I wasn't going to do these, but I have very little impulse control and an obsession with Taylor Swift. So when inspiration struck 20 days late I just kind of ran with it.
Content warning for brief suicide reference. This is post-TYD, for those who have read it (and I guess for those who haven't, if you're worried about spoilers, lol).
Arthur tried to talk him out of doing something so stressful with his first-ever solo drive.
"We need milk, Matthew," he coaxes as Mattie pulls on his sneakers. "You could just drive to the store."
Mattie wiggles his index finger by his heel, trying to unfold the back of the shoe. "I'll get some on the way back."
"That'll be long past teatime," Arthur frets.
"You never put milk in your tea."
"You do."
"Well I'm not going to be here for tea, am I?"
Arthur purses his lips and falls silent. Finally, he sighs, runs his right hand through his graying hair, and asks, "Do you know where you're going?"
"Francis sent me the address a couple weeks ago."
. . .
It's unseasonably warm for early June. Eighty-five degrees and it's only ten in the morning. Last week, when Mattie took his driver's test, it barely cracked seventy. Still, it's nice to be able to blame his sweaty palms on the heat. His car is a fifteen-year old Outback with no A/C, so it's a reasonable excuse.
Even with all that, plus the heavy coating of yellow pollen, it's not lost on Mattie that his car is nicer than most of the others in the apartment complex. Gone is the high-rise from five years ago; Francis' home now is a ground-level apartment in the low-income housing projects.
He double-checks the address on his phone, and contemplates texting Francis to let him know he's here. The thought of waiting for a reply turns into a lump in his throat, however, so he strides up the sidewalk and knocks on the door in what feels like one breathless motion. The sound of movement inside sets his heart racing like a skittish rabbit, but he just clenches his fists and waits, counting the nail-holes in the broken wood of the door frame until he hears the doorknob rattling.
. . .
Contradictions ricochet through Mattie's mind as he sits on the low, gray futon that functions-he guesses-as both bed and couch. Any previous image of Francis he had was swiftly and unceremoniously dispatched by the man who answered the door, and he finds himself confused every time he looks up from the glass of ice water sweating between his hands. The Francis that lives in his mind is a strange marriage of father and beggar, the embodiment of both unconditional love and desperate obsession, but the man sitting calmly on the folding chair across from him is neither.
He is a stranger.
His hair still falls a couple inches past his shoulders, but the silver intermixed with blond gives it a strange iridescent quality that makes Mattie blink whenever he tries to look at it. His eyes don't sparkle, nor are they dark and hollow, ringed with the marks of many sleepless nights. They are still and solemn, but not sad. They gaze evenly into Mattie's, and he looks away, both angry and ashamed that this man has somehow managed to find the peace that still eludes him.
Do you know what I did? What you made me do?
He wants to scream, to disturb that peace that seems to mock him, but he is suffocated by an oppressive certainty that Francis bought his peace by sacrificing Mattie to the demons that haunted him.
Francis didn't put the pills in his mouth, he reminds himself. Francis didn't know what happened. He still doesn't.
Mattie has replayed the argument a thousand times. He has castigated Francis for expecting a teenager to carry the burdens of his troubled life. He has hurled insults and heaped blame, he has demanded apology upon apology. He has watched Francis grovel at his feet in his mind's eye, and none of it has made him feel any better. Certainly none of it has prepared him to meet this serene presence and inscrutable gaze.
"How are you, Mathieu?" the stranger asks, but the lilt in his voice as he says Mattie's name is as familiar as the feeling of sunshine on his face.
Something in Mattie recoils, retreating towards the depths of his pain and anger, but something else blooms suddenly in his chest, almost painfully strong, with even deeper roots.
"I'm okay," he finds himself saying, and even more surprising than the words is the realization that he actually means it.
He looks up at Francis again, and the stranger is still there, but the new man is no longer a façade, but a layer, under which the outlines of the men Mattie knew before are still visible. Because there's a steady kind of peace that can only come after great turmoil, and an unspeakable tenderness of being that can only be born of love.
Mattie blinks. It's a familiar image, he realizes, but not the one he was expecting. Because it's neither the father of his early years nor the spectre of his coming-of-age, but the reflection of another man altogether.
In all these years, Mattie has never seen any real similarity between Francis and Arthur. But what are they, really, he asks himself, but two broken men who have loved him?
"You know," Francis says thoughtfully, "Today is the anniversary of the day you came to live with me."
I do know, Mattie wants to say. That's why I came. But it feels like every memory, every day of his life is suddenly before his eyes all at once, and the dizzying coexistence of happiness and sorrow is overwhelming. Without Francis, there might have been so much less sorrow, but there would have been countless joys lost, never known, never missed.
He came here today-this day specifically-to confront the pain it signified. Unprepared as he is to reckon with the happiness, he blurts out the first thing that comes to mind.
"Do you have any tea?"
Francis looks briefly perplexed, then laughs. "Oui, mon cher," he says. "Come."
Mattie follows him the few steps into the kitchen, awkwardness dogging his heels.
"Um…" He kneads his left elbow with his right hand. "Do you have milk?"
"Ah," Francis sighs as he puts a kettle on the stove, "I'm afraid not. I need to buy more."
And Mattie laughs.