Chapter 85: we can find each other this way I believe

The bite in the air promised ice, and ice is exactly what it delivers.

Not much. It's not what he would call real sleet, when he gets up in the middle of the night and looks out to see. Nor is it really freezing rain. It's more of a freezing mist, a frigid haze that moves in and coats everything with a fine membrane of ice. Even at two in the morning, no illumination but a streetlight half lost in a blurry halo of ice crystals, he can tell that when the sun rises - assuming it does - it'll rise on one of those glass worlds he loved so much as a child, everything made new and unearthly in a way not even snow really achieves.

He stands at the window long enough to be sure of this, and then - smiling to himself - he goes back to bed.

He really should get some damn curtains, though.

The sun does rise, everything blown clear again, and it does rise on a glass world, so of course he has to get dressed and go walk around in it.

It's early, just after dawn, and the streets are silent, windows curtained and shaded. He didn't think about it at all beyond the most general kind of recollection, but three blocks away he realizes that he's done exactly what he used to do - risen early so he could see it before it was shattered. Except no one is going to shatter it now - or sure, people will just by virtue of moving around and going about the day, and kids will because that's what kids do, but there's no malice waiting for him when the sun hits a certain point. There's nothing specific to be afraid of, no one going to be cruel or make him be cruel with them. There's just...

There's simply the world, and living in it.

Nothing will be open yet - not that many things will be open on a small-town Sunday - but the coffee shop will be, and doing a fairly brisk business later on with people coming out of church. So he walks there, though it's a couple of miles, going swift until he's warm, breath steaming into the air and then smoking when he lights a cigarette, watching the town start to stir around him. People making their way out of houses to their cars and bound for First Baptist/Presbyterian/Methodist, rubbing cold hands, groggy and frequently petulant kids who would and possibly will cheerfully become atheists if it means they get to sleep in two days in a row. There's corn hanging on doors, wreaths of silk and plastic autumn leaves, squash and pumpkins. Happy cartoon pilgrims and turkeys in front yards. Somehow he never really noticed these before, and he doubts they all went up overnight.

Now and then he still feels like he's moving outside of everything. That he's looking in on something he won't ever truly be part of. No; more than now and then. A lot of the time.

But that's all right.

It's been a while since he saw Beth coming out of church, and he thinks he can treat himself. There's nothing suspicious about it. He arranges it so he's not even waiting there across the street. Just so happens to be passing, coffee in one hand. He gets waves from them. He waves back.

The ice is beginning to melt off everything, dripping in soft glittering rain. Beth is ducking out of the way of a dribble of it coming off the church's eaves when she catches his eye for a moment that stretches out and out, her hand lifting to tuck a strand of her hair back into place in slow motion. Her coat is still open and he can see the gray sweater she's wearing over a forest-green wool skirt that stops just below her knee. Very pretty. Very proper. Very demure.

It's not the first time he's looked at her like that, at this smiling happy Nice Girl with her Nice Family, and - with a wicked little flush - thought about what she's like when they're alone. What she's like now in his bed.

Fuck me. Oh my God, Daryl, fuck me harder, I want you to-

No conflict in this. There never was. Nothing is a front for anything. Not a scrap of artifice in her. She is and always was beautifully, deeply, gloriously complicated.

So is he.

He moves on.

Everything is taking on the feeling of simultaneously winding up and winding down, and it's not just the work he's doing - putting large parts of a farm to sleep for the winter. Of course during winter nothing on a farm really slows down - he didn't know that firsthand before but he's learning it now. Speed simply pops up elsewhere. The days are shortening and shortening, and he's getting to the farm shortly after dawn and going home well into dusk, if not later. Usually later, if he stays for dinner. It comes to him halfway through the week that they're about a month out from the shortest day of the year, and he has to pause, pitchfork in his hand, simply to let that sink in.

Wednesday night, he tells Beth about it on the phone, and he doesn't have to go into why it hit him so hard, and he's grateful for that. He's never spoken to her about it, never put it into words and put the words down between them, but he's pretty sure that he's not the only one who has picked up that significant elements of this whole thing are fitting the pattern of a very old story. He was wrong about that; he wouldn't still be here if the fit was perfect. But that in itself is why it hit him.

There are things he wants to tell her, to ask her, and the questions he's already posed to her are only the beginning. He can feel a lot more of them now, churning beneath a largely placid surface. That big scary future in its box is beginning to rattle around in there. He doesn't think he can keep it locked for much longer. It would be great in some respects to be able to continue taking this one day and hour and minute at a time - broken still into week-long blocks with the ecstatic promise of occasional weekend sleepovers - but the Daryl Dixon who could and almost certainly would have done so to the bitter end no longer exists.

There's more than just now. Now is ultimately all that matters because now is all that's real, but there is more.

He signed a lease. He put his literal name to the idea that there's more. He made a promise, and it's a promise rooted in time.

He's starting to wonder what other promises he might be capable of making.

On the subject of promises: He never made them. Not really. Not real ones. Some of it was that he always took promises seriously, always hated the idea of making and then breaking them, and refused to make any he wasn't sure he could keep. But the deeper and more fundamental reason was that there wasn't anything to promise, and no one to make the promise to. Who would have cared? What could he have offered? It's not just that he has nothing much to give Beth; for his entire life he hasn't had much to give anyone.

Or it felt like that. Now he knows a little better; he knows he did the best he could with Merle, that he made his share of mistakes but there were mistakes made on both sides, a lot of them, and those mistakes were almost unavoidable. Given what he had, who he was, who he is, he did the best he could have done. He doesn't blame himself for how it ended. He doesn't blame either of them.

Merle had his choices to make too. Now they both have to live with the consequences. Bad and good.

Wednesday night he talks to Beth about his pre-solstice realization. Before that, he drives home in the starry dark lost in the contemplation of endings, Annette's meatloaf still sitting warm and pleasantly dense in his stomach. Nothing that has ended so far has done so in a way he would have expected, and every single ending feels like the only one that could ever have come. Every single goodbye feels like a necessary one. Turning away from something and turning toward something else. He's still in the turn. Still swinging into the dark. Still facing an oncoming December.

He doesn't know if he's ever going to see Merle again. Sometimes he's sure he will, sooner or later. Sometimes he can't imagine doing so. But the truth is that he won't. He knows that. Even if he does, he won't be him, and Merle will no longer be Merle. The skeletons of those people will be there, but on the surface in many ways they'll be two strangers. They'll have to start over. Assuming that's even possible.

He wants to believe that.

He would never promise Merle that he'll see him again. He would never promise anything like that. The future is big and scary and entirely obscure; he still shies away from the idea of making any commitment that places him in a certain place at a certain not-yet time for a certain reason. Because what if he fucks up. What if he makes himself a liar.

But he thinks maybe he can promise to feel.

Closing his eyes and gripping the wheel, tracing internal fingers over invisible scar tissue. He doesn't know if he'll ever see Merle again. He can't make any promises concerning that.

But he'll always love his big brother. He can promise that much. And keep it. Even if the only person he's making the promise to is himself.

There are things he knows he feels, knows he will feel. Knows he can swear by. Make a vow.

Then there are the things he never saw coming.

They aren't talking on the phone every night now but they still make their little trade, when they can. Their little exchange. His words for her music. Her lying in her darkness and him lying in his, feeling her so close and knowing she's feeling the same. Fingers in the sheets, reaching for hers and almost believing he might find her hand. It doesn't hurt except in the softest, most pleasant way, and he still doesn't feel like he's in danger of starving. She doesn't sound like she is. This is so gentle, this kind of wanting her, even in its moments of fiercest heat, and he thinks he could go on feeling it for a long time without it becoming unbearable.

Without it becoming tiresome.

Sing for me. So she does, some songs he recognizes and some he doesn't. Some songs he knows aren't hers and some he's sure are, and he doesn't need to ask her where those songs came from to know. Those are less frequent, but they do come. But mostly it's the words of others, like the ones he reads, and they fit just as well.

I turn around to look at you, you light a cigarette
I wish I had the guts to bum one
but we've never met
and I hope that I don't fall in love with you

Sing, Beth.

but June is like an echo
of the sounds we never made
I swear they find me in my waking hours
thirty days like poison flowers

the wind in your hair
like a sigh, like a sigh

Beth, sing for me.

You read.

Oh, fine.

I don't want you just to sit down at the table.
I don't want you just to eat, and be content.
I want you to walk out into the fields
where the water is shining, and the rice has risen.
I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with the mud, like a blessing.

Now sing.

from the hills and up behind my town
is naked from the horizon down
the curvature is pressed against the raise
we walked up in the fields alone
and the silence fell just like a stone
that got lost in the wild blue and the gravel grey

More.

No. Your turn.

Not that he really wants to fight her on it.

Give me somethin' really special. Give me somethin' you can't get out of your head.

And he has one of those, doesn't he? More than one. Many. He can break himself open for her now. It's not even difficult. She broke him open a long time ago.

But this one.

The door fell open

and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.

Two people. One very obvious. But then the other.

She's quiet for a long time. He shudders and closes his eyes and presses his fingers against them, watches the pressure send sparks bursting against the inside of his lids. He doesn't have to give her context, or explain why it's this one and what it means. What it did to him when he found it. How it came out of nowhere and left him reeling.

If Beth Greene isn't really a goddess, Will Dixon wasn't ever really a monster. A bad man, a cruel man, a man whose very being was soaked in an utterly unremarkable kind of evil, but just a man all the same. A man who, once, maybe hadn't been so different from Merle, so different from Daryl, until something went so wrong as to become irreversible and he was too far gone, and he couldn't come back.

Maybe a tiny part of his father wanted to come back. Wanted to and never could.

"Do you think you could ever forgive him?"

"I don't know," he whispers.

"Do you want to?"

He can't speak. It's possible - it might be, it could be that it happens - that under a blanket of darkness, unseen by anyone, he nods.

and we talk on the phone at night
until it's daylight
and I feel clever
and I hear the slow in your speech
yeah, you're half asleep
say goodnight

Goodnight, Beth. Goodnight, girl, my sweet girl, goodnight. I don't want to have to say it but I do, so here it is. I love you, I love you, and goodnight.

The infamous Becca is proving to be intensely useful. Beth has promised to be careful to not overuse her, and it does seem as though the girl holds regular sleepovers - sometimes with one or two people and sometimes with many - and Beth has been a semi-regular attendee in the past. Annette and Hershel have never wondered at this; Becca and Beth have been friends since third grade, though not best friends, and Becca's family is fairly wealthy owing to something to do with her mother and they have a large finished basement with a very large TV and both a Playstation and XBox, in addition to a pool table and a pool. And Becca is a pastor's daughter and therefore implicitly trustworthy. Which is very funny.

Hershel and Annette aren't stupid by any means. But they are very trusting, and they appear to be sort of oblivious.

Fortunately.

So it's fine, and as far as he's been told Becca hasn't asked for many details - though she's asked for a few. How far Beth has gone, for one thing. What she's done. What she gets up to. This isn't odd, nor is it alarming. It makes all the sense in the world to Daryl that a girl would want at least some of the details of her friends' sex lives, and if her cooperation is affording him and Beth opportunities to do exactly that, it even strikes him as a pretty fair trade.

And she won't talk. Beth trusts that. So he does too.

So on Thursday Beth texts him, tells him that she can come over again on Friday night and stay. She'll have to leave early, no lazy morning and lingering afternoon, but he doesn't even sort of give a fuck; it's another night where he can go to sleep with her in his arms, wake up with her there...

And feel like it could happen again. And again and again. Like it's possible.

On Friday afternoon - cold and gray and blustery - he's helping Annette shuck corn in the kitchen. Talking in an idle way about Thanksgiving - listening to her talk, mostly, but then much less idle and breaking a little in a way he doesn't expect but doesn't want to stop, and telling her directly and straightly, with few words but no evasiveness, that he never in his life had a real Thanksgiving. That he grew up poor, incredibly poor, and his parents weren't much to write home about, and he didn't have any of this.

That this town is the first place in his life in which he's really felt like he could make a home.

That he's happy she asked him to come.

She listens. His own honesty is like a kick in the spine but only in terms of force, not pain. He feels his brain and then his mouth forming those few words, giving them to her, and he feels the last of the version of himself from those early days of August dying and drying up and falling away like a snake's shed skin. He can look at this woman - yes, he's looking at her, not the whole time and a lot of it down at his moving hands, rough and calloused and scarred, the hands he's put on her daughter, but even so - and he can tell her these things and he doesn't have to be afraid of being judged, of being told he doesn't belong and isn't wanted in this nice bright world, of being told he has no place here and he has to go.

He's not a kid anymore. He's not a child. He's a man.

I love your daughter, and she's why. She's not all of why, she didn't do all of this, the only person who can make you well is you, but she's why, and I love her. And that much I can promise.

That much I can give her.

He's quiet for a while, and after that while, though she still doesn't speak, she reaches out and covers his moving hand with hers, and stops him. And then he really can't look at her at all.

He's not a piece of shit. He stopped believing that a while ago. He's a good man, or he can be. He's trying and that's what matters. But also?

He's kind of a piece of shit.

So that night Beth comes over.

And it's not her fault, it has nothing whatsoever to do with her or her presence and it almost certainly would have happened anyway, it's just one of those wrong-place-wrong-time deals and no one is ultimately to blame except one specific person, and in the end it's good that they're there when they are and it ends the way it does, but that's when something else goes bad.

Note: Songs/poems are, in order:

"I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love With You" by Tom Waits
"Song For the Fireflies" by Josh Ritter
"Rice" by Mary Oliver
"Come and Find Me" by Josh Ritter
"A Visitor" by Mary Oliver
and of course "Be Good" by Waxahatchee.