Re: Living Room: Hannah & David
Hannah wouldn't be surprised to know Molly didn't talk much about the house. Hannah always did. She talked about it. Talked and talked and talked, and it always made people uncomfortable, but it was hard for Hannah... for Amy to pretend it never happened, and maybe it was easier for people who hadn't walked out with their haunting. She'd carried the bent-neck lady throughout her life, hoisting her and bearing her weight, and that shade was there all the time. Always, always, surprising her and expected and both things at once, and she still saw her now, so it was harder for Hannah and Si to forget. How could you forget something that was there still?
"I hope so," she said of someone finding love and not drowning and rotting and being forgotten, and she nodded a little bit about comforting thoughts of life being a string that went from point to point and without tangles or kinks overlapping between. "Life layers itself," she said. "Right now, we're sitting here, but if you just close your eyes and you reach out, you can feel the layers maybe. Right now, you might be sitting somewhere with Molly for Christmas, just there, just a staircase down, and maybe a staircase up you're a priest and tending flock. It's not about alternates. It's about our lives and how the moments all fold over each other. Like stacked postcards, instead of postcards all set out in a row."
She looked at him with cocked head and wide, wide blue eyes that were the color of inky bellflowers. "Maybe it's better to be dead than to have survived? Maybe it feels like a betrayal to live when she didn't? Maybe you really, really think it. Trauma is wide, David. I know that. I know what it's like to wake up and know you're dead, or think you are, but then you're not, and it all must've been a bad dream. But you can't wake up from the dream, because she's gone, and that proves it happened." Maybe it wasn't a really good conversation for Christmas, and she was a little sorry of that, but they hadn't gotten together and talked in a long, long time, and there was something lost about David that made it easier for him to understand her, or so she felt.
His comment about the house made her tear up a little, and she stretched across the tiny space that separated the island of them on the couch, and she hugged him. Chin to shoulder, arms around his upper arms. "Thank you. You'll come see me at work, okay? After New Year," and she pulled back with a sniffle and smile, and she stood and held a hand out to him. "But now you have to say really nonsensical things when it looks like Jamie or Mars or I are going to start throwing Monopoly houses at each other."