Drowning your Sorrows by Land and by Sea - Part Two
Title: Drowning your Sorrows by Land and by Sea (2/4)
Characters: Jack, Penny, Kate, Hurley and Sayid
Pairing: Jack/Penny, Desmond/Penny
Rating: PG13
Disclaimer: Lost doesn't belong to me. This is what I look like if I was evil.
Spoilers: Up to the Other Woman
Summary: Some Lies are just waiting to be confessed to the right person.
A/N: Dedicated to lenina20
x x x
Over the sound of the whirring blades and sputtering engine, Aaron’s cries are deafening. Everyone else is mute, too stunned by events of the last hour, of the last six months, to protest alongside the baby. No one joins his screams even when the helicopter dips to the right side, and then drops suddenly from the sky. Jack surrenders his hold on Jin’s abdomen and grasps a bar on the cabin’s ceiling. His hands, slippery with blood, fail to connect and the momentum throws him up against the wall. A dizzying array of green and brown spins outside the open entryway, inviting them back to the island. For the second time that day, Jack believes he’s going to be thrown out of a helicopter.
They seem to fall forever but it must have been only a matter of seconds before the blades come to life again and the helicopter hangs in the air, steadying itself, before rising. Jack is tossed to the floor and crawls to the back where Jin’s crumpled body has slid. Hurley uncurls himself from the ball he had folded into even before the threat of a crash appeared and together they roll Jin onto his back. Sun unbuckles her harness and scrambles over the seat to her husband’s side. Jack does not object when it is her steadier hands that takes over the sutures.
Aaron continues to cry, an unseen siren clutched in Kate’s arms. Her head remains bent, covering his tiny body with her own. All that’s visible to Jack is her hair, which flies above her seat as if immune to gravity. Beside her, Sayid risks a glance back; he’s unsurprised but still apologetic. Between his limited piloting skills and the spotty repairs, Sayid had warned them all it was unlikely he would get them off the island, let alone to anywhere safe.
Just as the coast comes into sight, Sayid twists the helicopter away from the ocean and Jack braces himself for what he thinks is an emergency landing. But the craft remains stable and deliberately goes back across the island. They should not be wasting their fuel but Jack realizes Sayid needs to see for himself what he had described.
Aaron quiets as they fly over the community of houses and the cabin becomes eerily peaceful. Hours ago, before Miles had thrust Jack out of the helicopter escorting Ben off the island, he had watched helplessly as canisters of a nerve gas called Novichok were tossed below, a cloud of white vapour dispersing before they even hit the ground. Jack forces himself to look at the results. Even in the growing dusk, the bodies are unmistakable, scattered across the grass, some hanging half inside doorways and peeking out from the surrounding brush. No one, thankfully, is identifiable from this height but a quick count reveals they must be the only ones to have escaped unscathed. Sayid does not linger. He changes course and they fly speedily away from the carnage.
Jack remembers watching with his parents the thrilling footage of the evacuation of Saigon. He was fascinated by the helicopters that hovered over the roof of U.S. embassy like a flock of giant birds, gathering a never ending line of people in their claws. It was years before he understood what it all meant. At the time, Vietnam was merely a word whispered by his parents and spoken solemnly by men on the television; some sort of disease, he had speculated. But even at five years old, Jack got a sense that he was witnessing the end of something iconic.
It wasn’t just the chaotic departure by air or even the flood of death that lay in their wake that pushed this memory to the forefront of his mind. As Jack watches the island become smaller and smaller and then finally disappear, he is overcome with the finality of the moment. It was over. They had survived but they had also lost. He couldn’t begin to list what had been lost.
x x x
As he recounts their flight from the island to Penny, Jack can’t stay still. He paces between the kitchen and the den, pausing each time to touch the cotton curtains hung over the deck’s glass doors, closed to hide the view of the beach. They do not, however, keep out of the sound of the waves. Their crashing penetrates the cottage and acts as a secondary narrator to his story. Penny sits in a chair in the centre of the room, hugging her legs, her sad eyes tracking Jack’s every move.
“And the rest, what you read in the papers, was true. They found the seven of us on this pile of rocks; I wouldn’t even call it an island. There was no vegetation, no fresh water, no shelter. We collected rain and caught fish, and slept under the inflatable raft that had carried us there once the copter went down.” Jack recalls when the ocean liner appeared out of the mist after three weeks, everyone of them out of their minds with hunger, thirst and anxiety, and Aaron so close to death, they were convinced the boat was a mirage. “We started our story from there. It was simpler, safer. If we stayed quiet about the rest, we hoped they would leave us alone.”
Penny gives a slight nod and rests her chin on her knees. Jack collapses, exhausted in a chair across from her, runs his hands over his hair. He wants this to be enough for her, the confirmation of their lies, but considering he had yet to mention Desmond, he knows they are nowhere near done.
“What do you think they did with Ben?”
This is Penny’s first question and it is unexpected because she too seems to be avoiding asking about Desmond and for Jack, he has barely thought of Ben since they left.
Whether Miles was Ben’s captor or rescuer, Jack no longer cares. Yet he can’t help recall the trace of humanity he saw on Ben’s face as Miles hung Jack’s body over the edge of the helicopter and untied his hands, a strange gesture considering it was followed by throwing him out of the craft. Jack doesn’t remember the fall, only the sensation of hitting the water. The experience of being enveloped in a pool of cool blackness was almost soothing and he had just let himself sink further and further until he opened his eyes and noticed the corpses still reined to their airplane seats at the murky bottom. The desire not to die like them prompted him to break his plunge and he kicked hard until he broke the surface.
“I don’t know.”
It was the same response he had for Sayid and Kate when he later met them, Sun, Jin and Hurley back at the beach before they left in the their own helicopter, the one Michael, Desmond and Sayid has crash landed a month before, on their escape from the freighter.
Penny does not ask anymore questions. She gets up and mixes them both a drink and waits for him to continue. Her quiet patience is a prompt in itself so he swallows the scotch in two gulps and begins another story, one where only the end is important now.
“I understood you spoke to Desmond on the freighter.”
“Yes.” The tears she has been holding back begin to pool in her eyes.
“When he returned to the beach, he seemed much taller, stronger. He was so buoyed by hearing your voice, he could have lasted another five years on the island.”
Penny makes a sound that lands somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
“And I think he could of if he hadn’t gotten it into his head that he and Faraday, the physicist, could go back and save Charlie.”
“Go back?”
“Yeah, I was never clear on what they meant but in his elated state, Desmond had me half convinced they could do this.” He sighs and rubs his hands together. “They would go off into the jungle, back to the site of hatch and do some sort of experiment. This went on for a few weeks, I think. It’s hard to remember, a lot was going on. The camp had reunited and most people were living at the barracks, for safety. Everyone expected the freighter people would return once they got a new helicopter. I stayed on the beach with a few others to help Sayid try to fix the one we had.” He realized these details were unimportant; he was stalling, wanting to leave Penny with the image of a stalwart Desmond as long as he could.
“Over time, Desmond’s mood began to change, he would return from the jungle forgetful, belligerent, panicky. Sometimes he thought Charlie was alive, other times he thought he had died that very day. Faraday was same. On occasion they didn’t even seem to know each other, sometimes they didn’t know any of us. Sayid said this had happened before, when they were on the freighter.”
Jack tries to state all this as gently as possible. If he didn’t think Penny would know he was lying, he would have made something else up. The best he can do is not mention the headaches and the nose bleeds and that near the end, Desmond didn’t even know who the woman was in his cherished photo. “We tried to stop them from going out. At one point we sedated Desmond, tied him to a tree and planned to take him to the barracks but he escaped with Faraday and they disappeared for days.”
He paused to let this all sink in. The sun has gone down but neither of them moves to turn on a light. The darkness makes it easier to continue.
“Then Faraday returned alone. At first he didn’t remember what happened or who Desmond even was but eventually his memory returned. He said they had gone down to the Looking Glass, to try their experiment there.”
“Where Desmond drowned like Charlie.” Penny says this like she knew it all along. How she guessed, Jack does not know, other than she had come here prepared to hear the worst.
“He never put it in those words but that’s what we gathered. Kate and I planned to investigate but we didn't get a chance because just then John appeared with Aaron. He said Claire, the baby’s mother, was ill with a fatal and highly contagious sickness. He wanted us to keep the baby safe, quarantined. Juliet, the other doctor returned with him because she thought she could save Claire. The next morning Hurley appeared saying no one was sick and John had gone crazy and stolen Aaron. That was the same day as the gas attack.”
Jack was not quite sure Penny’s even heard the last part. She’s risen and pacing the same course he had before. He wants to say more, that perhaps Faraday is not the most reliable source, that maybe Desmond managed to survive their experiments and wherever he was, he had missed the gas attack. But even if that was true, Desmond had been so far gone when he last saw him, physically and mentally, Jack doubted he had the heart or energy to survive on his own. It would be wrong to offer her false hope.
Penny reaches for her coat. He thinks she’s just cold and was about to suggest building a fire when she exits the room without saying a word and heads to the front door.
“You’re leaving?”
After all the trouble she’s gone to get him to talk, Jack assumed this would only be the beginning, that Penny would have a thousand follow-up questions and she would deride him for lying and ask him to help her expose the island and all its madness. Instead, she can’t flee his presence fast enough.
“Yes.”
“Is there anything else you want to know?”
“Like what?” Penny looks up at him, her face is hard with challenge and he realizes he has nothing to add that would soften the blow he’s dealt her.
She slips out the door and he is tempted to reach out and grab her arm, force Penny to stay and listen to all the rabid memories her determination has unleashed, from his father’s death to the failed raft to Ben’s operation. He needs to tell her about meeting Ana at the airport bar and letting Boone die and how amid the chaos he lent his heart to two women claimed by other men. He wants someone to understand that it doesn’t bother him to get on an airplane but show him a ping pong table or a vintage computer and he goes weak in the knees. But he lets her go because his story is not hers, and the combination of their grief would be overwhelming.
Still, he can’t help ask her one more thing. “Are you going to keep looking?”
Penny strides purposely down the Silverman’s driveway; her slumped shoulders are the only sign that she’s delaying her breakdown until she has some privacy. She does not answer him until she opens the car door. “I won’t bother you again, Jack.”
x x x
Jack has become averse to touching their bodies. His patients are too brittle, too soft, too human. A scent he never noticed before follows him home from the hospital, sickness and death. He showers twice, three times a day trying to shake it off. Even though he’s only just returned, he takes a leave of absence. Then he discovers the odour is found outside of work. It coats the walls of Hurley’s institution; it floats through the air at Kate’s sparkling clean house and clings to Aaron. When he smells it at his mother’s, he realizes that it must be him and not everyone else.
This sensation only appeared after speaking with Penny. Instead of unburdening himself as he hoped, he feels heavier. He doesn’t regret meeting with her, not quite, but he thinks if he had to do it over, he would have continued their lie. Where has telling the truth gotten either of them? He imagines the heavy cloyingly sweet smell of defeat now follows Penny too, replacing the trail of lightness and hope. So he is shocked when he sees her again to find nothing of the sort. She radiates a quiet calmness and confidence that stuns him. If it’s all a front, it’s a solid one. The worst he could say was she looked tired.
They run into each other on the U.C.L.A. campus and Jack is convinced this meeting is accidental. It was clear when she left the Silverman’s cottage that Penny wanted no more from him and even if she had, there was no longer a reason to manufacture ways to get his attention. It is also clear when he finds her clutching a copy of Faraday’s thesis that she has not relinquished her search. But there is something different about Penny and it takes him all night to pinpoint what that is.
After some weak protests and he is not quite sure why he insists so hard, she agrees to join him for a drink. They choose to remain on the campus since the student pub is an unlikely place for anyone who might care to see them together and it’s a casual enough environment not to encourage any serious talk. They order beers and a plate of appetizers and joke about the decades in age difference between them and the rest of the pub’s occupants. He tells her about the lecture he gave this afternoon, stepping in for a sick colleague and she laughs politely at his exaggerated description of failing to make the room’s A/V equipment work.
“Have you been in L.A. this whole time?”
He means since they last met but she perceives the question differently. “Off and on since 2001. I’m just back from London. My father…” Her voice drops off and she pokes a soggy mozzarella stick with her fork.
“Your father?”
She drops the fork and picks up her glass. “He had an accident. There was a home invasion.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He’ll be fine. He always lands on his feet.” She says this derisively, implying it’s no compliment.
“Did they catch them?”
“It was one man and he got away. The police have no leads and my father, as always, is being uncooperative. I’m certain he knows who shot him.” Even though she was the one to bring him up, she quickly changes the subject. “How are your friends?”
It’s fine for him to expose himself to her but he feels protective of the others and shrugs away her question. “They’re fine.”
“And the children?”
“Also fine.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“Did you learn anything?” He nods at the bound sheaf of papers at her side entitled Development of a High Performance Parallel Computing Platform and Its Use in the Study of Space and Time.
“No,” she sighs as her fingers graze the cover. “I came to speak to Faraday’s former adviser, hoping to have him translate this into lay terms but the only thing he did was send me to the bookstore.” She pulls a slim paperback from her purse and hands it to Jack.
Slaughterhouse 5 or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt Vonnegut. Jack shakes his head and genuinely smiles for the first time in Penny’s presence. It’s not just that Faraday’s title makes more sense to him but Jack suddenly gets a flash of Sawyer, his goofy lopsided glasses perched on the end of his nose, reading this novel on the beach. He hands the book back. “I might have more luck with the physics, if you want me to take a look.”
“Really? That would be wonderful.”
The gesture surprises them both and Jack places the heavy book it in his briefcase before he changes his mind. He has no desire to understand Faraday’s theories, anymore than he wants the island to be found again by anyone, but he has an urge to make things up to Penny. He also wants to see her again because even though she triggered it, she’s the only one who seems to keep the ghostly smell at bay.
They are freer with each other after this. Penny returns to the subject of her father and without implicating him fully, indicates that he has continually thwarted her search for the island. Jack reveals that he couldn’t bear to watch the DVD she gave him and out of nowhere he admits to her, before he had even admitted to himself, that he often feels Charlie’s presence watching him, judging him. He can’t believe he has actually said this out loud but Penny doesn’t look at him like he’s crazy. She reaches across the table and pats his hand.
They leave soon after this with plans to meet again to discuss Faraday’s thesis. Penny presses her hand against her stomach and requests a meeting place with less greasy food options. There seems to be a mutual desire to remain clandestine so their homes are out of the question, as are more public options. Despite its distance from L.A., the familiarity to both causes Jack to suggest they return to the Silverman beach house and surprisingly Penny agrees. He says he’ll check with Marc and get back to her with a date.
Outside the pub, Jack jiggles his car keys and asks the question which has bothered him from the beginning. “Why me?”
Penny smiles weakly and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “Desmond always wanted to be a doctor.”
Only after they part does Jack figure out what is different about Penny. While she referred to the island several times, she only mentioned Desmond once and when she did, she spoke of him in the past tense. Even though this is how he thinks of him, of all of them, it sounds wrong coming from her and he’s not sure why.
x x x
To be continued here.
Characters: Jack, Penny, Kate, Hurley and Sayid
Pairing: Jack/Penny, Desmond/Penny
Rating: PG13
Disclaimer: Lost doesn't belong to me. This is what I look like if I was evil.
Spoilers: Up to the Other Woman
Summary: Some Lies are just waiting to be confessed to the right person.
A/N: Dedicated to lenina20
x x x
Over the sound of the whirring blades and sputtering engine, Aaron’s cries are deafening. Everyone else is mute, too stunned by events of the last hour, of the last six months, to protest alongside the baby. No one joins his screams even when the helicopter dips to the right side, and then drops suddenly from the sky. Jack surrenders his hold on Jin’s abdomen and grasps a bar on the cabin’s ceiling. His hands, slippery with blood, fail to connect and the momentum throws him up against the wall. A dizzying array of green and brown spins outside the open entryway, inviting them back to the island. For the second time that day, Jack believes he’s going to be thrown out of a helicopter.
They seem to fall forever but it must have been only a matter of seconds before the blades come to life again and the helicopter hangs in the air, steadying itself, before rising. Jack is tossed to the floor and crawls to the back where Jin’s crumpled body has slid. Hurley uncurls himself from the ball he had folded into even before the threat of a crash appeared and together they roll Jin onto his back. Sun unbuckles her harness and scrambles over the seat to her husband’s side. Jack does not object when it is her steadier hands that takes over the sutures.
Aaron continues to cry, an unseen siren clutched in Kate’s arms. Her head remains bent, covering his tiny body with her own. All that’s visible to Jack is her hair, which flies above her seat as if immune to gravity. Beside her, Sayid risks a glance back; he’s unsurprised but still apologetic. Between his limited piloting skills and the spotty repairs, Sayid had warned them all it was unlikely he would get them off the island, let alone to anywhere safe.
Just as the coast comes into sight, Sayid twists the helicopter away from the ocean and Jack braces himself for what he thinks is an emergency landing. But the craft remains stable and deliberately goes back across the island. They should not be wasting their fuel but Jack realizes Sayid needs to see for himself what he had described.
Aaron quiets as they fly over the community of houses and the cabin becomes eerily peaceful. Hours ago, before Miles had thrust Jack out of the helicopter escorting Ben off the island, he had watched helplessly as canisters of a nerve gas called Novichok were tossed below, a cloud of white vapour dispersing before they even hit the ground. Jack forces himself to look at the results. Even in the growing dusk, the bodies are unmistakable, scattered across the grass, some hanging half inside doorways and peeking out from the surrounding brush. No one, thankfully, is identifiable from this height but a quick count reveals they must be the only ones to have escaped unscathed. Sayid does not linger. He changes course and they fly speedily away from the carnage.
Jack remembers watching with his parents the thrilling footage of the evacuation of Saigon. He was fascinated by the helicopters that hovered over the roof of U.S. embassy like a flock of giant birds, gathering a never ending line of people in their claws. It was years before he understood what it all meant. At the time, Vietnam was merely a word whispered by his parents and spoken solemnly by men on the television; some sort of disease, he had speculated. But even at five years old, Jack got a sense that he was witnessing the end of something iconic.
It wasn’t just the chaotic departure by air or even the flood of death that lay in their wake that pushed this memory to the forefront of his mind. As Jack watches the island become smaller and smaller and then finally disappear, he is overcome with the finality of the moment. It was over. They had survived but they had also lost. He couldn’t begin to list what had been lost.
x x x
As he recounts their flight from the island to Penny, Jack can’t stay still. He paces between the kitchen and the den, pausing each time to touch the cotton curtains hung over the deck’s glass doors, closed to hide the view of the beach. They do not, however, keep out of the sound of the waves. Their crashing penetrates the cottage and acts as a secondary narrator to his story. Penny sits in a chair in the centre of the room, hugging her legs, her sad eyes tracking Jack’s every move.
“And the rest, what you read in the papers, was true. They found the seven of us on this pile of rocks; I wouldn’t even call it an island. There was no vegetation, no fresh water, no shelter. We collected rain and caught fish, and slept under the inflatable raft that had carried us there once the copter went down.” Jack recalls when the ocean liner appeared out of the mist after three weeks, everyone of them out of their minds with hunger, thirst and anxiety, and Aaron so close to death, they were convinced the boat was a mirage. “We started our story from there. It was simpler, safer. If we stayed quiet about the rest, we hoped they would leave us alone.”
Penny gives a slight nod and rests her chin on her knees. Jack collapses, exhausted in a chair across from her, runs his hands over his hair. He wants this to be enough for her, the confirmation of their lies, but considering he had yet to mention Desmond, he knows they are nowhere near done.
“What do you think they did with Ben?”
This is Penny’s first question and it is unexpected because she too seems to be avoiding asking about Desmond and for Jack, he has barely thought of Ben since they left.
Whether Miles was Ben’s captor or rescuer, Jack no longer cares. Yet he can’t help recall the trace of humanity he saw on Ben’s face as Miles hung Jack’s body over the edge of the helicopter and untied his hands, a strange gesture considering it was followed by throwing him out of the craft. Jack doesn’t remember the fall, only the sensation of hitting the water. The experience of being enveloped in a pool of cool blackness was almost soothing and he had just let himself sink further and further until he opened his eyes and noticed the corpses still reined to their airplane seats at the murky bottom. The desire not to die like them prompted him to break his plunge and he kicked hard until he broke the surface.
“I don’t know.”
It was the same response he had for Sayid and Kate when he later met them, Sun, Jin and Hurley back at the beach before they left in the their own helicopter, the one Michael, Desmond and Sayid has crash landed a month before, on their escape from the freighter.
Penny does not ask anymore questions. She gets up and mixes them both a drink and waits for him to continue. Her quiet patience is a prompt in itself so he swallows the scotch in two gulps and begins another story, one where only the end is important now.
“I understood you spoke to Desmond on the freighter.”
“Yes.” The tears she has been holding back begin to pool in her eyes.
“When he returned to the beach, he seemed much taller, stronger. He was so buoyed by hearing your voice, he could have lasted another five years on the island.”
Penny makes a sound that lands somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
“And I think he could of if he hadn’t gotten it into his head that he and Faraday, the physicist, could go back and save Charlie.”
“Go back?”
“Yeah, I was never clear on what they meant but in his elated state, Desmond had me half convinced they could do this.” He sighs and rubs his hands together. “They would go off into the jungle, back to the site of hatch and do some sort of experiment. This went on for a few weeks, I think. It’s hard to remember, a lot was going on. The camp had reunited and most people were living at the barracks, for safety. Everyone expected the freighter people would return once they got a new helicopter. I stayed on the beach with a few others to help Sayid try to fix the one we had.” He realized these details were unimportant; he was stalling, wanting to leave Penny with the image of a stalwart Desmond as long as he could.
“Over time, Desmond’s mood began to change, he would return from the jungle forgetful, belligerent, panicky. Sometimes he thought Charlie was alive, other times he thought he had died that very day. Faraday was same. On occasion they didn’t even seem to know each other, sometimes they didn’t know any of us. Sayid said this had happened before, when they were on the freighter.”
Jack tries to state all this as gently as possible. If he didn’t think Penny would know he was lying, he would have made something else up. The best he can do is not mention the headaches and the nose bleeds and that near the end, Desmond didn’t even know who the woman was in his cherished photo. “We tried to stop them from going out. At one point we sedated Desmond, tied him to a tree and planned to take him to the barracks but he escaped with Faraday and they disappeared for days.”
He paused to let this all sink in. The sun has gone down but neither of them moves to turn on a light. The darkness makes it easier to continue.
“Then Faraday returned alone. At first he didn’t remember what happened or who Desmond even was but eventually his memory returned. He said they had gone down to the Looking Glass, to try their experiment there.”
“Where Desmond drowned like Charlie.” Penny says this like she knew it all along. How she guessed, Jack does not know, other than she had come here prepared to hear the worst.
“He never put it in those words but that’s what we gathered. Kate and I planned to investigate but we didn't get a chance because just then John appeared with Aaron. He said Claire, the baby’s mother, was ill with a fatal and highly contagious sickness. He wanted us to keep the baby safe, quarantined. Juliet, the other doctor returned with him because she thought she could save Claire. The next morning Hurley appeared saying no one was sick and John had gone crazy and stolen Aaron. That was the same day as the gas attack.”
Jack was not quite sure Penny’s even heard the last part. She’s risen and pacing the same course he had before. He wants to say more, that perhaps Faraday is not the most reliable source, that maybe Desmond managed to survive their experiments and wherever he was, he had missed the gas attack. But even if that was true, Desmond had been so far gone when he last saw him, physically and mentally, Jack doubted he had the heart or energy to survive on his own. It would be wrong to offer her false hope.
Penny reaches for her coat. He thinks she’s just cold and was about to suggest building a fire when she exits the room without saying a word and heads to the front door.
“You’re leaving?”
After all the trouble she’s gone to get him to talk, Jack assumed this would only be the beginning, that Penny would have a thousand follow-up questions and she would deride him for lying and ask him to help her expose the island and all its madness. Instead, she can’t flee his presence fast enough.
“Yes.”
“Is there anything else you want to know?”
“Like what?” Penny looks up at him, her face is hard with challenge and he realizes he has nothing to add that would soften the blow he’s dealt her.
She slips out the door and he is tempted to reach out and grab her arm, force Penny to stay and listen to all the rabid memories her determination has unleashed, from his father’s death to the failed raft to Ben’s operation. He needs to tell her about meeting Ana at the airport bar and letting Boone die and how amid the chaos he lent his heart to two women claimed by other men. He wants someone to understand that it doesn’t bother him to get on an airplane but show him a ping pong table or a vintage computer and he goes weak in the knees. But he lets her go because his story is not hers, and the combination of their grief would be overwhelming.
Still, he can’t help ask her one more thing. “Are you going to keep looking?”
Penny strides purposely down the Silverman’s driveway; her slumped shoulders are the only sign that she’s delaying her breakdown until she has some privacy. She does not answer him until she opens the car door. “I won’t bother you again, Jack.”
x x x
Jack has become averse to touching their bodies. His patients are too brittle, too soft, too human. A scent he never noticed before follows him home from the hospital, sickness and death. He showers twice, three times a day trying to shake it off. Even though he’s only just returned, he takes a leave of absence. Then he discovers the odour is found outside of work. It coats the walls of Hurley’s institution; it floats through the air at Kate’s sparkling clean house and clings to Aaron. When he smells it at his mother’s, he realizes that it must be him and not everyone else.
This sensation only appeared after speaking with Penny. Instead of unburdening himself as he hoped, he feels heavier. He doesn’t regret meeting with her, not quite, but he thinks if he had to do it over, he would have continued their lie. Where has telling the truth gotten either of them? He imagines the heavy cloyingly sweet smell of defeat now follows Penny too, replacing the trail of lightness and hope. So he is shocked when he sees her again to find nothing of the sort. She radiates a quiet calmness and confidence that stuns him. If it’s all a front, it’s a solid one. The worst he could say was she looked tired.
They run into each other on the U.C.L.A. campus and Jack is convinced this meeting is accidental. It was clear when she left the Silverman’s cottage that Penny wanted no more from him and even if she had, there was no longer a reason to manufacture ways to get his attention. It is also clear when he finds her clutching a copy of Faraday’s thesis that she has not relinquished her search. But there is something different about Penny and it takes him all night to pinpoint what that is.
After some weak protests and he is not quite sure why he insists so hard, she agrees to join him for a drink. They choose to remain on the campus since the student pub is an unlikely place for anyone who might care to see them together and it’s a casual enough environment not to encourage any serious talk. They order beers and a plate of appetizers and joke about the decades in age difference between them and the rest of the pub’s occupants. He tells her about the lecture he gave this afternoon, stepping in for a sick colleague and she laughs politely at his exaggerated description of failing to make the room’s A/V equipment work.
“Have you been in L.A. this whole time?”
He means since they last met but she perceives the question differently. “Off and on since 2001. I’m just back from London. My father…” Her voice drops off and she pokes a soggy mozzarella stick with her fork.
“Your father?”
She drops the fork and picks up her glass. “He had an accident. There was a home invasion.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He’ll be fine. He always lands on his feet.” She says this derisively, implying it’s no compliment.
“Did they catch them?”
“It was one man and he got away. The police have no leads and my father, as always, is being uncooperative. I’m certain he knows who shot him.” Even though she was the one to bring him up, she quickly changes the subject. “How are your friends?”
It’s fine for him to expose himself to her but he feels protective of the others and shrugs away her question. “They’re fine.”
“And the children?”
“Also fine.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“Did you learn anything?” He nods at the bound sheaf of papers at her side entitled Development of a High Performance Parallel Computing Platform and Its Use in the Study of Space and Time.
“No,” she sighs as her fingers graze the cover. “I came to speak to Faraday’s former adviser, hoping to have him translate this into lay terms but the only thing he did was send me to the bookstore.” She pulls a slim paperback from her purse and hands it to Jack.
Slaughterhouse 5 or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death by Kurt Vonnegut. Jack shakes his head and genuinely smiles for the first time in Penny’s presence. It’s not just that Faraday’s title makes more sense to him but Jack suddenly gets a flash of Sawyer, his goofy lopsided glasses perched on the end of his nose, reading this novel on the beach. He hands the book back. “I might have more luck with the physics, if you want me to take a look.”
“Really? That would be wonderful.”
The gesture surprises them both and Jack places the heavy book it in his briefcase before he changes his mind. He has no desire to understand Faraday’s theories, anymore than he wants the island to be found again by anyone, but he has an urge to make things up to Penny. He also wants to see her again because even though she triggered it, she’s the only one who seems to keep the ghostly smell at bay.
They are freer with each other after this. Penny returns to the subject of her father and without implicating him fully, indicates that he has continually thwarted her search for the island. Jack reveals that he couldn’t bear to watch the DVD she gave him and out of nowhere he admits to her, before he had even admitted to himself, that he often feels Charlie’s presence watching him, judging him. He can’t believe he has actually said this out loud but Penny doesn’t look at him like he’s crazy. She reaches across the table and pats his hand.
They leave soon after this with plans to meet again to discuss Faraday’s thesis. Penny presses her hand against her stomach and requests a meeting place with less greasy food options. There seems to be a mutual desire to remain clandestine so their homes are out of the question, as are more public options. Despite its distance from L.A., the familiarity to both causes Jack to suggest they return to the Silverman beach house and surprisingly Penny agrees. He says he’ll check with Marc and get back to her with a date.
Outside the pub, Jack jiggles his car keys and asks the question which has bothered him from the beginning. “Why me?”
Penny smiles weakly and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “Desmond always wanted to be a doctor.”
Only after they part does Jack figure out what is different about Penny. While she referred to the island several times, she only mentioned Desmond once and when she did, she spoke of him in the past tense. Even though this is how he thinks of him, of all of them, it sounds wrong coming from her and he’s not sure why.
x x x
To be continued here.