Author's Note: A reviewer berated Sirius last chapter for the whole Kati thing, so I thought I should clear up how the two stories are related. They are in the same story universe, and Larka will appear later. At this point, in However We Know the Landscape of Love, Sirius is still sort of with Novia—as in, she thinks they're together, and he thinks that they went on a date and there is absolutely no commitment in his books. He's started to feel a small, nagging affection for Larka, but nothing more than a gentle good-will towards the girl. Still, nothing happened with Kati—it was a bit of innocuous flirting. Sirius at this age still likes to assert himself that way (he's only a teenage boy, let's be realistic). So don't judge Sirius too harshly. Well, at least not for that.
Chapter 11
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
– I've always thought I was the only person in the world who had any feelings at all –
By the time morning rolled around, the soft dawn creeping up the horizon behind the trees, each and every one of them was ready to collapse. The party had finally dwindled down to just two or three couples necking each other with perhaps too much display of affections. Caius was still nowhere to be found, so Arlene, as the impromptu hostess, declared the party to be dead until the evening again, and shooed the inappropriate couples away.
True to James's prophecy, Kati left alone, with a disappointed frown, as Sirius cheerfully waved goodbye at her. Arlene was willing to bet half her inheritance that Kati was boggled as to what a rejection was. Sirius either did not understand or did not care about Kati's confusion, and instead had a friendly arm slung across Remus's shoulder.
Arlene was a little embarrassed to face Remus, for she was sure he had noticed her staring straight at him for ages. But her newfound attraction and consequences thereof had to wait—now they had to rest, for although tomorrow promised to be a drizzly day, they had countless parties to attend to, and even more to turn down.
They were woken early in the morning though, at that hour when one would only be woken up for bad news.
Indeed it was bad news, the sort of bad that could scarcely be righted ever again. Somebody coming down the hall was shouting for her, and Arlene was at first upset over being woken up (still hungover). When the door to her bedroom was thrown open, however, she recognized the intruder as Daddy's physician. He had a ghastly look and was still shouting at her when he got in.
For once in her life, Arlene forgot about her hair.
She got into a car—a police car, with full sirens ricocheting through the air and flashing lights breaking the night. The physician said that she should get to the hospital at once, and Arlene didn't like the sound of that. He then went silent in the car, pretending to focus on driving, but Arlene knew he just didn't want to tell her something.
The drive seemed painfully long, despite being only ten minutes. They made it into the great white building without a word, stepping inside the mirrored glass doors and turning more times than Arlene could keep track of, in her dizzied state.
She nearly ran into the back of the physician when he stopped abruptly. "Here it is," he told her in a hoarse whisper.
She stepped in and felt her heart halt, then beat with unhealthy fervor.
Oh goodness, look, Daddy was in a gigantic white bed, almost completely buried in cotton sheets and down comforters. There were cushions all around, thick as walls, covering all possible space. Instead of looking soothing though, the same cushions seemed to eat up all sound, until Daddy's shallow breathing glided inside and disappeared. She whimpered, rushing over to Daddy's side. She seized Daddy's hand, with the unnerving intuition that if she did not, she would never have the chance to again.
"Superplum," he said, voice weak.
"Daddy," Arlene whimpered.
"You will be fine, won't you?"
"Of course I will be, as long as you're here with me, Daddy."
"You will be fine, I have no doubt, never did. Forgive an old man, won't you?"
"No, I won't forgive you if you give up, Daddy, Daddy, look at me, wake up!"
It was no use. He was obviously dying. It seemed like it would only take but a cold draft to take his flimsy life away. It was agonizing to watch, life slipping away breath by breath, cough by cough. Such a sight—death, where one lays writhing and suffering, was no something Arlene was familiar with. It filled Arlene with horror, looking at her Daddy, his falling hair, his bloodless skin, his hacking coughs, his hollow cheeks and fervent eyes. But Daddy was breathing—laborious, but undeniable in proof of his being—that was good, right?
"Somebody do something!" she cried to nobody in particular.
"I'm sorry," someone in a white robe said.
"How is this happening?" she continued, "what's even wrong with him?"
"Shut up," Caius—was he always here?—snapped at her, "he's had his surgery for three weeks now, and you start bitching now?"
Daddy's hand twitched in hers, flailing a bit, and it took Arlene a moment to realize it was his signature dismissing move. She held tighter, trying to trap the leaking warmth in Daddy's hand, each callous along his palm speaking to her of a different day that he took her hand. "What do you mean surgery?" she developed a dangerous glint in her eyes.
"He had a hip replacement surgery," a familiar voice said. It was Mr. Goldbum, the lawyer, unobtrusively standing in a corner. "A routine, low-risk surgery. It went very well."
"Then," Arlene waved frantically, wordless to describe the man lying in almost stilled air.
"A complication, unfortunately," another white-robed doctor said. "His kidneys failed, and it brought an onset of organ failures, now affecting his lungs. It should," the doctor faltered a second, "be mere hours now."
"Why didn't anybody tell me?" Arlene demanded.
"You stupid little girl," Caius growled out, "you can't take a second out of your life to actually notice anything."
Arlene was about to retort, but words failed her—he was right, wasn't he? Why hadn't she noticed anything? Why did she just assume that Daddy's absence was just like any absence before that? Why did her own, insignificant life seem so important?
"Children," Mr. Goldbum spoke up, "Please do not fight over his deathbed."
The mention of 'death' united the brother and sister, and they both glared at the lawyer, as if somehow his saying it out loud was the cause of this tragedy. Arlene wiped away her tears furiously, and silently dared the lawyer to open his mouth again—to let one word, clumsy and vulgar, define what was happening. Silence dragged on. There were too many people and not enough Daddy. It didn't make sense to Arlene, how someone could take in and let out so many breaths, thousands, millions, without ever thinking about it, and yet, here, now, he would stop.
"I'm sorry," Caius eventually said, a gruff apology but nonetheless sincere.
"I'm sorry too," Arlene replied just as carefully, "Let's never fight again."
"Never," he swore vehemently, as if the same pledge hadn't been uttered and broken countless times before. There was a reason why Arlene rarely interacted with Caius. Although they made up almost immediately after viciously fighting, inevitably they did. Daddy had not liked seeing his children fight, so they remedied it in the only way they knew how: to avoid each other.
"I apologize for the insensitive timing," Mr. Goldbum said, eyeing the tentative truce, "but there are matters to take care of."
"Right now?" Caius growled out.
The lawyer nodded grimly, "It is of importance that you—both of you—understand the situation. As neither of you are of age yet, Mr. Day entrusted me to act out his interests."
"Fine," Arlene nipped out, "Just get on with whatever crap you have to say." What did it matter, what this irrelevant person said anyway? Here was her Daddy, his face pale like bleached wood, and she wondered how she could have ever liked pale faces.
The lawyer forgave her rudeness, instead showing her a flicker of sympathy. "Mr. Day commands a personal net worth of approximately six hundred eighty million. Being the heir to the main branch, he also has responsibility over a number of family estates and businesses. He has two funds for each of you, a tuition fund with monthly payments of allowance until you come of age. Now, as the elder of the children, Arlene, you will assume as the heiress unless your Grandmother opposes—"
"Wait," Caius interrupted all of a sudden. "I want a paternity test before anything is given out."
"What?" Arlene asked incredulously.
Caius refused to meet her eyes, instead just mumbled to the lawyer's general direction, "What I said, a paternity test."
Mr. Goldbum scratched the hem of his blazer. "Well it is allowed, although by no means necessary; it is the traditional course of action, although few families actually follow it these days."
"Well I call for it," Caius said petulantly.
Arlene was flabbergasted, to say the least. On so many levels. Daddy was still here, you know, it wasn't as if he was already—you know—he was still here. And really? Caius and she never got along, but she would have liked to think that there was an undercurrent of grudging affection beneath all their hostility. "Caius," she said absentmindedly, too shocked to sound hostile.
He refused to meet her eyes.
"Whatever," she spat out, and promptly directed her attention back to Daddy. If only the day could just stop now, before it got any further.
But of course it couldn't. Before the sun reached the midday peak, Augustus Day had already passed away. His mind had been gone for many hours, slipping away after a final look at his beloved daughter, but his body clung on for a while longer.
Arlene stood vigil over whatever she could. When they pulled the sheet over Daddy's face, she let them roll him out, and continued to watch the empty space in front of her. The doctors and nurses wanted her gone, but just shook their heads and let her be, due to a combination of sympathy and how much they paid for the room.
She probably would have stood there for forever, except her friends—she had forgot about them—came and gathered her, like a doll that ran out of battery. They gently led her to the car, to the house, up the stairs, to her room.
They were all bundles of twitchy nervousness. Lily kept a hand on her arm the entire time, supportive, but Arlene didn't have the energy to tell the girl that being touched made her nauseated right now. James ruffled his hair too much, and Sirius dragged his feet behind them all, loitering and uncomfortable. Marlene gave her best to look sympathetic, but she was awkward at best. Remus kept in the back with Sirius, his face carefully neutral.
"Are you alright?" Lily asked once Arlene was on her bed. Lily was trying to show empathy instead of an empty question. Arlene knew she meant well, and that she was the sort to honestly care, but it ended up being empty anyway.
Arlene couldn't find her voice; she nodded, just wanting all of them to go away so she can puke. Maybe if she puked her intestines out, she would stop feeling so awful. The six of them were uneasily spread out in her room, taking space and yet not taking up any at all. There was something uncomfortable about their companionship, something clumsy about the deliberate way they kept just enough distance, and something heavy in the silence.
She couldn't look at them. The sun looked like a blinding, furious ball of fire in her window. It reminded Arlene of her last birthday, where Daddy had tried to make her a cake—from cake mix that his PA delivered here, but it was the effort. He had make a gooey heap of yellow muck, and they ended up eating an elaborate three-tiered beast that the PA ordered ahead of time (her lack of confidence in her boss's cooking both discrete and well-reasoned), with a glistening gilt ball that spelled out 'Happy Birthday'.
"I'd like to get some rest," she said weakly.
.
Once you thought you knew something, once you've decided, doubt was never an option for you.
It felt like an Edgar Allan Poe story, surreal and frightening.
They were shaken out of their fretful, drunken sleep when the light was barely touching the sky. Even those who did not recognize the siren's harsh lights knew the gravity from the density in the air. Nobody told them what was going on—which was fair—until when Caius returned. James had approached him, all friendly and Gryffindor courage, but Caius snarled back. It was enough to tell them what had happened though.
Lily, bless her heart, immediately went to the butler to get the maid, found the maid who had a thing with the chauffeur, called the chauffeur who was busy elsewhere with somebody who obviously wasn't the maid—in the end they got to the hospital, and herded a completely blank Arlene back.
It was scary enough just to see Arlene like that. He would have preferred her hysterical and weepy. He should have thought of something, some way to make her feel better. Instead, he could only thought of how bravely accepting she had been with her ex-boyfriend earlier in the day, and how tenderly insecure she was about measuring up to Kati earlier that night. These were woes that he might have secretly scoffed at—he should have scoffed at. Remus knew that he, despite being sympathetic soul, usually held in disregard the people who blatantly complained of their teenage angst, but there was something … so earnest about Arlene. He couldn't explain it, beyond that perhaps by seeing her problems, they became less impersonal, like how he genuinely felt for Sirius the first time he saw the belt-shaped bruises blossoming on his back.
Besides, with a father concerned with his own life, and a brother who withdrew and was broody most of the time, Arlene had developed in childhood the idea that in order to be heard, one must yell. It was only logical.
He couldn't tell what was worse though—to be faced with the death of a loved one, or to lack all love from one's family to begin with
Note: 'I've always thought I was the only person in the world who had any feelings at all' is from the play by William Inge that tells the segments of one family's (and everybody else's, really) troubles, set in a small town in Oklahoma in the roaring twenties. If anybody had read it, they'd know that despite the immense tragedy in the play, it shows that good things can happen. The daughter learns that her shyness is just an excuse to think she's the only feeling person in the world; the son grows defiant and a little caring; the father admits his human weakness and fear of change; and the mother, Cora, the Mrs. Dalloway of the household, learns that life cannot ever be a neat, tidy present.