We had been back in New York for four days, after our weekend of escape from reality in Lima. I didn't need to look at the clock to know that it was too early to be awake, but we both were, we both knew what day it was. Brittany's nails dug into my arms as I held her from behind, fighting her emotions, I knew, but we didn't speak, we just lay there in silence. It wasn't long before I could feel the sobs wracking her body, and I held her tighter as she cried.
It was hard to believe that it had been an entire year since the Bow Tie Brigade had knocked on the door, waking me with the news that would forever change my life. But today wasn't about me, it wasn't about how my life was changed. It was about Brittany, about letting her remember and letting her grieve. It was about Sam, the man who had grown in my esteem since his untimely passing, the man who I would forever be grateful to. It was about Annie, about finding a lasting way to let her keep someone she'd never know, yet who was so vitally a part of her, in her heart.
So little time had passed, and yet everything had changed. In just a few short months, I'd gone from physically recoiling (despite my best efforts) at the mention of Sam Evans' name, to being able to talk about him openly, to spending time with his family (who, unfortunately for us, had been in Florida with Penny's sister when we were in Ohio. They needed to get away from real life, Brittany and I both knew the feeling) and now, to spending four days wracking my brain for any possible way to make this day easier on my wife. But I'd realized, maybe some things just aren't meant to be easy. Maybe some things we just have to pass in the best way we know how.
"I don't think about him every day anymore." Brittany whispered through her tears, not wanting to wake the baby. She turned in my arms so her nose was pressed against mine and sighed. "Is that horrible?"
"Britt." I sighed, not knowing the right answers for her. "I think that someone doesn't have to consciously pass through your thoughts every day for you to still care about them, to still remember them."
"I can't believe it's been a year." Her fingers absently brushed her rib cage, pressing hard against the bones that were once broken.
"Don't-" I started, but stopped myself. Sometimes you had to make yourself feel that something was real, I knew that from experience. "It's hitting you again, isn't it?"
"Yeah. All of it." Fresh tears sprung to her eyes, and she let them fall. I knew it was about more than the hardship that came with marking the anniversary of Sam's death, it was about the things we'd put off speaking about.
"Britt, don't do that to yourself, not today. There are three-hundred-sixty-four other days where we can talk about that, figure out the jumbled mess off emotions that is our life. But if you go there today, you're going to make yourself crazy." It couldn't always be about us. Sometimes it had to be about our separate battles.
"I know. You're right. It's just that all of reality is hitting so hard again."
"Yeah, I wish we could have stayed away from it forever." I kissed her between the eyes, softening her furrowed brow. "Are you going into work today?"
"I need to." She sighed. "I only have a few weeks left to prepare, and honestly, I can't just sit here and replay last year in my head all day."
"It's a good idea. But if you're going to dance all day, you should try to get some more sleep."
She nodded into my chest, and I could feel the tears that were still falling. She needed to be sad, but seeing her cry would never become any less painful. I rubbed her back with one hand and ran my hand through her hair with the other, humming notes with no song to soothe her. We lay there like that for close to an hour, until I finally felt her breathing slow and her tears stop falling. Watching her sleep, I hoped that the rest of our lives wouldn't be punctuated with these intense bouts of sadness, that eventually, they would be tiny blips on long stretches of joy.
At a quarter to four, with Annie buttoned up inside of my coat, I waited outside of Britt's studio. She looked absolutely exhausted, probably from the combination of lack of sleep and never letting her feet stay still. I frowned looking down at her gloveless hands, and knowing her tendency to lose them on a regular basis, pulled out the extra pair I always kept in my coat pocket for that reason. She smiled weakly as she put them on before her lips were on mine and then all over the baby's head. Then, without a word, she slipped her hand into mine and we walked.
It was a strange juxtaposition, the thoughts that were passing through our heads and the state of the city. It was December, and though I'd mentally checked out in previous years, it was hard to avoid (when you're sober) the trappings of Christmas that were everywhere. Garland, twinkling lights, gigantic wrapped presents and Santas on every corner. It was beautiful, really, but my mind wandered to Sam's parents, wondering how they could tolerate so much happiness when they were so sad. Looking at Brittany gave me my answer, as I watched her grinning at a particularly fat and jolly (and not "sun-tanned") Santa.
"I'm embracing happiness. Some super hot, super smart girl once told me that it was okay to do that." Brittany said simply, answering the question that I hadn't asked. It was what I'd told her after Sam's parents had visited us, and I was glad that every once in a while, I was capable of giving decent advice, even if I never could take my own. "And that guy is so much better than the Santa at the Lima Mall."
"Britt, I'm a better Santa than the Santa at the Lima Mall. That guy is gross."
"No, you'd make a terrible Santa."
"What? Why?" I gasped, faking offense.
"Because." She pressed her lips close to my ear. "Santa only comes once a year."
My cheeks burned and I looked around to see if anyone had heard. That was Brittany, the woman I was so over-the-top, ridiculously in love with. The woman who could break herself from her own dark thought processes to make a sexual comment without skipping a beat. It was moments like that where I felt like the air could fill my lungs completely again, moments where I believed that in the end, everything would really be okay.
We had to make a stop before reaching our destination, and I smiled inwardly when Brittany walked out of the card store with three green balloons in her hand. It looked like we were headed to the circus, not down to the water to send messages to the great beyond. But that's what we were doing, the solution I'd finally come up with and that Brittany had been thrilled by. We'd tie messages to Sam on the balloons and let them go. Okay, neither of us believed that he was going to get the messages, but it was a way to mark the day of his passing, something simple but meaningful.
"Thank you, Santana." Britt said to me as we approached the desolate pier.
"For what?"
"Today, every day. I don't know. You just never took the easy way out on things, you've made it such a point to have reminders of Sam for the baby, to allow me what I need to get through bad days like this. It's just different than I ever expected."
"Britt." I could feel my throat tightening. "I love you more than anything, and I know you love me just as much. When you first got here, I was already so used to being jealous of Sam that I couldn't stop right away. People say you can't compete with a ghost, but I don't think there needs to be a competition. I have you, I have Annie, completely, every single day for the rest of my life, and I'm beyond lucky for that. You deserve to be able to remember Sam however you want, Annie deserves to know about the man who is partially responsible for bringing her into this world. That doesn't make me any less your wife, or any less her mother."
"Wow."
"I know." I laughed, impressed with myself. "I think I finally have been with you long enough that some of your genius is rubbing off on me."
When we reached the end of the pier, I unbuckled Annie from the warmth of my chest and handed her to Brittany. Rifling through my bag, I pulled out the envelope with three sheets of paper folded inside. On the first, a letter from Brittany, the second, Annie's hand and footprints in pink paint (we'd decided on that she should send something, even if she had no idea what was happening) and the third, a letter from me. Yes, even I'd written a letter to Sam, surprising as it was even to myself. But I had things I needed to say that I couldn't say out loud, and this seemed like the perfect way to get them out.
After tying the papers to the balloon strings, I handed two of them to Brittany and gestured her forward. I'd wait a few steps behind, give her a minute before joining her at the end of the pier. I'd learned from my own life that sometimes there are things we need to do on our own. This was some kind of closure for her, I knew that and wanted her to have as much time as she needed. I watched as my wife and daughter stepped towards the end of the pier and Brittany let go of the balloons.
"Sam." She said quietly, but in the stillness of the late fall I could hear her. "At your funeral, I couldn't say goodbye to you. Instead, I sat there crying and feeling sorry for myself because I felt responsible. But today, after a year has passed, I want to say what I should have said then. I'm sorry for a lot of things. I'm sorry that I led you on so I wouldn't feel alone, I'm sorry that I couldn't love you the way you deserved to be loved, and I'm sorry for what happened on the night you died. A few months ago, I thought that I was sorry for being happy, but then I realized that Santana was right, that you'd always wanted me to be happy, and I'm doing just that, so I can't be sorry. You know, Annie has two moms that love her, and she has you watching out for her too, so I know she's the luckiest girl in the entire world. I'm rambling a lot, but you know I do that. Basically, what I wanted to tell you is that today I'm saying goodbye to you for real, and I'm forgiving myself since you can't be here to do it. I love you Sammy, I hope you're happy with a ghost girlfriend or something and that the evil dwarf up there is being nice to you."
I hadn't even noticed that I'd let my own balloon go, I was so amazed listening to Brittany. I looked down at my watch and saw that the time was right. It was exactly a year ago, forgive me for sounding like Rachel, but five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes earlier, something happened that could have taken Brittany away from me forever, but instead, was the same thing that brought her back. I wasn't being selfish, I'd told Sam as much in the letter I'd written. I'd apologized to him (Santana Lopez didn't do apologies, but apparently Santana Lopez-Pierce did) for hating him when he'd never really done anything wrong. I thanked him for taking care of Brittany, for helping to create Annalise. And I'd promised him that even though we couldn't sell a reality show to MTV about he, Brittany and I attempting to parent one child together, I would never let our daughter forget that she had more than just two moms. Words would never be enough, but I had to write them and hope that wherever he was, he understood that what I felt for him transcended anything that I could ever write.
"San?" Brittany held her free arm out to me and I moved in to stand with her and Annalise.
"Are you alright?"
"I am. Closure is weird, you'd think it would make you feel worse to say goodbye for good, you know?" I nodded, letting her continue. "But then it's just over. I needed to do this."
"It was good you did."
There wasn't much else I could say, there wasn't even much else I could think. I just stood there, arms around Brittany and Annie looking out at the East River that looked significantly less disgusting than usual. We could see our breath in the air, the Christmas lights in the windows of the high rises in Queens, and I couldn't help but hum the song that Rachel was dedicating to Sam in her Rent performance at that very moment. Oh, you got to, you got to remember the love. You know that life is a gift from up above. The snow started to fall for the first time and Annie's eyes were wide, trying to make sense of the sky. I looked at the smile on Brittany's face, and I felt what she was feeling. That it was some kind of sign of approval for me, of forgiveness for her from the man who would forever be a part of this family.
Credits:
Seasons Of Love, Rent
