So for all of you waiting to see when this gets more into Bensler, don't worry it will, if you truly enjoy my story you'll wait. But I promise, it will be bensler within the next few chapters! Please leave reviews!
They walk along the beach in the sun,hitting eighty. Julia, in a red sox jacket, runs ahead to look for crabs. The beach is flat and shallow, curved like a shell, the sand the color of weathered wood with calligraphy of seaweed written along it's crust. Behind the seawall are the summer houses, full now, summer being in full swing. Too late, Olivia realizes she should have told Julia, only four, to take off her shoes.
James' shoulders are hunched against the cold. He wears his leather jacket as always, even on the hottest of days, unwilling to invest in a t-shirt, or perhaps too vain, she has never been exactly sure. Her own flannel shirt hangs is tied at her waist, her arms getting darker with the sun hitting her bare arms with the tank top she has on.
"Whats wrong?" she asks
"Nothing" he says, "I'm fine."
"You seem subdued."
"I'm okay."
He walks with his hands in his pockets, staring straight ahead. His mouth is set in a hard line. She wonders what has happened to upset him.
"Did I do something?" she asks
"No" he says
"Julia has a art show for her pottery class."
"Good" he says
"Can you be there?" she asks
"No, I have a trip"
There is a pause.
"You know" she says "Once in a while you could bid a schedule that gave you more free time, more time to be at home."
"Says the woman who has the same problem, you're married to that job."
She is silent.
"Julia misses you." Olivia says
"Look" he says "Don't make it worse for me than it already is."
From the corner of her eye, she can see Julia twirling in circles on the beach. Olivia feels distracted, pulled toward the man beside her by a gravity that seemed unnatural. She wonders if he's feeling well. Perhaps he is simply tired. She has heard the stories, the statistics. Most airline pilots die before they reach retirement age, which is sixty. It's the stress, the strain of unusual schedules, the wear and tear of the body.
She moves towards him, tucks her hands around his stiffened arm. Still, he stares ahead.
"James, tell me what is it?"
"Drop it, will you?"
Stung, she let his arm go and walks away.
"It's the weather" he says, catching up to her "I don't know."
Apologetic now, mollifying.
"What about the weather" she says coldly, unwillingly to be so easily mollified.
"The stickiness of it, the feeling of just not being relaxed. I hate it."
"I don't think anyone likes it much" she says evenly
"Olivia, you don't understand"
He removes his hands from his pockets, adjusting his jacket, he seems to slip further into his leather jacket.
"Today is my mother's birthday" he says quietly "Or would have been"
"Oh James" she says going to him "You should of said"
"Was it very bad when your mother died?"
"I don't like to talk about it."
"I know you don't but talking about it can make it better."
"I doubt it."
"Was she sick along time."
He hesitates. "Not too long. It was quick."
"What was it?"
"I told you. Cancer."
"No, I know" she says "I mean, what kind?"
He sighs silently "Breast" he says "In those days, they didn't have the kind of treatments."
She puts her hand on his arm.
"It's a terrible age to be left without a mother" she says
Just five years older than Julia, she thinks suddenly, and the realization makes her go cold all over. It is agonizing to think of Julia left without a mother, considering the job she does.
"She was Irish right? You once said"
"She was born there, she had a beautiful voice, a beautiful accent."
"You had your dad."
James makes a short, derisive sound. "Dad isn't exactly the correct word, my father was an asshole."
The word, which James seldom uses, shocks her.
She unzips his leather jacket, and snakes her arms inside.
"James" she says
"I don't know what it is" he says "Sometimes I'm afraid, sometimes I think I have no center on gray days, no beliefs."
"You have me" she says quickly
"That's true."
"You have Julia" she says
"I know, I know. Of course."
"Aren't we enough" she asks
"Where is Julia?" she asks, suddenly pulling away
Olivia whips around and scans beach. James spots her first, a brief flash of red among the gray. Olivia inexplicably paralyzed, watches James race across the sand and wade with high steps into the waves. She waits an endless minute and then sees James snatch Julia like a small dog from the surf. He holds his daughter facedown by the waist and she thinks for a moment that he will shake Julia dry like a dog. But then she hears a familiar cry. James kneels on the beach, whips off his leather jacket and enfold the small body. When Olivia reaches the two of them, he is wiping seawater from his daughter's face with the tail of his shirt.
Julia looks stunned.
"The wave knocked her down" James says breathlessly "And the undertow was taking her out"
Olivia picks Julia up, cradling her in her arms.
"Let's go" James says quickly "In a minute, she'll be freezing"
They begin to to walk fast back to the house. Julia coughs and wheezes from the seawater. Olivia murmurs soothing words. Julia's face is bright pink from the cold sea.
James holds Julia's hand as if attached to his daughter by an umbilical cord. His pants are soaked, his shirt untucked, Olivia thinks that he too, must be freezing. The thought of what might have happened to Mattie had he not seen her in time weakens her arms, her knees. She stops abruptly on the beach,and, in a natural movement, James encircles her and Julia in his arms.
"Aren't we enough?" she asks again
James bends his head and kisses Olivia on the forehead.
"Enough of what?" Julia asks
Sometimes she felt as if she had lived, three, four years within the few days. At other times it seemed just minutes ago that Robert had stood at her door and uttered the two words, Mrs. O'Connell, that had changed her life. She could not remember time looping in on itself in such a manner before, except perhaps for those two or three sublime days when she had first met James O'Connell, and fallen in love, and life had been measured out in minutes rather than hours.
She lay on the bed in the guest room, her arms outstretched, her head slightly raised on a pillow. It was sunny outside, but now the sky was beginning to have clouds swirl around the blue sky. She pulled out a hair clip that held her hair together and tossed it onto the floor, where it skidded along the polished wooden boards and came to rest against the baseboard. She had meant that morning to get up and clean the traces of the past five years of James. Climbing out of bed, she found her way to James' office, she opened the door and gazed at the pulled drawers and scattered papers on the floor, the strange nakedness of desk without it's computer equipment. She had known that the FBI would come with search warrants and documents, but she hadn't known precisely when. She had not been back to the house since the memorial service, where she'd been staying at Elliot's for a few days. Nor had Robert, who had returned to Washington immediately after the memorial service. She had finally returned to the empty house.
Julia was in bed, and Olivia insisted that she stay in bed, a nice peaceful coma that would allow her to sleep for a couple of days, to awaken to a consciousness dulled by time, so that she would not be hit again and again with the pain that was always absurdly and cuttingly fresh. It was why Julia slept so long, Olivia thought, to postpone that awful moment of knowing.
Olivia wished she herself could manage a coma, instead she felt herself to be inside a private weather system, one in which she was continuously tossed and buffeted by bits of news and information, sometimes chilled by thoughts of what lay immediately ahead, thawed by the kindness of others, frequently drenched by memories that seemed to have no regard for circumstance or place, and then subjected to the nearly intolerable heat of reporters, photographers, and curious onlookers. It was a weather system with no logic, she had decided, no pattern, no progression, no form. Sometimes she was unable to sleep or eat or, most oddly, to read even a single article through to the end. And not because the subject matter was James or the explosion, but because she couldn't summon the necessary concentration. At other times, when speaking to others who were on the phone, Elliot, or Robert, she couldn't get to the end of a sentence without forgetting what the beginning had been, nor could she remember, from moment to moment, what task it was that she had been engaged in. Occasionally, she found no idea who it was that had called or why. Her mind felt crowded, as though there were a critical fact teasing her at the periphery of her brain, a detail she ought to be thinking about, a memory she ought to be seizing, a solution to a problem that seemed just beyond her grasp.
Worse however, were the moments of relative calm that suddenly gave way to anger, all the more confusing because she could not always attach the anger to the appropriate person or event. It seemed composed of bits, tiny stone chips of an ugly mosaic, irritation at James, as though he were standing next to her, for something as trivial as the fact that he had neglected to tell her the name of their insurance agent, which she could easily get herself, or for the infinitely more innocent yet utterly infuriating fact that he had left her for good. Or anger at Andy Gramble, whom James had played tennis with for years, for treating Olivia as though she were vaguely toxic when he'd met her on day at Peet's.
Olivia knew that there were more appropriate and more obvious targets for her anger, but, inexplicably, she most often found mute or helpless in the face of them, the media, the airline, the agencies with their acronyms, and the hecklers, disturbed and frightening hecklers on the telephone, at the memorial service, and even once, mind numbingly, on the television, when a woman asked for a man on the street to comment about the crash investigation, where he turned to the camera and accused Olivia and the NYPD of hiding critical information about the explosion.
Shortly after the interview with the Safety Board investigator, Elliot had suggested they go for a drive. They left the house and walked past the press, ignoring them. Elliot had given Olivia his sunglasses, and she had put them on. He guided her to the car. He held the door for her, and only after it had closed did it occur to her to ask where they were going.
"Saint Malachys" he said quickly
"Why?" she asked
"I think it's time for you to talk to a priest"
She was never Christian, nor Catholic, but Elliot was now taking her to a Catholic church. When she'd been young and her mother drunk nearly every night, she had went to her friend's houses to stay overnight, where often their parents would take all of them to church. Sitting alone in a darkened pew, she had been entranced by the seemingly moist stone walls, the intricately carved wooden cubicles with their maroon drapes where her friends and others would confess their sins, the captivatingly lurid paintings of the stations of the cross, which her best friend at the time back then, had tried to explain to Olivia unsuccessfully, and the tawdry red glass globes that held the flickering candles that her friend would pay for and then light on her way out.
In the early years of their marriage, James had been aggressively scornful of the Catholic Church. He had attended Holy Name when he was a kid, with the worst that parochial schools had to offer, including corporal punishment. I t was hard for Olivia to imagine schooling much worse than her own, which had been so spectacularly dull that when Olivia thought of her elementary school, what came to mind was the dust in the corridors. Lately, however, James thoughts against the church seemed to subside, and she wondered if he'd changed his mind. He never talked about it, she didn't have much to say.
They knocked on the large wooden door inside the church, nearby the exit. A tall man with dark, wiry hair, answered the doorbell.
"There's been a death." Elliot immediately said
The priest nodded calmly and gazed from Elliot to Olivia
"This is Olivia Benson" Elliot said "Her husband died in a plane crash"
It seemed to Olivia that the color left the priest's face for just a moment and returned.
"I'm Father Greg Anderson" he said to the both of them, extending his hand "Please come in"
They followed the the priest into a large room with leaded glass casement windows and seemingly thousands of books. Father Greg gestured for them to take seats around a small black fireplace grate. He looked to be in his late forties, and he seemed unusually muscular and fit under his dark shirt. She wondered idly as she sat there what priests did to keep in shape, if they were allowed to go to the gym and lift weights.
"I want to honor my husband" Olivia said when Father Greg had seated himself. He held a pad of paper and a pen in his lap.
Olivia searched for more explicit words but couldn't find them. Father Greg nodded slowly and appeared to understand. Indeed, Olivia had the distinct impression, through the interview, that the Catholic priest knew a great deal more about her needs and her immediate future than she herself did.
"I'm not Catholic" she explained "But my husband was, he was raised Catholic and educated in Catholic schools. I'm sorry he hadn't been to church in quite a long time."
There was a pause as the priest took this in. Olivia wondered why she had felt necessary to apologize for James.
"And what about yourself?" Father Greg asked
"I don't belong to anything, but I've been to church a few times when my friends took me, but otherwise I don't go."
"Are they're any family members to inform?"
Olivia hesitated and looked at Elliot.
"No" she said, uncomfortable aware that she was lying to a priest in a Catholic rectory
"Tell me about your husband."
"He died on the American Airlines plane that crashed. He was the pilot."
"I read about it in the paper."
"He was a good man, hardworking, loving. He was an only child, he grew up here, went to school at Holy Name, Airfare for six, liked to fish, go to the beach."
Those were the facts, she thought, but the real James, the James she knew and loved, wasn't in them.
"And you? How are you?" the priest asks
"Me?" Olivia asked "I feel like I've been beaten up."
The priest crosses his legs.
"And Captain O'Connell has been returned?"
"Returned?"
"The body."
"There isn't a body. My husband's body hasn't been found yet."
"We could wait for the body to be found."
"No, for my daughter's sake, for James' sake, we need to honor James now...And I doubt very much that there will be a body."
That night pacing sleeplessly in her kitchen, she began to wonder if she should tell Father Greg that there was in fact, a living relative of James. And wasn't it wrong of Olivia to not inform the woman herself that her son had died? She thought of an elderly woman sitting in a nursing home, a spitting image of James. It wasn't simply the discovery that James had lied to her that troubled Olivia, it was the continued existence of the woman herself, a woman that Olivia herself did not know quite what to do with. Impulsively, Olivia reached for the telephone on the wall.
When she had the correct number, she dialed the nursing home.
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