Though we lingered oft' in the garden - part seven (1/2) - The end
Dinner is quiet, and fraught with tension. Their parents are doing their best to make conversation, asking about her day and Noah’s preparations for his trip back to college in a few weeks, but Noah hasn’t really looked up from his plate since they all sat down, and there is a bowling ball setting up residence in her throat which prevents her from forming a sentence more than two words in length without choking. After several moments when the only sound in the room was the steam rising out of the take-out containers, the adults seem to have decided that it’s best to leave them alone and so are talking quietly amongst themselves.
She can’t keep her eyes from him, his sullen face focusing extraordinarily hard on his food, she keeps hoping that he’ll look up and meet her eyes and that she’ll know that everything will be ok, but he won’t, and she doesn’t, and she feels like she’s going to cry.
After twenty minutes of basically just moving food around her plate she asks to be excused. She doesn’t wait for an answer, it’s the most she can do to move slowly and calmly up the stairs and into her bedroom, instead of running as fast as she can out the door like she really wants to.
She surprises herself when she gets there. Ordinarily she would flop onto the bed face first and sob vigorously into her pillow until all of the pain felt like it had flowed out of her and into the pale yellow fabric of the pillow-case. But this entire situation seems somehow too much for her usual dramatic ways, and what she actually does is pour herself a glass of water from the tap in her bathroom, and sit down on the edge of her bed while sipping from it. It’s quiet, it’s understated. It’s new.
She still feels like she wants to cry, and wail, and sing Celine Dion songs about heartbreak and loss and everything else that she’s feeling, but she just…doesn’t. She thinks that maybe this is what growing up feels like.
She’s not sure how long she’s sat there before she hears footsteps on the stairs, Noah’s footsteps, and the slow creak of her door being eased open. She feels his weight shift her balance on the bed as he sits down beside her, and she passes him her glass of water when he leans forward, elbows resting on his knees, and sighs. He takes it from her quietly, and gulps down a big portion and hands it back to her. If it weren’t for the pain in her chest and the lump in her throat, it would feel exactly as though nothing had ever happened.
Dinner is quiet, too quiet, no one is saying anything. Noah is sat across from her and he is glaring at his food like it has ruined his day or something. Aunt Norah is sniffling quietly at the other end of the table, and her daddies just keep looking at each other between bites and then looking back at their food again. It’s too quiet, she doesn’t like it.
Her daddy explained everything to her this afternoon, about Noah’s dad and how he had left and how they had to be especially nice to Noah and Aunt Norah today, and she was trying, but Noah won’t look at anyone, and Aunt Norah doesn’t seem like she’s really there at all. So dinner is very quiet, and she’s not really all that hungry anyways.
She wants to help. She doesn’t know how. She wishes she were older and understood things better. She understands Noah, he always makes sense to her. She knows that if he would just look at her, she could smile at him and everything would be ok again. Smiling at him always makes Noah smile, even when he’s really sad, it’s like a secret that no one else knows. But Noah won’t look at her, and nothing is ok.
Aunt Norah speaks for the first time since they got here, telling him to eat his vegetables, and it makes him angry. Rachel doesn’t really know why because he actually quite likes broccoli, and eating vegetables has never made him mad before, but he’s shoving his plate away and kicking the table as he jumps down from his chair and then he’s running upstairs to her room.
Aunt Norah is crying properly now, and while her dads are trying to calm her down Rachel slips quietly down from the table and goes to find Noah. He’s in her room, like she thought, sitting on the edge of her bed, heels kicking into the frame. She’s never seen him look so miserable. She smiles, and he returns it, but it’s not the same as normal. She goes to her bathroom and pours some water into the plastic Ariel cup that her Dad uses to wash her hair with, and hands it to him as she clambers up onto the bed.
He gulps it down in one go and then passes the cup back to her. They sit there for a while in quiet. When he looks at her again, he’s smiling a little bit more, and when she smiles back and his smile widens, she knows that everything’s going to be ok.
They always know how to make each other better.
It seems like they’ve been sat here for a long time. She doesn’t want to be the first one to speak, wouldn’t know what to say in any case, but she wants him to be the one to settle this, because when you think about it logically, he’s holding all the cards, and she doesn’t even have an Ace-high.
After what seems like forever, after the point where she’s started concentrating solely on the sound of his breathing, keeping beat with it in her head, he exhales, heavily, and turns his head to look at her where she’s sat beside him.
“I don’t wanna fight anymore.” He says, softly, and she casts a glance at him sideways, kicking the heel of her right foot against the bed frame.
“Me either.”
“In fact,” he tells her, sitting up and twisting his body towards her, “I never wanted to fight in the first place, I just apparently didn’t have a choice.”
She’s staring at her sock. There’s a tiny hole just underneath the unicorn on her left ankle, she never noticed it before. He’s gazing at her intently. She’s focusing on that tiny hole.
“I know.”
“Damnit Rach, are you gonna help me out at all here?” He stands up and crosses to the window, leaning one arm against the frame and staring aimlessly out onto the backyard where they grew up. If this weren’t all so real, she would probably be thinking about how theatrical it all seems.
“I don’t think I can.” He sighs and lays his forehead against the window pane, she feels like she’s wearing his patience. She’s not meaning to, but she doesn’t know what to do or say in this situation that will make anything better.
His Nana Connie always used to tell them that when you didn’t know what to say, the truth seemed to work more often than not.
“I know that I- that I’ve changed a lot recently, and that maybe those changes have been confusing the way that you see me. But I couldn’t stay a little girl forever, Noah.” She’s talking to his back, he still hasn’t turned from the window, but she sees him tense a little so she knows he has to be listening, and she has to chokes back a sob as she says, “I had to grow up sometime, and you had to see it, even if it means that-“ She’s fully crying now, she can feel hot, wet lines running their way down her cheeks. “Even if it means that I don’t get to keep you.”
She steels herself for the next part, because it’s almost impossible to say. Even if he probably, definitely knows, and she’s known it forever and it’s just basically a fact, putting it into words is like making it real, a real, solid, corporeal thing out there between them that she can’t take back. It requires more strength than she suspects she really has to finally say the words.
“Noah, I love you. I’m in love with you.” He spins round and his eyes are wide with surprise, and bright with moisture. She knows her own eyes are glistening with freshly formed tears as well, but she’s started now, she has to keep going.
“At the moment that’s all I can really bring to the table. You’re the one in charge of this Noah, because everything we have here is hinged upon how you feel about me. So believe me when I tell you I would help you if I could, but I can’t. You’re gonna have to figure this one out on your own.”
He’s looking at her like he’s dumbstruck, and she begins to suspect he might be because he hasn’t said anything at all, he’s just staring at her like he doesn’t quite believe any of it, and she’s staring back, willing him to.
At length, he nods, just once, and looks to the door, then back at her. Then he nods again and walks out. It’s times like this that she really wishes that she picked someone a little more verbal to fall in love with. But she knows he’ll be back, that this discussion isn’t over. So she flops back onto her bed and waits, in the quiet and the fading light, for him to come back to her.
(2/2)