Neither have they hearts to stay,
Nor wit enough to run away.
Samuel Butler, Hudibras
It happens like this:
The chopper clicks and stutters and whirs and Jack takes her hand in his.
"You have to lie," he says, slowly, word-breath word-breath. His eyes are wide and dark and slightly crazy, she thinks, afraid. His fingers tighten around hers, and they are too cold, before what can leave her parched throat. "Please." His voice cracks a little. She stares.
His body is at a weird angle, half-across Sawyer, and when he closes his eyes for an instant he looks as tired as she has ever seen him. The blood on the front of his shirt has yet to dry. The chopper swoops a little lower, creaking, and Frank curses. Jack opens his eyes and smiles at her. She feels a sourness choking her, filling her mouth. He never smiles like that.
"Don't come back here for me," he says, this time quickly, and she wants to rip her hand from his and slap him and rewind and make this all go away, but he is too strong, and she isn't sure she could move anyway. "Don't come back, Kate."
He lets go of her hand and is gone--she jolts forward, and half-screams, and the propeller cutcutcuts them up and away, away, away, and the wind whips her hair against her face, stinging. The sourness in her mouth nearly spills over. Sawyer holds her back from the edge, arms like iron, unyielding, and she wants to cry and push him away, down, deep into the sea where he belongs, and when a dark shape bobs up to the surface she shudders and screams in earnest. He is alive. He is alive.
"Son of a bitch," Sawyer mutters into her hair, but not angrily, and she pushes him away, fists small and pale against his skin, trembling, pathetic, undone. He doesn't fight her. The dark shape disappears on the horizon. Her heart halts and re-starts of its own accord.
Their boat goes up (down, actually) in smoke and the island disappears in two painful and blinding seconds of light and the chopper somersaults into the water, dizzying, colder than cold. Sawyer gives Desmond CPR (where'd he learn that?) and Sun is a statue and Sayid coughs up saltwater and Frank watches the sun unblinking and Hurley ticks off the hours and Aaron whimpers, clutching and sucking and finding no traction at the front of Kate's shirt.
She concentrates on breathing.
Salvation is a light on the horizon. The saltwater on her cheeks is long dried and crusted-over, and she gets fresh clothes and a shower and a healthy meal for the first time in weeks and a bed for the first time in even holds Penny as if he'll never let her go and she feels like a shameless voyeur, watching them, wanting.
The sunrise is very beautiful over the water, and the rail is cold beneath her fingertips as she clings to it with her free hand. She can smell smoke on the air, cigarette smoke, and the deep rich scent makes her chest ache in a still fractured space. She presses her cheek against the peach-fuzz of Aaron's head, almost automatically. His skin is so soft that she could cry.
"He meant it, you know," comes Sayid's voice, soft and restrained at her shoulder, and she turns around, starting, holding the baby a little closer to her front. This time is the unspoken coda.
"I know," she says, and again, louder, but not stronger, "I know." She can't quite meet his eyes, because they are quiet and still with pity. She hates pity, hates it more than anything else. Hates it more than she hates her betraying shattered heart and her clinging lips and her beautiful frantic limbs. Pity is her weapon of choice.
"Do you know what he meant when he said you were to lie?" His voice trails off delicately and he looks away, as if preparing himself. She takes a long, quivering breath and shakes her head.
"No," she sighs. "I don't."
This lie is the first.
"You do realize they're gonna arrest you," Sawyer says, smoldering cancerstick carefully poised between forefinger and thumb (he started when they got to the boat and four days later he has yet to stop), like he's the leather-clad anti-hero, the cowboy rebel of some old black-and-white movie, the sort of thing her mother taught her to go for. This is their first real conversation in days--in weeks!--and look, it is off to a beautiful start already. She very nearly covers Aaron's ears in mock-reproach. Very nearly laughs. The skin spread tight across the bones of her face feels fragile and thin and raw and she's surprised when it doesn't rip altogether.
"They'll arrest you first," she retorts. If she were ten years younger she would stick out her tongue. If she weren't holding a baby she would flip the bird. I am the good girl. His eyes flicker and burn straight through hers.
The solid earth feels strange beneath her feet. She feels naked in her buttoned-up dress shirt, bereft without sand between her toes and a layer of sweat coating her back. The others let her talk.
"We . . . we were the only survivors of the crash. We washed up on an island." She clears her throat. There are invisible question marks at the end of each of her sentences. Aaron gurgles and smiles, toothless. The camera shutters go clack. "We survived on fruit, fish. Made shelter. Found a fresh water source. We--I gave birth after we'd been there two months." We. We. We. We. She swallows. "A boat washed up on shore a few weeks later." Her voice sounds very small in the cavernous room. Sun shifts at her right 's palms form a steeple against the bridge of his nose.
Sawyer leans forward to his mic for the first time. "We were lucky." His dimples deepen; the reporter nearly swoons. Kate resists the urge to roll her eyes. But he would like that.
We were damn fools.
She buys a house with the money from the settlement. Hires a good lawyer with the rest--or he'd better be good. This time she actually has something to lose.
She gets lonely at night, thinking, sometimes. Sleeping is hard because nightmares come, nightmares that end in the taste of salt water and the screech of her scream, and she wakes up two hours before the alarm even on weekends, body wired and trembling, curled up in her thousand-count Egyptian sheets, crying for her throbbing heart, crying for everything she is missing, crying for her mother, although she'd never admit that last. It is a little bit like waking up during a hurricane when you've left the windows open. Sometimes when she wakes up Aaron, safe down the hall in his crib, is crying, too.
Kevin calls one day and after a very short and very awkward reunion she decides that alone is better than the alternative (didn't Tom teach her anything?). Sleeping pills are the cure for every weakness.
Sawyer shows up on her doorstep six months months later, just after she's put Aaron down for his nap, tucked him in with his blanket and pacifier. That blanket is his lifeline.
It's cloudy out, and unusually damp, but he's wearing sunglasses, and she sees her reflection in them. She is startled to find she doesn't quite recognize herself.
He gets mud all over her her nice new Home Sweet Home mat, and his sorry is a bit too glib to be sincere. She leans on the screen door, holding it shut, arms folded tight across her chest before he can come in, giving him a once-over. He is thinner than she remembers, and paler, too. The smirk is the same, though, still familiar, and it still makes something twang deep in the pit of her stomach. This time, though, the twang is identifiable: she'd cry guilt if that weren't a dirty word.
"Long time, no see, Freckles," he says, and how he makes it sound like her fault she's not quite sure. He takes off the glasses and she finds that the bloodshot veins sticking out in his eyes only make the blue that much bluer. There is a playing house crack just bobbing on the tip of his tongue, she can feel it. She waits a beat but it doesn't come, and that is when she decides to let him in.
Her house smells of Johnson's baby powder and air freshener and new furniture. He smells like sweat and smoke and fresh air and cologne. He is too big, sitting at her little polished kitchen table. Too real. He is the realest thing she has seen in a long time and also the strangest, and it is all she can do not to touch him. Kiss him, hit him, make him be sorry, anything.
"You've been busy," he remarks, tilting his head and the front legs of his chair, eyes roving over the room, the beautiful furniture, the bottles and teddy bears and storybooks strewn across the couch in the living room. He hates it, she can tell. Or maybe she just wants him to hate it. She concentrates on the coffee pot. Purposefully gives him all black.
"I've got Aaron, now, Sawyer," she says, walking over to the other side of the table and sitting down, gingerly. There is something so very wrong with the image of Sawyer, leather-jacketed blood-stained shit-eating Sawyer, sitting docilely in her suburban kitchen. "Got to be responsible." Her smile is as tight as her tone is sing-song.
He laughs. The boiling coffee she'd been swishing in her mouth goes down cold. "What?"
He raises his eyebrows and leans in a little. "Nothin'. It's just--you just remind me of someone, is all." There is that smirk again, this time with something behind it. He is daring her to ask. He wants her to ask. He wants her to be the one to lose control.
She can't even count the number of times she's thought that about him and so she decides to let this one go. And she isn't going to ask him where he's been, what he's been doing all this time, either. He wouldn't tell her anyway. She swallows her anger with the cream and sugar.
This ends in coffee spilled on the table and her fingernails digging lines up his back beneath his shirt and the scruff of his jaw burning her throat as he kisses down, down, down. She keeps her eyes wide open, and they well up with tears as she meets him, arching up, meeting every single attack, neck thrown back, staring straight into the ceiling. When he lays her down on the couch she lands on a plastic ducky toy and it makes a rubbery squeaky noise, and they both glance around in alarm before they remember to laugh, shaky, a little fake. Sssshh, we'll wake up the baby. We have to be quiet. We have to be careful.
There is a mold stain right above her. She'll have to take care of that later. The blood pumping through her fragile veins is molten lava, and it hurts as it pumps faster and faster and faster and then then then--stops. She keeps her eyes open until he closes his, Kate one last deep dark exhalation on his lips, arms wrapped around her, too tight and too warm. The backs of her legs itch. She keeps her eyes wide open late into the night, keeping time by the glowy-green clock on the microwave. She keeps her eyes open.
If she closes them, he might disappear.
Ten months, two weeks, and one day after they are rescued and two months after her trial ends with a watered-down restraining order--they always go easy on the mothers--she leaves Aaron with a nanny and permission to watch all the Barney he wants and calls Sawyer to tell him she won't be seeing him tonight. She wears sunglasses and a baggy sweatshirt and her hair pulled back tight into a bun and lets the sympathetic blond lady doctor tear up her insides with sharp metal toys. This will never happen again. Never, never, never. She plays the Oldies station in the car all the way home.
She moves like an old woman into the foyer, keys a dull death-rattle in her hand, and jumps when she finds a dark long shape leaning against the banister. She jumps, but doesn't shout; she'd been expecting him to come anyway. (Why the hell did she give him a key?) Just not like this. He doesn't smell of smoke anymore--he's trying to quit. It's bad for the baby, you know.
He moves towards her and she thanks God that it's too dark for him to see her face because with her cat's eyes she can see his and it is sad enough for both of him. Hey, Freckles, he says. Freckles. What happened? She tries to move away but he wraps around and around her like a vise, big calloused hands snaking over her waist, up to her shaking shoulders, and she can feel herself beginning to crack, straight down the middle, as always. The fault line rips and roars open, but it is too familiar to make a sound. It goes easy, like a knife through butter. What happened? he asks again. The worst thing in the world, she wants to say but doesn't. The worst thing in the world happened.
Kate. Kate Kate Kate. The name makes her want to scream. He holds her as if he'll never let her go and his voice is too soft, too scared. She wants him to yell at her. She wants a reason to yell back. The shoulder of his shirt grows wet and his arms begin to tremble. Are you crying? Kate. Don't. His hand covers the back of her head.
She closes her eyes against the pain.
He looks so much younger when he is sleeping. The lines etched into his forehead won't quite go away. She doesn't kiss him goodbye because that would make it final.
She doesn't leave a note. She doesn't have the time, and this lie is the last. She doesn't want to hurt him more than she already has.
Aaron's face is red and scrunched-up against the chill morning air as she buckles him into his carseat, and she tucks his blanket around him, snug.
"Let's go, baby," she murmurs. Let's go. Let's let go. She drives away from her house with the sour taste of leaving bubbling in her mouth, again, and the smell of smoke, phantom-like, swirling around them all, making it hard to breathe.