|
|
Keepsakes
by Abi Z.
Author's note: this is a repost to some lists. Some lists (like UCSL)
are getting it for the first time. This story isn't slash, but its
sequel (which you won't understand unless you read this) is.
Spoilers: "Blind Date" in a major way, but call this an AU as far as
everything that happened afterwards.
Warning: rampant rambling and meandering. Nothing really offensive,
just some bad language and non-explicit booty. I tried to put some
smut in it, I really did, but it just didn't happen.
Archive: sure
Contact: Praise and constructive criticism to crescentia@yahoo.com.
Flames to jesse_helms@helms.senate.gov.
Disclaimer: What's mine is yours and what's yours is mine. Unless
you're Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy (grr argh), in which case what's
yours is *so* not mine.
Summary: A lawyer examines his life. Because, damn it, redemption
isn't just for vampires and rogue slayers.
--
He was not the type of man for keepsakes: his apartment was
spacious but spare, decorated with bare walls except for an Alfred
Stieglitz print of a winter night in New York, a kind of cold he swore
he would never know again. His dishes were black, his countertops
white, and you could have eaten off the hardwood floors if you'd wanted
to. But people were never impressed by the cleanliness, and his dates
had always insisted that he come to their places.
But he had a few things, beyond the basics of suits and ties and
cutlery and shampoo. He had his sister Letitia's seventh grade
picture--the year of her death, that February when influenza had struck
the Maine coast and sent her to what their mother believed was a better
place. He had Lana's picture, too, from fourth grade: in March, three
weeks after Letitia's death, not so much out of sickness but loneliness
from missing her sister. And then the survivors, taken two years
later, the year he'd graduated high school. Larissa, the oldest, at
nineteen, already working in the mill; Lambert, sixteen, who would drop
out of high school and join the Marines; Leander, at fourteen, with his
bright eyes and shaggy hair; and Lindsey himself in the center,
seventeen, smiling, knowing he was getting out. He kept the pictures
in his wallet, behind his California driver's license, and sometimes,
idly, he looked at them, trying to divine the thoughts behind the
faces, most especially his own.
Those ridiculous names, all L's after their parents, like it was
some sort of cosmic miracle that Larry MacDonald and Leda Cunningham
had wound up marrying each other. Lindsey had gotten strong because of
his name, blacking the eyes of the latest person to call him
"girly-man" or "faggot" or any number of small-town taunts. He wasn't
sure which variety of insult he fought harder: his name he couldn't
control, but the sex part he could, and all the adolescent Lindsey
could think was that he had some genetic defect, something that ran in
the MacDonald family just like alcoholism, that made him ache for a
man. Girls were tantalizing, too, but he couldn't imagine that they
wouldn't guess his secret, and so he defended his name and his honor,
and he made it through high school celibate and undiscovered. He was
the first in his family to apply to college, and he prayed to a God he
didn't believe in that it would get him out of Maine.
It did: it got him to Hastings University in the heart of Boston,
surrounded by trees and seventeenth-century churches and tony clothing
stores. And there, much to his surprise, his name served him well,
just feminine enough to seem upper-crust. He arrived with two
suitcases, and he found himself rooming with Hunter Kirkland, whose
family looked at his name and his Maine origins and assumed that he was
just like them. They were Bostonians who summered in York Harbor; they
didn't know one Maine hole in the wall from another, and Johnstown,
Maine, might as well have been Kennebec for all the Kirklands knew.
Hunter pulled Lindsey onto the lacrosse team, ignoring his lack of
experience, and they played together for four years. Lindsey stayed in
Boston for Thanksgivings, Easters, and even one Christmas, and he lived
for a summer, between his sophomore and junior years, in the Kirklands'
airy Cambridge house while he interned with a law firm downtown.
The right thing to do that summer would have been to succumb to
the attentions of Ginger, Hunter's nineteen year-old sister, but it was
instead her best friend who captivated him. Therica Albright's family
were cousins of the Kirklands who lived in Wellesley. Therica was
doing a summer dance program in the city, and rather than commute the
hour, she was staying with her relatives in town. The kinship was
distant, but Therica was clearly related: she had Ginger's sun-blond
hair, and Hunter's patrician nose. Lindsey had met Therica in passing
around the Hastings campus--he remembered dimly that she had been to
one or two of the lacrosse matches--but he recalled her only vaguely.
But it was the sight of her out on the back porch early one morning,
using the old wrought-iron loveseat as a barre for her ballet
stretches, that stuck in his mind.
He started riding the T with her every day: Therica's studio
wasn't far from the firm where he was working, and she only left about
twenty minutes after he did. Her wit was sparkling, sometimes edgy,
and she missed nothing. She had mild dyslexia, which made reading and
school a struggle, but she gave directions to tourists in fluent
French, German, or Japanese. She was weirdly awkward around the
opposite sex, but with Lindsey she let herself shine. He fell in love
with her every day on the T, back and forth from downtown to Cambridge.
They lived chastely enough with the Kirklands: Therica was hesitant
to sneak around in her relatives' house, and Lindsey was too shy to do
any more than kiss her. Hunter walked in on them in the kitchen late
one night--Therica sitting on the counter, Lindsey standing, her legs
around his hips, his hands in her hair--but had simply laughed, said,
"Excuse me," and left again.
School started just after Labor Day. Hunter and Lindsey moved
into a suite in one of the campus houses, and Therica moved into an
off-campus co-op with two friends. Lindsey was invited to spent the
night, but never did: he was embarrassed to tell Therica that he'd
never had sex before. That Thanksgiving, though, Hunter's parents were
in Greece, and Therica was in a fight with her mother, and so they had
dinner at Therica's apartment. Lindsey and Therica cooked a turkey,
Ginger and her boyfriend brought potatoes and a pie, and Hunter's
girlfriend brought her grandmother's green bean casserole and pound
cake. Afterwards, sleepy with food and zinfandel, Lindsey and Therica
had fallen asleep on the sofa, and he had woken several hours later
from nightmares of hunger and cold.
They were bad enough that he woke Therica, too. She pulled
herself into a sitting position and leaned Lindsey back against her.
"Who was Letitia?" she asked.
"Just someone I used to know."
"Did she die?"
Lindsey whipped his head around to meet calm blue Brahmin eyes.
"What makes you ask that?"
"You kept telling her to wake up."
And so he told her about Letitia, and Lana, and the rest of them.
Larissa, at home in the sock factory; Lambert, who'd been shipped off
to Somalia; Leander, who had already lost an eye in a knife fight; and
finally himself, who had escaped. Therica believed him, and she
listened to him quietly for most of the night. Then she tucked Lindsey
into her bed, told him she loved him, and let him sleep for the next
ten hours.
They'd made fumbling, exploratory love the next morning--Therica,
Lindsey was delighted to discover, was no more experienced with men
than he was with women. She was remarkably verbal in bed, and if she
didn't like something, she told him; if she did like it, she just
moaned. They went out for orange juice and Chinese food on Saturday,
but beyond that stayed in the apartment for the entire weekend, and
only got dressed when Therica's roommates returned Sunday night. He
lived with her unofficially for most of that year, and officially the
next, when Therica talked her parents into paying for a one-bedroom in
Jamaica Plain. Lindsey loved her, and he wanted to do things the right
way. It was easy for him to ignore other girls--it was what he did
anyway--and less so for him to ignore other men, but he did, and he was
faithful, and he told himself that he always would be.
Senior year, Lindsey applied to six law schools, each of which
waived his application fee, and he got into all of them. UCLA gave him
the best aid package, a full ride plus living expenses, and he would
not know until years later that the offer was underwritten by a UCLA
grad and managing partner of Wolfram and Hart. Lindsey moved west in
August, and Therica, who had put off auditions and gotten a job
teaching dance at a day school in Westwood, moved with him.
And there, Lindsey thought ten years later, looking out from his
office onto the lights of Los Angeles, his troubles began.
Los Angeles was different from Boston--not to mention Maine--in
every way. It was sunny all the time, and everyone there seemed
beautiful and well-fed: even the migrant workers seemed better off
than most of the people he'd known in Johnstown. When he walked to
class, both men and women openly appraised him. One evening in the
grocery store, a man about his age, handsome and clean-cut, dressed in
a fraternity cap and faded blue jeans, had been making casual
conversation for about ten minutes when Lindsey realized with a shock
what he really wanted. Matt, his name was, and two weeks later, in his
bed, Lindsey slept with a man for the first time. Clearly, Matt had
done this before, and Lindsey was content to spread his legs and let
Matt fuck him into oblivion. It was a pattern Lindsey found remarkably
easy to establish.
But what really startled him was how easy it was to lie to Therica
afterwards.
She found out, though--they always do, Lindsey thought. It was
idiocy to think that she wouldn't: her father had cheated on her
mother for years, and Therica knew what to look for. Lindsey realized,
later, that she checked for signs of infidelity as subconsciously as he
made sure that the apartment was always warm, and that there was always
five days' worth of food in the refrigerator. He really didn't think
they were going to starve, and she really didn't think he would cheat,
but she smelled it out like a werewolf smelling fear, and she left.
Lindsey dug himself into school, and then into Wolfram and Hart, and he
filled his bed with actors and models of both sexes, and one day he was
thirty and about to defend a child-killer.
He had made his choice and allied himself with Angel, and then he
had remade it, and he had sat at his desk in the empty office that was
now his, and he had thought, all this is mine.
But now he thought: it has to end. He closed the blinds, cutting
the room off from the outside, and without the city lights, it looked
like what it was: empty and sterile. It was time to leave, and it
looked like Wolfram and Hart might just let him go.
Lindsey put the phone back on the hook and called his banker at
home. In ten minutes, the transaction was done: five thousand in
cash, awaiting him at Western Union, and the rest in a trust fund, for
Larissa and Leander's kids. When he left, he taped a note to the door:
I QUIT. He smiled at the guard on the way out.
There wasn't much to pack. He folded some sweaters and jeans into
a suitcase, and threw in a ski jacket. He had a friend in Worcester
who ran a Legal Aid office. He could support himself working there for
a while, and then maybe he'd leave the law completely. Get a master's
in legal theory and teach somewhere: live in a college town, drive a
Hyundai, and watch the leaves change every year. Marry a former
student and have a couple of kids. Forget about demons and dark-eyed
vampires and blind murderesses.
The Western Union was five blocks from his house. He parked on
the street and had the money in ten minutes, and then back into the
Jag. It was about a three-day drive to California, four if he slept.
He could stay with Hunter for a few days--remarkably, after the Therica
debacle, Hunter still spoke to him, although Ginger didn't--until he
got on his feet, called his friend in Worcester, found an apartment.
He hadn't been back East in years. He wondered if it still looked the
same. Los Angeles was a living, volatile organism in a way that
Boston, settled so many years ago, would never be. L.A. glittered and
expanded and shone, while the East seemed to writhe within limits
written years before and never changed.
But at heart, he was still a Maine hardscrabbler, and he'd gotten
in over his head out here. Hunger and cold he could fight, and he'd
thought he could juggle demons and vampires and living an hour from the
Hellmouth (because what was Maine if not a colder version?). He'd
thought he could do it, and he had watched it fall down around him. He
pulled off the highway in Santa Monica to get gas and coffee. He
filled up the car and then got the largest size of coffee they had,
loading it with sugar--black as sin, sweet as love, as Hunter might
have said--before paying at the counter. "You're gonna be up all night
with that," the clerk, a young blond man with a lip ring, remarked.
"I have a long drive ahead of me."
"Going on a trip?"
Lindsey shook his head. "No. Leaving for good."
The boy smiled at him. "Seems like a lot of people around here
want to leave for good. Not many of them do it, though." He handed
Lindsey fifty-seven cents in change. "Good luck to you, man."
Outside, underneath the half moon, the night was filled with stars
and possibility.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Feedback? crescentia@yahoo.com
|
