- -
Some things in this world,
Man, they don't make sense.
And some things you don't need
Until they leave you
Then the things that you
miss,
You say:
Baby, baby, baby,
When all your love is gone,
Who will save me
From all I'm up against out in this world?
-- Matchbox 20, 'Bright
Lights'
--
"You never shut up, do
you?" Rory asked playfully, securing her cell phone more closely to her
ear while keeping her free hand steady on the steering wheel of her car.
"I love it when you
rhetorical-ise me."
"You love it any time the
focus is on you in any way," Rory told her mother through the phone, her
voice teasing but her point blunt.
"This is true. But who am I
to deny the fabulous person that I am in any way?"
Rory smiled, signaling and
then turning into the right lane of the highway. "So, was there a point
to this conversation?"
"Is there ever?"
"Ooh, you can hand out the
rhetorical as well as receive it."
"I am so proud of myself.
Keeping up with the likes of you, Miss College Graduate."
"Oh, speaking of, did you
hear about the party Grandma and Grandpa are throwing me-"
"-In honor of the one year
anniversary of your college graduation? God, yes. Your grandmother won't
stop talking to Larry about it."
"Mom, there will come a day
sometime when you stop naming your appliances and call it the answering
machine. And, really, you should pick up once in a while when Grandma
calls."
Lorelai scoffed. "I
remember the days when you agreed with naming everything to make it
unique. And besides, you only say these things because it would keep the
brunt of her away from you."
"That is exactly..." Rory's
voice faltered as she hurriedly pressed on the brakes, slowing the car
considerably to keep from crashing into the slow moving trail of
vehicles before her.
"Did we have one of those
'my cell phone cut out at an inappropriate moment' things happen, or did
you just swallow your tongue mid-sentence?" Lorelai asked from somewhere
far away.
"Oh... Traffic is slowing
down here. Sorry, I just got distracted, what with the whole trying to
keep the pieces of this car intact thing," Rory explained, her attention
still detained as the line moved forward ever so slowly. "I think I'm
going to have to call you back."
"Okay," Lorelai said
easily. "Take care of Betty."
"I'll make sure my car is
fine. Bye, Mom."
Rory disconnected the call
and tossed her cell phone to the empty seat beside her. She could see an
ambulance up ahead, pulled over on the shoulder of the road. As the line
before her budged forward, everyone taking their turn to stare, she saw
what remained of a car collision. The two vehicles were pretty totalled,
one of them flipped over and headed down the slope of decorative grass
separating the two different direction spans of the highway.
Honestly, she tried to pull
her eyes away, but something kept them seeking, searching for what had
sent her brain a-buzz, the fuzzy, dizzying sensation in her head dulling
away her awareness of anything but the crash. She slowed further till
the car stopped completely, much to the annoyance of other drivers
behind her, who sounded their horns in an alarming way. She was staring
down at the ground at a body lying on a small padded mat right outside
of the ambulance van. Someone was being given CPR, their hair bloodied
and clumped in strange places where jagged edges of broken glass had
likely sliced through to the skull.
Rory gasped as her breath
caught with the morbidity of staring likely death in the eye. She wiped
away sudden tears with frenzied fingers, hurrying to right herself in
the driver's seat and forge ahead, away from the accident with its angry
car horns speeding her along. Car engine roaring, she sped away from the
collision that had drawn stares from her like a Christmas tree caught on
fire and lit up with the lick of the flames.
--
The next morning, Rory sat
with Lorelai at the kitchen table of her old house, which had become the
Lorelai&Luke residence, and she had it tattooed on her brain (thanks to
Lorelai and her relentlessness), that it was "for real this time".
Coffee was guzzled like gasoline in a Hummer as Rory sat, too troubled
with her thoughts to reminisce, as always she used to, about living
here. And how amazing it was that she didn't anymore. Her apartment in
New York drew many parallels, but without Lorelai, Crap Shack Jr. just
didn't compare to the original.
Rory nodded along
conversationally to Lorelai's description of how Luke chose orange juice
over coffee when there was no tea in the house. "It's like, he abandons
the Pizza Hut of morning beverages and stumbles on purpose over to the
empty lot of Pizza 73. Orange juice! What have I been married to all
these months, I mean, really?"
"Heh," Rory said, her
coherence somewhere else, her eyes on the extra large coffee mug in her
hands.
"Not liking the analogy?"
Lorelai guessed, tilting her head towards Rory's lost expression. "I can
do a better one..." The space between herself and her audience was not
lost on her. "In fact, with how far away your mind is right now, I could
probably invent a time machine, go back, erase what I said, and insert
the better analogy in before I even started to speak."
She narrowed her eyes at
Rory when still there was no response, nor a lift of the head from the
intense staring at the mug. "I'm going to use a real eraser, you know.
Your dad stole one for me somewhere around ninth grade to prove
something. And he really did, from Mr. Callahan's chalkboard. I know now
that he is the one to go to if you want useless stolen crap that has no
value to you whatsoever. Until, of course, you invent the 'time
machine'. Ooh, I'll put it in air quotes like Dr. Evil... Rory?"
"Hmm?" Rory heard her name,
and chose that moment to perk right up, instantly paying attention.
"What's got you looking so
'deer, totally not in headlight range'?"
"Oh, it's nothing. I
just... passed a pretty bad crash on the highway yesterday." Rory
shrugged her shoulders, trying to will away images of the bloody hair,
the overturned car. "I can't find a reason why I was so interested in
looking, and why, even after I drove on, it's like I can't look away."
"Didn't anyone ever tell
you it's not polite to stare?" Lorelai softened her face and reached out
a hand to touch Rory's, which were still entwined around the coffee mug
that said, I was with Stupid until he left the coffee here. They
shared a secret comfort smile.
Rory exhaled deeply, then
forged ahead. "You stare."
"At mirrors."
"A bit too much, though."
Lorelai found a grin that
slowly spread across her features. "Oh, but it's fun to play vain!"
"Play?" Rory did her best
to imitate the grin. "Don't kid yourself."
Clearing her throat and
taking mock offense, Lorelai reached for the newspaper that was neatly
folded on the table. "Cue silent treatment: now."
Rory giggled silently and
reached for the sections of the paper that Lorelai tossed away. She
never said no to a look at what Stars Hollow tagged as "journalism". It
did feature a weekly "Kirk's Kreations" column, after all. Tossing the
sports section aside, she was confronted with a familiar face, and
gasped loudly, startled. "It's Dean!" she declared to the kitchen
surrounding her, her eyes not leaving his face, the solemnity portrayed
in every black and white line.
"What?" Lorelai asked,
looking up and setting down the page of ads.
Rory's voice cracked as she
repeated, more resolute this time, "It's Dean..." Her voice became a
whine of I don't want this, I want the opposite: "It's
Deeeeaaan..."
As a tear fell from the
storm brewing in Rory's eyes, Lorelai tried to see what her daughter was
talking about, but Rory's grip was steely on the paper, thus it wouldn't
budge. Lorelai pressed her lips together, however, as she could see the
title at the head of the page as Rory's eyes pored over it, as if trying
to memorize it before she could attempt to forget it.
Obituaries.
--
'Head injuries and internal
bleeding' kept replaying itself in her mind, like a horror-story
slide-show that just repeated the image of morbidity like the loud,
consistent beeping of an alarm clock. The late-May spring air sent
strands of her hair to tickle her cheeks lightly, the feeling similar to
a caress. She met the strands with the palm of her hand, holding them
gently to her face. Reveling in the one soft thing that would touch her
all day, knowing the stab in her heart would begin its pierce as soon as
she rose to a panic.
The soft breeze was a short
one, and soon enough all of Rory's strands fell back into casual waves
along the top of her shoulders. There were so many things she had been
realizing ever since viewing the particular section of the newspaper
that hardly ever had reason to be included. She realized now that her
hair was cut similar to the length of her first year at Yale, again. She
heard his voice in her reminiscent mind:
"Did I ever tell you I like
your hair?"
She squinted at the
sunshine that peeked through the lush leaves overhead as she sat at the
same spot where she had found such sorrow the day that Dean got married.
She let herself use that as an excuse to look at nothing but the frayed
edge of her jean skirt. She picked at soft grass near her body, leaning
slightly on the old tree beside her. Turned out, it was nothing like
leaning on a friend. Whatever sweet nothings the leaves gently
whispered, they weren't understood by her, not this day.
There were so many things
she didn't understand that day. Like why this was affecting her so much
when she hadn't spoken to or heard from Dean since their final break-up
in the immaculate driveway of her grandparents' home. When he said out
loud what she would come to realize as fresh days and new relationships
developed in the wake of the hollowness he left within her. That it was
time to say goodbye to their time together. That he didn't belong
in her life anymore, and maybe never did.
And then there was Logan,
who was the bombshell to carry the ache of the memories of Dean out into
space. She'd rarely even thought about that time in her life since it
had been overcome. She was introduced to the world of rich men's hair
products, and glowing short blonde strands to replace the floppy wisps
of brown that she held in her grip as she was together with a man
for the first time. Logan was everything that Dean had meant to say he
would never be.
'So, now you care?'
she thought bitterly to herself. 'Now that he's gone, "survived by" his
parents, his sister, and no one else.' No wife, for Rory had helped take
that away. She'd thought of dropping Dean a postcard, here and there,
and saying those things reserved for people you don't understand how to
communicate with anymore. Lots of "things here are good" and "hope
you're doing well", and not much of anything else. She'd made herself
ignore the depth of the connection when it was alive, and now it had
been severed by a roughly driven dark green jeep. That's what one of the
cars had looked like. Somehow she sensed that Dean's was the overturned
faded red truck that met its doom in the ditch separating two areas of
highway.
Somehow, she'd never dealt
with the reality that there would come a day when there would be nowhere
to deliver those unwritten post cards. No chances to ask, when she was
lonely, "Do you ever think about me?"
Her mind had been blasted
by a violent volcanic eruption, which blew the significance of recent
things away, replacing them with memories of being a teenager, a girl
lost in love with Dean. It was as if the volcano had paved a tunnel
right to the part of her brain that saw things most clearly, like
viewing her troubles through a magnifying glass. She was remembering the
way that it had been, really been. The love that had been truer than
she'd experienced since.
She used to have a boy who
became a man in her presence, and grew more attached to her than to his
wife. She knew a man who had the most tender way of caressing her naked
upper arm while they snuggled together under her sheets that were no
longer infused with virginity, but enlivened with passion that couldn't
be spoken with words.
She was left, now, with the
memory of Dean driving away that last time. Left with the pieces of a
past that was now broken and would be tainted with the emptiness in the
reality that now one of them was dead. The memories were left alone to
her, for her to do what she would with them.
She could ask him no more
questions. She would never look at that face again. Instead, his
deliciously dark hair wouldn't be full of life, but stuck with gooey
dark red blood, like she saw that day on the highway. When she stopped
without knowing the reason for her morbid fascination that would so
quickly come to be explained, and abhorred.
Where she had left him
before, sparkling in her many-sequined blue dress and diamond tiara,
watching him leave, his thoughts full of things that she never had the
chance to correct. Ideas of their lives being too different; their
destinies too far spread.
All that separated them now
was the big piece of land between her spot on the large hill and the
church building, which was in plain view. She didn't attend his wedding;
she couldn't bring herself to attend his funeral, either. Not the
traditional way, at least. She knew that the service was going on inside
of the building every second that she sat there, on the hill that was so
conveniently removed from the immediate situation. She felt like rising
to a cloud and perching there, squinting her eyes not only at the sun,
but in an effort to see what was going on so far down below. Perhaps
amid the masses of cloud, she could forget and surrender her misery, and
float around like in a dream.
She bit her lip at the
thought of that denial, that childish way of wishing for something other
than what was apparent and permanently affixed at the forefront of her
brain. She was the devotee to all of the misery she had caused and the
goodness she had left behind her to forge ahead into a world that turned
into... this.
The church doors opened,
and a small hoard of black, drearily-clothed souls migrated from the
funeral back to their cars, some license plates from Chicago, others
from closer locales. She pressed her lips into a line and felt alone,
just like that day when he'd run to a vehicle of his own with a new
bride he barely knew. The day when she'd sat in this exact spot, hiding
from feelings that came to fester and feel like an ulcer in the pit of
her stomach.
She couldn't hide from her
feelings today. But she could hide her presence from everyone else,
while she searched for a rewind button on her life, and his.
(For God sakes, turn
around...)
--
She thought, as the church
was long since empty, and the sun was beginning to set, of seeing his
grave, one day. She wondered if, as she stood before his gravestone,
she'd resort to the 'Patch Addams' poetry reading or the 'Forrest Gump'
confusion speech. And talk about heaven or hell, as if anyone really
knew what either one was. All she knew of hell was the torment that was
funneling in her mind, making her steps heavy and labored, as if it hurt
to move. How deeply could the agony set in her bones? How many pain
relievers would it take to make her body numb and her mind absent from
this place, this space in time?
She didn't feel like
counting games. She didn't visit his grave, to see the dates of birth
and death, a life sealed, zipped, and filed away. She didn't want to set
foot on the freshly dug grave so that it could give death to the fifteen
year-old in her own body, and snatch away all she had to hold on to of a
past lover who deserved a proper goodbye. She would not say it. She
would not contribute to that file. She would not be an active part of
his death, knowing the way he had wanted her as more a part of his life.
She left the somber grassy
hill, intending never to visit it again.
--
"You're playing 'house'
again," Lorelai noted, as if it was an understood term as Rory entered
the kitchen, looking for an easy dinner.
"Playing house? I'm in
a house," she corrected.
"You know what, I'd have to
card you right now if you entered my liquor store, babe," Lorelai
continued by way of explanation.
"I usually do get carded."
"Now they're going to think
your I.D. is fake."
"Why?" Rory shook her hair
about a bit, and nervously pulled upon the dark sleeves of her most
depressing yet comfortable shirt.
"That jean skirt is so 2000
for you. Maybe even earlier. I find it hard to believe that was still in
your closet."
Rory sighed, dropping into
a chair at the table, her voice defeated. "What do you mean?"
Lorelai looked to different
parts of the ceiling as she struggled to word her point correctly. "It's
like you're regressing. Nineteen again, and stumbling out of your room
to tell me that a boy's here to borrow a book."
"Mom..."
"It's like you're trying to
live in a time when you had him as a surefire part of your life."
"Are you always this
annoyingly insightful?" Rory asked, wanting to rub her eyes but unable
to due to the thin coat of mascara on her lashes.
"Freud jumped into my body
last night. We switched bodies in our dreams."
"I hate Freud..." Rory
muttered, letting her head fall to rest, forehead first, on the kitchen
table.
"All teenagers would say
that."
Rory's voice was garbled a
bit by her position and her words were difficult to understand. "'M not
a teenager anymore."
"A day ago I didn't think
so, either," Lorelai said pointedly. "There's no use living the past,
hun. You're just going to wind up letting your future pass you by. And
you'll be trapped behind glass, like a dying fish in a zoo somewhere."
"Why would it die...?"
"Well, a fish isn't that
interesting an animal. I kind of wanted to end that analogy as soon as I
started it."
Rory's slight chuckle came
out like a sigh, before she dropped her arms onto the table and rested
her head on their softness. She closed her eyes, and saw the empty black
space her first boyfriend had been surrendered to.
"You can scream, if you
want," Lorelai offered, when enough time had passed that they almost
both fell asleep right then and there. "You can have the whole house."
She stood from her chair, her movements uneasy. "But I can't hear it. I
just can't," she said, gathering Paul Anka from where he sat
comprehending his strange little world on the floor and taking him with
her out to the yard.
Plugging her ears at the
far end of the front yard, Lorelai waited for a loud sound, a single,
long release of terror at the biggest loss yet in Rory's life. She
waited for the sound of an eternal flat line to penetrate the stuffed
holes in her ears, a generation long curse word bleeped out on public
television. She waited for a single scream to pierce the air for so long
that it seemed foreign when the silence remained afterward as she found
the bravery to stop plugging her ears. She waited, her limbs tense as
the silence was all that met her, and now engulfed her daughter
completely.
- -
to be continued...
