Fic: Grace - Chapter 18 (part 2)
Title: Grace - Chapter 18 (part 2)
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
Ryan answers the door, and this, it has to be a first; I’m so used to Spencer, to Clare or someone else, to people I don’t know, people with sharp eyes and sharper tongues and heavy fists, so used to crashing into, imploding against these people instead.
His eyes are soft, but they’re expectant, I don’t read eyes, can’t, should stop trying.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I reply, and I dig my hands deeper into my pockets, rock back on rough heels.
Ryan stares for a moment at me, past me, before swinging open the door and nodding me into his apartment.
“Tea?” he asks. “Coffee?”
“Water?” And I flop down on the sofa, lean my feet against the coffee table.
Ryan nods, wanders into the dinky kitchen and comes back bearing two half-full glasses.
“So,” he says, and he sways a little, backwards and forwards and the fan’s on in the corner, I wonder if it’s blowing him over. He hands me a glass, folds onto the other end of the sofa.
“So,” I reply, and I nod, gesture into empty space with tired fingers, worn out hands. “Yesterday was…” and the words trail off, a big, fat blank in a head normally too full of thoughts.
“Enlightening,” Ryan finishes, and he might be smiling, grinning small and hesitantly down into his glass. “Nice,” he says instead, and he won’t, can’t look at me.
“Yeah,” I say, and I grin back, chuckle a little, and it’s more half-hearted than it should be. Not enough…not enough anything behind it.
Silence settles like the dust after wartime, ashes after fire, it’s gentle, falls in the space, the worlds between us right now. Ryan’s on the other end of the sofa, but he may as well be in another city, another country, he’s too far away and I don’t, I can’t feel him. Touch him.
“I won’t get bored of you,” I say instead, a timid olive branch, a fucking peace offering.
Ryan’s head shoots up, and he stares too hard, coarse eyes and parted lips. “What?”
“Your main concern…” And I clear my throat, rub a hand across my thigh. “Your main concern yesterday was that I’ll get bored of you, and I won’t.”
Ryan stares again, and a few times he opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, to debate or bargain or refute, but he closes it again, rethinks his answer.
“My main concern,” Ryan says after what feels like hours, “is that we know nothing about each other. My main fucking concern is that we’re gonna wake up in six months and neither of us will be enigmas anymore, neither of us will be a secret, and we won’t just be bored of each other, we won’t fucking like each other.”
“My main concern, Brendon,” he says, and he hesitates here, stumbles over the words. “Is that I have baggage, and I don’t want to start something, if you’re not gonna follow through.”
“You told me about your dad.”
Ryan just stares, half-lidded eyes and what can only be described as a fucking sneer marring his pretty face. “A life of shit can’t be properly summed up in two minutes of fucking word vomit.”
Ryan’s small, tiny even, too thin and too bony, and we’re sitting here and I can see where his spine tries to break out of the skin that clothes his back. I can see through his t-shirt, his jeans, I can see it all, wide and naked and vulnerable because Jesus Christ, we’ve fucked twice now, and the fucking bedroom lights were on both times.
We’ve fucked and the walls of his old apartment, the picture frames of my bedroom, it’s all bared witness and will testify to this in a place of court. I’ve fucked Ryan Ross twice, but I’ve seen him fucking naked too many times.
Nudity, Catherine told me once, when she was high and trashed off her face, when her make-up smeared to make her look like a work of post-modern fucking art, is a state of mind.
We, me and Ryan, we’ve been naked since the beginning.
“Be with me,” I say, and I whisper it into my glass, curl my fingers around it just tight enough to hurt.
Ryan, I can see his ribcage, see it quiver beneath my words. “What?”
“That’s all I can say.” And it is. It’s everything, all of it, what this whole fucking thing’s been amounting too. “Be with me.”
“Brendon…” he says, and I can see his chest, I can see him inhale, exhale too hard, can see every breath, every beat of one tired motherfucker of a heart.
I try again, and I know I’m not, I know Ryan can see me, can see my chest and my back, my cock, my bare fucking legs. “Do you feel anything for me?”
“Brendon…”
“If yes,” I say, and I shiver, the fan, it’s really cold. Ryan, he shudders too. “Then let’s…I just want to try.”
He pauses, puts his glass on the table and wraps his arms around his lower belly. His knees are knobbly, I remember that, know that, can see that as he pushes his legs out against the floorboards. “I’ve got nothing to offer you.”
“You’ve got too fucking much to offer me.”
“I have baggage, Brendon.”
And yeah, he does, will have, I’m shit at tenses, pastpresentfuture. But the point is: so do I.
I have suitcases full, crates and boxes and fucking storage units worth.
Ryan leans back into the sofa pillows, and maybe I can’t see him as well as I could seconds ago, maybe he’s covering himself up a little, hiding behind screens and shields and the cotton of his t-shirt.
Ryan worries too much, I tell myself; Ryan thinks we don’t know anything about each other. That’s probably true, because if you asked me what his favourite colour was, favourite food, the name of the kid who probably bullied him in junior high, I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer.
“My name is Brendon Urie,” I say. “I am twenty years old and I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada.”
He stares at me again, eye contact that really fucking hurts, opens his mouth, says, “Tell me something that I won’t read on your fucking business card.”
And right, I was getting there. “I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, the youngest of five children to a mother that maybe loved me more than I will ever know, and maybe never loved me at all.”
Ryan pauses for a second, but nods, silently, briefly. “I’m listening.”
“I was born in Las Vegas to a woman who didn’t have a chance to live her life. She married too young, and had kids too young and she cheated on her husband and she ignored her eldest daughter, even when she was set to self-destruct.”
I take a deep breath, because this, it’s train of thought, verbal fucking diarrhea. “My mother is alive, but maybe that’s just on the outside, and I read her journal like you told me to, and I learnt more about her than I ever, ever wanted to know.”
And this, right here, this is a revelation. More than I ever could have thought on my own, something I maybe started thinking last night. “But most of all, I learnt that I don’t want to be like her, I don’t want to live how she lived, and maybe that’s the greatest lesson she ever could have taught me.”
“Where do I fit into this?” Ryan asks, and he hesitates as he says it, doesn’t want to sound too selfish, too self-involved, too self-concerned.
“I think,” I say, “I think that if I lived like my mother, like Grace fucking Urie, then I would marry someone like Audrey, and I would cheat on her with someone like you.”
I pause, breathe. “I don’t want to have to cheat on either of you.”
Ryan doesn’t say anything, but he’s staring, hard and tired and blisteringly something, and it’s that something that I can’t put my finger on, can’t figure out, so instead I say, “Catherine’s funeral is in two days.”
“I know,” he says, and his fingers, they clench in the sofa cushions.
“Make up your mind before then.” This, it’s the most decisive I’ve ever been about something. “And if you don’t want to do this, fine, but I won’t be able to see you anymore, and if you do then…” and fuck, “…I don’t know.”
*
If Catherine could ever see how much her fucking funeral cost, I’m pretty sure she’d piss herself laughing.
No one should spend this much on a cremation.
No one should spend this much on celebrating a life that probably never should have existed in the first place.
No one should spend this much on an event to which two people have organized, same two people being the only ones there.
“Fuck,” Loretta says, and she drops her cigarette, stumps it out with the toe of her stiletto. “Why am I here?”
“Coz you love me?” And I flash her big eyes and a tiny smile and Loretta, she eats this shit up, grins back and wraps an arm around my shoulders.
She lights a new cigarette, holds it up in the air. “Catherine Grace Urie,” she says, “we hardly knew ye.”
The priest, he won’t shut up; bible verses, gospels, words I don’t understand, nor feel the need to understand pouring from his open lips. The funeral started half an hour ago, and Loretta and I, we sit in an empty church. That doesn’t hurt as much as it probably should. I didn’t really invite anyone.
Loretta takes a long, hard draw on her cigarette and the priest glares from his place above the alter, above Catherine’s ash-body.
The thing about being famous, being fucking rich is that you can pay people not to notice shit like Loretta chain smoking in a Catholic church. She’s only doing it to piss the priest off, he made a few derogatory slurs in our first meeting, and Loretta, she wanted us to find a new guy, I just couldn’t be fucked.
“What’s wrong?” she mumbles, and I turn around just enough to come face to face with two large, concerned eyes. This, it could be in a chickflick.
“It’s my sister’s funeral,” I whisper back, “I’m pretty sure I’m not actually allowed to be expressing any form of joy or remotely felt happiness.”
“Nah,” she says, “I get that. You just keep looking at the fucking back door, and unless you’re thinking her drugged-up spirit is gonna swoop in, I have no idea who you think you’re gonna be seeing.”
I sigh, slide down in the pew and stare at the prayer cushions that hang beneath the Bibles, beneath the hymn books. “I told Ryan-“
“Jesus fuck,” she says, and she laughs, this raw sound that tears its way around the cigarette still lit between her teeth. “You and him, you need to figure it out.”
“You think?” I say, and it’s around this time, these seconds that the door slides open and I turn around so hard, so fast that my neck clicks, clinks, aches. There’s a body in the doorway, but it’s not the long thin one I was hoping for.
This one, it’s short and hunched and it curls in on itself. I dismiss it at first as one of the church workers, a nun or a monk or maybe some alter boy, but in seconds there’s the clip-clop of heels on the tiled floors, and this person, woman, I correct myself, she slides next to me in the pew.
“Hi,” she says, and she’s tired, old, she’s not like I remember at all, if anything, she’s prettier, not as sharp around the edges. This woman, the tiny thing, it’s Grace fucking Urie.
It’s my mother, and she has driven four hours with arthritis-ridden fingers to come to my sister’s funeral.
“Jesus,” I say, “mom? I-“
She cuts me off, leans across my prone body to Loretta. “Anymore?” she says, and she gestures to the cigarette in between Loretta’s lips. Loretta lights one, passes it to her wordlessly, and my mum sits back and chain smokes her way through Catherine’s funeral.
*
We’re all standing outside the church on this tiny, grassy patch of land and my mum and Loretta, they’ve sorta hit it off. Almost. They don’t talk, but they tolerate each other enough to smoke beside one another.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I tell my mum, and she doesn’t smile, but her eyes are wide and her lips are parted.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she says, “but don’t tell your dad, he’s under the firm belief I’ve been cold turkey since I was fifteen.”
“How’d you hide that?” Loretta questions, and she taps the cigarette, lets the ash hide between the blades of grass.
“Lots of air freshener,” she says. “I do all the washing in our house, so that helps.”
“I don’t know what to say to you,” I say, and I can feel Loretta’s eyes on me, deducting, thinking, present and attending.
“Then don’t say anything,” my mum says, and she shrugs tired shoulders, lets loose a tiny grin that makes decades fall from her cheeks, her eyes, her heart. “I’m here for Catherine,” she says. “I’m here to tell her that I’m sorry.”
I almost say something to that, try to refute, but this, all it equates to in my head is mememememe.
“You?” she says, and fuck, did I say that out loud? “I don’t need to say sorry to you yet.”
This, it has to be slow motion, because nothing clicks for a few moments. “What?”
“I’m not trying to jumpstart a dead relationship,” she says. “I’m not gonna lie and say that my reasons for being here are for you and Catherine, because they’re…” And she hesitates, quirks a grin and she, she’s fucking bashful. “They’re for me.”
“I’m not saying sorry to my dead daughter for her forgiveness, and I’m not saying it so that I can race back home and tell our church that my relationship with my eldest daughter has found purpose and understanding, coz fuck, I didn’t understand that girl when she was eight, and I sure as hell don’t understand her now.”
She lights a cigarette, props it between her teeth. “My reasons for being here are for me. I’m here because I hated that girl, but she was mine.” She turns, stares me dead in the eye. “And I loved her.”
“And me?”
“You’re not dead yet and neither am I,” she says, “So us, we’ve still got time.”
“To rebuild?” I say, and I quirk an eyebrow, say it with too much skepticism, too much unhidden loathing (not of her, not of her).
“No,” she says, “we’re not…I don’t think that’s possible. We both have our own lives to live, huh?”
“Me: fame and fortune, you: adultery and lies?” I don’t mean to say it, I don’t, but my mum, she laughs it off, even if there is a hint of bitterness underneath it all.
“Yeah,” she says, “for wont of a better phrase, yeah. I mean, to…I don’t know, understand each other.”
I stare at the ground too hard, every breath is ripped from my throat and my chest and then, and then there’s a hand on my arm, light and, and really fucking heavy. I look up in time to see Loretta’s half-lidded eyes and the gentle purse of her big, red lips.
Right.
“I’m not making any promises,” I tell my mum, tell Grace, and she just laughs again, says, “Neither am I.”
“Right,” I say, “good.”
Because yeah, it is. This woman, she gives a shit, cares more than she pretends not to, and yeah, so do I.
My mum, she looks over my shoulder, quirks a brow at something too far away and says, “Either of you waiting on some pretty little boy in a beat up car?”
I spin around too quickly, almost rip Loretta’s arm off in the process, and Loretta, her eyes latch onto him faster than mine, she laughs, cackles, a deep, throaty sound. “Jesus, Bren, these people want to wring you dry, don’t they?”
She laughs again, but I wave her off, one foot in front of the other and God, my mum was right. Ryan’s car is cheap and nasty. Red, but the paint is so chipped, so old and so desperately in need of an overhaul, in need of too much love and care and fuck, the thing could be vintage.
Vintage crap.
I’m walking over to the car, to Ryan, and he doesn’t do much, doesn’t really respond, just stares with big eyes, watches my every step, every flick of my wrists and blink of my eyelids.
In seconds we’re standing opposite, too close, too close, too close, and neither of us say anything. You can hear the grass grow between us.
I rock on my heels, shift my feet too quickly, lightly and toe the ground. “I-” But Ryan, one of his hands darts out and cups my open mouth.
“My turn,” he says, and his eyes are wide, open and desperate, and all I can say, all I can murmur in reply is an okay that gets spliced and mutilated as it tries to claw its way through the spaces between his clenched fingers.
“My name is George Ryan Ross,” he says. “I am twenty years old, and I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada.”
Ryan takes his hand away too hesitantly, leans back against the car and stares at the ground. “I was born to a dad who didn’t love me and nor did he hate me.” He sighs. “I was born to a mother who couldn’t look at me.”
He puffs out his cheeks, purses his lips and my heart pounds in my chest, explodes against my ribcage and the residue, it’s all over me, splattered across my head and my lungs and my fucking liver.
“I moved to bumfuck America when I was fourteen years old, and I worked at that diner until I was nineteen. I met some of the greatest people I will ever know and some of the worst people I would ever want to know, and I don’t regret one meeting.” He takes a deep breath, stares me right in the eye. “My favourite one though, was this asshole who walked in and thought he owned the bar, who ordered a salad and called himself God.”
I’m not sure if this is the end of it, of his speech, his declaration, but the wind is bowling me over, I’m swaying, can’t stand still, can’t stand upright. Ryan, he must see, coz he reaches forwards, clenches my arms in his curling fingers and then, and then he scrunches his eyes shut, screws up his face and he looks like he must be holding his breath.
I say the only thing I can, I say the only thought that’s crossed my trash-heap mind since I saw him. “Is this a yes?”
Ryan breathes out, opens his eyes and threads his fingers through mine. “I still have baggage.”
I shrug. “Me too.”
Ryan slows, and there’s a war going on behind him, inside him, through him. I can see it all, can see with every twitch of skin, every change of opinion, every flutter of eyelashes, and Ryan, he counters it all, says fuck you to each and every soldier, and he does this by leaning forward, closing the worlds between us and kissing me.
And this it’s, for the first time in ever, this is what it should be. I’m not standing outside the church at my sister’s funeral, kissing a boy I hardly know. I’m standing in the grassy carpark opposite a church and I’m kissing someone that I’m probably in love with.
There’s a difference, even if it sounds stupid.
The residue of my heart still litters all my organs, every ounce of me, but instead of aching, instead of feeling the loss, those little parts of me are swelling, spreading that emotion, that love to everywhere, to my lungs and my toes and my intestines, this warmth, I feel it.
Ryan moves away, kisses my chin, my jaw line up to my cheekbone, whispers into my ear, “This is a maybe, this is an ‘I’ll give it a go.’”
Ryan leans back, grasps my hand too tightly, presses it to his lips and sighs hard onto my fingers. “This is probably a yes.”
And this, I guess, is where we could roll the credits.
My problem with that though, is that this isn’t the end.
I’m back at square one, leaning back into the desk chair opposite the laptop where I’m writing this, wondering where the hell this’ll finish up. There are too many endings, more endings than scratches on a child’s CD-rom.
More endings than I can count on the cilia of my lungs.
I could finish it here, send it off to a publisher, my editor, whatever, say that this, all of it ends with Ryan saying ‘yes’. Only it doesn’t, because we don’t start seeing each other for real for another year and a half.
We’re both stubborn assholes.
It could end in three years, when I move into Ryan’s shithouse little apartment, and we spend hours making paper cities, and Ryan, he teaches me origami. (we give up in an hour, go play on the Playstation that I didn’t quite have the heart to leave behind in that dreary forever entitled ‘childhood’).
Maybe it ends in four years time when my mother dies and leaves all her money to a man that I’ve never heard of and, well, all she leaves to me is another motherfucking journal.
*
In case you’re wondering, I do meet the man my mother had the affair with.
If you’re expecting something big and dramatic like in the films, then I’m sorry, but you’ll be disappointed. Maybe I was too.
It was at my mum’s funeral; a great, big Mormon celebration of life and death and everything between. I sat between brothers and a sister and my dad who turned his grief into an over-dramatic-loss-of-wife spectacle, sobbing and wheezing and fuck, that in itself was embarrassing.
There was this man, tall and lean, freckles on his nose and a cane in his hand and he sat spaces away from anyone else, the last pew in the hall. His face, it had been etched out of marble, stone, rock, he was some Greek sculpture, he didn’t twitch or sob or move for the whole thing, just towards the end, when he got up and left the building.
It was afterwards, at the wake, where he wandered over on tired legs, clenched a fist around my shoulder and mumbled out an, “I’m sorry.”
I say, “Me too.”
What scared me the most was how much he looked like me.
How much I looked like him.
*
Stories end every day, every year, every second, only, when they end, things start to begin as well.
I don’t want to sound clichéd, I don’t want to sound overly obnoxious or as if I’m spewing the same bullshit that every second man does. The point is, when one door closes, thirty windows open.
You just have to choose which one you’re gonna leap through.
That’s why when I write this, I’m choosing which windows to close, how to end it. I’ve been in that room, that bloodstained, shit-stained one in my head for too long now, and I need to draw a close.
I’ve scoured too hard, cleaned too much and my fingers have wrinkled up from the effort, my knees and palms bruised from kneeling, scrubbing, doesn’t matter though, coz my life’s still going, things still happening and so as much as I clean out my head, it doesn’t matter yet, coz the glass in the window is still shattered, and the first gust of wind is going to blow a potted plant over. Soil and branches and withering stems seep through the cracks in the floorboards.
Point is, maybe there is no end yet.
Or maybe, just maybe, this is the end.
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
Ryan answers the door, and this, it has to be a first; I’m so used to Spencer, to Clare or someone else, to people I don’t know, people with sharp eyes and sharper tongues and heavy fists, so used to crashing into, imploding against these people instead.
His eyes are soft, but they’re expectant, I don’t read eyes, can’t, should stop trying.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I reply, and I dig my hands deeper into my pockets, rock back on rough heels.
Ryan stares for a moment at me, past me, before swinging open the door and nodding me into his apartment.
“Tea?” he asks. “Coffee?”
“Water?” And I flop down on the sofa, lean my feet against the coffee table.
Ryan nods, wanders into the dinky kitchen and comes back bearing two half-full glasses.
“So,” he says, and he sways a little, backwards and forwards and the fan’s on in the corner, I wonder if it’s blowing him over. He hands me a glass, folds onto the other end of the sofa.
“So,” I reply, and I nod, gesture into empty space with tired fingers, worn out hands. “Yesterday was…” and the words trail off, a big, fat blank in a head normally too full of thoughts.
“Enlightening,” Ryan finishes, and he might be smiling, grinning small and hesitantly down into his glass. “Nice,” he says instead, and he won’t, can’t look at me.
“Yeah,” I say, and I grin back, chuckle a little, and it’s more half-hearted than it should be. Not enough…not enough anything behind it.
Silence settles like the dust after wartime, ashes after fire, it’s gentle, falls in the space, the worlds between us right now. Ryan’s on the other end of the sofa, but he may as well be in another city, another country, he’s too far away and I don’t, I can’t feel him. Touch him.
“I won’t get bored of you,” I say instead, a timid olive branch, a fucking peace offering.
Ryan’s head shoots up, and he stares too hard, coarse eyes and parted lips. “What?”
“Your main concern…” And I clear my throat, rub a hand across my thigh. “Your main concern yesterday was that I’ll get bored of you, and I won’t.”
Ryan stares again, and a few times he opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, to debate or bargain or refute, but he closes it again, rethinks his answer.
“My main concern,” Ryan says after what feels like hours, “is that we know nothing about each other. My main fucking concern is that we’re gonna wake up in six months and neither of us will be enigmas anymore, neither of us will be a secret, and we won’t just be bored of each other, we won’t fucking like each other.”
“My main concern, Brendon,” he says, and he hesitates here, stumbles over the words. “Is that I have baggage, and I don’t want to start something, if you’re not gonna follow through.”
“You told me about your dad.”
Ryan just stares, half-lidded eyes and what can only be described as a fucking sneer marring his pretty face. “A life of shit can’t be properly summed up in two minutes of fucking word vomit.”
Ryan’s small, tiny even, too thin and too bony, and we’re sitting here and I can see where his spine tries to break out of the skin that clothes his back. I can see through his t-shirt, his jeans, I can see it all, wide and naked and vulnerable because Jesus Christ, we’ve fucked twice now, and the fucking bedroom lights were on both times.
We’ve fucked and the walls of his old apartment, the picture frames of my bedroom, it’s all bared witness and will testify to this in a place of court. I’ve fucked Ryan Ross twice, but I’ve seen him fucking naked too many times.
Nudity, Catherine told me once, when she was high and trashed off her face, when her make-up smeared to make her look like a work of post-modern fucking art, is a state of mind.
We, me and Ryan, we’ve been naked since the beginning.
“Be with me,” I say, and I whisper it into my glass, curl my fingers around it just tight enough to hurt.
Ryan, I can see his ribcage, see it quiver beneath my words. “What?”
“That’s all I can say.” And it is. It’s everything, all of it, what this whole fucking thing’s been amounting too. “Be with me.”
“Brendon…” he says, and I can see his chest, I can see him inhale, exhale too hard, can see every breath, every beat of one tired motherfucker of a heart.
I try again, and I know I’m not, I know Ryan can see me, can see my chest and my back, my cock, my bare fucking legs. “Do you feel anything for me?”
“Brendon…”
“If yes,” I say, and I shiver, the fan, it’s really cold. Ryan, he shudders too. “Then let’s…I just want to try.”
He pauses, puts his glass on the table and wraps his arms around his lower belly. His knees are knobbly, I remember that, know that, can see that as he pushes his legs out against the floorboards. “I’ve got nothing to offer you.”
“You’ve got too fucking much to offer me.”
“I have baggage, Brendon.”
And yeah, he does, will have, I’m shit at tenses, pastpresentfuture. But the point is: so do I.
I have suitcases full, crates and boxes and fucking storage units worth.
Ryan leans back into the sofa pillows, and maybe I can’t see him as well as I could seconds ago, maybe he’s covering himself up a little, hiding behind screens and shields and the cotton of his t-shirt.
Ryan worries too much, I tell myself; Ryan thinks we don’t know anything about each other. That’s probably true, because if you asked me what his favourite colour was, favourite food, the name of the kid who probably bullied him in junior high, I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer.
“My name is Brendon Urie,” I say. “I am twenty years old and I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada.”
He stares at me again, eye contact that really fucking hurts, opens his mouth, says, “Tell me something that I won’t read on your fucking business card.”
And right, I was getting there. “I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, the youngest of five children to a mother that maybe loved me more than I will ever know, and maybe never loved me at all.”
Ryan pauses for a second, but nods, silently, briefly. “I’m listening.”
“I was born in Las Vegas to a woman who didn’t have a chance to live her life. She married too young, and had kids too young and she cheated on her husband and she ignored her eldest daughter, even when she was set to self-destruct.”
I take a deep breath, because this, it’s train of thought, verbal fucking diarrhea. “My mother is alive, but maybe that’s just on the outside, and I read her journal like you told me to, and I learnt more about her than I ever, ever wanted to know.”
And this, right here, this is a revelation. More than I ever could have thought on my own, something I maybe started thinking last night. “But most of all, I learnt that I don’t want to be like her, I don’t want to live how she lived, and maybe that’s the greatest lesson she ever could have taught me.”
“Where do I fit into this?” Ryan asks, and he hesitates as he says it, doesn’t want to sound too selfish, too self-involved, too self-concerned.
“I think,” I say, “I think that if I lived like my mother, like Grace fucking Urie, then I would marry someone like Audrey, and I would cheat on her with someone like you.”
I pause, breathe. “I don’t want to have to cheat on either of you.”
Ryan doesn’t say anything, but he’s staring, hard and tired and blisteringly something, and it’s that something that I can’t put my finger on, can’t figure out, so instead I say, “Catherine’s funeral is in two days.”
“I know,” he says, and his fingers, they clench in the sofa cushions.
“Make up your mind before then.” This, it’s the most decisive I’ve ever been about something. “And if you don’t want to do this, fine, but I won’t be able to see you anymore, and if you do then…” and fuck, “…I don’t know.”
*
If Catherine could ever see how much her fucking funeral cost, I’m pretty sure she’d piss herself laughing.
No one should spend this much on a cremation.
No one should spend this much on celebrating a life that probably never should have existed in the first place.
No one should spend this much on an event to which two people have organized, same two people being the only ones there.
“Fuck,” Loretta says, and she drops her cigarette, stumps it out with the toe of her stiletto. “Why am I here?”
“Coz you love me?” And I flash her big eyes and a tiny smile and Loretta, she eats this shit up, grins back and wraps an arm around my shoulders.
She lights a new cigarette, holds it up in the air. “Catherine Grace Urie,” she says, “we hardly knew ye.”
The priest, he won’t shut up; bible verses, gospels, words I don’t understand, nor feel the need to understand pouring from his open lips. The funeral started half an hour ago, and Loretta and I, we sit in an empty church. That doesn’t hurt as much as it probably should. I didn’t really invite anyone.
Loretta takes a long, hard draw on her cigarette and the priest glares from his place above the alter, above Catherine’s ash-body.
The thing about being famous, being fucking rich is that you can pay people not to notice shit like Loretta chain smoking in a Catholic church. She’s only doing it to piss the priest off, he made a few derogatory slurs in our first meeting, and Loretta, she wanted us to find a new guy, I just couldn’t be fucked.
“What’s wrong?” she mumbles, and I turn around just enough to come face to face with two large, concerned eyes. This, it could be in a chickflick.
“It’s my sister’s funeral,” I whisper back, “I’m pretty sure I’m not actually allowed to be expressing any form of joy or remotely felt happiness.”
“Nah,” she says, “I get that. You just keep looking at the fucking back door, and unless you’re thinking her drugged-up spirit is gonna swoop in, I have no idea who you think you’re gonna be seeing.”
I sigh, slide down in the pew and stare at the prayer cushions that hang beneath the Bibles, beneath the hymn books. “I told Ryan-“
“Jesus fuck,” she says, and she laughs, this raw sound that tears its way around the cigarette still lit between her teeth. “You and him, you need to figure it out.”
“You think?” I say, and it’s around this time, these seconds that the door slides open and I turn around so hard, so fast that my neck clicks, clinks, aches. There’s a body in the doorway, but it’s not the long thin one I was hoping for.
This one, it’s short and hunched and it curls in on itself. I dismiss it at first as one of the church workers, a nun or a monk or maybe some alter boy, but in seconds there’s the clip-clop of heels on the tiled floors, and this person, woman, I correct myself, she slides next to me in the pew.
“Hi,” she says, and she’s tired, old, she’s not like I remember at all, if anything, she’s prettier, not as sharp around the edges. This woman, the tiny thing, it’s Grace fucking Urie.
It’s my mother, and she has driven four hours with arthritis-ridden fingers to come to my sister’s funeral.
“Jesus,” I say, “mom? I-“
She cuts me off, leans across my prone body to Loretta. “Anymore?” she says, and she gestures to the cigarette in between Loretta’s lips. Loretta lights one, passes it to her wordlessly, and my mum sits back and chain smokes her way through Catherine’s funeral.
*
We’re all standing outside the church on this tiny, grassy patch of land and my mum and Loretta, they’ve sorta hit it off. Almost. They don’t talk, but they tolerate each other enough to smoke beside one another.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I tell my mum, and she doesn’t smile, but her eyes are wide and her lips are parted.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she says, “but don’t tell your dad, he’s under the firm belief I’ve been cold turkey since I was fifteen.”
“How’d you hide that?” Loretta questions, and she taps the cigarette, lets the ash hide between the blades of grass.
“Lots of air freshener,” she says. “I do all the washing in our house, so that helps.”
“I don’t know what to say to you,” I say, and I can feel Loretta’s eyes on me, deducting, thinking, present and attending.
“Then don’t say anything,” my mum says, and she shrugs tired shoulders, lets loose a tiny grin that makes decades fall from her cheeks, her eyes, her heart. “I’m here for Catherine,” she says. “I’m here to tell her that I’m sorry.”
I almost say something to that, try to refute, but this, all it equates to in my head is mememememe.
“You?” she says, and fuck, did I say that out loud? “I don’t need to say sorry to you yet.”
This, it has to be slow motion, because nothing clicks for a few moments. “What?”
“I’m not trying to jumpstart a dead relationship,” she says. “I’m not gonna lie and say that my reasons for being here are for you and Catherine, because they’re…” And she hesitates, quirks a grin and she, she’s fucking bashful. “They’re for me.”
“I’m not saying sorry to my dead daughter for her forgiveness, and I’m not saying it so that I can race back home and tell our church that my relationship with my eldest daughter has found purpose and understanding, coz fuck, I didn’t understand that girl when she was eight, and I sure as hell don’t understand her now.”
She lights a cigarette, props it between her teeth. “My reasons for being here are for me. I’m here because I hated that girl, but she was mine.” She turns, stares me dead in the eye. “And I loved her.”
“And me?”
“You’re not dead yet and neither am I,” she says, “So us, we’ve still got time.”
“To rebuild?” I say, and I quirk an eyebrow, say it with too much skepticism, too much unhidden loathing (not of her, not of her).
“No,” she says, “we’re not…I don’t think that’s possible. We both have our own lives to live, huh?”
“Me: fame and fortune, you: adultery and lies?” I don’t mean to say it, I don’t, but my mum, she laughs it off, even if there is a hint of bitterness underneath it all.
“Yeah,” she says, “for wont of a better phrase, yeah. I mean, to…I don’t know, understand each other.”
I stare at the ground too hard, every breath is ripped from my throat and my chest and then, and then there’s a hand on my arm, light and, and really fucking heavy. I look up in time to see Loretta’s half-lidded eyes and the gentle purse of her big, red lips.
Right.
“I’m not making any promises,” I tell my mum, tell Grace, and she just laughs again, says, “Neither am I.”
“Right,” I say, “good.”
Because yeah, it is. This woman, she gives a shit, cares more than she pretends not to, and yeah, so do I.
My mum, she looks over my shoulder, quirks a brow at something too far away and says, “Either of you waiting on some pretty little boy in a beat up car?”
I spin around too quickly, almost rip Loretta’s arm off in the process, and Loretta, her eyes latch onto him faster than mine, she laughs, cackles, a deep, throaty sound. “Jesus, Bren, these people want to wring you dry, don’t they?”
She laughs again, but I wave her off, one foot in front of the other and God, my mum was right. Ryan’s car is cheap and nasty. Red, but the paint is so chipped, so old and so desperately in need of an overhaul, in need of too much love and care and fuck, the thing could be vintage.
Vintage crap.
I’m walking over to the car, to Ryan, and he doesn’t do much, doesn’t really respond, just stares with big eyes, watches my every step, every flick of my wrists and blink of my eyelids.
In seconds we’re standing opposite, too close, too close, too close, and neither of us say anything. You can hear the grass grow between us.
I rock on my heels, shift my feet too quickly, lightly and toe the ground. “I-” But Ryan, one of his hands darts out and cups my open mouth.
“My turn,” he says, and his eyes are wide, open and desperate, and all I can say, all I can murmur in reply is an okay that gets spliced and mutilated as it tries to claw its way through the spaces between his clenched fingers.
“My name is George Ryan Ross,” he says. “I am twenty years old, and I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada.”
Ryan takes his hand away too hesitantly, leans back against the car and stares at the ground. “I was born to a dad who didn’t love me and nor did he hate me.” He sighs. “I was born to a mother who couldn’t look at me.”
He puffs out his cheeks, purses his lips and my heart pounds in my chest, explodes against my ribcage and the residue, it’s all over me, splattered across my head and my lungs and my fucking liver.
“I moved to bumfuck America when I was fourteen years old, and I worked at that diner until I was nineteen. I met some of the greatest people I will ever know and some of the worst people I would ever want to know, and I don’t regret one meeting.” He takes a deep breath, stares me right in the eye. “My favourite one though, was this asshole who walked in and thought he owned the bar, who ordered a salad and called himself God.”
I’m not sure if this is the end of it, of his speech, his declaration, but the wind is bowling me over, I’m swaying, can’t stand still, can’t stand upright. Ryan, he must see, coz he reaches forwards, clenches my arms in his curling fingers and then, and then he scrunches his eyes shut, screws up his face and he looks like he must be holding his breath.
I say the only thing I can, I say the only thought that’s crossed my trash-heap mind since I saw him. “Is this a yes?”
Ryan breathes out, opens his eyes and threads his fingers through mine. “I still have baggage.”
I shrug. “Me too.”
Ryan slows, and there’s a war going on behind him, inside him, through him. I can see it all, can see with every twitch of skin, every change of opinion, every flutter of eyelashes, and Ryan, he counters it all, says fuck you to each and every soldier, and he does this by leaning forward, closing the worlds between us and kissing me.
And this it’s, for the first time in ever, this is what it should be. I’m not standing outside the church at my sister’s funeral, kissing a boy I hardly know. I’m standing in the grassy carpark opposite a church and I’m kissing someone that I’m probably in love with.
There’s a difference, even if it sounds stupid.
The residue of my heart still litters all my organs, every ounce of me, but instead of aching, instead of feeling the loss, those little parts of me are swelling, spreading that emotion, that love to everywhere, to my lungs and my toes and my intestines, this warmth, I feel it.
Ryan moves away, kisses my chin, my jaw line up to my cheekbone, whispers into my ear, “This is a maybe, this is an ‘I’ll give it a go.’”
Ryan leans back, grasps my hand too tightly, presses it to his lips and sighs hard onto my fingers. “This is probably a yes.”
And this, I guess, is where we could roll the credits.
My problem with that though, is that this isn’t the end.
I’m back at square one, leaning back into the desk chair opposite the laptop where I’m writing this, wondering where the hell this’ll finish up. There are too many endings, more endings than scratches on a child’s CD-rom.
More endings than I can count on the cilia of my lungs.
I could finish it here, send it off to a publisher, my editor, whatever, say that this, all of it ends with Ryan saying ‘yes’. Only it doesn’t, because we don’t start seeing each other for real for another year and a half.
We’re both stubborn assholes.
It could end in three years, when I move into Ryan’s shithouse little apartment, and we spend hours making paper cities, and Ryan, he teaches me origami. (we give up in an hour, go play on the Playstation that I didn’t quite have the heart to leave behind in that dreary forever entitled ‘childhood’).
Maybe it ends in four years time when my mother dies and leaves all her money to a man that I’ve never heard of and, well, all she leaves to me is another motherfucking journal.
*
In case you’re wondering, I do meet the man my mother had the affair with.
If you’re expecting something big and dramatic like in the films, then I’m sorry, but you’ll be disappointed. Maybe I was too.
It was at my mum’s funeral; a great, big Mormon celebration of life and death and everything between. I sat between brothers and a sister and my dad who turned his grief into an over-dramatic-loss-of-wife spectacle, sobbing and wheezing and fuck, that in itself was embarrassing.
There was this man, tall and lean, freckles on his nose and a cane in his hand and he sat spaces away from anyone else, the last pew in the hall. His face, it had been etched out of marble, stone, rock, he was some Greek sculpture, he didn’t twitch or sob or move for the whole thing, just towards the end, when he got up and left the building.
It was afterwards, at the wake, where he wandered over on tired legs, clenched a fist around my shoulder and mumbled out an, “I’m sorry.”
I say, “Me too.”
What scared me the most was how much he looked like me.
How much I looked like him.
*
Stories end every day, every year, every second, only, when they end, things start to begin as well.
I don’t want to sound clichéd, I don’t want to sound overly obnoxious or as if I’m spewing the same bullshit that every second man does. The point is, when one door closes, thirty windows open.
You just have to choose which one you’re gonna leap through.
That’s why when I write this, I’m choosing which windows to close, how to end it. I’ve been in that room, that bloodstained, shit-stained one in my head for too long now, and I need to draw a close.
I’ve scoured too hard, cleaned too much and my fingers have wrinkled up from the effort, my knees and palms bruised from kneeling, scrubbing, doesn’t matter though, coz my life’s still going, things still happening and so as much as I clean out my head, it doesn’t matter yet, coz the glass in the window is still shattered, and the first gust of wind is going to blow a potted plant over. Soil and branches and withering stems seep through the cracks in the floorboards.
Point is, maybe there is no end yet.
Or maybe, just maybe, this is the end.