Re: Living Room: Hannah & David
She didn't point out that Amy was dead. She, Hannah, was alive, and she was Amy too, but she didn't want to pretend that a girl hadn't died, scared and alone, in a big, big house. A fairy tale castle, and she'd dangled from a banister while a man laughed high, high above, and that was where he'd always been. Marcus. And she didn't remember what came after death, if anything came. She knew her memories had been taken from after, whatever they'd managed to capture in some strange, unrepeated fluke, it had come after. Because she remembered. She remembered running, and she remembered crying, and she remembered screaming. She remembered the fear that climbed from her belly upward as she tried to grip the railing futilely. She remembered the fall. But she was here, and that other girl wasn't, and she didn't want to forget. But she smiled at David, warm and unfocused, a glow cast in twinkling lights from a nearby tree. "I would've made her find Si," she said of Molly taking her in, and she didn't say it would've been bad, but it would've been. Si was at his worst then, and they'd spent so much money trying to get him clean. "He's doing really good," she added of her twin brother.
And then the toast, and she knew David drank too much. That he had before Molly died, and she just assumed he did now, too. Now, when he thought he was some shade. But he was here and warm and real, and she watched his adam's apple bob as he swallowed. Alive, and then she swallowed down her own drink, the clink of the glass echoing in her head.
She put the glass aside, and then she looped her arm with his companionably, rocking against his side a little as she began a slow, slow walk to a nearby couch, one unoccupied, intending to sit a little. They didn't have to be at Jamie and Mars' for a little bit yet, and there was time to bask in the warm shadow of quiet chatter and Christmas good-feeling.
There, there, the couch, and she sat and patted the space beside herself. "Tell me what you've been doing. It's been a long, long time," she said, and it felt like forever and ever ago. She tried to remember, as she tucked a leg beneath herself and turned her body toward his, when she'd last seen him. At the carnival? Maybe then, and she worried her lip as she thought in an old habit that Mom had tried to rid her of so many years ago. "Do you ever wonder how much of the past you remember right, and how much you create because you need it to have been a certain way?" she asked.