Um, yeah, I don't really have anything to say about this chapter. Except I still don't own the characters I guess. And that reviews are greatly appreciated. To all the Valparaisos!
IV.
Mark dropped cross-legged into the grass. He pulled his coat tighter around him to try to block out the biting wind and leaned forward, tracing his fingertips over the stone in front of him.
"Hi," he said softly. He hated that you could hear the traffic from here. It seemed like such an irreverent, insensitive intrusion. But at least the streetlamps were a soft blue color, unlike the orange lamps outside the loft. If you squinted your eyes you could almost believe it was just moonlight.
Mark did this occasionally, came here to sit and think. Maybe he did it too much; he wasn't really sure. It didn't particularly make him feel any closer to her, or to God, or to any sense of closure that this must have afforded some people. But he did it nonetheless.
In retrospect, he supposed that she seemed perfect to him. Maybe that was the way that it always worked, the flaws faded more quickly. Or maybe it was because people felt guilty remembering the bad things. Mark could remember, but it all seemed remarkably irrelevant now that she was gone. He didn't feel the need to think about her spectacular temper or her ability to break anything she touched, because he missed her smile and her intelligence and her warmth so much sometimes that he felt like he couldn't breathe.
Roger still hadn't come out of his room. It had been almost two weeks, and the silent face of his door was staring at Mark, daring him to go crazy. He wouldn't get through this without Roger, he knew that. He couldn't bear to lose them both.
Mark threw open the door to the medicine cabinet violently, rummaging around for some Tylenol. His hand brushed an empty prescription bottle, and it fell into the sink, rolling around against the porcelain surface. He knew immediately what it was and felt a great sense of trepidation as he slowly picked it up with hesitant, shaking fingers. It was April's medication. She was manic-depressive, and the medication helped her control her moods.
But the bottle was empty.
Mark's mind suddenly flew back to weeks before, a conversation they had had.
"Are you going to the club tonight?" she asked, shaking a pill from the bottle and swallowing it with an ease born of familiarity.
"I don't know. Probably," Mark said, frowning. "You're running low."
"Yeah, I know. I need to go to the pharmacy." She sighed. "I hate this stuff. It makes my mind so cloudy, and I'm not even sure I need it anymore. I haven't been symptomatic for years."
"Yeah, but that's because of the medication, right?"
"Probably, but I've read that manic-depression can go away on its own when it's diagnosed in teenagers, and I was fourteen at the time. What if I don't actually need it anymore, and I'm just feeling bad and emptying my bank account for no reason?"
"Yeah, but... you're going to refill the prescription anyway, right?"
"Of course, I'm just talking. Better safe than crazy, after all."
The number of pills left in the bottom of that bottle couldn't have possibly lasted her more than a few days. She must have been off of her medication for weeks before.. before she...
"Roger!"
Mark burst in on his friend, his tortured eyes wide and hands shaking almost imperceptibly. Roger was lying on his bed, staring idly out of the window. He turned slowly to look up at his friend with dull, lifeless eyes.
"What?" he asked flatly.
"Take your AZT," Mark replied, tossing the bottle at him. His tone was strangely urgent.
"Damnit Mark, the last fucking thing -- "
"Take it!"
"I should have known," Mark whispered. "I should have done something."
The night April died was still unreal to him. It was like watching one of his movies - the way he opened the bathroom door to find Roger rocking on the floor with her in his arms, covered in her blood, sobbing - and he devoted the same obsessive, focused attention to it. He replayed the images in mind over and over, trying to seek out some kind of logic in it, find some clue he had overlooked before that would lead to a satisfactory explanation. He knew he should have seen it coming; in retrospect the signs seemed so clear. Her complaints about the way the lithium made her feel and how she had thought she might not need it anymore, the progressive darkening of her moods just before that night, the inordinate amount of stress she was under from school and a fight with her mother. All of those combined with the AIDS diagnosis, which was still a complete mystery to them all, must have been enough to push a highly rational but emotional girl over the edge.
The day she died Roger became very still and quiet, and he stayed that way. Many people misinterpreted this for extreme stoicism, but Mark recognized the shock deep in the back of the musician's eyes and knew that Roger's true reaction hadn't even begun. Mark might have come completely dismantled himself, but he had Roger to focus on. The need to take care of his friend kept him in the immediate moment full of mundane thoughts and details, and that kept him sane. With little protest, he took Roger - practically catatonic - by the arm and led him home from the hospital as though he were a blind man. In many ways he was. After Mark laid him into bed and turned off the lights, he returned to his own room to stare at the picture on his bedside table, surprised and almost frightened that he could look at that photograph of her, smiling broadly and looking as beautiful as she ever had, without crying. He eventually fell into a blessedly dreamless sleep and woke up some hours later in astonishment to find Roger sleeping beside him. It was the closest that Roger had ever come to asking for help. Mark stared at him for a long time in the harsh daylight that was filtering through the window. His face was calm and untouched in sleep, just like any normal man's. Mark didn't want him to wake up, because he knew in his big green eyes he would see the reflection of his own stunned, suffocating misery.
His gaze eventually drifted from Roger's face to see a piece of paper lying on the sheets between them. He picked it up curiously.
It was a note, from April.
Not the one that they had found stuck to the bathroom mirror, but another one. The first note had been scrawled on a post-it, but this was written on a regular sheet of paper in her calm, even hand.
I love you guys. Take care of each other.
That was all it said, and Mark found himself staring at the words. They blurred, and he could no longer make them out, as though they were written in a different language. His confusion and guilt and wretchedness became a choking ball in the center of his throat. He wanted to cry and scream at her and demand why she had done such a thing to them, but he would never have the opportunity. It was impossible to comprehend or accept.
Mark felt Roger stir beside him, and he raised his bleary eyes from the words on the page to find himself locked into Roger's gaze. There was something in the hopelessness of the other that bound them irrevocably together.
"I couldn't sleep," Roger had finally offered as a hoarse, devastated explanation. "I found that underneath my pillow."
Before Mark had time to figure out how it happened, they were in each others arms, holding onto each other tightly, knowing that they were all they had left in the world that really mattered. Both of their tears finally came as they lay there tangled up in each other for hours, their grips never loosening.
Just don't let go, god, please don't let go...
But after that morning Roger disappeared, locked himself in his room and left Mark to face it all alone.
Mark sighed, knowing that he should be heading home, and stood. He kissed the dandelion he had picked up while walking through the cemetery and placed in on top of her headstone.
"Love you."
*
"We have to tell him."
"No we don't. Roger, are you crazy?" Maureen asked. "We'd only be hurting him, and isn't that what you're so concerned about avoiding?"
She flung that last question at him like a weapon, but Roger was barely listening to what she was saying. Just moments ago they had broken apart, Roger pulling away from her in sudden shock and disgust with himself. She had sighed, as though she expected this all along, and slowly began to re-button the top three buttons of her blouse, which he had fumbled open. He had winced, wiping the lipstick off of his numbly tingling lips, realization instantly sobering him as effectively as a crash of cold water. What in God's name had possessed him to kiss Maureen? The image of Mark's sweet, trusting face weighed heavily on his already guilty conscience. After all that Mark had done for him, all he was for him. Roger had stopped it almost as soon as it started, but he knew that the damage had been done.
"He has a right to know," Roger insisted. "Maybe cheating on Mark comes easily to you, but I won't be able to look him in the face."
"You're not cheating on him!" Maureen suddenly burst, leaping up from the seat she had taken on the couch. "Jesus! What is it with you two?
Roger turned to look at her, his eyes wide at her unexpected, cryptic outburst.
"What are you talking about?" he asked.
"Please." She laughed. "As if you didn't know, as if you hadn't noticed."
But his face was still blank with confusion, and after a few moments she gave up waiting for the realization to come to him. She might be waiting for a while; denial, in Roger's hand, was a particularly powerful tool. And frankly, she was growing tired of spending all her time with uncommunicative men harboring suppressed desires.
Maureen stalked off to Mark's bedroom. She found a bag on the floor of the closest and began to fill it with clothes that she pulled down randomly from hangers and out of drawers. Roger stood in the doorway watching her, and she could practically feel the incomprehension in his heavy gaze.
"Maureen," he said. "I have no idea what you're saying."
"Of course you don't," she said calmly even as she slammed a dresser door shut. "Boys are so fucking blind."
She was beginning to get to him; she could tell as she swept past him out of the bedroom. He was clenching his fists by his side in agitation.
"Why don't you just say whatever the fuck it is you mean?" he snapped waspishly.
She dropped the bag in her hand and turned to look at him.
"Who's the song about Roger?" she asked.
She could have sworn she saw him pale. "What?"
"The song Roger!" she cried, her patience and cool, calm front evaporating. "Who the fuck is the song about? And don't tell me it's about her, because we both know that's bullshit."
"You don't know a goddamn thing Maureen. I wrote that song over a year ago, it's about..."
When he hesitated, she jumped on it.
"Go on," she said, "tell me it's about her. I dare you to lie to me with your dead girlfriend's name on your lips. Use them to betray another person you 'love' tonight."
She knew she had pushed too hard then. Roger took a step toward her, looking for all the world like he was going to hit her, his eyes blazing. He seemed to gain control over himself, however, before Maureen had a chance to betray herself by stepping back or flinching away.
"What do you want from me Maureen?" he asked stonily, pressing the heels of his hands against his pounding eyes.
"I want you to keep quiet about this," she replied.
"Why?"
"Because telling him will do more harm than good. You may feel like it's your goddamn obligation, but I know what I'm talking about."
"Keeping it from him will only make it worse. And besides, when did Mark's well-being become your top priority? When you were fucking other guys behind his back?"
"And when the fuck did it become yours?" she snapped. "When you were making him deal with your bullshit addictions even though he was grieving too or when you were groping his girlfriend? Sacrifice his happiness for your own peace of mind if that's what you have to do, Roger. I mean, hell, it's never stopped you before. But I swear to you, it's the worst possible thing you can do to him right now. Leave it be."
"Christ Maureen!" Roger said, the full force of his frustration breaking through. He couldn't stand her smug superiority, the way she was asserting herself as the window into Mark's soul. She didn't know; she hadn't been there. "You've been around how long now and you think you know Mark? You think you understand him? Give him some fucking credit!"
Maureen sighed. He wouldn't see. Roger would never give up that idea that he had to protect Mark was from his selfish bitch girlfriend, never realizing that his own selfishness was what he should really be sheltering the filmmaker from. She knew the reality of the situation: Mark could never have Roger. But to deny him the world he had created in his head where they were such perfect friends that it didn't matter was beyond any cruelty she could do in the name of honesty. Roger however, blind and stupid, would charge straight into that fragile, crystalline structure screaming the harsh truth because it was 'right', martyring himself for a righteous cause. Only it was Mark that would be destroyed; he would never be able to put the shards of his dream back together again.
"I think we've firmly established that you don't like me Roger," she said wearily, "but try to listen to what I'm saying, because - believe it or not - I care about him a lot. You are too close to this situation to see it like I do. Don't tell him. Just let me go away. He'll learn to live without me surprisingly quickly, if I'm not mistaken, but not if he knows what happened here tonight. You don't need to protect him from me anymore - you won - but you need to protect him from this."
Roger was looking at her intensely but didn't say anything. At least he was thinking about what she said. She bent to retrieve her bag and walked toward the door.
"I'll call him tomorrow so we can do this the right way," she said, pulling on her coat.
The musician suddenly seemed to realize what the bag full of her clothes meant, and she saw a spark of panic in his gray-green eyes.
"No, don't! Not because of me," he said. "I may not like you, but he needs you."
She smiled sadly, opening the door and winding a scarf around her neck.
"No he doesn't," she said. "He needs you, so you've got to be the one who's there for him, okay? Remember what I said."
And she was gone, the door shutting softly behind her. Roger couldn't decide if he was relieved or disappointed. Confusion permeated his mind and heart, and he backed away from the door slowly. He sat on the table, Maureen's words running a riot through his head, and waited for Mark to come home.