Swan Queen AU
We're sitting in bed, just like before. She's sitting on her side, reading a book, something scholarly with big words and a lot of pages. The glasses that she only wears for reading are perched delicately on the tip of her nose. I sit next to her, reading a magazine, nothing special, just something to pass the time until she tells me it's time for bed. It looks normal, almost peaceful, as though nothing is wrong. But the fact that we don't speak is a loud inclination that something is wrong.
"This is how it is now, isn't?" I say, louder than intended, unable to focus on the magazine in my hands any longer. The silence that fill the house is killing me. She turns to look at me from her side of the bed. There's a small crinkle between her eyebrows that, after all the years I've known her- loved her- tells me she doesn't understand what I'm asking. We haven't really talked in months, just gone through our daily lives using basic conversation: What should I make you for lunch? Are you working late tonight? Your mother called and wanted to know if we can join them for dinner, what should I tell her? The things married people say that don't really have any meaning. We can hardly look at each other sometimes, both deafened by the incredible silence of what's missing from our house.
"This is that thing that people do when their child dies." I explain. "Where their so lost in their grief until they give up on each other and barely speak. Where their dead kid becomes the only thing they have in common, and it ends them." I watch her flinch every time I say dead, I watch her eyes glaze over with tears. And I feel this overwhelming urge to hug her and take it all back. But I don't, because there is nothing I can do to give her what she really wants, nothing I can do to make her whole again.
She doesn't answer. And I understand, she never been great with sharing her emotions, and neither have I, so how can I ask her to now. It was so sudden, nothing that anyone could've predicted or stopped. All it looked like was a fall off a swing at school, the nurse said he was fine, and let him return to recess. Then his speech changed and he couldn't think straight. We were both at work when we got the calls, meeting each other in the waiting room of the hospital I knew she hated. He was already unconscious when we got there, and soon after that, the swelling in his brain took his life.
"I don't know," she says, pushing her own book away, and looking straight at me for the first time in longer than I want to admit. "I—don't want it to be. But maybe it is." She shuts her eyes and turns away, trying to hide the pain that is so clearly etched on her scrunched face. I know she's thinking about him, the five-year-old boy who should be cuddled between us, reading a comic book. What I don't know is that every night when she doesn't pick him up from school, she sits in his room, the room we painting while I was pregnant, clutching his pillow to her chest as she sobs. When she's finished, she straightens herself and starts dinner, because she doesn't want to look weak in front of me.
I'm thinking about him, too, how tomorrow we won't be greeted by the insistent little voice demanding pancakes again. And what she doesn't know is that his favourite toy didn't get lost in the chaos that day, that I have it hidden in the center console of my car, so I can cry over him, too. Because I don't want to seem weak to her.
It's our own desire to be strong for each other that's slowly tearing us apart, and I can't stand it any longer. I want my wife back. I want my life back. And just like her, I want our son.
Tears leak out of her eyes, and it's the first time I've seen her cry since we held our son after the doctors pronounced him. I don't even notice the tears streaming down my own cheeks.
Something already broken inside us breaks, then, as we both cry. But this time, I'm there to catch her, and she's there to catch me, as we both fall. I finally reach out and am able to do what I haven't since we watched his little body roll away. I wrap my arms around her and pull her close to me. Her arms reach around me and hold me just as tightly.
We sit like that all night, holding each other and crying and murmuring to each other. And the next morning, we wake, not to the voice we both wish we would, but to each other and a beautiful sunrise. And for the first time in months, our eyes meet fully, and we smile.