NOTE:
The poem "The Whitsun Weddings" by Philip Larkin is mentioned in this chapter. (The title is also a line from said poem). For those of you who haven't read it (if you like poetry, go read it, if you don't, don't bother) the basic theme of the poem is a cynical view of marriage, which Larkin portrays as souring potential love. That's all you'll need to know to get the significance of the brief allusion.
Chapter 25: With all the Power That Being Changed Can Give
HOLLY
My brain doesn't really wake up again until I'm already sitting down in an aisle seat and the train is pulling out of the station. Next to me, in the window seat, is a pregnant woman. She looks a handful of years older than I am and is looking out the window with a distant smile on her face, both hands resting on the giant drum of her belly, swelling up like a terrifying miracle under her purple shirt. I find myself staring at it, still too 'away' to feel any strong emotion towards the woman, though there is the nipping of something bitter at the far edges of that blankness.
She feels me looking and glances over a few seconds later. I quickly look away, but she soon shifts her body slightly in her seat, and breathes in a certain half-inviting way. The damage has already been done.
"I'm three weeks away," she says, moving one hand in an ellipse over the side of her pregnancy.
"Congratulations." At least I'm still wearing my sunglasses. I manage to look back at her, only grazing my eyes across hers, not wanting to continue this too far. If I do, I might start to hate her. From the gentle, perfect way she talks, and the gentle perfection of her body, I've already started to feel far too small.
But she's friendly, and motherly, and has different ideas. "You're American," she says with a curious smile. "Are you at Uni, here?"
Who am I kidding. I can't possibly get angry at this woman.
"No," I say, letting myself relax; letting myself pretend, for a moment, that I'm just some random young woman. I only hope there doesn't come a point at which she recognizes me. "No, I'm just traveling."
Her face tilts slightly with concern. "Alone?"
"How I like it."
She smiles and rubs her hand against her belly, again. "I can understand that." I wonder if she's on the train just to be on the train. She seems like that kind of free-spirited, confident person. Like the kind of person I have always wanted to talk with. "What have you seen so far?"
We carry on an entirely normal conversation, which lasts perhaps half an hour. The woman-she never once reveals her name or asks for mine, perhaps a secret code of sorts among women traveling alone-has plenty to talk about, and doesn't ask too many questions. I am glad, in a dissociative sort of way, to listen to her. She tells me about her husband, a Physics major who has been reading A Brief History of Time to her belly, and about how excited the whole family is about the baby. She tells me that her own adoptive mother could never have children, and how overjoyed the older woman is that her daughter is having a child of her own.
Eventually, the woman has to get up to pee. I stand up to let her out and watch her walk down the aisle towards the lavatory, her every movement whispering of a deep-seated patience with herself and with the world. I sit back down and, my hands pressed between my knees, watch the green fields and trees passing by outside the window. I'm reminded of that poem "The Whitsun Weddings" by Philip Larkin, and spend the next few minutes trying to snatch onto a line from the poem. But I can't remember anything specific. It's not a frustrating task, though. It keeps me from thinking too hard about the theme.
The woman takes a while and she still hasn't come back out of the lavatory by the time the train rolls into the station of the town listed on my ticket. I wish I had some way of leaving the woman a message, a scrawled 'good luck' on a slip of paper… but I know I have to go. And something about the woman, now that she's no longer sitting next to me, seems not-quite-real.
I have never been to this town before, or consciously heard of it. I must have picked it randomly from a group of departures once I'd reached the station. It's a picturesque little place with narrow streets and frequent trees and green spots. The sort of little town you could easily get lost in, and never realize you're going around in circles. I walk thoughtlessly through the streets. There are plaques explaining the history of some of the older buildings and I stop to stand over them but don't read anything. I pass a well-kept graveyard by a pretty stone church, and cross over a stream on a wooden bridge, hearing the birds. I walk down the main street, which is host to a mild flow of cars. Two young boys, siblings, burst through the door of a little shop with a ring and a cheer, sucking on candies as they walk, gangling, down the sidewalk.
Watching them, I stop moving. All at once, I'm punched in the face by the fact that I have half-siblings. I had seen photographs of two young boys on my mother's Instagram account.
I know I shouldn't. I know I really, really shouldn't. But I do it anyway. I duck into a narrow, empty alleyway with mossy stone walls and open my phone. I stare into the screen at the children, at my mother, and at my mother's husband until I can't see them anymore because of my tears.
I don't try to stop my quiet weeping even once I've left the momentary safety of the alleyway. Tears crowd and slip and stick behind my sunglasses as I walk aimlessly around the streets, in search of a place or a person that will tell me what to do next. Maybe I should buy a room at an inn. But I don't want to confine myself anywhere yet. I don't even know what I am planning to do. Am I going to get back on a train and ride it until the end of the line? Am I going to stare out at the grey sea from the northernmost tip of Scotland and then turn right around again? Am I going to try to go back to New York? What am I going to say to Ben? Am I actually going through with this? What is 'this' in the first place?
I feel outside of my body, and I know I need to find a spot to sit down. But I can't bear to sit down right now. Instead I find that I've circled back to the graveyard. I lean against the cobblestone wall that keeps it in privacy from the street. I can't tell which way my breathing is oriented, whether I'm taking in air or releasing it. But I'm not completely spinning alone through the universe. My disorientation reminds me of something. The way I feel, now, is the exact sensation I'd had when I'd been inside of my last nightmare.
In the dream, I had murdered my father. For some reason, it had played out just like the final scene in the nineties adaptation of Lolita. Humbert Humbert, the infamous pedophile, pursues Clare Quilty, the superior pedophile who had stolen the twelve-year-old love of his life from him, through Quilty's giant house, shooting him with a revolver. Quilty, bleeding, climbs into his bed, pulls up the sheets, and awaits the fatal blow.
I first saw the movie when I was in sixth grade. Another lonely girl from school had the DVD at her house and invited me over to watch it. We had no idea what was really going on in the plot. We could only sense that it was perverse and a little bit delightful, in a Very Naughty Way. But as the film had progressed, as Lolita had recognized her situation, trapped with her rapist stepfather, going from hotel to hotel across the United States, my mind had started going down a different path than the other girl's. I still giggled with her, still screamed "YUCK!" But only the other girl faked vomiting. If I had done that, I would have actually thrown up from shock. I don't remember her name. I never really interacted with her much after her parents had found out that we'd watched one of the forbidden movies on the shelf. But I can still remember her face, the way her eyes rolled when she'd stuck her tongue out and imitated gagging. That was the first time I had understood that what happened to me in my father's apartment was unnatural and capital-B-A-D. And, since, the scenes of the movie-especially the last scene, when Humbert Humbert seeks out and murders Quilty-have been burned inside of my mind, just like that other girl's facial expression.
In the dream I had been pursuing my father up the stairs in a giant Victorian house, the Humbert Humbert to his Quilty. I was holding a revolver and I shot him to death in a white bed. According to the film, it should have stopped there. But it hadn't. I had walked away from my father's corpse and into another bedroom, across a cluttered hall. In the center of the room, there was a cradle with a wailing infant child in it. I dropped the gun on the floor with a loud clatter and picked up the crying child with my bloody hands. Then an eleven year old girl in a plaid skirt appeared in the doorway. She leaned against the wall with her knees sticking out, crossing her arms tightly as she sucked on a lollipop. "Put her down," she said, talking about the baby but looking straight at me. "She's mine." Suddenly I realized that, not the child in my arms, but the little girl in the doorway, was my daughter. She uncrossed her arms and I saw, from the volume pushing out her white polo shirt, that this eleven-year-old girl was pregnant. Then I woke up.
I don't know how long I'm leaning, barely breathing, against the graveyard wall, before I start moving again. But it doesn't matter. I can't even remember walking anywhere when I next surface from my mindlessness and find myself sitting on a wooden bench in front of an ice cream store. I am startled fully into my body when two girls Lolita's age step out with tall cones and walk with long, exposed legs down the street. It's nearing six o'clock in the evening and the sky has changed to a chalky blue.
My body, newly returned to me but feeling older than ever, shivers with the vibration of my phone processing an incoming text in my back pocket.
Shit.
It's Benedict, of course.
The most recent message is 'Tom hasn't seen you for hours' but an hour before that, he'd sent 'Where are you?' and I hadn't noticed it. I must have been really, really far away.
A second later comes another one: 'Are you safe?'
'I'm fine.'
'Where are you?'
'I'm thirty minutes away.'
'What?'
'I'm in a town.'
'What town?'
'I don't know.'
After a beat of hesitation, my phone buzzes with his call. But I hang up before the first ring has ended. I don't think I could even manage to physically speak, right now.
'I don't think I can speak.'
A moment. Then, concern packed deep into every word: 'How do I know this is you?'
The thought of Benedict panicking sends me over the edge with a mere flick, and my eyes are already welling with tears again.
'Fingertips on lips,' I type quickly, the words swimming in the lakes of my eyes.
Three little dots appear in the bottom corner of the screen, but they stay there for too long and I understand before they've disappeared that he's given up on figuring out something to say.
I steel myself.
'I'm coming back.'
BENEDICT
Waiting at Paddington for Holly to emerge from the crowd, I realize that this is the first time I've ever been upset at her. It had been a similar feeling when we'd briefly argued in Tom's apartment last Christmas and she'd been gone from the apartment when I'd arrived home, scaring me half to death. That had been entirely my fault, however, for not noticing the note she'd left me on the countertop. This time, there had been no note, and no logical reason for her actions that I could easily pin down, to calm myself once I discovered where she was. Not to say that I haven't been trying to find a logical reason. I've been giving myself a headache with my efforts since she'd first answered my texts. But all pathways of reasoning have led me to dead ends.
It's seven thirty when I finally see her. She's walking among the crowd in a daze, her sunglasses still over her eyes, her body looking more haggard and small than ever. The moment I notice this lost look on her face, the slowness of her body, I can no longer be mad at her. But I am no less paralyzed by her as she seems to spot me without looking directly at me, and approaches across the crowd. I've never seen this exact look. She's not disassociating, but she's not all the way 'here' either. The first thing that enters my mind is that she might have been hurt, wherever she'd been. The gut reaction of panic that I'd had when she'd first texted me back and I'd been unable to help wondering whether it wasn't her, but a kidnapper on the other side of the keyboard, returns to me in full force now. My mind buzzes with the traffic of possible terrifying scenarios, with such intensity that when her little hand closes around mine and she's suddenly standing next to me, her body sending out waves of physical, helpless chill, I am nearly shocked out of my skin.
I lead. We hold hands all the way to the street so as not to give any prospective press any reason to jump on our appearance as indicative of some underlying problem. If we are photographed here, it will be the first time we've been spotted since coming out of the hospital after the miscarriage. But, really, I'm only thinking about publicity on a subconscious level. As we walk, my conscious mind is completely dedicated to detecting whether something has happened to her. She's not limping. Her shoulders are hunched but there's no sign of bruises anywhere along her exposed arms. Yet there is that palpable coldness, as though she'd been locked in an icy room for the hours upon hours she'd been gone.
After a minute of this, I have to press pause. I'm not Sherlock Holmes. I can't know everything she's experienced today, everything she's thinking, at the drop of a hat. I have to be patient; to let myself be human. But right now, when my protective instincts are screaming that she's been badly hurt while far beyond my reach, the combination of patience and powerlessness is proving really bloody difficult to handle.
It seems very cold on the street when we step through the many glass doors, and Holly audibly shivers against my side, looking ghostly under the embittering yellow lights. There's no time to give her my jacket. I hail a cab and one stops immediately. I lead her in, first, letting go of her completely and watching her climb forward into the black hollow of the car before following, dizzy in the moment before I close the door and we're sealed into a recognizable scenario. I direct the driver (who either does not pick up on who we are or is uninterested) to my address and wait for the wheels to start turning before looking at Holly.
"Are you alright?" I manage, my panic even more personal now that we're out of the crowd, out of the immediate evidence of the city around us.
Her eyes are dark and watery. She seems fundamentally changed from when I'd last seen her this morning. She seems shrunken and drained of strength and color, actively forcing herself back into the corner of the seat. "Not really," she says, seeming to admit it only because she knows there's no way of hiding it. Her voice is a whisper and it seems to break with each syllable.
My heart thuds with fear for her. I blink and behind my eyelids flash terrible images. "Did something happen?"
"I just walked around," she says quickly, not looking at me. But her eyes widen as she appears to realize the track my mind had been on when I'd asked the question. "I just walked around," she says again after a beat, her voice even more choked. But I know she's not trying to keep something like an attack from me.
The remainder of the drive is deeply silent.
At least I can be certain, now, that she'd left London of her own volition. What matters, now, is why. I wonder if she'd had an argument with Tom. But that seems unlikely. I can't even imagine them upset at each other; and when I'd called Tom earlier to see if she was still with him, he'd sounded totally oblivious. Maybe she panicked when I told her the details of the nightmare I'd had. That would have been a plausible reason for her to run away. But I still can't understand why she wouldn't have told me first. Had she been dissociating so completely that she hadn't even been aware of herself when she'd gone to the train station? Is that even possible? Would that make me any less upset?
Eight minutes later the cab pulls up outside my building. I pay the driver and don't think to say thank you until we're already on the sidewalk and the car is halfway down the street and Holly is hurrying up the front steps ahead of me to get out of the cold. The little entry room is eerily quiet and shadowy now that it's dusk outside, and when the front door closes, the air shifts palpably. We're sealed in with something ill-willed. That, or it has been waiting inside of us, and is showing itself now that it has been given silence and space to fill. Walking up the heavy stairs and going through the door of the flat, we can both tell that something is about to boil over. I don't want to find out what it is, but it's happening already, without my say.
Holly walks in before me and leaves my sight while I linger in the entryway a moment longer, hanging up my jacket and taking off my shoes. When I walk forward, I see her waiting for me, standing right on the boundary that separates the sitting room from the short corridor that leads to the bedroom. That blank look is still etched deeply into her face. But something ugly is now rearing its head in my heart. At once, I'm filled with that black upset which had trapped me while I'd waited for her at the station. It's not an anger at her, but it's rerouted to fall sharply upon her: standing here, so separate from me all of a sudden. So small and far beyond my means of protection; beyond the reach of my full love.
"I'm sorry for leaving without telling you. I didn't realize what I was doing."
She's taken the first step, but something about it feels unsteady and false. I can't read her right now.
"Didn't you?" I hear myself say. "Wherever you went, was that the end of the line, or were you going to go further?"
My tone is still manageable but barely. There isn't enough of my devastated, threadbare anger in it to make her defensive… yet… and her face is still lost and weary when she answers. "I don't know. I don't think I could have… gone further. I didn't want to. I just needed to breathe."
The look of her standing there, weakened by a day of emotion and seemingly on the edge of fainting, calls me towards her despite my desire to keep my distance. I stand nearer to her, close enough to touch her, but I don't dare do that. I'm aware that making my body more available to her has also put her in a position where she has to look up at him, and I feel like an inexcusable arse, but can't really undo it. Thankfully, when I speak next, I feel more in control, and my tone is gentler.
"I know what you mean by that. But you shouldn't have left without telling me you were getting on a train. I was under the impression that you and Tom were doing something together."
"We were talking, like I told you. But only for about ten minutes."
At once, I am both flooded with sympathy for her loneliness, and with further intolerance for the thought of her being on a train and far away from London without me having any idea until it was hours upon hours too late to ask her what was wrong; to ask if there was something I could do to help. Maybe that's just it, though. Maybe she'd known, without needing or wanting to give me a chance, that there was nothing I could do.
"You were alone all day up there?"
"I didn't even realize, half the time. I was… I don't know. But I'm back now. And I'm sorry."
"I wish it could be that easy, this time."
At this, something flickers behind her eyes. Combativeness, maybe a pinch of anger of her own. She's remembering how I'd reacted when she'd come back to Tom's apartment last Christmas and I'd exploded at her before even realizing that she'd left me a letter confessing her feelings and assuring me of her safety.
Her tone of voice rises to meet mine. "You would have felt the same way if I'd asked you before leaving."
"That doesn't make the fact that you left without telling me any less irresponsible. I was concerned for your safety."
Those words, 'irresponsible' and 'safety' strike a chord in her, just as I'd known they would. In the space between two heartbeats, I think I see her face twitch fractionally towards tears. Similarly, my throat constricts with guilt.
She starts to turn. "I need a shower."
But I can't let her go. "No." I grab her wrist, not too tightly, but tightly enough to make my point clear. "We need to talk. Right now."
"Honestly? What's there to talk about."
"Holly. When I first saw you-" I can't stop my voice from shaking "-I thought you'd been attacked. I know you weren't, now, but something went on while you were away, even if it was quietly, inside of yourself. You spent the whole day alone without letting me know where you were. We can't skirt around that."
Her eyes widen and weaken the way they had, momentarily, in the back of the cab, when she'd realized what my initial fear had been. She seems to realize for the first time that she'd put herself in danger. Her wrist twists in my grip. It takes a beat for me to realize that she's not trying to escape, but to hold my hand. I loosen my hand and take hers, watching her, listening, though my ears have to strain to hear her barely-breathed words.
"It's not… about anything… that I'm prepared to talk about."
A deep, breathless quiet blossoms like a bruise around us, sealing us in together. The particular look in her eyes has made me realize that, at the root of this, lie the things that neither of us really wants to talk about. Now, the argument we've just had seems like an entity of its own, which has pushed us to this point. Now, there's no turning around. There are things we both know we've pushed down, things we've never fully brought into the light. We've never sat down and spoken in depth about the miscarriage, both of us wishing for it to dissipate on its own; to be dealt with indirectly. Talking about nightmares, for example, had provided us with a supplement of what felt like 'working on it' while really, we'd only been pressing it down further, forcing it into a more compact form, which is hurtling back to hit us like a cannonball, now.
Holly stares up at me with watery eyes that tell me she is thinking and feeling just what I am. She's working to hold back her tears with all of her willpower, her whole frame straining to keep them inside. I tighten my hand around her little one and let my other hand stroke the hair at her temple, coming to rest at the back of her neck as my thumb strokes her cheekbone. The slight pressure on her skin, there, seems to weaken the defenses of her eyes, and a tear slips down to land warmly on my thumb.
"We've waited weeks," I say.
The tears in her eyes all come to the forefront at once and she leans forward, her body limp as she buries her face into my shirt. Her eyes are crying hard but the tears seem to have, oddly, little effect on her voice. It is a hot, low, choked whisper through the already-damp center of my shirt, right over my aching heart. "I don't want to."
"Neither do I."
And I truly don't want to talk about it. I just want to hold her this way all night, to soothe her tears and not have to think about anything that will bring our shared grief to the surface. For a beat, I can deeply feel the twenty years between us, and my heart almost stops. But then the pressure that's been building in my body for the past hour or so is finally released. Again, I become a part of her. I feel myself melting into her. Everything inside of me wants only to protect her; wants nothing more than to draw out the pain and take it into myself, instead. But in the case of the miscarriage, the pain is something we already share. I carry my designated part, and she carries hers. There's no reversal. But maybe, despite the torture that the conversation is sure to be, we will find a way to balance it more equally between us.
I pull her more securely against my body and her arms clutch tightly around my waist as her shoulders tremble. I draw in a breath. She's being incredibly strong. I must rise to meet her. "God, Holly, neither do I. But we can't hold off forever."
Slowly, she removes her face from my shirt and pulls back to glance into my eyes, star-specks of silver tears caught in her eyelashes as her gaze gets lost in the mark her sadness has left in the fabric of my shirt. When she manages to look back up at me, her face is still and strong in its honest suffering. "Fine," she whispers hoarsely. "I guess. You should know I'm not… prepared."
"It's okay."
I want to fold her into my body. I want to sweep her away to a warm, quiet cloud; to wrap her in the warmest edges of the sky. In just the past minute, there's been a rapid roller coaster of emotions between us; from tension to an angry plummet to, now, a deep cold place that we have to navigate together, in the dark. Neither of us wants to be here, but it's where we're meant to be right now. And I have to trust, for both of us, that with the small current of light shining from the torch of our love, together, we have the tools to make it out.
I look down at her, placing both my hands on the sides of her head and gently rubbing her ears. At once, I connect her drained appearance to the likelihood that she hasn't had anything to eat or drink since breakfast. "You seem faint, my love. Do you want to eat something first?"
I see the flash of wanting her eyes, but just as soon her jaw tenses as her teeth clench down, having different ideas. She shakes her head no. I know her well enough to tell that this is one of those times when she's trying not to think about her mouth, or the existence of her tongue; when the memory of torturous nights is pervasive in her body, defying all her attempts at control. I start to unwind myself from her, wanting to provide her with the space she may need. But the moment I do, the breath cinches in her chest. She doesn't have to say a word; I understand this must be one of those self-contradictory times when she can't bear to be touched, yet needs my physical closeness. I am more than willing to give it.
I sit down at the end of the couch and she sits with her back to the pillowy arm, her legs laying over my thighs to give her head easy access to my shoulder. I rub her right knee with one hand and with the other one, I continue to hold hers.
After a moment of looking at one another and neither of us being able to start, she shivers unconsciously and I motion to the blanket sitting folded at the other end of the couch. She nods her head and I hand it to her, letting go of her hand long enough to help her unfold it and wrap it around her narrow, bare shoulders before taking her hand again, my other hand still resting on her knee through her soft sweatpants. This kind of physical connection is something I've never had with anyone else. Every touch is precious and meaningful. The current that runs between our bodies is so much more than sexual. Holly's free hand moves to wrap around the wrist of the hand I'm using to hold her other one. Her fingers are gentle and trembling.
When her voice finally surfaces from the depths of her body, it's like a miracle, like a slowly cracking eggshell. The fact that sound is coming from this small, blanketed body is a sorrowful, precious gift to me, and I tighten my hand around hers, watching her eyes. If there is a great pain to feel, we are going to feel it together.
"When I've let myself think about it," she starts, "I've thought… I've thought that maybe we've been cursed with dead children since we first met."
I know before she's even finished what she's referring to. The young boy on the NYC subway who she'd almost saved, and who had died from complications in surgery in the hospital, just two days afterward.
"The boy," I say, a tension stirring in my chest at my inability to remember the name.
"Tim," she says. "Like A Christmas Carol."
I nod. "Like my father's name," I say, wondering how I'd forgotten it, now that I remember making the connection, back in New York, two years ago.
"Yeah…" Her voice trails off along with her thoughts and she seems to lose herself briefly before surfacing once more. "But it feels strange. Because… sorry…" she flinches slightly at her next, anticipated thought, and I deepen my hand's pressure on hers, feeling her eking warmth. "She wasn't even a complete child. It's not as if I ever met her. I never even knew she existed until…"
I notice that she's referred to our own lost child as 'she' but choose not to make anything of it. There are parts of Holly's mind that must be allowed to remain solely hers. There is nothing inside of me that is compelled to mine every millimeter of her side of the story. I'm only tormented that I hadn't been there to help her escape from that cold, dark shaft from the very beginning. The day or two for which I had been physically with her at the hospital and then at the flat after her release, seem totally insignificant; almost imagined. Then those two weeks of distance and phone calls and ignorance had ensued. No matter whether or not she chooses to see it as abandonment, it's a fact that I had left her alone at one of the most difficult times of her life; certainly the most difficult time in our relationship.
"I know I've said it before, and it's not going to mean anything new. But I am… more sorry that I've ever been about anything else in my life… that I wasn't there with you."
I choke on the final word, feeling like this is the first time I've relayed to her how deeply I've felt this particular guilt. Now, in her eyes, I can detect that she sees the completeness, the fundamentality, of that shame, that sadness, even if she doesn't understand it. We'd both been yanked hard by the miscarriage, but from very different angles.
She looks at me hard and draws in a shaky breath. When she speaks, it's again a whisper. "I'm glad you weren't." She gets lost for a few moments, as she sometimes does, but this time it is a different breed of lostness. I can't picture the wasteland she's walking through. I don't change anything about the pressure of my hands on her hand and her knee, letting her drift and then come back to me. When she does return, her free hand has drifted to her abdomen, where it rests, very still. My eyes are helplessly drawn to it, even once she has managed to attempt eye contact with me. "It only would have been worse. It felt… I couldn't see anything… couldn't sense anything but this… tearing. Searing ache." The fingers of that hand make a terrible clenching motion, and as I watch it I imagine that I feel something distantly comparable to what she's trying to describe. I try to swallow, but can't. "It was an ache, but it was sharp. The worst… the most wrong pain I've ever felt. I wish that… Tom… wasn't there, either. And I certainly wish I hadn't been where I was, when it happened."
It did happen at the worst possible time and in the worst possible place. I remember all too vividly how the press had made something tragically romantic of the fact that I'd been across the Atlantic from her, in New York, filming a talk show. Finding out the news through the media rather than through Holly, or even through Tom… that had been one of the few times in my career when I truly wished that I had chosen some other path. Sitting here on the couch, I close my eyes for the briefest of moments. And in that moment I see a flash of an alternate reality: Myself and Holly living a simple, quiet life in a house on the coast. A momentary hiccup in our morning routine… a gasp… perhaps a shattering tea cup. Still a tragedy, yes, but a purer version of myself right there to hold her, to carry her to the car.
"Oh, Benedict…"
Her voice calls me back to this reality, in which I have started to cry silently and motionlessly, without realizing it. She gently pulls her hands out of the loosened cave that my own two hands have formed around hers, and they hesitate, trembling, before touching my face. Her fingertips press with care against my falling tears and then she shuffles her little body closer to mine, resting her head on my shoulder and embracing me as best she can. The blanket that had been around her shoulders has shifted off of them, a hollow shell sinking around her waist, but she doesn't shiver.
I feel myself slipping towards the verge of sobbing. I narrow down my senses until I can hear and feel her shallow, warm breathing. I focus on it for all that I am worth, and very slowly, the tears cease to collect and heat up behind my eyes. I breathe deeply and look down at her shoulder, at the loose tendrils of her hair, at my own startling hands on her back. I collect my words and my breath meticulously, feeling the nearness of a possible shattering.
"You know I wish from the bottom of my heart that it didn't happen at all."
Holly stays still for a few long moments, seeming to deeply consider the words. Then, with a shifting sound, she looks up at me with a blank face, somehow seeming even more diminished than before.
"Would you have wanted it?"
I haven't thought about this question in explicit terms as it pertains to our loss, but the answer has always seemed natural in my mind, as though a built-in part of it. Of course I would have wanted the child. I would have cried for joy on hearing the news of Holly's pregnancy. I would have bowed down to her and pressed my ear and my lips to that space between her hip bones. I would have embodied the most terrible of cliches… but the cliche would have been completely, unbelievably, joyously true. I want to bow to her and kiss her, now. But in this reality, it would be an act of yielding to grief, not of celebration. And though I know she would not resent me for such a melancholy gesture of farewell to that unknown little being we had lost before we had known of its existence, she would sob and be ashamed. For fear of that, I will not as much as whisper my fingers over her robbed, flat abdomen.
Yes. Of course I would have wanted it.
Holly has read my thoughts, in all their complexity, before I have even begun to think about formulating them into communicable words. And her reaction is not at all what I would have expected.
A sudden coldness grips her upturned face, and she draws back from my chest. Her hands grip one another tightly, her knuckles instantly white. Even her legs, still laying over my thighs, become tense, as though on the edge of leaving. Sure enough, she does slip them away, the soft skin of her calves whispering over my knees in the moment before her feet make gently-thudding contact with the floor. I watch her stand and walk very slowly across the room to the unblinded window. She looks out of it, and it's now dark enough outside that I can see the featureless reflection of her face in the glass.
I sit up straighter. Her body is suddenly tense; almost on the edge of being frantic. One of her hands travels in stages to her head, where it grips a fistful of her hair, and she seems to consciously stop itself from pulling. Her shoulders hunch, making her cave in around herself… I wonder if she's been overwhelmed by a fit of cramping. But when she breathes in and her posture forces itself to improve, I know she'd been on the edge of physical defeat at the hands of powerful emotion. She speaks to the window. "We've never talked about… this."
I realize that we truly haven't. It feels so odd… We are so close that, sometimes, I forget that there are things we don't know about each other. All at once, a tense nervousness breaks over my body. The last time Holly had been in London for Christmas and the New Year, I'd found myself fantasizing about a future in which we might have children together. But I'd never thought seriously about the implications of that scenario, and the steps that would be required to get there; and I'd certainly never spoken about that desire with Holly, knowing that it would be better to slow down and wait for such a life-changing discussion. Now that I'm honest with myself, that image of myself and Holly is something that feels wonderful to me, that feels like something I desperately want in my life. But Holly's current reaction to the implications of my answer to her question is telling me that she probably has a very different idea about having children than I do… and not just as the prospect pertains to the miscarriage. I've never so much as considered her side of such matters before, and a gulf of shame rips through my gut at my selfishness in this respect. But I'm even more upset at myself for having never seen the necessity in broaching the subject earlier in our relationship. Holly had been spot-on in her uncertain tone of voice when pointing this out to me.
"I… You're right. We haven't." I can't make myself go further.
There's no trace of Holly's breathing in the room. "Okay," she says hoarsely, her body trembling along with her voice. "Benedict… Tell me… how you feel about kids."
She's already read my mind, of course. But she needs to hear me say it aloud, and rightfully so.
It feels like a dark confession, brimming up in my soul. "I have always wanted children."
Holly's hand falls from her hair. Her shoulders hunch again. She has the immense bravery to turn around and face me when she says what she says next. There is no anger or spite in her face, only a vague lostness that pinches some vital cord connected to my heart and twists it dangerously.
"I don't think I ever could."
Her face has started to tremble and she's already crying full force by the time she's gathered the words with which to continue. All I can do is listen to her words, my mind not quite letting them sink into my understanding. My whole body is tense with the unexpected shock of this moment. How could I have been so foolish and oblivious as to expect a fairy tale after all she's been through? Of course she can't imagine herself as a mother.
"I think-" she manages, her voice high pitched, forced through sobs. "I think I would have wanted… an abortion? If I'd found out about it before… the miscarriage happened? I've thought about children… a lot... And I would be too terrified… that I'd stop wanting it, or I would hate it no matter how perfect it was… Ben, I've never been my best self… I've never been good at all, in the presence of children. They just make me… too sad. They… put me on my guard… you know? And I couldn't… let myself. I couldn't possibly…"
Her hands lift helplessly into the air and, shivering in her grief, now, she smothers the sound of her crying against her forearm. I want to go to her. I need to go to her. But the reality of the meaning of her words has finally started to seep into my heart, and I can't make myself move. I'm utterly useless. Which I suppose I have been for the past month.
I watch as she gathers control of her breathing, like collecting shards of broken glass from the ground. Her arms slowly lift, cold and shaking, to wrap around herself. She clutches her shoulders and bows her head for a moment before looking at me again. Her face trembles, tears still streaming down it. But her sobs have ceased and her voice is inhibited only by her unsteady, half-gasping breathing.
"Ben, you would be the best father to ever live. But that doesn't change that I really… I couldn't…" She takes a deep breath, the sort of breath I have to take when I'm trying to simply understand my own thoughts, let alone explain them to someone else, and when they are of such a deeply emotionally painful nature… "Benedict, an absent mother is… ruinous. And with your job… This isn't fair. You need… You deserve…"
She's fallen to shaking her head, her lips parted coldly, her whole face like a distant moon. She's averted her eyes, which stare darkly at the floor. Backlit by the slight light coming from the streetlamps in the night outside, she looks like a melancholy angel, moments from fading away.
My mind retraces her words and clouds slowly with disbelief. A great, metallic weight sinks into my chest in slow-motion, pinning me to the couch. "Is this why you left?" I hear myself say lowly, at the volume of a whisper. "Holly, were you… were you leaving me?"
She ignores the question… or doesn't hear it at all. She just shakes her head, trapped in her own world of pain. "Ben," she chokes, "you would be the most wonderful, perfect… dad…"
And again she bursts into tears, tears that hold a new meaning this time, obviously thinking of her own father.
I suddenly cannot do anything but stand up and go to her. The weight is still there, but it has entered into my body rather than sitting on top of it. I carry myself in order to reach her, and once I'm there, I use all of myself to carry her. My arms wrap around her shoulders and I bring her into me tightly, holding her up.
"Is this about him?"
"Partly. Maybe a lot. I don't know-"
Suddenly she starts a bit, perhaps at the gentle stroking of my knuckles against her cheek. Her crying cuts off and her hand clamps down on mine with unbelievable strength as her breathing gets panicked and all her body's energy is spent on chasing after it. Maybe in another reality, she's squeezing together all the bones in my hand from the painfulness of a terrifying, glorious labor. Maybe that never happens in any reality.
I think about pulling away but upon sensing this intention Holly only pushes herself against my body more tightly. I oblige her needs, putting everything I have into detecting them, completely unable to tackle what's going on in my own heart at the same time. I cease in my more gentle, clearly unhelpful touches, and instead wrap my arms around her in a deep-pressure hug. Slowly her breath returns to her and she sinks warmly against me, though she's still shivering; and her silence is indicative of a deep-running shame at what she's admitted.
"I'm not mad at you," I promise her. And it's completely true. I feel devastated; I feel misunderstood and betrayed by my own procrastination. But for Holly I only have painful true love.
After a minute, her voice pushes with a steady warmth against my shirt and my chest. "I trust you to be a father because you're nothing like mine. The problem is that I'm terrified of being a mother. It's literally not you, it's me. My mother abandoned me when I was five years old, and then my father started abusing me. I have no model. I'm never going to be able to get over the… debilitating fear of what I could so easily do wrong."
I squeeze her more tightly, finding some relief of my own in the deep physical pressure. My voice is the most normal it's been since we stepped through the front door. "What exactly are you afraid that you'll do wrong?"
She shakes her head slightly against my chest, breathing out in disappointment and the strength to admit everything to me, despite what she's learned about my feelings towards the subject we've, until now, unwittingly tiptoed around.
"I'll be… overprotective. Always on my guard, always scared for them, and afraid that they'll see through me… Still scared of myself, as usual. Dissociative. I'll be… me. And 'me' is in no state to be a parent. Not now and probably not ever."
"Parenthood is never perfect," I say, wincing immediately afterward and cursing myself for my first mindless instinct to be to recite nonsense words of wisdom. That's not what she's telling me at all, and I know it.
"I get that, Ben," she says softly before I can apologize, shifting her head to look up into my face, her chin still resting against my chest. The real miracle is that she's not angry with me, not the other way around, as she seems to believe. "I know that… But my parenthood would be abysmal. I would rather…"
She trails off and it doesn't take much observation of her suddenly-frozen face to tell what she'd almost said.
She would rather run away.
She looks up at me with a deep coldness in her eyes, as though her body has just been poured full of ice water and her ability to function has been immediately slowed down to the point of almost-freezing. There is a deep fear of herself in those eyes. When her voice next ekes out into the chilling air of the room, each word forcing itself through her tight jaw, it is as cold and quiet as I have ever heard it.
"I refuse to do it, Benedict," she whispers. I swear I almost see her breath clouding in front of her from the frigidity of the sound. "I refuse to do it. I will not be like her."
She is speaking of her mother.
A devastating montage plays inside my mind: her mother leaving the small grimy New Jersey apartment, her mother sitting in a window seat on a Northbound train, tiny five-year-old Holly slowly realizing what has happened as her father slowly turns to drink and, for the first time, strikes his child to the kitchen floor.
I'm reminded of the helplessness I'd felt upon waking up when she'd had her last bad nightmare, and had sprung away from me in her terror rather than seek comfort in my arms.
She slips away from me now, stepping closer to the dark window until her breath fogs against it. An eerie sight to see in late-summer, but the night had indeed been cold, out of doors. Then, her muscles moving slowly, she lowers herself and sits down underneath the sill, leaning back against the wall and tucking her legs up to her chest, hugging her knees. I understand her perfectly. The couch seems a world away, now. The hardness of the floor seems the most comfortable, the most understanding option.
I join her on the floor, letting my legs lay out in front of me and feeling distortedly distant from the socks on my feet.
We share this silence together as we've shared so many things, knowing each other deeply enough to not have to speak or touch to assure ourselves of the other's understanding. A minute or so passes, and finally something resembling relaxation has entered into the room, to my relief. There's no scrambling for something to say, there's actually a preference for lengthening the quiet. But something necessary comes to me, and i know I mustn't keep these sorts of things quiet anymore, for any length of time, no matter how negligible they might seem in the moment of questioning.
"Holly," I start, my voice naturally opening up the quiet. "I want to ask you if you would mind telling me about the dream you had." She turns her head to look at me and I can tell from the look in her eyes that she knows the one I'm referring to. "I'm not trying to corner you about it. But if it has anything to do with why you… ran away… then I would appreciate knowing what it was about."
She doesn't nod her head or verbally agree to my request, but she slowly separates herself from the wall and pushes herself out silently in her sweatpants to sit with crossed legs, the better to face me as she tells me the contents of that particularly startling nightmare. I'm grateful for the ironically casual posture of her shoulders, confirming that she also feels more at ease than she had two minutes ago.
"Okay. You know what Lolita is, right?"
I do, indeed, and a flood of fear sweeps briefly through the front of my brain as I too quickly infer what she might mean by this introduction. "Oh, Christ, Holly. I was your Humbert Humbert."
But contrary to my grim expectations, her face opens in surprise and her hand quickly reaches out to grip mine tightly in reassurance. "No! God, no, Ben!" The ghost of a shivering smile crosses her face and she seems to nearly laugh. The freezing tension which had kept us at a distance even in each other's arms a minute ago, when standing, seems to lose even more of its strength. "It's unclear, but I think… I think that, actually, that's who I was. I can't remember if it varies in the novel, but there's a scene in the nineties film adaptation, towards the end, where Humbert goes and finds Quilty in his house, right?" I nod my comprehension. "And he's obviously going to kill him, but there's a specific sequence I've never forgotten."
"And you were in that scene."
"Yes. I was the one with the revolver. I was following Quilty up the stairs and through the house. It wasn't Quilty, exactly… I just knew it was supposed to be him, and it looked like him, but it felt like my father. He was ahead of me, and he turned the corner…"
She furrows her eyebrows for a moment before shaking her head, thinking it better to skip over the details she can't quite wrap her head around than to dig for them.
"I can't exactly trace what happened. But at some point I followed him into a bedroom and he climbed into bed bleeding… And I killed him, just the way it happens in the movie. And it should have ended there, but it kept going."
From the way she glances away from my eyes and starts addressing her recollections to the floor, I know that this next part is what had made the nightmare so terrible; not that what she's already described to me isn't bad enough on its own.
Her voice trembles. "I went into a different room, a nursery… and there was a baby in a cradle. I was holding it and then there was this kid, this pre-teen girl in the doorway… and she said the baby was hers, and…" Now her eyes look up at mine again, seeking some kind of handhold as she prepares to deliver the twisted punchline. "She was pregnant, Ben. She was eleven at most and she was pregnant… and she was our daughter."
The breath in her body collapses again at this. There are no tears, this time, only a complete blankness of face and weakness of body.
I am frozen inside just from the way she'd described it. I can understand all too well her feelings, in the wake of that night, of never wanting to go back to sleep again. I actually feel sick to my stomach.
Holly shakes her head at herself. "I know you don't want me to be. But I'm so ashamed, Ben. I'm so sorry."
The utter misery that stiffens her face prods at something dominant in me. I reach out and gently take her chin in my hand, looking at her with a firmness I rarely use, but which catches her complete attention, now. "Holly, you are not to tie yourself down to shame for something over which you had no control. And you are certainly not to apologize to me for your feelings."
It seems, momentarily, that my words have penetrated the self-doubt that so deeply enshrouds her. But then she shakes her head again, her fingers wrapping around my wrists as I continue to hold the sides of her face, and looks at me with deep sorrow. "It's wrong to do this to you," she says, almost to herself. "I'm not… like you. I love you. But I'm not good enough for you."
(Not like you…) Her words echo in my mind. I know without effort what that's supposed to mean.
This has to do with my career. With the second-hand fame-almost, if not most certainly worse than the direct version, just like cigarette smoke. It's unfair. With all the difficulties that she's been put through; the extra stress that's been added to all of her periods of hardship by simply being attached to someone like me.
I can't help wondering, for an instant, if she's right. If she would be, somehow, in a better life situation if the man with the gun had never come onto the subway where we were both sitting on that October day in New York. If my session of discreet people-watching had simply ended and the enchanting girl in the Columbia sweater had slowly faded out of my memory in the weeks to follow. She surely would have been spared a lot of pain. But other types of pain would have befallen her, instead. I know it's selfish, but in this moment I feel somehow grateful that, at least, I get to be with her through the pain allotted to her, to us, in this reality.
Not even the furthest bounds of my imagination can thoroughly accept the prospect of a reality without her.
Her body has started to tremble from the wait. She looks so much colder than I'd previously realized, and I take a moment to crawl over to the couch and return to her with the blanket she'd left when she'd first stood up at the beginning of our conversation. I envelop her in it and then take her hands in mine again, looking into her eyes as I tell her what she doesn't know she needs to hear, as I have tried without success to do before.
"There is so much you have persisted through, my darling. So much that you have overcome, and that you overcome every day of your life. I see it, and you do it without even realizing it. I see you. I see what you create-" (She frowns, her eyes brimming with tears with the renewed thought of how hard it's been for her to write lately, but I won't allow it, and I snap up her attention again, repeating myself) "I see what you create. I see what you have done to get yourself to where you are, completely regardless of my involvement in your life. We could very well survive if we broke it off. At least after, say, ten years of recovery." (She laughs tearfully at my jest but nods, understanding and agreeing with my meaning) "But that is what makes us strong. We choose to stay together because we love each other."
I make myself quiet. She looks at me and I see that she's finally let go of the will to deny the legitimacy of my pride in her, my love for her. This is a secret inner confidence I have not been let in on, yet, and seeing it is something quietly magical. She knows everything that I have said is true, even if she would not say such things aloud, herself.
There is understanding and appreciation in her face, but not happiness. She breathes out shakily. "Then what did we do to deserve what happened?"
We sit there, reeling from the power of the words, the power we can't put to use. It is an unanswerable question.
Of course, we can't continue with any sort of serious discussion after this. Our collective emotional strength is totally exhausted. But as our words settle and thin around us like smoke after one of those battles in Tolstoy that Holly and Tom can rave about to no end, the improving visibility makes it clear that everything that we needed to say has been said. No matter how difficult it was. There is much to think about after tonight, but we don't have to process it all immediately. There are small moments of forgiveness to be found somewhere in even the most painful of cycles.
Holly hugs me fully, finally, and I deepen what she starts with the pressure of my arms. I listen to her exhale and my heart feels, at last, peaceful.
After a minute of relief I sense the cogs of her mind shifting to life again. Her voice mumbles sarcastically against my shirt, a light and joking tone redeeming her hoarseness. "I think it would be a good idea, if either of us has any further major life goals we've yet to discuss, to unveil them now."
I catch onto this rope that she's tossed to me, starting to pull myself back to her. "Hmm. So it's the right time to tell you that I secretly dream of quitting everything and becoming a penniless traveling street organist in Austria?"
I feel her smiling against my shirt, a bright, appreciative smile that she lets herself make, picturing the image. "Complete with top hat and white gloves?"
"Not to mention the requisite miniature primate assistant."
She laughs a chiming laugh, "Is that a thing?" and I can't help the chuckle that seeps through and warms my system. There is more to be spoken about, more to be resolved after tonight, but right here, right now, there's a spark of normalcy; a spark of who we were, together, just a month ago.
I grin and draw her in closer. "I have no idea."
We sit in each other's arms until the initial patterings and soft, distant rumblings of a summer rainstorm sound outside the window. Holly's body fills with light at the sound, we both love the rain, and she stands up to push open the window, also pushing open her heart, and mine. We readjust ourselves on the floor to sit in front of it, watching the rain as it swells around the beacons of the lamp posts along the street, and letting the cool damp air wash over us.
"Benedict," she coos after some time, her head resting on my shoulder, surfacing out of her thoughts to calmly relay them to me. "I really am sorry for leaving without telling you. I want you to know that I wouldn't have left you. I didn't even realize that's what I was misguidedly thinking of doing until I noticed your texts, too late. But I promise you I felt no dread coming back. That felt right. It was the feeling that made me want to leave in the first place that was out of place."
"Were you feeling trapped by me?" I ask gently, feeling no tenseness or remorse, stroking her shoulder.
She shakes her head. "No," she says. She waits a moment, smiling sadly and then looking back out into the rain, her face darkening mildly. "No, I felt trapped by myself."
I squeeze her hand and she looks back up at me. "I swear to God, Holly. We're going to find the keys and get out of this hellish fucking room."
She makes a slow sound in her throat, her face calm and open, watching mine. I can already see the light seeping through the cracks in the door of said room. It's distant, but we'll find a way. I bend down and carefully, carefully press my lips into hers, watching her eyes slip closed before mine follow suit. There doesn't have to be movement or heat or passion for that old current to stir to life again. We savor it mutually for a few moments before drawing away. In the wake of the kiss is a sort of release. A sort of emptiness. A good emptiness. We have both said things that have waited too long to be spoken and heard aloud, and now we can move forward with eyes clearer than before. Any of the subconscious ugliness that has been pent up without our knowing it in the past weeks has been alleviated. Ourselves are all that is left.
"I met someone on the train," Holly mentions after a while, in the same tone as before.
"Who was it?"
She smiles to herself. "You know I'm not into this stuff. But I think she might have been… an angel. Or something."
A little chill goes through me at the way her eyes subtly shine when she says the word. "What did she look like?"
"She was pregnant. Of course. And she was telling me about her family and her husband, who was a Physics major and was reading A Brief History of Time to her belly. She had to get up and go to the lavatory and she didn't come out again before I had to get off the train. But I could just be being silly."
I squeeze her hand and look sincerely into her eyes, finding something affirmed inside of myself by her words. "I don't think you're being silly."
Some silence.
It starts to thunder.
NOTE:
Hello again (so soon)! I had to chop yet ANOTHER segment out of the behemoth of a chapter that was originally going to be chapter twenty-four, so here is that segment. The next one should be coming relatively shortly, as the days before Holly returns to NY and Ben goes off for filming are all-too-quickly checked off. Things aren't miraculously going to get better after this conversation (obviously some more issues were stirred up in the process) but, hey, at least we FINALLY got to see a little "spark of normalcy" between these two!
Let me know your thoughts, I know my emotions were running high throughout this whole thing…
On_Errand_Bad
19 August 2021