Her son died in September.
Her son died in September, in her arms, in their home. In the end he was ready to go, but she wasn't ready to say goodbye. She cradled him against her heart, her husband's arms wrapped around both of them, and even though she begged him to open his eyes, he never did.
They buried him on a rainy day, and that seemed right. The sky didn't deserve to be brilliant blue, the sun didn't deserve to shine. She was quiet at the wake, the funeral, the burial. The sky was gray and the trees were gray and she was gray, faded around the edges as rain soaked her hair and they placed her child alone in the ground. James clasped her hand, firm and secure, the only thing that seemed familiar and safe anymore.
It still didn't seem real. It didn't seem real at all. There were moments when she forgot, when she thought she ought to go check on him, or that today would be a nice day to take him to the park, or what book should she read to him next, Peter Pan or Matilda or maybe The Wizard of Oz?
And then it would all come crashing back down to her, crushing her under the weight, and she would have to stop and close her eyes and let everything shift back into place, everything a little sharper and a little colder and a little harsher than it was before.
Her world was words, but she lost them. Her world was empty now, and silent. Her books stayed closed on the shelf because there was no one to listen to her read. Cards and letters piled up, unopened, because she knew what they would say and she didn't want to hear it. The flowers her colleagues and her husband's coworkers sent stayed in their vases till they rotted, their soft scents turning sickly sweet with decay.
Time heals all wounds, she was told, and as time went on, her wounds were bandaged and covered, her grief palatable for the general public. She opened the cards and letters, checking only the names but not reading their contents. She threw away the flowers and gave the vases away. She sent thank you cards. She left the social media groups for parents of terminally children, deleted the computer files of sleepless midnight internet searches that were no longer needed. She put away the photos, keeping a single picture in her nightstand drawer, a picture the way she wanted to remember him.
James filled his emptiness with traveling. He went on leave with the hospital in DC and kissed her goodbye for the moment, finding places where he could help other people's children. He called her often, his love for her warm in his voice over the phone. When he came home there was sunshine again, a brightness and a lightness that she couldn't create alone, but she understood that he needed to find his own ways to grieve, and she kissed him goodbye over and over again with an unspoken understanding, knowing he would find home again.
She went back to teaching, lecturing twice a week. She found that she'd missed it, but it wasn't enough. There were too many gaps, too many silences, and no matter how many words she knew, how many languages she knew, there was no way to fill it.
The closed door on the first floor haunted her. No matter how she tried to keep away, it lingered in the back of her mind, even when she took down the drawings that she'd hung up for him so long ago. She never dared to open it, but on the nights she couldn't sleep she sometimes allowed herself to sink down to the floor and lean against the wall, her hands over her face, and stay there for hours, waiting for him to call for her through the closed door and know he never would.
His father left on a Tuesday.
He was a smart child. Everybody said so. He should have seen this coming. But he didn't.
His parents fought. They always fought. When he was little- smaller than he was now- they had the courtesy to put on a polite face until he went to bed. At night he fell asleep to the sounds of his parents screaming at each other in the living room, faintly muffled by the closed door and the blankets pulled over his head.
Mommy is sick, his father told him when he was five years old, but he already knew that. He read it in a book somewhere- you always know after you are two., two is the beginning of the end. And he was two years old, just shy of three, when his mother placed him in his high chair and then forgot he was there, leaving him alone in the house to scream himself hoarse while she ran errands that she'd run the day before and tried to teach a class that wasn't scheduled for that afternoon.
That just happened sometimes. She would forget things, or vanish for a few hours, or lose her temper. That was all right. He knew she loved him.
He wasn't as sure that his father loved him. It was harder to see. His father tried, at least when he was younger. He was proud of him then. When they had neighborhood barbecues his father would pull down law books for him to read aloud like a party trick. His father coached his T-ball team, even though he was the littlest on the team and cried when fastballs whizzed past his head. He attended parent-teacher conferences when his mother couldn't ("I just can't leave the house today, I just can't!") and picked him up from school when his mother forgot ("I thought it was Saturday, I genuinely did!") but his father's good graces didn't last forever. His love was conditional, and he did not meet the terms.
His father came home later and later, until some nights he never left the office. Weekends were silent affairs, his mother swallowed up in books and his father finding every reason to make himself scarce.
Even through this, he never thought his father would actually leave.
He left not with a bang or even a whimper. Just a quiet resolution. Like his mind had been made up long ago, and he'd simply bided his time for the right moment.
He watched it happen, watched his parents become strangers before his very eyes, blurting out statistics because it was safer than to say don't make things change and I'm afraid and what will happen to me now?
The fear coiling in his chest grew fingers and clenched his heart when his mother spoke.
You could take Spencer with you. Just for a little while.
He knew a lot of things, but he didn't know his own mother didn't want to be responsible for him until that moment.
And his father said nothing. His father didn't want to be responsible for him either.
It was the first time that he truly realized that his parents were fallible, because even though he was smart ("your son is a prodigy, the brightest child his age that I've ever met") he still held the childish belief that his parents were perfect.
So his father left, and his mother went into her room and shut the door, and as his childish faith cracked it left its mark behind. The beginning of the end.
He went into the backyard, alone. There was almost no grass to speak of, the remainder barren and sharp, the ground still hot in the early autumn weather. He laid down, his arms stretched over his head, staring at the cloudless blue sky, listening to the sound of his heartbeat in his ears. There was a shift in his equilibrium, as if the world had been pulled out from under him and he was floating weightless and lost, alone in the universe, and no one would ever bring him down to safety again.
"It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone."
Author's Notes:
Here it is at last! The Spencer Blake AU!
There's a very angsty setup to this one- but I had to find a way to A) put Spencer in a place where he would end up needing to live with someone else, and B) I needed to get him to Washington DC. So there's going to be a couple of chapters of foundation work, but I promise there's a really good payoff! And let's be real- Spencer needs good parents, and the Blakes need a child to love. I can't wait for them to meet.
I hope you stick around! This prologue is pretty short, but the actual chapters will be a fair bit longer. And my tumblr is themetaphorgirl if you'd like to chat!
Thanks to Maeve, Brenna, and Maddy for letting me scream about this fic on a regular basis!