Damage Undone

Chapter 10. Like Goodbye





“Well,” Romano said, looking wryly at Susan. “Alone at last.”

She lifted her hands in a kind of helpless question.

“I told her,” he remarked.

“Told her what?”

“Tumor’s recurred, hasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what you were doing at his house.”

Susan seemed wary, as if she thought that was a veiled jab. She knew him too well. “Yes.”

“Was he ever going to say anything to Lizzie?”

“I kept telling him to.”

“You’re a regular little Girl Scout, eh?”

“What’s that mean?” she said, leaning against the bridge, looking out.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, giving up. Not much more fun for the pot than it was for the kettle.

“So,” she said, looking at him. “What now?”

“I suppose they live happily ever after. Greene dies happy and comforted; Elizabeth raises their daughter alone.”

“I’m glad they’re working things out.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Want to split a taxi?”

“You going north?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

They both seemed too tired for conversation. Romano found himself thinking back to that moment on the bridge, when all four of them had faced each other in a circle. Moment of truth and all that crap. And Elizabeth had walked away with Mark.

Well, good. It would make it that much easier to leave County.

*

“What is it?” Mark said when they were at the end of the bridge, hesitating before going back to the real world.

Elizabeth stood still and her eyes were dry from sheer willpower. “Robert told me something,” she said steadily.

His eyes dilated in panic, and she said, “You’ve had a recurrence, haven’t you?”

He sagged. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to come back just because of this.”

Well, she rather admired him for that. Still, “I wish you had.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No – I’m sorry.” She repeated herself. “I’m sorry, Mark. I know we’ve both made our mistakes, but I think mine – or my biggest, anyway – was not being willing to work hard enough. When things got too difficult, I ran away.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

“Isn’t it?”

“If I had just kept Rachel under control, none of this would have happened.”

“Well, let’s not do this,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“No. Nothing does.”

“There’s no chance, then?” she said, feeling the last bit of hope sink out of her.

“Not this time.”

His voice was eerily calm. She felt herself quiver with threatening tears and then tamped it down furiously. But Mark, noticing this effort, bent to kiss her forehead, and she closed her eyes in another onslaught of emotion.

She loved him. He was her husband; he was the man who had slept by her side for two years, who had sympathized with her loneliness in America when no one else quite understood. His death, even if it had come during their estrangement, would leave a void.

But where did that put Susan? another side of her wondered. Where did that put all those fights they’d had before, all the times Elizabeth had thought she couldn’t stand another day without her freedom…? She and Mark could be friends now. It didn’t seem like there had ever been more, like she had ever promised her body and heart and life to this man. The idea was incongruous at best.

She opened her eyes. “You’ve been waiting for me, haven’t you?”

“Of course.”

So easy for him, she thought bitterly. He would make one choice and then another, as if life were a linear path, a progression. And he would barrel straight along that path, unstoppable, unaware of the chaos pressing in on all sides.

He looked over at her, his eyes glossy and wide in the dark. “Does this mean you’ll come home?”

The word sounded odd. This wasn’t her home, she thought. America, England – they had both been unsatisfying, she had never found a place that was wholly hers.

She decided to let him tell her where her home was.

“Mark,” Elizabeth said directly, “you’re dying.”

He froze, like she had slapped him. The reality of that sentence might have been too much, but she didn’t know how to soften the truth. She switched tactics. “I want you to think about how you want to live the time you have left. It’s your decision.”

“What?” he said breathlessly.

“You decide,” she said. “Do you want me back?”

“I – of course –”

She cut him off. “No, don’t act like it’s obvious. I think you have a choice – and I think you’ll know what I mean if you think about it.”

He looked enlightened, as if his situation had never quite been presented to him this way, even in his own private thoughts. “You mean Susan,” he deduced after a few seconds.

“Of course,” she said with a glimmer of impatience. “Mark, I –” she couldn’t even say the word anymore, without hesitating–“I love you…”

He touched the back of her hand with quiet affection. (—Very quiet, some unrepentant, mocking part of her added.) “I love you, too.”

“…I just can’t make every decision. This one has to be yours.”

“All right.” He turned away from the water, looking weary. “But I don’t know how.”

“Too bloody bad.”

He smiled at that, and she, knowing already what he’d do, smiled back.

*

Sitting in the back of the cab, Susan fumbled for the thin wallet somewhere inside her purse. The fare was ridiculous, she thought. Romano, startlingly, waved her aside. “I’ll get it,” he said.

She had learned to distrust that sort of chivalry, and its implications. Men like him wanted nothing better than to remind her of her delicacy; a kind of backlash, an assertion of superiority. “No—”

“If that’s your apartment, I’m thinking cab fare is beyond your budget,” he said. Then, more expressively, with a glance at the ramshackle place, “Way beyond.”

“Always courteous,” she smiled wryly, relaxing at his customary rudeness.

He shook his head. “Well, don’t expect any more ostentatious shows of generosity after tonight.”

“You’re not a long-term kind of guy?” she teased.

That elicited a hint of a real smile, which surprised her to no end. “Not at all. But we have a lot in common tonight.”

*

Mark walked Elizabeth to her hotel and paused outside the door of the lobby. She had recovered from before; her face was smoothed out for public consumption.

“You can come up and see Ella,” she said. “She misses you, I think.”

He smiled. “I miss her too.”

“I don’t want to distance you from her,” Elizabeth said. “Not now. I would have done things differently—”

She stopped, looking chagrined. Mark didn’t know what she was thinking and realized belatedly that this had often been the case. There had been so many moments when she was cold or unhappy and the best he had been able to do was wait it out, smooth things over.

Upstairs, in the neat, dreary little hotel room, they sent a drowsy Chris away with cab money and Elizabeth went to change into pajamas. Mark stroked Ella’s forehead as she lay in the crib.

“I love you,” he whispered to the blinking child.

She didn’t seem to understand. He stifled a stab of panic; it wasn’t the Ecstasy, it was just that all children developed at their own rate. Comparisons were destructive, he’d seen enough panicky parents to know that.

Elizabeth emerged from the bathroom and Mark saw that she’d been crying again.

Before he left she hugged him gently in a spontaneous gesture that was unusual even during their best times, and he noticed the gentleness, so unlike Elizabeth. It felt like a good-bye.





Chapter 11: Kodak Moments