“Eventually you’re going to want more than my basement.”
“And what if I do? Yesterday you walked out onto your deck—and I’m guessing it’s been a long time since you did that. You really think you’ll never be able to do more? Never be able to let me help you do more? I’m here for you, okay? I’m here,” he said, and that pretty much sealed it. The romantic part of this fought a hearty battle, but in the end terror won. He was going to beherefor her, for God’s sake.
He thought she could really take him being here for her.
“You know what my favorite part of this movie is?” she asked. “In the beginning, when she’s in her little cabin drinking her wine, watching those home movies of her once-happy life and grieving over her dead husband. You know why?”
“I’m afraid of the answer, but want you to tell me it anyway.”
“Because she’s so desperately sad, and yet I know what’s coming. That’s the thing about movies, the beauty of movies—you just wait a little while and everything will be okay again. You know he’s coming for her. In a little while a man will fall from the sky and make her okay again. Do you know how many times I’ve wished for a man to fall from the goddamn sky?”
“I feel as though you’re trying to make some kind of point.”
“The point is the same for every movie I love. No one is really coming to rescue Jenny Hayden—not in reality. In reality there is no magic, no alien or angel or superhero to save you. In reality, Jenny sits on the rug and watches the movies forever and drinks her wine and that’s it. That’s the real ending, you know that’s the real ending. No one comes across time for Sarah Connor, and Hawkeye doesn’t return for Cora, and Captain Amazing doesn’t catch Amy Anderson as she falls from the sky.”
She wished she hadn’t added that last one. She hadn’t meant to add the last one, but it was there now and oh it was stinging behind her eyes. She could hardly get the last word out—her voice caught right on the end syllable.
And she knew he could hear and see it.
He always heard and saw it—even when she didn’t let it show.
“It doesn’t have to be,” he said, so gentle, so gentle.
But that only made it worse. It only made it harder to tell him.
“It will be,” she said. “You’ll see.”
* * * * *
She tried not to think about him. That was her best bet—to just put the whole thing out of her mind as though it had never happened. That method had worked well for her in the past. It would work just as well here, she was sure it would. She fell back on her old routines—watching films and shows obsessively, reading well past four in the morning, keeping herself busy with mundane house tasks when her eyes started to bleed—and for a while that seemed to succeed.
Until she found herself crouched by the skirting boards in the hallway, a piece of sandpaper worn to smoothness clenched in her fist, knuckles bleeding because she’d been doing it so long and so badly, sweat coating her body in a thick, greasy film. She didn’t know when she’d started this crazy crusade or what time it now was, but she understood one thing very clearly.
She was on the verge of passing out.
She’d pushed herself to the point of passing out.
And hestillhadn’t removed himself from her mind. It was as if he had died—though she supposed he had in a weird way. Bernie was gone and Holden would carry on from here, gleaming and glorious and able to forget. That guy she’d known no longer existed, or perhaps never really had.
Captain Amazing is not going to catch me as I fall from the sky, she scolded herself, only this time shedidcry. She cried not because she wished that he would, but for the idea that hecouldhave. If things were like they were in the movies, he could have done just that, that very thing, and oh the thought was unbearable.
It haunted her dreams. It kept her awake.
She came close to calling him in the middle of the night just to take it back.Please just tell me I was wrong, please tell me I was, she wanted to say, and then she’d wake in the clear light of dawn and be mean with herself for it.He can’t tell you that you’re wrong, this new, cruel her would say.Any more than you can ask the Goblin King to take you away from all of this right now, or dive into a river and find yourself in Oz, or somehow read a book and be Atreyu. The very idea of everything turning out wonderfully is as mythical as all of those, and you know that now. Don’t you, Alice?
She did. She knew it so hard and so thoroughly that she didn’t realize the package was from him. She opened it, sure she had ordered something then just forgotten, and even after she’d found the disc inside she didn’t think anything of it.It’ll be a movie from that website that burns old unavailable crap for idiots, she thought, and continued to do so all the way up to the point of pressing Play.
It wasLast of the Mohicans—though not all of it. It didn’t start at the beginning. It started at the part with the waterfall, and the moment it did she knew. She knew what it was. She tried to deny it but it was impossible to. There was Daniel Day Lewis, and he was saying the only thing that was on the disc. The only part that had been captured—“You be strong, you survive...you stay alive, no matter what occurs. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you,” he said.
I will find you.
* * * * *
The next day there was another, and this one was somehow even better and more heart-wrenching and less bearable than the first. He’d picked something from one of her favorite movies—not just a line that made sense for their situation. This one kind of didn’t in context, yet the effect was staggeringly good. She held her breath all the way through hearing it, thinking of how he must have worked out exactly which ones she loved above all others. He must have found her shelf of best movies, and he even knewwhythey were the best. He knew what she liked about them.
“You are my sun, my moon, my starlight sky,” Mad Martigan said. “Without you—dwell in darkness. I love you.”
And then her heart attempted to consume her whole body. She had to sit down, but the couch was three feet away. It might as well have been three miles for all the good it did her. She just had to kind of crouch a little to take the strain off, though it hardly helped at all. Nothing would have helped her.
