@kingdonweek day 4: hurt/comfort
I had this sitting in my drafts for a while and polished it up a bit. It's not my best writing (sorry) but I did further my Penny Loves Bugs agenda, my Frank Langdon is from Appalachia agenda, and my Mel loves Touching Langdon's Arm agenda :)
(also you can probably tell that I am grieving because grief is all I really want to write about lol). Post Abby divorce, maybe the start of their relationship if you squint a bit. Autistic Mel (as always).
CONTENT WARNING: mention of suicide
***
“Hey.”
“Hey."
Frank wasn’t sure why they greeted each other like that at the end of shifts, who had started it, what events prompted it. Like so many other rituals, the initial meaning had been lost to time. He knew only that it felt natural as breathing, their acknowledgement of each other. That the day had come and went and they had survived.
“Penny asked me why the other kids don’t like her. Why they think bugs are stupid.”
There was an urgency to his voice, the words itching to get out, and no one else he wanted to tell. He thought of Penny: her glasses, her cherub cheeks, her crushing need to take care of things. She loved bugs, cicadas especially, for some reason. Over the summer, she plucked a desiccated shell straight from the sidewalk and held it in her fist as if it were alive. He thought it’d be a temporary thing. Now it had been six months, and she still carried it around with her. He wondered what would happen when the shell finally cracked.
“She grossed the other kids out in the playground, apparently. She saw a wolf spider carrying her eggs on her back. Said she was like Santa Claus. She brought the class out to see and they were horrified.
Then the asshole teacher---I know it’s just a spider, but come on---stomped on it. She couldn’t stop crying, Mel, and I didn’t know what to do,” he admitted. It felt good just to say it, to lay his fear on the concrete and watch Mel tend to it. She would make it right; she always did. It was like Dana said. Mel had the healing touch.
“What was it like for you and Becca, growing up? How did you get through it?”
She looked past him as she spoke. “We had each other. That helped. But, outside of her, I got very good at imagining friends. I had whole, um, storylines. I was always at the periphery of making friends, of connection, but never really close to anyone.” She pushed her glasses up. “My dad called me Mel-Bel. Said I was so quiet, I needed a bell, so people could keep track of me.” Mel had never mentioned him before. Her father.
“Kids are assholes,” Frank said. She’d shown him photos of her and Becca as kids--Mel squinting in ill-fitted glasses, Becca grimacing into a smile, both like small woodland creatures rounded up and forced to pose. There was, as far as he could tell, nothing about either sister that stood out. In a bad way, at least. Mel had the bruises and cuts, the baseball jersey, the boyish hair, of one of those girls child-Frank had always watched, transfixed, hoping for the slightest crumb of attention.
In fact, in his hometown -- right outside Hendersonville, in a pocket of road and valley where the same names kept appearing on mailboxes -- there had been so few children around that being discriminating meant being friendless. His best friend had been the neighbor’s daughter. He had not considered, for a moment, that she could be anything else. Friends were decided by geography: you hung out with whoever happened to have emerged from the same outcropping of civilization, the same winding cul-de-sac.
He wanted to hug Mel. To make better whatever hurt she still carried inside her. Maybe she felt it -- his overwhelming need to be useful, to be needed -- because she squeezed his arm, the triceps brachii, a signal they now understood to mean I want to be touched. Working that out had not been painless. Sometimes Mel grabbed his arm anyway, out of nerves or habit, and he had learned not to presume. But there was no mistaking this, the pressure of her hand, urgent and pleading. He hugged her, felt her pulse, hare-quick, and the ridge of her spine. Shit, he thought. Is she eating enough? Another item for his mental checklist.
She leaned into him, arms crossed around him, tight, then tighter, hungry for something. He had an inkling of what that was and pushed it down.
“Just…never let Penny feel bad for loving what she loves,” she said, into his shirt. “Make sure she knows, um, she’s not alone. That there’s people out there who like spiders too.”
He wanted to keep her there, against him, but she leaned back and looked up at him, head turned, thoughtful. “Have you ever taken her to a firefly festival?”
“No. I didn't know those existed, to be honest." It sounded like exactly the sort of thing Mel would know about.
“My dad used to tell us about fireflies, growing up. Apparently, there’s a kind in the mountains that blink synchronously. He tried to get me to go with him once, and I said no.”
“Tell me about him,” Mel whispered, the slight hitch in her throat meaning if you want to.
“Okay. Will you tell me about yours? A dad for a dad?”
“Only,” he added, “if you want to.”
Frank knew people like Mel -- people who cared this deeply, this carefully -- rarely sprang from the earth fully formed. There was always a backstory, a precipitating event. He wanted to know hers, badly, if she was willing.
Something wistful crossed her face. She nodded. “You first.”
“He was deeply religious, like most men born in western North Carolina, I guess. He was forty-five when they had me, and the way my mom tells it, he cried for hours when the pregnancy test came back positive. They’d been trying for years. The doctor swore up and down it wasn’t possible. Adoption -- well, they would’ve, but it never worked out. And then they had me. All eyebrows and hair and exceptionally long and skinny, in a concerning way, for a newborn.”
Mel smiled. “How old was your mom, then?”
“Forty.”
“Oh, wow,” she said. “And they’d been trying all that time? What do you think was wrong?”
“No clue. Knowing my dad, maybe he hadn’t quite figured out how the whole reproduction thing worked. He was a very sheltered man.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean--”
“I’m just joking, Mel. I don’t think they ever figured out why it took so long.”
“And your dad?” It was embarrassing, how much he wanted to know. He had overshared, maybe, about his own father. He felt raw, having exposed some part of his life he couldn’t take back. He also knew Mel would be careful with the information; she always was.
“He…uh, killed himself,” she said, matter-of-factly. If it distressed her to tell him this, her face did not show it. He realized she had probably gotten used to saying these words, had said them so many times, to so many different people, that they had lost all meaning.
“Shit, Mel. I’m sorry--”
“It’s okay, Frank,” she mumbled. “I said I would.”
“We were young. Eight years old. I have memories, but sometimes I don’t trust them. Whether they’re really memories, or just things people said happened, you know?”
“I do.”
“He and Mom never got along, or if they did, I don’t remember it. He’d bring home candy sometimes, from the store, for me and Bec--um, that feels so stupid. My dad died and all I remember about him is that he brought us candy.”
“You were eight. We don’t choose what we remember. Shit, wouldn’t it be nice if we did?”
“Well, yeah,” she admitted. “But…how can we know what’s going to matter? I just want to talk to them. To ask them why they would leave us. It’s all I can think about. I read this book, a few years ago, and uh, I’m paraphrasing here, but the author said when his wife died, he wanted to tell her about it. That was his first thought. That's all you ever really want.”
“I wake up and for a minute, I'm okay. Then I think, They're gone. They're never coming back. That's why I clung to Becca, I guess, convinced myself we would never be apart. That’s what we wanted. I never even considered she would think differently.” Her voice got quiet.
“I… was selfish. Of course she wants to live independently, to have a husband, and a dog, and a family. The things we dreamed about as kids, like looking into a toy store, knowing you won’t ever have the thing you want, but maybe looking is enough. It must be.”
“Do you ever want those things?” he asked, half-dreading her answer.
“Uh, well, it never seemed like it was in the cards. Any of it. A family?” Her voice cracked. “I love kids. I don’t know that I love, um, the gestating part. How much they need from you, for so long.”
“I can see that,” he said. “Considering the job we have.”
“If I could…lay an egg, and it would hatch, and the child would be precocial, like a foal, ready to walk the second its feet hit the ground, I’d be okay with that, I think.”
“So, the kids would need to come ready-made? How many?”
“I always, um, thought two was a good number.”
