Fic: Grace - Chapter 15 (part 1)
Title: Grace - Chatper 15 (part 1)
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
Chapter 15
Ryan has four different highlighters.
Bluegreenyellowpink and as the lines in the journal blur together, so do the colours. The whole thing, these frayed pages, it’s just a rainbow of thoughts and feelings, and what Ryan deemed important. It hazes together like a sunset, like an ocean, like vomit, bile, piss, and my pupils cross over my nose just trying to take it all in. Trying to absorb it all like a toilet absorbs a hangover, like a rug absorbs sweat and cum and dust. The whole background is nothing; it’s meaningless, it’s stupid, but the words, they stand out too bold and too firm. The words, they stick out and imprint themselves on my fingers when I hold the pages too tight.
I am reading my mother.
I’m reading her like a handbook, like a magazine, like an Ikea instruction pamphlet, like everything she has ever felt, ever done, ever wanted. It’s written on the pages in front of me. It’s just quotes and passages, and some of those little lines of prose and thought, some I know are written by her, but the point is, the point is that it’s her explanation for everything that she has ever, ever done.
It’s her reasoning, it’s her justifying herself and her decisions to the great wide world, and maybe to me too. Maybe she knew I’d get a hold of this. Maybe she knew that it would end up in the dirty hands of the two of her children who hated her most. She gave it to Catherine, who gave it to me.
This, it’s her head and it’s her heart, and maybe most importantly of all, it’s her.
Catherine’s pages, they aren’t nearly as inspiring, most of her words have been scribbled down, with letters that trail off the page; the high of drugs and alcohol hindering any efforts at maturity or depth. There are one offs though, spaces of time where Catherine must have come hurtling back down to Earth just long enough to write a few letters, cry over them and let the ink mingle with her tears. I swear I can smell the saltwater, smell the liquid heart-ache, those fluids that her body was desperate to get rid of. I can smell Catherine on these pages, and absorbing all this, it hurts more than it was supposed to, but by the time I finish reading it for the first time, I realize that this is why I put it off so long.
I knew it would hurt, I knew that this whole thing would be a dagger to my heart, knew that it would leave me wasted, over-dosing on emotion, overdosing on Urie.
There is only one passage that Ryan has underlined instead of highlighted. One in the whole million-page thing, and it’s one line that has a two-page spread all to itself.
It falls on the thirty-fourth page of my mother’s half of the journal, and it sits all on its own, the kid who eats lunch in the school toilets, the ugly hooker, the leper. It’s obscure, because it’s so unlike the rest of the goddamn thing where words and pictures slip into every crevice.
The hardest things to say in this lifetime are ‘I love you’ and ‘I’m sorry’.
It’s my mother’s handwriting, and this is one thing that I can’t place, I can’t tell when she wrote it and I don’t know why. It’s not referenced, and it’s so out of place. The page, this one specifically, it’s fraying at the edges, and Ryan’s underlined my mother’s penned scrawl with a thin pencil line and an arrow.
An arrow to his own letters, his own tiny print that looks more like the footprints of a rat, a rodent, a lizard, his own custom font that really takes up even less space than my mother’s did.
I don’t know. ‘Goodbye’ is pretty fucking hard too.
I bite my lip, rest my back against the wall behind me, my legs tucked under me and I take a deep breath that rattles my chest like the world is ending.
I don’t know it right then, but this week, the week that follows me reading this, it’ll make me say all three, and my mum, Ryan, they were both right.
These words, they are so fucking hard.
*
“What the hell are you doing?”
I can’t see who said it, not yet, not now, but Loretta, her arse sticks out from behind the antique cabinet in the hallway. Loretta, she likes to fiddle with things, fix them, tinker about like a watchmaker and the world, it’s her own personal Big Ben.
“Right now? I’m getting dinner. People do in fact require nutrition at some point during the day, and, you know, I didn’t do the breakfast or the lunch thing, so…”
Loretta’s head pops out from behind the cabinet, and she crinkles her nose, rolls her eyes up to her hairline. “For real?” She says, “I mean, I thought that the human body could live off booze and drugs and sex. Are you saying it needs food too? Jesus Christ, how the hell am I even alive?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.” And I take a too big bite of my bread roll. “The blunt honesty though, it fits you like a second skin.”
“Sarcasm requires more effort,” Loretta says, and she’s found her feet, has found her way to my side and has stolen my bread roll out of my hungry hands. “I’m a naturally lazy person,” she bites, gives it back, and rubs long fingers through my hair. “What are you doing?”
“Eating.”
“No,” she says, “before. You haven’t been yourself all week, locking yourself away and, I just…”
“Just what?” I ask, and maybe I’m genuinely curious. Loretta’s eyes are as dark as dark, and her hair is wet, it curls around her cheeks, around her neck.
“Nothing,” she says, “you’re being an asshole.”
“Whatever.” And I grab the handheld phone from the bench top. “I’m going back to my room. Don’t come in.”
“Like I’d want to.”
And a part of me wishes she did want to, that she’d follow me in so that I could delay all this a little longer. So I wouldn’t have to do this, so I wouldn’t have to call my mother.
I collapse on the bed like a falling high-rise, push my head into the pillow and my fingers, they grasp the phone too tight, enough that the flesh between my thumb and finger strains and aches and just, it hurts. It doesn’t hurt as much as the rest of me does though, when I realize I have to look my home number up. I can’t remember it, and Jesus, it has been long.
I can hear the phone ringing, that muffled click as someone picks it up on the other end of the line.
“Urie household, Grace speaking.”
The words pour from my mouth like a flood, like a storm, like tears. I can’t stop myself, and my voice, it shakes. “Were you really that unhappy?”
I can almost hear the quirked eyebrow, the apprehension that crawls into her voice. “Who is this?”
“Brendon,” I reply, and it’s curt and straight to the point. “Were you unhappy?”
“Wow.” She laughs a little; a coarse, strained sound that tears itself from the back of her throat. She sounds so fucking tired. “I can’t say I thought I’d hear from you again.”
“I can’t say I thought I’d call.”
She laughs again, and this time it’s a little more natural. “Honesty is the best policy.”
“I wish you believed that.”
“Ah, just because it’s the best policy does not mean I abide by it. I’m not an honest person, Brendon,” she says, and the sound is muffled over the phone. “I never have been, and I have only ever pretended to be for yours and your siblings’ sake.”
“Even now, you’re lying.”
She laughs, chuckles, a hearty thing that echoes in my ears. “Yeah.”
“Were you really that unhappy with everything? With Dad, with us…” I take a deep breath, exhale hard enough that it crackles into the phone. “…with me?”
“Oh, Brendon,” she starts, and I can hear her collapse onto the stool beside the phone. They still haven’t rearranged furniture, not that I ever expected they would. “Oh, Brendon, not all of us are destined for the life you’ve managed to set up for yourself.”
“I made this.” I say, “People are in charge of their own futures.”
“To an extent,” she says, and I’ve never heard her voice this firm before, not even when I was fifteen and high and stumbling through the door at three in the morning. “Your life, who you are, it’s all shaped by the people, the environment around you. Genetics too, I guess.”
“Not always.”
“No,” she says, “sometimes you’re just meant to be a certain way, and the rest of the universe falls at your feet to ensure that.”
I can hear her breathing and it’s more comforting than it should be, more warm, more needed than I ever thought it would be. Both of us, we’d just gone into the attic, shaken out an old rug and the dust is settling back on top faster than it should. The silence, it rests on my shoulders, seals my mouth shut until, after what feels like hours, I manage to pry my lips back open.
“You didn’t love Dad, did you?”
“No.” It’s so curt, so straight to the point that it surprises me. I was expecting some meandering, some quiet and embarrassed thought.
“Then why did you marry him?”
“People hold certain expectations,” she says, “and sometimes you love someone so much that you can’t let them down.”
I almost scoff; my mouth hangs open in disbelief. “You didn’t love him though.”
“Who says I’m talking about your father?” And it’s not a question, not even when she words it like that. It’s a cold-hard statement, and we both know it.
“Did you have an affair?” Because it makes sense, with her writing and with the way she’s acting now.
“Yes.”
“With who?”
She laughs, and I can hear the chair creak beneath her, can feel myself shuffle on the bed. “No one you’d know, love.”
“How’d you do it, then?”
“What?”
“How’d you live like that? How’d you marry a man you hated, have five fucking kids with him, two of which I know you fucking hated, and just…how’d you live like everything was normal.”
“It was normal, Brendon,” she says, and I roll over, my face pressed against the pillow. “It was normal for me. Life isn’t a bouquet of white roses, if it was there would be no adultery or rape or divorce. People don’t always get what they want, so you have to learn to like what you have.”
The silence settles again, and it’s a little less comfortable, a little less sincere, and my eyes slide shut and my mother, I can almost feel her do the same.
“Oh,” she whispers, “and for the record, I loved all my children. I still do. Mothers, we can’t pick and choose.”
My voice finds itself again, and my hands, my fists, they clench in the sheets. “Are you going to leave Dad?”
There’s a short pause, before a firm, “No,” echoes through the line.
“Are you still having the affair?”
“Yes.” There’s a smile in her voice, I can hear it.
“Are you happy?” This, this is what matters the most. Her reply, it’s not one I want to hear.
She sighs too hard, enough that I can feel warm breath on my ear. “No.”
My voice is lost in my throat, and I have to find it, I have to say something here because I need to, I do, I need to let her know that “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she whispers, and really, that’s all there is to it.
*
Continue to part 2.