For @dad-inside, an alternate universe where Mel gets the One Wish Willow from Obsession :)
I wrote most of this at five o clock in the morning, mildly feverish and under the influence of insomnia, so don’t judge it too harshly
(frank langdon definitely listens to sublime, I won’t take questions on that)
Becca dropped it in her lap the way a cat drops a mouse at your feet: cheerful and chirping and expecting high praise.
A questionable stick, shaped like bundled vanilla beans. Becca said she got it from Etsy. She was always on Etsy. Mel didn’t pry. She was glad, really, that Becca was interested in something not named Adam.
“How much was this?” At once she felt bad for saying it. Their mother’s words, spat out.
“Thanks, Becs,” she added, her own words. “What, um, is it, exactly?”
“An Etsy witch,” Becca said, not answering her question. “She’s the real deal, Mel, so don’t start with me. I met her online during the worst of the pandemic, and I paid fifty dollars for a protective spell. If you’ll recall, you didn’t get COVID. Not once.”
Mel sighed. “Okay. Why was the Etsy witch selling it? It looks like something you’d pay someone to take off your hands. I’m sure there’s twenty of them floating down the nearest creek.”
“No, this one’s special. Trust me.” Becca’s face was turned away, toward her canvas. She was smiling, Mel guessed, by the wicked tone in her voice.
“You can make a wish. Any wish you want, and it’ll come true.”
“Becs, haven’t we seen enough movies to know how bad an idea that is? Even if it were possible. You went through that whole time traveling phase, remember?”
“It’s just a gift, that’s all.”
Mel eyed the stick with suspicion, then the box it came in. One Wish Willow. Red and off-white, though she couldn’t tell if it was vintage or just designed to look that way.
AMAZE YOUR FRIENDS! You only get ONE wish.
Becca now held a brush in her hand, making sweeping motions across her newest piece. Ophelia in the river, John Everett Millais’s rendition, now hers. Swathes of green and blue blooming outward. Flowers bright as fresh wounds. Drowning was not so peaceful. Mel wished it was.
“How’s Dr. Langdon?” Becca’s voice was lofty, as though she were proving her point.
“Um, he’s fine, I guess.”
Yesterday the two worked closely on a patient. Nothing serious, thankfully: a little girl with RSV and sanguine eyes who insisted, while they checked her vitals, on wearing a fairy crown. She waved her wand---more of a branch, but they didn’t press her on that distinction---claiming she cast spells on them both. Good ones, I hope? Mel had asked.
They had both been utterly charmed. At one point Langdon looked over at her and grinned, his joy contagious, one of those expressions she’d never understood until working with him. She smiled back, as though she had a choice in the matter. She’d tried not to notice the lurch in her chest. Or she’d noticed and tried not to connect it with him. It embarrassed her, like most memories involving him, though she couldn’t say why.
She had a crush on him, maybe. Admitting it was the first step to getting over it. A childish crush, all-consuming, like Ruby’s fixation with Gilbert Blythe. Ruby had gone off her food how a cat in heat does, transfixed by need, and then been taken by galloping consumption. Mel felt similarly consumed. Maybe tuberculosis would take her, too.
Langdon was married, though that detail seemed, in certain moods, rather easy to flatten, easy to walk across like a field of dandelions, the seed heads loosening and blowing every which way no matter how careful you were.
And so Mel blew Abby out of her mind like dandelions, without care or attention, the stick settling in her hands. She spun it round, her mind elsewhere, circling the subject of his wife without landing on it.
Abruptly, like a wishbone on Thanksgiving, the single stick became two.
“Shoot!” she whispered, jamming the pieces into her pants pocket before Becca could see. A new record of gift-breaking.
Work the next morning. The usual routines of the day: combing her hair, brushing her teeth, weaving three ropes of hair through her fingers, back and forth and between, until it became manageable. Then the bus.
“Dr. Langdon!” She smiled at the sight of him, almost Pavlovian. His eyes raised slightly, as if she'd said something funny. Lately he had been parking at the far end of the lot, close to her bus stop. Most days, which was turning into every day, they walked together to the hospital.
He was walking now, a little too fast, so she had to jog to keep beside his shoulder.
Then he grabbed her hand. She had not expected it. She stopped in her tracks, and he stopped too, like a train coming to a halt. The force of it made her knees buckle.
“Mel?” He seemed bewildered, standing over her, hair curling over his eyes. She didn’t understand how he tolerated it, the hair.
He had not, she noticed, released her hand. Well, no. She didn’t notice it---she had never once forgotten it. How his hand felt over her own, large and reassuring, firm enough to hold her in place, loose enough to let her move freely, so long as she didn’t go far.
For a moment, with a slight cast of worry, he glanced toward her left hand.
Holding hands. Was this something good friends did on a regular basis? Langdon was her first real one, other than her sister, and blood relatives didn’t count.
They held hands for the rest of the walk: he said nothing, singing Sublime's greatest hits under his breath. Two pints of booze, tell me, are you a Badfish too? He swung her hand to the chorus, his wedding ring pinching her fingers. Lord knows I’m weak, won’t somebody get me off this reef?
They held hands past the ambulance bay, sacred ground, and into the locker room. She didn’t question it. It was nice, being led; she was always leading others, for six years now, her mother and then Becca, the endless torrent of appointments. Sometimes she felt like a husky entrusted with precious cargo, well-intentioned but still bounding, headfirst, into a blizzard.
(Balto was a new favorite in the King household. Small mercies.)
When Langdon bent down to open his locker she rushed ahead---no, no, I’ll do it! ---at which he looked mildly interested.
His back still bothered him. Of course he would not admit this. Mel helped in little ways: Langdon knew what she was up to, she was sure, when she handed him ibuprofen, when something fell on the floor and she was the first to snatch it up. He didn’t argue anymore. She considered this progress.
His hand found hers again as they walked through the hospital entrance. Dana was behind the nurses’ station, cross-legged, glasses down, eagle-owl focused. But not on them. Mel’s stomach flipped once or twice. “Morning, kiddos,” Dana muttered, absentmindedly, flipping through a stack of paper.
Unease was washing over Mel, churning. Giddiness too. The two were looping within her.
“Right, I’m off,” Langdon said, and bent down.
Suddenly he was kissing her. Familiar and brief, but kissing her. Mel didn’t pull away, which surprised her most of all. She rose to the tips of her toes, pressing into his mouth, her hands finding, then squeezing, his shoulders. Whatever temporary insanity this was, it would be her first and last time touching him like this; she might as well, as Becca liked to say, make hay while the sun was shining. Her enthusiasm seemed to amuse him. When they parted he was smiling, hands on her clavicles, steadying her.
“It’s just one shift, sweetie. But I get it.”
He pulled her against his chest in one fell swoop, making her yelp, a secure, unyielding hug, the only way she liked them. Then he was turning and walking away, all bouncy, whistling Badfish again, getting smaller.
Her eyes wouldn’t leave him until he was fully out the door.
She looked in terror at Dana, preparing for admonishment, or perhaps a severe beating.
Dana barely even shifted.
“Um---Dana--I’m s-sorry---Abby---”
Dana pushed her glasses up.
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