It's been so long since I've written prose, I think I've almost lost the trick of it. So, I'm sorry about this. I'm not really happy with it, but I'd rather get it down, if you know what I mean. For my muse, though she'll never read it, I'm afraid, and for NotAContrivance, since she will. Probably. I'm trying to avoid the format of SA, but damn, they're good framing devices…and I like writing from first-person, so whoops. Apologies, Lor.
As always, updates will be sporadic, but I've got an outline for this one written down, so it's not like I'll forget the plot. Or end up being bored with it…or so I hope, anyway. Edwin/Lizzie are both in college, or rather, working, Casey/Derek are out of it (college and sanity), and Marti is sixteen. And, they haven't met each other yet. It's AU, but exactly how, you'll have to read to see, dear reader. Anyway: Onwards.
"Don't push it," said my mother, but she was smiling. Our heads bobbed out of the water, grinning at each other foolishly. The water was warm, exactly what you'd expect from the Caribbean, and we were both treading water. At least, we were now – my mother had restrained me the moment I leapt off the boat, aiming to go straight down. The wetsuit and flippers were tight-fitting on me, but I was itching. Itching to dive down, and finally, finally catch one of those colourful fish. The fish I'd seen in my mother's pictures, on our walls, in our aquarium, only in their natural environment. I was twelve then, if I'm not wrong. And I was so excited, partially because of that, partially because my mother had brought me along on her research, and partially because I loved seeing, experiencing, new things. Once in a lifetime things. Even then.
"You'll see all the fish soon enough, Edwin," my mother said, "Have patience."
I never forgot that one moment, with the hot sun beating down on my mother and I, from a clear blue sky, breath-masks hanging loosely from our chins. The goggles were perfectly transparent, beads of water rolling down the side of my right eye. The heavy oxygen tank strapped to my shoulders weighted me down a little. But the saltwater buoyed me up, and the waves moved me, ever so slightly, hither and thither. Above us, endless blue sky. Vertically below us, an entire world, endless blue sea. A reef, one of the most isolated reefs left on Earth, someplace my mother had discovered in between a few small islands, almost reefs themselves. Seaweed forests. Anemone orchards. Rocks and crevices and little caves, homes for the creatures who lived and died there.
I smiled back, unable to do anything but grin stupidly. The grin on her face made her all at once the mum I remembered, someone who made Derek and I Nutella sandwiches when we were small, who stepped between us when we fought, who joined in on our playfights with water balloons that were several times more bouncy than any I or Derek could make. Sometimes, even with timed fuses. My mother, who backed me up when Derek framed me for whatever prank he played, who made up for my dad when he couldn't come to my science presentations.
Her eyes softened, and she raised tanned fingers in a countdown. Five, we took a breath. Four, three, blew it out. Two, chewed on the breathing apparatus. One.
And then we dived.
Catching the colourful fish with my bare hands, whose names my mother whispered to me when I was small in lieu of bedtime stories of the traditional kind, was a once in a lifetime experience. Letting them go, even more so.
My mother had easily two hundred times the experience of catching fish with her bare hands, and letting them go. Perhaps that was why, when my father sent her divorce papers, stress emanating from his face, that she simply signed, and breathed in, breathed out. And smiled at him. Letting him go.
Even then, six whole years before my mother and my father's marriage finally foundered and gave way entirely, the signs of the looming divorce were there, crystal in their clarity, in my memories. Throughout that entire (divine) trip, my mother only mentioned my father once, and it was only to call him, to remember to eat. For all that their partnership broke up, they still cared about one another, and my father clearly needed some kind of watcher.
My mother was easily irritable out of the water. To her many suitors, who paraded through her house like one endless list, she became some kind of mermaid – lively and gregarious, patient and knowledgable when discussing the ocean, but hot-tempered otherwise. The children situation didn't help much – after my father left, taking Marti with him, Derek took two months before moving out himself. He'd never been close to our mother, especially after his teenage years; Derek was the outgoing type, sure, but also the partying type, the type of person who thrived off parties and beer, free and easy girls, seduction and debauchery. Off-field, anyway. On the rink, he favoured speed, controlled violence, and unimaginably precise technique to become something of a hockey superstar. If my dad had been the only one raising us, I think I'd have known more about hockey, but my mother had dragged me off on science trips so often after I turned thirteen that I barely knew the basics of the sport. Okay, that was something of a lie – I did know how to play, if only because Derek had kept using me as a goalie while practicing throughout high school. But it wasn't as if I knew the teams that well. The Knights? Um…er…that's pretty much all, actually. Alas. Woe is me.
My mother did shape me significantly, though I never got into marine biology like her. That was for the best, since my mother was also all kinds of stubborn. A type of person who shaped theories, then pounded them through, refusing to let rivals beat it down. No matter how logical. She would have quaffed my spirit, or we would have degenerated into endless fighting. I had for example the one, brief, affair she had with a fellow biologist - it led to shouting of incomprehensible biological theories throughout the house. Vehement, incoherent. It wasn't fun to live in, and I'd done my best to escape to friends' houses, to the mall even, just to get out of the house. The mall really wasn't fun. Primarily because, as the resident nerd in school and yet as the brother of the then semi-famous Derek Venturi, I kept getting recognised, insulted, compared to my brother (usually in a negative, or wonderingly negative, way). Worse yet, fangirls, convinced that I still had contact with my brother, pestered me again and again to give them his phone number. Much as I resented my brother, I wouldn't do that to him (more than once, and then only with the bitchiest, ugliest one I'd ever met…he appreciated the prank, but threatened my life if I did it again) – and besides, I didn't even have his mobile number anymore; Derek had shattered his phone in a party game sometime a few months back, and never let my mother or I know his new one. Even from far away, Derek assaulted my life through his influence, shaped it – like my mother. Derek's was indirect; he caused me many, many problems, without realizing it. Perhaps he would have put a stop to it, if he was around. But he wasn't. (And probably, would not have regardless. He would have taken humour in it. It would have been just like him.) My mother took an active interest in me learning the scientific method, and though I did well enough in AP Biology, I found my real passion, my real talent, in mechanics, physics, astronomy – the hard sciences, the typically male ones.
And now I was a sophomore in Queens, majoring in Engineering, with a small loft I had found for a pittance, but was only just beginning to pay off. I worked in a rickety old café, where my mechanical skills came in handy in frequently fixing the broken-down, 'classic retro vintage' junk heap of a coffee machine, though at least it made coffee to die for … or die by, depending on the setting. Studying like I did, pushing myself like my mother had taught me, kept me up in the wee hours of the morning. Coffee that could peel paint did help, far too much – and at least Jamie, the manager and one of my closest friends, had given me the key so I could get in and out whenever I felt like it. He called it "Guaranteeing service 24/7," and at one point, during one of my fiercest study periods, (where I was there almost every night) had actually hung a sign outside the café saying so.
The rickety old café wasn't just that, of course. Not in this city. Not in this city, which would house so many memories. All crystal in their clarity. Alas.
I'd been entirely too lucky out of high school. Jamie, who'd been closer to me than anyone of his type was supposed to be – dramatic, musical, artistic, creative, illogical – came with me to Queens. Within the first semester, Jamie had found a job in that rickety old café, charming the pants off the owner (a girl no more than five years our senior, named Amelia) with his paintings and music. It was my idea, but the sparse decorations soon were replaced with his paintings, his experimentation with different styles throughout his own course in the visual arts. Of his own volition, he filled the somewhat desolate building with flamenco guitar, his fingers dancing over the strings in the corner of the cafe. Flamenco, because in my freshman year, my mother high-tailed it off to Spain (finally – the grant had been left open to her after her fourth published article, and she finally had the freedom to take it up, my father having left her), and I missed her unbelievably. Soon enough, when I needed a job, Jamie's opinion was what swayed Amelia's – and I got in.
Business wasn't too bad, either. And it picked up considerably after Jamie had a talk with her, and Amelia began to hire waitresses, sprightly ones. To the waitresses, I'm sure, I was just the boy in the back, fixing up coffee for them to serve. Nothing special. I liked it that way, too. I was bad with women, horribly so. I never knew what to say to them, really, where even to begin. No, leave me to my mechanics, to my gadgets and contraptions. Leave me to my plans for the future, for cameras and radios, screens and wires. Gears, rotating. A coffee machine, undulating and hiccoughing, moments before it frays yet again.
She walked in halfway through my sophomore year, at a time when the far-too-bulky coffee machine was choking on its own powder. I was hurriedly holding it together – literally at this point in time, trying to get the brand-new washers to stay in place instead of springing off far too enthusiastically. Amelia wasn't around, taking a short break, and neither was Jamie, who was smoking at the back, breathing out great plumes of smoke, drawing it into his lungs. Unhealthy, but who was I to judge him?
"Hi," Lizzie McDonald said, "I'd like to apply for a waitressing job." Her unfamiliar voice (at that point in time, since, you know, it was about to get a lot more familiar to me) was completely confident, as though there was no chance of rejection. Even though she could have seen the café bustling outside with many, many waitresses, and there was no vacancy sign in the window.
"Give me a moment!" I shouted from the back. "I'll be out in a – few – minutes." Punctuating each word with a tap from a small hammer, I managed to get the washers on, and nails back into place. Wiping the sweat off my face with my forearm, I stepped through the entrance to the kitchen.
Was transfixed. Poleaxed.
She was stunning.
"Well?" she asked, her pink lips forming the 'wuh', her tongue (nimble, flexible) flicking off the 'l's.
"I'll have to talk to Jamie," I said. "Uh, the manager."
Way out of my league. Way out of my reach. And yet -
"That'd be great," she said. And she smiled.
For a brief moment, I felt like I was on that reef again, catching colourful fish that darted between the crevices, with my bare hands.
And, like the first time I managed to seize one, never wanting to, refusing to, let go.