Fic: Sidewalk Flower (Hannibal, Will/Alana) PG-13
Title: Sidewalk Flower
Author: iridescentglow
Fandom: Hannibal (TV)
Pairing: Will/Alana
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 3,228
Archived: AO3
Summary: Will writes Alana letters from the asylum, but she does not read them. She knows that if she does, she’ll fall in love with him.
Spoilers: #1.13, 'Savoureux'
Note: This is either a love story, or it’s a story about how everyone trespasses on Will Graham’s psyche, even if they have the best of intentions. I’m not entirely sure.
-----
Sidewalk Flower
“So, do you have a boyfriend?” he asked when their starters arrived.
He pulled back his lips into a coy smile to reveal a row of perfect white teeth. Then, uninvited, he poured her an unwanted glass of wine. She realized in that moment that she’d forgotten his name. (Dan? Dave?)
“I… I have a pet,” she said, stabbing at her asparagus.
“You do? Awesome. I have a dog.”
“I have eight,” she replied honestly.
Her date laughed uproariously. “Good one.”
“No, really,” she said with a sigh. “I have eight dogs, a loyalty card for PetSmart, a man who loves me who’s locked up - and I’m pretty sure I told you twice that I hate wine.”
*
That was how Alana Bloom’s last date went. Her last date that didn’t involve a visit to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, that is.
Alana arrived home hungry, since she didn’t get to eat much more than the asparagus spears at dinner. Her stomach rumbled as she stepped over the pile of mail on her doormat. She kicked off her heels and picked up the mail. A fuzzy stampede rushed to meet her arrival. She petted the dogs distractedly with one hand as she examined the letters.
Nestled between the junk mail was an envelope that bore familiar handwriting. Will’s handwriting, laborious in felt-tipped pen. Without opening it, Alana took the envelope into her bedroom. She retrieved a heavy shoebox from underneath her bed and placed the envelope inside it.
Ever since his arrest, Will had written her three or four letters a week, without fail. After the tenth letter, she’d stopped opening them. They weren’t love letters - that was too banal a description. They were letters of intensity. They were letters that howled. They were thin slices of Will’s heart, pressed between cheap, prison-issue paper.
Sometimes she told herself she was saving the letters to return to Will when he got out. (They were his letters, after all. He should have them back.) Sometimes she told herself she was working up the nerve to burn them. Sometimes she wondered if she was waiting for a rainy day when her weakness got the best of her.
She knew that if she read those letters, she would fall in love with Will Graham.
*
What she’d told Dan-Dave was the truth.
She had a pet. His name was Will and he looked at her like she was the whole universe packed into a single person. It was the same way Winston looked at her, wet nose snuffling into the curve of her arm, as if she alone were able to love him. No, not just love him. Sustain him.
Will didn’t have a wet nose, but the comparison still stood.
When they’d locked away Will, they’d severed any chance for him and Alana to have a functional relationship. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He wasn’t her equal. He was a pair of mirrored dog eyes looking up at her.
*
Nonetheless, on Thursday evenings, Alana went to the Baltimore State Hospital to visit Will. She wore lipstick and perfume and silver earrings that jangled. She told herself it was her armor against the soulless rows of cells. But, secretly, she knew that she dressed up to please Will.
Despite his endless stream of ardent letters, their visits were surprisingly formal. She sat primly on a folding metal chair in the hallway, facing his cell bars. He sat inside his cell on a desk chair that was bolted to the floor. Their meetings were chaperoned by an orderly named Barney, who stood impassively at the end of the corridor.
Will and Alana both obeyed the rule to stay at least two feet from the bars at all times, even though she felt no fear from Will. His encephalitis was in remission and the worst of his dementia had receded. She was still painfully aware of the aura of madness that remained, though. Perhaps madness was the wrong word. Abandon seemed closer to the truth. A glint of abandon remained in Will’s unfocused eyes.
She could (and often did) pretend she was simply there as a friend comforting another friend in a time of need. She avoided personal topics and instead mainly shared with him funny stories about her students and what they wrote in their term papers. (He nodded often, smiled occasionally, but never laughed.)
For his part, he mostly talked about the books he borrowed from the asylum’s tiny library. The library was a mix of paperback romances discarded by nurses and obscure historical texts that no one else wanted. Their conversations were accordingly bizarre.
He once spent 45 minutes telling her about housing construction in Scandinavia in the fourth century, followed by another 20 minutes describing (in flat, detailed language) the story of an innocent milk maid who fell in love with a rodeo cowboy. In fairness, it was better than a lot of dates she’d been on.
She could almost pretend that their evenings together were platonic. Except for the moments when she caught Will looking at her. Staring at her. With an intensity of longing that made her heart drop to her stomach.
*
One particular Thursday, there was no time for discussion of Scandinavian building methods or anything else. Without even saying hello, Will sent the metal tray carrier shuddering over to her side of the bars.
Will, over-animated, gestured emphatically at what lay in the tray. It was a typed offer on stationery from the DA’s office.
“Diminished responsibility,” he said. “Thirty years. I’d serve fifteen. Probably.” He gave a little spasm of a shrug. “And there’s a clause, see? I’d move to a prison. Probably. Chilton has to sign off on it.” Again, he gave a spasm-shrug, followed by a grimace that turned too quickly to a smile. “But it would be prison, not the hospital. Maybe even medium security - after a few years.”
The excited look on Will’s face was almost too much for Alana to bear. It had been a year since Will’s imprisonment and the battle had almost entirely left him. There had been too many dead-ends to the investigation; too many glimpses of exoneration that were subsequently buried by the mountain of evidence against him.
Will pressed on, “Better to have a convict boyfriend than a lunatic boyfriend, right?”
“It would be a guilty plea, though,” Alana said carefully.
Will’s excitement deflated like a punctured life raft.
“I know,” he said miserably. “But at least it’s something.”
Alana knew what he was thinking. This was a way to take control of his own destiny. Stop the purgatory of meetings with lawyers, meetings with Chilton; meetings, meetings, endless meetings. Swap crazy-jail for jail-jail. And, in fifteen years, he would be free… (Probably.)
“Tell me what to do,” said Will.
“It’s your decision,” said Alana.
“I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me.”
In that moment, Alana felt sure that she could feel the weakly fluttering wings of Will’s life in the palm of her hand.
“Will, it’s your decision,” she said again, with a firmness she didn’t trust.
“But Alana, I love you-”
Will sprang out of his chair and pressed himself against the bars. Behind Alana, Barney the orderly took a single step forward. “Easy!” Barney barked, and Will wilted backward as if he’d been struck.
Alana didn’t know whether the flush of heat that flooded her face was the result of embarrassment at Will’s all-too-public declaration, or if it was because of the declaration itself.
*
The Thursday that followed was worse.
Again, before she could even say hello, Alana was greeted by the tray carrier shuddering the meet her.
Inside the tray lay a ring.
More specifically, a strip of paper twisted into a ring.
Will fell onto his knees - onto both knees, not one; he looked to be begging before an unseen god.
“Alana,” he said, “I know you think it’s just the trauma. Projecting my feelings onto the nearest warm body. Mistaking kindness for passion.” The words had the quality of a speech; rehearsed to the point of monotony. “But I do love you. And I want to marry you. Alana… marry me… please.”
Alana stared at Will, struggling to process the moment.
She’d never been proposed to before. She’d been in relationships she knew were headed in that direction. (And she’d sabotaged those same relationships before the question was ever popped.) She’d also been in relationships where marriage was a foreign concept. Her relationship with Will was officially the only marriageable relationship of her life.
She remembered her grandmother once telling her, matter-of-factly, It’s always good to have options.
She felt a bubble of laughter at the back of her throat.
Well, gee, Gramma, Alana thought, I got a hell of a man who wants to marry me.
*
When Alana left the State Hospital, she realized it had begun to drizzle. She drove home on automatic, with the wipers beating back and forth across her windshield. Her thoughts were far away; she was already planning what she would do when she got home.
Back at her house, Alana shovelled (literally shovelled) dog food into a tray on the kitchen floor. The dogs, dumber than peacocks, flocked around her ankles in a feeding frenzy. Carefully, Alana stepped over them and went to the bedroom. Her hands shook as she reached under the bed and took out the shoebox of letters.
Ever since she was old enough to recognize the ways of human nature, Alana had avoided excesses. She’d never smoked. She’d never drank to excess. She’s never over-eaten, over-exercised, or over-indulged at all. Secretly, however, she’d always known there was an addict-in-training inside her; an addict who’d spent years starved of the excesses it craved.
And, like an addict, Alana binged on Will’s letters.
She tore open envelope after envelope, creating a snowfall of paper around her. She sat on the floor of her bedroom with her knees drawn up to her chest like she was five years old.
And she began to read.
…I counted the bricks in my cell today. 960 bricks in all. This is the size of my world. My life is measured in bricks and they don’t even number a thousand. I’m left instead to wander the pathways of my mind and, Alana, every one leads back to you…
Alana skittered from letter to letter, from December to June, from dawn to dusk, as Will’s feelings poured out of the letters.
…All I have in here is time and time and you…
…Alana, I saw you today and you made a perfectly reasoned argument about why I should not and cannot love you. You are perfectly right, of course. I should not and cannot love you - but I do love you.
I love you. I love you. I get a sick pleasure out of proving you wrong. I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll say your name on my death bed. Or on my death gurney, if the prosecutors get their way. I love you…
Alana let one letter fall from her grasp only to reach for another. As she did so, she felt a wet nose at her elbow. Winston, sated from his dinner, nudged his way into her personal space. He curled around her feet like a blanket and went to sleep.
She read on.
Will’s letters tugged her from laughter to tears, leaving her near hysterical. Yet still she read on. Alana was barely aware of the hours passing, but at the edge of her consciousness, she heard the weather intensify. Rain lashed at the windows, Winston snored at her feet, and she read on.
…I dream of the ocean and of you. I can’t stand land anymore. I want to find a boat and sail it to the farthest point between continents. You and me and a thousand miles of blue sea separating us from the rest of the human race…
…I stood in line for the telephone earlier, waiting to speak to my lawyer. I listened, unwittingly, to a fellow inmate make love to his wife over the phone. No, in truth, I suppose he fucked her. Through the phone lines. I’m embarrassed to say that it turned me on. I realized I want to hear your voice as you slide your fingers into the wetness between your legs.
I want to fuck you, Alana. I want to fuck the pain away and stop thinking and I want to feel. Feel the shudder of your body as you come with me inside you. Alana, my fantasies of fucking you are 50ft tall and soundtracked in surround-sound. You told me you stopped reading my letters. I hope you don’t read this one…
…Literally every other facet of my life has been ripped away and yet my heart continues to beat. I feel sure it beats for you and you alone…
…If it weren't for the crushing perspective of this place, would I have just sleepwalked past my feelings for you? It’s funny to remember a time when the idea of being rejected by you was terrifying; when vulnerability was an abstract form to be avoided at all costs. Now I am cut open, vulnerable like never before, and I know what real terror feels like. Maybe it’s this place that focused my feelings for you. Maybe I am forced to be thankful - to all the dark conspirators in my life that only succeeded in bringing me to the light. To you…
…In the vacuum of my cell, I have been joined by a new living thing. Not another inmate. I don’t think they qualify. A plant - a weed, I suppose - has begun to grow in a crack of my wall. A gift of the dank and heat and fluorescent light. It’s only a weed, but I find myself captivated by it.
Flowers bloom in the cracks of the sidewalk and green new life grows here. I am careful not to fall into the superstitions of my fellow prisoners, but I can’t help but see it as a sign…
When Alana finally finished reading, it was past midnight and a damp smattering of her tears covered Winston’s fur. Alana took a deep breath and wiped her eyes.
For better or worse, she’d made a decision.
*
“Excuse me?” Dr Chilton said, letting out a bark of laughter.
The action caused Chilton to wince; laughter aggravated his rearranged internal organs, only recently healed after being stitched back into their proper place. Alana, seated across from him, reminded herself not to feel satisfaction at his pain.
“We’d like your permission to get married,” Alana said again and then reconsidered. “No, that’s not exactly correct. For the marriage, we don’t need your permission. But we would also like a ceremony. Only a brief one. Within the hospital grounds, of course. Perhaps in the prayer room, if it’s convenient.”
“You. Want to marry Will Graham,” said Chilton.
He didn’t look amused anymore. He looked… spiteful. Jealous, even. Now it was Alana’s turn to supress a smile.
“Yes,” she said pleasantly.
Chilton, she reminded herself, was a temporary presence in her life. Will, with her blessing (…her instruction…?), had lodged his guilty plea with the DA’s office and soon he would be shipping out. Swapping crazy-jail for jail-jail, in his words.
“Dr Bloom… Alana… we have many fine doctors here,” Chilton said, leaning forward, his expression a poor facsimile of benevolence. “I would even consider assessing you myself. I feel strongly that you may need to be treated for mental illness.”
Alana smiled - and imagined slapping Chilton hard across the face.
“I recognize that it may be difficult to understand,” she demurred. “And, sincerely, I appreciate your concern.”
“You have… a wonderful capacity for kindness, I’m sure,” Chilton said slowly. He uncapped his fountain pen and made a small, inscrutable note on his pad of paper.
“Thank you. But I’m marrying Will out of love, not kindness.”
“Yes, just last week, I saw another tremendous love match. A twenty-four-year-old slip of a girl in love with a paranoid schizophrenic who decapitated his first wife. Touching, really. They were also married in the prayer room, so I suppose I must extend to you the same courtesy.”
“Thank you,” said Alana.
She uncrossed her legs and stood up to leave. She had almost reached the door when Chilton spoke again.
“You are the still point in his madness,” Chilton said in a low voice. “You are his anchor. You are his everything. I may hold the keys to his cell, but you hold the keys to his soul. What an astonishing responsibility.”
Chilton reared back in his seat and cast her one last contemptuous look.
He said, “You should know that it’s very poor form to fall in love with your patient, Dr Bloom. Or to fall in love with their love for you.”
“Will is not my patient,” Alana said firmly. “And I know my own mind.”
She wondered, fleetingly, if she was telling the truth.
*
The ceremony was quiet.
She didn’t invite her parents, who’d made it clear during a frosty, long-distance phone call that they believed she was insane. “I guess crazy is contagious,” her dad spat down the line. “Messing with other people’s minds has messed up yours now.” Thanks, Dad. Love you, too.
Two orderlies bore witness instead, torn between watching Will warily for signs of violence and trying to get a look down Alana’s dress. Dr Chilton was unable to attend, due to an ‘episode’ unfolding in Will’s wing of the hospital. (A wedding gift from the paranoid schizophrenic and his second wife, Will told her with a ghost of a smile.)
In the prayer room, she and Will held hands, nervous as teenagers.
She didn’t wear white. She wore blue, in fact. Poor symbolism, she reflected sardonically, but it was a dress she liked. Will, of course, wore his orange jumpsuit. They didn’t take any pictures. They didn’t have cake. They didn’t dance to ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’. But it was enough to stand and say the words.
With trembling hands, Will slid the paper ring down her finger. It almost tore, but the fragile paper held. More symbolism, she decided.
You may kiss the bride.
Will looked into her eyes. She saw such yearning, such naked emotion reflected there. Alana felt light-headed. The moment sparked and their lips met.
*
Epilogue
Alana’s world is small now. Not 960-bricks small, but not much bigger.
Her life is quiet, but for the occasional barking of dogs (her dogs, their dogs) and the sound of mail hitting the mat. Her life is lived in visits to the Baltimore State Hospital - soon to be replaced by visits to the Maryland Penitentiary. Her world is small and she’s not even sure she misses the larger parts of it that she has cut away.
She writes to Will every day and she is still surprised at the way the words pour out of her. She is supposed to be the stoic. The sensible one. But now, unaccountably, she is the dreamer. The lover.
Dear Will, she writes.
Love. It doesn’t make sense. It blooms in the cracks in the sidewalk and it bloomed for us.
Author: iridescentglow
Fandom: Hannibal (TV)
Pairing: Will/Alana
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 3,228
Archived: AO3
Summary: Will writes Alana letters from the asylum, but she does not read them. She knows that if she does, she’ll fall in love with him.
Spoilers: #1.13, 'Savoureux'
Note: This is either a love story, or it’s a story about how everyone trespasses on Will Graham’s psyche, even if they have the best of intentions. I’m not entirely sure.
-----
Sidewalk Flower
“So, do you have a boyfriend?” he asked when their starters arrived.
He pulled back his lips into a coy smile to reveal a row of perfect white teeth. Then, uninvited, he poured her an unwanted glass of wine. She realized in that moment that she’d forgotten his name. (Dan? Dave?)
“I… I have a pet,” she said, stabbing at her asparagus.
“You do? Awesome. I have a dog.”
“I have eight,” she replied honestly.
Her date laughed uproariously. “Good one.”
“No, really,” she said with a sigh. “I have eight dogs, a loyalty card for PetSmart, a man who loves me who’s locked up - and I’m pretty sure I told you twice that I hate wine.”
*
That was how Alana Bloom’s last date went. Her last date that didn’t involve a visit to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, that is.
Alana arrived home hungry, since she didn’t get to eat much more than the asparagus spears at dinner. Her stomach rumbled as she stepped over the pile of mail on her doormat. She kicked off her heels and picked up the mail. A fuzzy stampede rushed to meet her arrival. She petted the dogs distractedly with one hand as she examined the letters.
Nestled between the junk mail was an envelope that bore familiar handwriting. Will’s handwriting, laborious in felt-tipped pen. Without opening it, Alana took the envelope into her bedroom. She retrieved a heavy shoebox from underneath her bed and placed the envelope inside it.
Ever since his arrest, Will had written her three or four letters a week, without fail. After the tenth letter, she’d stopped opening them. They weren’t love letters - that was too banal a description. They were letters of intensity. They were letters that howled. They were thin slices of Will’s heart, pressed between cheap, prison-issue paper.
Sometimes she told herself she was saving the letters to return to Will when he got out. (They were his letters, after all. He should have them back.) Sometimes she told herself she was working up the nerve to burn them. Sometimes she wondered if she was waiting for a rainy day when her weakness got the best of her.
She knew that if she read those letters, she would fall in love with Will Graham.
*
What she’d told Dan-Dave was the truth.
She had a pet. His name was Will and he looked at her like she was the whole universe packed into a single person. It was the same way Winston looked at her, wet nose snuffling into the curve of her arm, as if she alone were able to love him. No, not just love him. Sustain him.
Will didn’t have a wet nose, but the comparison still stood.
When they’d locked away Will, they’d severed any chance for him and Alana to have a functional relationship. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He wasn’t her equal. He was a pair of mirrored dog eyes looking up at her.
*
Nonetheless, on Thursday evenings, Alana went to the Baltimore State Hospital to visit Will. She wore lipstick and perfume and silver earrings that jangled. She told herself it was her armor against the soulless rows of cells. But, secretly, she knew that she dressed up to please Will.
Despite his endless stream of ardent letters, their visits were surprisingly formal. She sat primly on a folding metal chair in the hallway, facing his cell bars. He sat inside his cell on a desk chair that was bolted to the floor. Their meetings were chaperoned by an orderly named Barney, who stood impassively at the end of the corridor.
Will and Alana both obeyed the rule to stay at least two feet from the bars at all times, even though she felt no fear from Will. His encephalitis was in remission and the worst of his dementia had receded. She was still painfully aware of the aura of madness that remained, though. Perhaps madness was the wrong word. Abandon seemed closer to the truth. A glint of abandon remained in Will’s unfocused eyes.
She could (and often did) pretend she was simply there as a friend comforting another friend in a time of need. She avoided personal topics and instead mainly shared with him funny stories about her students and what they wrote in their term papers. (He nodded often, smiled occasionally, but never laughed.)
For his part, he mostly talked about the books he borrowed from the asylum’s tiny library. The library was a mix of paperback romances discarded by nurses and obscure historical texts that no one else wanted. Their conversations were accordingly bizarre.
He once spent 45 minutes telling her about housing construction in Scandinavia in the fourth century, followed by another 20 minutes describing (in flat, detailed language) the story of an innocent milk maid who fell in love with a rodeo cowboy. In fairness, it was better than a lot of dates she’d been on.
She could almost pretend that their evenings together were platonic. Except for the moments when she caught Will looking at her. Staring at her. With an intensity of longing that made her heart drop to her stomach.
*
One particular Thursday, there was no time for discussion of Scandinavian building methods or anything else. Without even saying hello, Will sent the metal tray carrier shuddering over to her side of the bars.
Will, over-animated, gestured emphatically at what lay in the tray. It was a typed offer on stationery from the DA’s office.
“Diminished responsibility,” he said. “Thirty years. I’d serve fifteen. Probably.” He gave a little spasm of a shrug. “And there’s a clause, see? I’d move to a prison. Probably. Chilton has to sign off on it.” Again, he gave a spasm-shrug, followed by a grimace that turned too quickly to a smile. “But it would be prison, not the hospital. Maybe even medium security - after a few years.”
The excited look on Will’s face was almost too much for Alana to bear. It had been a year since Will’s imprisonment and the battle had almost entirely left him. There had been too many dead-ends to the investigation; too many glimpses of exoneration that were subsequently buried by the mountain of evidence against him.
Will pressed on, “Better to have a convict boyfriend than a lunatic boyfriend, right?”
“It would be a guilty plea, though,” Alana said carefully.
Will’s excitement deflated like a punctured life raft.
“I know,” he said miserably. “But at least it’s something.”
Alana knew what he was thinking. This was a way to take control of his own destiny. Stop the purgatory of meetings with lawyers, meetings with Chilton; meetings, meetings, endless meetings. Swap crazy-jail for jail-jail. And, in fifteen years, he would be free… (Probably.)
“Tell me what to do,” said Will.
“It’s your decision,” said Alana.
“I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me.”
In that moment, Alana felt sure that she could feel the weakly fluttering wings of Will’s life in the palm of her hand.
“Will, it’s your decision,” she said again, with a firmness she didn’t trust.
“But Alana, I love you-”
Will sprang out of his chair and pressed himself against the bars. Behind Alana, Barney the orderly took a single step forward. “Easy!” Barney barked, and Will wilted backward as if he’d been struck.
Alana didn’t know whether the flush of heat that flooded her face was the result of embarrassment at Will’s all-too-public declaration, or if it was because of the declaration itself.
*
The Thursday that followed was worse.
Again, before she could even say hello, Alana was greeted by the tray carrier shuddering the meet her.
Inside the tray lay a ring.
More specifically, a strip of paper twisted into a ring.
Will fell onto his knees - onto both knees, not one; he looked to be begging before an unseen god.
“Alana,” he said, “I know you think it’s just the trauma. Projecting my feelings onto the nearest warm body. Mistaking kindness for passion.” The words had the quality of a speech; rehearsed to the point of monotony. “But I do love you. And I want to marry you. Alana… marry me… please.”
Alana stared at Will, struggling to process the moment.
She’d never been proposed to before. She’d been in relationships she knew were headed in that direction. (And she’d sabotaged those same relationships before the question was ever popped.) She’d also been in relationships where marriage was a foreign concept. Her relationship with Will was officially the only marriageable relationship of her life.
She remembered her grandmother once telling her, matter-of-factly, It’s always good to have options.
She felt a bubble of laughter at the back of her throat.
Well, gee, Gramma, Alana thought, I got a hell of a man who wants to marry me.
*
When Alana left the State Hospital, she realized it had begun to drizzle. She drove home on automatic, with the wipers beating back and forth across her windshield. Her thoughts were far away; she was already planning what she would do when she got home.
Back at her house, Alana shovelled (literally shovelled) dog food into a tray on the kitchen floor. The dogs, dumber than peacocks, flocked around her ankles in a feeding frenzy. Carefully, Alana stepped over them and went to the bedroom. Her hands shook as she reached under the bed and took out the shoebox of letters.
Ever since she was old enough to recognize the ways of human nature, Alana had avoided excesses. She’d never smoked. She’d never drank to excess. She’s never over-eaten, over-exercised, or over-indulged at all. Secretly, however, she’d always known there was an addict-in-training inside her; an addict who’d spent years starved of the excesses it craved.
And, like an addict, Alana binged on Will’s letters.
She tore open envelope after envelope, creating a snowfall of paper around her. She sat on the floor of her bedroom with her knees drawn up to her chest like she was five years old.
And she began to read.
…I counted the bricks in my cell today. 960 bricks in all. This is the size of my world. My life is measured in bricks and they don’t even number a thousand. I’m left instead to wander the pathways of my mind and, Alana, every one leads back to you…
Alana skittered from letter to letter, from December to June, from dawn to dusk, as Will’s feelings poured out of the letters.
…All I have in here is time and time and you…
…Alana, I saw you today and you made a perfectly reasoned argument about why I should not and cannot love you. You are perfectly right, of course. I should not and cannot love you - but I do love you.
I love you. I love you. I get a sick pleasure out of proving you wrong. I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll say your name on my death bed. Or on my death gurney, if the prosecutors get their way. I love you…
Alana let one letter fall from her grasp only to reach for another. As she did so, she felt a wet nose at her elbow. Winston, sated from his dinner, nudged his way into her personal space. He curled around her feet like a blanket and went to sleep.
She read on.
Will’s letters tugged her from laughter to tears, leaving her near hysterical. Yet still she read on. Alana was barely aware of the hours passing, but at the edge of her consciousness, she heard the weather intensify. Rain lashed at the windows, Winston snored at her feet, and she read on.
…I dream of the ocean and of you. I can’t stand land anymore. I want to find a boat and sail it to the farthest point between continents. You and me and a thousand miles of blue sea separating us from the rest of the human race…
…I stood in line for the telephone earlier, waiting to speak to my lawyer. I listened, unwittingly, to a fellow inmate make love to his wife over the phone. No, in truth, I suppose he fucked her. Through the phone lines. I’m embarrassed to say that it turned me on. I realized I want to hear your voice as you slide your fingers into the wetness between your legs.
I want to fuck you, Alana. I want to fuck the pain away and stop thinking and I want to feel. Feel the shudder of your body as you come with me inside you. Alana, my fantasies of fucking you are 50ft tall and soundtracked in surround-sound. You told me you stopped reading my letters. I hope you don’t read this one…
…Literally every other facet of my life has been ripped away and yet my heart continues to beat. I feel sure it beats for you and you alone…
…If it weren't for the crushing perspective of this place, would I have just sleepwalked past my feelings for you? It’s funny to remember a time when the idea of being rejected by you was terrifying; when vulnerability was an abstract form to be avoided at all costs. Now I am cut open, vulnerable like never before, and I know what real terror feels like. Maybe it’s this place that focused my feelings for you. Maybe I am forced to be thankful - to all the dark conspirators in my life that only succeeded in bringing me to the light. To you…
…In the vacuum of my cell, I have been joined by a new living thing. Not another inmate. I don’t think they qualify. A plant - a weed, I suppose - has begun to grow in a crack of my wall. A gift of the dank and heat and fluorescent light. It’s only a weed, but I find myself captivated by it.
Flowers bloom in the cracks of the sidewalk and green new life grows here. I am careful not to fall into the superstitions of my fellow prisoners, but I can’t help but see it as a sign…
When Alana finally finished reading, it was past midnight and a damp smattering of her tears covered Winston’s fur. Alana took a deep breath and wiped her eyes.
For better or worse, she’d made a decision.
*
“Excuse me?” Dr Chilton said, letting out a bark of laughter.
The action caused Chilton to wince; laughter aggravated his rearranged internal organs, only recently healed after being stitched back into their proper place. Alana, seated across from him, reminded herself not to feel satisfaction at his pain.
“We’d like your permission to get married,” Alana said again and then reconsidered. “No, that’s not exactly correct. For the marriage, we don’t need your permission. But we would also like a ceremony. Only a brief one. Within the hospital grounds, of course. Perhaps in the prayer room, if it’s convenient.”
“You. Want to marry Will Graham,” said Chilton.
He didn’t look amused anymore. He looked… spiteful. Jealous, even. Now it was Alana’s turn to supress a smile.
“Yes,” she said pleasantly.
Chilton, she reminded herself, was a temporary presence in her life. Will, with her blessing (…her instruction…?), had lodged his guilty plea with the DA’s office and soon he would be shipping out. Swapping crazy-jail for jail-jail, in his words.
“Dr Bloom… Alana… we have many fine doctors here,” Chilton said, leaning forward, his expression a poor facsimile of benevolence. “I would even consider assessing you myself. I feel strongly that you may need to be treated for mental illness.”
Alana smiled - and imagined slapping Chilton hard across the face.
“I recognize that it may be difficult to understand,” she demurred. “And, sincerely, I appreciate your concern.”
“You have… a wonderful capacity for kindness, I’m sure,” Chilton said slowly. He uncapped his fountain pen and made a small, inscrutable note on his pad of paper.
“Thank you. But I’m marrying Will out of love, not kindness.”
“Yes, just last week, I saw another tremendous love match. A twenty-four-year-old slip of a girl in love with a paranoid schizophrenic who decapitated his first wife. Touching, really. They were also married in the prayer room, so I suppose I must extend to you the same courtesy.”
“Thank you,” said Alana.
She uncrossed her legs and stood up to leave. She had almost reached the door when Chilton spoke again.
“You are the still point in his madness,” Chilton said in a low voice. “You are his anchor. You are his everything. I may hold the keys to his cell, but you hold the keys to his soul. What an astonishing responsibility.”
Chilton reared back in his seat and cast her one last contemptuous look.
He said, “You should know that it’s very poor form to fall in love with your patient, Dr Bloom. Or to fall in love with their love for you.”
“Will is not my patient,” Alana said firmly. “And I know my own mind.”
She wondered, fleetingly, if she was telling the truth.
*
The ceremony was quiet.
She didn’t invite her parents, who’d made it clear during a frosty, long-distance phone call that they believed she was insane. “I guess crazy is contagious,” her dad spat down the line. “Messing with other people’s minds has messed up yours now.” Thanks, Dad. Love you, too.
Two orderlies bore witness instead, torn between watching Will warily for signs of violence and trying to get a look down Alana’s dress. Dr Chilton was unable to attend, due to an ‘episode’ unfolding in Will’s wing of the hospital. (A wedding gift from the paranoid schizophrenic and his second wife, Will told her with a ghost of a smile.)
In the prayer room, she and Will held hands, nervous as teenagers.
She didn’t wear white. She wore blue, in fact. Poor symbolism, she reflected sardonically, but it was a dress she liked. Will, of course, wore his orange jumpsuit. They didn’t take any pictures. They didn’t have cake. They didn’t dance to ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’. But it was enough to stand and say the words.
With trembling hands, Will slid the paper ring down her finger. It almost tore, but the fragile paper held. More symbolism, she decided.
You may kiss the bride.
Will looked into her eyes. She saw such yearning, such naked emotion reflected there. Alana felt light-headed. The moment sparked and their lips met.
*
Epilogue
Alana’s world is small now. Not 960-bricks small, but not much bigger.
Her life is quiet, but for the occasional barking of dogs (her dogs, their dogs) and the sound of mail hitting the mat. Her life is lived in visits to the Baltimore State Hospital - soon to be replaced by visits to the Maryland Penitentiary. Her world is small and she’s not even sure she misses the larger parts of it that she has cut away.
She writes to Will every day and she is still surprised at the way the words pour out of her. She is supposed to be the stoic. The sensible one. But now, unaccountably, she is the dreamer. The lover.
Dear Will, she writes.
Love. It doesn’t make sense. It blooms in the cracks in the sidewalk and it bloomed for us.