I wanted to write a cute fluffy pieces about Riley and Rubik, but ended up with this monster mess instead. That being said, I hope you like it and do leave a comment if you do!
Also, I just created a tumblr ( TangerineTales) so hit me up if you've any suggestions for people/cool blogs to follow! Always up for more procrastination material.
WHEN SEPTEMBER ENDS
by Tangerine Tales
Riley is 10 when his father passes away. No matter how hard his parents and Matt try to hide it from him, he knows it is coming sooner or later. For one, the whispered conversations that end abruptly as soon as he enters the room make it clear that whatever his father is suffering from (Stage 4 – Lung Cancer, he later learns after mastering the skill of eavesdropping) are a sure indicator that his father's health is far from the optimistic situation the three paint for him.
On the day his father passes away, Riley buys a Rubik's cube. He grabs the toy off the shelves from a corner-store, on his way home from school. It doesn't look like it's too difficult, and he needs something to entertain himself with while at the hospital.
In line with their attempts at keeping Riley in the dark about his father's condition, the three had initially decided that Riley shouldn't visit his father at the wards. Of course, Riley protested against this – his face growing red with anger and frustration at being treated like a tiny child, as usual. His parents relented in the end. That battle won, Riley still finds himself gently pushed out of the ward after exchanging a few pleasantries with his father, every time he visits.
"I'm not 5, you know!" he once shot at his mother. But the look of hurt across her face, and the desperate need in her eyes to cling onto some fantasy, made it evident that she needed to pretend not for Riley's sake, but for her own. Since then, he makes sure to keep his conversations with his father short – "School was good. I'm one of the top in class. The pigs say hi. I love you, pops." – in order to quickly scoot out of the room, before he can see his mother's façade drop again.
Sometimes, Matt joins him outside, as he roams the corridors. But most of the time, he wanders around alone. He doesn't get why Matt, only a few years older than him, gets to act the grown-up, while everyone treats him like the baby of the family – but also figures that this is a bad time to pick a fight.
The day his father "lost the battle to cancer" (Riley hates that euphemism with a passion), Riley, as usual, makes his quick exit into the hospital's corridors, and plants himself in one of the chairs situated near the room. He pulls the Rubik's cube out of his pocket, messes up the different colours as thoroughly as he can, and begins his attempt.
Turn this column, shift this down, turn this one, then turn it this way. It's rather hypnotising, the way that whenever he looks like he's on the verge of solving the cube, he ends up making a fatal mistake somewhere. If there's one thing that Riley prides himself on, it's his ability to solve puzzles; and he refuses to concede defeat to a plastic cube. This one should be over here instead.
There is some sort of commotion going on in his father's room – he can hear his mother's voice, raised and frantic. If I solve this puzzle in five minutes, nothing's going to happen. His hands move swiftly across the cube's surface, trying all sorts of different permutations. The noises in his father's room get louder. Four more minutes – it's going to be nothing. I can solve this. As long as I finish this, nothing's going to happen.
Never taking his gaze off the cube, from the corner of his eye, he catches a glimpse of a doctor and a nurse rushing down the corridor – wheeling a set of serious-looking hospital equipment. It's fine. They're not going to pops' room. It's just a coincidence. You've three more minutes, you just need to solve this.
They turn into his father's room, just as Matt runs out.
"Ri – Riley."
Everything's going to be fine. I'm almost done. I can do this.
"Riley, look at me."
Two more minutes.
"Riley, will you take your eyes off that God damn cube, and listen to me?"
Just a few more columns to go. As long as I solve this, it's just going to be a false alarm.
He barely registers Matt hauling him up and marching him into his father's room. He keeps his grip on the cube tight. He doesn't look up, doesn't see the way the doctor is desperately trying to revive his father, whose heart-rate seemed to have slowed to a flat line.
As long as I don't see anything, it doesn't exist. As long as I solve this, everything will be fine. I'm almost there. Nothing's going to go wrong. This column needs to be here. Shift this one, turn this way. As long as I solve this, everyth –
"I'm sorry."
He hears a strange guttural cry which sounds like his Ma – but can't possibly be.
On the day his father passes away, Riley doesn't remember anything else.
I just need to finish this, and everything will go back to normal.
He doesn't remember much of the following days either, except for coloured columns and his hands hurting from how much he's twisting and turning. He wonders if the dream he's had of him trying to bite Matt whenever his older brother attempts to take away the cube is actually reality instead. It doesn't matter – all that matters is finishing this cube.
"Don't worry about Riley, Ma. I'm sure he's fine," he hears Matt say on occasion, as if far off in the distance.
Riley doesn't cry at his father's funeral. He's not even sure if he's attended – but he must have, because he has flashes of memories: of being dressed by his mother (he makes sure to always have one hand on the cube); of going down to a cemetery; of flowers and people crying; of hands trying to take his cube away from him.
"He hasn't said anything since –" His mother chokes back a sob. He catches a glimpse of Matt and his mother hugging, tears running down their cheeks.
They don't need to worry. I'm going to fix everything with this cube.
On the day Riley solves the Rubik's cube, his father passes away for the second time.
He runs down the stairs, into the kitchen where his mother is sitting. His eyes are bright and wild, and he brandishes the solved cube in his hand. "I did it, Ma! I did it! I won – I solved it," he cries. His mind is racing – he's saved the family! "Pops is going to get better. I did it – he doesn't have to be in the hospital anymore!"
His mother says nothing, a strange expression on her face. There is an awkward silence that descends upon the two of them. Riley doesn't understand – why is she not more excited? Why doesn't she understand what I just done? "Ma, I –"
It is this moment in which Matt bursts into the room. "Riley –"
"Matt, I did it. I solved the cube! Everything's going to be fine now. Pops will get out of the hospital, and we can go back to normal!"
"Riley, there's… something I need to show you."
On the day Riley solves the Rubik's cube, he cries for his father for the first time, letting the cube fall from his hands onto the soft, fresh earth of his father's grave.
He passes the next week in a daze. He knows he's driving his already-devastated mother crazy with worry, but there's a fog in his head that can't be lifted. It's difficult to form any coherent thoughts, and the idea of doing anything gives him a massive headache, so Riley buries himself deep into his bed, barely leaving his room. He misses a week of school, then another, and soon a whole month. There's a niggling sense of panic about how much work he has to do to catch up with classes, but it's easy to ignore as he forces his eyes close and attempts to sleep himself out of existence.
He always wakes up with a tinge of disappointment.
For the first week, Matt is constantly fluttering about in his room, trying to get him to do something – "C'mon Riley, let's go for a ride through the woods.", "Riley, I bought you another cube. Maybe you can show me how to solve it? I'll just leave it on your nightstand here, okay?" – but eventually leaves, half pissed off with his brother for being so uncooperative, half panicking about his comatose state.
His mother comes up to sit with him every day. They don't say much, there's nothing much to say anyway. Riley notices that each time his mother hugs him, she feels a little frailer than before. He tries to say something to lift her spirits, but finds that nothing comes to mind.
Sometimes, he hears Matt and his mother talking about him outside his room. His mother often sounding as if she's on the verge of tears. All he needs to do is get out of bed, get into a fresh set of clothes, and give her a big hug – and it frustrates Riley that he's unable to do something as simple as that. He hates himself for being stuck in his bed, for not even having enough energy to change his shirt by himself.
One day, Riley wakes up to a soft whine and warm fur. There's a small puppy in his bed, crawling about in his sheets and sniffing at everything cautiously. It looks up at Riley as he startles awake, and hesitates before approaching him, taking tiny steps that leave little creases on the bed. Riley's not sure how to react, watching it as carefully as it's watching Riley.
"She hasn't got a name yet."
Matt is standing by his door-frame, arms crossed.
"You can name her if you want."
The puppy lets out another soft whine and dives into Riley's arms, having determined that Riley isn't that much of a threat. It – no, she – begins licking at his fingers. It's drier than he expects, and she's a lot smaller than he initially thought. He holds her up, and she struggles against his clumsy grip, twisting out of it and tumbling back onto the bedsheets.
"Since you're home so much, you're going to have to look after her the most."
She pads around his bed, tail wagging at the new sensations around her.
"I'll just leave you two to get to know each other."
The puppy never leaves his side after that – not when he's awake, that is. She never seems to get tired darting from one end of his room to the other, yelping as she sprints about. Riley takes toys down from his shelves – old stuffed animals won at carnivals, a Velociraptor from when him and Matt were obsessed with Jurassic Park, little army figurines – and lets her sniff at everything. She takes to his old teddy bear quickly, dragging and nudging it around his room.
He remembers the bear. His father had won it for him at a carnival when he was 5, after several tries at a sword-fighting game. At first, he wants to yell at her for how rough she's treating the bear: tossing it around, leaving little bite-marks all over it. But he sees how excited she is with the toy, how she keeps bringing it to him and wagging her tail expectantly before snuggling into his lap with the bear, and he decides maybe it's okay if he just lets her keep it. It was collecting dust on his shelf anyway.
"Have you given her a name yet?" asks his mother, one day, as they're setting up a small kennel in his room. She had gone out to buy the model from a hardware store, and Riley had found himself volunteering to help fix it up.
Riley shrugs.
Despite the kennel, the puppy spends most nights sleeping with Riley in his bed. She nuzzles close whenever he jolts awake from nightmares, and her little breaths and the steady rise and fall of her chest help to lull him back to sleep. Sometimes her legs move rapidly while she's asleep (and sometimes, that wakes Riley up as well), and Riley wonders what she's dreaming about. There are moments she lets out small cries at night as if in a nightmare, and it is in these moments that Riley snuggles closer to her, and pets her gently until she seems to pass out of it.
"I was thinking… Maybe I should take her outside for a walk today?" Riley suggests one day. He doesn't see how his mother's eyes light up at that suggestion.
"Sure dear," she replies, and gives Riley one of the largest hugs he's ever received from her.
It's the first time he's stepped out of his house since he found out about his father. The Sun feels a little too bright, and he squints a bit. He's brought a leash out, but he doesn't think he'll need to use it – for all her excitement at being outside, the puppy never seems to stray too far from him. She barks as she races about, chasing stray butterflies but always bolting back to him after a few moments. Her happiness is contagious, and Riley can't help but run alongside with her. They dart through the woods, jumping over fallen branches and boulders – no particular direction in mind.
It's only when she runs ahead and lets out a loud bark that he realises where they've been heading towards: his father's grave. Having worked on the farm his entire life, his father had stated in his will that he wanted to be buried in family soil. Riley comes to a stop when he sees his father's gravestone, faltering. The puppy barks again, and runs back to him, running circles around him then back to the gravestone – evidently confused by why Riley stopped playing with her.
He approaches the site slowly, resisting the urge to bolt in the opposite direction or to lay on the ground and curl into the dirt. He's not sure how he even remembered getting here, having been led by Matt the previous time. The puppy sits directly in front of the gravestone, sniffing at it. It's evidently something that she's never encountered before. Then, as if she's smelt something, she begins burrowing into the soft dirt and Riley starts, opening his mouth to snap at her to STOP WHAT ARE YOU DOING? when she pulls out a dirty object that was half-swallowed by the soil around it.
It's his cube: muddy and grimy. Its colours faded into dirty brown after weeks of sitting in the dank of the soil. The puppy lets out a soft bark, and nudges it towards Riley, as if recognising that it was once his. She looks up from it at him.
And it is the image of her – sitting on top of his father's grave, tongue out and tail wagging - next to that damn, damn Rubik's cube that took days away from him which breaks something in him. Riley falls to his knees, hands deep in the soil, gasping for air as he starts to cry again. The puppy panics at this reaction (it's not the first time she's seen him cry, but it's the first time she's seen him cry like that) and runs to his side.
Suddenly, Riley feels like he's finally breathing again. Amidst the shaky sobs, he draws in large lung-fulls of air, savouring the sweetness of each breath, trembling at how new everything feels. The puppy jumps onto his knees, licking away the tears that fall down his face, barking softly as she does.
They stay like that for a long while, boy and puppy. And when he looks up again, at his father's gravestone ("Michael Griffin. 1960 - 2008 Father, Husband. He will be missed."), he feels like he's woken up from a very long sleep. He sees the – no, that's not right: his – puppy, standing by his abandoned cube, and says, "Thank you… Rubik."
She barks in response.
And for the first time in a long while, Riley smiles, and feels as if everything may be okay again.