A/N: 12-04-02: Yes. It's been a long time. Apologies. Please read the last
chapter (or the entire story) to refresh your memories. Even I had to do
that. And I fucking WROTE it. At any rate, I think I've lost my touch for
this story. It's been too long, and I've forgotten the state of mind I used
to be in when I'd write it. So now it feels foreign. At any rate, hope it
isn't too disappointing.
Only an epilogue left. Please nag me if you would like to see it sometime in the twenty-first century.
And yeah, I love how I originally said the clinic was on W. 29th, and now I've been calling it the East Side Healthcare Clinic for the past two chapters. Ignore that.
Disclaimer: I own no one except my lavish supply of handmaidens who, sadly, do not make an appearance here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
17. [R]
I just wish he'd asked me why.
For months, I'd been asking myself why I'd written all those letters to her while I was gone, and never sent even one of them. Asking myself never seemed to do much good. It didn't keep me from smack, it didn't keep me from leaving New York. But when *he* asked me why I did something... somehow, it made everything clear.
I wonder if that's reversible?
I knew he questioned himself nonstop. He always had. Would his answers ever be different if I were the one asking?
I'd probably never know. I can't remember the last time I asked him why. Why he had hid behind that camera, why he didn't speak up when he knew I was reading his mind anyway, why he had to fall in love with the one woman I was meant to be with...
Not that it mattered now.
Unfortunately, I wasn't one of those people who could wander aimlessly and still end up in the one place fate had intended me to be. If I didn't have some vague conception of where I was going, I would end up in some dark basement with screaming music, old acquaintances, and white powder.
And so, I went to see her.
She'd wanted to be buried next to Angel-that's all I knew. I hadn't asked them anything about the funeral, and no one had volunteered any information. I assumed they didn't want to tell me, and they assumed, considering I wasn't there, that I didn't want to know. We were probably both right.
The stone above the ground looked like any other, except it had her name written across it. Hers. Instead of... anyone else's. It didn't belong there. It belonged on her driver's license, which expired two years ago, and was a fake she'd had done at some novelty shop in the city. It belonged on the door to her dressing room at work, with little hearts, stars, and post-it notes surrounding it. It belonged on the envelopes of all the letters I wrote her in Santa Fe, and never sent.
Not here. Not on a stone in the ground.
I looked at the pile of crumpled letters in my hands, squashed together with a fat rubber band. I'd kept them in my car in Santa Fe. I'd always put them in the front seat with me on my way to the post office, and decide against it once I got there. Before long, a nice pile had begun to develop. I'd never touched them since. Not until now.
"This never would have happened..."
And she wasn't here. She couldn't hear me. Honestly, which was more pathetic? The fact that I thought, somehow, she could... or the fact that talking to her was so pitifully therapeutic? I sat down in the grass beside her, placing the pile of letters next to a fresh red rose that had obviously been left by someone more desperate than I was at proving their sentiment.
"If only I'd sent these, he wouldn't have forged them like the ass that he tends to be. You wouldn't have kissed him, none of this would have happened, and you'd still be here now."
It sounded ridiculously, impossibly simple that way.
If only life could be run on the promise, rather than the prospect, of 'if only's'.
I inched closer, feeling the soft, warm ground with my hands-as though it held some distant sense of life-and felt my eyes begin to burn with tears.
"I'm sorry," I choked. "I'm sorry I left and I'm sorry I came back and I'm sorry you lost the man you loved and I..."
The impending thoughts shocked, and embarrassed, me. But, as no one could hear, I allowed them to take the more tangible form of words.
"...And I'm sorry he lost you."
It felt wrong. I shouldn't be sorry at all. Not for him.
But somehow, I couldn't help but ache for anyone who felt the pain of her loss as much as I did.
"I-I don't hate him," I spurted quickly. "I can't blame anyone for falling in love with you. And I know he took care of you. It's just so unfair, because I thought I'd always be that person. The one who looked out for you. But... he did it where I failed."
Crazy, really, how saying something out loud that I'd known to be true for so long could make my hands tremble.
I never left that patch of grass all night. I never closed my eyes. I sat with my letters and my lost love and I talked to a gray stone until the first bird signaled morning... at which point I fell asleep.
The rain woke me up, hours later. Hours which felt to have been condensed to perhaps five or ten minutes, I noted in my exhaustion. The letters were getting soaked, beginning to melt into each other in a wet, wrinkled mess of paper and ink and stamps. I quickly snatched them up, putting them back in my jacket pocket, and pulled myself to my feet.
But I just couldn't make myself leave her.
"What do I *do*, Mimi?" I demanded of the stone, my voice barely rising above the downpour of rain. "I know he took care of you, but you're gone, and... and..."
And that's when it hit me.
It was my turn to take care of *him*.
The loft greeted me with emptiness when I came home, breathless and soaking wet and suddenly, painfully alone. I don't know why I expected him to be there. He had test results to pick up. He was at the clinic-he had more courage than I expected. That part was real, Roger, if you remember correctly. The whole Mark-possibly-being-positive thing-that wasn't a dream. No more than was her death.
It was real. So unfairly, fucking real.
My tires screeched through the grimy wet streets of the East Village, and as I rounded the corner onto 29th, it was easy to believe I was just coming to pick up my AZT for the month, as I had done for years.
Actually, it wasn't that easy. I never picked it up; I never remembered. Mark had always done that.
Inside, the woman at the front desk offered me a small smile, which vanished as I crossed the space between the door and her desk, paying little attention to the fact that my footprints alone were completely drenching their carpet.
"May I... help you?"
"Someone-came in here," I stammered, instantly realizing the futility of this statement. "He was wearing a..." All right, how the fuck was I supposed to know what he was wearing? "He has blonde hair and blue eyes and glasses and I know he's here so just... let me see him."
Making demands before introducing yourself. Way to win her over, Roger.
"You mean Mr. Cohen?"
"Yeah. Mark. He-"
"He left over an hour ago."
My eyes narrowed, bewildered. "His appointment *was* an hour ago."
"Well, he didn't stay long."
God damn it, that could translate to anything.
Carefully, I leaned over the desk, my voice insultingly slow and enunciated. "What do you mean, he didn't stay long?"
"He got called to the back, and... a minute after, he was storming out the door."
Two and half seconds later, so was I.
My thoughts raced wildly as I drove home, but it wasn't until I parked in front of the loft that I was able to grab one thought, look at it, and fully take it in. And it wasn't until I did this that I realized all my thoughts were nothing more than variations on the same one.
He was positive. Mark had HIV. My best friend was going to end up dying of AIDS, just like me.
Any way I admitted it, I still felt sick to my stomach.
Irony had always sent me into a rage, especially when it was at my expense. But in this moment, I couldn't fight away the sick truth of our fates. Both of us, just in our twenties, being served death sentences by the women we'd fallen so desperately, intensely in love with.
The women who, conveniently enough, had left us to suffer this alone.
Not surprisingly, I returned to find the loft still empty. This was quickly becoming a new pattern for me. Ordinarily, when I returned from one of my raging tantrums, he'd be seated in the exact same spot as he'd been when I left him. Waiting for my return. He was always waiting for me. I never had to wait for him, because he was always there.
How fucking spoiled I'd gotten.
Somehow, miraculously, distraction was strong enough to avert my eyes to the phone, where an insignificant red light blinked, over and over, as though counting down to the explosion of a time bomb.
At least he'd called.
I lunged for the receiver, knocking it off the hook as I whacked random buttons, luckily managing to punch 'play' in my frenzy.
"Twelve thirty-six p.m.," groaned the recording.
Holy fuck. Only three minutes ago.
"This is the East Side Healthcare Clinic with an urgent message for Mr. Mark Cohen."
Fabulous. A follow-up phone call. How fucking discreet. What, did he forget his "So You're HIV+--Now What?" pamphlet?
"Mr. Cohen, your test results at our lab were regrettably mixed up with a Michael Cohen. The results you were given today were his, and entirely inaccurate."
I froze.
"Your test came out negative, Mark. Congratulations."
I had barely heard past the opening sentence. The message wasn't what paralyzed me. I still heard it, of course, in the back of my mind. But I was frozen because of something else. Something quieter. Something tangible, and far more terrifying, than a phone call.
A small yellow piece of paper, folded once in a messy half and placed face- down on the kitchen table.
I wonder if he remembered.
If he did, this was a sick joke. If he didn't... God, how could he not?
Everyone remembered. Even the ones who weren't there.
The day we came home and found the yellow piece of paper on the kitchen table before someone, no one remembers who, burst into the bathroom and found her... her body crumpled in a heap and drenched in a pool of blood.
This wasn't fucking funny, Mark.
I stood in front of the paper, above it, towering menacingly over the kitchen table as though if I appeared threatening enough, I just might be able to alter the words printed inside.
All I remember about April is... we could have saved her. If we'd thought to look in the bathroom sooner instead of standing over the freshly read note for ten minutes, in shock...
We could have saved her.
My fingers crushed around it, snatching it from the table and recklessly whipping it open.
'Roger,
I have AIDS. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
Love, Mark'
It was cryptic. It was ambiguous. Probably intentionally so. But it was Mark. And that kept it from really being cryptic or ambiguous at all.
I knew him. He knew I knew him. He knew he'd said all he needed to in that note.
His penmanship sent a chill down my spine. It was so similar to mine now- likely from the days and days of poring over my handwritten songs, taking in my voice as his own and translating it to paper.
It scared the shit out of me.
But not enough to keep me planted there in a frozen stupor.
I drove-everywhere. Halfway to Maureen's and back, wondering if I'd lost my mind in the process. Chanting the question over and over, 'If I were Mark, what would be my venue of choice for suicide?', nearly drove me into a telephone pole three times, taxis twice, and pedestrians more times than I could remember even *seeing* pedestrians.
What if he wasn't trying to be creative? What if he wasn't trying to hide?
What if he... wanted to be found?
What if the yellow half-piece of paper was only the beginning of his reenactment?
And so, for the next thirty seconds, I was given relief from the question of location, which had begun to chant itself independently of my will. Instead, my focus now lay on the image of him... the same way we'd found her...
And once again, too late.
It wouldn't happen. Not this time. Not today.
I found him on the sidewalk by the cemetery.
Slamming the gears into reverse, I backed up to him as close as I could get, but he was already inside the gate, sloshing through the rain and the already soaked grass, his coat stretched tightly around him.
Not bothering even to turn off the engine, I leapt from the car.
"Mark!"
Good one, Roger. That's bound to send him running into your arms.
It didn't take me long to catch up to him, but gathering the courage to actually *do* something about this new lack of distance between us... that was another effort entirely.
"Mark-" I was breathless now, and grabbed his arm, spinning him around until I could almost see his eyes beneath the sheets of rain.
"Go," he instructed firmly, his tired, pained voice straining to slice through the rain and be heard, somehow. "Go home."
I shrugged, unfazed. "No. I'm not letting you do this."
"It's not exactly in your control, Roger."
"FUCK this!" I screamed, releasing his jacket, somehow confident that he wasn't about to take off on me. "I lost her, I'm not going to lose you too!"
"Well," he laughed-actually laughed. "How touching." He turned from me and continued up the path.
Again, I grabbed his sleeve. "Mark-"
"NO!" How quickly laughter fades. "No, you've fucked up everything in our lives and I'm not letting you take this away from me too"
"There's nothing to take away! I'm trying to keep us *both* from losing something."
He shook his head, not hearing me at all. "You hate me. You think I'm to blame-"
"No, I-"
"But I loved her. And I know she loved me. And-"
"I fucking know that!"
His eyes sliced through to mine, past the rain, completely puzzled. "What?"
"I know she was in love with you! And I know you took care of her and I know she's gone because of me, because I left her, I left both of you. It's my fault. And we've lost her, but goddammit, Mark, we haven't lost each other. Not yet."
I stopped, trying to swallow, and finding my throat dry despite the torrents of water beating down on us.
I shook my head, my arms dropping to my side. "She wouldn't want this, Mark."
He shook his head quickly in agreement, like a child being taught the dangers of crossing the road without a grownup. His eyes wide, blurred by rain but glistened by tears, I could see his entire small frame trembling.
"She's gone."
Slowly, I nodded. "But we're not."
I don't know how it happened, going from stiff, freezing figures standing in the grass, staring at each other-to heaps on the ground, leaning against a gate and crying in each other's arms. I could count on one hand-maybe even one finger-the number of times we'd found ourselves this close, this desperate... this trusting. Last time being, of course, the ten seconds prior to the moment he told me he was the father of Mimi's unborn child.
Only this time, he didn't shove me away.
Just when I thought the hug was developing a serious potential to strangle us both, I extracted myself from his embrace, offering a random piece of conversation to break the silence.
"You're not positive."
"What?"
"They mixed up your results with someone else."
His eyes darted everywhere in confusion, in shock. "But why-why didn't you tell me..."
"I didn't want that to be the reason you decided not to go through with it."
The corners of his mouth danced, lifting slightly upward before he shook his head-not a gesture of great communication, but a mere expression of wonder. And for the first time in over eight months, I saw the boy I'd discovered on a sidewalk six years ago, filming a butterfly with a broken wing.
Strange, that it took me to this point to realize that wasn't the only broken butterfly he would film in his lifetime.
But, unlike that first one... we would heal.
He blinked. Smiled. Dropped a hand on my arm. "I want to go home."
[epilogue next. here's the pic that inspired this last chapter: http://www.geocities.com/bohogirls/pictures/obc/adamanthony.jpg so... yeah. :)]
Only an epilogue left. Please nag me if you would like to see it sometime in the twenty-first century.
And yeah, I love how I originally said the clinic was on W. 29th, and now I've been calling it the East Side Healthcare Clinic for the past two chapters. Ignore that.
Disclaimer: I own no one except my lavish supply of handmaidens who, sadly, do not make an appearance here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
17. [R]
I just wish he'd asked me why.
For months, I'd been asking myself why I'd written all those letters to her while I was gone, and never sent even one of them. Asking myself never seemed to do much good. It didn't keep me from smack, it didn't keep me from leaving New York. But when *he* asked me why I did something... somehow, it made everything clear.
I wonder if that's reversible?
I knew he questioned himself nonstop. He always had. Would his answers ever be different if I were the one asking?
I'd probably never know. I can't remember the last time I asked him why. Why he had hid behind that camera, why he didn't speak up when he knew I was reading his mind anyway, why he had to fall in love with the one woman I was meant to be with...
Not that it mattered now.
Unfortunately, I wasn't one of those people who could wander aimlessly and still end up in the one place fate had intended me to be. If I didn't have some vague conception of where I was going, I would end up in some dark basement with screaming music, old acquaintances, and white powder.
And so, I went to see her.
She'd wanted to be buried next to Angel-that's all I knew. I hadn't asked them anything about the funeral, and no one had volunteered any information. I assumed they didn't want to tell me, and they assumed, considering I wasn't there, that I didn't want to know. We were probably both right.
The stone above the ground looked like any other, except it had her name written across it. Hers. Instead of... anyone else's. It didn't belong there. It belonged on her driver's license, which expired two years ago, and was a fake she'd had done at some novelty shop in the city. It belonged on the door to her dressing room at work, with little hearts, stars, and post-it notes surrounding it. It belonged on the envelopes of all the letters I wrote her in Santa Fe, and never sent.
Not here. Not on a stone in the ground.
I looked at the pile of crumpled letters in my hands, squashed together with a fat rubber band. I'd kept them in my car in Santa Fe. I'd always put them in the front seat with me on my way to the post office, and decide against it once I got there. Before long, a nice pile had begun to develop. I'd never touched them since. Not until now.
"This never would have happened..."
And she wasn't here. She couldn't hear me. Honestly, which was more pathetic? The fact that I thought, somehow, she could... or the fact that talking to her was so pitifully therapeutic? I sat down in the grass beside her, placing the pile of letters next to a fresh red rose that had obviously been left by someone more desperate than I was at proving their sentiment.
"If only I'd sent these, he wouldn't have forged them like the ass that he tends to be. You wouldn't have kissed him, none of this would have happened, and you'd still be here now."
It sounded ridiculously, impossibly simple that way.
If only life could be run on the promise, rather than the prospect, of 'if only's'.
I inched closer, feeling the soft, warm ground with my hands-as though it held some distant sense of life-and felt my eyes begin to burn with tears.
"I'm sorry," I choked. "I'm sorry I left and I'm sorry I came back and I'm sorry you lost the man you loved and I..."
The impending thoughts shocked, and embarrassed, me. But, as no one could hear, I allowed them to take the more tangible form of words.
"...And I'm sorry he lost you."
It felt wrong. I shouldn't be sorry at all. Not for him.
But somehow, I couldn't help but ache for anyone who felt the pain of her loss as much as I did.
"I-I don't hate him," I spurted quickly. "I can't blame anyone for falling in love with you. And I know he took care of you. It's just so unfair, because I thought I'd always be that person. The one who looked out for you. But... he did it where I failed."
Crazy, really, how saying something out loud that I'd known to be true for so long could make my hands tremble.
I never left that patch of grass all night. I never closed my eyes. I sat with my letters and my lost love and I talked to a gray stone until the first bird signaled morning... at which point I fell asleep.
The rain woke me up, hours later. Hours which felt to have been condensed to perhaps five or ten minutes, I noted in my exhaustion. The letters were getting soaked, beginning to melt into each other in a wet, wrinkled mess of paper and ink and stamps. I quickly snatched them up, putting them back in my jacket pocket, and pulled myself to my feet.
But I just couldn't make myself leave her.
"What do I *do*, Mimi?" I demanded of the stone, my voice barely rising above the downpour of rain. "I know he took care of you, but you're gone, and... and..."
And that's when it hit me.
It was my turn to take care of *him*.
The loft greeted me with emptiness when I came home, breathless and soaking wet and suddenly, painfully alone. I don't know why I expected him to be there. He had test results to pick up. He was at the clinic-he had more courage than I expected. That part was real, Roger, if you remember correctly. The whole Mark-possibly-being-positive thing-that wasn't a dream. No more than was her death.
It was real. So unfairly, fucking real.
My tires screeched through the grimy wet streets of the East Village, and as I rounded the corner onto 29th, it was easy to believe I was just coming to pick up my AZT for the month, as I had done for years.
Actually, it wasn't that easy. I never picked it up; I never remembered. Mark had always done that.
Inside, the woman at the front desk offered me a small smile, which vanished as I crossed the space between the door and her desk, paying little attention to the fact that my footprints alone were completely drenching their carpet.
"May I... help you?"
"Someone-came in here," I stammered, instantly realizing the futility of this statement. "He was wearing a..." All right, how the fuck was I supposed to know what he was wearing? "He has blonde hair and blue eyes and glasses and I know he's here so just... let me see him."
Making demands before introducing yourself. Way to win her over, Roger.
"You mean Mr. Cohen?"
"Yeah. Mark. He-"
"He left over an hour ago."
My eyes narrowed, bewildered. "His appointment *was* an hour ago."
"Well, he didn't stay long."
God damn it, that could translate to anything.
Carefully, I leaned over the desk, my voice insultingly slow and enunciated. "What do you mean, he didn't stay long?"
"He got called to the back, and... a minute after, he was storming out the door."
Two and half seconds later, so was I.
My thoughts raced wildly as I drove home, but it wasn't until I parked in front of the loft that I was able to grab one thought, look at it, and fully take it in. And it wasn't until I did this that I realized all my thoughts were nothing more than variations on the same one.
He was positive. Mark had HIV. My best friend was going to end up dying of AIDS, just like me.
Any way I admitted it, I still felt sick to my stomach.
Irony had always sent me into a rage, especially when it was at my expense. But in this moment, I couldn't fight away the sick truth of our fates. Both of us, just in our twenties, being served death sentences by the women we'd fallen so desperately, intensely in love with.
The women who, conveniently enough, had left us to suffer this alone.
Not surprisingly, I returned to find the loft still empty. This was quickly becoming a new pattern for me. Ordinarily, when I returned from one of my raging tantrums, he'd be seated in the exact same spot as he'd been when I left him. Waiting for my return. He was always waiting for me. I never had to wait for him, because he was always there.
How fucking spoiled I'd gotten.
Somehow, miraculously, distraction was strong enough to avert my eyes to the phone, where an insignificant red light blinked, over and over, as though counting down to the explosion of a time bomb.
At least he'd called.
I lunged for the receiver, knocking it off the hook as I whacked random buttons, luckily managing to punch 'play' in my frenzy.
"Twelve thirty-six p.m.," groaned the recording.
Holy fuck. Only three minutes ago.
"This is the East Side Healthcare Clinic with an urgent message for Mr. Mark Cohen."
Fabulous. A follow-up phone call. How fucking discreet. What, did he forget his "So You're HIV+--Now What?" pamphlet?
"Mr. Cohen, your test results at our lab were regrettably mixed up with a Michael Cohen. The results you were given today were his, and entirely inaccurate."
I froze.
"Your test came out negative, Mark. Congratulations."
I had barely heard past the opening sentence. The message wasn't what paralyzed me. I still heard it, of course, in the back of my mind. But I was frozen because of something else. Something quieter. Something tangible, and far more terrifying, than a phone call.
A small yellow piece of paper, folded once in a messy half and placed face- down on the kitchen table.
I wonder if he remembered.
If he did, this was a sick joke. If he didn't... God, how could he not?
Everyone remembered. Even the ones who weren't there.
The day we came home and found the yellow piece of paper on the kitchen table before someone, no one remembers who, burst into the bathroom and found her... her body crumpled in a heap and drenched in a pool of blood.
This wasn't fucking funny, Mark.
I stood in front of the paper, above it, towering menacingly over the kitchen table as though if I appeared threatening enough, I just might be able to alter the words printed inside.
All I remember about April is... we could have saved her. If we'd thought to look in the bathroom sooner instead of standing over the freshly read note for ten minutes, in shock...
We could have saved her.
My fingers crushed around it, snatching it from the table and recklessly whipping it open.
'Roger,
I have AIDS. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
Love, Mark'
It was cryptic. It was ambiguous. Probably intentionally so. But it was Mark. And that kept it from really being cryptic or ambiguous at all.
I knew him. He knew I knew him. He knew he'd said all he needed to in that note.
His penmanship sent a chill down my spine. It was so similar to mine now- likely from the days and days of poring over my handwritten songs, taking in my voice as his own and translating it to paper.
It scared the shit out of me.
But not enough to keep me planted there in a frozen stupor.
I drove-everywhere. Halfway to Maureen's and back, wondering if I'd lost my mind in the process. Chanting the question over and over, 'If I were Mark, what would be my venue of choice for suicide?', nearly drove me into a telephone pole three times, taxis twice, and pedestrians more times than I could remember even *seeing* pedestrians.
What if he wasn't trying to be creative? What if he wasn't trying to hide?
What if he... wanted to be found?
What if the yellow half-piece of paper was only the beginning of his reenactment?
And so, for the next thirty seconds, I was given relief from the question of location, which had begun to chant itself independently of my will. Instead, my focus now lay on the image of him... the same way we'd found her...
And once again, too late.
It wouldn't happen. Not this time. Not today.
I found him on the sidewalk by the cemetery.
Slamming the gears into reverse, I backed up to him as close as I could get, but he was already inside the gate, sloshing through the rain and the already soaked grass, his coat stretched tightly around him.
Not bothering even to turn off the engine, I leapt from the car.
"Mark!"
Good one, Roger. That's bound to send him running into your arms.
It didn't take me long to catch up to him, but gathering the courage to actually *do* something about this new lack of distance between us... that was another effort entirely.
"Mark-" I was breathless now, and grabbed his arm, spinning him around until I could almost see his eyes beneath the sheets of rain.
"Go," he instructed firmly, his tired, pained voice straining to slice through the rain and be heard, somehow. "Go home."
I shrugged, unfazed. "No. I'm not letting you do this."
"It's not exactly in your control, Roger."
"FUCK this!" I screamed, releasing his jacket, somehow confident that he wasn't about to take off on me. "I lost her, I'm not going to lose you too!"
"Well," he laughed-actually laughed. "How touching." He turned from me and continued up the path.
Again, I grabbed his sleeve. "Mark-"
"NO!" How quickly laughter fades. "No, you've fucked up everything in our lives and I'm not letting you take this away from me too"
"There's nothing to take away! I'm trying to keep us *both* from losing something."
He shook his head, not hearing me at all. "You hate me. You think I'm to blame-"
"No, I-"
"But I loved her. And I know she loved me. And-"
"I fucking know that!"
His eyes sliced through to mine, past the rain, completely puzzled. "What?"
"I know she was in love with you! And I know you took care of her and I know she's gone because of me, because I left her, I left both of you. It's my fault. And we've lost her, but goddammit, Mark, we haven't lost each other. Not yet."
I stopped, trying to swallow, and finding my throat dry despite the torrents of water beating down on us.
I shook my head, my arms dropping to my side. "She wouldn't want this, Mark."
He shook his head quickly in agreement, like a child being taught the dangers of crossing the road without a grownup. His eyes wide, blurred by rain but glistened by tears, I could see his entire small frame trembling.
"She's gone."
Slowly, I nodded. "But we're not."
I don't know how it happened, going from stiff, freezing figures standing in the grass, staring at each other-to heaps on the ground, leaning against a gate and crying in each other's arms. I could count on one hand-maybe even one finger-the number of times we'd found ourselves this close, this desperate... this trusting. Last time being, of course, the ten seconds prior to the moment he told me he was the father of Mimi's unborn child.
Only this time, he didn't shove me away.
Just when I thought the hug was developing a serious potential to strangle us both, I extracted myself from his embrace, offering a random piece of conversation to break the silence.
"You're not positive."
"What?"
"They mixed up your results with someone else."
His eyes darted everywhere in confusion, in shock. "But why-why didn't you tell me..."
"I didn't want that to be the reason you decided not to go through with it."
The corners of his mouth danced, lifting slightly upward before he shook his head-not a gesture of great communication, but a mere expression of wonder. And for the first time in over eight months, I saw the boy I'd discovered on a sidewalk six years ago, filming a butterfly with a broken wing.
Strange, that it took me to this point to realize that wasn't the only broken butterfly he would film in his lifetime.
But, unlike that first one... we would heal.
He blinked. Smiled. Dropped a hand on my arm. "I want to go home."
[epilogue next. here's the pic that inspired this last chapter: http://www.geocities.com/bohogirls/pictures/obc/adamanthony.jpg so... yeah. :)]