It’s taken him twenty years and he hasn’t peeled back more than the surface. Everything he gets, he collects and memorizes with the same feverish passion. To know her is to never really know everything. He’s alright with that if it meant he could keep what he knows close to him. These kinds of days that bring him up to the roof are filled with nightmares and pitiless events. The world really wasn’t meant to work this way by any accounts- otherwise he’d be able to sleep and not look at the half-drunk bottle of red wine in his kitchen with increasing guilt.
“–Don’t know where I’d be if I wasn’t here, talking to you, really.”
Somewhere less vulnerable.
“–Yeah. She passed away at home in bed. I found her dead in the morning. Sometimes I wonder if…”
He trails off and shifts backwards to ease the throbbing in his chest. It doesn’t help- it’s a fracture they can’t do anything about. His sore arm droops down to the small of her back and stays there.
“–Ah… Ow… I wonder if she realized she was suffocating, or if I could’ve just checked earlier and gotten her to a hospital.”
Charlie’s dead body is a theme in his dreams. Or she’s dead and she’s walking, running after him and trying to kill him. The nightmares are vivid, varied, and come with him biting the inside of his mouth raw in his sleep.
“I think about what she would do in my place. What she would say to do. She always liked the idea of a better place- it’s why she went all over the coast to find it.”
He lets himself sink further, dizzy. It hurts.
“Think I’m a one-trick pony tonight, sweetheart.”
His wounds hurt him past the flesh. They dig deep into the bones, somewhere, untouched and aching. She knows, because she thinks the same things, collecting scraps of memories to patch the empty holes in her brain. It’s just not the same.
Her arms wrap around Leon, tucking his head against her chest.
Somewhere, in the sea of her mind, her brother makes his way to the coast. She doesn’t remember what he looks like anymore, just that he had salt-and-pepper hair and lines on his face at the age of thirty-two. Sometimes he appears as a person, sometimes a red, wet thing. This time, he’s a man lying on his death bed.
She finds it in herself to be glad Charlie died peacefully. It must be the place she took from Leon, hid carefully inside her.
“You never hear me talk about myself,” Ada says, her breath warm on his hair. “But I’m in the mood, tonight. Ask me anything.”
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