October 31, 2015
"It feels a little bit like stealing," Olivia confessed as they walked along.
"Say thank you, Riley," Paul prompted his son absent-mindedly.
"Tan yew!" Riley offered cheerily.
"It's not," Paul turned his attention once more to Olivia, smiling at her broadly beneath the wan autumn sun. "It's a community event, you don't have to be a church member to attend."
"Still, though."
Still, though, Olivia felt awkward, out of place, walking through the Methodist church parking lot side-by-side with Paul. It was Paul's idea, that Lindsey and Gabe join him and Riley at their church's annual trunk-or-treat event, and Olivia was grateful for the invitation, really she was; Noah was just a little too young for real trick-or-treating, and the church parking lot in the morning sunshine seemed safer than the street after dark. And it was normal, was so fucking normal; she'd dressed Noah up in a little pumpkin costume, and he looked absolutely precious, and she'd taken a million pictures of him on her phone already. Pictures she could print out, put in frames around their house, on her new desk in her new office, just like any normal mom would. This was their life now, and she meant to make it a good one, to give Noah a real childhood and happy memories he could cling to. Maybe one day twenty years from now Noah would bring some girl home, and Olivia could show off the pictures of her little pumpkin, and laugh, and not feel like an imposter in her own skin.
Bernie Stabler had dressed Elliot up like a carrot, once. Olivia could remember it so clearly, Bernie's desperation as she sat across the table from a stranger, showing Olivia those pictures, begging her to see that Bernie had not been a bad mother, to see that Bernie had tried. Olivia understood that desperation a little better now than she did back then.
"Look around you, Lindsey," Paul said, nudging her shoulder with his own. "Does anybody look unhappy to see you?"
Maybe he had a point. There were twenty, thirty cars gathered in the parking lot, trunks open and full of candy, and everywhere Olivia looked she saw smiling faces. There was a little booth at the edge of the lot selling bottled waters and brown paper bags of popcorn, and a rickety old speaker playing Christian songs, and the minister was wearing blue jeans, and he'd shaken her hand and told her he was glad she'd come.
It was a far cry from Halloween in the city; weird shit always seemed to happen on Halloween, and even if she wasn't working she'd inevitably find herself out on a case somewhere. The drunks and the EDPs came out in full force on Halloween; one year an entire contingent of men dressed up like stormtroopers had been brought in for questioning. Fin loved that, she remembered. He got a picture with them.
"Everybody here's so…nice," Olivia said. They'd reached the next car; Noah was holding tight to her hand but he'd learned that these nice folks were handing out candy, and he held out his plastic bag expectantly, blue eyes shining up at a grey-haired, matronly woman who crowed about how cute he was, called her friends over to see the little pumpkin.
"One of these days you're gonna have to tell me why you say nice like it's a bad word," Paul said to her as they broke away from the crowd of old ladies and ventured onward.
"One day maybe I will," Olivia said, shooting him a teasing smile. It was a lie; she'd never be able to tell him anything at all.
"Kathy Stabler!" Elliot barked at the nurse as he ran up to the front desk. "I'm looking for Kathy Stabler."
"Sir, I'm gonna have to ask you to take a seat -" the woman started to tell him, a dark expression on her face like she didn't appreciate his urgency, but he didn't appreciate her hesitation.
"My wife was in an accident and they brought her here," Elliot said impatiently. "I need to find her. I need to know if my son is with her."
"Give me just one second."
Elliot grit his teeth together and tried to hold still, tried not to pace or tap his fingers on the desk or otherwise give this woman cause to try to send him away again, but he felt as if he were coming apart at the seams. An accident, that's all the EMT would tell him over the phone; there had been an accident, and they brought Kathy to this hospital, and Elliot's mind was running wild, every possible worst case scenario playing like a film reel in the darkness every time he blinked. What if she was dead, in a coma, paralyzed? Where had she been going, on a sunny Saturday morning, and what had happened to her, exactly, and where the fuck was Eli, and what the fuck was he gonna do? An hour ago he'd been sitting in that church thinking about how he'd been unfaithful to his wife; thirty minutes ago he'd been listening to a priest tell him that he had to confess his sins to Kathy. How could he do that to her now, though? When she was hurt, and scared, how could he possibly compound her pain by telling her what he'd done?
What if she died, and he never got the chance?
"Sixth floor," the nurse said finally. "There's a desk up there, they'll be able to tell you about her condition."
Elliot meant to thank her, but he never quite got there; his feet were racing towards the elevators before the nurse even finished speaking.
It seemed to take an eternity, for the elevator to come, for it to carry him upstairs, for him to find someone who could help him, but eventually he did. Found a nice nurse with a pleasant face who told him that Kathy was in surgery, that one of her legs was broken, that her prognosis was good, that Eli was fine and in the bathroom and would join Elliot in the waiting room momentarily.
Which he did; Elliot had no sooner sat himself down in one of the hard plastic chairs in the waiting room than he heard a small voice cry out daddy! He launched to his feet, and caught Eli in his arms, held the boy close and tried to comfort him while his own heart was screaming. Eli was ok, and Kathy was going to be ok - eventually, hopefully, if God was good - but whether they knew it or not their family was already broken, and Elliot had been the one to do it.
How could I, he asked himself as he sat back down, pulled Eli down into his lap. That little boy, he was Elliot's whole world - or he was supposed to be - and he needed his parents, both of them, and what was I thinking?
He'd been thinking about her, about brown eyes and a heart as fierce as his own. He'd been thinking about himself, about all the things he'd never done and all the things he wished he had. He should have been thinking about them.
I'll be better, he told himself. God, please, let me be better.
"Two days in a row," Paul mused, smiling at her from the other side of the pillows. "I could get used to this."
"Don't," she warned him.
After the trunk or treat they'd all gone out for hamburgers and milkshakes, and Paul and Riley had helped Olivia carry Noah and his candy inside, and in the blink of an eye both boys had fallen fast asleep on the sofa, and it just made sense. It made sense, to carry them upstairs, tuck them into Noah's bed, let them sleep off the excitement of the morning. It made sense, to pick up the baby monitor, bring it into her room so she could keep an ear out for her son. It made sense, to fold herself up in Paul's arms, to let his gentle exuberance for her quiet her doubts, for however brief a time.
It made sense to fuck him.
Paul was a nice man, and he'd been good to her, and this was what people did, wasn't it? Normal people didn't carry decades of grief and violence like an albatross around their necks; normal people had normal relationships, not fraught with fear and self-recrimination. A normal woman could meet a normal man, fuck him on a Saturday afternoon while their children slept, and feel no guilt. Paul wasn't married, and he was nice and wasn't this what she was supposed to want? A man who could choose her, a man who wouldn't hurt her?
A man who didn't touch her the way Elliot did. A man who didn't know her, inside and out. A man who had not seen her at her worst, had not ever put her back together after she fell to pieces. A man whose affection did not burn her alive. If Elliot was a lightning strike what was Paul? A warm blanket, perhaps, comforting and soothing, not a devastating, ravenous hunger. It didn't matter, anyway; she couldn't have Elliot, and Paul was nice.
"There's something I gotta ask you," Paul said seriously. He rolled slowly onto his side, propped his head on one hand and reached for her with the other, his fingertips trailing over the tender skin of her chest, and as he touched her she fought the instinct to recoil, fear rising in her gut as it occurred to her that she knew, if not the exact words he meant to use, at least what it was that had triggered his curiosity.
It was the scars. His fingertips sought them out as he stared at her, telegraphed his intentions. It was too much to hope for, she thought, that he would just ignore them. Paul was a nice man, and nice men did not have girlfriends with scars like hers.
"Lorraine said your husband was…not very nice."
I'm such an idiot, Olivia thought. One casual remark, made on a night when she was tired and out of sorts, a remark she'd given no thought to since, had the potential now to spiral into disaster. She should've known better, she thought; the neighborhood she'd moved into was a close-knit one, and people talked, and all those people, they were loyal to one another, not to her. She should've seen this coming, should've known that Lorraine wouldn't keep her secret; she'd been a fool.
"Did he…is he the one who did this to you?"
"No," she said at once. That night with Lorraine, she'd been thinking about Elliot, and no Elliot was not the one who'd burned her. A part of her heart blamed him, blamed his absence, for Lewis, but it was a part of her heart she was not proud of, and tried not to entertain. William Lewis was a goddamn act of nature, like a hurricane or a volcano; there was no way to know if Elliot could've stopped him, and since she knew she'd drive herself crazy wondering about all the what ifs she did her best not to think of them at all.
"He'd never hurt me." Not on purpose. "I don't…I don't want to talk about what happened. But no, it wasn't him."
She'd never had to explain the scars to a lover, before. When it happened, in the months that followed, she was seeing Brian and Brian knew exactly what had been done to her and he never, not once, raised the subject himself. After Brian she'd been on her own for a bit, and then she brought Noah home and wasn't seeing anyone at all. The next person she'd slept with was Ed Tucker, and he'd known it all already, had seen the evidence photos for himself. Ed didn't need a primer on her past.
She'd not really given it any thought, before now. Hadn't thought about what she'd say if someone asked her about those marks, hadn't thought about Lewis at all in months, and now she found herself wholly unprepared for this conversation. Keep it simple, that was the advice Jackie had given her; the less details she offered the less she'd have to remember later.
But Paul was still watching her cautiously, his eyes warm and sympathetic, his affect that of a man patiently waiting for his lover to unburden herself to him. Maybe it would make her feel closer to him, if she was vulnerable with him now. Intimacy was about so much more than sex, and she knew that, and if this relationship with Paul was going to go anywhere at all she was going to have to learn how to share herself with him.
Not this, though, she thought. The secrets that had been burned into her skin were hers and hers alone, and no matter what he thought Paul was not ready to hear them. He might not ever be.
"I'm going to check on the boys," she said, and then she rolled away from him.
"I'm right here, Kathy," Elliot said, one of his hands gripping hers tight, the other gently brushing the hair back from her face. She was still out of it, drowsy from the anesthesia and limp in her hospital bed, but he spoke to her, just the same. "I'm right here," he promised her.
And Christ, but he wished he was somewhere else.