AN - Sorry for the long wait, y'all. Writer's block is a butthead.
It's the little things. That's what people are always saying. The little things that matter. She didn't really understand what that meant before. Now, now though, she thinks that she might be starting to understand.
It is a week after the rain storm. Charles has gone back to London and she feels lighter with his absence. The house has gone back to creaking in the wind and in the loneliness. But she does not feel as alone as she did before he came. Now she has someone else. Someone who makes her understand what it means to take pleasure in the little things. In the brush of a thumb across the back of her wrist. A smile that is released from its cage before the owner can clip its wings. The five minutes during which you can't tell if it's daytime or nighttime. A laugh that breaks the stillness of the deepening twilight. These are all little things. And they are beginning to matter a great deal.
They hold hands. While they sit on Helena's bench and watch the shadows chase the light across the grass. It's easy and familiar. Something old friends do. Or lovers. She thinks it should feel wrong, but it doesn't. She still hardly knows this woman. They are still strangers, although each day she learns something new. And each day, the distance between them is less and less.
That first day, after the clouds had dissipated and moved on to form over someone else's neighborhood, after the rain water had run off into the sewers and the puddles had mostly dried up, Helena had returned to the park in a state that could only be considered one of excited anxiety.
"You forgot this," she indicates the coat placed carefully on the wooden slats beside her.
"Thank you," but the other woman makes no move to pick it up, sitting carefully down on the other side.
Their shoulders are just barely touching, and Helena is not sure whether to lean closer or further away. If they were magnets, it would be obvious, because she would either be attracted or repelled automatically. North to North or South to South, or maybe, if she's lucky North to South. The stuff of fairytales and legends. But they are not binary magnets and this is not a laboratory, and so she holds herself stiffly upright and tries not to move.
"I'm Myka," the name slips past lips she has already come to consider perfect, and there is a sudden release of butterflies where her stomach should be. Doves let free outside the church doors after a wedding. She'd forgotten that feeling.
"Myka," she whispers, turning the word around in her mouth. It's nice. It's beautiful. Myka, like the mineral. Spelled mica. A sheet silicate often glossy and shimmery on its brown surface, but with its fair share of rough patches and uneven textures. Myka like mica. Stunning.
There is a slight bump that brings her back to the present, to the park and the late afternoon light. Myka has hit her shoulder gently with her own. Right, because, "Helena," she manages. She glances quickly to her right and catches a curious hazel stare. She doesn't look away. "I'm Helena."
Myka slips her palm, cold from the autumn chill into Helena's own. There are still crescent impressions on her palm from her fingernails the previous day, but the other woman doesn't seem to notice. She intwines their fingers as though they have not just officially met, as though their hands were made to never be empty, to never be apart. "It's nice to meet you," Myka says seriously.
Helena thinks that proper protocol suggests a handshake in this moment, but instead, she squeezes gently, flexing all of her fingers in unison. She's not sure when she lost the power of touch, when she stopped noticing textures and fabrics, hot and cold, sharp and soft. Her senses have been fading for the past several months. Her sight narrowed until she saw the world as though she was holding binoculars backwards to her eyes. She had trouble hearing individual sound waves, the vibrations tripping over one another, tying themselves in knots on their way to her brain. Her tastebuds fell flat and disused, except for the scalding coffee she swallowed like religion. She had marked the passing of each one with a half-raised hand of farewell and a faint sigh to see it go.
But she does not remember losing touch, that one sense she naively assumed wouldn't leave her. The entire human body is wrapped in layers of skin, and at first, it'd felt as though hers had been sloughed off, introducing a million nerve endings to the harsh atmosphere of the Earth. Yet apparently, even nerves become immune over time; perhaps she welcomed the pain, and in so doing, forgot what it felt like to actually feel. Perhaps. But she cannot be sure. Except that touch has, at some point in the not so distant past, deserted her, been left behind on the wayside, without a goodbye, unnoticed.
But she notices now that it's seemingly returned from the abyss, because Myka's hand is smooth in her own. There are callouses on her palm and the inside of her thumb. And Helena delights in the play of skin against her own, even if she is covered by only a delicate layer of protection which might, at any moment be punctured. She closes her eyes because she has forgotten the holiness of physical contact, the power of palm to palm, fingertip to fingertip, and she wants to remember. She wants to remember.
"Yours is bigger," it's nearly a pout.
"Because you're only five years old, little bear," she reminds her daughter gently. Tiny fingers are splayed out against her own, rising only to her first knuckle.
"Your hands are strong, mummy," she says, sounding a bit awestruck.
Helena presses forward gently, and the child pushes back in response. "Your hands will be strong as well, my darling."
"Strong enough to catch the stars?"
"The stars? Why would you want to catch them? They're safe up in the sky!"
"Not always," and Christina lays back upon the grass to peer up into the dark infinite. Helena misses the feel of her small palm immediately, but the child raises both hands above her head, as though cupping the entire night sky in her hands. "You said sometimes the stars fall down," she reminds her mother. "Shooting stars."
"I suppose. But we wish on those ones don't we?"
Christina shrugs tiny shoulders, and Helena turns to look at her. She wants to make sure that her daughter believes in magic, at least for several more years. She could tell her that shooting stars are particles of dust and ice burning up as they enter the earth's atmosphere. She could explain the science of it. The force that is gravity, pulling them to their dooms, but she'd much rather her five year old make wishes on their fiery tails and disappearing arcs.
"I wish for it."
"For what?"
"For the star that's falling out of the sky." Perhaps she understands more than her mother has told her, and not for the first time, Helena is reminded that this tiny human is brilliant, light years beyond her own stunted adult capacity for understanding.
"What do you wish?" She wants to know, even if that means it won't come true.
Christina reaches for her larger hand and lifts it, so her mother, too, is holding up the sky and the millions upon millions of suns light years away. "I wish for strong hands, like yours mumma, so I can catch the star and hang it back up in its place."
"Is that what you wish," but it comes out as no more than a murmur, because now it is her turn to be awestruck.
Christina nods easily, a shadow in the night, skin palely shining from the pinpricks of light up in the sky and the glow of their own sun reflected in the moon. "Mhmm. For the falling stars to find home again." She doesn't even know how wonderful she is, and Helena is lost for words that would explain her own brilliance to her.
Her eyes are still closed as she traces the whorls and patterns of the other woman's - Myka's - fingerprints. She memorizes them, cataloguing the mountains and valleys away for another day, holding the mental image on her retina, neon green and fluorescent pink against the black of the backs of her eyelids. Once she has it, certain it shan't slip away, her eyes flutter open once more, meeting curious green ones, studying her. Myka does not look away, and Helena thinks perhaps she ought to feel embarrassed for some reason - the silence has stretched well beyond social norm - but she doesn't.
Myka's eyes are tired she sees. Deep. Understanding. Older than the wrinkle-free face attests to being. Helena thinks that she is older than this woman beside her, older in so many ways. Bowed down by a century more of living, but at the same time, she feels of an equal age. As though they have the studied the same number of things, breathed the same number of oxygen molecules, hollowed out the same number of tree rings within their bones. She feels her lips move, creeping upwards, fighting the pull of gravity, of hundreds of days of downward curvature. She thinks she might be smiling, even if it is a bare echo of what it once was, she thinks it might count.
And Myka smiles softly in return, her own coming easier, with less effort, less struggle. But it is not smooth. And there is a crack running down it's left side, and Helena wants to point it out, to lift a shaking finger and run it down that crack and ask where it came from, what earthquake shook the soil loose to expose it's naked edge. But that might be rude, might be crossing the boundary between acceptable and not. She isn't certain.
Myka's smile disappears, tucked away behind a once more studious expression. This, Helena recognizes, is the brunette's resting place. Curious. Calm. Controlled. She feels her own half-smile slipping away, but without a mirror, she cannot say what her facial muscles have rearranged themselves to transmit. Except, even if she had a mirror, and even if that mirror were only a simple basin of water with a rippling surface, she is not certain she would be able to pick out her face from a line up.
Charles had looked at her that way for the first several days of the visit: as though she only looked like a woman he had once known very well. And as she'd seen him off that morning, he'd kissed her cheek as one might a stranger you've only just met and are leaving, knowing you'll never see again. Except Myka doesn't look confused or lost; she is looking at Helena as though hers is a face she would recognize anywhere.
"Helena," Myka speaks. "That's a beautiful name."
"Oh. Oh," it is the only thing she can say. It isn't even a word really. Technically it's just a single letter, but all other 25 of the english alphabet seem to have slipped away from her as soon as they placed the tiny bundle into her arms. Seven pounds exactly. It seems a crime that such a tiny thing can come into being looking so decidedly perfect. Ten fingers. Ten toes. A nose. A button mouth. Dark eyes, not blue like the books said to expect, but dark and open and staring unblinkingly up at her. Brown hair. So much hair! On a perfect, round head.
She is afraid to move, to breathe, to despoil the innocence that this child is made of. Her very own miracle. She'd scoffed at the new mothers who bespoke their son's or daughter's miracle status. It's the cycle of life. Birth, death. Nothing special. But this-th-this human, this girl is special. She is wondrous and wonderful. A miracle.
"Oh," and she strokes a single finger along a downy cheek. "Hullo," three new letters. That's a good sign. "Hullo, my darling." The words are forming on her tongue, but she isn't sure how, because she was certain that the afterlife would be dark and cold and not brimming with joy. But if this isn't Hell than surely this must be the Heaven they preach about. Because life cannot be continuing as usual outside this room. Heaven in the tiny fists of a baby only seventeen minutes old. Heaven in black eyes and downy hair. Heaven in its purest form.
The name comes unbidden to her lips. She hadn't looked through any baby name books, had avoided conversations with colleagues about potential monikers. She wasn't sure what she was expecting, but it wasn't this, this blinding clarity that her daughter's name had been chosen for her, that when she peered down into that chubby, delightful face, the name would spring to her lips as easy as pollen to the bee's stinger. "Hullo, my darling. My Christina."
"Thank you," she says, and this time, the smile is not as difficult to find.
"Do you like literature?" her runner had asked her on the third day.
She had waited, searching the blue skies for an answer, as though a plane might appear, dragging a banner behind in its wake. Yes! or No! One or the other. "I think so," is the only thing she can discern from the single cloud's fluffy whiteness.
Myka cocks her head, as though she's considering whether or not laughter is an appropriate response.
"I used to," she amends.
And the brunette nods as though this is an easier answer to understand.
"Books are...dangerous." She does not say that their words are fraught with sharp edges and dastardly twists and turns, that they pull her up onto a cliff she has no way of descending, leaving her there, stranded, to be buffeted about by an invisible wind. She does not tell Myka that books are confusing and she is unsure how to follow their convoluted maps. Beginning and Middle and End are terms she cannot decipher. So she sticks with dangerous, its multiple syllables challenge enough for the moment.
"My middle name is Ophelia," Myka announces quickly, as if the two women've been sharing intimate details for years, and this is the last piece Helena needs to finish a 1000 piece puzzle. "My father owns a bookshop," and this is meant to explain everything; it very nearly does. "Bering & Sons - that's what it's called. But there were never any sons. Just me and my younger sister. I'm not sure he ever recovered from the disappointment." She laughs, but it is not the chime of church bells Helena has come to associate with her laughter. Her eyes have gone hazy and distant, a shade darker than sage.
Helena bends over, lifting a single orange leaf from beneath the bench. She hands it to the other woman, the delicate veins cutting jagged lines through the leaf's skin. "In Autumn, the green chlorophyll stops production as the hours of sunlight wane." She knows this, but she lets Helena explain it anyway. "And it's not that the leaves are dying, or that they are suddenly inadequate. The new buds will come back green with the springtime." This isn't an answer to take away the pain Myka so obviously feels at her father's rejection, but it is an explanation. Of what, well, Helena is not quite certain.
Myka takes the leaf almost reverently, and spins it by its stem. "I always thought they were more beautiful when they changed," she admits. "The reds and the oranges and the yellows. It's nature painting."
"Yes," Helena agrees breathlessly, "Yes, exactly."
The bell above the door dings as Christina makes a beeline for the back of the shop and the children's section where there are both books and toys. "Easy, Chris," she calls gently. "Walk, please."
"Morning, Ms. Wells!"
"Morning, John. It's Helena, please."
"Back already?"
"We finished the last Time Warp Trio last night and I promised we'd come get something new first thing."
He laughs. "Well you know the way," he indicates the path her daughter has taken through the bookshelves.
"I do," she laughs as well, shaking her head as if to say, 'Children.' She is probably his best customer. She could simply take her daughter to the library, check the books out for free, and return them after they have been devoured, but she prefers to keep them, turning their pages reverently time after time. And Helena understands, because she feels the same way; there is no feeling that compares to cracking the spine of a new novel, breathing in its ink and glue and virgin pages, and knowing that it is yours to escape into whenever you need to.
"Mummy, come see!" her youthful voice calls from some unseen location. "I think I found the next series!"
"Already?" she grumbles, but she follows the sound anyway. "I'm coming, darling. I'm coming!"
Myka must run earlier now because she takes her seat on the bench beside Helena wearing jeans and the jacket she wore the first day they actually spoke. She wears her hair in a ponytail and Helena is not sure how to ask that she wear it down and loose about her shoulders, flyaway curls going every which way. Myka always looks a bit more tense when she's got her hair pulled back, as though she's just stepped out of the office for a brief break, and is ready to dive back in at any moment. Although Helena is not sure what the other woman actually does. She works for the government, yes, but that is all she knows. And she finds that she is curious. She wants to know.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, and tied it up in a burlap sack and tossed it over the bridge into the river, but Helena has spent the past several months drowning. She is not frightened of a bit of water in her lungs. And so she wonders, in the hours between visits, between their conversations, she wonders. She drinks her coffee black, and she leaves her mail, unopened and unwanted on the kitchen counter, she sleeps naked in her bed because the house doesn't care and the ghosts don't peak, she showers, delighting in the scalding heat, she forgets breakfast and so eats a bagel, dry, on her way out the door. But even as she does these things, she wonders.
She lives in both an empty house and on the five blocks between it and the park, but she only feels alive while she's sitting on a bench that once was painted green and is now brown with age, beside a woman with runaway curls and green eyes that tell a thousand and one stories. She wonders in silence, but she gets answers, slowly but surely. Handed to her cupped in the palm of this woman's hands. And she holds the answers close, sewing them reverently into the lining of her sweaters, into the lines zigzagging across her own palm, placing them in the empty spaces of her ribcage for safekeeping, and the cracks in her heart to protect them.
"His name was Sam."
It is the seventh day. And on the Seventh Day, the Lord rested.
Helena opens up her chest and prepares the space between her fourth and fifth ribs on the left side. There is room there, plenty of it, because she can tell already, that this is the answer to something she has been wondering for far longer than seven days.
"His name was Sam," Myka repeats, and there it is, the answer to the sadness swirling in her eyes.
Helena does not speak.
"And I loved him," the other woman's voice is not shaking, she is not stuttering, but rather is speaking clearly. Even so, Helena can recognize the loose façade the other woman is resting beneath, and the ease with which it could be blown away.
She wants to shut herself off, to curl into a ball around the name Sam and to forget everything else. She wants to ask Myka not to continue because the name is enough; she does not need to hear anymore. The rest of the story is already floating above their heads in a black cloud of agony and anguish. She wants to ask the sun to come out because the sky is gray and overcast and stories such as these are not meant to be told in the sunshine. It is a protective mechanism. A woman who has avoided the sun for months because its brightness was too overwhelming, now begging for its brilliance to stave off the pain in her partner's eyes.
Partner. She gets sidetracked by the word, the title, and before she can stop herself, she has tilted her head in acquiescence. Fight or flight. She will not fly. She will stay. Here is the story she has been wondering about, the least she can do is remain grounded long enough to listen and remember.
It's funny, the things one is willing and able to endure for others. Because there is a name she possesses, holds close to her chest, that is capable of tearing her limb from limb. A beautiful, devastating name, and she is in no way strong enough to bear it. But this name, Myka's name, the name that haunts her and weighs on her as gravity might on Jupiter, this name, Helena is able to stomach, to carry.
"His name was Sam," and the third time makes it final, a solid weight settling upon both of their laps. "And he was early. But I was late," she bites her lip. "And I loved him."
There are no birds chirping, and with a start, Helena realizes that they've settled themselves back at the bottom of the sea, back in the darkness, millions of tons of water sloshing about above them. Except this time, there is the faintest pinprick of light reaching them from the sky kilometers overhead, glancing down like the sun through motes of spinning dust.
Myka speaks low and soft, her words coming in fits and starts, and Helena doesn't interrupt. Helen wonders if this is the first time Myka has released these words, birds into the air, fish into the sea, air bubbles traveling up to the surface to release their small pockets of oxygen. And she wonders if there is a tiny part of Myka that is telling the story not for herself, but for Helena. And she wonders idly if this is what connection means: telling your story for someone else, and knowing they will listen.
"We were on assignment in Denver. I work for the Secret Service." Is that supposed to be privileged information? Helena isn't sure. "I hadn't been working for long; the guys still considered me a newborn on the job. Sam was a senior officer. And he and I, well, we were ... together." She isn't blushing, but Helena thinks that perhaps, if this were any other tale, Myka's cheeks would be tinged pink at the admission, a tale with a happy ending. "And there was a job in Denver. I organized it. Time tables, made sure everyone knew their position, the mark, the target." She is gone, her hazel eyes searching out some far distant place back in Colorado, and Helena is left alone on the bench in Washington D.C. "Except I was late getting to my mark." She'd alluded before that Sam may have been early, but Helena sees now that Myka does not believe in such a possibility, even if it might be tinged with truth. "He-he died." Helena wonders how they have avoided being crushed; that much water weighing down above them should have forced the space out from between their individual atoms long ago, reducing them to nothingness. Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. But can it be erased? "I loved him, but I was late."
It's the little things. These moments. These little moments. She is starting to understand.
There are tears on Myka's cheeks, cracks of crystal running across her pale skin. Diamonds are one of the hardest substances on earth, and only the sharpest saws are capable of changing the facets of one's surface. But grief is the sharpest saw. Regret. Emptiness. Emptiness most of all. Helena sticks her hand out and a single, solitary salt water droplet drips from Myka's stubborn chin to fall into her outstretched palm, a single, solitary diamond, worth more than all the gems still hidden beneath the earth's surface. The englishwoman rolls the tear about her palm until its molecules separate into a million separate atoms and evaporate, gone in the blink of an eye, in seven thousand heartbeats, and the single ticking of a clock man has ordered to beat in a certain rhythm.
She looks up to meet a bleary gaze, still looking heavy with hurt. Helena thinks that she is incomplete. That once upon a time she was whole, that there was a name that made her feel love and gratitude and wondrous delight, but that name has been lost in red. And now she is splintered and cracked, bits of her left behind with every step, every movement. Except Myka is looking at her, actually looking at her. No one has looked at her that way in many of the moon's lifetimes, as though there is a piece of her worth giving, a piece of her that might come in handy, that is needed, wanted. So, with a tremendous heave, she pulls out one of the few fragments of herself that she has left, poking out from beneath her lungs, and she holds it gently in her palm, and she reaches with a steady hand to place the shard against Myka's pale cheek, her imperfect splinter against the diamonds still dripping from the other woman's dark green eyes. This is all she has to offer, but Myka has asked, in telling her story, in giving her diamonds away, and so she places it there, softly against the silent woman's pale skin. "I was late, too." And the light shining down from above, cutting through kilometers of seawater and saltwater tears and diamonds, illuminating the dust motes spinning madly, is suddenly shining a bit brighter. "I was late, too."