2006 OC Sentence Challenge Part Two
Title: When The World Is Frosted White
Part: 2/2 (Click on tag for part one.)
Status: Complete
Author: muchtvs
Rating: PG 13
Sentence Prompt: "Marissa is stuck between Heaven and Earth, having to make sure Ryan forgives himself before she can cross over."
Written For:
shelbecat. An amazing author. I am unworthy.
Beta's:
joey51 and
crashcmb
Author's Notes: Posted in two parts. Which I hate. Because it's not fair that I have to post in such small incremints. It sucks. End temper tantrum.
Big *kiss* to
ctoan for organizing the challenge.
When The World Is Frosted White
Part Two
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Marissa is on the beach, watching Johnny as he walks towards her, his surfboard nowhere in sight.
“I’m leaving now,” he tells her. “I have to go.”
“Where?” she asks inquisitively, intrigued by his sudden departure.
“I don’t know,” Johnny says honestly. “Someplace else I guess. Somewhere other than here.”
“Why?” she asks, following him as he heads towards where the sand ends and the abandoned boardwalk begins. “What changed?”
“I think my father did,” Johnny says quietly, as he waves goodbye. “He figured out he didn’t really hate me or my mom. He hated himself.”
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Marissa decides maybe she’s breaking one of the rules of this place when she goes to Ryan first, instead of him seeking her out through his dreams.
She closes her eyes and wishes for him to be under the pier.
She concentrates hard, harder than she has ever wished for anything before and an uncomfortable feeling buzzes through her, as if this place is sending her a very certain message that she’s most definitely violating an unstated ordinance.
But nonetheless, Ryan comes to her, his hair a bit longer than the last time she saw him. His eyes just a little more wrinkled, his face a little fuller.
She lays out an orange beach towel and invites him to sit down on it, but he shakes his head no and she thinks maybe he might even be aware that this really isn’t his own dream he’s in, but actually a minute of his sleep that Marissa has stolen from him.
But she had to.
This is important.
And she knows that Ryan will never dream it himself.
“Ryan, who do you blame for me dying?”
“Volchok,” he immediately answers and although he manages to look her straight in the eyes to say that much, he redirects his vision right after.
“Who else besides Kevin?” she asks. “Who else do you blame? Do you blame me?”
“Sometimes,” he says crossing his arms and taking a step backwards, as if distance actually possesses real measure in this undefined void she has forced him into.
The booming and constant crash of the waves against the wooden posts of the pier is threatening to sweep their conversation out to sea so Marissa raises her voice and yells into the wind, “Do you blame yourself, Ryan?”
He stops backpedaling, looks out into the ocean, looks down at the sand, looks at his hands.
Looks up at Marissa and answers, “Everyday.”
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Marissa’s not sure what to do to help him because Ryan doesn’t ever dream about her anymore and she wonders if he even remembers her at all.
She knows he has a baby of his own.
A little girl.
She knows he and Inez are wonderful parents, because once in a while Marissa continues to bend the rules of this place and sneaks a peek outside of it.
Sometimes she spies from a distance as Ryan and his wife play with their kids, or watch television or eat family dinners out on the patio.
She smiles as Ryan painstakingly teaches his daughter how to ride a bike.
Marissa tries to be nothing but happy for him, even though at times, she’s occasionally sad for herself, because it would have been so nice to have a little girl of her own and sit her down at the kitchen table and spend lots of time braiding her hair into long, tight pigtails.
She shuffles through her memories but doesn’t find any she wants to go to, to visit, so she sits alone in the lifeguard house and patiently waits to go someplace else, someplace other than here.
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Ryan dreams of so many things, like he and Inez and Summer and Seth leaving their various kids and their respective nannies with Sandy and Kirsten in Newport and finally taking that summer vacation they are always talking about, the one where they sail to Tahiti on a yacht that Seth spent three years researching.
He dreams about all of them sitting in the balmy breezes of the Pacific, laughing and celebrating their friendships, Inez and Summer drinking way too many martinis and he and Seth downing countless shots of whiskey.
He dreams about waking up still drunk, to an empty bed and wandering off the boat, onto a private beach they are docked at and discovering Inez having sex with Mitch, the yacht’s twenty-five year old hired deck hand.
He dreams about the satisfying crunching sound Mitch's nose makes when he slams his fist into the guy's face.
He dreams about stumbling into his cabin and sitting with his head between his knees and vomiting violently because the whiskey is ripping a path from his stomach back up his throat every time he closes his eyes and sees that kid fucking his wife.
He dreams about Inez begging him to open the locked door and let her in and pleading for him to understand that it meant nothing, what he saw between her and Mitch, and that she’s so lonely because every year he gets more and more distant and maybe she’s trying desperately to hurt him, to force him to face the fact that little by little, they are falling apart because no matter how close she physically is to him, he won’t let her into his heart.
He dreams about leaning against the wall, his head pressed against the yacht’s wooden paneling and listening to Inez saying to him, “You never talk to me, Ryan, about anything. You never tell me about your mother or your father or the brother you pretend doesn’t exist or who you were and what you went through before you began living with Sandy and Kirsten. I’ve told you everything, Ryan, everything about myself. You know everything about me. Yet I have to find out tonight, hear it for the first time, from Summer, about a girl named Marissa and how you loved her before you loved me and how she died in your arms on graduation night. Your goddamn arms, Ryan. How is it possible that you could go through something like that and it takes all these years of marriage and seven martinis for anyone to ever tell me? I feel like I don’t even know who you are.”
He dreams about wanting to open the door and letting Inez in and telling her all about it, about the bruises his father gave him and the alcohol and drugs his mother neglected him for and the brother who turned his childhood trust against him and how he’s still waiting, deep down, for Sandy and Kirsten to reject him and about how sometimes, he dreams about a girl he once loved.
A girl he once had a part in killing.
Because that spring so long ago, he knew Marissa was in way over her head, and instead of taking her back, he shoved her away, and instead of thinking about her needs, he only thought about his own, and instead of protecting her the one true time it mattered, he failed her.
He dreams about all of it.
He dreams about Inez crying quietly in the hall, saying over and over, “Ryan, please let me in.”
And then he dreams about Marissa.
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He comes to her at the lifeguard stand, slowly up the ramp, one step at a time, shoulders hunched, body heavy.
She sits next to him, side by side, their legs separated by mere inches, their shoulders touching.
“Inez slept with another guy,” he tells her.
“She didn’t mean to,” Marissa answers, and she’s not sure how, but she knows for sure that what she just told Ryan is true.
“How do you not mean to have sex with someone?” Ryan says forcefully and yells, “How the fuck does something like that happen? What? She forgot she was married? She forgot we have two kids? She forgot I existed?”
“She loves you,” Marissa says, and she knows she’s right about that, because Inez looks at Ryan exactly how she herself used to look at him.
“She’s just like the rest of them,” Ryan says bitterly. “Just like everybody else in my life.”
“No, she’s not,” Marissa counters. “Inez is different. Don’t push her away. She loves you. You can forgive her.”
“Screw that,” he says angrily, but Marissa knows better.
She knows Ryan better than maybe he knows himself.
She knows he won’t walk away from his children.
She knows he won’t try to separate them from their mother.
He’ll stay with his wife, but that’s not the real problem.
“You need to forgive her, Ryan.”
He shakes his head and looks in the opposite direction and asks her, “How can I do that? What you’re asking me to do is impossible.”
“I forgave Kevin,” Marissa says.
“It not the same,” Ryan answers. “This is different.”
“Forgiving is an act, not a situation,” Marissa says, and she knows that before she came to this place, she wouldn’t have been able to tell Ryan that. She wouldn’t have understood the meaning of the words.
“You’re so good at giving people who love you second chances, Ryan. But you never forgive them for anything. You have to start forgiving them.”
He glances back at her and asks softly, “Have you forgiven me?”
She doesn’t hear him ask the question in the voice of the grown man in front of her, but rather he sounds like the shy boy she remembers from when they first met.
From when they were both young.
“I never had to forgive you,” she tells him. “You were never to blame.”
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Ryan only dreams about Marissa one more time, in one last place.
The diner’s flashing neon sign warns that it’s closed for the night and yes, Ryan might be thirty years older than when he first met Marissa, but he sure as hell can still pick a lock.
They sit across from each other in their favorite booth and Marissa wishes up some cheeseburgers and a bunch of golden brown French fries and Ryan waves his index finger back and forth from her to the food and says, “Nice one.”
“You too,” she laughs, pointing at the jimmied door.
“Inez and I are going to counseling,” he says. “I want to work it out.”
“You need to talk to her.”
“I know,” he nods. “I’m getting better at it.”
“You need to forgive her,” Marissa reminds him.
“I almost have,” he says.
Marissa closes her eyes and when she opens them again, they’re sitting on the front steps of Harbor and she’s running her fingers through his hair and teasing him about the shiny silver grey streaks she finds peppered here and there.
She wonders how it can be possible that Ryan has somehow become as old as her father, when wasn’t it just a few minutes ago that the boys stood in royal blue gowns and the girls in deep maroon and they all threw their graduation caps high up into the air and challenged life to try and keep up with them?
“It wasn’t your fault I died, Ryan. You need to forgive yourself.”
“I’m trying,” he promises.
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When the world is frosted white, Marissa goes to heaven.
She’s not sure of the precise moment Ryan kept his promise to her but she knows he has, and that he has truly forgiven himself, because this anywhere and everywhere place that has been all around her for as long as she can recall, is quickly disintegrating into no place at all.
Its Crayola colors are draining and fading into a soft, soothing bleached light.
There’s only one memory left she hasn’t used.
One last moment Marissa hasn’t visited in all the time she has been here.
One memory she has been saving.
An unforgettable brief second of her life when nothing else mattered.
Marissa closes her eyes and when she opens them again, she’s at the Kickoff carnival, sitting in the Ferris wheel, holding Ryan’s hand and kissing the boy she always loved and will continue to love forever.
They go around one more time in a smooth fluid circle and Marissa doesn’t even care about what might happen, about what it all might mean, when she leaves the colors behind.
As she floats high into the sky.
Counting all the stars as they pass by.