the art of boxes (chapter 12)
you can read this here, on my lj, or at ffn.]
part 1. part 2. part 3. part 4. part 5. part 6. part 7. part 8. part 9. part 10. part 11.
...
twelve. when your eyes turn from green to grey in the winter, i'll hold you (maybe i'm just in love when you wake me up)
.
"Quinn?" Judy asks. She knocks on Quinn's bedroom door three times.
Quinn quickly pauses the music playing (loudly) from her iPod dock and tries to catch her breath as best she can-she's not really dancing, more just flailing around her room to music and throwing clothes into various piles for laundry later (Spring Break Duty #1, Rachel had written on a checklist). "You can come in."
Judy smiles as she opens the door-Quinn's sure it has something to do with her completely disheveled hair or maybe even the fact that she's wearing a t-shirt and jeans.
"What's up?" Quinn clears a pile of sweaters from her bed to the floor, bouncing a few times before she sits still.
Judy holds up two dresses-one soft pinks, patterned with flowers, and the other simple, black, elegant. "Which one do you like better?"
Quinn raises her eyebrows. "What will you be wearing it for?"
A familiar flush creeps up Judy's neck to her cheeks-Quinn's body reacts the same way-and Judy glances at a heap of Quinn's scarves near her closet.
Quinn stands up excitedly. "Are you going on a date, Mom?"
"It's not a date," Judy says.
Quinn claps excitedly-a silly mannerism she thinks she must have picked up from either Rachel or Beth-and asks, "Who's it with?"
"His name is Tom," Judy says. "One of my friends from book club knows him from her gym, and she thinks we might like each other."
"Tom, huh?" Quinn waggles her eyebrows, and Judy rolls her eyes. "I'm glad you're going." Quinn takes the dresses from Judy's hands. "Sometimes I worry that you're getting lonely here by yourself."
"I'm not by myself." Judy sits on the cleared patch of patterned duvet. "I have plenty of things to keep me busy."
Quinn holds up the pink dress against her form in the mirror. "I'm sure you don't miss me or Frannie at all."
"I miss Frannie," Judy says seriously, and when Quinn turns with an incredulous stare, Judy is laughing. "Oh, Quinn, of course I miss you. Sometimes I don't miss your music-"
"-It's good music, Mom-"
"-But you, I miss you lots. But I'm good."
Quinn hands Judy the black dress. "If he doesn't like you, he's an idiot."
Judy smiles.
"And, Mom, I miss you too, you know."
.
Rachel's spending the night catching up with Kurt, and Santana responds to Quinn's text asking if she and Brittany wanted to hang out with: We're playing naked fort wars, if you'd like to join us.
So Quinn smiles and settles down on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate and Swamplandia! by Karen Russell as she waits for Judy to come home. She curls up in a blanket and one of Judy's softest cashmere sweaters, and her perfume-Chanel No. 5-is comforting and heavy, saturated and sad in a good way: Quinn is the one waiting for Judy to come home.
The first time Quinn came home from one of the parties she'd been at, with pink hair and a pierced nose and a ripped t-shirt she'd paid seventy-four dollars for at Urban Outfitters, she smelled like cigarette smoke and she'd been drunk and high on drugs she didn't even know the names to. When she'd stumbled through the front door as the dawn peeked out from the covers of night, Quinn had seen Judy asleep on the couch. When she closed the door-slammed, maybe-Judy had jerked awake. She was still in her clothes from the day before.
They didn't say anything, and Judy had looked mad, but as Quinn trudged up the stairs and kicked off (real) Doc Martins and her clothes and inspected a few hickeys on her collarbones from Abigail, red and incriminating, because they were small and dainty and rough, the expression in Judy's eyes picked at Quinn's insides, like the beak of a bird trying to hatch from an egg.
Quinn pushed it back before the shell around her could crumble completely, and she collapsed into bed naked. But she knew it: Judy had been worried, and Judy had been relieved when Quinn had come home. Judy had been glad.
Quinn knew that once she acknowledged that, the bird would hatch and grow and fly. A part of her wanted that-had always wanted it, desperately, painfully-but she was also scared: You could see so much more when you were able to fly.
.
It's not that late, only about 11:00, when Quinn hears the garage door creak open. Judy was going to a simple dinner at a nice restaurant at 8, and then a movie, so Quinn had expected her back later if things had gone well.
"Hey," Quinn says.
"You didn't have to stay up for me," Judy says, sitting down in the chair across from Quinn's curled position on the couch.
Quinn shrugs. "It's only, like, eleven. I wouldn't have been asleep anyway."
Judy slips off her black pumps.
"So." Quinn scoots over on the couch. "How'd it go?"
Judy sighs, sinking back into the chair.
"That good, huh?" Quinn leans out to pat Judy's hand. "What was wrong? Did he have growths or was he in the mob or something?"
"No, no."
"He liked Twilight, didn't he?"
Judy laughs quietly. "Nothing as interesting as that. We just had a difference of opinions on some things we talked about. He wasn't rude, really, just-I don't think we'll be going out again."
"Do you want to-what things, Mom?"
"Nothing, really."
Quinn sits up, and she feels her stomach drop in a moment of panic, like the first drop due to turbulence on an airplane. "Was it because of me?"
Judy straightens, looks at Quinn seriously. "No, Quinn."
"It was."
Judy smiles softly. "In a way, in a wonderful way, it was. Tom asked me about my children, and I told him about Frannie, and then I told him about you."
"Me? And Rachel?"
Judy nods.
Quinn thinks of baby birds being pushed out of their nests. "I'm sorry," Quinn says.
Judy squeezes Quinn's hand. "I'm not. Not for us, at least. I'm sorry for Tom."
"Mom-"
Judy shakes her head. "These past few months, seeing you just be comfortable in your own skin, I-Quinn, I've never seen you so happy. I'm proud of you for so many reasons, and this is just one of them. I love you. I take you the way you are. I'm sorry when other people-and I was there once-can't get that."
Quinn starts to cry, and Judy just takes her arms and wraps them around Quinn in a hug. "Thank you," she mumbles.
Judy kisses Quinn's forehead. "And he was a Whitesox fan."
Quinn laughs. Judy doesn't seem to care at all that it gets snot all over her dress.
.
Rachel comes over that evening. They watch old Sherlock Holmes films and Rachel helps Quinn fold loads of laundry into neat stacks on her bed. They smell like fabric softener and Rachel's hands are warm when Quinn kisses her. Judy is out at a ladies' night, organizing some things for an upcoming event at church, and the house is quiet except for soft music from Quinn's iPod.
When Quinn woke up for the first time she remembers in the hospital after the accident, she remembers Judy sitting there, clutching a navy and grey scarf, one that Quinn bought her a month before online. It said Yale Mom. And Rachel was at her bedside, too, sniffling, wearing a Cheerio's sweatshirt that had Lopez stitched into it in red lettering. They were there, and in Quinn's version of that immediate world that existed in a kind of fuzz, like when the lens of her camera was out of focus, that was what mattered. Quinn had been in pain-her chest ached and her head pounded-and she had been scared, but Rachel had been humming an Ed Sheeran song softly. It was a ghost, flying into the spaces that included lusting after a woman and self-hatred and fear and, Quinn would learn later, the twisted and inflamed, angry vertebrae of her spine. But for that moment, it had been perfect: Judy and Rachel were there.
An Ed Sheeran song comes in Quinn's iPod now, a year and a month later, in her childhood bedroom. Where Beth had been conceived. Where she'd dyed her hair pink, where she'd cried and cried and cried. Where she'd first kissed Santana, where she'd gotten lost in the 1920s just as easily as Wonderland.
Ghosts.
So when Rachel's fingers probe down along the waistband of Quinn's jeans, this time, Quinn nods. Rachel's eyes grow wide and Quinn hears her breathing hitch, but then Rachel says, "I love you." Quinn believes her.
Rachel takes Quinn's pants off. Rachel kisses the new, bright red, thick rope of a scar from Quinn's chest tube. Rachel lets Quinn's hands roam.
Then Rachel's fingers tease, and she looks up at Quinn, searching. "I haven't-with a girl and I want-"
"You're you," Quinn says. "I'm sure."
Then Rachel pushes her to climb toward the sun. When she falls, she falls hard and she falls fast, like she's been waiting for her entire life to do so. Rachel catches her; the world focuses again and Quinn is wrapped up in Rachel's arms. And then Quinn feels new life, and she moves further than ever before, until she can't breathe.
Drowning.
Only this time she's steady as the entire ocean breaks around her, and Rachel murmurs her name like the tide.
Afterward, they lay there together, and they cry.
"Are you okay?" Rachel asks, brushing aside Quinn's hair.
"I've just-Do you ever have moments where life is just overwhelming sometimes, like things are too big for you to feel? Like there's just too much matter inside of you, too many cells trying to feel too many things? Moments where no words in the entire world are ever going to be enough?"
Rachel nods. "Yes."
Quinn kisses the palm of Rachel's hand. "I just feel like my body's too big for my skin or something. Like if I don't cry, I might explode."
Rachel laughs once. "I love you."
"I love you, too."
"You were amazing."
Rachel blushes. "So were you. I-nothing's ever been like that for me before."
"Me either. Anywhere near that."
Rachel sighs sleepily. Quinn just holds her and tries to inscribe the perfection of that moment into her brain, into her cells that are flying everywhere at once, dipping and zooming in excitement.
Then the garage door opens, and Quinn hears Judy walking up the stairs. She pulls the duvet over she and Rachel-who's fallen asleep-as completely as possible, then shuts her eyes. Judy pokes her head in and Quinn sees from a peek from behind her pillow as she smiles.
"Goodnight, girls," Judy whispers.
The moon is huge outside of Quinn's window, bright as she falls asleep.