Summary: On a cold, rainy night in December, Dawn writes a letter to Mary Anne. One-shot.
Rating: Teen for mild language.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Thanks for not objecting, Ann M.
Author's Note: While the majority of the world celebrates the birth of Christ with self-indulgence and hypocrisy, I celebrate by writing BSC fanfiction.
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Dear Mary Anne,
It's raining in California. I know I used to brag about California's warm, sunny seventy-five degree Christmases, but I'd never spent a Christmas in Northern California. That's where I am. At least for now. I may pick up and leave after the New Year. After this cold and dreary holiday season, I'm not sure how much more I can take. I am lonely enough without the constant rain further secluding me from the world. I think if I keep moving, keep looking, I will eventually find what I need - happiness and forgiveness and peace of mind.
I'm living in Arcata. You probably don't know where that is. It's way up north, far from the heat and traffic and materialism of Los Angeles. I thought it's what I needed. It's beautiful here, but it's hard to see the beauty through all the rain. The rain is neverending, so that nothing and no one every completely dries. Sometimes I feel that the rain is solely for me, a reminder of my own misery and discontent. You called me self-absorbed the last time I saw you. I guess you were right. (I know you were right). I think that even the forces of nature revolve around me.
I'm working in a coffee house across from the local college. It's awfully quiet and still these days. All the students have gone home for the holidays. I'm not going home this year. I volunteered to work straight through the holidays. All day Christmas Eve and Day. Someone needs to be here and I'm not needed anywhere else. Besides, I need the money more than I need the illusion (delusion?) of a happy family waking up on Christmas morning to exchange thoughtless gifts while pretending to still like each other and know each other and care about each other. Who needs that when there are counters to wipe and half-cafs to serve?
Dad isn't expecting me for Christmas. He doesn't expect me for anything anymore. It's just as well. All he ever does is bitch about my dropping out of UC Santa Barbara two weeks into Senior year. I give him something else to be angry about bitter about. It's been six years and he's still as angry as the day Carol packed up Gracie and left. I wonder if that hole is still in the den wall. I never knew someone could literally punch a hole in a wall. Maybe all the walls are full of holes now. Who the hell knows. I haven't been back in three years.
Sometimes during the holiday seasons, when it's late at night and I've run out of sleeping pills, I lay in my bed in whatever town I'm in that year, and wonder if anyone misses me. I miss me. Remember that girl I was before everyone started hating me and before I started hating myself? I miss her. She was a good person. Loving and generous and flawed in ways that people can forgive. The flaws I have now aren't the kind that people forgive. I know because I can't forgive them either.
I miss everyone, Mary Anne. I miss the way we were...before. I miss you and Dad and Jeff and Carol and Gracie and Richard...and Mom. I know you don't think I have a right to that. I don't have a right to regret and remorse. I don't deserve to feel all the things now that I couldn't feel then. The things I couldn't spare when people wanted them and needed them and still cared enough to expect me to offer them. But I was stuck in my own self-absorption and denial to spare anything for anyone. And now all I have is regret and remorse. And that's a much worse punishment than anything you could wish upon me. And I imagine you've wished a lot of terrible, hateful things in the last four years.
I talked to Jeff last week. I don't think he's ever coming back to California. He loves Vegas even more than he ever loved California. He loves the school and the dorms and the swim team and all the friends he's met. He even loves the lingering heat and the desert and the lights and the tourists and now that he's finally twenty-one, he loves gambling. Life is strange. When he was ten, he was screaming to return to Palo City and by the end of high school, he was screaming to leave. I'm jealous that Jeff has found the place he belongs without looking too hard.
So, I talked to Jeff last week and he said he saw you at the Rosebud over Thanksgiving. He said you looked good. He said you're working at the Stoneybrook Library, but thinking of returning to Vassar, but are worried you're too old. (Twenty-four is not as old as it sometimes feels). Jeff also said you're dating Robert Brewster (Stacey's Robert?) and that you and Richard live on Slate Street across from the Pike's old house. I know there's some things Jeff didn't say. Or maybe that you didn't say. Like if you asked about me and if you are still angry and if some part of you still cares. Did you and are you and do you still? I know I deserve your anger, but I don't deserve your curiosity or concern. I know you agree.
So, that brings me around to why I'm writing this letter. It took me long enough to reach the point. I know you're rolling your eyes and thinking, "same self-absorbed, shallow Dawn, going on and on about her pain and suffering, like she's all that exists in the world." Maybe you're calling me a bitch, too. I suspect you've grown a bit cold and bitter these last four years. Disappointment does that to a person.
Sorry isn't enough. If I said sorry every day for the rest of my life it would never be enough. It's not enough for you, it's not enough for me, and it's not enough for Mom. I could spend my life trying to make it up to you and to myself, but I can't make it up to Mom. You can't make amends with the dead. I wish I'd known that four years ago when knowing it would have mattered. Hindsight's 20/20. We expose our true colors in a crisis. I flew mine on a flag with pride - dark and cold, self-absorbed and shallow. You exposed your true colors, too, Mary Anne and they were so much lovelier than mine. You surprised no one with your compassion, but you surprised us all with your strength. No one would have guessed that in our dysfunctional, patchwork family you would be the strong one.
You are a better person than I. (I know you agree. You told me so yourself). When the diagnosis came and everyone fell apart, you picked up all our pieces. You did what Richard and I could not. You left your life, your independence, put it all on hold, and not out of obligation or a sense of duty, but out of love. Richard buried himself in his work because it was easier than facing the cold reality of slowly losing another wife to cancer. Me, I was three thousand miles away in Santa Barbara, partying on the beach, smoking pot with my roommate, and making out on Professor Heinrich's desk with his teaching assistant. I spent Spring Break puking tequila all over the streets of Ensenada and the summer in South America doing things I don't remember clearly, which is probably for the best. I wonder now how it must have been for you that year, spending long, lonely days in the silent house, counting out pills, preparing meal trays, giving sponge baths, and washing bed pans. I feel that lonely silence in my own life and maybe that's my punishment - to bear for my whole life what I made you bear alone for a year.
I could make excuses. I could tell you I was mad at Mom - over the divorce and over the move to Connecticut and over letting Jeff and me return to California without following, and that it's not like Mom and I got along so well anyway. I could tell you I had too much loss already - Mrs. Winslow dying and Carol leaving and Sunny running off to Miami with that security guard from the mall and Maggie swallowing all the pills in her parents' medicine cabinet. Those would all be little pieces of the truth, but the absolute truth is that I was scared. I didn't think she'd die. Even when you told me and Richard told me and Mom told me and Jeff told me. I didn't think she'd die. And it just got easier to not call. And to not visit. And to not worry.
You don't want excuses. I don't know what you want. I know what I want. I want forgiveness. I also know I'll never get it. I can search all I want and will never find it. Mom's not capable, you're not willing, and me, I'm not capable or willing. I guess that's what stops me from resuming my life - if I keep running, pretending to be searching, at least I am doing something. But I always catch up with myself and the things I run from never leave me - guilt and regret and the knowledge that I'll never be rid of either. They will gnaw at my heart and conscience until I breathe my last breath. I think Maggie had the right idea. At least she got what she wanted out of life - to not live it anymore.
So, I know what holds me back. What holds you, Mary Anne? What keeps you in Stoneybrook, shelving books for Mrs. Kishi, and cooking dinner for your father? Your life should have restarted four years ago when Mom's coffin lowered into the ground. I guess grief doesn't work like that. There is no expiration date. Abby Stevenson gave me this card at the funeral that said something like, "there is no grief like the unspoken grief." That's our motto, Mary Anne. Yours and mine. We grieve for Mom and ourselves and lost time. I grieve for you. Do you grieve for me? I remember the last time we saw each other, at Mom's funeral when you called me self-absorbed and spat in my face. At night, when I lay awake, I feel that wetness on my cheek and hear the gasps echo through my mind. I don't think anyone had ever seen a eulogy end like that.
So, Mary Anne, on the fourth anniversary of Mom's death, I write to thank you. Thank you for giving up a year of your life to care for her. Thank you for being the daughter I could not be. Thank you for not failing her like I did.
I've written to you all the things I write every year. And I'll never mail this letter, just like I don't every year.
Merry Christmas, Mary Anne.