Give Unto Me
© 2004 Black Tangled Heart
The book belongs to dear Jeffery. The film belongs to sweet Sofia. Title and lyrics are property of Evanescence.
For Petal and Kara: the latter because she is Lux, the former because she is darling.
Give unto me your troubles
I'll endure your suffering
Place onto me your burden
I'll drink your deadly poison
"Did you love her?"
He's heard the question so many times. In his car when a girl whose name he didn't remember had sweat dripping down her bare back and come on her tongue. Perfect curls drooping, perfect lipstick smeared. From friends when they drove late at night, for lack of something to do. For the feeling of night breeze in their hair; for being lifted out of misery by pot clouds and coke lines. From parents. From teachers. From strangers.
"Did you love Lux Lisbon?"
The question is different from her mouth. That mouth is still pink; still thirteen. She's older in mind and heart, but her face is baby-sweet. Flat chest. Smooth hands. Fingers ink-stained, shins pale. In that dirty wedding dress, still. Her scars are gone, but there's a woman in her eyes: the woman she has become in every way, save for her virgin body. Virgin suicide.
She's changed and stayed the same.
She's been in heaven long enough for Trip to see more death around him; for them both to watch the world wither and die before it is reborn. Trip outlived the beautiful, tragic Lisbons; he outlived most of the people with whom he had drug rehab. Rehab that never worked, because heroin brought him to his own end.
He expected to plunge to the deepest circle of Hell. He expected to be punished. Instead he rose like the white moon to Heaven's gate for reasons still unbeknownst to him. He wandered the shimmering stretch of heaven until he found a fuchsia sky and fields of white blossoms. In their midst rested Cecilia, bright-eyed. His own eyes remained filled with the darkness of a life without Lux, his light.
His hands are callused, his lips dry. And Cecilia is still that woman trapped in a girl's body. That virgin. Virgin suicide.
There are others in heaven. Under the fuchsia sky; among the white blossoms. Faces he recognizes and doesn't. Chase Buell's brittle fingers still play the strings of an invisible violin. His smile is reminiscent of the one he wore as Lux touched him on that final night. Lydia Perl isn't in Hell after all, with her hair that matches the inferno's hue. Still dyed, even at the age of fifty when a car crash left her without breath.
Cecilia is radiant among them; she's sanity where he has none.
It is with her that he speaks earnestly. He's faced doctors and pills and pathetic attempts at therapy. He may have spoken of Lux with interest, his eyes crinkling into slits as he smiles, remembering the smell of her neck, the freckles on her elbow. But he never tells them that. Won't let them know everything. They all don't deserve to know about her. Sometimes he thinks he didn't deserve to, either.
Cecilia's hand with its bitten nails is warm in his. "How do you know what love is?" he counters her question, though they both know he'll answer it in due time. "Your mommy never showed you real love, did she? Those church pews and that gross creamed corn." He makes a face, and she laughs.
"My mom loved me in her own way, and I don't resent her. But it was my time to go, and nothing could have stopped that." Her voice steady, assured, irrefutable. Her eyes bright. "I love my sisters. Do you love my sister?"
She's dart-sharp. She's flashing-blade quick. He knows she won't let him get away with silence. He moves closer to her, brushing her hair away from her eyes. "You're stalling," she says, when he leans in to wrap his sinew- corded arms around her. He says nothing, and presses his warm face against her neck.
"All those boys never loved her. Those ones on the roof and in the school yard. But hey, we were in the car and on the football field, so why am I any different from any other guy who put his fingers or tongue in her?"
Cecilia doesn't pause for a second before she answers. It's out of her mouth fast. Sure. "Because she loved you, Trip."
He lifts his weary cheek and gazes at the sky, expecting to see Lux's face against the clear blue. But it's only hazed with clouds and shot with sunlight. Cecilia touches his shoulder with her gentle fingers. He turns to her again, to find her eyes dark and solemn.
"Is she in Heaven with you?"
"Yes."
Cecilia gets to her feet. She brushes off her wedding dress, and Trip notices her bare wrists. He lifts himself off the ground and catches Cecilia's white arm between his palms. He brings the inside of her wrist to his lips and kisses the pulse point. There are no pink cuts or silver scars, no poison spread across the fuchsia sky or field of white blossoms.
"Will you help me find her?"
She takes his hand. "Yes."
No Lux.
"Why am I here, Cecilia?" he says one night while they rest, lying on their backs looking up at the constellations. They know now that heaven is wide and fruitful, with its residents scattered and strewn like a handful of stars tossed from the sky. "Why am I here?" he asks again, feeling her squeeze his hand. "After how I treated people and how I abused myself and how in the end any good thing I did never mattered."
There is a stretch of silence from Cecilia. She's the one that chews her words before they come out of her mouth. Like Bonnie, whose tongue formed prayers more often than requests or snide remarks. Unlike his Lux, whose mouth was as wild as her roaming hands and unruly blonde hair. Everything about his Lux screamed of rawness: her beauty and fragility and utter recklessness. He still remembers their first kiss, and how he didn't sleep that whole night after.
"Gotta get back before bed check."
Cecilia digs her fingernails into Trip's palm and snaps the taut silence: her voice steady, assured, irrefutable.
"Everything mattered. You loved her. And that has to mean something." From her, it sounds completely doubtless. It is as though all truth spills from her mouth. She looks at Trip, her sweet face an entity of honesty. "You loved her, and if she'd known it, she'd still be alive. But you're here now, and as long as you love her still, I know things will be now what they couldn't be before."
She releases her hold on his hand and gently touches his cheek. "Goodnight, Trip."
He presses her fingers against his lips. "G'night, Cecilia."
He sleeps uneasily, his face buried in the crook of his arm. She lies close to him; his arm slung about her waist for warmth and reassurance. When he wakes suddenly, she calms him, until they both sleep soundly.
When he wakes in the morning, Cecilia is gone. The sky is clear and cloudless again, though the sun burns high and furious. Blossoms are trampled from Cecilia's flip flops, though he knows his heart cannot be trampled into thinking she has left him. He lies back and waits. He has spent far too much time wanting things to happen quickly. Everything that came quickly left quickly. The pleasure flew from his mind and body when he came down from whatever high it offered: the lithe girl with russet hair who screamed his name and left him twisted up in his bed sheets, the joint that expanded his mind and then left him in darkness.
Lux was the only good thing that could have lingered, had he not left her alone on the field in her white dress with her white face and broken white heart.
Cecilia returns when the sun is hottest, blinding, searing. She kicks off her flip flops and settles next to the man she has grown so fond of in such a short time. "Trip?" Her voice is soft, solemn.
He sits up, dizzy with heat and sudden movement. Cecilia touches his shoulder with her ever-present reassurance. It sends relief through him the way heroin never did. He turns to her, and sees that Lux sits beside her. His heart leaps into his throat, and suddenly he feels as though he's back in his car again and Lux is atop him in her nightgown, kissing him furiously, flaying him alive.
And he loves her. He loved who she was when he first met her. Her fragility buried underneath a façade of hostility. Loves who she was when everything was blurred and blissful, with her Homecoming tiara and her grass-stained white dress. Loves who she was when she woke up alone, when she told herself and the world she was over him, because that was a lie. Loved who she was when she searched for her favourite radio song before she filled the car with carbon monoxide and ended life gray-faced, cigarette between her fingers and a melody in her head. She loved him through it all, and he loved her for it. And he loves her still. Loves her now, so many years later.
"Lux?" His voice hoarse, ragged. Will she be just a ghost like she's been in his dreams for so many years? Flickering and white, blurred at the edges. Ephemeral. Her body atop his that vanished when he tried to touch it, her voice that filled his ears that faded away before he could open his mouth. The kiss she never returned. Just a ghost on his bed, in his head.
Her hand on his cheek is real. Soft and chapped and white. The same hands, the same jaded eyes, the same pink mouth. She is as real now as she ever was in life, like she has waited for him all this time. Stayed the same girl just for him.
"Trip."
It can't be this perfect.
Nothing is ever this perfect.
Except her.
"Trip?" she says again, her eyes searching his face.
He doesn't know what to do. Kiss her? Hug her? Gather her small body up in his arms and tell her that his whole life, he has never loved anything but her? He never knows what to do around her. Smooth, composed Trip falters, falls. Falls for her.
That girl drove me crazy, man.
They sit in silence under the hot sun. Neither of them has ever coped well with silence. She knew too much of it, he didn't know enough. And it crippled them both from the inside out. When they do lock eyes, he expects her to frown, to scream, to cry like the unloved fourteen-year-old she has always believed herself to be. But she smiles, and he kisses her.
For once, she is free of aggression. She doesn't kiss him furiously, flay him alive. She is soft and pliant in his hands, and he in hers. Anxiety seeps out of his pores. She melts into him, like the sunshine melting onto their bodies. When he finally breaks the kiss, his glistening lip and glittering eye tell her everything, but he voices his truth anyhow. She needs to hear it.
"I love you, Lux Lisbon."
Her face glows, burns, darkens. Her shining eyes fill with storms. Sharp shrieks leave her mouth, as though broken glass is falling from her lips. She starts to hit him, scratch him, kick him. Screaming. He tries to hug her, kiss her, gather her up in his arms.
"I hate you, Trip Fontaine. I loved you with all of me and you left me with nothing."
He shuts his eyes.
When he opens them, he finds himself still seventeen. Tan and dark and hopless. Jaded far too young, like his love Lux, that was and isn't. Cecilia is on his bed with sarcasm on her face and dripping from her voice.
"God, you scream loud."