Chapter 37

He wasn't in his room when she went to look for him. It was almost four in the morning and she thought that he would be asleep by now. It was with growing apprehension that she walked down the corridor in the search for him. Her mouth went dry and her feet moved slower as she saw the soft light stream out from the door that had been left ajar further down the hallway. She knew, even though she hadn't walked this far down this hallway on more than two occasions, which room it was. It was the room that, according to Michelle, had been locked for the last two years.

Joshua's room.

Liz took a deep breath and willed her feet, which suddenly felt like they were filled with lead, to move. She came up to the door and froze. Should she go in or should she just go back to her room and let it be? Was he waiting for her to come in, was he expecting her to come in or did he want to be left alone? She hesitated for a second or two before gently pushing the door open.

Her breath got caught in her throat as the room gradually revealed itself to her. The walls were white, but Disney characters had been painted on top of the white, making the room look like she had stepped straight into a fantasy world. But what caught her eyes were the toys covering the floor. It was not difficult, even from where she was standing, to see the layer of dust coating the trucks, the dinosaurs, the cars and the puzzles. Max hadn't moved or touched anything in here in two years. He had just locked the room and left it as it had been. Liz brushed a warm tear away from her cheek and her eyes traveled over to the small bed, where Max was laying curled up. His body was angled so that his feet were hanging over the edge of the wooden bed and his upper body was taking up most of the surface of the bed.

He was asleep.

Her breathing was trembling as she moved across the floor, being very careful not to move any of the toys. As she came closer to him, she saw that he was hugging something in his arms. She fell to her knees next to the bed and slowly reached out and brushed a strand of his dark hair away from his forehead.
"Max?" she whispered.
"Liz," he sighed without opening his eyes and something warmed inside of her. It was the way he said her name and the fact that he had said it when he was still asleep that told her that she had become a more important part of his life than she had dared to hope.
"Max," she repeated, moving her hand with a featherlike touch down his cheek, feeling the tickle of the five o'clock shadow against her fingertips.
"I wanted you to see," he mumbled, moving slightly beneath her touch.
Her heart ache and she had to force herself to not pull her hand away. She didn't know why she was reacting so strongly to his request, but to watch that movie had affected her in ways that she probably wouldn't be able to figure out in a long time. Nausea was rising in her throat and suddenly all she wanted to do was to get out of there. She couldn't be around him any longer. She couldn't stand to watch how broken he was now when she had just seen how happy he used to be.

Max chose this moment to open his eyes and he was instantly bombarded with the conflicting emotions clearly visible in her tearstained eyes. Without letting go off her eyes he rose up in sitting position and the stuffed cow that he had hugged in his arms fell to the side. He slowly brought his hand to her cheek.
"Do you want to leave?" he asked.
Liz's heart skipped a beat and she stared at him. She hadn't really expected him to be that brutally honest. Despite the fact that she had just been wishing to get out of there, the mere simplicity of his question and the raw concern in his eyes got her heart to react differently. Mutely, she shook her head in negative and watched him relax.
"I saw myself in another light yesterday," Max said.
Liz straightened up at the shift in topic of conversation.
"Or the day before yesterday," he smiled, remembering that it was well past midnight.
"What happened?" Liz asked.
Max cleared his throat and removed his hand from her cheek. Liz felt the loss of his touch immediately.
"When the…the accident happened," Max started and turned his gaze downwards to his hands, "all I could think about was all the good times that I'd had with Tess and Josh and I got stuck in that line of thinking. What I've been playing over and over again in my mind the last two years is what you just saw in that videotape. All the happy moments. But nothing real is really revealed in front of the camera and it was the real details that I chose to forget."
Liz was holding her breath. This was the breakthrough. This was why he had been so different last night. This was why he had started to come to life in front of her very eyes.

"And I couldn't let go. I didn't want to see that I would never experience any new happy moments with Tess and Josh again, and if I couldn't be happy with Tess and Joshua then I couldn't be happy at all."
Liz nodded. It all made sense. Why he wouldn't allow himself to smile more often. Why he wouldn't allow himself to enjoy good things that happened to him. Why he would always get guilty when he kissed her…
"What changed?" she asked tentatively.
Max swallowed. "I was telling Dr. Logan about this one time when Tess and I had been cooking out in the kitchen. I think that is the first clip on the tape."
Liz nodded. He had been filming Tess' stomach and she had been trying to get him to shut off the camera.
"I think it was particularly stuck in my mind because I had filmed it and I watched that tape a lot the first months after their… their death. But when Dr. Logan asked me what happened afterwards I first couldn't remember what had happened after I turned off the camera. We talked about what I could remember for awhile and then the rest came to me."
He took a deep breath and looked up, looking straight into her eyes. "During dinner, we started to talk about the baby and that lead us into talking about childhood memories. I was very quiet and shy as a boy and I got bullied for it."
Wordlessly, Liz reached out and took his hand in sympathy. An act that made him halt in his telling and he swallowed down the tears of relief that flowed to the surface with sudden strength.
"I told her about this, because we didn't know each other when we were smaller. She wasn't very…supportive. At first she was joking around about it, but when I told her that it wasn't funny she got very defensive and told me that I should get over it because it was in the past and I shouldn't obsess about something that happened ages ago."
Liz had to admit that she was surprised to hear those words come out of Max's mouth. All she'd ever heard about Tess was good things. It was as if she had been this pure fairy that couldn't do anything wrong. It was not only Max that had kept up with that charade but also Isabel. Judging from what they had told her, Tess was perfect.

"This made me realized that this had happened on several occasions and somehow Dr. Logan pulled it out of me." He tried to smile at the slight humor of it, but there wasn't much humor in that smile. "Every single moment. I was rather surprised actually that the memories were there. They had been there the whole time, but I just didn't want to see them. It was much easier to just think of Tess as the love of my life who I didn't know how I could ever live without. I couldn't think about everything that was wrong in our relationship because then I wouldn't do her memory justice. She needed to be remembered for all the happy times she brought me and I never realized that when I focused on that it hurt me in the process and I couldn't go on with my life."
"Wow," Liz breathed. "You must've had one aha-experience there."
Max smiled weakly. "It really hurts to change how I've viewed her the last years, but then I just think of you."
"Me?" Liz asked surprised.
"Yes, you," Max answered honestly. "I'm not so sure anymore if Tess and I would've made it for long. We were too different. It might've been the difference that brought us together at the beginning, but it might just be the difference that would've separated us."
"Max, you don't have to do this just to make me feel better or anything," Liz protested. She didn't want him to taint his memory of Tess just so that she wouldn't feel that she was worth any less than Tess.
"I'm not doing this for you, Liz," Max answered truthfully. "I'm doing this for me. I need to see the truth and you help me see it. I never wanted to compare you to her, but I did. I did it over and over again, and I guess I'm gonna do it again now. But that's the only way I can deal with this. I think that we always compare people to each other. We compare friends to each other to try to weigh how much they mean to us. I don't need to compare you to Tess any longer to realize what you are to me, because my heart tells me just how much you mean to me. But I need to compare you to her to explain to you why I feel like I can start living again."

Liz was hanging on to his every word, barely breathing.
"You've been here for me since the day I met you, Liz. You saw me when everyone else had stopped seeing me." He grasped her hands in his and looked down at how her small hands almost completely vanished in his large ones. He felt the softness of her skin against his palm and he took a deep breath, drawing the strength from her silent support, before looking up at her again.
"I loved Tess. I loved her so much that it hurt. And she loved me. We worked well together and even though everyone at the beginning said that we were wrong for each other, we proved to them over and over again that we were meant to be. Maybe we tried too hard. Maybe we tried so hard that we were too stubborn to see that we didn't fit very well together. She was a remarkable person and we were best friends, but I think that she would've made a better friend than a lover."
Max's hands tightened around hers and he could feel the tremors shaking her body. "Tess and I were good together, but she didn't heal me. You heal me, Liz. You haven't given up on me once and you've remained by my side. There were times when I was really upset or sad and when Tess would see my tears she would just walk away. She couldn't be there for me when I needed her the most. She lived in another world where everything had to be happy and life was easy. It became such a common occurrence that I hid my feelings from her, that I never realized that I had been hiding them. That's probably why it was so easy to forget that part of our relationship when she died."
"Do you miss her?" Liz whispered, her voice barely strong enough to speak.
Max nodded. "I miss her. I miss her so much. She wasn't a bad person and I still love her. I'll always love her, but I know now that we would never have lasted. She wasn't the one I was supposed to be with. I didn't feel what I feel with you with her. The feelings were there, but with you…" He took a deep breath and it was as if just talking about it made the intensity of what he was feeling even more prominent and he looked down at the entwined hands.
"I knew you from the second I met you. I knew what had been missing this whole time. You."

Liz nodded. This almost sounded too good to be true and it was with a certain uncertainty that she forced him to meet her eyes again.
"Max, I need to know if this is just something you force yourself to say to make it easier for you to move on or if you really feel like this."
Max held her eyes and then stated slowly, "I've never been more serious or honest in my whole life. You are listening to my heart, Liz. You helped me find my heart again and I don't want to miss out on you just to continue living in a memory that isn't even really true. I love you, Liz, more than you'll ever know. More than I ever thought I could love anyone."
The first tears silently rolled down her cheeks and she nodded. "I love you too, Max. So much. I was so afraid that you wouldn't see me. I was so afraid that I would have to compete with Tess."
"Tess will always be a part of me. I will always love her and she will always be a part of my memory. But I won't compare you anymore. You mean something else to me than what she did. I would never compare you to Isabel, because you mean different things to me. It's the same thing with Tess and you."
Liz sniffled and nodded. Max smiled softly, slight concern lingering in his eyes, and slowly brushed away her tears with the pads of her fingers. But new tears kept falling over his fingers and he tried to swallow back the feelings that threatened to overwhelm him.
"Tess complemented me. You make me whole," Max whispered.

Liz nodded, angling her head slightly upwards and blinking with her eyes as if trying to stop the flood of tears from streaming down her cheeks.
"Joshua?" she whispered brokenly. What about Joshua? It worried her that he hadn't mentioned Josh and come to think of it, he didn't mentioned Josh very often. Not at all actually.
"I'm still…" Max's voice cracked and Liz looked at him. When she saw his resolve break and the tears form in his eyes, she pulled her hand away from his and brushed her own tears away, before bringing her arms around him and pulling him towards her.
"It's okay, you don't have to talk about him," Liz mumbled. It was different with a child. You love a child in another way. Unconditionally.
"Let's go to bed," she whispered, tightening her arms around him.
He nodded against her shoulder and she squeezed him tightly one more time before loosening her grip and standing up. He looked up at her, his eyes red and miserable.
"Thank you," he murmured.
Her smile broke through her sniffles. "You don't have to thank me."
"Yes, I do," he insisted and stood up. "Thank you for being in that shopping mall that day."
Her smile grew bigger and without another word she took his hand in hers.

TBC...