Who: Gabriel, Ophelia and Earnest Reed. What: When children grow up When: Recently Where: Eloise's home
Whenever Gabriel Reed leaves them, he promises them he will come back.
He promised the first time (the tea cooling in china cup, Eloise’s hand curled whitely against the blanket like an unfurled blossom, ’I don’t understand’, coolly - blank, beautiful - she looks to him then, glassily perfect and extraordinarily fragile, ’I don’t understand’ and he kisses her, the rasp of growing stubble that he has carefully forgotten to shave off - he will need to grow it - and he says ’it’s not for long’ like a comfort, in its own bland, imperfect way with no idea at all when he will be done) and he promised the next, and by the third they had a rhythm, this imperfect symbiosis, an understanding. She will be in pieces, take herself to magnificent heights and devastation on a stage where the table’s third leg has not quite the right length (he watches, squints; by the fourth night he’s very bored of Chekhov and judges the scenery instead) and he will pack the things he owns into a faded leather bag and bear it off for the length of a production’s run. He promises, with a kiss and with a rough hand palmed across smoothed hair that he will come back and he does.
He comes back with the parts worn away, with rust where they won’t think to look. He comes back tanned and he comes back weary, and Uncle Sam stamps the maker’s mark where Eloise’s hands are too quick to find, a bullet graze beneath his arm, wrapped-strapped ribs one year (an accident, explained with a rueful smile), the puckered kiss of where a shot has hit the mark. As they reacquaint themselves, the lipstick too heavy for anything but the stage still in the creases of her mouth, she relearns him with this newly acquired landscape, the old selves forgotten and as the years pass - as the fractures spider across the glaze of their marriage - Gabe looks forward to the going if only to return to the winestain of a kiss, the hungry mouths and hands, the clatter of unnecessary and new hall chair knocked to one side.
He stands in the street outside the house (his house; they bought it together, delirious, ’you’re mad’, she accused, loving, she laughed - shrieking in empty rooms), and his hands are quiet; he balances, cane and coat and bright paper packages wrapped with glossy paper that is neither Christmas nor birthdays but Daddy-came-home-again-alive. He stands quietly - Gabriel is a quiet man, away from work and the carefully roughened-edge of banter, of laughter over spinning knife-blades, over death - and he admires it. He has not found one he likes quite so much; it’s been painted. Clean, perfect white - occasionally, Gabe wonders if she’ll try to paint him out next.
He promised the first time she held them (it was Phee, Phee in rumpled white cotton blanket and rumpled, red little face and he kissed her first and he kissed Eloise next and it was the same well done of virtuoso performances - the same flowers. Exhaustedly and fond, she is upturned face and sweaty tendrils of hair and he admires starfish hands with beads of pearly nails ’Now you’ll stop going on those ridiculous trips’, with certainty. Gabe smoothes a hand over tiny, delicate head and marvels, ’But I always come back’, he says, smiling into hours-old milk-dark eyes) and he promised the first time he left them. Ernie was six months when he left; when he came back he was unsteady and wobbly but walking. Phee screamed. She was overdramatic like her mother; he had a beard like an Arab. It took two hours to persuade her back onto his knee, chin scraped raw and shaved-fresh pale.
He promised the last time he’d left them, a month, two at most. But Uncle Sam has his own sense of time and there are weeks lost wrapped in hospital crisp sheets, in the dulled-knowledge of his own agony. They stood by the door - just two - and they looked at him with quiet misery, with the peculiar openness of children. ’Don’t go’, Ernie, blunt and happily unaware of the need to keep one’s feelings locked up tight. Gabe reached, wrapped an arm around pulled boy to hip in unfettered feeling. ’But he comes back’, Phee, unfaltering, father’s daughter, believing.
The doorbell is gentle. It is designed to be undisturbing. He has been warned but the woman in black and white - like a charicature, like the quiet spectres of people that sweep through his in-laws’ home - answers with the sort of dignity seen in expensive stores. Who is he? Gabriel spreads his hands, the cane wavers. He smiles the kind of smile that works across continents. Just the children’s father. They do still have one of those? He’s not sure. She doesn’t smile. She thins her lips - actually thins them, down to nothing, pinched white - he looks closer, interested and she disappears. She does not invite him in.
Gabriel steps over his own threshold like an intruder and the scent and cool of it rushes towards him, sense memory like a traitor sliding down the back of his neck, across the sprawl of his shoulders and instantly untensing them. There is a mark on the inside of the wall; he made that. The first time he came home, after three weeks away. She has not painted over it. She hasn’t painted over all of it. Eloise is in retreat; the world is cool and white and polished, contained comes to mind. She always did wish she could - the kids are barely in school. Gabriel’s mouth tightens, but he says nothing. The door slams, somewhere, and he shifts, alert. They are long standing habits, the ones he’s acquired and they carry over.
It’s not gunfire. It’s not alarm. It’s the woman in black and white, towing by both hands his children and Gabe wishes then (more than the times he wakes sweating through his sheets, more than the times the painkillers are reached for as mindlessly as someone who did not rely on wits, more than the times he has regretted something in this house) he is able to bend, to reach out. Instead he is cane and brace and a passel of presents that do not make up for broken promises. Phee is sulky pout and dark cloud of hair that was - at one point - combed. Her gaze is mutinous. Ernie won’t look at him. He turns, faces inwards, his hand is wrapped around both of his nurse’s - nanny? Gabe can never remember what next is brought over from England, packaged up like a tradition in his house, his country, his home.
“Ernie,” Gabe’s voice is soft, coaxing - he reaches out a hand for his girl, his Phee (his girl shrieking laughter, both hands in his hair, steering, Eloise with faint smile hidden behind her hand, ’you’ll spoil her’) but she does not come. She stands far enough away and out of reach that Gabe is left, empty armed and one child will not look at him at all. The nanny looks at him; disapproval is writ large on her face, Gabe stares at her.
“Kid, you’re going to have to detach sometime,” there’s a roll of laughter on into it, like he has all the patience, all the time. His knee is killing him. Gabe stands like he is a wall, like he is immoveable. Like he is stone and sea and unrevokable, and with small sob and hiccuping noise, Ernie is small propellant launched against his legs - Gabe bites the inside of his cheek; pain explodes against his synapses, a small noise escapes his throat, but he has a hand on his son’s head, and Ernie is damp against his jeans and Gabe laughs because his eyes sting and his cheeks are wet and because he can’t lean down to reach him.
But Phee, his own Phee. She stands and she looks at him and the abandoned bag of presents for not-birthday, not-Christmas, and there is something of her mother’s own scorn learned at the corner of her mouth.
“You promised,” she says, calm and quiet. His heart squeezes too tight. She’s mother-in-miniature, you promised and she could be Eloise the first time, the second time, deliberately cool. (’Oh, you’re back, are you?’ She tilts her head away, holds out her necklace to be done up - he is pressed into service, calloused hands skim her neck - ’I’ve a performance. Don’t wait up’) As if he could be pained, remorseful enough to buy her back.
“I did.” Gabe bows his head, penitent, acknowledging. Phee looks at him, cold-eyed. “I don’t want ice-cream and I don’t want a walk.” She’s been primed, prepped, what trips with Daddy mean. Outside, beyond the house, where it is harder to win them back with routine, with sleepy stories and kisses to say goodnight. Phee knows.
And Gabe knows - when Ernie is hand in hand, and bright chatter, when his small boy has forgot what it is to be without and when Phee is absent back at the house - what it is when sentinels learn what it is to break faiths.