by Cole McCade
And now, he didn’t know what to do without her.
He tried to speak, but only managed the grating syllables of her name, gravel that hurt his throat. “Maxi…”
“Fuck. Don’t you get sentimental on me. Don’t.” She scrubbed the heel of her palm against her brow and looked away, fixing her gaze on the window. “I miss her too, Joseph. And I’m scared for her too. But you raised her smart. Smarter’n I think she even knows. Girl’s been a caterpillar in her chrysalis for way too long, but we gotta believe she’s gonna break out and fly like the bright butterfly she is. She’s stronger than any of us gave her credit for.” She let out a brief, hooting laugh as harsh as gravel, as if she’d swallowed up her grief and Joseph’s and everyone else’s, and ground them up in her throat until they were small enough to be palatable. “’sides. Ain’t nothing none of us can do. Only options are to spend our lives pining and worrying…or have a little faith, get on to living, and believe she’s got on to living, too.”
Living.
Like he even knew what the hell living was, anymore.
“Easy for you to say,” he rasped.
“Nah.”
When Maxi looked at him her eyes gleamed wet and bright as polished amber, and he’d been wrong: the fool’s gold was all in her eyes, because only a fool would take her harsh laughter and stoic bravado as anything but a mask over a deep, abiding pain that she bore because she had no other choice.
“Nah,” she said again, and smiled. “Ain’t easy for me to say at all.”
CHAPTER TWO
ONCE MAXI LET HERSELF OUT, nothing remained in the silence but Joseph—Joseph, and those erratic movements from the kitchen, the rustles of a tiny mouse. A fretful, anxious mouse who filled the space with nervous energy, until his presence was as pervasive as a song stuck in the back of Joseph’s head, that one annoying lyric that wouldn’t go away no matter how he tried to distract himself with something else. Anything else.
Don’t come back here, he thought, and stared at his book until the letters turned into crawling ants without sense or meaning. Don’t. Just stay there and leave me alone.
But even without Walford Gallifrey in the room, he was still present. Present in the neat stack of books lined up on the nightstand in alphabetical order; present in the crutches leaning against the head of the bed, the curving steel arm cuffs and handles covered over in hand-stitched pink plaid cushioned sleeves to ease the bruising and cutting Willow had always fussed over so much. Present in the faint, lingering scent of key lime sweetness that followed Wally everywhere. Present in how neat Joseph’s bedroom was, the dust bunnies swept from the corners and the clothing he’d piled on his easy chair now folded crisply and draped over the back.
Wally must have done that while Joseph had been asleep last night, medicated into a deep and painless blackness. He’d never stayed in the room alone with Joseph long enough to do more than duck in with a sandwich or a plate of bubbling blueberry crumble, his head bowed, gaze fixed on the floor, while Joseph looked anywhere but at him and Maxi glared at them as though she’d like nothing more than to wallop them both. It had been that way for two weeks now: this tense waiting, the two of them filling a space that wasn’t big enough for both of them.
On the night when Willow had disappeared, Wally had laid his hand on Joseph’s arm and looked into his eyes, and Joseph had seen…something in him. Something he understood; something he didn’t resent, didn’t hate; something that hurt as much as Joseph hurt, aching for Willow and blaming themselves when no one was at fault but the man who’d taken her.
But when morning had come with no call from the police, the mounting tension had turned into the silence of things unsaid, a silence in which Joseph always seemed to be asking When are you leaving? while Wally seemed to be begging How long can I stay?
You’ve gotta forgive him some time, Maxi had said.
No. No, he didn’t have to do anything. Not when Wally had tried to take his daughter away, all those years ago. It had taken everything in Joseph to win that custody battle, and then Wally had had the nerve to say he’d done it for Willow’s own good. As if stealing her was somehow the right thing to do.
Showing up now that she was gone didn’t fix a damned thing.
Footsteps. Coming down the hall; drawing closer. Joseph dropped his book on the nightstand, closed his eyes, and braced himself to roll over. It hurt, lifting himself up this way, his spine sending curls of pain radiating out through his entire body as if each line of agony was a singular petal in a bristling chrysanthemum. He fell onto his side and pulled the covers up as the bedroom door creaked open; eyes closed, he tried to control his breathing with deep, measured inhalations and exhalations.
Tentative steps murmured against the floorboards, questioning in the quiet groan of weathered, pliant planks, answered in the tantalizing scent of cinnamon and icing. Then a faint rattle of dishware, the scrape of a chair, before Wally sighed.
“You needn’t pretend to be asleep,” he said in that prim way of his, that way that drove Joseph crazy. When he’d first met Wally he’d wondered if the man was faking it, putting on these airs both fantastical and cultured, like some kind of strange peddler out of a British storybook—but if those airs and that lilting, whimsical accent had ever been affectations, they had become so ingrained in Wally over the years that now they were as much a real part of him as the growing crow’s feet seamed around his eyes. Wally was larger than life—and yet now, as he crept around Joseph’s house, he held himself smaller than small, that ringing, confident voice rendered timid and quiet as he added, “I’ll not stay and bother you.”
God damn it. Joseph wanted to kick his own conscience; wanted to bury that twinge of guilt, burrow it right down into his layers of blankets until it lost itself. But it wouldn’t leave him alone, whispering childish, childish—and with a curse under his breath Joseph shifted onto his back, propping his head against the pillow and looking up at Wally.
Only two weeks had passed since Willow’s disappearance, but Walford had aged not days, but decades; sorrow haunted his eyes, and the fanning peacock spray of his exaggeratedly long, dark lashes was less swishing feathers and more spreading, grasping, desperate fingers, trying and failing to catch on to the wet gleam that always haunted those deep black eyes. He’d let his neatly waxed and swept hair go into a loose salt-and-pepper shag that fell across his brow and smoothed the angular, ascetic lines of a narrow face at once gaunt and pretty. Leaning more toward gaunt at the moment, and Joseph wondered, with an unwanted rush of concern, when Wally had last stopped fussing over feeding Joseph and taken the time to feed himself.
Right now Wally sat in the bedside chair with a tray across his slender thighs, creasing his already limp slacks. That cinnamon and sugar smell came from a stack of thick, mounded cinnamon rolls dripping with creamy white icing and a dusting of what smelled like nutmeg; Joseph’s mouth watered even looking at them, but pride made him refuse to reach for them even though he knew they were for him. Wally kept doing things for him, while the whole time Joseph couldn’t stand to look at him because he saw Miriam in the high crests of his cheekbones and Willow in the purse of his soft, full lips; saw everyone who kept leaving him, when the only one he wanted to get out of his hair…wouldn’t go.
He would, sooner or later. Miriam had apparently passed the runaway gene to her daughter, and Wally had always had that family curse, back when his circus had traveled from pillar to post and filled the corners of the country with bright, gaily music, colorful things, colorful people. He’d put down roots in Crow City in recent years, but that didn’t mean anything. He was the last one left. Sooner or later, he’d run too.
And Joseph told himself he didn’t care.
“Is it the silent treatment today, then?” Wally murmured.
Joseph realized he’d been staring. Just staring at Wally, taking him in without seeing him. Seeing everything but him, while the stillness stretched on between them. He swallowed thickly and shook his head.
“No. No, I…” He what? What was wrong with him lately? Any father would grieve a missing daughter, lost in ways he couldn’t understand even though she was still alive, yet so far away she might as well be dead. But this catatonic brokenness…was he really as codependent as Maxi said? He pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth, then sighed. “I can’t seem to get out of the inside of my own head. Circling in limbo, like Willow leaving pushed the pause button on my life. All these thoughts dragging me down, pulling me into the dark.”
He glanced toward the window, that square of sunlight that branded his flesh like a hot iron no matter how he moved to get away. Every time Willow had moved his bed out of the worst of it, the seasons changed, and then came summer again, burn-burn-burning as though it would burn itself out into nothing and take the whole world with it, that fiery star in the sky pushing constantly toward inevitable death.
“I think I prefer the dark,” he said. “I always hated the summer sun.”
“Autumn will be here soon,” Wally replied. “Merely a month away. Perhaps less.” He looked down at the tray in his lap. “I’d like to be here to see the leaves turn.”
“You think you might not be?”
“Do I have any reason to stay, now?”
Joseph looked at him: at the defeated slump of his shoulders, the bow of his head, the way his fingers curled, listless, against the edge of the tray. The quiet wanting in every line and draw of his body—yet Joseph didn’t understand what Wally wanted, or why he wanted it from Joseph of all people.
I can’t give you anything, he thought, and muttered, “No. I guess you don’t.”
Wally fixed him with a searching look—probing, dark, and Joseph wondered what he saw. If he saw a man, or just a collection of body parts married to this bed and to this misery. If he saw an equal, or someone to be pitied and pampered, someone less than human, less than whole. Not really a person; an obligation, a burden, someone without will or life.
Wally reached toward him, then pulled back as if burned, curling his hand against his chest. “You live too long in your regrets, Joseph.”
“Would you rather have me live like you? Running away without caring about the consequences?”
“Are you talking about me, or talking about Willow?” Still that steady, searching gaze, yet in the depths of those dark eyes a flicker of hurt glimmered like a candle in the dark. “Or is it Miriam you still see?”
Don’t. Don’t ask me that.
Because he remembered the first night after Willow had disappeared: Wally by his side when no one else was, with Maxi outside bickering with police officers who didn’t think a few hours and one secondhand tearful phone call were enough to qualify as a missing persons case. Wally’s arms around him, holding him up when the world had fallen out beneath him and nothing remained but a black pit sucking him down. Wally stroking his hair back, Wally’s voice lyrical and soothing, murmuring things Joseph hadn’t been able to make out over the sound of his gasping, broken breaths; he’d known only that those quiet nothings had calmed him, until he’d leaned hard into Walford and focused on nothing but the vibration of his voice in his chest.
For those moments, he’d forgotten that he hated Wally. He’d forgotten every year, every day, every hour, every minute of resentment; every harsh word; every secret and buried guilt.
But when the light of day had come he’d remembered, and he didn’t know what to do with those emotions when they didn’t fit the comforting after-impression of those long, strangely skeletal hands stroking up his back as if Wally could knead the tension and pain from his body to bring relief to his weary soul and broken heart.
When if Wally would just leave, stop hovering, run away like everyone else in his family…
Joseph wouldn’t have to think about it at all—or wonder if, in truth, all he saw in Wally was echoes of the past, and the woman Joseph had loved with every burning piece of his heart.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered, and closed his eyes again.
Wally’s continued presence filled the room: waiting with a particular intensity at once oppressive and as fragile as Wally himself. Joseph didn’t know when he’d started thinking of Walford Gallifrey as fragile instead of as some glib, smiling asshole who made a theater performance out of everyday life…
But then before these weeks he’d never seen Wally cry, either, as he’d had that terrible night: tears gathering in the deep lines carved around his face, glistening on his cheeks, beading on that wide, full pink mouth that hardly ever smiled anymore.
“Well then,” Wally said matter-of-factly, as if some conclusion had been drawn. The noise of his little movements drew closer; there came the clack of the tray’s legs unfolding, before they settled to either side of Joseph’s hips in a cage, pinning the sheets against him with the heat of the cinnamon rolls seeping through, warm against his thighs. “Let’s get some food in you, and then I’ll get out of your hair.”
When Joseph opened his eyes, Wally filled his vision: blocking out the light from the window, making a quiet shadowed autumn evening out of late summer with the way he filtered the light like the bits of colored glass he’d been so fond of bringing for Willow. And for a moment Joseph wondered if that scent came from the cinnamon rolls or from Wally, something that went deeper than baking and cinnamon and sugar and icing, something that made him think of faraway places and the waning amber suns of every autumn in every place Walford Gallifrey had passed through, steeped into the man’s skin.
Then Wally pulled away, and Joseph squinted against the light and turned his head aside.
He braced his hands against the bed to push himself up. Pain, his constant companion, wrapped him in its embrace, a lover that wouldn’t let go—but he ignored it with his jaw clenched and his fingers digging into the mattress. Wally reached for him, but stopped when Joseph held up a hand. No. When he needed help, he’d take help, but he could damned well do this on his own.
“Thank you,” he muttered grudgingly. “For the food.”
Wally wrung his hands, then lowered his eyes with a miserable sound in the back of his throat. “No need to thank me. It’s nothing.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
“Joseph, I…” Wally spread his hands. “What do you want me to do? I can’t leave you here like this. I can’t. But I don’t know if you want me to go, or want me to stay.”
Like this? Like this? Like what? Like he lived every damned day? “What I don’t want is your pity,” he hissed.
Wally deflated. “It has never been pity. Never.”
“Then what?” Joseph demanded. “What has it been? What are you trying to prove by doing this? What the fuck do you get out of this martyr complex bullshit, hovering over me like you can fix me or fix yourself or something if you fuss at me enough?”
For long seconds, there came only the sound of Wally’s sharp inhalation, a breath caught trembling. “What are you asking me, Joseph?”
“I don’t know. I don’t. But I feel like you’re trying to take me over. You tried to take Willow away from me. And now she’s gone, and you’re taking over my house, cleaning it and cooking in my kitchen and just being here, taking over my life—”
“Am I really so terrible?” Wally’s lips trembled. “I am truly sorry, Joseph. I never meant to steal even a moment of your autonomy.”
Joseph gestured bitterly: at himself, at the crutches leaning against the bed, at the bed tray he wasn’t even certain he could lift if he wanted to get up. “Autonomy. Is that what you call this? Autonomy.”
“Your body may take some things away from you, but you still have yourself.”
He didn’t want to hear this. These useless platitudes. He clenched his fingers to either side of his thighs, held them as long as he could, but the pain knotted into an awful thing, as if the tendons in his hands had been replaced with barbed wire—and with a hitching thickness in the back of his throat, he let go, breaths shuddering, eyes closing. “I don’t even have t
hat anymore,” he whispered, and that barbed wire was in his heart, too, piercing with its needling touch. “That’s how I feel, anyway.”
Uncomfortable silence. And then, tentative, quiet, “…if you want me to leave…”
Because that was the answer, wasn’t it? Don’t know what to do with the ruined man, so fucking leave and make it someone else’s responsibility. As long as no one had to look at him, he wasn’t here. Wasn’t a burden that required any kind of understanding or self-awareness or anything but smug, useless self-congratulation for being kind enough to have pity on the poor man with the broken body.
But when he opened his eyes, it wasn’t pity he saw in Wally’s gaze.
It was quiet, hopeful entreaty, pain…and something he didn’t understand. Something needy, something vulnerable and broken, something that pushed Joseph to swallow his pride and croak out:
“Don’t.” Then again, stronger, the first word hardest to get out. “Don’t leave.” But he couldn’t stand flaying himself open this way, couldn’t endure these confusing, conflicting emotions when he still couldn’t look at Wally without seeing the day he’d stood across from the man in court and defended the right to keep his own daughter when multiple sclerosis wasn’t a fucking fair criteria to declare him an unfit parent. He looked away, glaring at the wall. “Stay another night. I could use some company, even if it’s an asshole like you.”
Wally’s weak laughter floated over the room, then trailed off into a sigh. “I shall, then. But I cannot stand to sleep in her room again, Joseph.” He made a soft sound behind his teeth, his voice dropping smaller, shrinking somehow until it wasn’t quite a whisper; a tiny thing standing in the middle of too much empty space. “It’s as though I’m sleeping in her coffin.”
“She’s not dead.”
And yet he could see it: Willow with her eyes blank, that green gone pale and washed-out, maybe a hole right between her eyes rimmed in red or maybe the prints of that man’s hands on her throat once he got sick of her—
