A/N: A prompt from anonymous on Tumblr: Rindy's birthday.


In Central Park (Late April)

In Central Park, the clouds loomed low over the gardens and the rocks. It was not the right weather, Therese thought, for a day that Carol had waited for for weeks – ever since she had heard that Rindy would spend her birthday with her mother, unsupervised. Carol had received the news around the time of her own birthday, and Therese knew that nothing the two of them did to celebrate could compare. The telephone call had been a line from heaven. It had lit up Carol's face. She had turned up the music, and laughed more times this month than any month since the start of the year, since Harge had taken Rindy away over Christmas. What had made Harge change his mind? Carol did not care.

Therese watched them from a distance, from the sidewalk that curved from Fifth Avenue into the park and to the playground where Rindy giggled on the swing. Therese watched as the girl jumped off and into Carol's arms, and recognized, as she had before, Carol in the cock of her head and the wave of her hand. Therese had seen Rindy only twice before at their apartment. The other times Carol had to go somewhere else. Therese was not sure where exactly. But the girl had grown, briskly and almost brusquely, in the last few months. There was still Carol there, but there was also someone else, becoming more and more present in the way she walked and talked and fixed her hair. And in the way she was dressed, Therese thought. Since Carol bought the little girl clothes that she never seemed to wear.

They had decided that it was best if Therese did not join them in the park, in case Harge had someone watching. But Therese had looked around and had not seen anyone else watching. She felt she would know if there were. No, the only person watching was Therese, watching as a gust of wind sent the little girl's hat flying, and the woman ran after it, watching as though she did not know them at all, the woman and the girl, as though she were looking in through a shop window at a vision she would always want and could never have. It was an old thought, but new, in that moment. And yet, she liked to think that Carol knew she was there.

She took a photograph of them then, from a distance, with the two figures like specks of dust on the lens. When she stepped back and away from the image, she bumped into someone on the sidewalk. She turned and saw the face of Harge. But it was not Harge. 'Hey, watch where you're going!' the man shouted as he was swept away into the subway.

'Sorry!' she called back, although the man was already gone.

She walked into the park through another entrance and took photographs of the dancing trees for a Chekhov set she was meant to be working on. A boy climbed one of the trees and tore his pants on one of the branches, and she took a photograph of him, too. She bought a hot dog at a hot dog stand where no one else was and talked to the vendor for a bit, a blond man from Brooklyn whose father owned a motorcycle garage. He asked if she might want to go out for lunch one time, and she replied, not unkindly, that she did not eat anymore in order to preserve her figure. She walked away with the hot dog in hand – a touch of wry humor that Carol would have approved of, she thought.

One way or another, she always came back to Carol. Sometimes she imagined, or dreamt – as if her mind liked playing tricks on her – that her thoughts of Carol slowly dwindled, fizzled out, without her noticing. Like Carol's thoughts of Abby had, or so many people's thoughts of other people. That she would walk out, one day, and not wish to come home. After all, she now knew how Carol got dressed in the morning, how she cooked her meals, how she crossed her legs on the couch, how she slept on her side, or smiled in the sunlight.

She knew, with dead certainty, that if that ever happened, if she ever wanted to leave, Carol would let her go wherever she pleased. The knowledge that Carol would suddenly struck her with the force of an ax – even though she had not left and Carol had not watched her go. Carol would say that it was all her imagination, dipping and soaring in all the wrong directions. Standing on an empty path in a grey park, the thought made her smile, and she heard the faint strains of the song of a street musician. When she came back to reality, she always came back to Carol.

She threw out the hot dog when it was only half-finished. If anything, it was far more likely that Carol would leave her, as she had left others, because Carol had Rindy and Abby, and Therese had no one, not really. Dannie and Phil and the others from work did not really count. And why was that always the case? She sat on a bench and tried to read a book she had been meaning to read for a long time. The air was humid and hot in her throat. The flowers bloomed by her side. The clouds were gradually lowering themselves across the park as if they meant to crush her and everyone else in it. For a moment, she wished that they would. Then she put away her book and walked home.

On the bed in the spare room, she lay with her eyes closed, like a corpse or a monument, as the front door opened and fell shut, as Carol and Rindy's voices intermingled with the sound of the radio and of cups being taken out of cupboards and the image of the boy in the park dangling upside down by his ankles, and the grey birds fluttering against the grey sky, and then the ring of the doorbell, and a little girl's cry of joy, and a low voice. And then nothing.

'Why didn't you say hello when we came back?' Carol asked at dinner that night. Her eyes were greyer than before, and she was smoking again. Carol waited, but Therese said nothing. 'Was that you in the park this afternoon? Standing there like a specter of death?'

Carol had known, of course. 'I'm sorry, I shouldn't have gone. I didn't stay for long.'

'Don't apologize.'

'I wanted to see…I guess.'

Carol waited again, but Therese did not say any more. Then Carol got up and started to wash the dishes. 'You'll understand one day, when you have children of your own.'

Therese stiffened. 'When?'

'When, if… You know what I mean.' The dishes clattered in the sink.

'I can't have children if I stay with you.'

'You might not want to stay with me all your life,' Carol said.

Therese thought that the room might tilt, that all Carol's glasses and dishes and cups might slide off the counter and fall to the floor with a crash. But nothing happened. 'Why not?'

'You might feel differently in a year or two.' Carol finished clearing the dishes.

'Why would I?' Therese asked, and heard her voice tremble. She could have hit herself.

Carol sighed. 'Can we talk about this anoth–'

'No. No, we can't! You always say that, and we can't. We're talking about it now.' She felt that she was going to ask Carol something she was going to regret, and she felt that there was nothing she could do to stop it. 'Are you saying this because you don't want me here in a year? Is that why you're saying this?'

'Therese, I'm tired,' Carol answered, and before Therese could say anything else, Carol had left the kitchen. And that was it. Just like that, Therese's courage – or whatever it had been – was gone, and she felt nothing but a stupid frustration that she had somehow managed to make this all about herself again.

She sat in the chair in the kitchen for about an hour, looking through the windows at the blank, damp sky that had chased her out of the park. The cat named Holiday wove little paths through her legs, and she tried, tried and tried to imagine what it was like to have a daughter, a husband, a baby to nurse every morning and every night and a husband to feed like she had seen in plays and read about in books. But a film kept drawing itself across her eyes, a film of a young Carol and a young Abby playing tennis in white on a New Jersey lawn over the vacation like Carol had told her. She wondered what it would have been like if she had grown up with Carol instead of Abby, and what it would have been like if they had shaped each other's lives from the start.

Would they also have loved, and not loved, as Carol and Abby had? And would Carol also have found someone younger to replace her? Was that maybe why Carol thought Therese would want someone younger, a lover or a daughter or someone who would only see the world through Therese's eyes? Did Therese want that? And did Carol ever look at something and see it the way Therese saw it or couldn't she, just like Therese couldn't imagine what it was like to have lived longer than she had?

A light flickered on in the window of an apartment across the avenue. Was life always like this, always looking in on other people's lives but never being able to play a part? Only always trying, reaching until we grew too old and tired to reach any further– Carol walked back into the kitchen and stopped in the doorway. 'Why on earth are you still sitting there?'

The tone of the question might have made Therese laugh if she had not felt so exhausted. 'I don't know,' she said, and heard her own flat voice the way she sometimes heard Carol's. There was a silence. 'I don't think I want children.'

'All right.'

'I don't want anyone but you.'

Carol moved then, and she felt the warm hand on her arm. 'Darling, you know I'll always be here.'

She took the hand and let Carol lead her to the couch in the living room, where she pulled Therese's feet onto her lap and had her read out passages from her favorite Shakespeare until she had found her voice. '…there they hoist us, / To cry to the sea that roar'd to us, to sigh / To the winds whose pity, sighing back again, / Did us but loving wrong.' Eventually, she heard that Carol had fallen asleep. The rain ticked at the wide windows of their apartment. She put the book aside and looked at her, at the fingers that gripped Therese's knees, at the mussed blond curls, the red lips, slightly parted, and the long lashes, beautiful and blond and solemn.

With care, Therese pulled a blanket off the back of the couch and draped it across Carol. The rain was ticking harder now, more urgently. With care, she leaned in and placed a kiss on Carol's cheek. Carol stirred in her sleep and, in that moment, something of her expression as she dreamt made Therese almost understand, almost understand what it was to want to bring someone new into the world. Then Therese must have fallen asleep, too, because when she woke she was lying on her side with Holiday squeezed beside her and Carol's arms around her, Carol's breath rippling in pleasant, steady waves along her back. So there they were, she thought, as she listened, as she loved – lone comets floating above the park and the city and the street, cut off from everyone and everything except each other.


A/N: Something slightly longer and a bit more contemplative for the farthest I've ventured into their timeline. They've been living together for a little over a year now. I so wish I could've written them as one big happy family but I just didn't quite feel like it would happen…

The Chekhov play Therese is prepping is 'The Seagull' – there were a series of Off-Broadway revivals of Chekhov's plays happening under a director called David Ross at the time, which is fun. The Shakespeare lines are from 'The Tempest' (which is also where the epigraph of all these scenes, listed under the table of contents, is from), because Therese loves her nature imagery (and because the play, rather surreally, and not unlike the Seagull, mixes metaphors of nature with issues of family and love).

Also, as a point of coincidence, the last line of this chapter turned out to contain an echo, or even a kind of recasting, of the penultimate line of the very first scene, 'In Colorado Springs (Early February)'. The reference to Harge taking away Rindy for Christmas picks up on 'In Paris (December into January) II' and the reference to Carol's own birthday reaches back to 'On Madison Avenue (Early April)'.

Next one will be a flashback to an earlier, sunnier time and a long overdue rendezvous with an old friend…