"World Upside-Down", for recycledfaery
Title: World Upside-Down
Author: To be revealed
Rating: R (for mention of child death, themes of revenge)
Category: Gen, het
Characters: Alex Mahone, Pam Mahone, mention of Cameron Mahone
Requested by: recycledfaery
Summary: A life is like a string unspooling: the longer it is, the more tangled it becomes.
Author's Note: The prompt used was: After Mahone pushes Wyatt off the dock, he calls Pam. What does he say? Elements to include: a knife, the phrase ‘live a little’, and a dumpster. (Given the little canonized information we have on Pam Mahone, creative license has been taken in regard to their past together. ) Some lines of dialogue taken from 4.05.
World Upside-Down
I.
A life is like a string unspooling: the longer it is, the more tangled it becomes. The more lies told, the more mistakes made, the more hope cast…the more webs woven.
When it’s pulled taut, that’s when the knots form.
You tighten the cords, looping them over and over in skilled precision, twisting them over his thick wrists twice, three times, redoubling your efforts and your resolve; he won’t wiggle out of this. He won’t pick these free, fingernails bloody and wasted as they are.
You march him, one foot in front of the other, in the straightest path to retribution…in a bee line for the bay. It’s not the first time you’ve executed a man. It’s not even the second time, or the third. It will, however, be the last.
“Walk,” you order, and Wyatt’s shuffling gait commences, but in your mind’s eye, you see another first step: your own, toward something irretrievable. Redemption? Forgiveness? No, you recognize it for what it is-your own last will and testament. Your own passing from this life to another.
You’ve left the warehouse behind. You’ve driven pass industrial cargo equipment, huge steel loading hooks coated in paint chipped by weather, time, and hard use, and now you’re both marching under the blinding sun, the stench of an entire row of industrial Dumpsters leaving a sheen of oily vapor on the air. You push him toward the water. The only sound is the cry of a gull and the rhythmic clang of the chains binding Wyatt.
It’s the end of the line, but it hardly began here.
It certainly hadn’t begun with Wyatt, with the pinch of your skin as you bound him, the green give of the harbor as it waits to admit him. No, it had all started with Oscar Shales, a mound of dirt, a bag of fertilizer. A birdbath marking place like a stony finger pressed to the pages of a narrative you long to put down, spine bent back upon itself, straining.
That day, burying the remains of that man, your back had ached. You had arched. You had risen. Your muscles had felt stiff, but that had been expected. You’d aged thirty years at least in the last month.
“Hi, Dad!” Cameron had called. “What are you doing?” You had lifted your head from the acrid stench of the earth, the sharp bite of Lyme in your nostrils,his voice like a siren in your ear. A warning-not quite swallowed in time-had sprung to your lips.
“Get back!” you had shouted. “Stay away from me!”
The force of your reprimand had hit the air like a slap. He had halted, stung, his sneakers skidding to a stop just shy of the overturned dirt. “Go inside the house, son,” you had tempered, your voice-your chest-hollow as a drum. “I’ll be right there.”
And my God, you had actually believed it. You had actually thought that after dirtying your hands to this degree, you’d be able to be there, and whole, and his.
*****
Maybe even Shales hadn’t been the beginning, but rather the beginning of the end. Maybe it started much earlier, with your acceptance into the academy, or with your first interview with the Bureau.
Or maybe it can be traced back much further than that, read like a future in reverse, your fate staring back at you in a mirror, unblinking. You flip it on its head, and suddenly you’ve gained fifteen years to life, and you’re once again sitting behind a brunette in Advanced Chemistry on an unseasonably warm day in March. A brunette whose profile, head tilted to one side, chin resting in hand, keeps you mesmerized all period.
Later, you catch up to her on the sweeping lawn of the quad. You think of something clever to say, and she turns, a swift flare of interest sparking in her eyes to cause the blood to race in your veins. You squint against the sun, shove your hands into your pockets, and rock back and forth on the balls of your feet as you navigate an ask out for the following week around the sudden dryness of your mouth and the thickness of your tongue.
She smiles. “How about tonight?” she suggests-no, she dares-with a raise of her eyebrows, and you cease your casual rocking, thrown abruptly off your game. You’re used to reading people like books. So little usually surprises you. You decide, on the spot, that you could learn to like surprises.
“Live a little,” she taunts with a laugh, and you do.
You do.
*****
Your boy is born under the steady hand of a surgeon, extracted from the womb amid the most sterile of conditions. The Cesarean Section is unexpected, another surprise you take in stride; everything happens so fast you have time only to don your mask and note the flash of the scalpel before his newborn wail cuts through you like a knife and you’re left gaping, still cataloging what has happened, the color draining from your face. It’s often like that, with sudden blows. You watch as he’s drawn from his mother like a heartbeat extracted from your own chest, washed and wrapped and placed in your arms, and when all is said and done, it’s the most by-the-book operation of your life.
He has his mother’s brown eyes and long lashes, and you can’t fathom anyone, the world over, ever loving another human being to a greater degree. You look at Pam, and you look at Cameron, and for once, your latest case slips to the back of your mind and you experience your first, fleeting hint of fulfillment. You hold your son and you think: This is my life work. Right here is the beginning and the end of me.
You forget so quickly.
*****
Wyatt, however, will not. He will be forced to remember, if only for a handful of seconds before death, the people he had so severely wronged.
Will it matter? Will it stabilize any cosmic imbalance? You must believe it will, because for once, no one is twisting your arm. No one is holding a threat over your head, holding your son’s life or your wife’s happiness hostage…because they can’t. That threat has been mined bare, stripped back, left to burn. Wyatt knows it; you can see it in his eyes. He has no card left to play. It’s such an empty victory, you could rattle around inside of it, alone save for the sound of your solitary sorrow.
You don’t ask him for any last words, but he thinks he has a right to them all the same. His attempt at aligning himself with you-“We’re the same, you and me”-doesn’t even anger you, because suddenly, there’s absolutely nothing left to hear. There’s absolutely nothing left to say. There’s absolutely…nothing.
There’s one startled look upon his face-had he really thought you wouldn’t do it?-followed by a single splash, which reverberates like only the softest plink against your conscience. Within seconds-too few, for such a large mass-the water is still. All this history, all this astounding wrong is swallowed whole like it’s nothing.
*****
After watching the last ripples of Wyatt’s descent into the harbor, you wait a full day to call Pam back. When you finally dial the number, you’re not sure what you’re hoping she’ll say. You really only hope she’ll answer at all.
After all, you created a son together. You lost a son together.
No, you correct yourself. Not together. You had left her on her own that day.
The phone rings in your ear once, twice, half a dozen times, until you’ve given up all hope of her picking up.
“Alex?”
You are at a loss for words. In your head, a myriad of memories are vying for prominence, each one blocking out the last, each one aching to be seen. Heard.
Live a little, you think.
Live a little. Live a lot.
Live.
You hang up. You disconnect from the woman you love, the mother of the child whose death sentence you signed, the only thing that’s kept you in hope and in sheer, outright humanity for as long as this nightmare has been consuming you whole.
You turn back toward the warehouse…down the dock, past the Dumpster ripe in the heat, back to the people you had once wronged, and who had now stood aside while you knotted your own noose. While you sealed your own fate.
You’ve come undone. You’ve unraveled. There’s nothing left for you but frayed ends, fanned thin as silk.
II.
He calls.
He doesn’t have to say anything; you know it’s him the moment you pick up the phone.
“Alex?”
Nothing. Labored breathing. Stale static.
“Alex?”
Silence thick as thieves. If torment were a sound, this would be it.
If torment were a sight, it would be that of your own child dying. It would be the tableau that played out before your eyes only days ago, and that repeats in a sickening loop while you sleep. Like horror manifested. Like cold-blooded cruelty turned to chaos at the pierce of your scream, every violent act premeditated, all of it executed with detached precision until even your fear is ground fine as powder beneath the sole of that monster’s boot.
If it could be measured, it would be in the mere fraction of inches that had separated you from him as he suffered, that fingers-breath of distance that had divided you as he struggled, knees sunk into the carpeting, dark stains expanding rapidly across the front of his favorite Cubs t-shirt until it was no longer blue. Until it had turned purple right before your eyes, the color of blood-red plums. You know this. You were forced to witness this. You were forced to watch the torment in the widening of his eyes, his utter trust in you surely eradicated upon his last cohesive thought. And now, you are forced to live after he is not. You carry this knowledge within you everywhere you go, cradling it like a glass-blown treasure nestled in straw, an exotic fruit wrapped in tissue to ward against bruising.
*****
You married him the very year you met him; you were young, but you didn’t care, you were naïve, but that wouldn’t last long. It’s so easy to relive it all, when you’re not trying so hard to forget. You close your eyes, counting back from ten, then from one hundred, watching the focal point of your memory shift like a pendulum, swinging from good to bad and back again. He enters the Academy that same spring. He graduates, and the pride on his face as he stands at attention, receiving his dress blues, brings enough joy to your heart to ease the worst of the sting of the 70-hour work weeks that follow. That continue for years after.
You remind yourself that you want what he wants. That you share the same goals. You rally behind his ambition, his department, his missions. You don’t ask questions…not at first. You’re content to see him pleased.
He rises through the ranks with unprecedented speed.
You only slowly become aware of the changes in him. The man who had been warm, witty, quick with a joke or a smart remark becomes moody…withdrawn. He no longer invites company to the house, no longer invites your families or even you to share in conversation or much else. You attribute it to stress, pressure from the higher-ups, his own unyielding perfectionism eating away at his free time. But it’s much more than that. It’s much worse, although you staunchly refuse to admit such a thing for far, far longer than you should.
By the time you’re ready to be honest with yourself about the change in him, it’s as clear as night and day, a demarcation between sanity and obsession. You shield Cameron from it, your friends from it, even his associates from it, as much as you can. You make excuses, allowances, adjustments. He doesn’t thank you for it. After a time, he doesn’t speak to you at all.
And in the end, after all this, he’s the one to leave you. The irony of it, the insult of it, leaves you speechless.
*****
Years go by, with your only significant conversation pertaining to Cameron’s immediate needs. The separation is not amicable. The coldness continues. The distance magnifies.
And then…a change to the ugly pattern you’ve followed for so long. The Fox River Eight escape. A man comes by the house whom you know is not FBI or Internal Affairs or anything else he claims. More time goes by. The phone rings. He sounds hopeful for the first time in years. He’s nurturing a vested interest-in Cam, in you--for the first time in years.
He speaks of Columbia, he speaks of love. Even after set-back after set-back, he is optimism incarnate, promising a fresh start. Promising to turn the world upside-down to get back to you. He acts like a man reborn. You know now it was the opposite: he was a man slowly dying.
You open up. You smile into the phone. You Google travel agents and you dare to hope.
“Pam?” he says. “Let’s live a little.”
Let’s, you think, and then, right as though on cue, comes the other shoe, dropping. He backpedals. He falters. He disappoints. He’s everything you should have expected of him.
And then what you never, ever could have anticipated, the world over: unmitigated, unforeseeable cruelty. Catastrophe.
*****
You agree to meet in a diner.
He’s right there, in the flesh, but you stare at him as though through a square of glass. He’s as inaccessible as your own emotions of late, buried deeper than his deepest secrets, deposited into freshly turned earth. You imagine if you put your hand up to touch his face-but you wouldn’t, you couldn’t-your palm would meet with solid denial, a cold, clear pane pressed flat to your skin. It’s a small comfort, this dividing line between you.
Still, it hurts to look at him. It hurts to look away. It just hurts.
You look like hell. He looks like hell, and you look at each other…helplessly. He can seem an awkward man at the best of times, over-thinking, under-emoting, but now? Now he reminds you of a fish out of water, silently flailing. You’re suddenly, bizarrely, reminded of the goldfish the two of you had bought Cameron for his fourth birthday. Even a preschooler can care for a fish, you had said, but they had proven you wrong, Alex and Cam. They had both stood in mute surprise as it had flopped there, on the floor, until still, its bowl tipped over by a stray soccer ball. Water pooling. Seeping into the racecar rug adorning Cam’s floor.
Eyes bulging. Dying.
Now, your hands curl into fists at your sides, knuckles white against the denim of your jeans. You brought this upon us! you want to shout. You dragged all of this to our home, into our own front yard! You want to hate him, but you cannot. When you look at him, you see all you have left of Cameron. You see all you have left of something that was once so good, it took your breath away. And you cannot de-sanctify that. You cannot dislodge such a tenuously thin tribute to Cam’s memory.
The booth is toward the back. The vinyl bench is torn and stained. There’s twenty years’ worth of stale cigarette smoke lingering in the air. Once upon a time, you were both better than this.
Once upon a time, before any of it went south, you were genuinely happy, of this you’re sure. Such things cannot be faked. And now? Now you are both so broken, you mirror each other’s misery, both bent at the middle, elbows on the Formica table-top, braced for the worst...in yourself? In each other? He shows you photos, and you ID the man who murdered your son. You think it cannot get more surreal than this.
And yet it does. “You didn’t do this,” you hear yourself saying, because you have to believe it. “In your heart you are a really good man.” You shift in your seat, hoping and yet not hoping to catch his eye if he looks up. You feel slightly awkward voicing this sentiment. It’s as if you’re working out a puzzle out-loud, talking yourself through a mind-bender that’s left your brain in knots. “That’s why I married you,” you continue slowly, trying to fit the pieces together…the ones that are left, anyway. “That’s why I started a family with you.” Your voice breaks, and he sobs, and the level of pain in the booth rises and spills. Overflows, just like the bowl with the goldfish, silently gasping. Just like a crescendo filling your ears. You’re surprised it’s not audible. Palpable.
You touch him. You rise and circle the table to him, your hands on his shoulders, your voice in his ear. You whisper words of vengeance, not comfort, and you tell him, finally, to be himself: fanatical. Focused. Dogged. Obsessed with justice.
It seems fitting that sincerity is the last thing you ask of him. You know you could take it further. You could ask him what happened. You could ask him to start at the beginning, and untangle this whole sordid web for you.
He would try. He would bend to the task, hands cradling his skull, head down in defeat, but this timeline of events, this domino of misery crashing into more misery starting with Shales and continuing on like a hurricane through the Company and Abruzzi and Apolskis and Burrows and Scofield is not what you need. It’s would amount to only wave after wave of misdirected righteousness and sin that would culminate in your own ultimate, unspeakable disaster…a torrential tragedy you do not want to relive nor hear him lament.
Instead, you both silently weep. You touch him once more-briefly-before rising.
He’s a shell of a man, but what can you offer? You feel scraped clean yourself, like the bottom of a bowl or the hollow of a gourd.
You imagine you’ll never see him again.
*****
You hang up the phone with dry eyes.
It hardly matters what he had intended to say: there’s not a promise he could make, an apology he could utter, a corner of the earth you could both flee to that would ease even the slightest ounce of grief from the pinch of your shoulders and the aching of your heart.
Because there’s no coming back from this, no matter how much history lingers behind you or how much future swims before you. Any feelings that may still exist, tender shoots still surviving somewhere under the rubble, are outweighed ten to one by grief dense enough to block out the sun. There’s no shaking something this devastating, this life-defining, because to do so you’d have to shed your own skin and lobotomize your own memories. And if you did that, if you actually managed it, who would remember Cameron then? Who would keep that torch burning, that eulogy alive? Who would honor him? The cost of an anesthetized mind is too high, and so you’re forced to live this, every day, day-in and day-out, with no relief in sight.
Live a little.
You will go somewhere. You will do something. You will work and eat and breathe, and maybe, someday, though unfathomable now, you will plan and pursue and dream.
Live a little.
You will seek touch, and comfort, and forgetfulness.
Live a little.
It’s more than Cameron received, and during your worst days, you fear it’s much, much more than you and Alex deserve.
Author: To be revealed
Rating: R (for mention of child death, themes of revenge)
Category: Gen, het
Characters: Alex Mahone, Pam Mahone, mention of Cameron Mahone
Requested by: recycledfaery
Summary: A life is like a string unspooling: the longer it is, the more tangled it becomes.
Author's Note: The prompt used was: After Mahone pushes Wyatt off the dock, he calls Pam. What does he say? Elements to include: a knife, the phrase ‘live a little’, and a dumpster. (Given the little canonized information we have on Pam Mahone, creative license has been taken in regard to their past together. ) Some lines of dialogue taken from 4.05.
World Upside-Down
I.
A life is like a string unspooling: the longer it is, the more tangled it becomes. The more lies told, the more mistakes made, the more hope cast…the more webs woven.
When it’s pulled taut, that’s when the knots form.
You tighten the cords, looping them over and over in skilled precision, twisting them over his thick wrists twice, three times, redoubling your efforts and your resolve; he won’t wiggle out of this. He won’t pick these free, fingernails bloody and wasted as they are.
You march him, one foot in front of the other, in the straightest path to retribution…in a bee line for the bay. It’s not the first time you’ve executed a man. It’s not even the second time, or the third. It will, however, be the last.
“Walk,” you order, and Wyatt’s shuffling gait commences, but in your mind’s eye, you see another first step: your own, toward something irretrievable. Redemption? Forgiveness? No, you recognize it for what it is-your own last will and testament. Your own passing from this life to another.
You’ve left the warehouse behind. You’ve driven pass industrial cargo equipment, huge steel loading hooks coated in paint chipped by weather, time, and hard use, and now you’re both marching under the blinding sun, the stench of an entire row of industrial Dumpsters leaving a sheen of oily vapor on the air. You push him toward the water. The only sound is the cry of a gull and the rhythmic clang of the chains binding Wyatt.
It’s the end of the line, but it hardly began here.
It certainly hadn’t begun with Wyatt, with the pinch of your skin as you bound him, the green give of the harbor as it waits to admit him. No, it had all started with Oscar Shales, a mound of dirt, a bag of fertilizer. A birdbath marking place like a stony finger pressed to the pages of a narrative you long to put down, spine bent back upon itself, straining.
That day, burying the remains of that man, your back had ached. You had arched. You had risen. Your muscles had felt stiff, but that had been expected. You’d aged thirty years at least in the last month.
“Hi, Dad!” Cameron had called. “What are you doing?” You had lifted your head from the acrid stench of the earth, the sharp bite of Lyme in your nostrils,his voice like a siren in your ear. A warning-not quite swallowed in time-had sprung to your lips.
“Get back!” you had shouted. “Stay away from me!”
The force of your reprimand had hit the air like a slap. He had halted, stung, his sneakers skidding to a stop just shy of the overturned dirt. “Go inside the house, son,” you had tempered, your voice-your chest-hollow as a drum. “I’ll be right there.”
And my God, you had actually believed it. You had actually thought that after dirtying your hands to this degree, you’d be able to be there, and whole, and his.
*****
Maybe even Shales hadn’t been the beginning, but rather the beginning of the end. Maybe it started much earlier, with your acceptance into the academy, or with your first interview with the Bureau.
Or maybe it can be traced back much further than that, read like a future in reverse, your fate staring back at you in a mirror, unblinking. You flip it on its head, and suddenly you’ve gained fifteen years to life, and you’re once again sitting behind a brunette in Advanced Chemistry on an unseasonably warm day in March. A brunette whose profile, head tilted to one side, chin resting in hand, keeps you mesmerized all period.
Later, you catch up to her on the sweeping lawn of the quad. You think of something clever to say, and she turns, a swift flare of interest sparking in her eyes to cause the blood to race in your veins. You squint against the sun, shove your hands into your pockets, and rock back and forth on the balls of your feet as you navigate an ask out for the following week around the sudden dryness of your mouth and the thickness of your tongue.
She smiles. “How about tonight?” she suggests-no, she dares-with a raise of her eyebrows, and you cease your casual rocking, thrown abruptly off your game. You’re used to reading people like books. So little usually surprises you. You decide, on the spot, that you could learn to like surprises.
“Live a little,” she taunts with a laugh, and you do.
You do.
*****
Your boy is born under the steady hand of a surgeon, extracted from the womb amid the most sterile of conditions. The Cesarean Section is unexpected, another surprise you take in stride; everything happens so fast you have time only to don your mask and note the flash of the scalpel before his newborn wail cuts through you like a knife and you’re left gaping, still cataloging what has happened, the color draining from your face. It’s often like that, with sudden blows. You watch as he’s drawn from his mother like a heartbeat extracted from your own chest, washed and wrapped and placed in your arms, and when all is said and done, it’s the most by-the-book operation of your life.
He has his mother’s brown eyes and long lashes, and you can’t fathom anyone, the world over, ever loving another human being to a greater degree. You look at Pam, and you look at Cameron, and for once, your latest case slips to the back of your mind and you experience your first, fleeting hint of fulfillment. You hold your son and you think: This is my life work. Right here is the beginning and the end of me.
You forget so quickly.
*****
Wyatt, however, will not. He will be forced to remember, if only for a handful of seconds before death, the people he had so severely wronged.
Will it matter? Will it stabilize any cosmic imbalance? You must believe it will, because for once, no one is twisting your arm. No one is holding a threat over your head, holding your son’s life or your wife’s happiness hostage…because they can’t. That threat has been mined bare, stripped back, left to burn. Wyatt knows it; you can see it in his eyes. He has no card left to play. It’s such an empty victory, you could rattle around inside of it, alone save for the sound of your solitary sorrow.
You don’t ask him for any last words, but he thinks he has a right to them all the same. His attempt at aligning himself with you-“We’re the same, you and me”-doesn’t even anger you, because suddenly, there’s absolutely nothing left to hear. There’s absolutely nothing left to say. There’s absolutely…nothing.
There’s one startled look upon his face-had he really thought you wouldn’t do it?-followed by a single splash, which reverberates like only the softest plink against your conscience. Within seconds-too few, for such a large mass-the water is still. All this history, all this astounding wrong is swallowed whole like it’s nothing.
*****
After watching the last ripples of Wyatt’s descent into the harbor, you wait a full day to call Pam back. When you finally dial the number, you’re not sure what you’re hoping she’ll say. You really only hope she’ll answer at all.
After all, you created a son together. You lost a son together.
No, you correct yourself. Not together. You had left her on her own that day.
The phone rings in your ear once, twice, half a dozen times, until you’ve given up all hope of her picking up.
“Alex?”
You are at a loss for words. In your head, a myriad of memories are vying for prominence, each one blocking out the last, each one aching to be seen. Heard.
Live a little, you think.
Live a little. Live a lot.
Live.
You hang up. You disconnect from the woman you love, the mother of the child whose death sentence you signed, the only thing that’s kept you in hope and in sheer, outright humanity for as long as this nightmare has been consuming you whole.
You turn back toward the warehouse…down the dock, past the Dumpster ripe in the heat, back to the people you had once wronged, and who had now stood aside while you knotted your own noose. While you sealed your own fate.
You’ve come undone. You’ve unraveled. There’s nothing left for you but frayed ends, fanned thin as silk.
II.
He calls.
He doesn’t have to say anything; you know it’s him the moment you pick up the phone.
“Alex?”
Nothing. Labored breathing. Stale static.
“Alex?”
Silence thick as thieves. If torment were a sound, this would be it.
If torment were a sight, it would be that of your own child dying. It would be the tableau that played out before your eyes only days ago, and that repeats in a sickening loop while you sleep. Like horror manifested. Like cold-blooded cruelty turned to chaos at the pierce of your scream, every violent act premeditated, all of it executed with detached precision until even your fear is ground fine as powder beneath the sole of that monster’s boot.
If it could be measured, it would be in the mere fraction of inches that had separated you from him as he suffered, that fingers-breath of distance that had divided you as he struggled, knees sunk into the carpeting, dark stains expanding rapidly across the front of his favorite Cubs t-shirt until it was no longer blue. Until it had turned purple right before your eyes, the color of blood-red plums. You know this. You were forced to witness this. You were forced to watch the torment in the widening of his eyes, his utter trust in you surely eradicated upon his last cohesive thought. And now, you are forced to live after he is not. You carry this knowledge within you everywhere you go, cradling it like a glass-blown treasure nestled in straw, an exotic fruit wrapped in tissue to ward against bruising.
*****
You married him the very year you met him; you were young, but you didn’t care, you were naïve, but that wouldn’t last long. It’s so easy to relive it all, when you’re not trying so hard to forget. You close your eyes, counting back from ten, then from one hundred, watching the focal point of your memory shift like a pendulum, swinging from good to bad and back again. He enters the Academy that same spring. He graduates, and the pride on his face as he stands at attention, receiving his dress blues, brings enough joy to your heart to ease the worst of the sting of the 70-hour work weeks that follow. That continue for years after.
You remind yourself that you want what he wants. That you share the same goals. You rally behind his ambition, his department, his missions. You don’t ask questions…not at first. You’re content to see him pleased.
He rises through the ranks with unprecedented speed.
You only slowly become aware of the changes in him. The man who had been warm, witty, quick with a joke or a smart remark becomes moody…withdrawn. He no longer invites company to the house, no longer invites your families or even you to share in conversation or much else. You attribute it to stress, pressure from the higher-ups, his own unyielding perfectionism eating away at his free time. But it’s much more than that. It’s much worse, although you staunchly refuse to admit such a thing for far, far longer than you should.
By the time you’re ready to be honest with yourself about the change in him, it’s as clear as night and day, a demarcation between sanity and obsession. You shield Cameron from it, your friends from it, even his associates from it, as much as you can. You make excuses, allowances, adjustments. He doesn’t thank you for it. After a time, he doesn’t speak to you at all.
And in the end, after all this, he’s the one to leave you. The irony of it, the insult of it, leaves you speechless.
*****
Years go by, with your only significant conversation pertaining to Cameron’s immediate needs. The separation is not amicable. The coldness continues. The distance magnifies.
And then…a change to the ugly pattern you’ve followed for so long. The Fox River Eight escape. A man comes by the house whom you know is not FBI or Internal Affairs or anything else he claims. More time goes by. The phone rings. He sounds hopeful for the first time in years. He’s nurturing a vested interest-in Cam, in you--for the first time in years.
He speaks of Columbia, he speaks of love. Even after set-back after set-back, he is optimism incarnate, promising a fresh start. Promising to turn the world upside-down to get back to you. He acts like a man reborn. You know now it was the opposite: he was a man slowly dying.
You open up. You smile into the phone. You Google travel agents and you dare to hope.
“Pam?” he says. “Let’s live a little.”
Let’s, you think, and then, right as though on cue, comes the other shoe, dropping. He backpedals. He falters. He disappoints. He’s everything you should have expected of him.
And then what you never, ever could have anticipated, the world over: unmitigated, unforeseeable cruelty. Catastrophe.
*****
You agree to meet in a diner.
He’s right there, in the flesh, but you stare at him as though through a square of glass. He’s as inaccessible as your own emotions of late, buried deeper than his deepest secrets, deposited into freshly turned earth. You imagine if you put your hand up to touch his face-but you wouldn’t, you couldn’t-your palm would meet with solid denial, a cold, clear pane pressed flat to your skin. It’s a small comfort, this dividing line between you.
Still, it hurts to look at him. It hurts to look away. It just hurts.
You look like hell. He looks like hell, and you look at each other…helplessly. He can seem an awkward man at the best of times, over-thinking, under-emoting, but now? Now he reminds you of a fish out of water, silently flailing. You’re suddenly, bizarrely, reminded of the goldfish the two of you had bought Cameron for his fourth birthday. Even a preschooler can care for a fish, you had said, but they had proven you wrong, Alex and Cam. They had both stood in mute surprise as it had flopped there, on the floor, until still, its bowl tipped over by a stray soccer ball. Water pooling. Seeping into the racecar rug adorning Cam’s floor.
Eyes bulging. Dying.
Now, your hands curl into fists at your sides, knuckles white against the denim of your jeans. You brought this upon us! you want to shout. You dragged all of this to our home, into our own front yard! You want to hate him, but you cannot. When you look at him, you see all you have left of Cameron. You see all you have left of something that was once so good, it took your breath away. And you cannot de-sanctify that. You cannot dislodge such a tenuously thin tribute to Cam’s memory.
The booth is toward the back. The vinyl bench is torn and stained. There’s twenty years’ worth of stale cigarette smoke lingering in the air. Once upon a time, you were both better than this.
Once upon a time, before any of it went south, you were genuinely happy, of this you’re sure. Such things cannot be faked. And now? Now you are both so broken, you mirror each other’s misery, both bent at the middle, elbows on the Formica table-top, braced for the worst...in yourself? In each other? He shows you photos, and you ID the man who murdered your son. You think it cannot get more surreal than this.
And yet it does. “You didn’t do this,” you hear yourself saying, because you have to believe it. “In your heart you are a really good man.” You shift in your seat, hoping and yet not hoping to catch his eye if he looks up. You feel slightly awkward voicing this sentiment. It’s as if you’re working out a puzzle out-loud, talking yourself through a mind-bender that’s left your brain in knots. “That’s why I married you,” you continue slowly, trying to fit the pieces together…the ones that are left, anyway. “That’s why I started a family with you.” Your voice breaks, and he sobs, and the level of pain in the booth rises and spills. Overflows, just like the bowl with the goldfish, silently gasping. Just like a crescendo filling your ears. You’re surprised it’s not audible. Palpable.
You touch him. You rise and circle the table to him, your hands on his shoulders, your voice in his ear. You whisper words of vengeance, not comfort, and you tell him, finally, to be himself: fanatical. Focused. Dogged. Obsessed with justice.
It seems fitting that sincerity is the last thing you ask of him. You know you could take it further. You could ask him what happened. You could ask him to start at the beginning, and untangle this whole sordid web for you.
He would try. He would bend to the task, hands cradling his skull, head down in defeat, but this timeline of events, this domino of misery crashing into more misery starting with Shales and continuing on like a hurricane through the Company and Abruzzi and Apolskis and Burrows and Scofield is not what you need. It’s would amount to only wave after wave of misdirected righteousness and sin that would culminate in your own ultimate, unspeakable disaster…a torrential tragedy you do not want to relive nor hear him lament.
Instead, you both silently weep. You touch him once more-briefly-before rising.
He’s a shell of a man, but what can you offer? You feel scraped clean yourself, like the bottom of a bowl or the hollow of a gourd.
You imagine you’ll never see him again.
*****
You hang up the phone with dry eyes.
It hardly matters what he had intended to say: there’s not a promise he could make, an apology he could utter, a corner of the earth you could both flee to that would ease even the slightest ounce of grief from the pinch of your shoulders and the aching of your heart.
Because there’s no coming back from this, no matter how much history lingers behind you or how much future swims before you. Any feelings that may still exist, tender shoots still surviving somewhere under the rubble, are outweighed ten to one by grief dense enough to block out the sun. There’s no shaking something this devastating, this life-defining, because to do so you’d have to shed your own skin and lobotomize your own memories. And if you did that, if you actually managed it, who would remember Cameron then? Who would keep that torch burning, that eulogy alive? Who would honor him? The cost of an anesthetized mind is too high, and so you’re forced to live this, every day, day-in and day-out, with no relief in sight.
Live a little.
You will go somewhere. You will do something. You will work and eat and breathe, and maybe, someday, though unfathomable now, you will plan and pursue and dream.
Live a little.
You will seek touch, and comfort, and forgetfulness.
Live a little.
It’s more than Cameron received, and during your worst days, you fear it’s much, much more than you and Alex deserve.