Notes: There's one more part to this that I'll post in the next couple of days. I have another story that I'm working on for after that with an actual plot and everything (... plot still to be determined), but it might be a couple of weeks before I start posting that. Thank you for reading!
Holding On and Letting Go
Part IV: December
Rusty smelled the tree before he saw it, a fresh, tingly sort of piney smell entering his nose as soon as he entered the condo. Sharon had solved her case, then. Either that, or being more than a day into December without a tree or decorations had gotten to her and she'd taken a break long enough to buy a tree and gone back to work, but her keys were there.
"Rusty?"
"Yeah," he called back.
He sometimes wondered who else she expected. Jack had given his key back. Sharon had changed the locks anyway. He knew none of her friends had keys. He didn't think Sharon really liked having people over. She usually went out to meet people.
Except at Christmas. She'd been disappointed last year when it looked like her Christmas party might not happen.
Christmas was the exception to most of Sharon's rules, really.
"Hey." She looked up when he entered the living room, smiling. "Where are you coming from?"
"I went back to school after I saw Dr. Joe," he said, cautiously eyeing the boxes spread out on the couch and across the coffee table. Sharon had done more than just get a tree. "For a little bit. The TA for my history class is having study sessions for our final."
"Was that helpful?" She reached down, taking two of the weird little angels with no faces from a box on the edge of the coffee table.
"Not really." Rusty began carefully shifting some boxes out of the way to make room for himself on the couch. "Maybe if I'd never shown up to class before."
"Reviewing the basic facts is often quite helpful."
"It's not really a basic facts kind of final, Sharon." And he knew who won the Civil War.
"You might be surprised," she said, still weighing the angels in her hands.
She thought he should keep going, then.
"I thought you could never have too many angels."
She snorted. But she hung both on the tree, and let him change the subject. "I think I'll put the bows back on the wall this year," she said. "I liked the effect."
Whatever that was.
"I liked them better on the tree."
He hadn't really, but she'd been very particular about each bow being exactly centered. Very particular.
"Hm." Sharon frowned at the wall, then looked at the tree. "I think I have enough that we can do both."
"You can never have too many bows?" he suggested, and she laughed.
"No." She crouched down, rummaging through a box at her feet. "So, how was it with Dr. Joe today?"
This was the one question that Sharon ever asked where he could get away with one-word answers. "Good."
Sharon nodded, straightening up with the tree topper angel in her hand. "Good."
"We..." Rusty hesitated.
Sharon went back to the tree, but her head turned towards him just a little.
"He said that sometimes you miss people more on holidays," Rusty said. "I don't know, though. Christmas wasn't really her thing."
Maybe that was for people who had more memories.
He could remember a small Christmas tree thrown up in a corner of a messy apartment and before she'd pawned the radio in her car, sometimes she'd let him listen to the Christmas stations. Once, after Christmas but still before New Year's, they'd gotten a tube of snowman cookie dough on sale for a dollar. But mostly, Christmas was like his birthday. It was one of those things he only celebrated with Sharon.
When Sharon's hand settled gently on his shoulder, he realized he was staring blankly at the tree. He hadn't even seen her come around to his side of the table.
"I know you miss her," she said. "I'm so sorry."
She'd said the same thing to him a few Christmases ago.
When he leaned forward, Sharon's hand shifted, coming to rest between his shoulder blades. He braced his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands as he considered all of Sharon's little angels.
"Can you—like, do you think... is it possible to miss something that was never real?'
She sat beside him, the two of them squeezed into the small space he'd cleared free of ornament boxes, her thumb stroking slowly back and forth. "How do you mean?"
"I miss her," he said. "But sometimes... I think I miss the person I wanted her to be. Does that make any sense."
"I think so," Sharon said. "You didn't want to stop hoping that she would change."
"Yeah." Rusty swallowed. "I didn't even think she would, really."
Sharon's arm slid the rest of the way around him.
He hadn't wished for a mother like her. He hadn't known enough to.
"Do you think she loved me?"
"I do," Sharon said quietly. "As best she could."
Her best hadn't been very good.
"She didn't like me very much, though."
Sharon liked him.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Always."
He shouldn't do it. He knew that. It was a terrible question, and whatever her answer was, it wouldn't help.
"Are you ever glad she's dead?"
Sharon's arm was still across his shoulders, so he felt her freeze. Rusty held his breath as she carefully unwound her arm and withdrew it, her expression horrified as she turned to face him. "Of course not," she said. "Rusty... I adopted you knowing that I'd always be sharing you with her."
"Right," he choked out. "I know."
Sharon still looked concerned. "If I've ever said anything to imply—"
"No," he said. "You haven't. Just... forget about it."
Sharon's eyes narrowed suddenly, and Rusty looked away, his eyes fixed firmly on his knees like that would keep her from figuring it out. But she did, of course, and he knew exactly when it happened, because she let out a very slow, very quiet breath.
He couldn't look at her.
He couldn't breathe, either, and he felt his cheeks turning warm.
"Oh," Sharon said quietly. "Rusty..."
He tried to take it back, tell her that he didn't mean it, but his throat wouldn't work. His mouth opened and he felt his lips struggling to form the words, but none came. The pain in his throat extended down into his chest like a fist had wrapped itself around his heart and then shoved it down into his stomach.
"Rusty." In the blurry peripherals of his vision, Sharon leaned closer.
"Don't say it's okay." He finally got the words out. "It's not okay, Sharon."
Her fingertips brushed his shoulder.
She stiffened in surprise when his arms went around her. That made everything hurt worse, because Sharon wasn't the one who was supposed to flinch at touching. He almost pulled back, but then her arms wrapped around him and she pulled him into her, holding on with the sort of iron grip that had surprised him the first time.
Rusty tucked his face into her shoulder, his eyes squeezed shut, but he felt a few tears leaked out into her hair when she lay her hand on the back of his head. He swallowed as hard as he could, trying to keep the rest of them in.
He managed, in the end. It felt like trying to choke down glass, and the pain of it made him dig his fingers into Sharon's back.
Her hands worked gentle circles into his shoulders.
He turned his head, resting his cheek on her shoulder. "I'm not really glad," he whispered, feeling tears sting at his eyes again.
The slow motion of her hands stilled when she wrapped her arms around him again. He knew without needing to look that she'd laced her fingers together. "I know."
"It's just—my whole life, I..." He could hardly understand himself.
Slowly, as his breathing slowed to match Sharon's, his fingers unclenched. The knot in his throat worked itself free, and Rusty swallowed again.
Sharon loosened her hold on him without nudging him away, and he held a moment longer before lifting his head. When he was brave enough to look her in the eye, there was no judgment there. Instead, her look was warm, and she reached up to smooth his bangs back into place.
"Better?" she asked gently, and he nodded.
He tried again. "My whole life, I had to worry about her. Even when she was gone, I did. I told the cops Gary kidnapped her."
"I know," she said. "I read the police report."
Of course she had. "I guess I kind've knew he hadn't." Back then, it had been easier to think that someone had made her leave him. It still was.
"I was still worried," he continued. "Like—like, was she going to start using again, like when she got out of rehab? Was she going to get arrested again? I didn't want her to end up in prison."
Sharon nodded.
"And I know... like, Dr. Joe and I have been over this," he said. "it doesn't mean I don't love her. I know that. But... but I don't have to worry about her anymore. And whenever I think about that..."
"You feel a little relieved?" she said, when he shrugged..
"Yeah," he said, feeling ashamed of himself all over again.
He knew that his mother hadn't been a great mother.
In a way, leaving him at the zoo had been the best thing she'd ever done for him. Whenever he let himself think about the sort of future he would have had if he'd done the rest of his growing up with her, he couldn't imagine anything that he liked. Assuming that he'd made it that far, because Gary's temper had been growing shorter and shorter, and whenever they got into it, the fights had been longer and longer.
But being left once before had prepared him for what it felt like to be going about his day and be hit out of nowhere with a reminder of her, and that almost-year on the streets had taught him how to never cry in front of people, so he didn't have to worry about breaking down in the middle of class when he saw one of his classmates with a keychain from the Griffith Park zoo or spotted a blond woman in her thirties walking across campus wearing a yellow shirt.
He thought yellow had been her favorite color.
He was pretty sure she'd had no idea what his was.
After she'd left him the first time, he'd thought that maybe she'd been right. He'd been too hard on her, about Gary and the drugs and... everything. He felt different now, especially after the scene she'd made at the rehab place, but he still didn't like to think of it as abuse.
The more time he spent with Sharon, the harder it was not to, because she'd been angry at him plenty of times without ever acting the way that his mother had. He'd heard her argue with Ricky and Emily a couple of times. She was sharper with them than she was with him, but she never screamed, or threw things, or hit any of them.
She never acted like she didn't love them when she was angry.
Rusty loved his mother, but sometimes he wasn't sure why.
Sharon loved him all the time. She'd made that really clear. But no matter how he looked at their situation, it always seemed to Rusty that he'd gotten the better end of their deal and for whatever reason, Sharon just didn't care.
He shook his head when the concern on her face deepened, knowing he'd been quiet for too long.
"I think I'll get dinner started," Sharon said. "Unless you've already eaten?"
"No," he said. "Someone brought brownies to the study thing. That's all I've had."
"Okay," she said, touching his shoulder again as she got up. "If you want to give me a hand, we can keep talking. About something else, if you'd rather."
He could tell that she knew he did. Rusty stood, following her into the kitchen.