounds belongs to Dick Wolf and NBC.
Maroon
i.
Were Alexandra Cabot dead, it would have been a simpler matter. The failure would be definite, the hour of passing would be documented, and Dr. Leslie Yeung could go home to her apartment to eat and sleep off her exhaustion and, most importantly, to forget her job for just a little while. The case would have been straightforward and familiar, had the woman died.
Callous as that sounded, the seasoned trauma surgeon was relieved and quite proud that her patient pulled through the night. She'd dug two bullets out of the woman, for God's sake, and patched a hole where the third slug had missed a subclavian by maybe half an inch. Ms. Cabot was a lucky, lucky woman.
So it was news to her when she was told, very sternly, that her patient had died.
Dr. Yeung glanced from the FBI agent's stoic face to the hospital bed, where her patient was sleeping fitfully, still breathing, and evidently still alive. She glanced at the security detail standing outside the door, and back to the fragile figure on the bed with IV lines curling around her arms. All this mysterious fuss for one woman, and no one seemed inclined to satisfy her curiosity as to why?
The agent made her sign lots of papers. He made her swear an oath, though she had already compromised her own values by putting her name on the death certificate.
"You'll need more than one witness for this," she told him, stubborn, unable to sign away her patient's life quite yet, unable to accept that this Alexandra Cabot, with a family and a career and a whole life ahead of her, would be officially brain dead in about two hours.
"We'll take care of the rest," he said simply, tersely. She looked back down and began to mechanically fill out the cause of death. It was like signing a post-dated cheque, and the agent's sheer efficiency throughout the whole process unnerved her.
"And here I thought I've seen every surprise there is in this job," Dr. Yeung remarked to him, to fill the silence.
He grunted. Small talk was evidently not part of proper procedure.
She studied the heart monitor absently, watched its reassuring rhythm. "You said she agreed to this. Does she know what she'll be losing?"
He gave her a searching look. There was a glimmer of respect, there, one professional to another. "You tell me, doctor," he said. "At least she'll still be alive. You got her life back; now I have to get her a new one."
"Undo all my work," she replied with some humour. She leaned back in her chair, feeling very tired all of a sudden.
He smiled thinly, tucking the papers away in his jacket, and nodded his balding head to her. It was done. The room was stuffy with tension and the sharp tang of bleach, and she couldn't stay any longer, not one more minute. What else could she do?
She went home, fed her cat, stroked his head until he purred, and had a long shower.
a. i.
"You can't stay here," her partner said, very quietly and firmly. He'd been a rock through all of this, solid and reassuring, but even he was beginning to show the cracks. "Go home and change."
"You go ahead. I can't, El," she said. "I can't leave her – not knowing. God, it was all my fault-"
He looked at her haggard face, tear and blood-stained, and it was as if her face and her guilt and her fears was a mirror of his own. Our fault, he thought, we should've known. His mind churned, turning over the past few weeks, over and over, obsessive, desperate to find out when everything had gone so wrong.
His cell phone vibrated. He glanced at the display and turned it off, viciously. His brow furrowed, deep lines etched prematurely into his forehead, darkening his face as he paced under the harsh hospital lights. Olivia watched him vent, strangely detached.
"You should go. Get some sleep. Kathy's worried," she said, like any good partner would. He nodded, reluctant.
"I'll give you a lift home," he said, equally concerned for her. There were deep shadows under her eyes, and new ones in them, and he didn't like the implications.
She managed a pained half-smile. He knew that look. She was staying. She had to. "It doesn't matter," Olivia the woman said. "I won't sleep, anyway."
ii.
They had to find another place for the IV drip in his arm. There'd been too many needles, and the nurse couldn't find the big vein through the scars.
Lying sedate on the lumpy hospital mattress, nineteen year-old Adam Fowler rubbed the raised flesh on the inside of his arms with thoughtful fingers. Pretty soon there'll be a new scar-one tracked across the pale yellowing flesh of his stomach, under the stark outlines of his ribs. This scar would save him instead of killing him, as the drugs had done.
He didn't need them now. He'd been clean for over a year; a year of inordinate rage and hopeless inadequacy and withdrawal and detox centres and his parents alternately commanding and pleading, shouting and crying.
A pair of soft steps whispered towards his bed, and he smiled in surprise. Usually she only visited after her classes ended at five, but she was early today. Well, Adam wasn't complaining. There was a rustle as someone sat down next to his bed. A pair of big brown eyes looked down at him, and he opened his eyes and gazed back with joy.
"Angie," he said, and tried to prop himself up. His breath hitched, and he gasped a little.
"Shh," she said, and pushed him down firmly. "You shouldn't get up."
"Yeah," he breathed. "But this time tomorrow, I'm gonna be all right. You'll see. Soon I'll run circles around you."
Angie laughed a little. She ran track in college, and even with all his parts whole he wouldn't be able to beat her, not in a million years. He loved her smile. She was his purpose, the reason he was lying here right now, alive, instead of shooting up in his parent's basement.
"Mom and Dad are coming soon," he told her. Angie nodded.
"I've never seen them so happy," she said, "when the doctor told him the woman had died."
He traced the lifeline on her palm, smooth, unbroken. "Seems kinda cruel, doesn't it? I-"
She cupped his hand in hers. "I thank her every minute of the day, whoever she is."
"I wish I could meet her," he said. He had a morbid desire to look upon his rescuer's face, to feel where her liver would be, healthy and whole, to imagine what it would be like to take her gift. He wanted to say thank you in person.
"It would be better not to," Angie replied.
There was a stampede of footsteps in the hallway. His head jerked up, and Angie turned towards the door. Adam heard his dad's voice, high with anger, his mom's frail with confusion, and then they came into the ward and the peace fled.
His dad, unflappable, implacable, was shouting at a doctor. His face was flushed, and his hands shook. His mom was quieter, but there was a raging despair in her face, such hard disbelief that Adam had to look away.
Angie stood in alarm. Adam's hand fell down, weak, helpless.
"Wh– what?" he managed. "What's the matter?"
Gordon Fowler's eyes were hot as he looked at his son, lying so still on the bed, seeing his hopes and dreams vanishing as quickly as they had come.
"Mr. Fowler, we don't know what happened - "
"What the hell does that mean? Is it because he's a cokehead? That's it, isn't it? Useless. A waste. That's all you people will ever see him as!" In his anger and bewilderment, Gordon Fowler was lashing out at their doctor, who could do nothing but back away.
"Gordon..." Eileen Fowler pulled her husband back. She looked as if she could smash something, too, given a good solid baseball bat, but some inner strength had risen up in her. "Gordon, don't."
"Don't tell me not to, Eileen. Adam's our goddamn son. We have a right to know." He wrenched his arm out of her grasp.
Adam felt sick. "Dad! Wh– what's the matter?" he asked again, afraid to hear the answer.
"They don't have it!" his dad cried, between gritted teeth. "They don't have it."
"What do you mean?" Angie demanded, moving between him and his father, as if to act as a last, desperate physical barrier between him and bad news.
But Gordon had collapsed into a chair, with great wracking sobs. Adam stared, heart-wrenched. His dad was of the old school, a firm believer in the boys-don't-cry rule, and Adam had never seen him shed such tears, not even when he'd broken his leg in three places tumbling down a cliff. His mom made her way over, clutching at the bed rails, running trembling fingers over her son's fevered brow.
"Oh, Adam," she began, her voice breaking, "it's gone. There was some huge mix-up. The operation's been called off."
"We're very sorry," the doctor added, genuinely contrite, but it was too late for anyone to care.
Comprehension dawned on Adam, slowly, unwillingly. He was back on the waiting list. He wasn't going to live, not yet. To have that hope, and have it snatched away – his hands rubbed at the faded scars inside his arms.
"I don't get it," he questioned, flatly. His eyes shut. He pushed away a familiar burning need, one he thought he'd gotten rid of, a need to hide away and forget the pain.
"There's no body to get it from, is there?" Gordon said bitterly. "It– she was a donor. The register said so. But what's the use? They give a life, then they take it away. It disappeared, they said. How can a body just disappear?"
a. ii.
How can a life just disappear? Olivia was never arrogant enough to believe she was indispensable; if she took a day off, which was never, she knew someone would cover for her.
Only days ago a black SUV had sped into the night, taking a dead woman and Olivia's reason for being with it. Only a few precious days ago, before their fragile connection was brutally severed. Now the woman left behind was standing outside Alex's office. She held a few folded packing boxes in one hand and a roll of duct tape in the other.
When Olivia got to that familiar door, she wanted to knock. It felt wrong to intrude, wrong to go on when there wasn't Alex's smooth voice saying, "Come in." How stupid.
But she had volunteered for this, goddamnit. Someone had to sweep up the pieces, tie up the loose ends, tidy up this inconvenient business of dying and leaving things behind.
She turned the knob, and stepped inside gingerly.
There was someone sitting in Alex's chair. Olivia caught a flash of blonde hair, and for a moment she almost believed in the impossible, in this room surrounded by Alex's scent and her desk and books and pens and folders and coffee mugs and other reminders of life, but the chair swivelled around and everything shattered, again.
Elizabeth Donnelly said, "Come to help, detective?" Her voice was hoarse, and even lower than usual. Unfinished boxes were already cluttering the room, towers of books and files piled in haphazard stacks. It looked as if Liz had started packing with furious energy, then suddenly stopped.
Olivia found her voice. "Something like that," she said. Her eyes slid to the coat rack in the corner where a long scarf hung, maroon-red and forgotten. Without realizing it she went over and claimed it, possessively like a lover, stroking the fabric with clammy fingers, inhaling the long-loved smell, tucking it deep into her jacket pocket. A trace of what was there, a damning reminder of what was not.
Liz watched all of this, eyes hooded. She raised a sardonic eyebrow, and Olivia nodded slowly.
The bureau chief exhaled, a long quiet sigh. "I've always suspected," she said candidly. "But you two worked together. It must have been complicated. And hard."
Olivia looked at her steadily. "It's worth it, despite everything."
Liz inclined her head. This had been going on under her nose, and only now had she finally found the root of their relationship. And she couldn't even gloat about it. The loss still hurt too much. Damn it Alex, she thought, if I'd known, if you were here, I'd give you an ass-kicking and then send you home early.
"I'm glad," Liz said instead. And then she stood and handed Olivia a small square of paper, folded and re-folded many, many times. "Here. I was packing, and I found this in the drawer." She took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Olivia," she said, truly sincere, and stepped softly outside, closing the door gently behind her.
Olivia unfolded the scrap of paper and recognized her own messy scribbling. She couldn't believe Alex kept the note. She'd slipped the note under Alex's office door once, when she couldn't reach the ADA's cell or the ADA just wasn't responding, when Alex had been suspended, when Sam Cavanaugh had been lying in hospital getting a feeding tube inserted. It read, quite simply:
Alex,
I don't blame you. This has been hard on everyone. Anytime you want to talk, just call me, ok? You know I don't sleep much, I've woken you up too many times in the middle of the night.
Please, don't just ignore this.
– Olivia.
That had been the beginning. This was the end. And sitting alone on the floor of Alex's office, surrounded by only the ashes of what was left, Olivia wondered when the idea of 'them' disappeared and how she was left with only herself.
iii.
Five unanswered rings later, the answering machine clicked on with a decisive beep.
"You've reached Alexandra Cabot," the disembodied voice said into her ear. "Apparently I'm not available to take your call right now, so please leave a message and I will –"
Click. Hannah Sauber set the phone down with another impatient sigh. Maybe her customer was out of town, but her dry cleaning had been ready a week ago.
"Still no luck?" Ricky asked from his perch behind the counter. His voice was muffled. He didn't bother to lift his greasy nose out of his magazine.
"Nope," Hannah shrugged her shoulders. "I really hope she's okay."
"Probably out of town," Ricky said, with a bit of a sneer. "Or maybe she forgot. What does a suit or two matter to rich people like that?" He still hadn't forgotten Ms. Cabot's snub from her last visit, but every time she came he'd ask her out for a drink anyway. It was almost like a game, or a challenge, just to see if she would talk to him. If their banter hadn't been so absurd, or amusing, Hannah would have called Ricky on it before he could open his mouth.
Hannah rolled her eyes at her young cousin but said, "It just doesn't feel right. She's a regular; she won't forget. I've phoned her three times, and no one's answered." It was a bit chilling. This was New York City, after all, and while people weren't mugged on their doorsteps as outsiders may have been led to believe, it wasn't exactly the safest haven, either. She'd read worse things in the papers.
"Fuck, Hannah, just call her again if you're so worried," Ricky said, exasperated.
She grew irritated at him, at his tone, at his lack of respect. Someday she would lose her temper and throw him out, cousin or not. "I'm not paying you to swear at me. Get off that chair and prep the next load," she ordered, and he shot her an evil glare before shuffling off into the back room.
She picked up the phone again, hesitated, and pressed redial. Four rings later, in the middle of the fifth, some one on the other end picked up. Oh, thank goodness. Value Village wouldn't be receiving an expensive donation after all. Every time Hannah donated a load of forgotten clothing, she'd look at the second hand clothes on the racks and think, what memories have these clothes been through?
"Hello?" Hannah asked, when an awkward second or two had dragged by.
There was a pause, then a woman's voice said, "Yes?"
"I'm calling from Sauber's Fine Drycleaning on 3241 Union Avenue. Your items have been cleaned and they're ready for pick up," she said, with the air of rattling off the essential information learned by rote.
"Dry cleaning?" The voice held a note of confused surprise and something else – a raspy undercurrent, raw and dark, a little like a person with a sore throat and something else besides. Hannah suddenly realized she might not be speaking to the right person. The voice wasn't the same.
"I'm sorry. I would like to speak to Ms. Cabot, if she's available? Is this the right number?"
On the other end something dropped with a loud thump, like a box crashing to the carpet floor. There was a muttered curse, then a short bark of laughter. Far from being reassured, Hannah was unsettled by the sound.
"Yes, this is Alex's place, and I'm sure we would all like to –" the woman on the other end began, then stopped. "Sorry. I'm just a bit scattered, at the moment. Dry cleaning. Sauber's, at 3241 Union Avenue, you say?"
"Uh, yeah, that's right," Hannah replied, feeling very strange indeed, almost like an intruder.
"I'll stop by to pick it up this afternoon," the woman said. "Thanks."
They hung up together. Two hours later, when Hannah had all but forgotten about the phone call, a tall woman with short dark hair walked into the shop, scanning about with wary eyes. Ricky let his magazine flop open onto the counter. His eyes were wide as they travelled up and down and back up her body.
Hannah swatted him on the arm, glaring at him. Idiot. Scare off the customers. She smiled at the woman. "Afternoon. Can I help you?" she asked politely.
The woman tore her gaze from the racks of clothing shrouded in thin plastic, hanging above their heads like invisible men given form. Hannah met her eyes firmly, questioningly.
"I'm here for Alexandra Cabot's things," the woman said, ignoring Ricky's obvious fascination. She probably got that a lot. Her voice was steady but her hands were shoved into the pockets of her leather jacket. The woman had the best poker face Hannah ever did see, and she suspected she wouldn't see much else.
"Why, where is she?" Ricky blurted, fresh disappointment in his voice.
The woman didn't answer. Hannah told him to go sweep the floor. He didn't budge. The woman gave Cabot's phone number, and Hannah tallied up the bill instead. Ricky was sent to get the clothes off the racks.
While the woman was paying, Hannah commented off-hand, "It's a good thing you're picking these up, or else I wouldn't know what to do with them."
"I could say the same," was the brief reply.
Hannah tried again. "Four-hundred dollar suits are probably too good for a thrift shop."
She received a small smile in return, and was delighted to see how such a slight up-curving of the woman's lips transformed a previously sombre expression into a much more open face.
"Yeah, well, Alex's never been cheap," the woman said. It was the smile that cemented it for Hannah, and the longing look in the deep brown eyes that told her this woman was more than just a friend of her old customer. For years she had sat behind this counter, glimpsing small glimpses into other people's lives in the ten minutes she had with them, catching peeks of the sweet, the terse; the harried, the melancholy. The shows were always inadvertent, flashes of the lives underneath the clothing, little clues on the clothing. She had seen wine splashes on cocktail dresses and semen stains on severe skirts, and even some blotches that looked mysteriously like blood.
Needless to say, Hannah didn't want to look to closely at those.
"You two are close?" she asked, smiling slightly, and the woman looked startled. Her mouth opened to deny it, but there had been no mistake. Ordinary friends didn't send each other to pick up the dry cleaning. Ricky had been aiming at the wrong mark.
"Yeah, I guess we were." the woman said, voice calm, but when she reached to take the clothes from Ricky her hands fumbled around the hangars. "Thanks," she added, clasping the bundle to her like a precious talisman. She pivoted quickly on her heel, disappearing through the door just as abruptly as she had come. A beat passed, in which all the unanswered calls fell into place and Hannah wished to anything she could take all her words back. After a moment, her grip on the corner of the counter loosened.
"Damn," Ricky muttered, having overheard the last exchange. His eyes were wide, disbelieving, filled with something like hurt, something that even the teenage cynicism couldn't hide. His cousin didn't bother to correct him, this time.
"You never had a chance in hell, Ricky," Hannah said, her own voice sounding strange and high, echoing in the small shop. There was a chill in the air, an emptiness that was left behind, a feeling that Ricky had not encountered, not until this moment. He turned back to his mindless magazine for comfort, staring resolutely at the generic blondes paraded across the pages.
Hannah busied herself with cleaning the muck from the filters. Cleaning kept her mind on her own life. Go away, stupid stains. An unbidden thought came, then, breaking the water's surface.
She was so young. Not much older than she was. Hannah did a quick calculation. She would be turning twenty-nine this year. She hadn't ever thought –
She scrubbed harder. Some things couldn't be cleaned away, no matter how much perc she sprayed on, and the reminder of humanity's frailty was one of them.
a. iii.
"Morning, ma'am," the doorman said softly, tipping his hat to her with respect. Olivia nodded at him and managed a 'Morning, Pete'. He had come to know her by sight these past few months, and rightly so, and he'd never said anything, not a condemning word. Olivia and Alex had been grateful for his discretion. But the story, the other story, was out, now that the morning's paper had been released. Emblazoned across the front page were headlines Olivia knew to be false and a beloved face that belonged to her, only her, and not as fodder for the city's gossips.
She hated that. Alex wouldn't have liked being turned into some martyr for the cause. Ironic, now that all the 'voters in her constituency' knew the name of Alexandra Cabot, and all of that unwanted fame would not bring her back to life and office. 'Who's that? Oh, it doesn't matter anyway. She's dead.'
Olivia the woman had read neither the article nor the obituary this morning, but Elliot the cop had ploughed through both, as a self-served punishment. After seeing the headlines, Cragen had got up, hesitated, and poured himself a glass of orange juice.
She retrieved the mail from the box in the lobby, ignored the elevators, and ran up all twelve flights of stairs to Alex's apartment. The burning in her lungs and the soreness in her thighs were welcome distractions. She didn't know how many times she'd stood on Alex's doorstep; too many times to count, and not nearly enough to satisfy.
How many times had she taken those visits for granted?
She had the keys, but all the same she stood outside for several minutes before jamming them into the lock.
The door swung open inward. The apartment had the scent of home, just this side of dusty, a place where they had laughed and cried and talked and argued and made love and made pancakes and lived. Olivia took a shallow, shuddering breath. She crossed over to the couch, stepping around Alex's shoes and her coats and the hideous potted purple geraniums in the hall, careful not to disturb anything, this picture of a life lived, frozen in a moment.
In the here and now, far removed from that frozen time, Olivia was stuck packing again, taking all the pieces of their joy and trials and packing them into neat, square boxes. Only this time, this cleansing was so much more personal than packing away law books and case files.
It's worth it, despite everything.
So instead of mustering her energy, she sat down heavily on the couch, an uncommonly listless ghost, and as she waited the door's deadbolt clicked and turned.
Olivia stood up again. She was suddenly terrified. She knew who it was on the other side; a woman who believed she had outlived both her children and her husband, a woman with every right to loathe her, a woman coming to claim her share of Alex. Last night they had agreed to meet, to perform the unpleasant duty of tying up a life's fraying ends, because packing up the apartment meant they were finally acknowledging the death and that would be too hard to do alone.
"How long?"
"I – I don't know."
Mrs. Catherine Cabot had never approved of their relationship. Well, damn approval and blue-blooded conservatism. Once upon a time Olivia had had Alex, and no one could take that away.
"Ms. Benson," the mother said, by way of a greeting. Her wrinkled cheeks were paper-pale and hollow, and her eyes, the same brilliant shade as her daughter's, were dim with grief. Olivia was shocked by her fragile appearance, and her face held a smooth, porcelain calm. The last time they'd met was at a stiff weekend luncheon a month ago, a whole lifetime ago. Alex's mother had been as fit and hale as any sixty year-old had a right to be.
Then again, Olivia wasn't exactly glowing with health, either. She hadn't slept more than three, four hours a day since the shooting.
"Please, Mrs. Cabot, it's Olivia," she said. What did any of their differences matter now? "I hope the traffic wasn't too bad," she continued, painfully aware of Mrs. Cabot's sharp gaze, the way they seemed to observe and criticize Olivia and these rooms, both of which must seem paltry to her eyes.
"Oh, I barely noticed," Mrs. Cabot said, distractedly, trying to be composed but failing. Of course she would have a driver; he was probably waiting out in the hall. "Did you know," she confided to Olivia unexpectedly, "that I'd never visited my daughter once since she moved to New York? What kind of mother is that, hmm?"
That did not seem to deign an answer, so Olivia didn't give her one.
"As much as I –failed, in that regard, I would like you to know that I am grateful to you Ms. –Olivia. For what you gave her. For what I should have given more often, but did not," she said. Like mother, like daughter, she got directly to the point in a maddeningly indirect way. Olivia could have laughed, if it weren't for the sudden desertion of her vocal cords. She sat down, sinking into the softness, wishing everything could just go away as speedily.
Mrs. Cabot moved to sit next to her, back held rigidly upright. "I was too hard on the both of you. I am glad Alex finally found someone, at least," she said.
Alternating between amazement and bitter surprise, Olivia almost wanted to say that she might've told Alex that, too, sooner, and spare her countless nights of worry. The talks they've had, about Alex's fear of her mother's disapproval, her feelings of inadequacy just because she was different and wasn't going to marry a white upper-class businessman and stay at home and have 2.13 children. Then Olivia realized it took a death for Mrs. Cabot to realize this, and that it took shaking her whole black and white world upside down to gain this insight, and somehow Olivia couldn't fault her for the tardiness.
"I wish Alex could hear that from you, Mrs. Cabot," she said instead, and found tears welling up in her eyes. So what if Alex was still actually alive? She could share that hope with no one, not even with the woman who wanted forgiveness the most, who must have gone through a mother's hell many times worse than Olivia's.
"Catherine," Mrs. Cabot corrected. Olivia closed her eyes in acquiescence. They were finally, unbelievably, on first-name basis, too late to have pleased Alex. What kind of screwed up world was this?
"Catherine," Olivia repeated. It felt strange yet fitting on her tongue. She gestured at the boxes in the corner. "How about we…get started?"
"I will start out here," she replied decisively, meaning the living room. Olivia blinked. She'd expected – well, she wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. She just wasn't sure if she had the strength to – she paused, then gathered herself. Slowly her feet drifted towards the bedroom door, their bedroom. She placed a hand upon the smooth wood and pushed.
The rumpled sheets, the depressions in the pillows, they were all the same, all as they were before Alex left that morning, never realizing she would not see this room again. Olivia touched a pile of slacks and sweaters, neatly folded. Alex had a mania for folding things: underwear, napkins, tea towels, origami paper swans. Olivia remembered teasing her about it, and getting a mouthful of pillow in return–
A silver photo frame rested on the bedside table. The picture inside had been taken by an obliging tourist all too happy to focus his attention on two beautiful women. They were smiling, together, arms around each other, posing somewhere in Central Park. Olivia couldn't even remember that day. Had they gone for a walk, a jog? Or maybe it had been a picnic. But they never had time for picnics. Maybe her memories were making themselves up, in a futile effort to treasure each gem, each moment asleep and waking, that they had together.
This unfaltering detective found that she had to sit down on the bed, when she saw the photograph. She reached inside her jacket and fingered the worn note. Long fingers caressed the maroon scarf wrapped around her neck as if to imagine its warmth were Alex's arms around her shoulders and its touch was Alex's lips on the back of her neck–
–she had been a part of that happiness, once, happiness wrung from the most horrifying of cases and desolate of circumstances, when two people had unexpectedly found that they could live all the better for having each other, for putting up with each other's bullshit like no one else had ever done–
And suddenly all of the past week's strain and nightmares bore down on her and she broke, broke into a spectacular heave of rage and tears, and she shouted and threw the picture frame hard against the wall, where the glass shattered and the pieces tinkled to the floor, like mournful musical notes. The bedroom door flew open and Catherine Cabot was rushing in, all reserve gone, all pretences fallen, and together with their arms around each other they rocked on the floor, mother and lover both, cheeks pale and noses red, and they cried.
Finally Olivia wiped her eyes on her sleeve and said, thickly, "Thank you, Catherine."
The mother fumbled for a tissue and blew her nose into it. "Thank you! We both needed that," she said. Crouched undignified on the carpet floor, they breathed together in unison, once, twice, to gather themselves before undertaking anything else.
"Alex used to be afraid of monsters under her bed," Catherine said, out of the blue. Olivia found herself grinning through the tears.
"My–our Alex? Afraid of something?" she asked. The notion didn't seem possible.
"Oh, yes. The memory just came to me; funny how these things work! For a year Alex wouldn't sleep without a night-light… she was afraid of something tentacley and slimey, reaching out to get her in the dark." Catherine smiled, too, at the recollection.
"That's why she hogs all the covers," Olivia said.
"She used to love having a cup of something hot before bedtime, like milk, or…" Catherine's voice trailed off.
"I know. Something like hot cocoa, or tea, or else she couldn't sleep," Olivia finished. Some habits persisted. They looked at each other with a new respect, and there was a renewed acceptance in both their eyes, a spark of joy they thought they had already lost, or thought beyond reach.
Olivia reached out a hand. Packing could wait. For now she would allow herself to remember. "Would you like some tea?" she asked, and though Alex was gone in a speeding black van to a place where she couldn't follow, she thought determinedly that she could make some good come out of all this.
"How long?"
She still didn't know. The past was passed, and her whole bleak future stretched before her, albeit more crowded than an hour ago, with Catherine to share. With luck however– someday, one wild crazy morning– she imagined she might wake up in time to witness a rebirth. And for now, making tea for Alex's mother just the way Alex liked it in their kitchen, that was enough of a thread to keep her eyes open.