say hello wave goodbye

58: by now I'm playing time against my troubles (1993)

Back with the second and final chapter of this little interlude. This one picks up right where the last one left off.

December 1993

It'd be a lie to say he didn't still have feelings for her. Christ, the last time that he didn't have feelings for her was back when he also didn't have a driver's license. But he knows that this isn't the time, and not just because when he approached the hospital director, chomping away furiously on three pieces of spearmint gum and about to cut a very large check, the man had said 'if this is your way of trying to win back your ex, this isn't the time.'

He wanted to explain to the good doctor that there was no winning her back, that their relationship was far too fractured to ever allow for that kind of healing, but that would involve confessing to things that he's spent years repressing and there's no way he's going to let all that hard work go to waste.

Rebecca is lying on the other side of Stevie and watching him with those unblinking eyes. Maybe it's just because the booze is destroying his brain along with his liver, but he swears to God that her expression changes when he's in her line of sight.

You know you've fucked up your life spectacularly when even a doll is judging you.

He's never bothered to probe into where Rebecca came from or how Stevie got so attached, but he remembers seeing her in Stevie's dressing room next to a giant stuffed unicorn way back when he did that one Fleetwood Mac show a few years ago. At the time, he thought nothing of it. But a few weeks ago when he came to Phoenix and saw her and Stevie again- when he frowned at Chris to ask 'what the hell?', and all he said was 'don't fuck with the doll, man, just...don't mess with her'- by then, those blue eyes and dark brown curls started to look awfully accusatory.

You're imagining this cute little sleeping doll and she wasn't- she had a goddamn hole in her skull. She was gonna suffocate to death and you would never have even seen her because you'd be unconscious, if you weren't already dead yourself-

At least we would've died together!

He doesn't understand how they went from her raging at him for not letting her die to him wishing her dead in front of their friends, but he's pretty sure it was his fault from the beginning.

Fuck. He gets up as quickly as he can without disturbing her, grabbing his jacket and swinging it over his shoulder before he hurries down the hall. Behind him he can hear one of the nurses calling his name but he doesn't respond, doesn't stop for anything until he's yanking open the driver's side door of his car. Good thing he hadn't drunk his whole stash earlier.

She didn't really intend to die, did she? Surely if that had been her intention all along, she would've chosen a simpler, less drawn out method. She had threatened to stab herself back in Phoenix, and he isn't really sure how serious she had been about following through, but it meant that she had at least considered a means to carry it out. To make him watch her bleed out because that's what you deserve, as she had put it.

Is that what he deserved? Maybe. All he knows for sure is that she didn't deserve it- any of it. He thought that by putting some distance between them, it would be easier to stop thinking about everything that had happened over the preceding 20 years. And for him, it had been. He'd gotten better at compartmentalizing- some might say avoiding- all the unpleasantness that used to follow him around like an elongated late afternoon shadow. But now he wonders if he somehow just transferred all the pain onto her.

He's given up on thinking that he could've ever made their relationship work, or that he could've prevented what happened to their baby. He made one final attempt to reach out to her, clumsy as it was, when he saw her struggling after her last stay in rehab. In hindsight, he gets why she turned him away. She didn't think that she needed help, and even if she did, she didn't want it from someone who had so much anger and contempt toward her bubbling up just under the surface. But the sharp sting of that rejection, combined with the fear he felt at watching her self-destruct from the front row, turned out to be too much for him and he became determined to leave it all behind. It might have been the right thing to do for himself, but maybe it was the wrong thing to do for her.