Edith Olson (skintightsecret) wrote in savingthegames, @ 2014-09-13 22:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | arkin ford, edith olson, julian alvarez, tristan cadwalader |
Who: Eddie, Tristan, and Julian (ft. Frank and Arkin)
What: Eddie has her meltdown at Rabah's funeral, only it doesn't go the way anyone expects. That's probably because she sees Arkin lurking in the background. Tristan and Julian try to help.
When: Sunday September 14th; mid-morning
Where: A cemetery outside of the city
Warnings: Swearing, drunkenness
Status: COMPLETE
There wasn’t very much Eddie remembered about August. What came before, when she was Edith, was a vague cacophony of music, singing, strangers, bars, and sex. But beyond that - after that - was where her memories were most precise. Waking up Frank to support her, finding that Frank was very well off and offering to help awaken Julian, which her best friend assured she could take care of quite handily herself. The pain of waking up Tristan, witnessing the devastation on his face before he disappeared to find his sister, immediately leaving her alone and hurt but understanding and still with intention of remaining on task. Approaching her mother at the weekend barbeque to talk to her about the reality of the situation and finding the woman intensely immovable. Begging her to open her eyes, to see the world for what it really was. Being told that she worried too much and listened to the strangest music and it was doing something to her mind. Eddie spent hours pleading with Rabah to no avail. And she remembered crawling into her bed that night knowing she’d probably lost her for good. August was a picnic compared to September. Waking up, she was filled with questions but determined to get back on her feet as quickly as possible and to support the people around her. It didn’t matter as much if she hurt because she could shoulder it like she did everything and it didn’t keep her from honest to god empathizing with those around her. She called Mink - left a message, wondered why she even bothered because she wasn’t in a place to be used and tossed aside anymore. Called Tristan...left a message. Fretted. Called Frank, heard from Julian, felt relieved that the siblings were doing alright and happy to have them as company as they tried to work through the events of the past four-plus weeks. And then it unraveled piece by piece. Her mother refused to wake up from the illusion. She’d tried for hours, begged her to come back, and the woman remained what Eddie was certain was deliberately comatose. She discovered that her masked torturer had been frequenting the group home, indicating he was still keeping an eye on her and everything she cared for. Was texted by the Coalition to meet them for judgement (aka probably gonna die). Found Max’s dead body when her journey through checking on friends ended in his living room. Moved Rabah to a hospital and was fired from her bartending job for repeated absence. Tried to reach out to Tristan. Failed. Failed hard. Barely made it out of her severance with the Coalition alive. Was told that Rabah was dead. Autopilot. Everything was on autopilot. Out of respect for her mother, Eddie observed Aninut. As her mother’s only remaining immediate family member, every single duty to prepare for her mother’s funeral was in her hands. And as that only member, she was forced to be an Onen on her own. Onen were technically relieved of duties such as their job (ha) and were forced to withstand the loss without outside assistance. She called her mother’s rabbi and found a Shomer quickly, having Rabah’s body relocated. Rabbi Berkowitz argued she should have the funeral at temple but she refuted the necessity of that, opting for a funeral at the site of the cemetery itself. There were no flowers. There was no viewing. It was a simple wooden box with simple plastic latches and simple cloth interior. The first time Eddie saw the coffin, she stood there with grey eyes, running her nails along the smoothed grains of the wood, remembering the voices in her head, the seizures, the desperate, tearful pleas. Rabah was spared that nightmare. Good for her. Rabbi Berkowitz observed her with concern. A twenty-four year old women with obvious facial wounds staring at her mother’s coffin like her own soul was somewhere far away from her. If asked, Eddie wouldn’t be able to string two memories together of the next forty-eight hours. She drifted from moment to moment almost always in the presence of the casket, being told what should be done, what rites should be spoken, the little prayers that were to be said and recited. The invite list was pathetically small. Eleven, including Julian, Tristan, and Frank. Neighbors, really, people who’d caught wind and offered to bring food. Eddie’s fridge was empty. It was a good deal. On the morning of the funeral she dressed in a black dress with peplums, tripping over her own two feet in the black heels she wore. Her tattoos weren’t covered up and her face and shoulder continued sporting bandages. Frank helped her get dressed, her shoulder and side hurting too much to move the full range, and got some decent application of make-up on. Edith could apply red lipstick like a pro, but Eddie tried and looked like a kindergartener had gotten hold of her face. Frank might have suggested that red wouldn’t be the best color for a funeral or a black eye; Eddie disagreed. Once at the cemetery, she stood next to Frank. A cursory glance made a swift headcount of everyone there, all eleven of whom were in attendance. Tristan looked nice. Frank took her hand, but Eddie wasn’t sure why. Maybe she knew something the deceased’s daughter didn’t. Wasn’t she supposed to be crying? Shouldn’t she be sad? She stared at the casket as if everything she ever was rested inside there with Rabah while she herself stood as a hollowed-out doll. Berkowitz proceeded into the funeral with a practiced air and Eddie’s eyes remained glued on the casket in front of her. She barely heard him speak, but tried to pay attention, taking this time to give her mother whatever remaining care she had. A few minutes into the sermon she lifted her heavy gaze to once more skim the crowd, bypassing all eye contact entirely, until an odd sort of realization stuck in her head. Twelve faces. She counted twelve faces. She went back, looked them all over again, until a pair of stark, striking eyes caught her attention. And held it. The man from the gala stood in the background, a good distance from the other mourners and almost in shadow, and it seemed like a tidal wave had collided with her. She remembered the unusual feeling she’d had when they collided at the gala, her heel in his foot, and again with him standing here, she knew - that feeling had not been a coincidence or some random side effect of her PTSD. It had only ever been him. The man who’d captured her, the man who’d stalked her and visited her mother. Eddie felt immediately sick, but she didn’t break eye contact. She could feel her own hand shaking in Frank’s and jerked it out of her hold. Her entire body felt the tightening of her nerves, every inch of skin pricked at the sight of him, and she could hear her blood pumping in her ears. Everything - everything suddenly made sense… Her breath hitched, she took a step away from Frank, but she didn’t know what to do. Where to go. Was she terrified? Furious? Vengeful? She felt all of this at once, felt her body seizing at the sudden onslaught of torrential emotions and realizations, and nearly collapsed right there. Her mother - her mother - Rabbi Berkowitz said her name. Once. Twice. Frank leaned over, whispered if she was alright. Eddie took three deep breaths, a deer in the headlights, her heart in her throat. It was time for her to speak. No. Livid. Petrified. Hurt. Her mother had let this man kill her. He was winning. He was winning. Everyone needed to leave. She didn’t want to play this game anymore, didn’t want to do this, didn’t want them to see - So she exhaled a shaking breath, steeled herself, and turned to the onlookers. Every sense of loss she felt for her mother became something else, something bitter and angry and stabbing. And if she could do anything, it was to make these people leave. A mouse trapped in a cage. She felt herself suffocating under the weight of this man’s eyes. “I think, if people don’t mind, I’ll save my very private words for a very private occasion, such as after all of you get the fuck out of here.” She started a bit lowly, but picked up immediate buckets of pep, hoisting them over everyone’s confused heads. Choking. Suffocating. Angry. Laughing. Crashing. Breaking. Grinning. “Because you will all be. In about five minutes. Maybe less if I can really get some zingers in early. Here’s hoping!” So - usually when someone passes away, we like to raise them to this level of sainthood they don’t really deserve. You know, pretend for a bit that the world is all the worse because the deceased is no longer in it. Despite saying that, I’ll be honest. Rabah Mendelsohn really is a woman we all should look up to. Feel inspired by. Aspire to be. Why? Cuz this woman’s been planning in her head for fuck knows how long how she was gonna die, and by god, she did it.” The words were coming out of some prison in the back of her heart and she couldn’t stop them. She didn’t look at the man. If he wanted a show, she’d fucking give him one. “I don’t remember if it was after a night of hiding under her blankets while her husband went on a drunken rage because his favorite Nascar guy lost or one of those days while she was cleaning the house wondering if he was dead and if we'd have to live on the street cuz we hadn’t seen him in a week, who knows. The point is somewhere down the line she threw her hands up in the air and went “I quit!” And boy did she. What a role model, folks, really, a woman ahead of her time.” Eddie reeled it in a notch, clasping her hands and looking almost moroseful. “I hope I don’t sound too bitter. Really, I think it’s great. Good for her, she got what she always wanted, huh? Some peace of mind and a really long nap. Who doesn’t love a good siesta?” A laugh and a breath. “She’ll always leave a lasting mark on me. Not physical, no. Emotional. And...maybe not so much of a mark. More like baggage? Yeah. Baggage sounds about right. A shitton of fucking baggage that is never going to get resolved because if it had ever been resolved, it would’ve been before she left me alone with an abusive father or before I went to court as a teenager to keep her because she wasn’t going to go to court to keep me...you know, all the stuff I tried to do before I ended up living on the street anyway, fun.” She waved. “Mrs. Clarkson, thank you for coming, but I see you muttering there and I know you’re thinking I’m acting a bit meshuga, but I tell you what, you only came for the gossip and I’m just delivering the goods. Can I continue? Thanks.” Eddie paced somewhat, proceeding on with her lecture. Rabbi Berkowitz looked absolutely beside himself and she would have been able to tell how the others were handling it - Julian, Tristan, Frank - if she’d chosen to look at them instead of through them. But if her eyes met theirs, the fire would snuff and she was burning so bright. “This lasting mark got me thinking. About how I’d like to die. And really, after an event like this, such a heavy loss, you really have to up the ante. And death is a time of togetherness, I think, don’t you? So I thought what a great idea to take this time to really open up and bond with each other, huh? How about we all just take turns? Go around the circle, starting with - Mr. Hirschmann, why not?” She waved off at the older gentleman. “That means the rabbi goes last and he’s hosted so many funerals, I bet he’s got some great insights, don’t ya, you old codger?” Boldly nudged the man whose mouth was practically on the ground. “Me, personally, I think I’d like to die the way that I lived. Kicked in the gut by every single person I’ve ever trusted until I start internally bleeding, or get skinned alive and have alcohol poured all over the open wounds and smooshed in there, have my face bashed in with a club until I’m unrecognizable by two people who look like my parents, or cut up into pieces and have my parts wrapped and stuffed in the boxes in my closet that have all of my childhood belongings. Take me back to the beginning and let it soak, that’s what I say. Kind of poetic, isn’t it?” The response was less than enthusiastic. People were shuffling, looking incredibly uneasy, some looking back to the cars. “Eh. I realize that might give you some more time to think on your answers - oh! Bye! Thanks for coming! - but while you’re doing that - does anybody want a dog? Or two dogs? I have dogs. I don’t really know how it happened, but there it is. Two of them, Comrade and Baby. Baby, if any of you cared to remember, is the dog I gave my mother earlier this year. She’s exactly how she sounds: a big fucking baby. Comrade’s a sweetheart, too, he’s the dog of my late friend Max who nobody ever gave a flying fuck about. You know what’s so funny?” But she wasn’t laughing, she looked hysterically torn up about it. “He’s still sitting in the morgue, waiting for his certification on his cause of death, when he should be the one here surrounded by people. It’s been a banner week.” This was when she paused, breathing for the first time, eyes on the ground. Frank and the rabbi cautiously moved into her personal bubble. "Okay, you know what - don’t touch me -” Eddie pulled out of Frank’s hold, backing up. “I’m starting to get the feeling I might have crashed this party a little early. My bad. I’ll wrap up. Rabah Mendelsohn...was not a good person. Now, she wasn’t terrible, but she wasn’t good. I don’t know why people think passivity equals decency, I never read shit about that anywhere, but that seems to be the unspoken consensus. But she got what she wanted in the end. She got her bed. She got her...box.” This silence was less contemplative, more reflective. Lost in that same place she always went, so far from shore. “She’s got nothing left to worry about. So what the hell are we all standing around here for? Lower the bitch into the ground!” But she spun back around two seconds later, hands grasping at the ribbon attached to the left side of her dress and tore the fabric down the middle. The young woman threw it onto the casket with bold irreverence, dichotomous in that she took a moment to mutter, “Dayan ha’emet.” before hauling off again. Rabbi Berkowitz stood there with arms as wide as his eyes were. “We...I never even said the prayer…” Eddie was through the trees by then, never once looking over the shoulder to see if her nightmare had remained to watch it all the way through. But if she had looked, she would have seen there was nothing left where he’d been standing. Almost an hour later, a stumbling, mumbling figure could be seen approaching from the same place she’d disappeared to. It took any observers left - Julian and Tristan, as all others had been cleared out by Frank - all of two seconds to realize that she was well on her way to drunk. She wobbled as she skirted the headstones, an open bottle of red wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other. A six-pack of generic brand beer tucked under an arm, of which one of the bottles was already gone. It wasn’t entirely clear what she was saying to herself - probably cursing these damned heels and this tight dress or the fact that she was sure her shoulder wound had started bleeding again - but the lift of her head to spot two very familiar gentleman by her mother’s headstone had her excitedly surprised. “Hey! Hey guys!” She shoved her cigarette between her lips and waved. “Guess what I found! The - the shopping center, the one right on the other side - they had an ABC store. Mazel Tov! I’m supposed to be observing Shiva, which means I lock myself in my apartment for seven days to mourn. ‘Avoid a party-like setting’ or something. Oh well, fucked that one up the ass.” She sat herself ungracefully on one of the headstones with a satisfied ahh, depositing the beer on the ground and taking a swig from the bottle of red wine. “She loved the stuff. Personally I hate it, but when in Rome.” Another swallow, her speech slurred. “Soooo what’s going on? Did we forget how to drive? What’re you doing here?” |