Moving Back
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By: Doubleplusgoodduckspeaker
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~Rebecca's spirit left her on the day Arthur forgot she had agreed to stay with him. Yet despite everything, she was relieved that he had remembered her name. The Hawkins family, on growing up and growing older~
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Rebecca pauses at the threshold of the door. It is propped open from the inside, the screen door all that is needed to keep out the bugs on this particular summer evening. A moment later after regaining some composure she creeps through the hallway, feeling like an intruder after so many years of being away. The boards sing out underneath her feet as if they recognize her footfall, welcoming her back.
Arthur is on the back porch, on the wide Adirondack glider that has weathered to the patina the glossy advertisement had promised. He looks up at her, tilting his head back as a smile overtook his face. "Rebecca, what a nice surprise!"
She breathes out a long sigh, sets down her bags and gives him a tight hug.
The weeks that follow are lovely—they always like to rise early, to greet the sunrise with a cup of strong coffee and the daily newspaper. It is like when she was young, Chaucer and Herodotus her breakfast companions instead—often Arthur would have to urge her eyes up from the pages. Then the books turned into computers and she was gone, first to college and then to a doctorate. All the same, those childhood haunts continue to haunt her in the moments of stillness or of silence. There aren't too many, if she can help it. She tries to make her grandfather comfortable.
She comes into the kitchen midmorning to find him pouring himself a bowl of cereal. He turns to her, motioning with the box as he talks. "Rebecca, do you want one too? Or perhaps some toast?"
"Grandpa, we already had breakfast today." She doesn't know where to look so she settles for the hands that are gripping the cereal box. They are such strong hands, she knows.
She walks over to him and together they just stare at the half-filled bowl. "I know that," he says, slightly confused, as if the bowl had filled itself. It is proof of something terrifying. "I know that."
That summer the heat fell like a blanket over the small house. In the nights Rebecca would listen to the humming of the insects, to the way the wind disrupted each leaf of the tree outside her window. Through the years her hair has grown longer and she brushes it out in long even strokes to remove all the tangles.
This day is the worst. It is the first day he had calls her Alice.
They are sitting in the living room—he is reading, she is finishing her notes on an article to be published in an upcoming issue of Computer Science Quarterly—when she looks up to find him staring at her with an odd, questioning slant to his eyebrows.
"Where did you get those glasses, Alice? You don't wear glasses," he says, and her fingers froze over the keys of her laptop.
"Grandpa, I'm Rebecca." After a moment the light returned to his eyes and he nods A few moments later she catches him looking at her again, just like that, and she has to leave the room.
Finishing brushing her hair, Rebecca can't help but look at the small color photo taped to one side of the mirror. It is startling, how alike they look now. She looks like someone she can't remember, and at the thought Rebecca curls up into a ball in the center of her bed and hugs her knees to her chest. She tries to fall asleep this way but can't and so after some time she slides underneath the sheets of her bed and turns her face away from the mirror.
Her oldest memory is of sneaking into the study—they had never let her go there and she could never figure out why, it was just a room—and breaking a ceramic pot they had placed on the table alongside a dark-stained wooden lamp. Of course she hadn't meant to—her childlike hands with their fat, stubby fingers had simply been trying to pull herself up for some reason and she had knocked it down. It is the sound she remembers most, the sharp smack as the pot smashed against the floor. It shattered at her feet into an uncountable number of light and dark-toned fragments, and it was a miracle she didn't cut her feet on them as she ran from the room.
She tries sometimes to remember the time before that but all she can remember are things that enough people have told her so in her mind they have become memories. The warm, happy sound of her mother's laughter. A room painted yellow. The fuzzy softness of a blanket that would catch her when she tried to stand up and walk before she was ready.
No, she can't truly remember anything of the time in that other house, just the two of them. She doesn't remember the phone call to the daycare center, the surprise of her grandparents picking her up that day. She doesn't remember the funeral.
She has pictures and stories of that other life, just as she knows of her grandparent's. Pictures of years she couldn't ever remember hang alongside the staircase in a mixture of sizes and frames—a large bold print of them with the Pyramids looming beyond; a candid shot at his fiftieth birthday; a posed black-and-white wedding photo cut to fit an oval frame. She traces them with her fingers and commits them to memory.
"Yugi!" Rebecca's voice carries over the spluttering of his rental car as her oldest friend pulls into the driveway. "God, it's great to see you."
It is a small reminder that before all of this she still has something of a social life and some part of her still wants to interact more with the world outside the small wooden house, but somehow it feels wrong to want both. She can't neglect her grandfather, she won't let herself.
Yugi is tall enough compared to her, and there's a slight shadow across his face, markers that he's grown up just as she has. Rebecca suppresses a giggle at the thought of Yugi growing out his beard to match his wild hair as they walk inside. He's only here for the day—it was a matter of luck, of a conference in the next city over. Two phone calls and here he is, like magic. She can never help but to marvel at him every time they're together.
They're catching up when a series of heavy thuds interrupt them. Arthur is old and young again that day and his voice is high and frantic. "My Blue-Eyes White Dragon, it's gone! Where is that card?" There's another crash, louder this time, coming from his room upstairs.
Their sweet moment has dissolved in an instant, and at first Rebecca can't say anything. "I…I need to go help him…"
"Is… is this a bad time? Should I leave?"
"No!" Always so polite, always looking out for others—that was the Yugi she remembered. She can't make herself say the words, just like she had always fought so bull-headedly against what was right for what was easy. Of course it is a bad time. It's been bad. It's getting worse. But despite everything, she still wants him there. "Stay. Please?"
Rebecca climbs the stairs two at a time, throwing open the door to find the room completely torn apart. Boxes full of papers have spilled over, and books have been thrown clear across the room. A lamp that once stood proudly on his bedside table had shattered, glass slivers sinking into the thin Berber carpet. She can't find her voice—something must have knocked it out of her just like with this room, just like with their lives, just like in his mind. She can't pick up those pieces and make him whole again, no matter how much she tries.
"Rebecca there's a thief in this house!" Arthur runs across the room to her, startlingly fast despite his age, and takes her by the hand. "The room, it's destroyed, and my Blue-Eyes White Dragon card is missing. There's only four in the entire world—"
"Grandpa it's okay, calm down—"
"I won't let them take it away!"
"Nothing's gone, just sit down, and be careful—is that glass on the floor?"
"Don't tell me to be careful! I'm not some invalid."
In those next moments they both go completely still. She can barely hear Yugi's voice, but she can hear it all the same. "Is everything alright? Do you need any help?"
Arthur is gone, out of the room and into the hallway—looking at Yugi like he would a stranger. "You stole my Blue-Eyes Card! What have you done with it?"
Yugi looks up at Rebecca, and if she could she would measure the sadness in his gaze and take it out, because she was tired at people looking at her like that, but in those seconds Arthur has started down the stairs. His foot catches over something halfway down, and he tumbles into Yugi, who like any good, steadfast friend—catches him.
Rebecca hates the doctor's office. She always has, and even now that she has a PhD she won't let anyone call her 'Doctor Hawkins.'
She has sent Yugi away several hours ago so he wouldn't miss his flight. There are hushed conversations with the doctor, reports and tests given. He is awake during some of it but just on the cusp of lucidity. She doubts she'd want to come back after that either. "You both have options," the doctor says in the moments before he leaves to attend to some other patients. "Think about it."
Arthur is lying under starched white sheets, his left ankle wrapped—thank goodness it wasn't broken. They got lucky, the doctor had said. Of course it had been luck that guided them to this point. Rebecca sighs in exasperation and gets herself some trail mix from the vending machine in the lobby.
She looks down at him some time later to see him looking back at her, the tenderest expression in his eyes. "Are you alright?" she asks.
"You're not wearing your name tag—but I remember you. Evelyn, wasn't it?" He is old and young, taken to the hospital after a nasty fall from a ladder on his second field season. There he would meet the most beautiful girl and marry her, and they would later come to be grandparents of another beautiful girl who sits perched on the foot of his bed like a bird who at any moment could spread her wings and fly away.
"Evelyn… I'm alright, now that I've got you to take care of me."
She looks down to see him holding out his hand. There is something in the way the light from the half-open blinds comes into the room that takes those years away and makes him seem young and whole again. Rebecca ducks her head, and in the black-and-white pattern on the linoleum floors she sees fragments of a broken vessel, pushed from a table by small, childlike hands.
He smiles and, for better or for worse, she wants him to keep smiling for as long as he can. She reaches out and puts her palm in his and links their fingers together. It feels warm and strong.
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Author's Notes:
Thanks to the best beta in the entire world, My Misguided Fairytale. *great big bear hug*
Canonically Rebecca's mother and grandmother are not known, so I chose the names Alice and Evelyn for them, respectively, and hopefully brought a voice to them that canon did not.
Thank you for reading and please review, I value and treasure each one.