"Homewards"
Rating: Nice'n'clean.
Category: Falls under A for the presence of an Angsting Abby
Spoilers: Present Day Season 7.
Disclaimer: I am but a mortal. These characters fortunes (misfortunes?) are at another slave drivers will and command... And it isn't as kinky as it sounds.
Author Notes: Eeek. Yet another mother-daughter fiasco. Run with tail between legs if that's not your cup of mocha, otherwise, please don't hesitate to continue...:)
Summary: Abby confronts her past, Maggie confronts Abby confronting her past.
* * * *
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and they cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
--T. S. Eliot
* * * *
Frustration, noun: To be unwanted, and, then, finally, to be needed.
* * * *
Her mother had been amazing.
She had this way, of pulling rays of hope out from thin air, thin strips of nightmares, and all of a sudden the world wasn't such an evil, lonely, hateful place.
She sees pictures of herself, from then, in her arms, when she was three, four. Her mother's face pressed against her cheek, arms snuggled around her, clinging to her, for a million selfish and unselfish reasons, clinging to her because she loved her and she had been that ray of hope for her mother. Being a ray of hope entails a lot of responsibilities. And lots of lonely, exhausted nights, spent up late offering words of reassurance and comfort when you didn't believe in them. Making sure that no, the electric boards weren't going to cut all the supplies, that yes, they would have hot water for the next few weeks, and that it was OK, everything was going to be OK.
Even if she knew, even if Abby knew that it wouldn't be.
She wrote to her this morning. Her mom. Her Maggie. Said some really nice things, and other things that made her want to scream and stamp her feet and make a scene, and then she'd say some really nice things again. It's her mother's charm. The yin and yang she combines only too potently.
She wants to see her.
Standing by her open locker, she reads it for perhaps the millionth time within the hour, searching for something, something tangible, something that she can let herself believe, something to tell her that it's going to be OK. All she finds are empty promises and kissy kissy faces.
She hears voices and the note crumples in her hands, becoming a wad of second thoughts.
"Just be patient, and they shall come and seek you." Dave's telling Carter as the door falls shut behind them.
Carter turns to grin at him questioningly. "What is that? Zen and the Art of Dating?"
Dave gives him a wise eyebrow grin in return. "Oh no. This is the Tao of Dave."
Carter laughs. "The Tao of Dave?"
His eyes flash with playful-seriousness. "Don't mock the Tao Carter."
Carter shakes his head and grins, arms raised passively. "Was doing no such thing."
Dave continues. "-Only last night, there were these three ladies at this bar that I went to and they had absolutely no trouble with _this_ Tao."
Carter chuckles lightly to himself and watches the other man flop into a couch in the corner of the room. "How do you manage to walk Dave?"
Dave smiles. "Acquired talent. Years of practice. Play nice and some day I might even teach you."
"Dave handing out dating advice? Isn't that like 'the blind, leading the blind'?" She says, and they both turn to notice her, Carter smirking at her comment, Dave playing the wounded puppy.
She sighs and turns to share her grin with Carter; mocking Dave has become a pet hobby of theirs. They were considering starting a club. Make Weaver a residing President, based on her truly un-rivaled ability to Mock Dave.
She gives her locker another long, hearty stare, flicking through layers of unread journals and partially digested sandwiches –and Jesus, just what the hell did that used to be? Cringing, and promising herself to bring in some high strength bleach and deodorizer sometime this century, she slams the locker shut and turns to go.
Dave and Carter are both busy with their respective duties as residents. Dave's version of this anyway, which seems to involve lots of lying back on sofas with the latest issue of Rolling Stone on hand. She guessed that his Playboy was otherwise occupied.
She sighs and with bag over left shoulder moves to leave. She's several feet away from the door, when the feel of the crumpled paper sucks her back into reality. She stares at it for a few solid seconds, debating and doubting its existence. There's a dull ache in her chest. Right where her heart should be. She feels tears rise. It's involuntary. A reflex that she's developed over the years.
"Um, Carter...you free for a minute?" She turns to face him as she says this, one hand on the door, the other clutching at this wad of childhood traumas.
He looks up at her, the playful look in his eyes vanishing as they meet hers. He looks back down at the coffee machine with longing, and then back at her. Picking up his jacket, he nods. "Sure Abby."
They make a pit stop at Doc McGoos, grabbing two cups of hot coffee and then walking out in to what the weathermen would have them believe is spring. It's cold, and she tucks her hands under her armpits for temporary relief.
They stand, side by side, on the corner of McGoos for a while. Watching cars honk and roar and dissolve into the distance. Listening to the sound of emergencies and Volvos and people blur past them, living and breathing and moving along and then away. This is their form of meditation, their little escapism. Becoming One with rush hour traffic. Hypnotized by the normalness of it all.
"I, um, I received this this morning," and the crumpled sheet of paper with curly handwriting and kissy faces and loving invitations is transferred over to him. He looks up at her, seeking an explanation and when none is given smoothes the top out and begins to read.
This makes her feel silly. How she can still manage to be so affected by her. It's a simple mother-daughter letter. With questions of Meeting The Right One and When Am I Going To Be A Grand Mother and Did You Wash Behind Your Ears type nonsense. It's not like there are family secrets scrawled in between the lines.
It's just a simple letter.
From the most complicated person she knows.
He's looking back up at her. "So you don't want to go?"
She takes in a breath of cold air and sighs. The feeling of wanting to stamp her feet surfaces. "I...I don't know. Why now? I mean maybe she wants something from me, maybe she needs some money or some place to stay or someone to come and rescue her from whatever it is that she's managed to get herself into. Nothing for months and months and now this? It's just typical of her. She wants something from me Carter."
He purses his lips and shrugs, handing her back the note. "Sounds like she _wants_ to see you."
She groans and makes a fast motion with her hand. "See, this is exactly how my mother works. Makes it sound as though I've been the one avoiding her, running from her, when she has never given me any reason to trust or believe her."
Her eyes singe with anger, and years of frustration, and she has to look away.
She hates how Maggie can still affect her.
He lets the traffic consume them for a while, and she closes her eyes, swallowing her anger and her hurt and her tears. She sighs and bites at her lip.
"I don't think I can do this again Carter. I'm so tired of rescuing her or babying her or letting her get to me. I don't have the strength to do this again."
She can hear him shift besides her, his eyes dancing from the wheels of moving vehicles and then back to hers. "So what did you need me for? Sounds like you're pretty set."
She shifts her gaze from each of his eyes; that question attacking her and her whole train of thought crumbles. She's tempted to tell him to go away, that he's right, why does she need him, just out of spite of his honesty. Honesty has a tendency to burn her. And she's still licking too many old ones.
She looks away, when his lips tilt up in a sincere smile. Her hands making a mess of her hair. "I don't know Carter. I guess I wanted you to tell me to go to her, I wanted you to give me a list of reasons to go and then...then I could compare it with my own list of reasons not to go. I don't know Carter. I don't know why."
He nods, and there's more lip pursing, thoughts buzzing across his irises. He shifts his gaze back to something else, head tilting up to observe sky and then back to traffic, the silence of vehicles and life surrounding them, drowning them.
She joins his stare, raising coffee cup to mouth and then swallowing. All the caffeine feeding her deprived and tired neurons. The heat warming her lips and her mouth, her hands encircling the Styrofoam, seeking more warm coffee comfort.
"So...she's your mother. That's one reason to go."
She nods as if accepting this with a pinch of salt. "Genetically."
"She sounds as though she's taking her medication, that she's not doing so bad. That's another reason."
She gives a soft snort of disbelief, eyes rolling. "I'll have to see that one to believe it."
He thinks again. "And thirdly..." he trails off, and his eyes return to hers, as he takes a tentative sip of his coffee, "I think that maybe you need this more than you think you do... That maybe you have more than enough strength. I think that maybe this is exactly what you need."
He says, having the definition of "closure" down pat.
And she's again tempted to tell him to go. Tell him that she needs to think. Tell him that she needs to go away and think and deride all his presumptions about her and her life. Pull them apart into caricatures just so that the truth behind them can lose itself in their surreal ness.
She hates that he could be right. Maybe she does need this. And she hates that. She hates that she needs anything.
She sighs and presses the coffee cup against her lips as she watches him. Filing him under "H" for "mysteries of her life."
She suddenly has a vision of herself walking up her front doorsteps, baggage falling beneath her as her mother's hands come up and pull her against her, and they become just another mother-daughter hugging. Her mother showing her things, her new job, her new apartment, the new designs she's managed to scrawl out for bridesmaid dresses for that When Abby, When Abby Wedding of hers that she's already gotten all scripted out in her head. And then they'll laugh over old photos, watching favourite old movies. Just another mother-daughter.
"Weaver..."
He looks back at her, and shakes his head, as if flicking through a list of excuses that he has stashed away for this very type of situation. She wouldn't doubt it. He's like a boy scout that way. Always prepared.
"Your...gamma...your gamma just passed away. Has your gamma passed away yet?"
She shakes her head with a smile. "I'm saving that one."
He purses his lips again. "Grandfather?"
She sighs and grins. She feels as though she's time warped right back into ninth grade. Sneaking notes across desks and home rooms, asking for believable reasons as to why you just missed two weeks of algebra and only algebra. A string of relatives suddenly having tragic accidents and meetings with ecoli.
And then she's speaking again, her voice determined and gritty. Like she's been planning and waiting to do this her whole life, and suddenly, hey presto, a decent excuse emerges, and she's liberated to do just that, only finding that she doesn't even know where to begin.
"Will...will you come with me?" She asks and then looks away.
He looks up from his coffee sharply, their eyes holding. "You really need to do this yourself Abby."
Something else to file away in that cabinet of hers.
"Like I want to spend time alone with the woman who was responsible for the destruction of my family. You owe it to me to come, Carter." It comes out light hearted, but she's being too honest. She doesn't want to do this alone. She wants to do this, and she doesn't want for it to be alone. She does too many things alone, she's alone too many times, and she doesn't need this to be one of them.
He turns to tilt a semi-apologetic smile at her. "I...I think it would be good for you --to get a break from this place, a break from everyone here... But give me a phone call when you get there, tell me how things are going, OK?"
She nods, and shakes her head. Surrendering to this. Wondering just how on earth he managed to talk her in to doing it. Conveniently forgetting any of the parts that she just played.
* * * *
Frustration, noun: Starved...only to be given a fleeting memory of a feast.
* * * *
Weaver can be too trusting sometimes.
My grandfather on my father's side had a turn for the worse, she said, It's looking pretty bad, she said, Would it be asking for too much, she said.
If she suspected anything, she didn't show it.
Abby was grateful for that.
The plane leaves in four hours, a return trip to bury skeletons and organize Peace Talks, between the last person that she can be peaceful with, all underway.
Luka's slouching against the hallway, and she can see him wanting to say something, his eyes flickering from her travel case, back up to her lips and then her eyes.
It's three days. Only three days.
"So...um, don't do anything I wouldn't do...I'll miss you." And the words come out empty, their meaning dissolved in the search for their meaning.
He smiles bittersweetly, and walks up to her, suddenly, and she's taken by surprise as he pulls her against him in an intimate way that he doesn't do every day, his male odor, his male aura enveloping her, and she sinks into him, his chest, his warmth. Finding protection from the big bad world.
And then, like that, like seeing eclipses and experiencing the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it's over, and her skin is left with the memory of his warmth. He's standing away from her, a foot of emptiness dividing them, and she wonders if it's a permanent distance, if it's the distance of walls built up by decades of pain and hurt and loneliness. If there's a footbridge that she might some day find, to cross it.
"Are you sure you don't want me to come?" He says, their eyes flickering and dancing from one another.
She shakes her head gently, "No. No. I...I think I have to do this."
He understands, and his head dips up and down by miniscule degrees to demonstrate this.
Quickly going through a list of the things that she needs, tapping back pockets for Visas and Legal Documents, looking for that one forgotten thing that she can spend the next two decades searching for fruitlessly.
Everything's where everything should be.
With one more smile, and a flick of her hand, she's just a memory of warmth in his front room.
* * * *
Planes didn't scare her.
The fear of being on that one plane out of however many billion that for whatever reason falls out of the sky in a ball of flames and screaming passengers doesn't even trespass her thoughts.
Her hands clutch at the hand rests, and she leans back against her seat, the smell of other previous too-sweaty passengers who had made their knuckles whiten with the power of their minds submerging her. She takes those fabled deep breaths that supposedly cleanse and calm and rationalize.
She almost hyperventilates.
There's a Walt Disney movie sending animal shaped images across every other passenger's blank faces. Kids play tic-tac-toe some seats behind her. Men flirt and women laugh. Stewardesses standing around looking ready and prepared to hand out warm towels during apocalypses and the stuff that comes before.
She has an oxygen mask within arms reach and a plastic cardboard of the 101 Calm Things To Do During an Emergency folded neatly in the pocket of the seat in front.
No advice on how to track down the past and beat it into submission, no advice or cute diagrams on how to let go and move on from all those other small apocalypses that everyone takes part in every day of their lives.
She takes another deep breath.
Her fingers hungrily tapping away at the armrest for a cigarette, a muscle relaxant, a shot gun to aim right into Mickey Mouse's bowtie because if they see one more fairytale ending they're going to explode.
They grudgingly settle on flicking through the obligatory issue of Pretty Women Wearing Too Tiny Pantsuits and Then Maybe a Crossword or Two About The Great Old States of America.
There's static and then the air fills with the captain's deep, resonant voice, reminding them of their seatbelts and their destinations and to have a safe journey home, and there's a shifting as the passengers move to resist the effects of gravity.
Florida's suddenly just outside her window. Dark smudges suddenly gaining front doors and double glazed windows. The landscape becoming a city becoming an airport becoming the place where she grew up.
And Abby taps away at her armrest, wishing she had the ability to sublimate.
* * * *
Frustration, noun: Home and miles and miles away.
* * * *
"No, I just arrived."
Her hands trail up and down the phone receiver, that need for nicotine beckoning them all too easily and seductively. She thinks she has memorized every licensed and able K-Mart on the taxi drive over there.
She questions all those statistics that made her give up.
Did you know that non-smokers die every day?
She bets that it's been medically proven, dying with anticipation.
There's a rustled gap at the other end of the line. "So...?"
She sighs. "So...I called the number that she left with me, and I uh, left a message on her machine."
"...Abby." He sighs, sounding like a disappointed father.
She shrugs, a gesture wasted in the empty room. "If she wants to talk to me then she can give me a call. I want to give her some time to prepare before she sees me. So that she quickly find a job and convince me of this wonderful "transformation" she's undergone."
If he were in the room, she would imagine him giving her an eyebrow raise, as though asking for the real, actual, reason. But he isn't and so can't and moves on. "...How's it like, in Florida?"
It's comforting, his voice, the familiar sound of a friendly voice from her future, transported over a dozen cable wires and satellites into her past. "Oh it's OK." She grins. "It's been sunny non-stop since I arrived, everyone walks around in tiny bikinis and next to nothing else. How's Chicago?"
She can hear him smile dryly. "Chicago's great, as always. Just one endless beach party. I think it's raining today. And then tomorrow and a lot of the next day also. Lots of nice weather when you get back though, so don't forget to do that," He pauses, and there's a shifting in the background sounds, a sudden silence.
She smiles wryly, "It's just three days, and then I'll be right back to picking up bed pans and being everyone's favourite nurse."
Carter pauses, and the sounds of her alone in a strange hotel bed with starched sheets and really stiff pillows and a window that doesn't drown out all the sounds of a night in Florida surround her, and she's back to wanting a cigarette.
"Call me...if...call me, if you need to, OK?"
She's smiling again. "Sure...thanks Carter...bye."
"Bye Abby."
And then there's the dial tone, and she's already finding her wallet and looking for the nearest sign of tobacco smoke and a Ben&Jerry's retailer.
* * * *
Frustration, noun: The not knowing, living with the unexpected, knowing to expect the unexpected.
* * * *
The rain was something unforeseen and all the newscasters were left looking humble and apologetic, ties being straightened and then straightened again.
She continues to walk through it all, as it speeds towards the earth, striking cement and metal and running shrieking girls wearing next to nothing else. Walks through it all, like Moses parting the dead sea, only to have the laws of thermodynamics re-establish themselves, the water coming thundering back down to Earth in drops and drips and drops. Thick with anticipation; the prelude to a Noah's Flood.
Her shirt sticks to her skin, the water binding them together, draining through her, and she can feel the new packet of cigarettes dissolving in her front pocket. She wouldn't doubt that this was God's own special way of having her remain nicotine free. Sending a storm over to the sunny state of Florida to disrupt any plans that she might have of getting to sleep that night.
She throws a glance at her watch; swimming numbers inform her that it's almost eleven in the night. The streets around her are familiar. Backdrops to first kisses and games of hop scotch.
She could find her way home from here without a second thought.
An underwater trip down the backstreets of her childhood.
In the years leading up to her mother's breakdown, she suffered from depression and found it hard to keep a worthwhile job. Her dad would have to work overtime to compensate, and when Abby would come home from school she would find her mother buried underneath a mountain of bed sheets, refusing to talk to anyone, Abby's brother and her seeking comfort in front of the TV or at friends houses, only understanding that they wanted to be a million miles away from that place they called home.
And on the good days, on the days when her synapses and neurotransmitters would perform a manic one-eighty, all of this would be forgotten by their hunt for buried treasure in the living room, by the excitement in her mother's voice as they would run outside in the pouring rain, skidding through puddles and building whole Roman Empires out of mud.
And then they would come home to find her, crying and screaming in her pajamas, and they were silent observers as their father would lower his voice, approaching her, cooing softly as you would to a petrified and dangerous animal, and this would provoke her to lash out in a fit of hysteria, her dad forced into locking them in a room until yet another world disaster had been averted.
This became their routine for years.
The dance they did.
Looking back on it all, she understands why her father would want to just pick up and leave it all behind. Not content until at least five national states had been tossed between them. She wonders what her life would have been like should he have told her of his plans, had they made their escape together.
She used to think that it was somehow all her fault. In that awkward, innocent way that most eight year olds do. That all those years of sneaking out chocolate cookies, and telling white lies, and swearing when no grown-ups were around to hear, that all those years had caught up with her, and this, her mother, her dad, this was all her fault. On some cosmic level this was retribution. This was fair.
The rain was coming down thickly now, and she lifts the collar of her shirt up, beginning at a run to the relative desert of the hotel room.
Her mother had left a message on her machine when she returned.
Toweling her hair and stripping down and out of the soiled jeans and shirt, she pressed the blinking red button and listened as she made a hunt for dry clothes.
"Abby? Abby?! This is your mother, call me right away!" Her voice practically shouted, continuing to leave a string of numbers.
She froze, nailed to the bed.
Another message: "Abby, where are you? Why haven't you called yet? Where are you? Where's my Abby? Call me right now!"
She stares at the phone for maybe seconds, maybe lifetimes. Everything suddenly too cold and wet and real. Her head in her hands as she sits on the bleached sheets, her throat tightening, her mother's voice strangling her.
She said she was on meds. She promised that she was on meds. The letter promised that she was taking the right meds. She couldn't have been manic. She was just happy. Happy to hear from her.
Her resolve, all the courage that she had built up, faltering, shaking.
She lets herself cry. She was alone and she could let herself cry. And with head in hands she waits.
From her window the rain continued to fall. Water losing to the cement, and yet continuing on, undismayed, another water dance with the devil; waiting for the outcome to change.
* * * *
Rating: Nice'n'clean.
Category: Falls under A for the presence of an Angsting Abby
Spoilers: Present Day Season 7.
Disclaimer: I am but a mortal. These characters fortunes (misfortunes?) are at another slave drivers will and command... And it isn't as kinky as it sounds.
Author Notes: Eeek. Yet another mother-daughter fiasco. Run with tail between legs if that's not your cup of mocha, otherwise, please don't hesitate to continue...:)
Summary: Abby confronts her past, Maggie confronts Abby confronting her past.
* * * *
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and they cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
--T. S. Eliot
* * * *
Frustration, noun: To be unwanted, and, then, finally, to be needed.
* * * *
Her mother had been amazing.
She had this way, of pulling rays of hope out from thin air, thin strips of nightmares, and all of a sudden the world wasn't such an evil, lonely, hateful place.
She sees pictures of herself, from then, in her arms, when she was three, four. Her mother's face pressed against her cheek, arms snuggled around her, clinging to her, for a million selfish and unselfish reasons, clinging to her because she loved her and she had been that ray of hope for her mother. Being a ray of hope entails a lot of responsibilities. And lots of lonely, exhausted nights, spent up late offering words of reassurance and comfort when you didn't believe in them. Making sure that no, the electric boards weren't going to cut all the supplies, that yes, they would have hot water for the next few weeks, and that it was OK, everything was going to be OK.
Even if she knew, even if Abby knew that it wouldn't be.
She wrote to her this morning. Her mom. Her Maggie. Said some really nice things, and other things that made her want to scream and stamp her feet and make a scene, and then she'd say some really nice things again. It's her mother's charm. The yin and yang she combines only too potently.
She wants to see her.
Standing by her open locker, she reads it for perhaps the millionth time within the hour, searching for something, something tangible, something that she can let herself believe, something to tell her that it's going to be OK. All she finds are empty promises and kissy kissy faces.
She hears voices and the note crumples in her hands, becoming a wad of second thoughts.
"Just be patient, and they shall come and seek you." Dave's telling Carter as the door falls shut behind them.
Carter turns to grin at him questioningly. "What is that? Zen and the Art of Dating?"
Dave gives him a wise eyebrow grin in return. "Oh no. This is the Tao of Dave."
Carter laughs. "The Tao of Dave?"
His eyes flash with playful-seriousness. "Don't mock the Tao Carter."
Carter shakes his head and grins, arms raised passively. "Was doing no such thing."
Dave continues. "-Only last night, there were these three ladies at this bar that I went to and they had absolutely no trouble with _this_ Tao."
Carter chuckles lightly to himself and watches the other man flop into a couch in the corner of the room. "How do you manage to walk Dave?"
Dave smiles. "Acquired talent. Years of practice. Play nice and some day I might even teach you."
"Dave handing out dating advice? Isn't that like 'the blind, leading the blind'?" She says, and they both turn to notice her, Carter smirking at her comment, Dave playing the wounded puppy.
She sighs and turns to share her grin with Carter; mocking Dave has become a pet hobby of theirs. They were considering starting a club. Make Weaver a residing President, based on her truly un-rivaled ability to Mock Dave.
She gives her locker another long, hearty stare, flicking through layers of unread journals and partially digested sandwiches –and Jesus, just what the hell did that used to be? Cringing, and promising herself to bring in some high strength bleach and deodorizer sometime this century, she slams the locker shut and turns to go.
Dave and Carter are both busy with their respective duties as residents. Dave's version of this anyway, which seems to involve lots of lying back on sofas with the latest issue of Rolling Stone on hand. She guessed that his Playboy was otherwise occupied.
She sighs and with bag over left shoulder moves to leave. She's several feet away from the door, when the feel of the crumpled paper sucks her back into reality. She stares at it for a few solid seconds, debating and doubting its existence. There's a dull ache in her chest. Right where her heart should be. She feels tears rise. It's involuntary. A reflex that she's developed over the years.
"Um, Carter...you free for a minute?" She turns to face him as she says this, one hand on the door, the other clutching at this wad of childhood traumas.
He looks up at her, the playful look in his eyes vanishing as they meet hers. He looks back down at the coffee machine with longing, and then back at her. Picking up his jacket, he nods. "Sure Abby."
They make a pit stop at Doc McGoos, grabbing two cups of hot coffee and then walking out in to what the weathermen would have them believe is spring. It's cold, and she tucks her hands under her armpits for temporary relief.
They stand, side by side, on the corner of McGoos for a while. Watching cars honk and roar and dissolve into the distance. Listening to the sound of emergencies and Volvos and people blur past them, living and breathing and moving along and then away. This is their form of meditation, their little escapism. Becoming One with rush hour traffic. Hypnotized by the normalness of it all.
"I, um, I received this this morning," and the crumpled sheet of paper with curly handwriting and kissy faces and loving invitations is transferred over to him. He looks up at her, seeking an explanation and when none is given smoothes the top out and begins to read.
This makes her feel silly. How she can still manage to be so affected by her. It's a simple mother-daughter letter. With questions of Meeting The Right One and When Am I Going To Be A Grand Mother and Did You Wash Behind Your Ears type nonsense. It's not like there are family secrets scrawled in between the lines.
It's just a simple letter.
From the most complicated person she knows.
He's looking back up at her. "So you don't want to go?"
She takes in a breath of cold air and sighs. The feeling of wanting to stamp her feet surfaces. "I...I don't know. Why now? I mean maybe she wants something from me, maybe she needs some money or some place to stay or someone to come and rescue her from whatever it is that she's managed to get herself into. Nothing for months and months and now this? It's just typical of her. She wants something from me Carter."
He purses his lips and shrugs, handing her back the note. "Sounds like she _wants_ to see you."
She groans and makes a fast motion with her hand. "See, this is exactly how my mother works. Makes it sound as though I've been the one avoiding her, running from her, when she has never given me any reason to trust or believe her."
Her eyes singe with anger, and years of frustration, and she has to look away.
She hates how Maggie can still affect her.
He lets the traffic consume them for a while, and she closes her eyes, swallowing her anger and her hurt and her tears. She sighs and bites at her lip.
"I don't think I can do this again Carter. I'm so tired of rescuing her or babying her or letting her get to me. I don't have the strength to do this again."
She can hear him shift besides her, his eyes dancing from the wheels of moving vehicles and then back to hers. "So what did you need me for? Sounds like you're pretty set."
She shifts her gaze from each of his eyes; that question attacking her and her whole train of thought crumbles. She's tempted to tell him to go away, that he's right, why does she need him, just out of spite of his honesty. Honesty has a tendency to burn her. And she's still licking too many old ones.
She looks away, when his lips tilt up in a sincere smile. Her hands making a mess of her hair. "I don't know Carter. I guess I wanted you to tell me to go to her, I wanted you to give me a list of reasons to go and then...then I could compare it with my own list of reasons not to go. I don't know Carter. I don't know why."
He nods, and there's more lip pursing, thoughts buzzing across his irises. He shifts his gaze back to something else, head tilting up to observe sky and then back to traffic, the silence of vehicles and life surrounding them, drowning them.
She joins his stare, raising coffee cup to mouth and then swallowing. All the caffeine feeding her deprived and tired neurons. The heat warming her lips and her mouth, her hands encircling the Styrofoam, seeking more warm coffee comfort.
"So...she's your mother. That's one reason to go."
She nods as if accepting this with a pinch of salt. "Genetically."
"She sounds as though she's taking her medication, that she's not doing so bad. That's another reason."
She gives a soft snort of disbelief, eyes rolling. "I'll have to see that one to believe it."
He thinks again. "And thirdly..." he trails off, and his eyes return to hers, as he takes a tentative sip of his coffee, "I think that maybe you need this more than you think you do... That maybe you have more than enough strength. I think that maybe this is exactly what you need."
He says, having the definition of "closure" down pat.
And she's again tempted to tell him to go. Tell him that she needs to think. Tell him that she needs to go away and think and deride all his presumptions about her and her life. Pull them apart into caricatures just so that the truth behind them can lose itself in their surreal ness.
She hates that he could be right. Maybe she does need this. And she hates that. She hates that she needs anything.
She sighs and presses the coffee cup against her lips as she watches him. Filing him under "H" for "mysteries of her life."
She suddenly has a vision of herself walking up her front doorsteps, baggage falling beneath her as her mother's hands come up and pull her against her, and they become just another mother-daughter hugging. Her mother showing her things, her new job, her new apartment, the new designs she's managed to scrawl out for bridesmaid dresses for that When Abby, When Abby Wedding of hers that she's already gotten all scripted out in her head. And then they'll laugh over old photos, watching favourite old movies. Just another mother-daughter.
"Weaver..."
He looks back at her, and shakes his head, as if flicking through a list of excuses that he has stashed away for this very type of situation. She wouldn't doubt it. He's like a boy scout that way. Always prepared.
"Your...gamma...your gamma just passed away. Has your gamma passed away yet?"
She shakes her head with a smile. "I'm saving that one."
He purses his lips again. "Grandfather?"
She sighs and grins. She feels as though she's time warped right back into ninth grade. Sneaking notes across desks and home rooms, asking for believable reasons as to why you just missed two weeks of algebra and only algebra. A string of relatives suddenly having tragic accidents and meetings with ecoli.
And then she's speaking again, her voice determined and gritty. Like she's been planning and waiting to do this her whole life, and suddenly, hey presto, a decent excuse emerges, and she's liberated to do just that, only finding that she doesn't even know where to begin.
"Will...will you come with me?" She asks and then looks away.
He looks up from his coffee sharply, their eyes holding. "You really need to do this yourself Abby."
Something else to file away in that cabinet of hers.
"Like I want to spend time alone with the woman who was responsible for the destruction of my family. You owe it to me to come, Carter." It comes out light hearted, but she's being too honest. She doesn't want to do this alone. She wants to do this, and she doesn't want for it to be alone. She does too many things alone, she's alone too many times, and she doesn't need this to be one of them.
He turns to tilt a semi-apologetic smile at her. "I...I think it would be good for you --to get a break from this place, a break from everyone here... But give me a phone call when you get there, tell me how things are going, OK?"
She nods, and shakes her head. Surrendering to this. Wondering just how on earth he managed to talk her in to doing it. Conveniently forgetting any of the parts that she just played.
* * * *
Frustration, noun: Starved...only to be given a fleeting memory of a feast.
* * * *
Weaver can be too trusting sometimes.
My grandfather on my father's side had a turn for the worse, she said, It's looking pretty bad, she said, Would it be asking for too much, she said.
If she suspected anything, she didn't show it.
Abby was grateful for that.
The plane leaves in four hours, a return trip to bury skeletons and organize Peace Talks, between the last person that she can be peaceful with, all underway.
Luka's slouching against the hallway, and she can see him wanting to say something, his eyes flickering from her travel case, back up to her lips and then her eyes.
It's three days. Only three days.
"So...um, don't do anything I wouldn't do...I'll miss you." And the words come out empty, their meaning dissolved in the search for their meaning.
He smiles bittersweetly, and walks up to her, suddenly, and she's taken by surprise as he pulls her against him in an intimate way that he doesn't do every day, his male odor, his male aura enveloping her, and she sinks into him, his chest, his warmth. Finding protection from the big bad world.
And then, like that, like seeing eclipses and experiencing the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it's over, and her skin is left with the memory of his warmth. He's standing away from her, a foot of emptiness dividing them, and she wonders if it's a permanent distance, if it's the distance of walls built up by decades of pain and hurt and loneliness. If there's a footbridge that she might some day find, to cross it.
"Are you sure you don't want me to come?" He says, their eyes flickering and dancing from one another.
She shakes her head gently, "No. No. I...I think I have to do this."
He understands, and his head dips up and down by miniscule degrees to demonstrate this.
Quickly going through a list of the things that she needs, tapping back pockets for Visas and Legal Documents, looking for that one forgotten thing that she can spend the next two decades searching for fruitlessly.
Everything's where everything should be.
With one more smile, and a flick of her hand, she's just a memory of warmth in his front room.
* * * *
Planes didn't scare her.
The fear of being on that one plane out of however many billion that for whatever reason falls out of the sky in a ball of flames and screaming passengers doesn't even trespass her thoughts.
Her hands clutch at the hand rests, and she leans back against her seat, the smell of other previous too-sweaty passengers who had made their knuckles whiten with the power of their minds submerging her. She takes those fabled deep breaths that supposedly cleanse and calm and rationalize.
She almost hyperventilates.
There's a Walt Disney movie sending animal shaped images across every other passenger's blank faces. Kids play tic-tac-toe some seats behind her. Men flirt and women laugh. Stewardesses standing around looking ready and prepared to hand out warm towels during apocalypses and the stuff that comes before.
She has an oxygen mask within arms reach and a plastic cardboard of the 101 Calm Things To Do During an Emergency folded neatly in the pocket of the seat in front.
No advice on how to track down the past and beat it into submission, no advice or cute diagrams on how to let go and move on from all those other small apocalypses that everyone takes part in every day of their lives.
She takes another deep breath.
Her fingers hungrily tapping away at the armrest for a cigarette, a muscle relaxant, a shot gun to aim right into Mickey Mouse's bowtie because if they see one more fairytale ending they're going to explode.
They grudgingly settle on flicking through the obligatory issue of Pretty Women Wearing Too Tiny Pantsuits and Then Maybe a Crossword or Two About The Great Old States of America.
There's static and then the air fills with the captain's deep, resonant voice, reminding them of their seatbelts and their destinations and to have a safe journey home, and there's a shifting as the passengers move to resist the effects of gravity.
Florida's suddenly just outside her window. Dark smudges suddenly gaining front doors and double glazed windows. The landscape becoming a city becoming an airport becoming the place where she grew up.
And Abby taps away at her armrest, wishing she had the ability to sublimate.
* * * *
Frustration, noun: Home and miles and miles away.
* * * *
"No, I just arrived."
Her hands trail up and down the phone receiver, that need for nicotine beckoning them all too easily and seductively. She thinks she has memorized every licensed and able K-Mart on the taxi drive over there.
She questions all those statistics that made her give up.
Did you know that non-smokers die every day?
She bets that it's been medically proven, dying with anticipation.
There's a rustled gap at the other end of the line. "So...?"
She sighs. "So...I called the number that she left with me, and I uh, left a message on her machine."
"...Abby." He sighs, sounding like a disappointed father.
She shrugs, a gesture wasted in the empty room. "If she wants to talk to me then she can give me a call. I want to give her some time to prepare before she sees me. So that she quickly find a job and convince me of this wonderful "transformation" she's undergone."
If he were in the room, she would imagine him giving her an eyebrow raise, as though asking for the real, actual, reason. But he isn't and so can't and moves on. "...How's it like, in Florida?"
It's comforting, his voice, the familiar sound of a friendly voice from her future, transported over a dozen cable wires and satellites into her past. "Oh it's OK." She grins. "It's been sunny non-stop since I arrived, everyone walks around in tiny bikinis and next to nothing else. How's Chicago?"
She can hear him smile dryly. "Chicago's great, as always. Just one endless beach party. I think it's raining today. And then tomorrow and a lot of the next day also. Lots of nice weather when you get back though, so don't forget to do that," He pauses, and there's a shifting in the background sounds, a sudden silence.
She smiles wryly, "It's just three days, and then I'll be right back to picking up bed pans and being everyone's favourite nurse."
Carter pauses, and the sounds of her alone in a strange hotel bed with starched sheets and really stiff pillows and a window that doesn't drown out all the sounds of a night in Florida surround her, and she's back to wanting a cigarette.
"Call me...if...call me, if you need to, OK?"
She's smiling again. "Sure...thanks Carter...bye."
"Bye Abby."
And then there's the dial tone, and she's already finding her wallet and looking for the nearest sign of tobacco smoke and a Ben&Jerry's retailer.
* * * *
Frustration, noun: The not knowing, living with the unexpected, knowing to expect the unexpected.
* * * *
The rain was something unforeseen and all the newscasters were left looking humble and apologetic, ties being straightened and then straightened again.
She continues to walk through it all, as it speeds towards the earth, striking cement and metal and running shrieking girls wearing next to nothing else. Walks through it all, like Moses parting the dead sea, only to have the laws of thermodynamics re-establish themselves, the water coming thundering back down to Earth in drops and drips and drops. Thick with anticipation; the prelude to a Noah's Flood.
Her shirt sticks to her skin, the water binding them together, draining through her, and she can feel the new packet of cigarettes dissolving in her front pocket. She wouldn't doubt that this was God's own special way of having her remain nicotine free. Sending a storm over to the sunny state of Florida to disrupt any plans that she might have of getting to sleep that night.
She throws a glance at her watch; swimming numbers inform her that it's almost eleven in the night. The streets around her are familiar. Backdrops to first kisses and games of hop scotch.
She could find her way home from here without a second thought.
An underwater trip down the backstreets of her childhood.
In the years leading up to her mother's breakdown, she suffered from depression and found it hard to keep a worthwhile job. Her dad would have to work overtime to compensate, and when Abby would come home from school she would find her mother buried underneath a mountain of bed sheets, refusing to talk to anyone, Abby's brother and her seeking comfort in front of the TV or at friends houses, only understanding that they wanted to be a million miles away from that place they called home.
And on the good days, on the days when her synapses and neurotransmitters would perform a manic one-eighty, all of this would be forgotten by their hunt for buried treasure in the living room, by the excitement in her mother's voice as they would run outside in the pouring rain, skidding through puddles and building whole Roman Empires out of mud.
And then they would come home to find her, crying and screaming in her pajamas, and they were silent observers as their father would lower his voice, approaching her, cooing softly as you would to a petrified and dangerous animal, and this would provoke her to lash out in a fit of hysteria, her dad forced into locking them in a room until yet another world disaster had been averted.
This became their routine for years.
The dance they did.
Looking back on it all, she understands why her father would want to just pick up and leave it all behind. Not content until at least five national states had been tossed between them. She wonders what her life would have been like should he have told her of his plans, had they made their escape together.
She used to think that it was somehow all her fault. In that awkward, innocent way that most eight year olds do. That all those years of sneaking out chocolate cookies, and telling white lies, and swearing when no grown-ups were around to hear, that all those years had caught up with her, and this, her mother, her dad, this was all her fault. On some cosmic level this was retribution. This was fair.
The rain was coming down thickly now, and she lifts the collar of her shirt up, beginning at a run to the relative desert of the hotel room.
Her mother had left a message on her machine when she returned.
Toweling her hair and stripping down and out of the soiled jeans and shirt, she pressed the blinking red button and listened as she made a hunt for dry clothes.
"Abby? Abby?! This is your mother, call me right away!" Her voice practically shouted, continuing to leave a string of numbers.
She froze, nailed to the bed.
Another message: "Abby, where are you? Why haven't you called yet? Where are you? Where's my Abby? Call me right now!"
She stares at the phone for maybe seconds, maybe lifetimes. Everything suddenly too cold and wet and real. Her head in her hands as she sits on the bleached sheets, her throat tightening, her mother's voice strangling her.
She said she was on meds. She promised that she was on meds. The letter promised that she was taking the right meds. She couldn't have been manic. She was just happy. Happy to hear from her.
Her resolve, all the courage that she had built up, faltering, shaking.
She lets herself cry. She was alone and she could let herself cry. And with head in hands she waits.
From her window the rain continued to fall. Water losing to the cement, and yet continuing on, undismayed, another water dance with the devil; waiting for the outcome to change.
* * * *