Blu rises from the grave to write fiction on the internet
Title: Lethe
Summary: Even an angel can’t steal a year of your life without leaving a few obvious holes.
Word count: 3,000
Rated: pg (some language, implied sexuality)
Notes: Set post “Let It Bleed”; spoilers apply
Genre: Gen, angst, mild het
Characters: Lisa, Ben, Matt, mentions of Dean
A/N: Continued in “ Aletheia” though both pieces stand alone.
Disclaimer: Not the CW, just messing around in their sandbox, respecting their womens.
***
Lisa wakes from lonely, disconcerting dreams to an unfamiliar room. It takes her a second to remember: the sterile but stale air, the thin cot beneath her, the indistinct moans punctuated by the sharp click of plastic heels on linoleum. Hospital. Car crash. As if in response to the recollection, the wound on her stomach begins to pulse with pain. Her whole body feels desiccated and feeble; she hates being in the hospital.
She still smiles for Ben. “Doing okay, kiddo?”
He rouses from his chair by the foot of her bed, where he’s been hunched and sleeping. “M-hm,” he nods, groggily. “Can we go home today?”
“’S what the doctor said.” Lisa smiles again, bigger. Her fingers play along the three stitches on her middle that she can feel even through the sheets. Ben looks fine, just a little tired and a lot ready to get out of this place. Lisa’s tired too, and uneasy from those dreams she can’t remember beyond a hollow feeling of turning quickly to find there was nothing behind her, after all.
*
The doctor, as promised, checks the box that says they’re free to go. Lisa ducks into the bathroom to change into clothes Matt dropped off last night, before his shift at the hospital across town. That feels good, wearing her own jeans rather than the flimsy, exposing hospital gown. It feels stronger, she thinks, to have your legs covered up. More prepared.
“All ready to go?” she chirps at Ben, who grins.
“Definitely.” He hugs her like a younger kid, pressing his face right into her rib cage. Lisa strokes his hair for a moment. Soon he’ll be too old for this kind of thing, strange as that seems. He’s practically a teenager.
Ben lets go first and grabs his backpack. Lisa pats her pockets down, looks around the bed for anything she’s left, and pats her pockets again. “You sure you got everything?” she asks Ben redundantly, and he nods impatiently.
He breezes out the door, headed to reception, but Lisa hesitates. She has the unshakable sense that she’s forgotten something important. She double checks the nightstand, even the trash, but there’s nothing to find. With a final look around the room, she follows uneasily after her son.
*
Ben plays one of his videogames in a nearby chair while Lisa checks out and confirms her insurance information. There’s a huge charge for the emergency room that she’d almost like to dispute; the relatively shallow wound on her abdomen hardly warrants stitches, much less the ER. Then again, Matt’s always saying how hectic hospitals get at night, and hey, they fixed her up didn’t they? The money’s not worth the hassle. She signs on the line and taps the pen on the desk nervously.
“I’m sorry,” she says to get the nurse’s attention. “Could you give me a number for the man who hit us? He came over to apologize, but the guy just looked so messed up over it. I’d really like to… just tell him that we’re alright, and I’m sure it wasn’t his fault.” It had seemed at the time like he was going to tell her something but, in the end, decided not to.
“Hmm,” the nurse says with a cursory glance at her file. “Hmm,” she says again, sharper, eyebrows folding in on each-other. “Seems like we don’t have one. Actually there’s not even a license plate, or insurance or anything. It’s really strange.” She flips through the pages with interest for a second, then her face relaxes and she shrugs. “I wish I could help, but we just don’t have any details about the crash. Looks like nobody filed a report.”
Lisa realizes she’s playing with her stitches again. “Okay, is there anything you remember about him? “ The nurse gives her a look. “It just feels like unfinished business and I’d really like to put all this behind me,” Lisa says.
“I think he left with another guy?” the nurse says uncertainly. “Big black car? It was yesterday, so…”
“Yeah, It’s no problem. Thanks.” Lisa smiles tightly. “Hey Ben, let’s go.”
*
Lisa is absentmindedly watching a news program while Matt cooks dinner and Ben plays ball with his friends out front. She should be doing something useful, but she can’t settle her mind enough to focus.
Outside there’s the familiar crack of a bat. And then there’s a sudden memory of sitting right here on a summer afternoon, smiling and happy at the excited chatter of commentators as a man on T.V. rounds the bases, and in this memory there’s something bright beside her that she can’t turn towards, a white space burned out of the otherwise crisp picture. She is utterly apathetic towards baseball, and she has no idea where Ben got his huge love for it last year. Even when Matt insists they watch the big game, it certainly isn’t enjoyable. But there it is, this memory of a perfect afternoon.
“Lisa,” Matt says.
Lisa jumps a little and cranes her neck to smile up at him. “Hey babe.”
He half-smiles at the endearment. “Spacing out a little, there. Something up?”
Lisa shakes her head. “It’s nothing. I guess I’m still a little on edge- stupid I know. I just keep feeling rattled. Like I was in the middle of something and got interrupted.” She laughs a little. “And now I’ve got the jitters.”
Matt sits down on the couch next to her. “You were in a car crash, baby. A jolt like that, when you’re just out getting some groceries, can undermine your sense of everyday security. If you want, I can get you an appointment with Andrew. Real good guy, he works with people with who’ve been in traumatic situations. It’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“Right,” says Lisa. It’s not exactly the crash that’s getting to her, though. “Yeah.”
*
“Matt,” Lisa says. “Matt.”
“Hmm?” he says groggily from the other side of the bed.
“How did I get this cut on my stomach?”
He groans. “You know it was the crash, honey. What are you trying to say?”
“I mean specifically. Why a cut like this? It makes no sense. You saw my car, the damage was all in the front, there’s nothing broken or sharp even near the driver’s seat.”
“Okay, well, what do you want me to say?”
“Nobody filed a report. I don’t even remember why I was on the road at that time of night, especially with Ben in the car, which, by the way, was in the driveway when we got home, but did you ever get a bill for towing? I didn’t. And I swear that man who hit us was hiding something, he…”
“Lisa,” Matt says sharply, “you are talking like you’re completely paranoid. I get that all this has disoriented you, but be serious. You were in a crash. Can we drop this?”
Lisa freezes, and then smiles and shakes her head as if to say, silly me. “Sure, yeah. Consider it dropped.” She kisses Matt when he looks incredulous. Just to end the conversation.
She loves him, really, but every so often they ram up against this thing between them and there’s just nothing to say. He’s so straight-forward, he can’t understand when she sees a different, stranger side to things. It makes her feel like she’s irreparably flawed, right through the foundations of her character. Ever since she had Ben and turned her life around, this is the price she pays: she feels like an imposter next to the friends and lovers who, unlike her, were never even tempted to stray too far from the beaten path.
*
It becomes her constant companion, this feeling of missing, of loss. She feels like she’s left the house without her wallet, or with the door unlocked, or the oven on. Except she feels this way all the time, and the feeling is impossible to pin down. Maybe it’s more as if she was watching a movie and all of a sudden she switched to the wrong channel and can’t find the right station any more. Or as if she was in the middle of her favorite book and all the names of the characters changed, and the plot turned into something a little skewed from what it had been, only when she flipped back the book had always been that way.
Matt’s quick dismisses it, but there’s more to it than feelings. None of the details fit in this whole car crash scenario. Not the wound, not the lack of official records, not the timing. And it starts before the crash, way before: She and Ben moved- why? She had a job, there was no reason to leave all her friends, to yank Ben out of school and start anew. Yet here they are, living in an entirely different state in a house that isn’t even quite to her taste.
If she isn’t thinking about it directly, she realizes she has a fundamental awareness that her life changed drastically in the last year. That she reached a turning point. But when she looks back for what happened, there’s nothing: banal house-bound and work related recollections, the most obvious and boring memories. In fact, she can’t come up with enough remembered time to make up one season, much less a year. Even a boring year.
Maybe she is going crazy.
*
Lisa and Matt don’t talk like they used to. The thing between them keeps growing, and now Lisa finds herself running into it even during mundane of activities- cooking for example. Why does she have such a heavy hand with the salt? She stares at her hands and wonders, too.
Matt has started looking at her like she’s damaged. It’s giving her flashbacks to her life way before Ben, back when she was still scraping by on a couple hundred dollars a month, teaching a few yoga classes at the local co-op and pleading with her mom for hand-outs when she wasn’t drinking to black out and fucking any guy who looked like he’d think less of her than she did.
And that’s when she remembers, this one guy. She never really forgot; they met right around when she conceived, and she always associated him a little bit with everything that happened after- Ben, and getting clean and all. For all she knew he could be Ben’s dad. Still, it was so long ago; what was his name? She can remember his freckles and the curve of a well-muscled back, but not his face.
She does remember that when she first saw him, he was basically getting the shit beat out of him over what seemed to be a poker game gone wrong. But he was dishing out half of what he was taking, despite the three to one odds, and that kind of irrepressible spirit was just what Lisa was in the mood for.
When the trio got sick of not-quite-winning and left, Lisa brought the guy a drink she’d snuck past the bouncer into the parking lot where he was leaning against a black car- a classic of some type or other- trying to staunch a bloody nose.
She said something like, you look like you could use a drink, and he said… yes he said exactly “I could use a lot of things,” which wasn’t even a good pick up line, but Lisa still remembers the way he looked at her with those green eyes and how it made that raspy sentence the hottest thing she ever heard.
Dean. That was his name. It’s so strange, to think of him after all these years.
*
“…been holding back from each-other for a while now, and …”
“Yeah,” Lisa interrupts. Matt looks sorry, or rather he looks like he pities her for not having the maturity to hear him out.
“Look Matt, we don’t need to do this. I get it, feel the same way.” Lisa smiles sadly. “I don’t know what happened to us, either, babe. But I know it happened.” She strokes his shoulder. “No hard feelings, okay?”
“I felt like you weren’t letting me in,” Matt insists. “I know I could have…”
“You didn’t,” Lisa interrupts for the second time. She pauses to reign in her tone and starts again. “Maybe we just weren’t a good fit. Who knows, it’s not exactly an unusual story. Can we not overanalyze?”
Matt nods. “I’m so sorry Lisa. Sorry about us, and for confusing Ben like this. I’ll come by for my stuff any time it’s convenient for you. Tell Ben I am so sorry, it’s not about him. He was the greatest. Really.”
“Of course,” Lisa agrees. Ben’s always polite, but from day one he’s been antagonized by Matt’s existence, and if anything she imagines he’d be glad to think he drove the guy away. Lisa guesses it’s typical teen angst, not wanting another man around the house. Still, god knows it’s not like Ben had any father figure for Matt to replace. The extent of Ben’s animosity always seemed a little unwarranted. Or at least, it did recently.
As for her own feelings…she’s sorry that she and Matt have fallen apart, but not as sorry as she feels like she should be. Would be if she were the good suburban mom she looks like. When Lisa digs down, she finds that she always expected perfect, reasonable Matt to move on at some point. It wasn’t her life. She’s just not like him.
The correct response would be to realize how much the crash must have scared her, to be thinking this way, and to take Matt up on getting in touch with his shrink friend. But Matt leaving has freed her up inside. She doesn’t have to be correct.
Now that Matt has left, Lisa can settle into her own opinions about things. She’s learned to trust in that hollow, missing feeling; it is a symptom, an aftershock of something real. She knows now to read her emotions for clues without forcing her eyes towards those bright, burned out spots where a part of her has been erased. She needs to feel around the edges of those spots, that’s the trick. And then she’ll start to see the outline of what was stolen.
*
“Hey,” Lisa says softly. Ben looks up from the horror novel he was reading, his face a mix of embarrassment, empathy and glee.
“I kind of heard,” he admits. “Like, whatever, he was a total tool.”
“Thanks,” Lisa says ruefully. Ben shrugs. “It’s a big change, you sure you’re okay with this?”
Ben looks at her like she’s suggested he might want to try veganism for the summer. “He was just a guy, Mom. Our family is us. You and me.”
They both pause, waiting for another shoe to drop that never does. The family is, of course, just the two of them, and always has been.
Lisa sits down on the edge of Ben’s bed. “Honey, do you want to talk about the crash? I feel I never really checked in with you about that.” She searches her child’s face. “It was pretty freaky, spending the night in the hospital and all.”
Ben pauses, head cocked. “What’s there to talk about,” he says warily. So he feels it too.
“Kiddo, since the crash…do you feel different? Like we came out of there without something we had when we went in?” Lisa tries to walk the line between suggestive and letting Ben know it’s alright to say something out of the ordinary.
“Yeah,” Ben says. “Sort of like… throwing up when you’re sick, or putting down something heavy.” He looks pensively at the cover of his book. “I think it’s better not to…scratch at it,” he finally adds, quietly.
Lisa leans over to put an arm around his shoulders. “Sure thing, Ben. But I’m here if you change your mind.” She gives him one last crooked smile and goes back down to the kitchen.
Lisa gets it. She’s perfectly aware that what she’s missing might not be as nice as what she’s got. She still wants to find it. Ben is a kid in the end and kids bounce back from just about anything. But they don’t understand, they can’t, how close each person is to losing themselves in what other people want to see. How memories are the building blocks of your self, the only thing they can’t take away.
Except when they can. Whatever belongs in those bright holes, good or bad, Lisa needs to find it.
*
The week after Matt leaves, Lisa is scouring her closet for anything he might have left behind, and her hand bumps against cold metal. Confused, she pulls the object out. It’s a shotgun.
Lisa holds it across her lap, her eyes dancing from the worn grip to the lovingly shined barrel to all the tiny nicks in the metal that could only come from plenty of hard use. Matt doesn’t own a gun and neither does she, but she isn’t scared to find one in her home. The gun feels safe, not frightening. Familiar. It is impossible that this weapon should be hidden behind her winter sweaters, yet the weight of it in her hands is perfectly right, like so few things are, since the crash.
Lisa lets her emotions spool out- longing, frustration, anger and love. She knows better than to try to pin them yet to any “why.” It’s enough that she’s holding a touchstone to that different, harder world she always half knew existed but lost touch with in the hospital. She gently touches the trigger, the sight, the rough edge where the gun was sawed off. She can almost imagine the hands that held it. She’s holding a weapon, yes, but one that feels like protection and love. Uncompromising, whole hearted love tempered by a deep, immovable sadness.
But like a poem in a foreign language, all the emotion adds up to is aching sound and no meaning she can grasp. Even with the relic in her hands, Lisa hasn’t recovered anything, not even closure. The gun is the answer, but whatever took her memories and burned those holes was too efficient, it purged the question from her memory irretrievably. There’s nothing left to reassemble, just empty spaces of vanished time.
Lisa sits in her closet with the inexplicable shotgun across her knees and cries for the twofold loss, both for the love the gun represents and for her own bright, burned out memories.
***
Continued in Aletheia
Summary: Even an angel can’t steal a year of your life without leaving a few obvious holes.
Word count: 3,000
Rated: pg (some language, implied sexuality)
Notes: Set post “Let It Bleed”; spoilers apply
Genre: Gen, angst, mild het
Characters: Lisa, Ben, Matt, mentions of Dean
A/N: Continued in “ Aletheia” though both pieces stand alone.
Disclaimer: Not the CW, just messing around in their sandbox, respecting their womens.
***
Lisa wakes from lonely, disconcerting dreams to an unfamiliar room. It takes her a second to remember: the sterile but stale air, the thin cot beneath her, the indistinct moans punctuated by the sharp click of plastic heels on linoleum. Hospital. Car crash. As if in response to the recollection, the wound on her stomach begins to pulse with pain. Her whole body feels desiccated and feeble; she hates being in the hospital.
She still smiles for Ben. “Doing okay, kiddo?”
He rouses from his chair by the foot of her bed, where he’s been hunched and sleeping. “M-hm,” he nods, groggily. “Can we go home today?”
“’S what the doctor said.” Lisa smiles again, bigger. Her fingers play along the three stitches on her middle that she can feel even through the sheets. Ben looks fine, just a little tired and a lot ready to get out of this place. Lisa’s tired too, and uneasy from those dreams she can’t remember beyond a hollow feeling of turning quickly to find there was nothing behind her, after all.
*
The doctor, as promised, checks the box that says they’re free to go. Lisa ducks into the bathroom to change into clothes Matt dropped off last night, before his shift at the hospital across town. That feels good, wearing her own jeans rather than the flimsy, exposing hospital gown. It feels stronger, she thinks, to have your legs covered up. More prepared.
“All ready to go?” she chirps at Ben, who grins.
“Definitely.” He hugs her like a younger kid, pressing his face right into her rib cage. Lisa strokes his hair for a moment. Soon he’ll be too old for this kind of thing, strange as that seems. He’s practically a teenager.
Ben lets go first and grabs his backpack. Lisa pats her pockets down, looks around the bed for anything she’s left, and pats her pockets again. “You sure you got everything?” she asks Ben redundantly, and he nods impatiently.
He breezes out the door, headed to reception, but Lisa hesitates. She has the unshakable sense that she’s forgotten something important. She double checks the nightstand, even the trash, but there’s nothing to find. With a final look around the room, she follows uneasily after her son.
*
Ben plays one of his videogames in a nearby chair while Lisa checks out and confirms her insurance information. There’s a huge charge for the emergency room that she’d almost like to dispute; the relatively shallow wound on her abdomen hardly warrants stitches, much less the ER. Then again, Matt’s always saying how hectic hospitals get at night, and hey, they fixed her up didn’t they? The money’s not worth the hassle. She signs on the line and taps the pen on the desk nervously.
“I’m sorry,” she says to get the nurse’s attention. “Could you give me a number for the man who hit us? He came over to apologize, but the guy just looked so messed up over it. I’d really like to… just tell him that we’re alright, and I’m sure it wasn’t his fault.” It had seemed at the time like he was going to tell her something but, in the end, decided not to.
“Hmm,” the nurse says with a cursory glance at her file. “Hmm,” she says again, sharper, eyebrows folding in on each-other. “Seems like we don’t have one. Actually there’s not even a license plate, or insurance or anything. It’s really strange.” She flips through the pages with interest for a second, then her face relaxes and she shrugs. “I wish I could help, but we just don’t have any details about the crash. Looks like nobody filed a report.”
Lisa realizes she’s playing with her stitches again. “Okay, is there anything you remember about him? “ The nurse gives her a look. “It just feels like unfinished business and I’d really like to put all this behind me,” Lisa says.
“I think he left with another guy?” the nurse says uncertainly. “Big black car? It was yesterday, so…”
“Yeah, It’s no problem. Thanks.” Lisa smiles tightly. “Hey Ben, let’s go.”
*
Lisa is absentmindedly watching a news program while Matt cooks dinner and Ben plays ball with his friends out front. She should be doing something useful, but she can’t settle her mind enough to focus.
Outside there’s the familiar crack of a bat. And then there’s a sudden memory of sitting right here on a summer afternoon, smiling and happy at the excited chatter of commentators as a man on T.V. rounds the bases, and in this memory there’s something bright beside her that she can’t turn towards, a white space burned out of the otherwise crisp picture. She is utterly apathetic towards baseball, and she has no idea where Ben got his huge love for it last year. Even when Matt insists they watch the big game, it certainly isn’t enjoyable. But there it is, this memory of a perfect afternoon.
“Lisa,” Matt says.
Lisa jumps a little and cranes her neck to smile up at him. “Hey babe.”
He half-smiles at the endearment. “Spacing out a little, there. Something up?”
Lisa shakes her head. “It’s nothing. I guess I’m still a little on edge- stupid I know. I just keep feeling rattled. Like I was in the middle of something and got interrupted.” She laughs a little. “And now I’ve got the jitters.”
Matt sits down on the couch next to her. “You were in a car crash, baby. A jolt like that, when you’re just out getting some groceries, can undermine your sense of everyday security. If you want, I can get you an appointment with Andrew. Real good guy, he works with people with who’ve been in traumatic situations. It’s not something to be ashamed of.”
“Right,” says Lisa. It’s not exactly the crash that’s getting to her, though. “Yeah.”
*
“Matt,” Lisa says. “Matt.”
“Hmm?” he says groggily from the other side of the bed.
“How did I get this cut on my stomach?”
He groans. “You know it was the crash, honey. What are you trying to say?”
“I mean specifically. Why a cut like this? It makes no sense. You saw my car, the damage was all in the front, there’s nothing broken or sharp even near the driver’s seat.”
“Okay, well, what do you want me to say?”
“Nobody filed a report. I don’t even remember why I was on the road at that time of night, especially with Ben in the car, which, by the way, was in the driveway when we got home, but did you ever get a bill for towing? I didn’t. And I swear that man who hit us was hiding something, he…”
“Lisa,” Matt says sharply, “you are talking like you’re completely paranoid. I get that all this has disoriented you, but be serious. You were in a crash. Can we drop this?”
Lisa freezes, and then smiles and shakes her head as if to say, silly me. “Sure, yeah. Consider it dropped.” She kisses Matt when he looks incredulous. Just to end the conversation.
She loves him, really, but every so often they ram up against this thing between them and there’s just nothing to say. He’s so straight-forward, he can’t understand when she sees a different, stranger side to things. It makes her feel like she’s irreparably flawed, right through the foundations of her character. Ever since she had Ben and turned her life around, this is the price she pays: she feels like an imposter next to the friends and lovers who, unlike her, were never even tempted to stray too far from the beaten path.
*
It becomes her constant companion, this feeling of missing, of loss. She feels like she’s left the house without her wallet, or with the door unlocked, or the oven on. Except she feels this way all the time, and the feeling is impossible to pin down. Maybe it’s more as if she was watching a movie and all of a sudden she switched to the wrong channel and can’t find the right station any more. Or as if she was in the middle of her favorite book and all the names of the characters changed, and the plot turned into something a little skewed from what it had been, only when she flipped back the book had always been that way.
Matt’s quick dismisses it, but there’s more to it than feelings. None of the details fit in this whole car crash scenario. Not the wound, not the lack of official records, not the timing. And it starts before the crash, way before: She and Ben moved- why? She had a job, there was no reason to leave all her friends, to yank Ben out of school and start anew. Yet here they are, living in an entirely different state in a house that isn’t even quite to her taste.
If she isn’t thinking about it directly, she realizes she has a fundamental awareness that her life changed drastically in the last year. That she reached a turning point. But when she looks back for what happened, there’s nothing: banal house-bound and work related recollections, the most obvious and boring memories. In fact, she can’t come up with enough remembered time to make up one season, much less a year. Even a boring year.
Maybe she is going crazy.
*
Lisa and Matt don’t talk like they used to. The thing between them keeps growing, and now Lisa finds herself running into it even during mundane of activities- cooking for example. Why does she have such a heavy hand with the salt? She stares at her hands and wonders, too.
Matt has started looking at her like she’s damaged. It’s giving her flashbacks to her life way before Ben, back when she was still scraping by on a couple hundred dollars a month, teaching a few yoga classes at the local co-op and pleading with her mom for hand-outs when she wasn’t drinking to black out and fucking any guy who looked like he’d think less of her than she did.
And that’s when she remembers, this one guy. She never really forgot; they met right around when she conceived, and she always associated him a little bit with everything that happened after- Ben, and getting clean and all. For all she knew he could be Ben’s dad. Still, it was so long ago; what was his name? She can remember his freckles and the curve of a well-muscled back, but not his face.
She does remember that when she first saw him, he was basically getting the shit beat out of him over what seemed to be a poker game gone wrong. But he was dishing out half of what he was taking, despite the three to one odds, and that kind of irrepressible spirit was just what Lisa was in the mood for.
When the trio got sick of not-quite-winning and left, Lisa brought the guy a drink she’d snuck past the bouncer into the parking lot where he was leaning against a black car- a classic of some type or other- trying to staunch a bloody nose.
She said something like, you look like you could use a drink, and he said… yes he said exactly “I could use a lot of things,” which wasn’t even a good pick up line, but Lisa still remembers the way he looked at her with those green eyes and how it made that raspy sentence the hottest thing she ever heard.
Dean. That was his name. It’s so strange, to think of him after all these years.
*
“…been holding back from each-other for a while now, and …”
“Yeah,” Lisa interrupts. Matt looks sorry, or rather he looks like he pities her for not having the maturity to hear him out.
“Look Matt, we don’t need to do this. I get it, feel the same way.” Lisa smiles sadly. “I don’t know what happened to us, either, babe. But I know it happened.” She strokes his shoulder. “No hard feelings, okay?”
“I felt like you weren’t letting me in,” Matt insists. “I know I could have…”
“You didn’t,” Lisa interrupts for the second time. She pauses to reign in her tone and starts again. “Maybe we just weren’t a good fit. Who knows, it’s not exactly an unusual story. Can we not overanalyze?”
Matt nods. “I’m so sorry Lisa. Sorry about us, and for confusing Ben like this. I’ll come by for my stuff any time it’s convenient for you. Tell Ben I am so sorry, it’s not about him. He was the greatest. Really.”
“Of course,” Lisa agrees. Ben’s always polite, but from day one he’s been antagonized by Matt’s existence, and if anything she imagines he’d be glad to think he drove the guy away. Lisa guesses it’s typical teen angst, not wanting another man around the house. Still, god knows it’s not like Ben had any father figure for Matt to replace. The extent of Ben’s animosity always seemed a little unwarranted. Or at least, it did recently.
As for her own feelings…she’s sorry that she and Matt have fallen apart, but not as sorry as she feels like she should be. Would be if she were the good suburban mom she looks like. When Lisa digs down, she finds that she always expected perfect, reasonable Matt to move on at some point. It wasn’t her life. She’s just not like him.
The correct response would be to realize how much the crash must have scared her, to be thinking this way, and to take Matt up on getting in touch with his shrink friend. But Matt leaving has freed her up inside. She doesn’t have to be correct.
Now that Matt has left, Lisa can settle into her own opinions about things. She’s learned to trust in that hollow, missing feeling; it is a symptom, an aftershock of something real. She knows now to read her emotions for clues without forcing her eyes towards those bright, burned out spots where a part of her has been erased. She needs to feel around the edges of those spots, that’s the trick. And then she’ll start to see the outline of what was stolen.
*
“Hey,” Lisa says softly. Ben looks up from the horror novel he was reading, his face a mix of embarrassment, empathy and glee.
“I kind of heard,” he admits. “Like, whatever, he was a total tool.”
“Thanks,” Lisa says ruefully. Ben shrugs. “It’s a big change, you sure you’re okay with this?”
Ben looks at her like she’s suggested he might want to try veganism for the summer. “He was just a guy, Mom. Our family is us. You and me.”
They both pause, waiting for another shoe to drop that never does. The family is, of course, just the two of them, and always has been.
Lisa sits down on the edge of Ben’s bed. “Honey, do you want to talk about the crash? I feel I never really checked in with you about that.” She searches her child’s face. “It was pretty freaky, spending the night in the hospital and all.”
Ben pauses, head cocked. “What’s there to talk about,” he says warily. So he feels it too.
“Kiddo, since the crash…do you feel different? Like we came out of there without something we had when we went in?” Lisa tries to walk the line between suggestive and letting Ben know it’s alright to say something out of the ordinary.
“Yeah,” Ben says. “Sort of like… throwing up when you’re sick, or putting down something heavy.” He looks pensively at the cover of his book. “I think it’s better not to…scratch at it,” he finally adds, quietly.
Lisa leans over to put an arm around his shoulders. “Sure thing, Ben. But I’m here if you change your mind.” She gives him one last crooked smile and goes back down to the kitchen.
Lisa gets it. She’s perfectly aware that what she’s missing might not be as nice as what she’s got. She still wants to find it. Ben is a kid in the end and kids bounce back from just about anything. But they don’t understand, they can’t, how close each person is to losing themselves in what other people want to see. How memories are the building blocks of your self, the only thing they can’t take away.
Except when they can. Whatever belongs in those bright holes, good or bad, Lisa needs to find it.
*
The week after Matt leaves, Lisa is scouring her closet for anything he might have left behind, and her hand bumps against cold metal. Confused, she pulls the object out. It’s a shotgun.
Lisa holds it across her lap, her eyes dancing from the worn grip to the lovingly shined barrel to all the tiny nicks in the metal that could only come from plenty of hard use. Matt doesn’t own a gun and neither does she, but she isn’t scared to find one in her home. The gun feels safe, not frightening. Familiar. It is impossible that this weapon should be hidden behind her winter sweaters, yet the weight of it in her hands is perfectly right, like so few things are, since the crash.
Lisa lets her emotions spool out- longing, frustration, anger and love. She knows better than to try to pin them yet to any “why.” It’s enough that she’s holding a touchstone to that different, harder world she always half knew existed but lost touch with in the hospital. She gently touches the trigger, the sight, the rough edge where the gun was sawed off. She can almost imagine the hands that held it. She’s holding a weapon, yes, but one that feels like protection and love. Uncompromising, whole hearted love tempered by a deep, immovable sadness.
But like a poem in a foreign language, all the emotion adds up to is aching sound and no meaning she can grasp. Even with the relic in her hands, Lisa hasn’t recovered anything, not even closure. The gun is the answer, but whatever took her memories and burned those holes was too efficient, it purged the question from her memory irretrievably. There’s nothing left to reassemble, just empty spaces of vanished time.
Lisa sits in her closet with the inexplicable shotgun across her knees and cries for the twofold loss, both for the love the gun represents and for her own bright, burned out memories.
***
Continued in Aletheia