Remix challenge
Title: I'd rather go blind
Author: Bernie
Pairing: Jason Arnott / Petr Sykora /
Patrik Elias
Rimix of Mercury
in Retrograde By Tammy
I s'pose I should just get over this /
I'm not the first, I'm not the last / to ever wake up with a hurt inside / but
it just won't go away / it's getting worse every day / I can't a find a hole
that's big enough to crawl in and hide / I'd rather go blind (I'd rather go
blind)/ than see you with another guy
I'd Rather Go Blind by Paul Kelly
I think I owe the bitchy line to Fetisha
Jason's POV
*
** *** * ** ***
She takes up so much of the bed now, and
lies panting heavily and loudly in the room. Sleeping like this - the window
closed and the air turned up so high it is like winter - her skin trembles with
the cold and goosebumps even as she complains it is to damn hot to breathe.
*
** *** * ** ***
She smells like milk and dirt, she has
been weeding the garden and I realize she has been waiting all her life for
this moment. She hasn't worn perfume for three weeks, and her hair is down
around her face. It's two colours and I feel bad for never noticing that it was
dyed before. Scott is right; she has never been more beautiful.
* **
*** * ** ***
He shifted over in his sleep, with the
accustomed grumble of the long-married making way for their partner.
But I'm not. Married yes, but not for
long, and he isn't married to anyone. He is saving himself for the already
wedded; it has been a month since I was here.
*
** *** * ** ***
Lets be clear about something, right now.
No one was an innocent virgin seduced by bright lights. That is important. None
of us had our eyes closed, none of us was, or is, stupid. And if none of us got
all of what we wanted, well, we got some of it.
This wasn't how I wanted it. It's easy to
make me the bastard in all this, and I'll take my share of the blame, but it
isn't all my doing.
I didn't make him leave his house like
that, I could feel it, like it was all waiting for me when I walked in. Maybe I
am dreaming, maybe I am deluded, but his house breathed out when I walked into
it.
*
** *** * ** ***
I pretended not to see the painful
jealousy when Dina told him.
Triumph and terror mixed on her face.
"I'm pregnant." She blurted out
to him. You would think by now that she would be better at telling people that,
since she had babblingly informed nearly everyone who had crossed her path over
the past few days.
"Who's
the father?" Patrik asked casually and pretended not to notice her
expression freeze, and her lips thin out over her toothy smile.
"Ohh
ultrasounds are very important. You can make out features and everything."
Scott is astonishingly unaware of what was going on around him, telling me about
his kids in utero. Patrik, lurking still and trying as always to pick up the
pieces of Petr, smelled the tension, and moved in for the kill.
"You can
see if he has his daddy's eyes or his mama's nose." Patrik said and
smiled.
"They
don't have eyes at that age, it's just a blob." Martin said quietly from
the other side of the room. "They have fingers, but they aren't people
yet."
Didn't shut
Patrik up though. Maybe it wasn't intended to. Maybe Martin was just reliving
the sunny hopeful days of his own children's gestation.
"Can I
have a copy for my refrigerator?" Petr asked. "And one for the fridge
in the ladies lounge." His eyes are bright and I remember, yeah I fucked
you as well. And stopped you from fucking him.
"Shut the
fuck up." My voice, coming from far away only makes Patrik close his eyes
into slits and stare at me.
Dina
sleepwalked over to me and put her hand on my arm. She put her other hand on
her stomach and smirked right at Patrik. "You can have that," she
said.
* ** *** * ** ***
And she isn't
supposed to garden, something about infections and poison entering your blood
stream, and she says 'nothing is going to harm this baby' as she runs the wet
dirty earth between her fingers, and every move she makes is voluptuous and
cradling, and her fingers are too fat for her rings, and there are worms
wriggling around the top of the soil.
* ** *** *
** ***
Because it is
tradition, and we are guided by superstition, Petr and I still sit beside each
other on flights home. And I try to keep the mood right, on the plane, and he
helps me, in steering the conversation away from what happened. And I know it
would make me a real man to say, "lets just go to your place, and damn the
consequences." But then I think, it makes me more of a grown up to keep
the distance between us.
Patrik is a
gooseberry in the middle. He will lean over the back of the chair and steal my
CD's and ruffle Petr's hair and tease him about missing an easy goal, and for a
second suspended in mid-air we forget we are all supposed to hate each other.
They forget
that, I forget that it is all my fault.
* ** *** *
** ***
It's summer and everything is in bloom.
The flowers that she planted are coming out, and they all have their little
faces turned upward to the sun. The trees are dark green, and it is all I can
do to not carve our initials in them, hers, mine, and, the future's. The
cicadas are leaving their shells on the tree trunks, and the baby is a fat
sticky maggot feasting on all of us. A caterpillar, about to be a butterfly.
"I didn't know that I wanted it until
I had it."
And Dina rubs her hand over her stomach,
stretched whitely and mutely, billowing up like when you throw a sheet over a
bed. Her skin settles down in ripples over her once smooth belly-bed that I
used to pillow my head on.
But she has never been more beautiful.
*
** *** * ** ***
And pretending is more than over.
"Oh she is just there for
appearancesÉ"
"Oh were are just good friendsÉ"
"Oh team mates spend lots of time
togetherÉ"
Scott's eyes flicker over us when I use
those lines. I know he worries about me, pulls me quietly aside and says that
he is so happy for me that she is so beautiful with my child, that she is
glowing and it is so wonderful what the two of us will share to try and keep
every scrap of memory to hold onto on the road. I wouldn't think he could be
poetic.
"Your heart isn't free anymore, it
belongs to them." Scott's poetic moment has no end it seems. But he half
hugs me in a manly straight way.
An acceptable way for men to show emotion,
on the ice after scoring goals, drunk in the bar breathing beer into each
other's faces, when I announce the arrival of my child into the world. The rest
of the time it is just damn wrong; to think it, to hint around it, to admit it,
the feeling of some other mans hands on your body, for intimacy. Not for
victory, not for creation, for love.
*
** *** * ** ***
She has changed her mind a dozen times on
the colour of the room – the nursery – and soon it will be to late
and the child will be stuck with white walls.
I want to suggest a rainbow of all the
damn colours, but I don't. A rainbow, I could make it a joke, leprechauns at
the end, a pot of gold, but; I should ask her to put pink triangles in here,
means the same thing.
I know the symbols. I'm not as dumb as you
think I am. I know what it is to read between the lines of people standing to
close together. I recognize when someone comes into the office, or the ice, the
next day wearing the same suit as the night before. I know what it means.
What I can't say out loud is I want this.
I want this second chance I want to be a dad more than he can ever understand.
I want. Swings. A slide in the backyard. I want a paddling pool and tiny water
wings. I want girls to spoil and boys to teach to skate. I want to be fat,
forty and freaking out at my teenagers. I want. Them to steal my beer. I want.
Him to kiss me.
It's not like I can begrudge her this
time. Since I mostly won't be there for her, since I will miss all the firsts,
steps, words, tantrums, let's go shopping together, I can do that for you, for
us. For my family.
But we only make it as far as the
gardening center, and she buys baby roses and climbing vines and mulch and is
delighted that it is too heavy for her to carry to the car. And she coos and
arranges things in the back of the car, nestling them together, running her
hand over my arm. Not with love, or possession, with care. Smoothing the sleeve
of my shirt and soothing the muscle from working hard to put things here.
She fell for the rich hockey star, I know
that, she likes me well enough; we get along and she occupies herself and makes
sure things run smoothly when I am away for work, and we make each other laugh.
But for now I have almost no use to her.
The garden sighs under the weight of her
attentions, and gasps, weighted down with blooms in the sun, even as the house
waits for her to pay attention to it.
* ** *** *
** ***
She has stopped wearing nightgowns, filmy
silky lacey that looks like it belongs in porn and wears my shirts, stretching
the fabric over her stomach.
* ** *** *
** ***
It has been a month since I was here, and
he has never been more beautiful, he takes in even steady breaths as I watch,
and becomes filled with oxygen under my eyes, and glows with life. Without
meaning to, he rolls over to make room for me.
END
In this universe, Beach
