Reconstructing Madonna - Part Nine
Part Eight here.
Part Nine
Serena and Eileen look at each other wordlessly for a long time after Liz leaves.
Eileen’s cheeks are flushed - never a good sign - and her nails are digging deeply enough into her palms to cast white marks on the skin. Her eyes are furious.
Serena can tell, though, maybe from sisterly intuition or maybe just from experience, that despite her need to yell Eileen doesn’t want to be the one to start this.
They snap at each other all the time. Have ridiculous, petty arguments.
With Eileen and Serena, at least, a monthly blow-out is pretty much expected.
But this is the first time that Serena’s ever tried to manipulate Liz. Ever thrown past mistakes in her face. And it’s no surprise that neither of them are all that eager to examine why she’s choosing now to start.
(Because Liz is really getting better and they’re doing just fine on their own and Max Evans isn’t going to get one more chance to break her heart. Because maybe today was a bad day but there are good days, too.)
Eileen’s eyes shadow and harden when Serena grimaces. She knows that it’s because her lips do that awful thing where they turn up at the corners and she ends up looking satisfied instead of upset, but it still feels like her sister is mentally calling for her head.
She thinks of Liz alone on the streets, powers most likely out of control. Recalls her third year of graduate school, when Liz would stumble home from ‘target practice’ every Sunday, having achieved nothing but a headache and sparking hands that refused to discharge.
It can’t be safe for her to be in public right now.
Seeing as safety seems to be the last thing on Liz’s mind right now, Serena thinks her own worry probably doesn’t make that big of a difference.
Sunlight glints off of something in her periphery and it attracts her attention. She turns and stares at the plastic bag on the kitchen counter. Snorts in disbelief.
“I thought you cut this stuff out.”
She knows all her sister will hear is disapproval and condescension. What she won’t hear, never seems to hear, is all the love and concern and a fear that threatens to strangle her.
“I did,” Lee spits venomously. Everything she hasn’t been saying about Liz is communicated in her tone.
She crosses her arms over her chest, and though the gesture would look defensive on anyone else on her it is startlingly aggressive. Her ears are now almost as red as her hair. “But sometimes when Liz’s powers are acting up it helps her cool off.”
Serena’s eyes widen in disbelief. Breath spills from her mouth, forming the harsh remnants of a laugh.
Un-fucking-believable.
“Jesus, Lee! What, are you hiding a marijuana plant in your closet? Or are you just buying from some high school kid?”
“Give me some credit here, Rena,” and the pet name is uttered like a profanity, “I haven’t bought from high school kids since I was one. The landlord grows some stuff in the basement.”
She thought that after yelling at Liz her anger was spent. Now, however, she finds her temper reaching the boiling point all over again. (And some small part of her thinks, only with Eileen.) “Of course you would choose an apartment building with a built-in supply of joints. But, God, do you have any idea how stupid - not to mention dangerous - it is to give someone in Liz’s condition any kind of drugs?”
Eileen’s face reddens. She perceives her intelligence being insulted; and honestly, Serena’s not sure if she meant the comment that way or not. Her head is practically revolving on her neck right now she’s so panicked.
“Well maybe if you’d write her a prescription for something legal she wouldn’t need to smoke! But no, on the off chance that her completely human physiology is going to go haywire in the face of some much-needed antidepressants or a healthy dose of Xanax, you’ve decided it’s too much to risk!”
She has the strong desire to throttle her sister for her sarcasm. Struggles to keep her voice steady as she answers.
It’s not easy.
“Giving Liz pot is the equivalent of hooking someone with a severe panic disorder up to a caffeine drip. The term ‘bad high’ exists for a reason. It could make her paranoid, nervous, and completely dull her control and reaction times, which could be deadly for her or you. And the last thing we need right now is for Liz to start getting back into anything worse than that.”
Eileen reels back as if she’s been slapped.
And it’s only a second before she realizes her mistake, but by then it’s too late.
She squeezes her eyes shut. Hating herself and the out-of-character hysteria that triggered all of this.
“You know, you’re always telling me not to bring up anything that Liz doesn’t want to talk about - to give her time to come to terms with it on her own. Never mind that she’s had four fucking years to do that. But what you did to her? It was wrong.”
Serena wilts under the pressure.
All she wants is to melt into the floorboards. To settle onto a couch that hasn’t been gutted and pretend that she’s taking a mental health day with her sister and best friend.
To forget that she was pushing eighty the whole way here because she was going out of her mind wondering what was so bad that Lee had to pull her away from work.
Her sister, her fiery, ill-tempered sister who can make an insult leave a visible wound with just the inflection of her voice, undoes her quietly and without malice. “It was cruel.”
It was cruel. To remind Liz that the boy she pursued for months couldn’t put forth more than two letters and an intercepted phone call, and to imply that this was somehow because Liz is not worth fighting for - when really, Max was being torn in so many directions and had been abandoned by her so many times that Liz’s thoughtless departure was probably just ten times more than what he was capable of dealing with. It’s worse because she’s sure that her face, made hard with panic, must have given Liz all the ammunition she needs for a veritable festival of self-loathing.
She picked a horrible time to grow a backbone.
Serena vaguely recalls her old mentor telling her that she would make a good psychologist because, true to her name, she had one of the most serene personalities he’d ever come across.
She remembers the years where she simply kept her opinions on Liz’s behavior to herself unless it was asked for; and then, after that night that changed everything, suggesting hypnosis and dream journaling and a hundred other less conventional methods.
She remembers and just wants to slap her stupid, naïve younger self for actually believing that it was possible to resolve the problem without getting too close to it. That if she loved Liz enough then she could somehow manage to have two separate relationships with her, simultaneously being doctor and friend.
Because she got in too deep. She lost her objectivity the moment her best friend showed up at her doorstep on the verge of physical and emotional collapse for the first time.
(How could she not? How, when Lizzie was bawling and shaking and pleading with her to just make it stop?)
She’s always been so afraid that the specialist will be too cold and the friend too biased if she tries to give any advice. But in the end she’s been passive and useless and hurt more than she’s helped anyway.
The worst part is that she’s not even sure if she regrets it.
Liz has destructive behavior patterns. Twin guilt and God complexes a mile wide. Stubbornness that makes her irrational and unreasonable and has alienated more than one person who’s important to her.
She’s always been so hungry for some emotional bond Serena isn’t sure how to classify, much less supply. Without even the shreds that she puts forth, she’s not sure if Liz would have hung on as long as she did.
The truth is that without doing or saying anything, the very closeness that Maria, Eileen, and herself share with Liz is enough to manipulate her into putting in the smallest of efforts. Allowing this is practicing the most flawed type of psychology imaginable, but she’s just not sure what else to do.
She realized a long time ago that Liz, even though she probably doesn’t realize it, has no true desire to be fixed. That for her, there is merely functional and catatonic.
Her sister is still waiting for an answer. (More likely an excuse.)
She stares at her and says simply, “Max Evans is dead.”
Eileen’s eyes fill with tears.
She is suddenly every inch the five-year-old who used to crawl into her bed late at night and ask why mommy and daddy were never home.
“So Liz is just, seeing all of this? Making it up?” And then she is horrified, tears falling to her cheekbones like pellets. “Is it the Special Unit? Did they rig this whole thing so that Liz would be exposed? Are they here?”
Serena kneads her jaw tiredly. “No. I mean, according to everything I’ve found, Max Evans and Michael Guerin died in a car crash in 2005.” Her lips quirk and she smiles grimly. Weakly. “But I have - I hold a lot of respect for the connection that Max and Liz have. I’m pretty sure that she would have known if he was dead. Max’s sister Isabel is alive by all accounts I’ve read, but when I tried to find her and her husband it was like they’d fallen off the face of the earth.”
Her sister digests this for a moment. “So they’re in hiding. They thought the danger was bad enough that they had to disappear, and here we’ve just been flaunting our normal lives in the FBI’s faces all this time. Fuck.”
Stops. Eyes narrowed. “Wait. We promised Liz we wouldn’t ever try to contact any of them. How long have you known this? How long have you been lying to Liz?”
Bracing herself for the inevitable storm. “Since your junior year of college.”
Eileen’s eyes widen in comprehension. Her lips form a small, scarlet ‘O.’ She’s not getting mad like Serena thought she would. (Then again, she’s been doing a lot of things Serena never thought she would today.)
And then Eileen really shocks her, and connects the dots without any guidance whatsoever. “Right when the nightmares started getting bad.” Voice hushed.
Invisible creepy-crawlies travel the expanse of her arms.
Even though she’s never once experienced one of Liz’s infamous night terrors firsthand, Serena has a razor-sharp imagination. And she’s received plenty adequate descriptions to give her a few nightmares of her own.
“I just - something about them - I knew that it wasn’t… human. Especially when you consider the subject of her dreams. She went through a lot, but nothing that would have… I wasn’t going to say anything to her unless it really deteriorated, but I wanted the information to be available when she needed it or decided she wanted it. Then when I found out about Max and Michael, I assumed that any sort of meeting, aside from being impossible, would be ten times as dangerous to them as it would be to Liz. And to ask them to help her when she wasn’t even willing to see them seemed…”
“But why didn’t you ever say anything? We’ve been living like this for three years! And after what happened -”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t say anything,” Serena interrupts. Fights down the choking sensation in her throat.
For a minute all she can see is the small, broken form of her best friend. No bigger than a child and beaten within an inch of permanent damage.
Her voice is breathless and teary. “We found her with needle holes in her arms and four broken ribs, laid out on a park bench twenty miles away from your apartment with no memory except being grabbed by suited men.” And for as vividly as she remembers it, talking about it now it seems like this story is just a summer B movie playing out for paid and emotionally stilted actors.
Blinking away the wetness. Doing her best to be clinical and impartial. (Better late than never, after all.)
She meets her sister’s eyes, almost as if she’s challenging her. “We have no idea what happened to her, but she’s burying it so deep inside her subconscious that the only time she even dreams about the FBI is when she’s reliving Max’s abduction. And the physical toll that those dreams take on her -”
Serena’s voice breaks. She covers her face for a long moment. Draws in a shuddering breath.
Her face crumples.
“Five times over the past three years she’s passed out in my office. Once her heartbeat slowed so much that I thought I would have to call an ambulance. That’s really the worst part of this - we can’t get medical help for her without Max or one of the other hybrids to take care of a million details. But if he’s there, I’m afraid that everything that’s been bottled up inside her is just going to come rushing out. And I’m so scared that when that happens, we’re going to lose her.”
“Don’t say that,” Eileen warns. Her right hand systematically clenches, and Serena knows she’s fighting the urge to throw or break something. “Liz isn’t going to… she’s not, okay?”
She doesn’t reply.
Maybe to fill up space, maybe because now yelling will help escape the ugliness instead of welcoming it, Eileen starts in on her with renewed fervor.
“And you know, all these years I had this idea of you as this emotionless drone -”
It’s an exaggeration, but one that other people have made often enough that Serena stiffens in affront (and hurt).
“- and really you’ve just been sitting on this massive pile of shit wearing a poker face that could win millions in Vegas. Yeesh, I don’t know whether I want to hug you or slap you.”
Now that she’s insulted her way back to relative calm, Lee’s eyes lose that near-imperceptible hint of vacancy. “But I don’t get… I mean, why now? I know you said that you think Max would make it worse, but you used to think he would help. If Liz is really so bad off, why risk alienating her just to keep this ridiculous secret?”
She tugs nervously at one kinky-curly spiral of black hair. “I don’t know. I just completely lost my head. I was seeing and hearing myself say these irrational, damaging things and I knew I should stop, but it was just total verbal diarrhea.”
Eileen contemplates this seriously for a minute before shrugging. “Well that makes sense. If a guy goes for a decade without getting any then he’ll probably be over before he starts the first time he does get lucky.”
Serena’s expression is one of disgust. “Does your mind really relate everything to sex or do you just say these things to be crude?”
There’s a bit of impishness in her sister’s face. She is unaccountably awed at her recovery time, equally thankful for and wary of it. “It’s a little bit of both. But you know, in rehab they were really big on just saying the first thing that popped into your head. I think their staff psychologist is probably still hitting himself for that one.”
She laughs at this, tired and a little hysterical.
Eileen becomes serious. “Look, how are we going to play this with Liz? Because I really don’t want to even give the impression that we support this intended wild goose chase after Max the Asshat. But we can’t just lie to her, either.”
Her voice turns cautious. Guilty but hopeful.
“…Can we?”
Serena sighs. Wishes she didn’t always have to be the moral compass/responsible one/sole-decision-maker-in-regards-to-all-things-Liz. “No, we can’t. I’ll talk to her when she comes back. You should be ready for her to be -”
royally pissed? melodramatic? stoic and hard?
“- intense when we’re done.”
Lee snorts. “Well, yeah. When isn’t Liz intense?”
They sit in odd but fairly comfortable silence for the next fifteen minutes, and then begin the process of cleaning up Eileen and Liz’s ravaged living room.
-
The first thing Serena notices is that Liz’s hair, which is in a perpetual state of messiness, looks positively frightening. She’s obviously run her fingers through it repeatedly.
Her mind immediately flashes back to all the times when Liz has been huddled in a ball on her office floor, grasping at her hair as if she intends to rip it up by the handful. Her lingering guilt, not as strong as before but still very much present, makes her stomach flip.
It’s afternoon now, past four.
It’s a minor relief to her that her best friend was not walking around after dark in her current vulnerable state.
“You’re still here,” Liz asserts dully.
“Yeah,” she says. Her heart thumps in her chest, loud and slow.
Eileen, who has been peeing and taking advantage of the bathroom acoustics to sing show tunes slightly off-key, walks back into the living room. Stops short.
“Liz,” she breathes, her voice bursting with relief. She obviously wants to move forward, but glances unsurely at Serena.
She wonders what damn mountain she moved that after all the screw-ups she’s made her headstrong little sister is still taking her cues from her.
She stands up slowly, her stiff joints protesting loudly. “Walk with me,” she says quietly. Pleading.
Their eyes meet, and Liz nods slowly.
They trudge through the apartment hallway and then down the stairs to the lobby and out onto the sidewalk. Serena bites her bottom lip nervously, and notices Liz clenching her jaw. “Do you want to go to the beach?” she ventures quietly.
Raised eyebrows hover above worn and skeptical brown eyes. “We’re at least a mile away.”
She sighs. “We might need the time.”
With a lackluster nod, Liz momentarily ends all verbal dialogue. Despite Serena’s assertion that their conversation will take the walk to and from the ocean, they continue on in silence.
The streets are crowded and noisy. She sees Liz paling as the honking car horns and groups of raucous teenagers grow more numerous.
She forces herself not to soothe her.
Eventually they reach their wordlessly agreed upon destination: a smaller, near-deserted stretch of beach. There’s more dirt than sand and the waves are angular, choppy; but there’s next to no littering and for their purposes it is perfect. They’re not exactly here to play in the surf, anyway.
They stop twenty or so feet from the water. Inches from each other but on two separate planes entirely.
Serena finally starts. Deciding to go with the direct route, she says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have reacted the way that I did. It wasn’t fair of me to - it just wasn’t fair.”
“Do you really feel like I dictate your life? Like I don’t put any thought into my decisions?” Liz says quietly. Tightly.
Serena squints at the near-blinding sun. Anger is apparently doing wonders for Liz’s ability to keep it together.
“No,” she replies finally. Picking her words carefully. “I think that sometimes you’re pretty impulsive. And that you don’t like it when other people make decisions concerning you or even when they have a strong influence over your decisions.”
They’re silent for awhile. Then,
“I tried to heal one of the babies at the hospital.”
Serena looks up sharply. Oh, Liz…
“It didn’t work,” she continues. Her voice goes up a few decibels and gains an abrasive quality. “And then Max tried to heal him, and he couldn’t either. So that either means that I put myself and you and Lee on the line for nothing, or that I damaged him somehow. Personally I’m leaning towards the ‘my fault’ theory.”
“Lizzie -”
Liz’s hand raises and she shoots a blast straight for the water. It hits, and creates a veritable whirlpool. She lets her hand drop back to her side and looks at Serena defiantly.
Her bottom lip is quivering. “See? That’s what I do. That is what I’m good for.”
She stares at her friend, her friend who is a cocktail of human DNA and alien cells and a few hundred extra years’ worth of evolution, and trembles.
Liz has never been able to fire at will before.
She is not scared of what Liz will do to her.
She is scared of what she will do to herself.
Then she is sinking into the sand, laughing and crying and cursing.
And like so many other times, Serena simply stands on the sidelines and lets her ride it out.
When it is over, she speaks softly. “Why now?”
Liz shrugs, wringing her hands restlessly and pulling her mental disappearing act. “I don’t know. At first it didn’t even occur to me that it might be possible, and then we had all those problems with - you know.”
Serena flinches. Disbelieving - or maybe just sad - that Liz won’t even say it out loud.
“… and then I was always afraid that if I could do it, I’d hand off some innocent baby to completely clueless parents and in a year or so they would have no idea why their kid was lighting up like the Fourth of July.
“But David was premature. His mom is a drug addict, in prison for something probably related to that. The dad wasn’t listed on the birth certificate. And I just thought… you know, maybe he could do a lot worse than having a mom like me. And you know, you’re right, because I didn’t even talk to you and Lee about it. I just… did it. And I hurt him.”
Liz stubbornly wipes at the tears filling her eyes.
But Liz doesn’t even notice things like tears when she gets like this. Or if she does, she’s too far gone to care.
Something clicks into place.
And even if it’s just like all the other times, even if Liz calls bullshit after she tells her about Max and Michael and Isabel, she still has to try.
“He had a mother, Liz. A mother who chose to get herself into that position and who was taking narcotics like a replacement for prenatal vitamins.”
Liz stills.
Hoping wildly that this means something, something good, she rushes to continue. “There was a physician in the prison who could have foreseen this if he’d been paying careful enough attention. There were other people -”
“Stop,” she whispers.
Serena closes her mouth and then kneels next to Liz on the sand, craning her head in an attempt to establish eye contact. Is shocked to discover a terrified expression on her best friend’s face.
“What’s wrong?”
Liz scoots backward in the sand like an upside down crab. Hugs her stomach fretfully.
After a minute she shakes her head and meets Serena’s eyes.
And she can see that Liz is swimming closer and closer to the surface, about to break it -
“I just… sometimes I get these really weird premonitions. From you or Eileen or… other people. It’ll just sound like a voice in my head, like I’m having an imaginary conversation with you, you know? But then later if we’re having a conversation about the same thing, you’ll say exactly what I heard in my head.”
She slumps in defeat.
For a minute, she really thought…
Then she looks at Liz’s pale and sweat-slicked face. And somewhere in those unbreakable walls, she sees the smallest of chinks.
Wonders if it isn’t a coincidence that it’s showing up so soon after Max’s reappearance.
“Liz, you deserve to know why I was so crazy earlier.”
Liz turns to her, and she draws in a deep breath.
Opens her mouth.
And then she tells her everything.