(no subject)
Who: Jess Winters.
What: It's one year since her husband's death; Jess goes to the cemetary to commemmorate it.
When: Wednesday afternoon.
Status/Rating: E for emo (PG for one swear)/complete narrative.
It had been a cold day, like most days in March were. Jess couldn't say what direction the wind was coming from, or what temperature it was exactly, but she knew damn well March was always cold. It had rained on Danny's funeral, a year ago. It was cold then, too.
She wasn't wearing black today, as she had at the funeral. All black, then, from the coat Danny had bought her that winter to the kidskin gloves she'd sobbed into. It was jeans and hoodie today that made her look five years younger, if weren't for the lines at her eyes and the slump of her shoulders. Torn and old, out of fashion, and the jeans were a little tighter in the hips than they had been before she'd gotten pregnant, but her grandmother had taught her well in the art of rat-packing, and these were the jeans and sweatshirt Danny had liked best anyway. She pulled down her hood--it had stopped drizzling a while ago--and sat down on the damp earth. Clothes could be washed, and however morbid it was, sitting there on the grassy turf was the closest she would ever be to her husband again.
She didn't cry. He wouldn't want it. It wasn't that Danny didn't (hadn't; she needed to stop doing that) like her to cry: he was (had been) remarkably good about being a comforting shoulder. But it had been a year. She was far from forgetting him, but he wouldn't have (there, that was the right one) wanted her to mourn forever. He'd been too good-natured for that.
The flowers--daffodils--she'd set next to the ones from last week, and the fading daisies from the week before. Any earlier ones had been removed, and Danny wouldn't have wanted his grave covered in a bunch of flowers anyway. Too girly. It almost made her laugh; those would have been exactly his words. Too girly. Jess put her hands on her forehead, as if to steady herself. For a moment there it was almost like she could hear him--
"He would say things like that, wouldn't he," Carol said, closing the gap between them. Jess whipped around from her seat in front of the grave to see her mother-in-law striding carefully up the grassy lawn to her son's grave. There was only a single white rose in her hands, which she was regarding with a bemused sort of half-smile. She had the same redness to her eyes Jess knew she had, if there'd been a mirror around to check.
"Carol," she said, standing up hastily and dusting off her jeans. "What?"
"'Too girly,'" Carol said, apparently again. Jess thought, terrified, that Carol had somehow read her thoughts, but the older woman only shrugged, set her flower down beside Jess', and folded her arms beneath her chest. She was in something more somber than Jess, always better dressed than her daughter-in-law, but there was no disdainfully appraising glance at the mother's clothes today. She kept her eyes on the grave. "It was what he would have said, if he saw us both here, flowers in hand."
Jess had only ever seen Carol at the grave twice: at Danny's funeral, when everyone was there and Jess was crying too hard to see anything, and once a few months after, when they had arranged to take Matty there together. They strictly avoided each other at the gravesite otherwise; for Jess' part, she couldn't stand the thought of Carol's disapproval, her avoiding glances, the pointed way she spoke of Matty, when she was trying to remember the way Danny's hand had felt in her hair, or the sound of his laugh. Those were getting more difficult to recall. Sometimes she worried whether she wouldn't soon need a photograph just to recall his face.
"Yeah," she said finally, more sigh than anything. Her shoulders lifted helplessly. "Wouldn't have much choice in the matter, anyway." Carol looked down at her--she was a good four inches taller, even without pumps--from the corner of her eye, brow raised. Jess gave a half-hearted sort of laugh, like a nervous twitch of her lungs. "We're gonna put flowers on his grave whether he likes it or not."
"Yes," Carol agreed. There was a very long pause, and then the corner of her mouth turned up wryly. "Although I suppose, between the two of us, he never had much choice in anything."
Jess made that lung-twitch again, a little louder, and though Carol pursed her lips, the little curve remained, and her shoulders lost some of their stiffness.
They stood in silence for a long time. Carol's posture changed, her hands folding delicately at her waist, and Jess, after a while, disregarded her stepmother's stance entirely and sat back down on the wet grass. She'd take the subway home looking like she'd lost a fight with a puddle, but people could think what they'd like. She'd probably never see them again anyway, and if she couldn't give a shit for Carol's opinion of her wet jeans, she certainly couldn't about random New Yorkers'.
"Where's Matty?" she asked quietly, after some time. The sky was getting grey again, but it didn't feel like rain. Soon enough it'd be dark. How long had she been there?
Carol pushed her hair behind her ears, first one side, then the other. She made the same short sigh, a brief little pfft noise, that Danny had when he was putting words together. "With the nanny," she said finally. "I didn't think--well."
"Yeah," Jess agreed. "This isn't really for him."
"No. No, it isn't."
A pause. "Just for us sad folk."
Carol may have nodded; there was a shifting of fabric, but no words. The grass made a soft squishing noise as Carol's pumps moved in it, and when Jess glanced up, her mother-in-law's imposing form was over her--not towering, as it usually was. It was softer, weaker. Her arms had folded under her breasts again, lifting and wrinkling the lapels of her coat as her shoulders shifted upwards. She opened her mouth once, and shut it again.
"Jessica," she said, after a very long silence. Jess drew a blade of grass up between her two fingers, wrapping it around one vaguely until the green strand ran out, then wrapping it around again. She didn't answer. "Jessica," Carol said again, "I cannot give up my grandson."
It always came to this. "I know," Jess said wearily.
And then Carol surprised her. Her voice was a hair thicker when she spoke. "He is all I have left of my son."
Jess looked up sharply. Words failed her for a long moment. "He is all I have left," she said.
"You don't know what it's like to--to lose a son."
"I'm getting there," she said sharply, and it was only when she turned to look up and give Carol an equally sharp look that she saw the woman had seated herself on the grass beside her, disregarding the state of her woolen skirt. Carol Winters did not cry. But her face shifted, changed; her lips thinned and trembled, and her eyes never quite met whomever she was speaking to.
She removed her gloves with all the perfunctory movement of needing something to do. "He used to talk about you all the time, you know," she said, after a pause. "Even before you were married. Jess this and Jess that. He thought the world of you."
Jess didn't say anything. But she listened.
"I never thought my son would love anyone nearly so much as he loved me--and his father, of course--he died before you two met, I believe--at any rate." One bare hand waved the subject off, drifted back to push dislodged hair back behind her ear. Carol's nose was distinctly pink. She looked away from Jess, at the grave, at something over her shoulder; whatever her original thought had been, she couldn't finish it. The hand that had adjusted her hair drifted to her mouth, tapped its fingers against her lips, covered the whole of it with her palm as the other came to rest beneath and bolster it. Jess watched quietly.
"I miss him," she said, her voice impossibly small.
"So do I," Carol said, her voice even smaller. Taking a careful breath, she looked over to her daughter-in-law, and gently reached over to push Jess' bangs out of her eyes, take her chin in her palm. It was few and far between such motherly gestures were spent on Jess; the last had been when Matty was born. "You've been crying," she said, eyes darting over Jess' face.
Jess shrugged, wiped one hand across her face with such force she shoved her cheek clean off her teeth. Carol's hand didn't move. "Only a little."
Carol laughed, the same nervous twitch Jess had had earlier, and sniffed delicately directly after. "I don't think you were ever much for crying," she said, and when Jess looked over to acknowledge it with a weak, watery smile, she found Carol's other hand wiping her cheek much as Jess had wiped her own. Carol Winters didn't cry. She was trying desperately not to.
With all the hesitancy of approaching a wild animal--or perhaps more appropriately, approaching a relative--Jess reached over and took Carol's bare hand in her gloved one, giving it a small, reassuring squeeze. In the same moment, Carol reached over with her other one, and pulled Jess to her in a slightly crushing hug. Before Jess' head was even cradled on Carol's shoulder, the older woman was sobbing uncontrollably, as if for a year, as if for every moment she'd been holding it back, and it was only in the presence of a woman she wanted to sever from the only good left in this world that it was even possible to let it out. Carol sobbed, piteously and unrestrained, and it was only in the face of her mother-in-law's tears that Jess found she absolutely couldn't. Carol was doing it for her.
Tomorrow, they would not speak of this. Carol would adjust her make-up in the car and go home, and Jess would return to her empty house, watch Sleeping Beauty without Matty, and pray that sleep came. Tomorrow, there would be formal calls, all stiffness and propriety, to make sure Jess was still coming at 1 to pick up Matty from daycare. It would all be back to normal. But for now, she let Carol cry for her, held the woman's body, anything but fragile, like a piece of stained glass on the verge of shattering. Carol cried, and Jess slowly closed a door.