Hell is boiling over, and Heaven is full. We're chained to this world and we're gonna pull.
He wasn't drafted. He joined up. Was walking down the street one afternoon, saw the headlines, saw the men sitting behind the bunting and the recruitment table, picked up the pen and signed his name to the dotted line.
Which Annie O'Malley was fine with. No, really. Her father was a veteran as was her grandfather before him. She knows the pride of sacrifice and the strain of duty better than perhaps any woman Donny could have chosen to love.
It was when he showed up at her door with his marching orders that the house of cards that was her confidence in this situation blew over and landed in a pile of cards at her feet. She stands inside her threshold, he on the other side, his uniformed body and her betrayed expression visible to everyone passing by on the busy Saturday afternoon Boston street. His army uniform looks so damn good on him that the moment she opens the door, she's tempted to kiss him right in the sight of God and all the Bostonians crossing her sidewalk. But she stops herself. His expression and the packed bag resting over his shoulder forces that urge from her body.
He explains everything in an electrically excited tone, as if going off to war were the next best thing to getting drafted by the Sox.
And Donny is surprised, to be honest. When he spoke to his buddies, the way their girls reacted was vastly different than what he got. His buddies warned him that there would be tears and long, lingering kisses and photographs passed between hands to keep the body warm during long, cold nights in the French countryside. But Donny isn't blessed or cursed with any of that sort of reaction. Instead, his girl grinds her teeth together, her eyes filling with the depressed rage of a woman who has been delivered a body bag. Annie pushes him away, both of her hands reaching to his shoulders, shoving him away from her body with a force he's never before seen from her.
"I hate you," she spits.
Oh, she means it, too. Donny can see that from the way her hands shake as his do when he wants so desperately to make a fist and pummel something until the red haze of righteous anger is washed clean from his very soul. The selfish part of him wants to shout back that this is his duty, that she should be proud of him, that she should kiss him and hope that when he's a hero and the ticker tape is falling like snow around him and whatever goddamn metal he's surely going to win that he'll still look her way, much less still want to see her on Saturday nights.
"I'm sorry," is all he says, his face stone.
Her eyes tighten and he finds no trace of confusion or softness to them. He wants to scoop her in his arms and hold her, squeeze her until the language of her body is so permanently written in his skin that he will feel her every moment they are apart. But he won't. Because he's standing tall in his uniform and there is nothing more important than his pride.
"What the fuck does that mean?" She shouts, uncaring that the passerby will You're still gonna leave, aren't you? Your little apology hasn't changed that, has it?"
He nods. Because he is. It isn't the leaving that he's sorry for. At the assertion that he's still shipping out, her face turns flush and she blinks rapidly. She's trying so desperately to keep her eyes clear of the emotion that's coursing through her veins. He's going to get himself killed over there, the fucking moron. Donny has never been anything less than a hero to her, so she knows, the evidence is history in her mind that the courage he's displayed on the streets of Boston will carry with him to Europe. And that is where she'll lose him.
God, does she hate him. For making her love him and then leaving forever.
She'll never recover from this. Goddammit, she'll never get over losing him. Her anger does not leave her tone or her eyes.
"Then I still hate you. I hate you, Donny Donowitz."
But the honest part of him knows that he deserves this. He's known for days that he's shipping out. He's known and has told everyone except for her. He suspected that this would be the one goodbye that he couldn't shake. Now he knows for sure. Because when he ships out, the look of those few lonely tears slipping down her face as she turned from him and slammed the door behind her will burn behind his eyes every night he sleeps beneath the grand European skies.
They don't allow her into the Wives' and Mothers' War Effort Commission because she is neither a wife nor a mother. She has no promise from Donny, no ring on her finger and no photograph on her bedside table. All she has is the whispers and rumors and the names that they call her when they thinks she isn't listening. All she has is the snapshot of him that his father gave her when she went by that first afternoon of Donny's deployment. She keeps it in the pocket of her dress that rests just over her heart. Just to have the bastard close.
And when she goes to bed at night, she pulls it out of her day dress and gives it a long, hard look through slitted eyes. She doesn't think of the times they went to the Boardwalk or the movies, the Seder dinners she was invited to in spite of her decidedly Catholic upbringing, or the time they got drunk and kissed beneath the tree or the day he told her that she could cut his hair in his father's shop or the times they laughed until their sides hurt or kissed until their lips were swollen or the morning she woke to him beside her in bed, his eyes hanging with exhaustion, but looking at her as though she hung the moon. She doesn't think about any of those things. She just thinks that one thought that blocks out everything else. She just thinks about her anger, so that she doesn't have to think about her pain.
"I hate you," she growls at the photograph before slapping it, picture down, on her nightstand and turning out the light.
It doesn't matter how many times she repeats this ritual. He still stars in all of her dreams and nightmares.
It's a Thursday. And just like every Thursday morning, she is carrying a plate of pastries toward her front door, pastries she's made herself for the Donowitz family. It's a tradition they've started, ever since Donny left and the neighborhood women turned on her. It's the one time a week when she feels like the gaping, ripped out stitches of her heart might one day fix themselves again. A time to be with family, the family she never had, the family that Donny gave her.
She pushes through her door, squinting in the morning sun.
"Good morning, Mrs. Baker," she says, looking at her next door neighbor sitting on her porch.
But at the sight of Annie's smiling face, Mrs. Baker stands like a woman in a midnight graveyard.
"You haven't heard?" The matron asks, stumbling through the sentence as though the young girl at the house beside her has missed her own wedding announcement.
Annie shakes her head, not even thinking the worst. After all, it's Thursday. She has fresh muffins and the sun is shining and she's going to see the Donowitz family at the barbershop and on Thursday mornings like this nothing can be as dark as the newspapers seem to suggest.
Then, she understands. The look in Mrs. Baker's eyes gives her the suggestion. The vacant, lobotomized looks in the eyes of her other neighbors confirms it.
Donny's dead. Donny died on the front.
The fucking brave, heroic, motherfucker. Goddammit. The asshole went and got himself killed and there is no one she blames but him. It's all his fault. Oh, God, why in the fuck did he have to sign up? Why did he leave her? She knew he would do this. She knew he would leave her like this.
Annie's knees give out right there. The glass plate she was carrying shatters and she bleeds without moving to stop the stains. And until the lamplights go out the next morning, her neighbors for blocks around are uncomfortably underscored by the sound of a young woman sobbing as though a butcher cut her open with a hacksaw and ripped her heart out before smashing it with a ball peen hammer, screaming out in her breathless agony,
"I hate you…. I hate you…"
The sound of it will haunt the collective soul of the neighborhood for its next three lifetimes.
It feels like an eternity until she is able to stand up without wanting to collapse again. But, somehow, she moves again, though it only ever feels like she's walking around with concrete weighing down her shoes. She teaches herself to wear lipstick again. To curl and pin her hair. To wear that blue dress that Donny loved. To see his mother in the street and smile without running into her arms and sobbing, causing a scene in the middle of their neighborhood.
She stops going to church, though.
That was an experience.
The Sunday after she found out that Donny had been killed, the Sunday after the end of her life, the neighbors dragged her to church. The whispers swirl around her as she walks up the center aisle and bends her knee to the front altar, giving the sign of the cross before sliding into a pew.
No one bothers to sit by her.
Her tears do not stop flowing. Not for a moment.
But when Mass is over, she stumbles over to the altar of St. Augustine. His statue looms over her, staring down as Annie kneels on the unforgiving wooden floor. The candles, illuminated for loved ones and the ones who need intercession, stretch outward and upward, breathing warmth and light onto her face as strangers stare while passing her by. Pulling a coin from her pocket, she places it in the offering box and reaches for a match, striking it against the exposed bottom of her heel. A prayer sticks like uncooked dough in her throat as she reaches out the now flaming stick toward the wick of the cream colored candle sitting on the table directly in front of her.
The wick ignites and she blows out the match. She bows her head to pray, but doesn't even get to the sign of the cross before a cough echoes behind her. Turning, she looks up at the woman behind her, a travesty in a bright yellow dress and pearls. Lips clipped tighter than her purse, the woman stares down the edge of her skeletal nose and her smile tips up like a straw bent in half. She leans into Annie, passively giving the young woman with the raw eyes a measure of dignity. It isn't sincere, though. Annie can tell that from the first.
"Is that for your…" The woman swallows, nodding toward the candle as she attempts to think of a word for what this young woman has been doing with Donny, "Soldier?" She asks.
Annie nods, reading in the woman's eyes exactly what her meaning is for that. She does not speak, but instead attempts to turn back to her prayers. But, at the sight of Annie's back turning toward her, the older woman strides to stand over the candles.
One huff of air is all it takes to blow out the candle that Annie lit for Donny. How simple. How sickening. Every fibre of Annie's body seizes up as her gaze turns from the now smoking, lightless piece of wax and wick to the witch who blew it out so carelessly. But the witch is smiling.
"This is a Catholic Church, dear. We don't light candles for his kind."
Ears red and face flush, Annie feels the rage of Christ with the moneylenders in the Temple. Her hands twitch to break something, to shatter this woman and destroy everything she stands for and loves.
Annie could respond any number of ways. She could respond by reciting passages of both the Old Testament and the New that explain all of the ways that Gentiles who follow Christianity are blessed by God's chosen people, about how salvation is impossible without first the nation of Ancient Israel. She does not explain in soft, dulcet or loud, rough tones that anyone who has taken the time to read the Bible would understand the importance of brotherhood between Christians and their Jewish siblings. That they are co-heirs. That Christians are adopted sons, while God's chosen people are his true-born sons.
She could. But she knows that this woman isn't capable of rational, intelligent thought. Only of hate. So, eyes drying for the first time in days, Annie raises an eyebrow, looking for the woman to balk, and when she doesn't, she rises to her feet, brushing the front and back of her dress for dust before staring at the complete stranger.
"Fine," Annie says with a sickly-sweet smile that, were Donny here, would have caused him to clear out everyone for a five block radius because such smiles from Annie can only end in tightly controlled disasters of catastrophic proportions.
With a careless, though not careless at all, flick of her wrist, Annie knocks five candles off of the altar and onto the freshly waxed wooden floor, starting a fire that, to her feels like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra, but in reality only takes a bucket of water to clean and ends up leaving a tiny soot stain on the floor that they cover up with a false Persian rug.
She walks out as the flames rise and shakes her head, staring heavenward, where she is sure Donny is keeping watch right now. And, when she's safely a block away, she begins to laugh.
A real belly laugh that only comes when someone knows that an asshole is having a real laugh about this in Heaven.
"I hate you," she manages through her laughter which becomes increasingly streaked with tears, thinking about the man watching down as she somehow manages to screw everything up. She laughs as if he were walking right there alongside her.
When the women came this morning to sweep her into church, they told her that it would make her feel better. And they were right. She feels alive for the first time in days.
It's Christmas time. She hasn't cried in three days, which is both something of a miracle and something of a personal, hard worked-for triumph. But it's almost Christmas and she thinks that streak might well be ending. There's an emptiness in her house and an emptiness in the Donowitz home when she walks by to deliver their presents for Hanukkah. She was welcomed with watery smiles and careful small talk, but the halls felt quiet without their loud, broad companion.
She's dressing her Christmas tree when that damn song comes on the radio. God dammit. Just when the streak was getting hot.
I'll be home for Christmas…
Fuck Bing Crosby, she thinks to herself. Fuck him. Reaching into her Christmas box, she pulls out the glimmering star that will top her tree. Dragging a chair from her kitchen table, she plants it beside the tree. One leg finds its way to the seat of the furniture, and she struggles to balance as she rises to stand upright.
And she's in the middle of losing her balance when there is a sudden ring on the doorbell.
The chair slips beneath her and she lands right on her back with an unceremonious oof.
Obviously not going fast enough for whatever stranger is at the door, the bell rings again. Rising to her feet, she leaves the star on the floor and rubs her rear end, wondering if it's too odd and uncouth to sleep with an icepack on it tonight. Well, she thinks to herself darkly, at least there's no one in her bed to disappoint with such a baseless display.
"I'm coming," she screams over the sound of fucking Bing Crosby as the doorbell rings twice more.
Christmas Eve will find me,
Where the love light gleams….
To her annoyance as she's halfway down the hall, the doorbell rings again.
"Hold your horses," she shouts as she stomps her bare feet, knowing that she will probably get a noise complaint from her neighbors, but not caring because whoever has the audacity to ring her doorbell at nine in the evening deserves her ire.
The brass doorknob turns under her hand and she pulls the door back, ready to deliver an earful to whomever is waiting on the other side.
But nothing could have prepared her.
Her mind is silent. No whisper of thought. No shout of incredulity. She cannot string a thought together with all the twine in the world.
Because it's Donny. Donny Donowitz. Dead Donny Donowitz. The man they told her was dead. The man she's been mourning for months now. The man they traded to his mother for a flag.
The man she loved. The man she thought she lost.
Donny is on the other side of that door, wearing his uniform just like the day he left, handsome as ever even with the burn marks kissing the skin from his temple down past his collar. Over his shoulder is his duffle, and his hand rests on its strap. Annie can't think, she can't breathe, she can fathom how she ever managed to speak before this moment. Her eyes are the size of supper plates and Donny is convinced for half a second that he'll need to catch her before she passes out.
She doesn't pass out, though. She doesn't even sway. Instead, she draws a great breath into her chest and throws her arms around him as though he is the only thing tethering her to this world.
It isn't the damn Christmas song that breaks her no crying streak. It is the feeling of his arms around her, a feeling she thought she wouldn't have again in this life time.
"I hate you," she repeats over and over again, sobbing into the shoulder of his jacket.
I hate you for doing this to me. I hate that I lost you. I hate that I almost burned down a church because you were gone. I hate that I believed any force on Earth could take you away from me. I hate that I loved you so much that losing you destroyed me. I hate that I'm crying right now. I hate that I loved you even when I thought that you were dead. I hate that I love you so goddamn much right now. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Donny nods against her, nuzzling his face into her flesh, breathing in the scent of her for the first time in this new life that has been borne of a fire in Paris.
"I love you," he breathes into her skin, the words curling around her like cigarette smoke beneath a streetlamp.
She snorts through her tears, his familiarity sinking through her body like a rock into a lake.
"What d'you want, a medal?" She asks.
Donny smirks, she feels his lips against her neck. Goosebumps break out along her flesh.
"No thanks. I already got one," he gloats.
One of the feminine hands around Donny's back playfully slaps him and he opens his eyes long enough to look over her shoulder into the Christmas-ready house. Though she still has her face buried in his neck, she feels his hand leave her body and motion in the direction of her living room.
"What? No menorah?" He jokes.
Annie rolls her eyes and squeezes him even tighter, almost afraid that he'll disappear if she doesn't cling to him.
"Shut up, asshole."
God, she has missed getting to say that.
Please review! This is a companion piece to my story The Photograph, so if you like this one, please read and review that one as well! This was actually inspired by a review for that story, so if you like, i'd love to hear your thoughts on both!