We Could Get By

xiii.

Nellie inspected the tear in one of Sweeney's shirts. It was unlike him to do such sloppy work, though the occasional scuffle with a customer seemed unavoidable at that point. This particular gentleman had opened his eyes just a fraction of a second too soon and caught sight of the barber's murderous figure.looming over him in the mirror. Self-preservation took hold of the man and, though he fought tooth and nail, Sweeney had overpowered him in the end.

She had half a mind to show her husband how to sew, if just for the fact that something of his always seemed to need mending- shirts, pants, holes in the big toes of his socks. It was not quite as bad as it appeared most of the the time, though between mending and scrubbing bloodstains, Nellie sometimes felt as if she were drowning in clothes.

It was then, needle poised mid-stitch, that Nellie decided she would knit her husband a sweater. She watched him, hunched like a gargoyle over the business ledger that he'd spread out on the coffee table. A fisherman's sweater, big and chunky and cable-knit would suit him just fine, as far as she was concerned. It was not yet cold and autumn had only just started rolling in, but by the time the sweater was finished, it would be plenty chilly.

"Mister T?" He said nothing in response. "Love, ya been lookin' at it for an hour now. Ya haven't even moved. Don'tcha think it's time to put that away?" It was not that they were running low on money; quite the opposite, in fact. Nellie kept the books herself, in careful curlique numbers. Something else had been troubling him and whatever breakdown he was teetering on the edge of, had been building up momentum for the past month or two.

Sweeney remained stoic, hands gripping two frantic fistfuls of hair as if someone had taken a photograph of him just before some catastrophic meltdown, frozen forever in some silent distress. Nellie removed her pale pink dressing gown and draped it over his shoulders, settling herself carefully beside him. She reached out to close the book, and it was then that he turned his attention to her. There was a gentle sadness in him, painted in watery brush strokes across his face. His eyes were big and dark and glassy, looking for all the world like some sweet cow. Nellie had caught him in some fragile twilight, one foot on either side of the thin border between Sweeney and Benjamin. She smoothed a thick lock of hair from his forehead. He only blinked at her with his forlorn, watery gaze.

"C'mon, darling, what is it? Ya ain't been right in a long time." And so he hadn't, tossing restlessly at night, picking at his meals, going unusually long periods of time without uttering a single word. Since the day Nellie had discovered that picture of Lucy, he had not quite recovered from whatever had transpired in that shadowy room above her. Nellie had hoped their little holiday would do him some good- fresh air, change of scenery, plenty of time to at last tell her what had been on his mind. While he had seemed to lighten up a bit, it did not last. It never did.

Sweeney sighed and allowed Nellie to extract his hands from his hair. They fell listlessly to rest in his lap. "Ghosts, Nellie. That's what's wrong." He was drifting from her again, but she refused to let him go. She rose from her spot on the couch, bent to kiss his forehead, and went to the kitchen to put on water for tea.

Often, she pushed from her mind the images of the unfathomable horrors he had suffered all those years in prison. He had the scars to show for it, raised and jagged and pink across his skin, but thinking about it always made her cry. So she didn't think about it. Instead, she kissed him and poured affection over him like antiseptic. She did not think about it until the rare moments when she did and then, like now, it hit her with the force of a clenched fist to the face and made her weep quietly into her tea. The gloomy culmination of a life's worth of misfortune sat slumped on the couch, and the very sight of the man she loved more than the entire world itself made her cry. The tea kettle whistled and jostled her violently into the kitchen, into the present. She wiped the tears from her face.

Nellie returned to Sweeney's side, coaxing the mug of steaming tea into his hands. He looked lost, small and terrified and utterly alone, and it broke her heart. "Now then, love, why don'tcha tell me what's been goin' on." Mrs. Lovett did not expect him to say a single thing. He took a cautious sip of the tea, the scalding hot liquid doing nothing to change the vacant, troubled expression that he held.

"I saw her." Nellie nearly lost her grip on her cup. There was only ever one her, the very presence of her settling heavily over the house like a blanket that covered up all the windows and trapped them in shadow. Though Mrs. Lovett had always liked to dream of the impossible, it was never this sort of impossible. It was happening-upon-a-large-sum-of-money impossible, not a-most-certainly-deceased-woman-is-somehow-alive impossible.

She's dead. She's dead. I made sure of it myself. Nellie could not keep her heart from pounding wildly in her ears, could not keep the room from tilting all to one side and blurring. She tried desperately to recall the bakehouse that night, the hell of the oven flickering across Lucy's face. Nellie grasped frantically at the scraps of a memory that yes, she had gotten rid of the horrible woman herself. Her hands shook involuntarily, tea sloshing about and threatening to burn her hands. "Whaddaya mean, ya saw her?" she croaked.

"A man came up to the shop. Had his wife with 'im. It was like looking at her in a memory, and-" Sweeney trailed off, unaware that Nellie's heart rate was slowly returning to normal, that her white-knuckled grip on her cup's delicate handle loosed.

"And-?" She prodded gently. Nellie did not want to lose him to the thing that was devouring him, though she could not run the risk of pushing too far and folding him in on himself again. She did not move to drink her tea. The steam rose and fanned her face.

"And I've been seeing her everywhere since." The clock kept the time, every tick seeming to echo in the vast expanse of emptiness that their silence brought with it. Sweeney just looked so deflated, so strange and hastily pieced together. Her dressing gown still hung limp from his frame. "And I don't... I don't think I want to."

Nellie's head snapped up to regard him carefully, to be sure that she was not asleep, that she was not thrust unaware into some strange universe where nothing made the sense that it ought to have made. The words were sharp and stunted and odd, the voice that passed his lips sounding too small to really belong to him. "Ya what?"

"I've had enough of ghosts, Nellie." Sweeney set his tea down on the table, staring deep into the bottom of the cup as if something might be hidden there. The finality of it all weighed heavy on her hopeful heart. She did not try to touch him, though she wanted to. More than anything else, she wanted to touch him, to cradle him in her arms and sob into his hair. Nellie wanted him to cry, too, loud and stormy and human. She stayed put, twisting her wedding band to keep from pulling him against her and wrapping him in love like a gauze bandage.

"Oh, darling, so 'ave I."