“Someone built a book tower in the library that came down while I was doing some shelving,” he says, shrugging out of his jacket and hanging it on the hook. “Oh, and I’m almost done translating that manuscript Christopher brought in. It’s a really interesting Breton dialect.”
“Have the walls started bleeding yet?” she asks mildly. “Because that’s always what I worry about when you’re translating some manuscript that’s been lost to human eyes for centuries. That the walls are going to start bleeding, and then we’re going to have the risen dead and a bunch of animated trees to contend with.”
“I’d give myself a chainsaw hand for you,” he says, and she laughs, and everything is wonderful; everything is perfect. There are pieces missing, sure, and not just in the living room floor, but whose life doesn’t have a few missing pieces? Missing pieces are what makes it real, rather than just a painting of a life that could never actually exist. Missing pieces are essential.
Roger tries to tell himself that as he follows Erin to the kitchen. There’s nothing in a melancholy day that a cup of coffee and a lemon scone can’t fix.
She walks with a calm assurance he never quite manages to match, stepping with absolute confidence that her feet will find the structurally stable parts of the floor. She’s the reason they can live here at all: the place should technically be considered uninhabitable, but somehow she found the right combination of laws and loopholes to make it home. The rules love her almost as much as he does. Her ash-colored hair is lovely in the light slanting through the hallway window, and this is home, this is harbor, this is everything it needs to be.
This may not be the life he thought he wanted, but somehow it is absolutely the life that he deserves.
It can take Roger a long time to go to sleep, but when he does, he sleeps deeply and absolutely, with the conviction of a child. He sprawls, revealing the true length of his lanky limbs, which he so frequently keeps tucked in close to his body, out of the way. Erin sits in the bed next to him, watching him snore.
She wishes she could love him the way she suspects he loves her. She wishes she could respond to his increasingly frequent hints about marriage, children, a home in Albany or the Berkeley hills. She wishes she could tell him it’s never going to work out the way he wants it to, that she’s here because she has to be, and while aspects of their relationship have been organic—things she chose to do, rather than things she was ordered to do—the relationship as a whole has always been engineered. The same could be said about the both of them. Neither came into this world the way children are supposed to. Neither is likely to leave it that way, either.
Roger wrinkles his nose, makes a grumbling sound, and rolls onto his side. Erin takes this opportunity to slip out of the bed. If he doesn’t leave space for her when he rolls back over, she’ll sleep on the couch. She’s done it before, and he’s always been understanding. That’s just the sort of person he is.
Sometimes she contrasts him with Darren, her brother, who was all hard edges and sharp demands and the only other male she’s ever lived with. He would have followed her out of the bedroom, asking why she was disrupting his sleep by disappearing when he expected her to be there, accusing her of screwing with the natural order of things. They would have fought, his voice low and tight and reasonable, hers arcing ever higher, until it seemed like any glassware in the area would be sacrificed on the altar of their anger. The fight would have ended when one of them admitted fault or when morning came, whichever happened first, and then they would fall asleep like puppies, tangled together in a ball of limbs and silence.
It’s been long enough since he died that he shouldn’t still be haunting her. She thinks sometimes that he’ll haunt her until she follows him into whatever void awaits creatures such as they on the other side of the veil. If the twins are followed by the scar tissue of visions and revisions to their personal timeline, she’s followed by the ghost of a teenage boy who died for no good reason in