Beyond Repair (17 page)

He held out his hands to her but she would not take them.

She would not, not ever.

“No, no no no—you take that back. You don’t say that to me.
I don’t want you to be sorry. Don’t you ever be sorry for me. Goddamn, Holden,
I don’t want fucking sorrys, don’t you get it? That’s the whole point.
I
want to be the one who cares.
I
want to be the one who heals.
I
don’t want to be fucking broken anymore. I don’t want you to look at me with
those sad fucking moo eyes like I’m so pathetic. Go look at someone else. Go
look at the other three hundred and twelve passengers who died instead of me.”

She was really crying now, and it was awful, it was awful.

But somehow she couldn’t seem to stop. It all just kept
coming, one terrible thing after another.
He might as well know it all now
,
she thought, though that hardly helped. Nothing could help her now.

“Why did they die instead of me? I don’t understand. There
was a doctor on there who was close to inventing a cure for cancer. A cure for
cancer! And I know…I know there was an opera singer too. I looked her up—her
name was Maria Entilles. She could do all the notes, she could do the whole
scale, she was amazing. I’m not amazing. I can’t even leave my house, in case
everyone looks at me like you’re looking at me now.”

“It’s just the shock, honey. It’s the shock, that’s all.
It’ll fade.”

“It won’t fade. It never fades. No matter how long I go it
doesn’t go away. I thought everyone had forgotten once, sometime after it
happened. But then this woman saw me in the grocery store and…and…I just don’t
want it to be like that anymore. I want to be normal. I want to be Alice
Evans.”

“But that’s who you are to me. I promise, that’s who you
are.”

“Not anymore. Now you’ll always see something else instead.”

“I won’t. I won’t. Soon you’ll see. I won’t.”

“And if you don’t? If you just go on believing I’m Alice—if
in time you can accept that and the pity leaves your expression…what then? What
happens to us then? Do you really think we can be a normal couple? We’re not a
normal couple
now
. I’m so fucked-up I don’t even think I could write an
essay about what a normal couple
is
, let alone be a part of one. I can
never be a part of one.”

“You don’t mean that.”

She didn’t entirely, but how could she say now?

It felt so real when she said the words aloud. Everything
seemed logical and right, as if she’d just found the pieces to an impossible
puzzle and finally made them fit. There was just one piece left, really. One
practical point to make.

“No, I don’t. But I mean this—I don’t want to be a part of
one with you. I’m only making things worse for you, I know I am. I’m just
digging you in deeper—so deep that one day you’ll wake up and wonder how you
found yourself in this fucking abyss. This fucking codependent, dysfunctional
mess.”

“Is that really what you think we are?”

“Yes. Yes. I do. I wish I didn’t but I do.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have a choice,” she said, then did the worst
possible thing she could, a thing she knew she would regret always. They would
never come back from this. Once she’d done it that was it, but she went ahead
anyway.

She opened the door.

“Goodbye, Holden,” she said.

While in her head her real words sang.

Goodbye, Bernie, my love, my only love.

This time there were no beautiful letters or carefully put
together packages. Of course there weren’t. She’d exploded all over him like a
nuclear bomb. People who exploded did not get declarations of love. They got a
long, aching silence and then nothing, followed by some snide comment in an
interview a few months from now.

Yeah, I thought she was cool
, he’d probably say.
But
then it turned out she was an ungrateful, lying maniac who threw my wonderful
gesture right back in my face.

Though even as she was imagining the words, she knew how
unlike him they sounded. He would never be so indiscreet. He would never talk
about her like that. He wasn’t that kind of man, no matter how hard she tried
to make him be in her head.
He’s probably laughing with his posse about me
in some strip joint
, she thought, and then wept into her hand. She wept not
because it was likely to be true.

But because she knew it wasn’t.

He was a good man. He was such a good man. He was too good
for the likes of her, really. He deserved someone better, someone who didn’t
hope for beautiful letters again, but instead thought of sending ones to him.
She knew he did, the moment she saw him on some late-night talk show.

He didn’t have to say. The sight of him was enough—like an
electric shock amidst the numbing flicker of the stuff she was channel-surfing
through. It lit her up, though she tried not to let it. She tried to pretend he
just looked like Holden Stark, instead of the man she loved. He was a distant
thing again, a once-was crush.

It was no use, however.

He didn’t even look like Holden under the bright studio
lights. He looked like Bernie, he talked like Bernie, and finally he said
things that Bernie would say. She had turned him away, but he still said them.
I
met the love of my life
, he said, while she did her best to contain the
wave of feeling rising inside her. She put a fist to her mouth, as though she
could squeeze the tears back.

But they came anyway. They pushed against the press of her
hand and forced their way past her tightly closed eyelids. She told herself
they were stupid, that he didn’t mean her, that this was all a mistake. Yet
still they came. They made rivers down her face and forced her chest to hitch
in this terrible, grief-stricken way.

And there was nothing she could do to stop it.

He was still saying things. Each sentence was steadily worse
than the last, until finally the interviewer asked him,
So when are we going
to meet this lady
and he replied with the worst possible thing he could
have. Worse than,
Oh I’m taking a camera crew to her tomorrow
! Worse
than,
Her name is Enid Kazinski
. Worse than anything she could have
thought of had she lived to be a thousand.

“No, that can’t happen. She doesn’t want anything to do with
this kind of thing, you know? I think this kind of thing would hurt her. I
think I hurt her, just being who I am. Wanting more from her, thinking she
could just accept stuff like this. Hell, I can barely accept stuff like this. I
don’t know why…I don’t know why I ever thought it would be easy for her. And
I’m sorry for that,” he said.

All of which was insane enough on its own. The interviewer
glanced at the camera, as though to ask some unseen presence if this was okay.
If this was normal, she thought, because it most certainly wasn’t. During his
last interview she’d seen him use the word
fun
three times in one
sentence. He usually had the bored look of a factory worker who does nothing
but repeat the same task over and over again.

But he didn’t have it here. He wasn’t saying the right
things here.

Or at least, he wasn’t saying the things authorized by his
publicist.

Everyone could tell he wasn’t, and that was before he looked
at the camera.
He looked right at the camera
, as though he’d decided to
address America. Only it wasn’t America, of course it wasn’t America, he was
addressing
her
live on television. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and just in
case she was in any doubt, he said her name at the end.

He said her good name, her real name, the name she wanted to
have.

“Alice,” he said.

He really did mean her. All of this was about her. How could
she hold everything in when it was about her? It was like hearing someone call
her name from beyond the wreckage as she stumbled around wondering if anyone
out there could possibly be alive. It was like finding another survivor.

All these years, all these and she’d found another survivor.
It was enough to make her stand, though she didn’t know where she was going to
go. And she said things aloud, though she didn’t know who she was saying them
to. She only knew it felt good to do both, to get up and answer him, despite
the fact that he wasn’t there.

You didn’t hurt me. You haven’t hurt me.

Wait there, okay? I’m coming to tell you that you haven’t
hurt me.

Of course she didn’t know
how
she was going to come
and tell him that he hadn’t hurt her. But once the idea was out there, once it
had hold of her, she didn’t want to let it go. She clutched it tight to her as
she pulled on clothes that would look passable to outside people, and did
normal things like brush her hair.

You had to brush your hair if you were going outside.

And she was going outside. She was she was she was. There
could be no arguments about it. No hesitations or deliberations. She had a
vehicle that she hadn’t used in two years—but it was serviced and gassed and
she would drive it. And she knew where she could find him; he had left his
address for her the first time he’d left.

It wasn’t far at all, from her house to his.

But by God it
was
far from her house to the car. That
was the real problem. Somewhere in the last two years, someone had put an
entire continent between her front porch and the driveway at the side of the
house. More than a continent, in truth. It looked like a whole alien world when
she dared to peek out the door, all mottled and jumbled and just about covered with
obstacles.

Were those steps leading down from the porch? They looked
like jagged teeth. She couldn’t imagine putting her feet down onto them—not
even after she’d taken three deep breaths and burned his words right over the
part inside her that said
no
.
I hurt her
, she thought, but it was
to no avail. She could not go down those steps. They were too sharp, too apt to
hurt her, too in the open. They stretched beyond the overhang of her house and
right into all the air that was out here.
Oh God
, there was so much
air
.

There was so much
sky
. She could see it just beyond
the terrible steps, hanging there like a big empty threat.
Come near me and
I’ll suck you right off the ground
, that sky seemed to say. And she could
see it too. She could see her feet leaving the ground as gravity suddenly
stopped being her friend. She could see herself clinging on to the porch
railing, body lifting in one long bow toward that endless nothing, arms
straining uselessly to hang on.

She would never be able to hang on.

She hadn’t been able to hang on before. She’d tried, but it
hadn’t worked. Her mother had still spiraled off into that hated blue, no
matter how tightly she’d held her hand. She just wasn’t strong enough, that was
the thing. She had never been strong enough—not just in muscle, but in will.
That was why when she closed her eyes she saw her family streaming away from
her like paper people.

And it was why she couldn’t do this.

She had no idea how she got to the steps. It must have been
an illusion—yes, yes, it had to be an illusion. She wasn’t really doing this at
all. She had not grabbed the handrail like a goddamn life preserver, and was
not currently crawling down each step in the most painstaking way possible. If
she accepted for even one second that she was, she wouldn’t be able to carry on
doing this.

But she did.

She made it to step two and step three, just by hanging on
as hard as she could. By closing her eyes and sweating and thinking of other
things—like movie marathons and ridiculous meals and the words he’d sent her.
Anything but how terrible this was, or how she would look should anyone chance
by. They would probably think she was mad, even though she didn’t feel it. She
didn’t feel as if she were doing this as a small and rather awkward child
probably would.

She felt as if she were clawing her way out of a goddamn
abyss. Someone had knocked her into it then counted her out.
She’ll die down
there
, they had thought. No one could escape the pit. There were ravenous
mutant zombies milling around at the bottom, and everything was all in utter
darkness, and the walls were not just steep. They were mud-covered and miles
long, and in order to scale them you had to jam your fists through three inches
of whatever impossible metal they were made out of.

Yet somehow she was almost there. She could see the light at
the top. She could feel the heat of the sun on her face, so much missed. She
hadn’t realized how dark it had been down there, until she felt that pang of
loss.
I live thirty feet from the ocean
, she thought,
and
yet
I never go outside.

It was kind of a travesty.

But it was one that she was about to rectify. She could
actually see her car from where she stood now. She could feel the scrubby grass
beneath her feet. Both felt as though the world had slipped sideways, but that
was fine. That was good. She could walk on a sideways world. She could walk on
any world.

She just had to do it slowly—let her shaky legs unfurl one
at a time, like a new fawn just learning how to move around. Then once she
realized she could do it, she took another trembling step. Then another and
another, one after the other in a great rush of relief and happiness. By the
time she got to the car she was almost running on wings she didn’t know she
had, half crying and half laughing.

She had escaped. Somehow, she had gotten out.

Starting the car seemed like nothing after that. If she
crashed the thing on the way there, then so be it. If the metal broke up around
her, each piece fluttering and then tearing away just like it had on the plane,
she would weather it. She had weathered the very worst that could possibly
happen to a person, and she had lived. She had crawled out of the abyss.

Nothing could hold her back now—not even the image that
entered her head as she sped over the bridge that separated him from her. She
saw something ploughing into her, saw the car turning in midair. She knew what
it would be like; she could see her own hands reaching up to stop her head from
touching the ceiling. The slow motion of it, the helplessness of it…all were
perfectly clear to her.

But she didn’t stop.

She put her foot down instead, and headed for the edge of
all the terrible things that could possibly happen.
I could die, I could
die, I could die
, she thought, then drove on through to the other side. All
the way through, and to the place that lay beyond it. The one where death held
no dominion, and life wasn’t something to hide from, just in case.

There was no
just in case
.

There were only possibilities, endless and waiting
possibilities that now stretched forever in front of her. Even if he no longer
wanted her, even if this was a bad decision, even if, even if…it didn’t matter.
Her face was wet and her heart was full and it didn’t matter. She could live
now, without wondering what terrible thing would happen next.

She could finally live.

* * * * *

The look on his face wasn’t quite the one she’d expected.
Some part of her had imagined him breaking into a smile. Another part had
thought he might be angry in some weird way. No part of her had envisioned
this, whatever this was. It seemed like confusion, only a type of confusion
that had some terrible dark side. As if she’d died just a little while ago and
he was trying to process what he was seeing. He was Jenny Hayden, unable to
accept that her husband had returned. And the longer she stood there in the
shadows, the less he seemed able to accept it.

His voice, when he finally spoke, was very faint.

“Am I dreaming?” he asked, but she couldn’t say no.

It felt as if she were dreaming too. She was awake and this
was real, and yet it had all the hallmarks. She’d come across him by accident,
on a path through the woods by his home that she couldn’t have known he was on.
The moon was out and its light shone down in an almost blurry, soft-focus sort
of way. And finally, she had turned out to be not dead after all. She was alive
and had returned to him.

What else did this dream possibly need?

She didn’t know. She’d never had one with her eyes open
before. It was hard to take it in at first, but she could feel it getting
easier. She could see it was getting easier for him too. After a second he
seemed to realize logic could be applied—or at least asked about.

“How did you get here?”

“I drove.”

“You drove?”

“Yeah.”

“In a car?”

“Of course in a car. But only because I don’t have a hot-air
balloon.”

He didn’t laugh. She wasn’t sure why she expected him to.

Though maybe
hoped he would
was a better way to put
it.

She had
hoped
he would. She had hoped he might stop
looking at her like that—as though she were a terrible problem he had to work
out.

“And then what?”

“And then I saw the gates, and wasn’t quite brave enough to
go up to them. So instead I thought I would just explore this little wooded
area—it’s been a long time since I was in one.” She paused, considering whether
to continue. But he already knew, so what did it matter? He had been as weird
as he was going to be about it. “In fact, I never thought I’d want to be in one
again.”