Disclaimer: I don't own anything WAT-related, not even a red push pin!
Each of us angels
Summary: Can Danny Taylor ever admit that he needs someone? Danny-centric.
"We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another." - Titus Lucretius Carus
This is nearing the end nicely. Thank you to everyone for your patience and your encouragement.
I am grateful beyond belief for all your generous reviews.
Anmodo, especially: there simply aren't words for me to express how deeply I'm touched by what you said. Thank you!
Danny walked the streets for a while. He always thought better on his feet, and he needed to think carefully, to go over the arguments diligently, to coach them into the best possible terms. He realized how cold he was only when he touched his face to wipe away a stray drop of gathering rain.
He also noticed that it was getting dark. Not really late, just a February dusk creeping up in and stealing scarce daylight. He resolved to go home, even though he couldn't master much enthusiasm for the decision. Home was going to feel empty now, and the time, stretching until Monday, long. At least he would spend the day at work tomorrow. Doing all that paperwork he promised Jack and gearing up for that Monday meeting.
He was still composing his mental arguments when he exited the elevator and came to an abrupt stop.
For a second he thought that his exalted mind was playing tricks on him. That it conjured up something it saw previously and wanted to see again. Danny closed his eyes for a second and opened them quickly, like a child trying to assert that an unexpected and amazing gift he just received wasn't a phantom.
She wasn't a phantom, the girl sitting on the cold, marble floor by his door, he knees drawn up, a lined yellow paper pad perched up on them, whisps of hair falling into her face as she wrote intently.
Next to her, propped up against the wall were two packages: one small, with Dean & DeLuca logo on it, and another, larger - a box with an intriguing text, reading "The Four Paws Club."
He stood there, looking at her, all logical, rational, or otherwise coherent thought deserting him at the moment.
"You know, you really should have an umbrella," Audrey said conversationally, glancing up at him briefly and returning her gaze to her writing pad. "A gentleman always looks so distinguished with an umbrella. Plus, what would Mama Arevalo say if she could see you right now? She'd fire me as your official keeper."
It was surreal. She was commenting on his attire, like on that first, fateful morning, and just like then, she rendered him momentarily speechless.
"You are on the floor again." Danny finally said, still processing this as an out-of-body experience.
"Yes. I tried sitting on the ceiling, but I found it uncomfortable."
"You didn't leave." He felt silly stating the incredibly obvious, but he felt it needed to be acknowledged.
"No." She finally put the pad and the pen aside, but kept on sitting by his welcome mat. "It turns out, I had things to do that I couldn't possibly put off."
"Like what?" Danny's voice creaked a little, and he had to clear his throat.
"I had to go shopping. You need decent coffee. And so do I. I simply refuse to go another morning with that drain fluid you keep offering me. . . . I also felt compelled to get that litter box for Oscar. I sense I would like his company at my place a lot more in the future, and one feels obligated to accommodate one's guests."
"I see. Anything else?"
"Yes. I also absolutely had to commence writing my book. I couldn't put it off another minute."
"What happened to waiting until you are 60?"
"See, it occurred to me - the reality of life being what it is - that I might not make it to 60, and it's just a risk I am not willing to take."
Danny let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding since morning.
"Very wise idea. Besides, who said you can't write more than one book? There are always anthologies."
"Now there's a thought!" She lifted the pad and showed it to him. "See, this one is the account of my life so far. It's almost done. I'm thinking of calling it Pride and Prejudice."
"Snappy title." They were smiling now, both aware of what was implied rather than said.
"I thought so. It's a thriller."
"Of course it is." He approached her, arm extended, and helped her up.
"Thank you. I needed to get off this floor. I've been informed little Stevie is seeking legal action."
"Well, there goes your chance of a prospective marriage."
"Yes, I blew it, didn't I?"
"Well, with Stevie, anyway. He is not the kind that forgives and forgets. I should know: he still won't speak to me for some benign-but-apparently-offensive remark I made about his wheels six months ago. He takes his wheels very personally."
"Are you?" They entered Danny's apartment and made for the kitchen.
"Am I what? Feeling personal about my wheels?"
"No. Are you the kind that forgives and forgets?"
Danny took his coat off slowly - rain-soaked fabric dripping onto the tiled floor. He considered his answer carefully. Not because he didn't have one, but because he understood that its delivery could mean everything.
"Audrey, I, in all honesty, don't know what "forgive and forget" means. It seems to me backwards somehow. Because once you forget . . . once you no longer remember whatever it is you are supposed to forgive . . . then it is forgiven. But while you remember, you've got two choices: let bygones be bygones - which doesn't necessarily mean forgiveness, but rather acceptance of an excuse and a desire to move on, or you can try and revise your memory, making the transgression be something else."
Audrey by now climbed on the high stool and tucked her legs underneath. The pose and the place was reminiscent of her mother during the previous night's conversation, but the demeanor was altogether different. She didn't appear distraught or defensive, but merely attentive. It was clear she was pondering what Danny had just said.
He felt encouraged by it somehow. "I don't mean to say that people hold grudges simply because they can't forget an event. What I mean is that time can, if not necessarily make us lose the memory of that event, at least make it unimportant enough to forgive. Always provided that such an even can be made unimportant. There are some things that could never and should never be forgiven. . . . But, by and large, that's what forgiveness means to me: time allowed between the hurt and the healing.
"I see." She bit her lower lip. "And there hasn't been nearly enough time for you to forgive me for this morning."
Danny took her hand in his. "Audrey, you misunderstood me. I wasn't talking about us. If there are people in the case, it's you and your mother. As to us, you haven't hurt me, and there's nothing for me to forgive."
She lifted her head, disbelief clearly in her eyes.
Danny persevered: "You haven't hurt me. Don't get me wrong: you would have - deeply and undoubtedly - if you have left. And I don't mean just for a weekend in Philly. But as it is, you stayed, and therefore, as much as we need to explain and discuss things, there is no question of forgiveness here."
She lifted his hand and pressed it to her lips: a gesture that could have been awkward, but which she somehow infused with grace.
"We do need to talk." She held on to his hand, and Danny nodded, too choked up to speak. "I have a whole speech prepared."
"You do? I was working on one myself."
"Should we just exchange notes then?"
"I don't have any. It was in my head, but it's all gone."
"Gone?"
"Yep. I was working on how to convince you to stay, but that's all moot now. I need a new speech, and, possibly, something for the whiplash."
Audrey smiled sheepishly. "It does seem abrupt, my behavior. But, please, believe me, it's not because I am flippant or callous."
"I don't think you are that at all. Confused, may be, and thin-skinned."
Danny paused and then moved to the point:
"So, your mother left, I take it."
"Yes." The answer was short on words but long on meaning.
"Well, that's a relief, I don't mind telling you. Lovely woman though she is, it has been both an education and a nightmare knowing her."
Audrey giggled: "Funny. That's just what my father said." Then, turning serious, she continued:
"She wasn't happy to be leaving alone."
"I would imagine."
"See, that's just it: I didn't. I, in all honestly, didn't expect her to react the way she did yesterday and throughout last night. I expected, of course, that she'd condemn you and us outright, that she and I would come to our usual blows, and that'll be that. But she stumped me, you see. When she came back from your place, I was awake and confronted her. She gave me that piece about my not being right for you. Or not being good for you. And in my 2 a.m. sleepless indignation I blurted out the whole AA thing, and that I intended to be very good for you indeed - a positive thing in your life. Her reaction? She said that she finally understood why you'd been so adamant about being with me. That, putting it mildly, I was another object of addiction for you. That the ease and the enthusiasm with which you jumped into this relationship made perfect sense for someone with your particular propensities."
"Wow." Danny whistled. "Now, there's an interesting angle. And one I haven't considered."
"She did. She went on to say that she liked you the more for being a survivor, for conquering your problem, blah, blah, blah. . . . And then she turned to me and asked: So, what do you think he'd do if this new object should be denied him one day? He is still safe now, because this is fresh, but in a short while he'd be beyond help, and should you want to leave then, what remains for the poor man to do but to get back to his original addiction?"
"Jesus. She didn't put it like that, did she?"
"Oh, she did. Believe me. She's got quite a flair for the dramatic. I sometimes think she is the one who should have been a writer."
Danny shook his head in disbelief. "I don't know if this was more insulting to me or to you. Apparently, you are a flake that only merits being loved as a substitute for an addictive substance, and I am a junkie ready to latch on to anything as long as it'll provide me with a fix."
"For what it's worth, I don't think she realized that that's what she was saying. I think she believed that she was doing absolute right by both of us, and liking both of us in the process. Not in any small measure because she was rendering us helpful services."
"Human perception - never ceases to amaze me." Danny shook his head. "And she convinced you, I take it. . . . But not for long."
He squeezed Audrey's hand tighter.
"I hope you realize now that that was total nonsense. I didn't fall for you because I needed to feel a gaping hole in my life. I fell for you because I did. Because you are the person for me, and, I hope, I am that for you."
"I know." Audrey placed a light kiss on his forehead.
"The thing is, she was able to prevail on me, if only for a short time, and for that, I am truly sorry. . . . I don't deserve you." She put a finger to his lips, silencing a protest Danny was about to utter.
"It's not as if she was entirely wrong in her assessment of some of my actions. It is the importance that she assigns to my actions that is wrong. See, I do have a history of sometimes not following through on things. And some of those things are legitimate mistakes, and others, well, aren't. But mother acts as if there's some kind of a fatalistic pattern to it. A "doomed from the start" quality to everything I attempt, if you will. And the sad thing is, I used to think so, too. She has this effect on me - an effect I am only recently becoming fully aware of - where her outlook infects all my actions, and sometimes, in retrospect. You know, when you are doing something and enjoying yourself, and then something happens that completely spoils the memory of that enjoyment and colors it black?"
Danny nodded understandingly. He thought of the day his parents died. They were attending his Soft Ball game and all 3 of them were on their way home when it happened. Danny's team won that game, and he remembered how elated he was, even before the win. And how happy he was that both of his parents made it to watch him play. It didn't happen very often. Mother would come, but dad was often too busy, or, Danny suspected, too drunk to show up. After the accident, anything and everything connected with that day became tarnished. This tremendous, terrible thing has poisoned it all.
He threw away his catcher's mitt - one of the few presents his dad ever gave him. He wouldn't even watch baseball on TV for the longest time. He cut the ties to every friend he had on that team. He avoided cars as much as he could. Everything that gave him joy that day became a source of pain. It took years to remember the events leading to the accident with any kind of a peace.
Audrey slid off the stool and propped herself on the kitchen counter, her chin resting on her hands.
"My mother would have me believe that we don't control anything. Or, at least, that's what she herself believes. And may be because of that, I strive for control a little too much. Of course, rationally speaking, the fact that I don't want to believe my mother doesn't negate the reality of a lot of things truly being out of my control."
She shook her head as if getting rid of an annoying bug.
"One thing I am learning from all this mess is that I really should stop using my mother as a sign post. Whether she is right or wrong. Whether she means for the best or not. Whether she did or didn't damage me. . . . I mean, who doesn't think their parents messed them up? It's a fact of life that, even with the best of intentions, our parents would, inevitably, screw us up. And we will probably do the same to our kids."
Audrey took a deep breath: "In short, I am not defying her anymore, and I am not following her, either. I am declaring her irrelevant."
Danny smiled: "Yes, it's a brave and, no doubt, honest declaration."
"But? . . ."
"But I don't think you can. Not that I don't believe in your independence or you ability to follow through - whatever you may say of that ability - I just think that there are some people in each of our lives that can never become irrelevant. And that's OK. What we can do is give them less power over us. That takes time, and, I guess, an understanding that someone else's perspective is just that: someone else's. It can be useful, and it might be considered, but it's not a substitute for your own."
He was now standing next to her, and his arms went around her shoulders easily and naturally.
"I see this in practically any case I work. For every five eyewitness there are usually six different stories. It's mind boggling how several people can watch the same event unfold and see completely different things and draw widely different conclusions. And I am not even talking about the effects of time and memory. . . . You and your mother, for all your shared experiences, do not have the same perspective. You don't have the same attitudes. You don't even share perception. Which is probably why living your life in reaction to her impressions has made you so miserable."
"Incommunicable past," Audrey said softly into Danny's shoulder.
"What's that?"
"It's from Willa Cather's My Antonia - another one of those books that I love and my 8th-graders detested: '. . . we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."" She smiled and continued: "I always thought that it meant that some things from our experiences are impossible to communicate to those who haven't shared those experiences with us. And it's true, but it also means that even shared experiences are incommunicable, because different people perceive them differently."
"So," Danny hugged her tighter, placing a proprietary kiss on the top of her apple-scented head, "where does that leave us?"
"In the present. In the future. With our own experiences and memories yet to be made."
"Are we to ignore the past, then?"
"No, we can talk about it, and we can deal with it. We just can't let it swallow us. Or me, to be completely fair. You don't seem to need this wisdom."
Danny sighed: "You have no idea."
Audrey lifted her face to his.
"I have some idea. I've seen the scars. I haven't said anything, because I figured you'll tell me when you're ready."
Danny nodded. "I can tell you all about it. It's not a secret, not from you, anyway. I'm just out of practice. It's been years since I've gotten this personal with anyone. And if I seem wise to you - what with my not letting my past destroy my future - it's only because I've gone as far as I could down that road, and I know for a fact that there's nothing there. Not even a future."
Danny kissed her.
"I hope you know you can ask me anything you want. And I will tell you."
"I will, but right now we need to get you out of your damp clothes. . . ."
Danny's smirk was back in full force.
"You can get me out of my clothes anytime. Damp or not."
"That's comforting to know, Danny, but that will also have to wait. At least until after I fed you." She laughed at a slightly disappointed look on his face. "You have to eat. I am betting you haven't even had breakfast today, and it's after six o'clock already. . . . Come to think of it, I don't remember eating today, either."
"You're right, we'll order food, and we'll talk. It'll be like our first evening together."
For the first time in more than a day her dimples made their triumphant appearance: "Not exactly like the first evening."
"No?"
"Nope. I distinctly remember going to my place at the end of it. Not particularly wanting to leave, but going nonetheless. Tonight, unless you are planning on kicking me out, I am not going anywhere."
A/N: I feel that some sort of an epilogue is in order, even though this story is all but resolved. So, there will be one more, mercifully short, chapter. :)
