Chapter 68: you can't take back all those years

He has to start thinking in terms of what's next.

What's next is he needs to buy some things. This is a small rural town and it keeps small rural town hours, and pretty much anywhere he would buy most of those things is almost certainly closed, though there's a twenty-four hour pharmacy he knows about where he could probably pick up at least a few of the bare essentials. Some fucking ibuprofen, which sounds like a fathomless blessing at the moment.

He also needs food. Very likely that's something he can take care of with relative ease.

He can't do any of those things in here. He turns away from the window and stares at the door, then turns and looks to his left at the other door - the door that actually serves as his front door - which opens onto the stairway at the side of the house.

Well. He should probably get in the habit of using it. He feels in his pocket for its key and goes to it, fits the key into the lock, and the door swings open as easily and quietly as the other one. The night floods in - not really cold but cooling, fragrant with the gentle and not unpleasant smell of decaying leaves. Fresh. It feels good in his lungs. Feels a little like it's cleaning some of him out.

He closes the door behind him and heads down the stairs - iron, like the ones at the old place, but they don't groan and creak. They make solid, vaguely tuneful metal-sounds when his boots come down on them. This, too, feels good.

The stairs deposit him on a brick walkway that swings around to the front of the house and back to a spacious yard and a smaller porch. He looks to the right - toward the street - and then something grabs him and tugs him to the left, into the shadows of trees and deeper grass. When he saw it in the daylight it didn't appear to be mowed very often.

He's not in the right frame of mind to resist impulses like this. He goes left, feeling for his cigarettes as he does.

But it doesn't go well.

He was feeling almost good - or, if not good, sort of approaching the beginnings of okay. But as he walks he thinks about Beth's voice - that tight, watery quality, how he could feel that he was hurting her - and his gut starts to sink below the dropping temperature of the air, starts to get dense, aching all the way up into his chest and throat. He promised her, swore to her, intends to keep that promise, but there was a lot he didn't promise and he doesn't know what might slip into those gaps.

And there's so much he still doesn't know. There are so many variables he can't factor in. There's so much he can't see. This is a dark road and he has his headlights, but he can't see more than the few feet in front of him that they allow.

Man, if she don't break your heart, you are sure as shit gonna break hers.

Fuck it.

It's not what he was feeling last night. But it's not good. This might be some kind of house of light but the sun went down a while ago, and back here - the streetlights obscured by the house itself - it's all shadow. Dense trees. Rustling of unseen dry leaves. Off somewhere in that darkness he's pretty sure he hears a raccoon snuffling around.

He smiles, and it feels wan. If he brought the bow with him, the food problem would be taken care of right fucking now.

He pulls out his cigarettes, pulls out his lighter, makes a little red coal and plucks it out of his mouth and stares at it.

He never did that to himself before. The only marks he ever put on himself - or had put - is the ink. Now he has this. Little moon crater. He can already imagine what the scar will look like.

Beth will see it - when he finally does see her again, which he will - and he has no idea how he's going to explain it to her.

Except he... Christ. He could just tell her the goddamn truth.

She might be the only one he could tell who would actually understand.

The small back porch is just ahead. He sticks the cigarette back in his mouth and walks to it, sits down on one of the steps, lays his forearms over his knees and lets the dark sink slowly back in. And it's not fun - God it is not fun - but he's still feeling something, and he supposes that's better than the alternative.

He's getting the very distinct impression that this is one of those storied things that there's just no way around. This is one of those storied things you have to just bore your way through.

Stream of smoke at the shadowy trees, the sky - stars out, no moon. The bare minimum of illumination, without clouds. He remembers brighter starlight with her, out there, bright enough to see by. But this is town and there's too much of the wrong kind of light everywhere, and in his head there's not nearly enough light to see anything. If only he had a clear and fully articulated idea of what this storied thing even is. Something beyond his gut, which isn't terrifically helpful.

Then again.

You follow your gut. You got instincts, you gotta listen to 'em. You gotta learn.

He bites down on the cigarette and rakes both hands into his hair, clenches his fingers until bright little sparks of pain roll down his scalp.

"Daryl?"

So soft he isn't immediately sure he heard it. But yeah, he is sure, and when he hears the whisper of a footstep behind him he knows who it is. There's really only one person it reasonably could be, but it's not just that line of deduction. He knows how she moves by now, has had time enough time to observe her and note that she moves as if she's trying to take up as little space as possible. As if she's trying not to make too much noise. As if she's trying to attract a minimum of attention. She sneaks through the world.

Or... No, sneaking isn't the right word. She eases. Careful. A woman moving through a dim room where something is sleeping - something she very much doesn't want to wake up.

He can feel her at his back, though. Warmth. Presence. She is there, no matter how hard she might try not to be.

He's looking for clear terms. Clear articulation. Suddenly he's perceiving and thinking about Carol in a clearer way than he has since they met.

What fucked you up, Carol?

Because something sure did.

He grunts and doesn't turn around. He has nothing against her - doesn't know her, has no reason to feel much either way yet, except that she seems nice and she's been pleasant to him if a little standoffish - but he doesn't feel like conversation, and he sure as hell doesn't feel like getting to know the neighbors.

"Saw someone through the curtains, I thought..." Her voice is shaking very slightly. Almost imperceptibly. It's what finally kicks him into glancing back at her, looking up at her in the low half-light from the nearest windows and studying her carefully. He can't see much of her face, but what he can see - and it might just be the shadows but he doesn't think so - is drawn. Strained.

He can't be completely positive, given what he has to work with, but he would swear that she was frightened. Isn't now, but coming down off it. Adrenaline bleeding away through the pores - it's something he can almost smell. Can actually smell, maybe.

"Thought what?"

"Thought it was someone casing the house or something, I dunno." She's holding her forearm with her other hand, pulled tight against herself. "Saw Cathy leave. People do that. Watch places."

He grunts again and looks away, taking a long drag. "Light's on."

"Not much, I wasn't-"

"Mine." Scuffs his boot on the weed-choked brick. "Ain't got no curtains yet. 's bright." He looks back at her again, and while he can't summon up the raw material for any kind of smile, at least he knows he would give her one if he could. "Even if someone did try shit. Got the bow. Remember?"

"Yeah," she says softly. Doesn't move. He just stares at her; there's so much here that he feels like he almost has a handle on, and then so much that he can't quite make sense of. She creeps through the world like a little fucking mouse; she's also nimble, evasive, and he doesn't feel like pursuing any of it.

Wouldn't anyway. People who want to be left alone should be left the fuck alone.

"You mind if I sit?"

He exhales - it might be something in the remote vicinity of a laugh - and looks down at the brick, tapping ash onto it. "'s your fuckin' porch."

"Guess it is, yeah." She sits down to his left and a step up, and in the periphery of his vision he sees her dim form fold itself as she draws her knees close to her chest. "You can use it if you want, though."

He shoots her a quick look and an equally quick up-nod. "Thanks."

And he means it. He might not be equipped to be as appreciative as he would ideally be, but somewhere down in the swirling grayness that's lingering in him, he does feel it. Because he can imagine sitting here in the sun, even on a colder day, and looking at the sky and the trees he can't see now and having a smoke and just thinking. And it might be nice.

Might be nice to have a place like that.

There's a period of silence then, and he's grateful for it in a vague way. The truth is that he's discovering he doesn't mind the company. Would have been fine without it, but one way or another he's been alone for what feels like forever, and while he's still pretty damn sure he has to be - for right now - a little bit of time with someone else is probably not such a terrible thing.

And he doesn't dislike Carol. Of that he's also pretty damn sure.

But then she starts talking.

"Your brother isn't with you?"

The glance he gives her is immediate, instinctive, sharp. A stab at her that he doesn't plan for and doesn't smooth over, doesn't want to smooth over, even though it's likely that she doesn't even know what a badly raw, bloody spot this is for him right now. How the hell could she know that?

It doesn't matter. He never needed a good reason to get stupid levels of angry at someone, poked in just the right place.

He grits his teeth, stares down at the cigarette between his fingers. Smoked down over halfway. He's still been trying to smoke less - he thought just for her but now he's not so positive about that - but right now he feels like he could get through an entire pack in about an hour.

"He's gone."

She takes a soft breath. God just shut up shut up shutupshutupshutup. "Did... Did something happen to him?"

He wants to cackle at that. Just toss his head back and laugh until he hurts even worse than he does now. Laugh his fucking guts out through his throat. Instead he merely grunts yet again, drops the cigarette, grinds it out with the toe of his boot, lights another one.

"He's just gone."

"I'm sorry," she murmurs after a few seconds' pause. He should be giving her credit for not asking any more questions, should be - yet again - appreciative of the fact that she seems to realize she's come up against something and should back off. He should take it for what it is, accept it in silence, give her a nod or something, leave it the fuck alone.

There are a lot of things he should do. And he didn't exactly get where he is now by doing them.

So he sits in silence, smoking, little paper tube between his fingers acting as a kind of focal point that doesn't really do much to focus him at all, Carol's soft presence at his elbow, the night getting colder, all the shit he has to do and buy and take care of and figure out, and up there is a series of rooms he's absolutely certain he should be in but in which he still doesn't even sort of feel like he belongs.

He should leave it the fuck alone. Probably mutter a 'night and leave. Instead he stares down at the cigarette, stares down at the dim outline of the edge of the crater in his hand, and he murmurs, "Ain't how it was supposed to be."

She shifts. Leans a bit closer - he feels the slightest increase in the warm air on his arm and shoulder. "How was it supposed to be?"

He walked into this. That question isn't her fault; he set her the hell up for that, and he has no right to resent for her it, so of course he does. He does violently. And he knows himself well enough by now - can be honest enough with himself by now - to know that he's not even really resenting her at all.

Knowing those things doesn't help in any respect.

He grits his teeth, cigarette between them. The filter gives under their edge. Smoke stings his eyes. "Better."

"Better than what?"

Oh fucking HELL.

When Daryl was small - very small, young almost beyond the boundary of his ability to retain memory - outward expressions of anger terrified him. For various reasons he doesn't recall a whole lot from then, but he does remember that. He remembers anger as a vicious, roaring, unstoppable thing, and when once a summer derecho of record-setting intensity blew through and screamed wind gusts around the house for hours, pounded everything with raindrops that seemed the size of fists, sent hail tumbling down after it and destroyed cars and roofs, shattered the sky with constant lightning, uprooted trees and ripped down powerlines, sent a branch spearing through a neighbor's window and almost killed their little girl, he looked out his own window in the strobing dark of power-loss and thought oh, yes, the world is angry.

Instantly recognizable. He had been seeing smaller, more contained versions of it for a while. Things weren't truly bad, not yet, but they were well on their way, and little children observe much and understand a great deal. He knew they were going to get worse. Even then he knew.

When they did, when they finally got as bad as they could get and he felt that black void-maw of hatred opening inside him, he learned to be terrified of a different kind of anger - not outward but inward.

He learned to be terrified of himself.

This isn't like the rage that inspired that terror. This doesn't frighten him. It's cold and weary and it lurches through him like a drunk, swiping things off tables and knocking stuff over. But while he doesn't feel terror, he looks at it and recognizes that he can't stop it now, and he feels vague disgust with himself - because he should be better than this.

He really should be.

His teeth were gritted before; now they're grinding. He parts them long enough to yank the cigarette out of his mouth, puffing smoke through his nose, throat tight. Eyes stinging for reasons that have nothing to do with that smoke. He was almost kind of okay and now he doesn't want to be here, doesn't care that he feels so deeply that he needs to be, doesn't give a shit, but has no earthly or unearthly idea where the hell else he would go.

"Know what it was supposed to be better than?" Not loud. Low and strained and painful. "Two fuckin' years of fuck-all and me carryin' everythin' and a stupid fuckin' asshole prick of a brother killin' himself on crystal and Oxy-fuckin'-Contin and fuckin' cuttin' and runnin' 'cause he's a yellow sumbitch who can't fuckin' handle his own shit, that's what it was supposed to be better than."

He skids to a halt. He's breathing hard. The rage is suddenly less weary, but it's not burning hot. He just feels sick all over again. His disgust is now diffuse, general. He has no fucking idea what he's doing, no fucking idea how he's supposed to know. No fucking idea what any of this is even for.

He drops his head between his shoulders and makes a quiet, wrenched noise that originates somewhere near his diaphragm. "People tell you to try and you try and it ain't worth shit."

Another pause for station identification, which is nothing. He has nothing else to say. Nothing else worth saying. This afternoon he slept - he doesn't know exactly how long but he knows it was a good long time - but now he just feels like curling up and going back to that dreamless darkness.

But Carol shifts again, lets out a breath, and whispers, "I know."

Flare, sharp and hot. He snaps his head around, feeling his eyes narrowing and lips pulling back into something close to a snarl - matched by his voice. "The fuck you know 'bout it, lady?"

She looks levelly back at him. Not thrown. Sure as hell not afraid of him. "I'm not house-sitting." Her mouth twists. "Well, I mean... I am. But I also- I left my husband."

He snorts a laugh, scorn-edged and perversely pleasurable. It's a distraction. "Yeah, that's sure as shit the same fuckin-"

"I ran away from my husband."

He's cut off. Just fucking chopped. He might be angry, he might be close to losing himself in it - and speaking of perverse, what a horrible blessing that feels like - but he's not too far gone to realize the implications of those six words before she has to spell it out any more clearly. Because of the words themselves, and because he's observant even on his worst days, far more than most people, and he picked it all up, even if didn't put it all together.

He should have. The signs were all there. So familiar they're knitted into his marrow.

Who fucked you up, Carol?

"I'm hiding from my husband." She's not looking at him anymore. She's staring out at the breezy dark, at nothing. Her legs are drawn very close together, still bent, and she's hugging her knees like a long-lost and beloved child, her hands clasped against them. "He's... He's dangerous."

He takes a slow breath. He shouldn't even ask this. He doesn't need to. He already knows. In one way or another, he knows - or at least intuits - everything. Everything important, anyway.

This is a very old story.

"He hit you?"

"Among other things."

What he feels now isn't anger. He has no idea how to define what it is, no idea how to fully understand it - like so much of what he feels these days. It's not anger, though it's not completely unlike anger. It's sure as hell not surprise. It's not sorrow, and it is absolutely not pity, because he knows he would loathe anyone's pity and loathe them for feeling it, and he suspects she might feel the same way.

What he feels... a sick kind of kinship, maybe. Something he was missing.

His brother had the same father. The same scars.

Now that he's started he doesn't seem to be able to stop. "You got kids?"

She nods. "One. Daughter." She finally looks at him again, smiles an awful, weak smile, and swipes a hand over her face. Before she does he can see in the faint light from the windows that her eyes and cheeks are shining. "Sophia."

"Why ain't she with you?"

But he's pretty sure he gets this too. If not the specifics.

Carol sighs and lays her head sideways on her knees, angled so she can still look at him. "I sent her to stay with her godmother in Indiana. A couple of weeks ago. I got her out first, then I got myself out. I needed some time to work things through, and it seemed... I don't know, it seemed safer if she wasn't with me. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was a stupid idea. I was scared, I was just trying... I was just trying to do anything."

A shudder runs through her, and he feels a sudden and overwhelming urge to lay a hand on her back. But he doesn't. He's still not sure how to even do this. Not sure how anyone does. The woman in the truck's cab, talking to her, that single chaste kiss - you're not alone, neither of us is - that was different.

He's not going to say a final goodbye to this woman tonight. He's not going to never see her again.

She tilts her head back, blinks hard, disentangles one hand and rubs under her eyes, and she smiles that smile again, and he thinks in a way he hasn't before that this is something that someone who hasn't gone through it can never understand. Not fully, not really. There are two kinds of people in the world, and the line between them is a high wall.

"You know what the worst part is?" She actually laughs, shaky, and there's a thin strand of genuine, rueful amusement in it. "I don't know how to live without him. I mean... I've been trying, and I just... I just don't know."

She just stabbed him in the heart. Punched a needle straight through his sternum - one of those long, thick ones through which you deliver a hard shot of adrenaline. He feels it, a deep jolt, a burst of light at the outer edges of his vision, pure and fundamental mirror-like recognition.

He doesn't know how to live in the world. Not yet. He has to figure it out. He has to do it on his own.

So he needs to be here. This is exactly where he needs to be.

He's very bad at this. Sucks at it. But he has instincts and - given that right now they're all he has to go on - he's going to listen to them. He gives her a quick nod, very small, and flicks his gaze down and away.

"You wanna beer?"

He doesn't have beer.

Carol rakes a hand through her short hair, half-shakes her head. "I don't know if I-"

"You wanna whiskey?"

He doesn't have that either.

She laughs. She laughs, and it's still weak, still run through with tremors, but she sounds better. More robust. The laugh is deeper and there's warmth far beneath its surface, and he feels some of that warmth seep into him.

"Yes." She wipes at her face again. "Yes, that would be... That would be nice."

"Alright." He flicks the remains of the cigarette onto the brick - almost burned down to the filter, he only narrowly avoided further injury - and grinds it out beside its fallen comrade. He stands, half turns, and gives her a fraction of a crooked smile. "You gotta tell me where it is."

She arches a brow. "You're not buying a lady a drink?"

"Could make a run."

"I'm kidding. Cathy has... God, she pretty much has an entire wet bar in there." She jerks her head at the back door. "Through there, down the hall, living room. You can't miss it. Trust me."

He nods, gives her another minuscule smile, and goes on his mission.

He comes back with the entire bottle - Jack Daniel's, suits him right down to the fucking ground - and two glasses as a concession to gentility, since no, he's not buying a lady a drink. But he can more than afford to do so, and he makes a mental note to buy another bottle, regardless of how much they burn through tonight. Files it away. Tomorrow, maybe.

He's starting to put together some plans for tomorrow. Rough ones. He doesn't think they have to be much more than rough. Not right now.

Making them at all is enough.

He sits back down, opens the bottle, pours them each half a tumbler and hands hers over. She takes it, gives him yet another small smile, and lifts her glass in a salute, which he returns before draining half of what he has.

He needs to be here, and thinks this might also be a need, as far as that goes.

"Home sweet home," he murmurs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Carol giving him a quizzical look, head slightly cocked. She drank considerably less than he did, and doesn't seem inclined to follow it up all that rapidly.

"Is it?"

He glances at her - then angles himself against the old, pitted wood of the railing on the side of the steps, allowing a more direct view of her. "Is it what?"

"Home?"

He shrugs.

"Do you want it to be?"

He shrugs, and this time makes a soft noise to match. I'unno.

"I don't think I have a home anymore." She turns her attention back to the dark and takes another swallow, this time a bit bigger, and coughs lightly as it burns her. "Then again... I'm not sure I ever did. Ed sure as hell never made it feel like a home." She flicks her gaze to him, quick, and away. "I tried. I really did. But like you said." She tips the glass back again, and he wonders if his evaluation of a moment ago might have been the exact polar opposite of right. "Ain't worth shit."

"Yeah, but... You're here," he says quietly. He looks at her now, and his evaluation about her present drinking habits isn't the only thing he's revising. He thought of her as this mouse creeping through the world, and he thinks that was wrong as well. Because he remembers his mother - though she never really got the worst of it - and what she ran away into and how it killed her, and he remembers himself, and he remembers how he thought about running and it took him years. It took him so fucking long. So long, and by then he was wondering if he was just too far gone. If he wasn't going to get to come back. Wasn't going to be a whole person anymore.

He was. He did.

Or he is. Right now.

She looks at him again, what he can see of her eyes a little unfocused, as if he disturbed some kind of meditation. "Mm?"

"You're right here," he repeats. Emphatic. This is worth emphasizing. "Tryin'."

For a long moment she just keeps looking at him, half-lit. The light might have made her look older, the sharp shadows and lines, but instead it takes the years off her - many of which her husband probably put there - and she's young again. A version of her to which she probably said an unwilling goodbye a long time ago.

But we get to come back. Sometimes. If we try.

"Yeah," she says softly. "I guess I am."

He gives her a single nod, ducks his head. Looks down at his whiskey and then finishes it off, pours himself another - offers her the bottle and she shakes her head, puts up a hand - and he looks down at it some more.

"I know this girl," he says, very softly. "She's..." He laughs, just a breath, and leans his head back and stares up. Not at the sky. Not really at anything at all. The whiskey is settling into him - into a mostly empty stomach - and he's feeling warmer and looser now, relaxed. He still hurts - he hurts a lot, everywhere - but it's muted. Talking is easier. "She reads me poetry. You believe that? Fuckin'... Look at me. Poetry. Me."

He shakes his head in frank bafflement. Carol says nothing - doesn't agree or disagree. But he can feel her attention on him. He can feel her listening.

"But she's... There's this one. I remember." He remembers it because he asked to hear it more than once. His blood humming in the dark, coming back down from the hot imagining of her body, or just listening to her voice, knowing he might sleep better. Knowing it might ease the vicious knots in him, the wanting of her and the fear of losing her. Knowing it might take him back into the ruins with her, even if they couldn't actually go there - not the way they did before. To the fields and the water and the forest, take him back to something that was getting harder and harder to hold onto.

He remembers it. Part of it, anyway. He remembers it because it was only one of the things he thought over and over to himself in that darkness, repeated it like an incantation. Like a spell. Like he could invoke her and she would come to him.

"There was a new voice," he whispers, and falters a little. This hurts in so many different ways. All at once he misses her so much, and he hates the things he knows that tell him he's not ready to see her again, the things he can't ignore, because he's been so stupid but he's sure of this. This is right. This is the only way he can do it.

And he's sure Beth understands. Or he's sure she will.

"There was a new voice," he says again, stronger, and it all comes back, and he doesn't hear it in his own voice but in hers.

there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life you could save.

The words hang in the air after he falls silent. He can feel them stirring - almost hear them, like leaves. Might just be his imagination - he's so tired and it's been such a strange few days, even given how strange the last few weeks have been - but he wonders.

He wonders about a lot of things.

"We're gonna be okay," he says at last, turns his head and meets her gaze - hers steady, her face unreadable. "We're gonna figure it out."

"Figure what out?"

He releases a long breath and closes his eyes. Nothing about this is going to be easy. But he knew that. He knew it after he left her, that first night he went to her room. Touched her like that. Was with her like that. Was able to make her feel so good, loved her so much. What he knew then, heading back through the dark with the storm rolling toward him.

Knowing that he was going to fight for it.

"How to live in the world," he says, and says nothing else. Neither does she.

He needs to be here.

And now he needs to do what comes next.

Note: poem scrap is from "The Journey" by Mary Oliver.