Reaction
Tbh, Jamie thinks he's done. The dramatic shit, of watching stuff he didn't need to see, stuff he didn't need to feel, he thinks that's over and he's in the shower by the time it starts, and he nearly cracks his head on the side of the tub as he goes down, because he does. He takes half the shower curtain with him, and he's on the bottom of the tub as it washes over him, the pound of water on his back and on his shoulders receding for footfalls on hardwood.
And he knows within seconds whose it is. Where this is, even if he's never seen this place, even if he's never seen that woman other than in photographs, or memories he can't find, like marbles rolled under floorboards. He's never seen Dad look like this, like he's lit up interior, glass held up against light and he kind of longs to let the whole chase thing go, to lean into the weight of Mom's knee, to have his hair ruffled by a stray hand. He can't see Molly, but he kind of wants to shove the door open, and he's stuck in the futile certainty of a little girl growing up confident that nothing will change, nothing can change. He wants to stick the delivery labels back on that sticky end-table and book it out of that house, to drag them all by the tips of their fingers out past renovations and hardwood and loss.
But he can't. When he's back, when he's him again, Jamie's still on the floor of the tub and the roar of the water kind of drowns out anything that isn't the heartbeat of loss he didn't know well enough to know the spiky shape of it taking up residence in the back of his throat, behind his jaw where it hurts to swallow, and yeah, okay. It's not just the shower on his face that's wet.