We Could Get By

xx.

Nellie had been in the bath long enough that her fingers and toes were shriveling into little wrinkled prunes. She did not notice. Even after the water had long since turned cold, she made no move to ease out and dry herself off. The bathroom still smelled of the lavender oil she was fond of pouring into the water. Nellie could hear noise at the far end of the house. Toby was chasing Socks around, most likely. He had taken up a new job, helping the gruff fishermen down at the docks unload their boats and count the fish and whatever else they had hauled up. He had told her, rushed and excited over supper, that perhaps he might sell bait in one of the little shacks down there.

She waited expectantly to hear them knock something over, but they didn't. There was another noise, a faint click and then some creaks like the asthmatic, nonsensical whispers of some very old man who had smoked a pipe nearly his entire life. That was Sweeney. The man could float through the house like a ghost when he wanted to, slip unnoticed through the cracks in the doorways, but the noises he did make were subdued somehow as if she were hearing them muffled through a pillow or from rooms and rooms away.

Nellie could hear, through the thick wood of the closed bathroom door, the homey noises of the wardrobe opening, the bed frame squeaking beneath his slight weight, the wardrobe closing again. When she took a bath, she usually left the door open so she could still look into the bedroom and talk to Sweeney, but tonight she felt better with it closed.

Nellie stared blankly at the tops of her knees that rose pale and knobby from the water like two snow-capped mountain peaks. The sea was still outside. She could not hear the waves crashing onto the hard-packed sand the way she usually did, but there was another sound, far away and muffled in some awful corner of her mind; Mrs. Lovett had never heard anyone die before, least of all choking and gurgling on their own sticky blood. It chilled her, sent gooseflesh bubbling up all across her body. Or maybe that was just the cold bath water.

It had been haunting her all day, hanging low and bent like the point where you could no longer recall the words to a particular song, but the last bit that you could remember was stuck on a seemingly endless loop. She did not know if she could look at Sweeney when he inevitably came into the bathroom to retrieve her without seeing the shock etched permanently into the face of the boy Sweeney had dispatched in her sunny parlor earlier that day.

Neither Sweeney nor Mrs. Lovett had expected the boy to come back like he had said he would. Mr. Todd had looked less than pleased to see him when he turned up the next day, but there he was, bright and shiny as a new penny gleaming on the side of the road. He told the couple that his name was Phillip and that he had been a sailor- had been, he emphasized, letting them know in no uncertain terms that the sea held no future for him. He ate his pies and spilled his life story in big run on chunks of words, though neither Nellie nor Sweeney had asked him any questions. He came back the next day, and the day after that, until his daily visits had totaled almost a week.

He had seemed like such a nice boy, if not a bit nervous and perhaps a little too excitable. Not so bad as I'd thought, Nellie had said to her husband. Phillip had seemed like a very nice boy, indeed, until he had tried to kiss Nellie when she came by his table to clear his plate away. He'd had two pies by then, and had asked for a third as per usual. When he pressed his lips to hers, his whole body quaking like a leaf in a strong wind, she had been too shocked to slap him. Her face stung like a freshly cleaned wound. Nellie had been too shocked to do much of anything besides yell for Sweeney in sheer panic.

It had been all a blur after that, and yet she remembered some things as clear as though someone had managed to take photographs. Sweeney with the razor gripped tightly in his hand, recently polished blade in its grim glory. Philip, all shame and terror and tall, lanky, barely-adult awkwardness. Blood spattering, thick and dark, dark red and metallic-smelling, onto the floor. Philip lying, open eyes staring blindly at the ceiling, in a square patch of sun on the floor. The look on Sweeney's sharp face had been the worst part- feral and detached and wild in a way that she knew, deep down in the very bottom of her heart, that no person should ever be.

Sweeney had asked if she was alright, if Phillip had hurt her, to which she was sure she had shaken her head. Possibly, she had just stood there and was remembering it all wrong.

Nellie had never seen someone die before. She had heard it countless times, the sounds that came from upstairs when Sweeney was hard at work, but there had always been things between them then. She forgot, so easily that in retrospect it almost frightened her, what kind of man Sweeney was, what kind of things he did on a daily basis. There was blood on his hands, under his fingernails, permanently. Perhaps Nellie saw it so often that she had become blind to it and the blood that stained her own hands.

She rubbed her hand absently over the swell of her stomach, rippling the bath water and distorting her body beneath it. She felt as though something hot and sharp had poked through the space between her ribs. It lacked the urgent sting of anything that might be threatening, so she shrugged it off.

The bathroom door opened silently. If Nellie had not caught it moving out of the corner of her eye, she probably never would have noticed. Sweeney stood in the doorway. She did not look at him, but her heart leaped just knowing he was there and concerned with her. His coarseness had fallen away a bit since moving to that little seaside town, the rough edges worn the tiniest bit smoother. His eyes were not quite so mean and black as they had been when he came back from Australia, the way birds of prey looked. It did not change the facts, did not change the person that he had been beaten into becoming. She was not afraid of him, really, not even after the day's gruesome events. She was not afraid of him, and she supposed that fact alone should have frightened her at least a little. But it did not.

Sometimes, when she got those little glimpses of the man her husband really was, it shocked her, jolted her without warning into some strange state between sleeping and being awake where she would think to herself, Of course that's how he is! It was not as if Sweeney pretended for Nellie's sake to be something that he was not; she just liked to forget, to gloss over the grit of the facts with a pleasant coat of paint that was nice to look at.

Benjamin Barker had stopped by Nellie's parlor one night, after she assumed Lucy had gone to bed, and sat only when Nellie had insisted that it was more than alright with her. His youthful face had creased with some worry that he shouldered like a big heavy canvas bag. He would not speak of it. Even without knowing anything about her neighbor, she knew that much She had poured him a glass of gin, which Benjamin refused politely- Sweeney had turned out to be a gin man, though, drinking during those early days like it might bring back the light that gone out behind his eyes. They did not speak much that night. If they did, Nellie could not say what had passed between them. She could say, however, how his hands looked in the flicker of the lamp, strong and hardworking. Even now, so many years later, she could still see the comfortable dim of the parlor, the kindness in Benjamin's soft brown eyes, the little quirk of a smile he had offered her. He was new and wonderful, something exciting waiting to happen. The memory came to her at odd times, peeking from a never-quite-shut window in her mind.

She slid just a bit further into the water, the tips of her curls floating up off her shoulders and fanning out when they dipped in. There was a softness to the way he looked at her, and she could feel his eyes following the blue webbing map that her veins made beneath her too-pale skin. Her gaze left her knees and the water and her stomach. Nellie looked at him, at his tall, sad figure in the narrow threshold of their bathroom; and every ounce of love filled her to overflowing, spilling out of her and into the tub and onto the floor. It cracked her right in half, split her open like an egg. She believed with a firm certainty in love at first sight. She had loved Benjamin the instant he came to introduce himself all those years ago, and she fell in love with him all over again every time she stole a glimpse of him. Nellie felt the exact same way about Sweeney, changed and odd and disjointed as he was; every time she looked at him, she felt that very same pocket of warmth inside her, expanding until it was so big there was nothing else left.

It made her want to cry.

Before she could regain control of herself, Mrs. Lovett's face crumpled like one of the napkins that she gave her customers with their pies. Sweeney's lips parted in a quiet sigh.

"Oh, Jesus, Nell," he whispered. She must have looked fairly bad to garner the begrudging sympathy he offered. Nellie could not say anything one way or the other before Sweeney climbed - clothes and shoes and all - into the tub and nestled himself carefully against the new bulk of her body. The water was long past cold, and it ran in sheets over the high sides of the bath tub onto the floor where it collected in a big puddle.