Disclaimer: Terra Nova does not belong to me.
He is floundering in every aspect of his life. It is familiar in all of the wrong ways - he hates it. He cannot even coordinate with his wife on a way to work his way to some semblance of balance with it all because Elisabeth is one of the things with which he is most out of whack.
That sounds bad . . . even in his head. His wife is not a thing. She is a person. She is a person with whom (for the first time in two decades) he does not know how to talk. It is hard to be a team (or a couple or an anything) with someone when you can barely exchange a greeting without everything around you turning awkward. He does not think she has spoken directly to him at any point in time since he found himself on this side of the rift.
Don't even get him started on all of the not thinking about it he is doing about the rift - Maddy had wanted to go by herself. He has not forgotten about that. She had not seen a reason for him to put himself out by "tagging along" as she had put it. What if something had possessed him to listen to her? What if he had not "tagged along" on her "research project" on that boat? He has words for her (so many words) on the subject of her keeping him in the dark about what it was she was up to that he will likely never get around to actually saying given everything else that is going on with and around him.
He does not want to think about what might have happened. What would he have even known? What would Moore have been able to tell him? He cannot even guarantee that Moore would have gotten back to tell him anything. He had been distracted by the potential drowning that he was attempting to prevent, but there had been little doubt that their boat had been intentionally rammed. He tries not to think about it too much. There is nothing he can do about whatever may have happened (and he has his hands full here as it is).
He sees the expression on Maddy's face at times and suspects that she is dwelling, but they have enough to work through on other topics before he even attempts to commiserate with her on that subject. He does not appreciate the secrets that have been kept from him or the implication that it was acceptable to shut him out of pertinent information in that manner. He is a grown, responsible adult. Further, he is her father. He does not need to be protected or coddled for goodness sake!
Why do all of the women in his life behave as if the world is a better place when they keep things from him? It is not acceptable. It needs to end. That is, of course, easier to think than to accomplish since they seem to be in some sort of unspoken conspiracy against him - not that any of them will admit it.
He doesn't want to sound like he isn't grateful to be here. He is. He is so relieved to be with them all again. He would like nothing better than to throw himself into their lives in progress and pretend that all of the rest of it was not real. He wants the time and distance to go away. It won't. He cannot erase all of the things that are standing between them. He feels like it should be easier this time - he has done this before.
He made his peace with Maddy in the aftermath of his release as quickly as he could wrap his mind around what was real in contrast to what he had been expecting. He had told Elisabeth to take the kids and go without hesitation the instant he had known that it was a possibility. There had been no hint that Maddy was not included in the invitation. She was not supposed to be there when he was released, but she was. They had found their way; he just needed to do that over again times three.
That, however, requires that he find his way to being less angry. He is trying - has been trying since he first found out that Elisabeth had never made him a part of the loop. His daughter had been in danger of dying, and his wife had not even sent him a letter. How is he supposed to feel about that? He has tried to remind himself that he has no idea what it was like for her - he was not the one that was left behind with three kids, a pile of fines, and no assistance to speak of as she attempted to keep their family above water. He tells himself that when the anger creeps up over how little she communicated with him during that time. He can mostly find his way through that part of it. It is the leaving of Maddy where he cannot reign in his temper. It is there where no reminder that he does not know (cannot know) what it is like helps.
She came to see him (and he was so happy, so insanely happy just to see her again), and she looked him in the eye and lied (by omission maybe, but lied all the same) to him about what was about to happen. She left their sixteen year old daughter to fend for herself and did not even have the decency to tell him what she was planning. He resents that. He does not know how not to resent that.
Now, she will not even speak to him. She barely even looks him in the eye. He wants her to look him in the eye. He wants her to talk to him. He wants her to give him a reason - one he can hold on to and use to get over the resentment and disappointment. He wants to put it behind him so that he can move on to the part where he can reach out and physically touch his wife for the first time in years. He needs this tension to break. He needs them to move forward. They have gotten another chance here - an unprecedented, uncalled for, convergence of circumstances chance, and he feels as if they are wasting it.
It has to stop.
It has to stop.
They have been granted another chance - an unbelievable, unprecedented, convergence of circumstances chance, and she feels like it is being wasted. She needs to find a way to move forward.
Only, she isn't sure that she is ready to face what that will mean.
She focuses on being busy (because then she can pretend that she has no time or attention to offer to anything else). She is not proud of it, but she will keep doing it just the same. It was so easy to slip into closed off, professional mode (even if everyone who has ever worked with her knows that that is not her normal professional demeanor) in those first unsettling moments. She was bustling around and doing a slew of things by hand that did not need to be done by hand (have not needed to be done by hand since that awful day when the meteor hit and knocked out all of the tech in the clinic which sent them back into the medical dark ages). She was doing it by hand anyway - anything she could think of that would not compromise patient care. She did it because it took longer that way (and made her look as if she had no time to engage in casual or not so casual conversation).
She was already mentally beating herself up for her apparent outward coldness even while she continued in her chosen (or reactionary or whatever it was that had launched her down that path) behavior. It was no way to conduct a reunion. She had not even hugged him. Her husband was within touching distance for the first time in years and she could not even pull herself together enough to offer him an embrace. (She had practically smothered Maddy before turning her attention to Reynolds' condition. The difference in reception had to have hurt him. How could it not have?)
She remembers that the nurses kept looking at her as if she had lost her mind (maybe she had). She certainly did not feel stable at that moment, and she still doesn't even after having what should have been enough time to process her way through the shock. She wants to be able to talk to Jim - what she really wants is to throw herself at Jim. She wants to push a reset button on everything that has happened to and between them and have everything be exactly the way that it was before (without, of course, the constant fear that their youngest child would be discovered and ripped away from them).
It seems morbidly funny that never once in one of those worries and nightmares and fears for the future that she used to struggle with had she ever thought up a scenario where she and Jim would be split apart and not allowed to find their way through whatever might happen together. She had not been ready for that. She probably should have been.
How many times had her friends cautioned that Jim might be fun and Jim might be charming but Jim was also impulsive and liable to get himself in trouble he would not be able to find his way out of one day? She had never really listened to them. She had shrugged her shoulders and said the expected thing about knowing what it meant to be a police officer's wife - that she had always known that there was a chance of him not coming home to them (to her) one day. It was a distant possibility - one that tugged at the back of her mind from time to time but was never front and center. As it turned out, it never needed to be. That had never happened. He never went out on the job and never came home to them. Instead, it was the internal that broke them up . . . apart . . . whatever it is that they have become. He took that swing at the population control officer - that one reckless and in the moment with no thought to spare for the future action that turned their world upside down.
She realizes now that she carries a grudge about that. It is there - pulsing in the back of her head as a desire to push to get at a question to which she already knows there is no answer. She can scream why at him from across the room or whisper it from a negligible space as he holds her in his arms. It will not matter. There is no why. There was no thought. Taking that swing is what Jim does. He reacts in the moment. He follows whatever impulse leads him in a crisis and lets all the chips fall where they may. She knows he would do the exact same thing all over again because that is who he is.
It does not matter that she was the one that was left behind to try to pick up all of the pieces. It does not matter that she was the one who had to try to hold things together. It does not matter that she worked double shifts while shorting herself on meals for months when she could not shake the feeling that the outstanding balances on the fines would be used as an excuse to take Zoe again (to take all three of the children away). It does not matter that she had to watch their unresponsive daughter in that hospital bed with no husband around to put an arm around her or hold her hand and tell her it would be alright. She had to tell herself that it would be alright. She had to tell herself that she would find a way to make it alright. She had to squeeze her own hands together and let her son be the one to put an arm around her the only time she got physical reassurance from anyone (one that was more comfort for him than her but comforted her all the same).
It feels like nothing that she went through matters in comparison (as if it is some sort of twisted competition). Was she the one that was locked in a prison? Was she left to suffocate slowly from long term lung damage deliberately allowed? Was she the one that was barred from communicating with their children? Was she the one that no one knew whether or not she would still be alive when the day came that their separation was due to end? Was she the one that would be barred from her livelihood even if she did make it alive and physically functional to that day?
Nothing she suffered matters. Nothing matters except that she will always be the one who left their daughter (who left him) behind. She is the one who went to tell him that they were leaving without him and did not open her mouth to tell him that their daughter would be waiting for him if he could hold on long enough to make it out of those walls. She let cowardice win then. She is still letting cowardice win now.
How are they ever supposed to work their way through that? How are they ever supposed to talk about that? There is so much guilt and blame and time and changes between them that she does not know where they will even be able to start (although she does know that the start does not happen with her hiding herself in busy work at the clinic). She does not know if she has it in her to try to find a way through or beyond or around only to fail. What happens if they fail? What happens if she fails?
She had set it all aside - had understood that there was going to be no closure for what she had decided - had allowed to be decided. She had found a way to cope with the knowing that she would never really know. She can know now, and she is terrified of that knowing. She was a married woman with a martyr of a husband, and she was comfortable (had made herself be comfortable) living with that. None of it was ever going to be gone through or examined. They were going to be forever separate.
The only separation between them now is the one that she is creating. She cannot deal with this now. She is not ready to deal with this now. She needs time . . . for what purpose she is not sure but she knows that she needs it.
She needs to stall.