There was an old saying in show business. Said to have originated from circus ringleaders of the nineteenth century, it emphasized the show must go on in whatever the circumstance.
Go on it did, albeit with an understudy in the role of Juliet Capulet.
An understudy David said had the worst breath laced with pickle juice, though Dylan believed David to be a tad biased.
As none of the gang held familial ties to Donna, they were all required to await news on the Martins.
To Dylan's immense surprise, the wait hit Brandon the hardest.
Trailing not too far behind was Brenda, who insisted on staying for hours in the hospital in the hopes of seeing Donna, until she drooped to the point that Dylan would set her into his car to bring her home.
When he showed up at Casa Walsh, carrying a sleeping Brenda, Jim permitted Dylan to stay the night in Brandon's room.
Before the rest of the Walshes awoke, Dylan snuck into Brenda's bedroom in his Baja pullover to adjust her comforter, press his fingers against his lips, and set those fingers against her forehead.
Then, ever so softly, he dropped a real kiss against her forehead.
He spent the next two nights with the Walshes, lending his support to Brenda for her to have the energy to continue to shine on stage despite the worry for whom she had started to refer to as her best friend, slated just behind her brother, Dylan, and Valerie Malone.
Perhaps being that close to Brenda is what initiated the dream.
He had returned to Ireland; a more urban Ireland than the one the heavily pregnant Brenda of his previous dream had stood in, with far more cars and buses.
His ears perked up, hearing the loud, urgent tones of a thirty-six-year-old Brandon Walsh in the midst of an argument.
With Connor Monaghan, apparently.
Before the men could shut the turquoise door adorned with a bronze knocker, Dylan sped into the house and began his search for Brenda.
"Look, Connor; dammit, would you just listen to me? I know my sister. I fucking shared a womb with my sister. I'm telling you, I don't know who the hell this girl is, but she isn't my sister."
"And I keep telling you, Brandon; Brenda hasn't been herself since the miscarriage. You think I don't know my own wife?"
Miscarriage? Dylan's heart split into halves, quarters, thirds. Brenda had miscarried?
He should have been ecstatic at the thought.
He wasn't, not at all. He had never wanted Brenda to feel the kind of pain brought on by a miscarriage.
He had seen it firsthand himself, when Janet miscarried her second child with Steve.
It had been Dylan who had found her lying on the bedroom floor after Maddie had run to his house, sobbing.
Steve had never forgiven himself for being away at a work conference that weekend, and had allowed his grief to overcome him until the Beverly Beat went under, taking the Sanders' marriage with it.
The first time.
"Connor, I know you've had a really hard time since you and Bren lost the twins, but trust Brandon when he says he knows her. If something's off with Bren, Bran would know. I would know and I'm telling you, there's something weird about my best friend."
Val.
It was Val, long legs and multicolored miniskirt, pursed magenta lips.
Next to her was Steve, arms crossed and tense.
The man standing beside them must have been Val's husband, that Italian guy whose name they could never utter around David without David finding an excuse to leave the room.
It had happened so often that most of them couldn't recall the man's name, including Dylan.
"Any luck with Dylan?" Val whispered.
"None," Steve whispered back. "I'm still trying. If anyone can help Bren -"
"It'd be Dylan," Val finished. "If those two weren't so fucking stubborn…"
Help Bren?
Help me, Dylan.
The dream. Brenda had asked him to help her.
Help her with what?
Aiming an unseen sign of vulgarity in Monaghan's direction, Dylan raced up the stairs to where he assumed Brenda may be.
He slowed down as he neared the partially cracked door.
It was her. An older Brenda than he had become accustomed to seeing sat on the bed, hair pulled into a messy ponytail with loose curls framing her face. Her thick lashes were darkened by mascara. Her eyeshadow matched the royal blues in her summer dress.
She appeared just as prepossessing as she had the day he left London.
But something was different, and it wasn't her doleful expression.
The woman looked like Brenda. Breathed like Brenda. Talked on her mobile phone with Brenda's voice.
There wasn't that pull, that spark, that grenade of emotion. There was nothing.
There had never been nothing, even when they had insisted otherwise.
When Dylan said her name, she didn't hear him.
She had always heard him, even when she couldn't bear to listen.
"That's not Brenda," he said, his voice a warble. "Who the fuck is she, why the fuck is she pretending to be Brenda, and where the fuck is my Bren? Monaghan, you fucking twat, how the fuck do you not know your own fucking wife?"
"You owe me seven dollars. That's two dollars more than Dad paid today."
He whirled around, encountering the sight of braided pigtails arranged into one braid. "You can hear me?"
"Of course I can hear you, Goddad." Setting down the stack of books she carried as per usual, Madeline Sosna-Sanders tossed a starfruit in Dylan's direction.
It had become a tradition between them, ever since the Madster had been introduced to Iris on a pineapple mountain in Hawaii and tried to climb a starfruit tree before Steve had wrangled her.
Dylan caught the fruit, but couldn't eat it.
"And you can see me?" he asked, his throat drier than the Atacama.
"If I can't see you, then I must have some really great aim." Maddie's grin may as well have been Steve's own, for they perfectly matched. "God, I've missed you."
"I've missed you too, Madster." Dylan opened his arms for an embrace.
Maddie hurled into him.
And he hugged air.
"Do you feel anything?" he asked.
She didn't.
He swore.
Maddie added another dollar to his tab.
It had grown to the thousands before his departure.
"But you can see me," he said. "How can you see me when everyone else can't?"
"Well, it's my dream, isn't it?" asked Maddie. "They can't see or hear you if I'm the one dreaming. I've spent weeks studying how to purposely call someone into your dream. Talked to Nana Iris about it, too. She told me what I could try and guess what? It worked! You're here."
The dancing delight in his Madster's eyes invoked nostalgia in Dylan.
"I actually thought I had invited you into my dream," he said. "I was hoping you could do something for me."
"And I was hoping you could confirm my hypothesis, which you have."
"Your hypothesis?" he asked.
"I knew that wasn't Auntie Bren. I told Dad and bugged him nonstop until he finally called in Uncle Brandon. But now Uncle Brandon and Uncle Connor are arguing because Uncle Connor insists it is Auntie Bren, just a more depressed version of Auntie Bren, and Uncle Brandon thinks Uncle Connor's an idiot. But neither Dad, nor Uncle Brandon, can figure out how it wouldn't be my aunt, which is where you come in."
"Mads, let's get one thing straight." Dylan plopped onto a chair. "Connor Monaghan is not your uncle."
"Because Auntie Bren isn't actually my aunt?"
"No, Bren's definitely your aunt. But her fu - fumigating husband isn't your uncle."
"Fumigating? That's the best you can come up with?"
"Hey, give me some credit, little lady."
"You've always been a little bit in love with Auntie Bren, haven't you, Goddad?"
"It's that obvious?"
"It was obvious when you sat at my fifth grade graduation with your eyes blazing lasers into the gym doors almost the entire time. Everyone was there, except -"
"- except the twins," Dylan said, bearing the same intense pang in his chest he had experienced then. "You've known for five years about me and your aunt?"
"Longer than five years. I found Uncle David's old videotapes once, when I was sleeping over at Aunt Donna's. You kept staring at Auntie Bren, in some kind of cabin."
"Camping," Dylan smiled. "It's when we went camping, up in Yosemite. Your aunt and I weren't together then."
"But you had been?"
"Yeah, we had been."
"And you were after?"
"We were."
"What happened? Why have you never been together for as long as I've been alive?"
"It's complicated, Mads. Grownup stuff."
"That's what grownups say when they've fucked up."
"Now who owes a dollar to the college fund?" asked Dylan, amused.
She continued to press Dylan for details, until he broke down and said, "I should've told Bren how I still felt, before she fell for Monaghan, or at least before she married him."
"Is that why you disappeared?" The cocoa brown hues of Maddie's eyes were gilded with unshed tears.
"I disappeared?" asked Dylan.
If he had disappeared, that couldn't have been a copy he had seen of himself supporting Brenda in the barn.
Maybe it hadn't been his Bren. Maybe it had been a past version, one closer in time to his Bren.
"Yeah." Maddie's breaths shook. "Two months ago. Dad and Uncle David say they walked in, your place was trashed, like there was an earthquake but only in your house, and you haven't been seen since."
He could not help but ask if anyone had told Brenda the news of his disappearance, and how she had taken it if they had.
A teetering mountain of guilt overpowered Dylan when Madeline said Steve felt responsible for Brenda's miscarriage, as it had been his call to her about Dylan's disappearance that had resulted in Brenda's bleeding.
Bleeding. That was why he had dreamt of Brenda bleeding, why he had envisioned her bleeding in a white nightgown.
She had been in one when Connor found her, writhing near their bathtub.
Maybe it was Brenda on that bed, a Brenda more subdued than Dylan had ever seen her before.
Fuck, he felt wretched.
All he wanted to do was hold Brenda, take away her pain, and he couldn't.
"Goddad, you know what she called me? Madeline."
"Well, Mads, that is your name."
"But Auntie Bren doesn't call me Madeline. Not ever. I'm her fairy princess Maddie and her fairy princess Maddie knows that woman is not Auntie Bren. Don't go changing your mind on that."
"Bren calls you her fairy princess?" Dylan asked, throat clogged as if it had been stuffed by a number of vegetables tugged fresh out of the ground.
"How can you know so little of Auntie Bren, and still love her?"
"You'll understand when you're a grownup," said Dylan, adding before Maddie sent an eyeroll in his direction that would make Brenda proud, "though I hope you won't have to."
"I think you disappeared because of my wish."
"Wish?" he asked, baffled by the entire situation. "Mads, what could you have possibly wished?"
There was a legend, said Madeline, an old Chinese-Japanese story told to her by her Sobo, her maternal grandmother, of the Weaving Maiden and her Herd Boy.
The two lovers had been separated by the Weaving Maiden's father, the Deity of Light, when he was most displeased by the amount of time the Weaving Maiden spent with the Herd Boy. They were permitted to reunite only on the seventh day of the seventh moon, and, because the skies had been clear on the seventh of July, Madeline had wished on the moon for her godfather to be reunited with his Weaving Maiden.
"The seventh of July," said Dylan, taken aback.
The evening of his wish. The evening he had met Itero.
"I take it you think Bren is my Weaving Maiden?" No words could convey the emotion he felt that Madeline had helped to wish into existence his new chance with Brenda.
"Don't you?" asked Maddie.
"These lovers, are they star-crossed?"
"They're literal stars, Goddad."
Stars.
Your diamond hands / Will be stacked with roses / And wind and cars / And people of the past.
The stereo blasted out of nowhere.
The radio.
Brandon's clock radio.
I'll call you thing / Just when the moon sings / And place your face in stone / Upon the hill of stars.
"Mads, buddy, I think I'm waking up."
"Did it work, Goddad? Were you reunited with Auntie Bren somewhere I can't go?"
"Oh, Mads." His eyes filled with piercing tears upon seeing her own. "You know whatever happens, you'll always be my magnificent Madster. I hope you can go, someday. But I - I'm making a lot of changes in my past to make sure I can hold onto Bren and some of those changes might affect your Dad."
"So I'll never see you again?"
And gripped in the arms / Of the changeless madman.
"Dream me up on the seventh moon," said Dylan, fighting to stay asleep for a proper farewell to his Madster.
"Of the seventh day," said Maddie with a watery smile. "And Auntie Bren will come along, as well? The real Auntie Bren?"
"If I can figure out how to bring her," Dylan promised. "For now, you can play a huge role in helping to fix our story."
"How?" Maddie sniffled.
Dylan hated that he couldn't comfort his goddaughter.
"I think Bren and I were together in our pasts. All of our pasts. I need you to search every library and online database you can to find out about those pasts, especially if we've ever been together here." Dylan pointed out the window, mesmerized by the vibrant color of the land. It almost made him want to visit outside of his dreams. "In Ireland. And then the next time you dream me up, tell me everything you found."
"I can do that," said Maddie excitedly. "I'll start the second I wake up."
"If you remember," said Dylan, not wanting to say goodbye whilst also not looking to remain in the future.
Or alternate timeline, whichever.
"I always remember my dreams, Goddad."
We'll dance our lives away / In the ballrooms of Mars.
"Brandon, would you turn that thing off?" yelled Brenda, banging on Brandon's door. "Or I'll send you to Mars myself."
Thus began another day in the Walsh household with a Brenda who knew of Ireland only from stories she had read in her books or heard in family tales.
Another day when Dylan lost the memory of his dream the second he awoke, with one ringing thought remaining: Bren needs help.
Help with what, that was the unanswered question that gnawed away at Dylan and left him scratching his head.
For now, it seemed she merely needed help with getting from home, to the school, to the hospital, then back home again.
Dylan happily acted the role of her driver, enjoying the boiling jealousy on Reina's face when he saw the Porsche roll up with Brenda every morning, and roll away with Brenda every evening.
If he was lucky, Reina would force Brenda to make a choice between them before she was ready. Brenda would be so mad, she would never talk to Reina again.
He wasn't lucky.
Reina's face became a mask the moment Brenda stepped out of the car and joined him for another performance.
She never saw Reina's jealousy.
But Dylan did.
In Reina, Dylan saw the man he had become in those last few months in London.
He was determined to not become that man again, no matter what Reina tried with Brenda.
On the fourth day following the Martins' confrontations with their own fragile mortality, West Beverly's most sought-after gang received permission to visit Donna.
They found her banged up and with hearing loss in one ear from the blast, but in generally good spirits as she conversed with a boy David's age whom none but Dylan knew.
A boy whose family had been out sailing when the Martins' yacht had been struck by the other ship. A family who had immediately rushed to bring the Martins on board their own ship, called for medical attention, and stayed until Donna had awoken.
Dylan could not tell anyone he knew the boy or the boy's family, for the boy did not know him.
"Good thing the Martins had you guys around," said Brandon once the story had been told.
"Yeah, thanks for helping Donna," said David, who had set his hand on Donna's shoulder.
"Well, we weren't just gonna let them sink," said Robinson Ashe III, tousling his closely cropped, curled dark hair with a roguish smile.
David watched Donna, whose eyes seemed permanently taped on Robinson's.
The faintest hint of a frown seemed to cross over Brandon's lips, which Dylan learnt Brenda had also noticed when he mentioned it to her.
Kelly watched Brandon eye Donna.
Steve watched Kelly eye Brandon.
Dylan watched Brenda watch everyone and eye Robinson, who was eyeing Donna.
Brenda's gaze then settled on Dylan, her lips bearing the same secretive smile as his.
Having taken the brunt of the injuries, John Martin remained in a medically-induced coma. Felice Martin had come away relatively unscathed save for various scrapes and a gash over her eyelid, though the doctors had insisted on holding her for observation.
When only the Walshes and Dylan remained, Donna shared that she had requested Felice be barred from her room.
"I don't care if I never see my mother again, Bren."
"What happened?" Brenda folded Donna's hand through hers.
"My mom's doctor said she's pregnant," Donna huffed.
"Donna, that's wonderful! You're gonna be a big sister."
"It's not wonderful, Brenda."
"Because you want to stay an only child forever?" asked Brenda, confused by Donna's reaction.
"No, I've always wanted a little sister or brother."
"Then what's the problem, Don?"
"The problem is that my paragon of virtue mother, the person who would always say I'm on the pathway to Hell if I missed a single Mass, has been cheating on Daddy."
"How do you know that?"
"Because when I was ten, Bren, Mother and Daddy sat me down and explained to me that Daddy couldn't have any more kids after a skiing accident in Big Bear."
"Maybe the doctors were wrong."
"Or maybe Mother is having a baby through immaculate conception?" Donna laughed bitterly. "That's what she'll try to pass it off as: hers and Daddy's miracle child. But I'm telling you, Bren; that baby isn't my father's."
Brenda looked to Dylan, who met Brandon's questioning stare.
"You know something," said Donna.
"My boys thought they saw something," said Brenda. "That day I told you they saw your mom at an upscale restaurant, instead of the soup kitchen."
Donna glanced at the boys. "What did you see?"
"We might've been wrong," Brandon prefaced. "It could've been a business deal, or something."
"Brandon Walsh, you tell me what you saw right now," said Donna with a fire that surprised both twins.
But not Dylan, who had seen precisely how spirited Donna could become when given the opportunity.
"We saw your Mom enter a restaurant," Brandon began, choosing his words carefully.
"With Rush Sanders," Dylan added.
"Rush Sanders, as in Steve's dad?" asked Donna. "What was my mother doing with Steve's dad?"
"I was hoping we would be able to figure it out," said Brenda, "but I'm not sure spying on your mom is such a good idea right now."
"Why, because I can't?"
"No, because your entire family's in the hospital and you could've been really hurt and -"
"That's why I need you to spy on her, Bren. Daddy's gonna wake up and be super excited over a baby that isn't his."
"What if it is his?"
"Trust me. It's not."
Brenda decided to visit the hospital cafeteria to see what she could purchase for Donna that would be somewhat edible until Steve would manage to sneak in the planned grub Nat had cooked for Donna.
Dylan followed Brenda. At some point, perhaps subconsciously on Brenda's part but certainly not on Dylan's, their hands became laced together.
"Have you had any more visions?" Dylan asked under his breath.
"Not lately," said Brenda. "Not that I know of, anyway. But I've been so distracted, I wouldn't be able to pay attention. I'll be sure to write them in the book if I have any. What about you? Any visions or dreams?"
"None that I'm aware of," said Dylan.
On the way back from the cafeteria, laden with more desserts for Donna than an actual meal, they strolled past the large windows of a courtyard.
"Hang on," said Brenda, stopping in her tracks. "It's Donna's mom. Felice."
"Talking to Rush Sanders," said Dylan, intrigued.
"Yelling, more like."
Brenda stealthily sat in a large armchair, placed strategically by the window.
"Window's cracked," she said with a mischievous air.
"Might as well crack it a bit more," he said.
So they did.
"We can't discuss this here. Someone will see us."
"We damn well can discuss this here, and we damn well will. It was that Catholic idiot, wasn't it?" Rush Sanders paced the courtyard. "He landed you here? I told you, Felice. I told you to not marry that buffoon."
"John was steering, yes, but he is not responsible for the incompetency of the other ship's captain."
"You haven't been accepting my calls. You said you would leave John, that you and I can be together as we always should have been."
"Rush, you're drunk. Go home."
"Felice, you've said it yourself." He moved quickly, grabbing her hips before she could dart away. "You're miserable with that wet rag, John Martin. You crave adventure. You're tired of the stability. You long for the attention he won't give you, the attention I will. This isn't like when we were children. Your parents don't get to threaten to disown you. John doesn't get to threaten custody of your daughter."
"What happened between us this summer was a mistake, Rush. I am a married woman. I love my husband."
"He's got something over you, doesn't he?" Rush's finger grazed her chin. "What is it? Did he threaten custody again if you leave him? There's nothing he can hurt you with, Felice. Donna is sixteen years old. This isn't like the last time."
"Don't you have an ex-wife or two to go bother?" snapped Felice, her arranged coif falling into disarray.
"My first and second ex-wives aren't carrying my child." Rush matched the vitriol in her tone with the granite in his. "I would've never married either of them if you hadn't given in to your parents' demand that you stay away from the Greek Orthodox."
"Greek Orthodox? Rush, your parents were Greek Orthodox. You aren't anything. You don't even believe there is a God."
"Can you blame me, Felice? It was your agreement to marry the Catholic that separated us. Didn't matter that my family was far wealthier than John could ever hope to be, or that we'd been in this country since Van Buren; oh no, we were still Greek immigrants in the eyes of your parents, and they'd be damned if their daughter married a Greek immigrant!"
"That was a long time ago. None of it matters now."
"That's not what you said in my bed all summer."
"This is John's child. Both of my children are John's."
"Why are you doing this?" Rush's voice grew soft, scratchy. "Again? Why do you always do this?"
"Just," Felice inhaled through her nostrils, her own voice cracking, "just go home, Rush. Please. I can't destroy my family because of some childhood crush."
"Some childhood crush." Rush's features hued in scarlet. "Some childhood crush," he repeated. "That's all I am to you? After everything? Some childhood crush?"
"No; I mean, yes. I mean -" Felice crossed over to a bench. "Go home, Rush," she said for the third time.
"I'm warning you, Felice." Rush stood tall, proud, but with the face of one whose heart had just been obliterated. "John Martin will not be raising my child."
"What are you gonna do, Rush Sanders? Buy my kid the way you bought Karen Brown's?" Felice seethed.
His countenance became stone. "You swore you would never speak that name."
"You make one move to take my child from me and I will take you for everything you have," she said, without removing her carefully pinned gaze on a flowering rosebush. "Steve will learn everything."
"Then I will see you in court." Rush stalked out the door.
The normally composed Felice broke into a fit of strangled sobs, bending over on the bench until Dylan worried she would fall over.
But she did not. She instead recomposed herself, as Felice Martin always did.
Appearances. For as long as Dylan had known the illiberal, austere Felice, she had been about appearances.
Had Felice always been this miserable, way down deep under the layers she fought so hard to maintain?
"What the hell was that?" Brenda's lustrous eyes threatened to pop out of their sockets. "Oh my God. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God."
"I think God gets your oh my, babe," said Dylan in an attempt to calm her.
"We have information that could totally destroy two of our friends," Brenda fretted. "Oh my God, how can I keep this from Donna?"
"Who says you have to? You were already planning to snoop on Felice."
"Snooping on Felice to see why she lied to Donna is one thing. We now have heard proof that Don's mom cheated on Don's dad with Steve's dad. I have to tell them. But I can't tell them. Oh God, what am I gonna do?"
God must have told her precisely what to do, for Brenda charged into Donna's room with a yell that Donna had been right.
"Right about what?" asked Steve, from his seat next to Brandon and David.
Rather than answer him, Brenda asked if he had ever heard the name Karen Brown. Steve believed he had; a show business friend of his mother's, perhaps.
Dylan practically had to bite his tongue on what he knew of Steve's biological mother, Karen Brown.
That was information he should not have yet known and therefore, Dylan left the conversation to Steve and Brenda.
Steve, asking Brenda what she had heard. Brenda, suggesting Steve speak to his father, until Steve darted out to do just that.
With David and Brandon listening in, Brenda told Donna about Felice's affair.
"I can't believe her," said Donna. "She's really gonna let Daddy think it's his kid. I've got to tell him the truth, Bren. Oh God, Steve and I are gonna share a sibling."
"Should I tell him?" asked Brenda.
"No," said Donna, "I'll tell him."
Donna asked Brenda if she could stay with the Walshes once she was released from the hospital. Brenda used a payphone to call her parents to ask, who were both fine with the idea provided Felice agreed.
Donna said Felice no longer had a say in her life.
"Weren't you and Dylan going to go to the luau tonight?" asked Donna.
"I can't go to the luau. You need me."
"Bren, I'll be fine. Really. Go ahead without me."
"Yeah, go ahead, sis." Brandon offered his twin a reassuring smile. "David and I will stay with Donna and we'll call the beach club if anything happens."
"Okay," said Brenda hesitantly, bending down to give Donna a fierce embrace that still managed to be gentle. "Just so you know, I can make Dylan bring me back at any time. So don't pretend you're okay just so I'll go."
"Bren, seriously, I'm good. Go have fun. You deserve a break after all your work this summer."
"She's right, babe." Dylan slipped his arms around Brenda. "You've barely had any time to just relax lately."
"Bran should come, too," said Brenda.
"Bren, you know no one wants to see me dance," said Brandon.
"David?" asked Brenda.
David caught Dylan's eye and excused himself from attending with the excuse that he would prefer to stay with Donna.
"Guess it's just you and me tonight, Bren." Dylan offered out his hand.
"Okay, but I'll be back tomorrow, after the play," Brenda promised Donna.
"Hopefully just to get me out of here," said Donna. "Can't stand another day in this place."
Giving all three a look of gratitude, Dylan ushered Brenda away.
It wasn't a date, Dylan told himself, but it was time where they could dance together and be themselves, without their friends around.
He twirled Brenda towards him, turning her around so that their hips moved together in time with the music of the ukulele.
Brenda claimed she had not done the hula before. Her hips must have remembered from the first time now erased, for she knew every step.
Dylan held onto her as if he feared she would disappear when he let go, which seemed to him a legitimate possibility.
"Thank you," she said, stretched out beside him on a lounge chair.
"For what?" He turned on his side to face her.
"For asking if the play would be public. For giving Andrea and I the idea to ask Chris about making it public. For all the rides home from rehearsal. For not resenting me for breaking up with you."
"I could never resent you, mon amour eternel," said Dylan, certain that he lay red-faced. "You did what you felt you had to do after a scary situation."
"Mon amour eternel?" asked Brenda.
Dylan explained the French translated to his eternal love, which he thought rather appropriate given their past lives together.
"Well, mon amour eternel," said Brenda in a joking manner, "it was a scary situation we both went through. And the thing is, I'm not sure I did what my heart was telling me to do. I did what my head said to do."
"Nothing wrong with that."
"I don't think I could have gotten through these past few days waiting to see Donna if it hadn't been for you, Dylan. You really are my best friend."
"I never want to let you down, Bren. Something tells me I've done that a lot."
"That's the second time you've said that. From where I'm sitting, Dylan, I don't think it's possible for you to let me down."
"I'm glad you think that."
"And after everything you've done for me, I wanted you to be the first to know, even before Brandon, that I got the job."
"You got the job?" Dylan exclaimed, as Brenda had when he told her.
"I got the job." She poured her entire soul into her smile that enlarged at his enthused congratulatory words. "They told me yesterday. I start the week after you do."
"That's fantastic, Bren. I knew you'd get it. So we'll be working together."
Beat that, Reina.
"Yeah, guess we'll be seeing a lot of each other."
"Then anything could happen."
"Anything could," she agreed, searching his gaze.
Dylan was about to lean in when Brenda turned her head to look at the palette of fiery pastels crisscrossing the sky.
"Would you look at that cloud?" she said. "I swear it's in the shape of a harp."
The cloud did, indeed, appear to be in the shape of a harp.
Intertwined with a cloud shaped like a shamrock.
Goddamn fucking Ireland, stealing away Brenda's attention already.
"I think that one looks like Big Ben," said Dylan, attempting to plant London in Brenda's mind, instead.
"What? No, it doesn't."
"Pretty sure the way a cloud looks is subjective, Bren."
"Dylan, it clearly looks like a harp."
"A harp, or the Eiffel Tower?"
"Now you're just saying things." She stood. "I'm gonna get some punch. Want some?"
"Sure. Thanks."
Watching her walk off, Dylan cursed the fucking cockblocking clouds and their fucking Irish designs.
"You snatched one Bren from me," he muttered towards the clouds. "You're not snatching the other."
He wondered if that Brenda, his old Brenda, was looking out at the sky and thinking of him, too.
Bren needs help.
The thought had returned, ping ponging around the recesses of his brain.
Help with the punch maybe, he decided as he stood to relocate his Bren.
xx
Lightning scorching the earth. The sky rocketing into the sea. Every tree between County Cork and County Kilkenny toppling over. The Buckley house battered into complete disrepair. A draining of the Arctic, long before the Titanic could sink below its threatening waters.
She set her mind to the worst-case scenarios, trying to pinpoint one worse than the scenario that sent fear, frustration and fucking pain crashing down her cheekbones.
She knew, on instinct, that they needed help.
But with the storm the way it was, help came only in the form of Diolún.
This wasn't the plan. This was as far from the plan as one could get. Val would have been there with her, in the delivery room. Her mother. Brandon. Connor, of course.
No, even that wasn't the real plan.
The real plan would have been Dylan instead of Connor.
The issue was that when Connor had proposed, Brenda had thought with her head and ignored her heart.
Her head had told her she and Connor loved each other. He was a wonderful man who would provide stability, and she longed for stability after the mess of her past relationship.
Her heart; her heart had screamed that marrying Connor was the wrong decision. Screamed to seek Dylan. Screamed to see if he still felt about her the way she did about him.
Her head told her that was absurd, that showing up on Dylan's doorstep would mean being greeted by Kelly, who undoubtedly wore Dylan's ring on her finger.
There had been an ongoing competition for Dylan since they were seventeen, a competition Brenda had long tired of and wanted no part in.
Dylan had moved on, several times. There hadn't been any reason why she couldn't, as well.
She hadn't been the one who fucked it all up.
She had merely been the one to end it before the bitterness and resentment grew.
Brenda would have been perfectly fine with her decision, had it not been for Val.
And the unexpected ache brought on by Dylan's disappearance, in more ways than one.
Brenda would have laughed at neither Connor, nor Dylan, being anywhere close by, if it hadn't been for the certainty that her body was being sheared in halves.
"Nothing's happening," she sobbed. "Why is nothing happening?"
"I'm telling ye, Brenda. One push more and we will get the wee one out for an introduction to this great land."
"I cannot, Diolún. No more." Her throat was parched; her legs, sore. "I lack the strength."
"Ye have more strength than does the weaponry of ten thousand armies. Ye are Brenda Walsham, who climbed the Buckleys' tree in your skirts to rescue an injured kitten, with yer Ma yelling at ye to come down before ye broke your neck."
It had been a black cat, a victim of an abusive owner, with a young Brenda yelling to all who would listen that black cats should be treated no differently than other cats.
Diolún didn't tell her that part.
Brenda envisioned it herself.
"Brenda Walsham," Diolún continued, "who jumped onto the cart of the dogcatcher, to thieve the cart and free all of the stray dogs of Cork from their macabre fate."
Brenda asked where Diolún had been during both occurrences.
He had helped her up the tree. He had ran behind the cart, ready to catch her if she fell, as the dogcatcher sprinted behind them both and pelted ripened tomatoes in their direction.
"It sounds like we were best friends," she said, gripping at the ropes that bound the hay.
"Aye, that we were. The best of friends. We shared many hopes. Many dreams. Many ideas, ideas people may have believed absurd. Ye were especially enamored with George Cayley's flying machine." Having seemingly decided against decorum with Brenda's current state, Diolún kneaded her thigh.
"I was?" asked Brenda.
"Indeed. Ye said one day we would track down George Cayley and ask for a journey to the skies, to see other worlds. We accomplished much then, and we can do so now. Ye can do this. It is simply another thing to be done together, as we have so many others." Preventing imminent rope burn into Brenda's palm, Diolún secured her hand in his. "Come now. Bear down; there, that's the way. Another."
"Another?" Brenda cried. "You said one more."
"The head is out, Brenda. This leanbh is just taking a little time to finish their course, that is all."
"That's not all, is it? Please, Diolún," she begged. "Tell me the truth. My child is in trouble. I can feel it."
He avoided her eyes.
And in that moment, she knew.
"Tell me," she said, her voice flatter than a slab of dough before it is molded into a pizza by expert craftsmen.
"I believe I may need to reach inside." He dodged the question. "Help the leanbh along. But I," he choked back a sob of his own, "I do not want to hurt ye. I have spent many a moon questioning whether ye had even survived the voyage."
"I have every confidence in you," she said robotically, nearly numb to the idea.
"I am not sure ye should. There is very little knowledge I have retained from studying the work of yer father."
"Do what you feel you must."
Brenda battled against the intense urge to push again, waiting for Diolún to give the all-clear.
"Now," he said, reemerging. "Push now, Brenda."
She followed his command.
Through her blurred vision, she saw Diolún's hands, surrounded in cloths, raising something to his lips.
"Cry," he whispered. "Come on, wee lad of Brenda's. Please give a little cry for us, for yer Ma. Breathe. Like this." Diolún showed the babe how to draw a breath.
Lad. A son.
She and Connor had a son.
"I want to hold him." Brenda blindly reached out.
Stricken with grief of his own, Diolún handed over her silent, violently violet child.
Brenda took in the tiny hands, fingers, toes. Connor's facial structure. Her lips.
Her little survivor after she had bled out his twin. The last piece she had of her life as Brenda Walsh.
Gone.
To the moon.
To the stars.
Where she could not follow.
Not with George Cayley's flying machine, Leonardo Da Vinci's flight plans, the Wright brothers' airplane, or a twenty-first century Aerlingus flight.
She could lasso the Sun to make a chariot out of its lucent rays, draw up a team of silvery horses crafted out of the constellations, and she would still not reach her son.
The wail that ripped from Brenda's throat echoed the cry of a banshee. She blamed herself. Blamed the time travel, time travel she never would have done if her conversation with Arís hadn't led Brenda to believe she was miscarrying.
Perhaps her miscarriage would have been completed, had she not thought of the fucking movie she had seen with Connor, rather than the halls of West Beverly in the last decade of the twentieth century.
She blamed the laundry. The step. The invisible snake. The storm. The person who bought Lucas' wagon. The conditions that forced Lucas into selling his wagon. The country that had inflicted the conditions that forced Lucas into selling his wagon.
A country she had once loved.
A country she had once called home.
She blamed Dylan; Dylan and his fucking quest for whatever the hell he thought he needed that had gotten her stuck in a century without NICU care.
In reality, she could blame none of those things, for she had been losing her twins before she met Arís. This realization, however, did nothing to alleviate the blame Brenda placed upon herself.
Her son had been born, her son had died, and her husband would never know.
Her twin would never know.
Her parents would never know.
No one except she and Diolún McKay would know.
"Brenda." He brushed the dorsal side of his finger across the bottom of his eyelid. "Christ, Brenda. I - if I only had the medical training of yer father, then I could have -"
"This is not your doing." Her voice was firm. Listless. Unwilling to show emotion and yet simultaneously drowning in it.
"When I reached inside, I may have broken yer -"
"I knew there was a possibility." She had never known her tone to be so arctic. "Doc Haloran warned the shipwreck may have caused trauma to my womb. I should have prepared myself for this reality."
"Do not ye cast the blame upon yourself, either, Brenda Walsham-Monaghan."
Every organ had been clobbered by a javelin, and she had nothing to show for it.
Nothing except her permanently silent child, wrapped in patchwork cloths.
Her legs wobbled as she scrambled to stand.
"What are ye -" Diolún was quick on his feet, reaching out to steady her. "Brenda, ye just had a baby."
"And my baby is go - go -" Her eyes squeezed shut as another spasm of pain streaked through her. "Oh Mother Mary, full of grace, and all the saints, give it a rest, would you?"
Catching her, Diolún almost buckled under the weight of Brenda and the child she still clung to.
"The afterbirth," they said, as one.
"Yer mother would have boxed my ears for forgetting about the afterbirth." His hand began to rub down her stomach. "We should be able to coax it out."
A loom of curses overtook Brenda; curses she knew, curses she didn't. Religious. Secular. English. Irish.
"Brenda." Diolún raised his head, his voice infused with euphoric shock. "Brenda, lay back where you were. Now."
Befuddled, she accepted his help to return to her spot against the hay.
Three commands in to push, Brenda realized it was no longer about the placenta.
"Diolún?"
"There's another head." His face had lit up to a higher degree than she assumed hers had the first time she had made an entrance on the stage. "While ye stood, another head began to poke out."
"Another," she swallowed, "another head?"
She looked to the bundled babe in her arms.
The miscarriage.
She hadn't bled one of her twins out.
She had carried both of them inside her.
One swept away by the angels.
The other -
The other wailed as Diolún held up the flailing, pink-stained babe.
It was the sweetest sound she had ever heard.
"You've had a boy, Brenda," announced Diolún, voice coated in so much pride that he may as well have been the father himself.
"A boy." Brenda released more sobs; this time, for a far different emotion. "Twin boys. Connor and I had twin boys."
There remained a gaping hole in her heart that could never be filled as she examined the child she would never know.
Her son would grow up without his twin, as she was now without hers.
She, at least, had grown up with hers.
And yet; yet.
The son Diolún placed in her other arm cried out for her attention.
Brenda happily conceded, pressing the babe against her sweat-laden chest.
"Thank you," she murmured to Diolún.
"Do not thank me until we get ye thoroughly examined by the Doc," he said, frowning. "At the very hand of the clock that the storm clears, I am finding a way to bring all three of ye into town."
Brenda could tell by the look on his face that he was concerned about her pallor.
She pressed her slick forehead to her youngest son's tiny, wrinkled head.
Curled hairs as dark as her mane and Connor's combined had already begun to form.
It came sailing towards her: A ship, not quite as grand as the Titanic, but perhaps within that range. Her hand, grasping two tickets she had sold family heirlooms to purchase. Everything she owned, tucked away in a small trunk of a rusted suitcase. Her other hand, playing with the chain of the harp as she pleaded with a man in pressed uniform who towered over her.
They had all towered over her, in much finer garments than the plain dress adorning her curved figure.
My fiancé. He is coming. I know he's coming. Something has delayed him. I must go. I must find him.
An attempt to leave.
Brenda let out a gasp.
"What?" Diolún immediately looked to her. "What is it?"
"I tried to leave," said Brenda slowly. "On the ship. I tried to leave."
"The ship?" Diolún's breath exited from him in a jagged manner. "The ship that took ye to America?"
It had been a memory; Brenda Walsham's memory.
Brenda pondered if she would continue to gain memories stored in the mind of Brenda Walsham, and what would happen to her own memories in the process.
Would she slowly efface Brenda Walsh, as if the Brenda born in the mid-seventies, raised in the decades of neon Lycra and butterfly hair clips, dancing to theatre show tunes and Lesley Gore, falling in, out, and back in love with Dylan McKay, had never existed?
Perhaps it would be better that way, for she would never know how it felt to lose Dylan McKay, either.
"Yes." Brenda gave a slow, lethargic nod. "When I realized you would not arrive in time. I tried to leave. Explained to the crewmember taking the tickets that I could not depart without you. But I - I -"
Dammit, she was too knackered from childbirth and her grieving to figure out what had stopped her.
"It's alright," Diolún reassured with a kind smile. "Ye have just brought forth wee Walshams, twice. We can discuss this later." He placed a hand on her shoulder.
"We were engaged," said Brenda, her voice a question.
"Wed, in our minds," said Diolún absentmindedly, chasing the back of his hand along her skin. "Brenda, yer skin is in competition with an icebox."
"We could not marry because of our clashing religions?" she asked, fixated on the memory that belonged to another.
Was Brenda Walsham in America? Had she married? Become a mother?
Or was she unwed? Childless? Trying herself to return to Diolún McKay?
Did Brenda Walsham still exist, or had Brenda Walsh become her?
"It was complicated."
There had been, he said, a law enacted some years before their relationship that had permitted a lawful mixed marriage were the two to be wed before a Catholic priest.
"There were numerous difficulties to our being together. America was to be our freedom, our chance to begin anew, had Jarlath O'Connell not fumbled our plans." Diolún scooted beside Brenda, gathering her shivering figure into his warm arms. "I will apologize to yer husband's memory if I must, but I cannot just sit here watching ye while ye freeze." His arm darted in rapid movement across her shoulders, back and forth as would the pointer of a metronome.
"My angel," said Brenda faintly, a light smile kayaking across her lips. "Delivered my miracle."
"Ye are the angel," said Diolún. "Returned for me to hold, after all of this time. Sleep if ye wish. I will be here." He dropped a soft kiss upon both infants' heads. "Yer sons will be here. We ask that ye do not dawdle in the state of unconsciousness." Diolún burrowed Brenda and her children into his chest. His lips moved to her own head. "Replenish your strength and return to us, once more."
"Infirmary," she said bluntly, as if she had known all along. "I became ill, violently ill. Suffered a fainting spell. Awoke in the infirmary of the ship, where the ocean called from the porthole. Whilst you; you were -"
"I was here," Diolún's voice dipped below the sea, perhaps into a submarine of hazed memories, "beating the life out of that little shite O'Connell. Hollering that I would destroy his life for destroying ours, which I still intend to do. I would have killed him and been glad of it, had Lucas not pulled me away. O'Connell threatened to call in the authorities. Nuala paid him off rather handsomely. And I - I was faced with separation from -"
"I've not been a mother," said Brenda, her voice bouncing between two worlds of conscious thought and dreamy chaos. "I hope I will be good at it."
"Have ye really not been a mother before?" Diolún's voice sliced through the fog: pained, wistful, longing. "Ye have not borne other children?"
"I have not. Connor and I chose to delay our family until our futures were secured."
"I see," said Diolún morosely.
"Aiden," she said. "I shall call him Aiden, and his brother, Liam."
"Liam, the resolute protector of Aiden." Diolún spoke quietly, or perhaps Brenda had begun to fade. "An excellent choice, Brenda."
"Bren. Call me Bren."
"Bren. Now, there is a name that has not passed my lips in many rotations of the earth," said Diolún. "Ye will be a magnificent Ma, Bren, mo shíorghrá. I guarantee it." He played with Aiden's fingers, holding Liam's hand in his other. "I always believed so."
"Mo shíorghrá?" asked Brenda. "I am afraid I do not know that one."
"My eternal love," said Diolún somewhat shyly. "An old habit, I suppose. One I can ensure I shatter, if ye would prefer it."
"No," said Brenda, "I quite like it."
"I quite like ye," said Diolún in a soft murmur, though Brenda could not tell whether he was speaking to her or to her son.
Perhaps both.
Brenda began her ascension up the ladder to the lavender clouds encumbering the embossed door to the world of dreams, recalling the swirling terror experienced by Brenda Walsham on the ship to a level of if Brenda Walsh had experienced it herself.
Terror for the uncertainty awaiting her in the foreign lands of America. Terror for the unknown reason Diolún had not come, when he had been the one to insist they leave. Terror for her family: her father in a dank cell, her brother who had disappeared, and her mother, who died a mere few days into their rough voyage.
Terror for the ostracization, the cruelty lurking in the shadows for a young, unwed, Irish Catholic girl born to a family of previous good standing, carrying the leanbh of a young, unwed, dirt-poor Huguenot boy.
A young, unwed, dirt-poor Huguenot boy with whom she was ardently in love, who had been wanted by the authorities for the murder of a Catholic priest.
The murder of a Catholic priest that had led to the capture of her beloved Da.
-x
song - Ballroom of Mars, T-Rex | The Star Lovers - worldoftales
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As always, thanks a million for the readership, reviews, follows, favourites, alerts, discourse, plot ideas, etc. Stay healthy and safe out there. x