Title: More Than Memories
Rating: PG
Author: cgb
Fandom: Seachange
Category: Laura/ Dan, Laura/ Max, Laura/ Jack - by god, that
woman gets around!
Summary: This is going to hurt, they said, and it did, but after a
while, she stopped noticing.
*
It never really began. And it's silly, really, to be like this-
angry and
depleted of will. Crying on the floor. It's not like the one she
loves
has died. It's not like she's alone.
"Grief is a very private thing. You don't believe anyone will
understand how you feel." Meredith dispenses wisdom from the
bar
top like a modern day delphi.
Laura hasn't experienced grief. She lost grandparents she never
knew and watched her parents grieve in ways she couldn't
understand but it all seemed so far away. As if it were on a
stage.
She leans elbows on the bar and tries to imagine wrapping herself
in
pain like a blanket.
She remembers flying, taking a plane across the country and
sleeping with her head against the side of her chair. Flying was
escaping and getting far away fast. She used to want to keep
running then, so maybe she understood how Dan felt.
She used to be scared. She felt inadequate and incapable as a
parent and spouse. She never felt more alone than when she was at
home with them - Jack, the kids, the nuclear family in a meltdown
only no one had spotted the early warning signs. Jack was born to
damage control, easing the fear and the uncertainty by with an
ease
that belied his lack of organisation in other areas of his life.
She
protected them the only way she could think of, by removing
herself
from the picture.
Grief is private so she doesn't intrude. She leaves a jar on the
boat
shed steps. She can cook now. It's an offering. Unappreciated no
doubt, only she isn't quite sure what "looking after"
means. This is
the best she can do and she's never done it before.
She walks away or is turned away. She leaves feeling hollow inside
and she thinks about sleeping with Jack, anything to fill that
hollow.
She thinks a warm body next to hers could be all that she needs.
She cries for things that can never be: Dan, Jack, Trudy.
She dreams about Dan in a small town in Cuba somewhere. He is
holding out a cup for her. Coffee? She looks inside, only it isn't
coffee, it's water and it tastes like the sea. She wakes up and
it's
cold and quiet and only the waves remind her that she's here.
Alone. Lonely.
Eventually, Max takes the jar and doesn't leave. She brings him
tea
on the beach and watches him come in from the waves. He is Jonah
returning from the whale. A second chance.
"It's like an ocean," he says. "It's so deep you
can't imagine its
dimensions."
She doesn't ask but she knows he is talking about loss, his loss.
Maybe hers too. He comes out now like breaking away at the shell
piece by tiny piece. He offers a place for her in his misery and
she
accepts because it hurts too, but she wants to somewhere she fits.
When she was younger she was smart, oh so smart, and good and
clever, and she was courted by money and power and hanger-ons
looking for a ride to wherever she was going.
She wore new shoes to the interview. Smart shoes with a which
were sensibly black and sensibly low but for some reason pressed
against the bridge of her foot so hard they cut off her blood
supply
and left her with a tingling sensation in her toes.
The next day she had tiny bruises on her feet where the leather
had
been.
Jack took them to the seaside and there were these little purple
spots on her feet as she examined them in the sand.
This is going to hurt, they said, and it did, but after a while
she
stopped noticing.
Her feet are in the sand again as she thinks about leaving once
more.
"Do you believe in fate?" She asks Max who sits beside
her and
hates her tea.
"Does it matter if I do? Fate is all about looking back,
saying 'all this
happened for a reason' but everything is meaningful if you want it
to
be."
"But why would you want it to be meaningless?"
"It's all semantics, Laura."
"Maybe," she screws up her face and tosses the left over
tea into
the wind. If her future is in the tea leaves it is blowing away
down
the beach. "But it's not very romantic."
"Did Christmas lose its meaning when you stopped believing in
Santa Claus?"
"I stopped getting excited about losing my teeth when I
stopped
believing in the tooth fairy."
"Ah, but then your parents stopped placing money under the
pillow."
"I want to believe in all this," she says. "I want
to believe there's a
reason for this."
But he doesn't believe in anything and she knows it's like talking
to
the wind because her words come back distorted.
He never sent postcards or letters or tokens of his affections.
Meredith said he was trying to protect her but she wanted more
than
ever to know she hadn't been abandoned.
Max told her that Dan once hitched a ride in a tank and pretended
to
be a Belgian soldier at a checkpoint in Serbia. Everyone he met
thought he was crazy and everyone had a story about him that
probably wasn't true.
She admitted, she probably didn't know him very well. She never
had a chance.
As a young student she never had time for the whirlwind of romance
so she was surprised when a dashing engineering student persisted
in asking her out. He showed her how to make love in dark places.
He showed her that love could be dangerous and exciting. And then
he married her.
She'd never known the end of a love affair before so it took her a
long time to know when it was truly over and when she did she
realised it was many years ago.
"How can I get over it?" She drinks coffee in the
boatshed with Max
and talks about lost loves in exotic places. "It never really
began."
They aren't leaving. They know that now. They tell themselves
they'll leave but it's more than memories that keeps them here.
"You know, when someone dies, no one expects you to get over
it."
He wipes cups and places them on top of the coffee machine. They
stack in neat piles, just the way Dan left them. "But you
do."
"Just like that?"
"I didn't say it was easy, but it happens. My father told me
not a day
goes by when he doesn't grieve my mother. "
"You should ask him about it," she says. "You
should ask him what it
means."
"You're right. I should."
Max puts on Dan's music and it plays into the night.
She has lost and she is lost, but here in the boatshed with the
music
playing she is not crying, and she isn't sad.
And she isn't alone. Max leans on the bench with hands around his
elbows.
"It's always so quiet here," he says.
"And you think that if it gets too quiet you'll hear
it."
"Hear what?"
"That voice in your head telling you you're alone."
He sits down. "You understand, then, why I became a war
correspondent?"
"Yes," she says. "Yes, I think I do, now."
Fin