Chapter 21: Little | Present Day

Benedict

Holly has been sitting, silent and devastated, with her temple against the window and intermittent tears rolling down her face for the past hour. Unexpectedly, her sadness had originated less from Tom's strained account of the miscarriage than from learning that she had given in to substances and self-harm. Though she doesn't say anything, I know that she must be deeply ashamed of these behaviors: she'd never taken drugs or injured herself in her younger years, and to learn that she's broken the promise of self-control she'd made to herself is surely devastating.

But for all of its depth, upon hearing the revelation regarding her mother, this sadness dissolves in stages into complete anger, greater than any anger I have ever seen her in. When she has suffered from spells of anger before, now she is thriving in it, seeming to spur it onward deliberately.

"What happened after that?" she says at length, her voice hoarse and low, her eyes burning with tears and her whole face toeing the line of control.

Tom senses my paralyzed state and takes the bullet for me. "You forgave her, actually."

She smiles madly and laughs out loud, a hoarse, barking laugh; what else can she do? "And when did I make that mistake?"

"The summer of twenty-eighteen." She scoffs, clenching her jaw. "You and your mother are actually quite close, now."

Not a laugh, this time, only a deep scowl. She almost growls, and would growl if she weren't also on the verge of tears, when she speaks. "Oh, well she's in for a nasty surprise, because we aren't, anymore."

Bizarrely, something about this anger only makes me sympathize with her further. I know how she's feeling, only I've somehow, subconsciously, buried it down in order to remain in some semblance of control over myself. And I'm compelled to reach out to touch her, to try and take her hand. But when I do her whole body seems to flinch, and reflexively her hand clenches into a protective fist and darts towards her chest, where it stays. I think I see a spark of apology in her eyes before the anger, doubled by embarrassment, fills them again.

"I'm going to call her," she says, as though remarking boredly upon the weather, so it takes Tom and I a moment too long to register her intentions. She snatches up her phone and leaves quickly, shutting herself loudly into our bedroom.

Reflexively, I stand, but Tom keeps me from following her. Not a difficult feat, as I'd stood up so fast that I suddenly feel dizzy and off-balance from exhaustion. "You alright?" Tom says, but I barely hear him, and only collapse back to where I'd been sitting, again, the room zooming out and in around me. I shut my eyes and press my fingertips to my eyelids.

After the sound of the shutting door, no sound comes from behind it. For a minute, we both sit silently, listening and waiting for some hint. Tom is alert and watching the doorway, but I can do nothing but look at the floor, trying to block it all out. I am unable to accept the fact that I am incapable of understanding what has been set in place over these last couple of days. I don't want to accept it. Yet, at the same time, I know there is no way under the sun for me to do anything about it. I just have to wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait for her to come back to me.

"I can go," Tom says, after a minute has passed. He starts to stand and out of the haze of my grief for the living love of my life, I realize that he is volunteering to go and speak to her. But I can't allow myself to continue casting off my emotional responsibilities onto Tom's shoulders, as much as I would like to retreat into a cave of my own and not come out until things have been somehow, miraculously, impossibly fixed.

"No," I say, my arm raising itself to gently block Tom of its own accord. I recover enough awareness and focus to stand up consciously. "I should do it." I can feel him preparing to protest in his way, but he stays quiet and only nods to me. I can feel his presence vibrating throughout the room, and it's as though I pass through a physical boundary when I walk out into the short corridor.

Though I feel myself to have more control than I have in many hours, aided by the illusion of a purpose, I still enter the bedroom without remembering to knock first. Upon my entry, Holly (sitting at the foot of the bed with her ankles crossed a few inches from the floor) tenses and ceases to breathe for a long moment, before seeming to recognize me and relaxing, but only halfway.

And this series of gestures, and the interior reactions of my own heart (pausing, aching, weakly resuming) enables me to pin down the specific emotion I've been feeling. It's not as though it's all a dream-it's far too real for that. But it does seem as though something false is going on, something meaningful but too impossible to be true life, and it feels as though I should be able to simply break character at any moment… but I can't. I feel as though I'm acting.

(And though she feels as if she's in a pla-a-a-ay, she is, anyway… Dum-dum-da-dum-dum…)

Christ, I've never been so exhausted in my life.

I close the door and stay near it, not wanting to intimidate her further. I recall how nervous she had seemed that night when I'd found her on her campus in New York City, a small girl of seventeen with a crutch who could barely carry the backpack I'd returned to her on her own; how afraid she had been to be alone with a man-any man. And I can't blame her for feeling that way, now. I try to think sarcastically to myself. It's not as if she has any idea who I am. But there's no point trying to alleviate the pain in my chest. Again I feel that uncrossable boundary between reality and fiction, and I can't discern which side I'm on.

I resurface at the sound of her voice. "I couldn't do it," she says, as though confessing. I can see that she's tossed her phone onto the pillows behind her. She sniffles, pulls the sleeve of the sweater she's wearing over her hand and rubs her under-eyes with it. She looks at the floor for a minute, but her focus remains on me. I can't tell whether she's afraid of me or not, and am about to open the door again when she speaks. "It's weird."

I take a moment and find my voice. It's hoarse and dusty, but functional. "What is? Besides… everything, of course."

"You're right. Besides everything." She musters a half-hearted smile which falls off her face after a moment, like trying to stick a paper with old, dried-out tape back to a wall. "It's just…" and here, she looks up at me, "...it's just that at least one random person in the world is thinking about you, right now." Her shadowy eyes fill with awkwardness, and she tugs her lower lip into her mouth as though in guilt. I want to run to her and embrace her but I shouldn't and I don't. "Sorry. That wasn't supposed to sound creepy."

"It's alright. I know, I think about it, too. But we can't think about it too often, or…"

But it feels foolish to speak at all, so I allow myself to trail off, knowing that there would be no value in continuing to talk when there's no meaning in the words. So, we're quiet. She's thinking. I'm thinking, too, but only about what she could be thinking. Maybe she's only thinking about what I might be thinking.

Unable to cry, she breathes in and out shakily, and then whispers, almost to herself, under her breath. "I just… I feel… I feel like I'm on an island. In some different world."

I can't take it. Her voice had been so small that I feel as though I've imagined her words, for a moment, before I realize that they were surely real. The look of her, so small, once-brave (yet still brave in a quiet and unknown way that I can't understand and which isn't easily expressed), devastates me. I have to go to her. And I do, walking tensely across the room and kneeling down before the foot of the bed, looking up at her and channeling all my strength into keeping myself from touching her, from taking her hands, from hiding my face against her knees.

"Holly," I choke, "I am your husband. And I love you. And…" my voice stumbles, and then regains enough power with which to press on. "I want you to know that you… can… talk to me."

A single tear rolls down her trembling cheek. She says, in a hoarse whisper, "May I hug you?"

May she hug me? Is she fucking serious?

With shaking shoulders, shedding tears of my own, now, I open my arms wide and she climbs down into them, her whole body shuddering violently against mine as she cries, her quiet, heartrending wails muffled against my shirt. I'm torn between wanting to turn myself into warm water around her, and wanting to break her open and fix whatever has gone wrong. Frightened by the violence of this thought, I almost pull away; but she tightens her grip on me.

After a minute, when her tears have subsided significantly, she pulls back slightly, and looks up into my face.

And then she kisses me. Really kisses me. And doesn't stop.

My heart starts to pound. She's breathing quickly, or barely breathing at all. I can hardly tell what's happening moment-to-moment, but at some point, all at once, I realize that she's sat up on her knees and overwhelmed me, and I've turned us over, cradling her little torso and lowering her to the floor, hovering over her. In a moment of hesitation, her breath is soft against my lips, and then she tilts her chin up, prompting me to kiss her again. I close my eyes and everything becomes a blur of hot purple darkness.

I feel her hands in my hair, and my own hands go to her waist, slipping underneath her sweater and finding the warm skin there. I brace my own body flush against her narrow hips, my thumbs circling her hip bones as they arch up towards me. My longing for her is too strong to be permitted… but now her tongue is testing my lips, and I feel the soft fabric of her yoga pants burning across my skin as her leg shifts and her knee presses against my thigh. My groin has started to throb, and she lets out an anxious, high-pitched sound when she feels the evidence. I hear myself moan, feel myself falling deeper into her… only realizing now that I've been nearly crushing her beneath me.

All at once my body falls away from me, and I imagine how it must feel for her, to have a heavy male body pressing down on her, larger than her own. All at once, I am indescribably disgusted with myself. I push myself up, forcing myself away from her and looking breathlessly down into her face. She's been crying.

Before I can wrap my head around it all, she's already escaped from underneath me, and pauses in front of the door for a moment before she leaves the room without saying a word. In her absence, I collapse on the floor and roll onto my back, looking at the ceiling for a minute and feeling the heaviness of my own silence on my chest, until I've cooled off to a reasonable temperature, at which point I stand and leave the bedroom before I have a chance to get in my head about it.

I stand in the doorway. Tom and Holly are sitting tensely at opposite ends of the couch, and it's impossible to tell whether they've just finished some dire conversation or have not spoken a word to each other in the past minutes. Unable to move and not knowing what to do with myself, I look at Holly earnestly, wanting-needing-to talk about what just happened. Terrible thoughts have begun to take root in my mind, and I need to know what she has to say. I need to know if what happened moments ago was unwanted.

But of course this isn't a conversation we can have with Tom in the room. She stands up, looking at me with wide and shining eyes, and for a moment I think she's going to ask to talk to me alone. But then she says, to no-one in particular, "I need water," and passes by me without touching me, a gesture that both freezes and burns me after the ridiculous display of intimacy that had gone on in the other room, then slipping through the door and down the corridor towards the kitchen.

After a moment I find myself moving, and walk over to the couch, sitting down where she had been sitting beforehand, doubting that she would mind my depriving her of a seat next to another person she doesn't know. Tom looks at me but doesn't ask anything, though his face is solemn and his eyes worried, making various of his silent questions clear. Not wanting to answer any of them, I bend forward and bury my hands in my hair, sensing my breath more fully, sensing its shallowness, its unreliability.

Tom, to take the pressure off of me, gets his phone out and starts scrolling through his contacts. It's unlike Tom to rely on extrinsic support in difficult situations, but there seems little time for soul-searching and reason, right now, and I can't blame him. I'm not exactly acting like myself, either. Holly must be shocked that she ever would have married me. A black wave of dread overtakes my lungs as I ponder how she will continue to feel about our relationship as more days pass, and as she comes to know the real me. Will this life be anything like the one she expected? Will she hate it? Will she hate me? The beginnings of our relationship, when they have always seemed so steady and sensical before, all at once seem fragile, even unstable.

"Are you sure we shouldn't have Florence over?" Tom says, his voice even.

I expect my own voice to sound wobbly and weak in comparison, but something about the presence of my best friend helps me to breathe more deeply, and I sound reasonably like myself. "She's in Italy, remember?"

"Right. Saoirse? I'm surprised she hasn't called again."

"I honestly don't think she's ready, Tom."

"Okay…" I have begun to sense the problem-solving tone in Tom's voice, and know that he, too, must be suffering from all of this. A pinprick of guilt sinks into my forehead as I realize that I hadn't considered him to be a fellow sufferer until just this moment, and now I can see the exhaustion in his tense shoulders, the helplessness in his face. "What about someone she doesn't know, then? Maybe… Matthew?"

I glance over at the contact in question, deciding that it's about time I sit up regularly, and can't help but chuckle, albeit mirthlessly. "I doubt she'd react well to a masked Mr. Darcy standing in the kitchen."

"What about Jude?"

Definitely not. "Tom, I don't think this is a good idea, at the moment. Let's just…"

We both hear a quiet sound just outside the doorway, followed by the appearance of Holly, her hands thin and tightly clasped around a glass of water. She glances between us. "I don't need an intervention," she says, in a tone too monotonous to be called calm. "But I do think I should see a doctor. For..." and here, she taps her temple, a gesture which all three of us can relate to, at the moment, and with enough intent of comedic relief to allow Tom and me both to smile small smiles.

I arrange for a psychologist to come to the apartment and see Holly this very evening. Miraculously, as there had been no time for tests, he agrees, taking the request on blind faith. Not for the first time-but for one of very rare times-I am grateful for my mostly undeserved social position.

Doctor Fogel, a white-haired and bird-nosed man with eyes that smile enough to compensate for his mask, arrives at five in the evening. Holly almost offers him her hand for a shake before remembering our new circumstances and tightly gripping her wrist in embarrassment. Doctor Fogel notes this lapse in newly-made-normal behavior, and it seems to set the tone for his respect for and belief in the legitimacy of our complicated issue.

After talking with all three of us preliminarily, he and Holly go into the sitting room alone, leaving Tom and me to wait in the kitchen. Holly appears a little anxious to be going into a room alone with a stranger, and looks at me as though only I can cast her a lifeline for a moment before going anyway, so that I wonder whether I'd imagined her expression in my sudden need to be needed. I feel like a soon-to-be father, waiting outside of rooms, incapable of fully understanding what is happening. But I'm waiting for the rebirth of my wife, and this is not a part of the human experience that people all over the world suffer and survive and derive joy from every day.

They emerge an interminable twenty minutes later. "Well, it's not a fib," Doctor Fogel says, with an almost conspiratorial look at Holly, who seems slightly more at ease than she was earlier today. "I can't say anything for sure, at the moment, but while your thoughts about this being something to do with the stress of our current times, I don't believe that's what's going on, here. Early-onset Alzheimers or Dementia would be impossible, here, so I honestly do not know. But I will share this with my colleagues, and hopefully we will find ourselves at a trailhead of sorts in the near future. For now, I would advise you all to remain as calm and patient with one another as you can."

Doctor Fogel leaves promptly after gracefully receiving our thanks, and without interrogating Holly about what he'd asked her, Tom and I start preparing dinner from the food Tom had brought earlier this morning. We pass our meal of Chinese food and cherries in silence, and soon after, each of us is exhausted enough to warrant making an early night of it.

Tom settles himself in the guest room down the hall and Holly and I go into our room. Before there's much opportunity for interaction she starts to prepare for a shower, rooting through the closet until she finds a pair of pajamas. I watch her and eventually work up the courage to ask what I've been wanting to ask for many hours: "Did you want that? Earlier?"

She pauses for a moment, mid-movement, and continues staring into the closet. "I don't know." She finds the pajamas and straightens up, walking towards the bathroom door with the pajamas clutched to her chest, but then stopping to half-face me, only looking at me intermittently. "There's no blame involved. But… we shouldn't do it again."

I can feel the 'yet' on her tongue, but she doesn't give it voice. She looks at me directly for a moment, but then quickly diverts her gaze, stuck between lingering and escaping into the bathroom. I decide to keep her a moment longer. "If you don't want to sleep with me, I'll use the sofa. I won't mind it."

"No," she says, quite suddenly, her eyes brightening with a frantic look. "I'm afraid to sleep alone." Then she inhales sharply, her face flushing as she looks down, shaking her head at herself. "I'm sorry."

"It's alright." I know what she means. "I know what you mean."

She appears to try to smile, but her face can't manage it. She goes into the bathroom. A half-minute later, she cracks open the door and her hand sneaks out, setting her clothes into the main room against the wall before she closes the door finally and the water starts. I don't have to wonder where this habit comes from, knowing that she'd formed it while still a high schooler, to keep from leaving clothes on the bathroom floor-a punishable offense, as were most things, under her father's roof.

Tears sting my eyes, met with less resistance because of my exhaustion. I need a distraction.

I set about putting away the clothes for her. But in the process, a slip of folded paper falls out of her sweater pocket and onto the floor. I drop the sweater and bend down to pick up the paper, unfolding it and squinting in the dim lamplight. It's a phone number.

I look toward the bathroom door, then pick up my phone and dial the number. I get a recorded message: "You've reached the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. We are out of office-" but I've already stopped listening. I hang up and wait. Though I am vaguely aware that I ought to be thinking very hard, I can't. My mind is a torturous void of shock.

Five minutes later, Holly emerges from the bathroom. It takes her only a moment to notice my posture and to see the slip of paper in my hand. But her reaction is unreadable.

"Holly," I say, my voice already trembling. "Is this new, or was it already in your pocket before today?"

A moment. Then, "I got it from Doctor Fogel."

On the one hand, my heart fills with relief that she hadn't been thinking about an abortion even before all of this happened; but at the same time, a new breed of devastation causes my spirits to sink. It's impossible to blame her for this, but some part of me is irrevocably angry with her. "Was this the whole point of asking for a doctor in the first place?"

"No, Ben. I could have just looked it up, if I-"

"Then why didn't you?"

I'd raised my voice suddenly and she backs against the wall, wrapping her arms around herself tightly and bracing as though for a blow. When she speaks, her voice has risen half an octave. "I don't know."

For the umpteenth time today, guilt floods my system. But my tongue runs ahead of my mind, and though I know I should stop and apologize this instant, instead I retort, despite the ridiculousness of trying to carry on any sort of argument, "Right, well, neither do I."

Saving us from ruining ourselves, Tom comes through the door a moment later, already clearly set in Holly's favor, as he should be. "Ben," he says, his voice cool and concerned and slightly reprimanding, though the sliver of the latter is so small in his tone that hardly anybody but me could detect it. "What's going on."

Snapped out of my trance, I walk in the lingering daze over to the bed, and start to cry. It's either after a second or a minute, but at some point Holly's slight weight adds itself to the mattress beside me, and it's my turn to allow myself to sob against her shoulder.

At some point during this, Tom leaves the room, because once my eyes have spent themselves of tears and I've managed to cleave myself from Holly, we are the only two people in the room. I'm more than exhausted and need nothing more than to sleep early, and Holly knows this without my having to say anything. She stands up from the bed and says good-night to me, more with her eyes than with her very quiet voice. And though there's a world of unspoken words between us, there's nothing to be done about it now, while we can barely stand to look at one another. Better to leave it until next morning.

I can feel myself sliding into cold, black unconsciousness mere moments after my head meets the pillow, the lamp still lit on the bedside table.

Holly

I'm being burned alive from the inside out by nausea. It started in the shower, then mounted, and mounted, and mounted to the point of blazing unbearably, which is where it stands when I leave Ben alone in the bedroom. Clenching my jaw and squinting against nothing, I step slowly forward, planning to take refuge alone in the sitting room until all of this wickedness is driven out of my system. But rather than an empty room I find Tom on the couch, his head between his knees and his arms limply folded alongside his thighs. I think about creeping past the door but he senses me and sits up. Too late.

"Would you like tea?" I hear myself say through what I've convinced myself is only phantom pain.

Tom furrows his eyebrows slightly, not trying to hide his own exhaustion. I wonder who he is, just as I wonder who I am. "I wouldn't mind," he says, his voice low with the time of night. "Only if you're already making it."

I manage a nod of my head and proceed into the kitchen. Every movement (opening the cabinet, taking out the tea tin, selecting Ginger, preparing the water) seems to be part of a choppy and discordant montage that passes in the length of a blink. It's an unpleasant feeling, and though I can tell the disorientation is coming from exhaustion, I don't want to go to sleep yet.

It's while I'm slumped against the counter, my head resting on my crossed arms, that the pain suddenly surges in my abdomen, like a shattering of sparklers or glass, and I suddenly grip my side in agony. "Fuck," I hiss to myself, my mind instantly going to the worst possible meaning of this ripping pain and my eyes widening. "Fuck," I say to myself again, leaning back and looking between my legs: no blood. No blood. "No blood," I whisper, making it a mantra and trying to breathe. It's just a weird stomach ache. Ginger tea will help.

But it's not just a weird stomach ache. And it's not some weird pregnancy cramp, not some payback for what I intend to do with it. The cramping is from shock. What else?

The tea finishes. I pour it and hurry out of the kitchen to be with Tom, chased out of the room by the haunting monster of my own isolation.

"Thank you," Tom says when I hand him his mug, his voice indeed hoarse and worn from telling his dreadful section of the story. Apologies are written deeply throughout his face and posture, and I can only hope that he doesn't say anything-which he doesn't.

But he does look at me with pointed emotion, and I can tell he sees I'm feeling unwell. My hand had trembled as I'd handed him the tea, and immediately after setting my own mug down on the table, I have to steady myself against the arm of the couch, stumbling slightly and lightheaded. I recover my breath and sit down carefully, all under his watchful, emotional eyes.

Once I've settled and managed to take a few sips, he exhales in such a way that I know he's about to speak. But I'm still not prepared for the words, for the truth of them or for the devastating and hurtful tenderness with which they are delivered. "Do you think it's from…"

It's enough to make me crumble. My eyes have no tears to spare, but my whole body caves in on itself, and the dryness of it all is what makes it unbearable. I can barely force air past the arid cave of my mouth, and my spine bends over slowly in resignation until my jaw is pressed achingly against my kneecaps. I am full of hot sand, slowly turning into glass.

"Holly," Tom's mourning voice crawls towards me like a wind but only scorches me further. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have."

"You didn't do anything wrong," I whisper, my throat feeling scratchy. (It's all an illusion, Holly. Wake up…) I pinch myself and manage to prop myself up with my elbows against my knees, though my head remains heavy. "I don't know what to do."

Tom's hand moves slightly, but then moves back, and though the gesture makes my heart sting, I'm glad that he hadn't reached for me. Touching someone would be unbearably painful, right now.

"You're nine weeks along. You still have time to think."

"Nine? That's not long to decide. Eleven weeks is the limit."

"It's different, here," he says, with an understanding look. "You have until your twenty-fourth week."

I look at him and shake my head, somehow smiling ridiculously, more of a grimace than a smile, I'm sure: the only expression that the chaotic blankness in my mind can press forward to my face. "Fuck the United States," I scoff, the pain flaring up again. I don't want to talk about it, and he can tell.

To take both our minds off of the sourness of the day and of the past-surely throbbingly vivid for him, and vague but very real like a menacing pit of quicksand for me-we decide to watch a movie, until we fall asleep, if necessary.

"You like…" he starts, once we've been indecisively searching for a matter of minutes. He winces at his word choice and looks sideways at me, but I'm not offended. "Sorry. You would like the new Little Women."

"There's a new one?" Here's something to be interested in, something to settle me into my own mind.

"Saoirse and Florence are both in it."

We choose to watch it, and after just a handful of minutes, the pain seems muted. Soon, though, Tom turns to me quietly and looks at me with almost pleading eyes, which I sense for a few seconds before I turn to him.

"Holly?" he says, his voice low and somehow tortured.

I can barely breathe. Something seems wrong. "What is it?" I whisper, under my breath.

He watches me, his eyes flickering. He seems seconds from tears, but none fall. Then his face hardens again, and he blinks harshly.

"Nothing."

Then he looks away, and out of courtesy, not knowing what to think, I look back at the movie, as well. But I'm no longer paying attention to it.

There's something important that he's not telling me. Something that I wouldn't like to hear.

NOTE:

For those of you who weren't sure, the little lyric that comes into Ben's head when he's thinking about being 'in a play' is from the Beatles song "Penny Lane."

It's okay if that makeout scene was awkward to read… it was supposed to be, and it was definitely awkward to write. Almost hot, but… Yikes.

Next chapter: Again in the past, we find out (part of) why Tom is so tense around Holly in the present-day, and Benedict returns to London after filming.

19 June 2021

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