Curtain Call: Part VII

Sloan slept like a log during that first week.

And the next.

And the next.

It seemed that all she was capable of was sleep and emerging occasionally for whatever vegetable soup Emily was reheating from the freezer.

Emily made the largest batches of soup Sloan had ever seen, and together they ate that soup morning, noon, and night.

More accurately put, Sloan ate soup at noon and sometimes night.

As it became necessary to ration food after that first week passed, soup was the most logical response in Emily's opinion.

So much soup.

The original plan - for Emily to go home after Peter arrived in a few days' time - was long gone.

After the days of waiting for him turned into weeks, Emily lost her cheery disposition and went into battle mode, her battlefield being the cabin and her cause being cleanliness.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep her pallet on the floor provided her... Maybe it was having to constantly bat away Sloan’s offers for her to use the bed... Maybe it was that her soup rations were a fourth of what she had been giving Sloan...

Perhaps it was all of the above, but, most likely, it was the deafening worry over her husband’s whereabouts.

During the second week, Emily began pulling out kitchen drawers and slamming them down on the little table. She took everything out of them and began soaking their contents in the sink. She scrubbed at the drawers, muttering curses at her brother for letting his home reach this level of filth.

“I mean, Charlie…” and “Good Lord, Charlie” and “Shit, Charlie-” rang through the air, Emily cleaning and cursing from dawn and until dusk.

Sometime during the third week, she ripped the curtains down from the rods and took them outside to beat against the handrails of the stairs. She beat them so hard that Sloan began to wonder who Emily wished those curtains were, and, later that evening, whose necks she would rather wring far more than the dishcloths and towels she wrung the life out of while doing the dishes after dinner.

Sloan tried to steer clear of this reign of domestic terror.

When she was not sleeping, Sloan was staring out of windows, into her hands, or into the many cups of tea Emily poured for her against her will.

She had offered to help Emily a few times, and Emily had reluctantly agreed, only to quickly chew Sloan out for not doing it properly and shooing her away from the task.

After having been fired from chores enough times to get the message, Sloan sat in a fraying armchair, where she thought about… too much.

She thought about her office - it seemed her body still operated on her prior workplace's now-irrelevant schedule.

Break at ten.

Lunch at noon.

Break at three.

Each day something within her chimed at these times.

...mocking me...

She wondered what she would have been having for lunch each day, if she had never decided on Russian for lunch three weeks before. She got lost on the idea of her pretty tin lunchbox and whether or not she would ever need such a mundane item again.

She used to love packing lunches.

She used to love planning her day - morning coffee, afternoon tea, and evening hot chocolate.

Now it's all tea.

Her satisfying and abundant life had been reduced to cups of continuously weakening tea.

And soup.

She sneered at a rotting log, as if at her past self, for genuinely thinking she had control over anything. She cursed herself for ever having been anxious over a punishingly slow traffic light or a delayed package delivery. She had been so certain of her schedule and her dreams, and she had been so positive of a future in which she had no actual hand.

Pathetic.

She thought of her coworkers, bitter at how they dared to continue their lives without her, and likely quite seamlessly.

She wagered their lives were full of plans and direction and order.

Probably full of gossip, too.

She sipped from her steaming cup of faintly bitter English Breakfast, her third of the day, wondering if they bothered to speak out against what was happening to her in between company meetings or by the coffeepot in the breakroom, or if they had lost respect for her because she ran, or if they gained respect for her for the same reason.

...bitter...

She wondered if they ever even spoke her name.

Not likely.

She had been so sure.

She considered how any and all plans she had ever cherished and fostered were turned upside down and gutted as if Emily were on a mission to scrub them all raw.

Nothing's mine.

No plans, no order, and no sense.

Only time... time...

Emily caught her staring at a broken clock on the wall a little too often during the meals they shared.

“Enough of that," she warned one evening during the third week. She pointed at the clock with a spoon. "It’s not going anywhere.”

Sloan showed no indication of hearing her.

...time...

“Jesus,” Emily cursed before removing the clock right then and there, throwing the door open, stomping down the wooden steps, and hurling the timepiece into the lake as if it were a shot put.

Sloan was shuffling toward the loft before she even heard the splash.

Emily began checking in on Sloan more often after that. She went from bustling around the house in complete mania to watching Sloan carefully out of the corner of her eye at all times. She even woke Sloan one day, the first time in weeks that she had not allowed Sloan to sleep as much as she needed or wanted.

She let Sloan have a cup of watery onion soup before she pointed to a stack of books and a pile of washcloths.

“Dampen these and wipe these books off. They’re filthy.”

The task took her the better part of the morning. Sloan did not even bother reading the titles. She was detached from the task at hand and heaved a sigh of relief when she had finally finished. Just as she was about to get up and go back to bed, Emily unceremoniously dropped a crate in front of her.

“These are Charlie’s records. Be careful not to scratch them any more than they already are. Some of these I gifted to him throughout the years…” Emily trailed off, lost in thought over an album by The Carpenters. “You should listen to this one sometime.”

Sloan had nodded in empty agreement and dedicated the entirety of the afternoon to inspecting Charlie's collection.

Most of the albums were from the 60s and 70s, and their covers were like little paper time capsules.

She held onto the edges lightly with her fingertips as she read old studio information and lyrics. She ignored Emily’s puzzled looks when she took a moment to sniff them, noting that, just like books, they too had their own specific scent, perhaps influenced by previous owners.

Vinyl and turpentine.

She went through many cups of tea as she pored over these records, finding that she was taking longer than necessary as she accidently enjoyed herself. She dipped the rags in a small bowl of water by her side as she removed layers of dust and grime with each swipe. She cleaned the records even more carefully than the covers, gently tipping the cover and letting the record slip into her hand.

She shocked Emily when she asked where she could find a butterknife and an old t-shirt to wrap around it so that she could carefully clean the grooves of the disc.

"Emily?"

Emily sighed as she began hunting down the butter knife herself. "Yes, dear?"

Sloan squinted at the B-Side of an album, noting to listen to a song about a man who was nowhere at a later time. “Do you know where the word 'groovy' comes from?"

Emily did not stop her rummaging. "No clue. Why?"

"Because records," she answered, raising up Rubber Soul. "Are groove-y."

Emily turned and stared at her, searching her face.

"They have grooves!" Sloan pointed at the record and grinned, fading when Emily did not react. "What?"

Emily shook her head. "Nothing, it's just I haven't seen you smile like that before."

Sloan nodded, her face falling a bit. "Oh."

Emily could see Sloan shrink into herself a bit as she put the record into its cover. She rested her hip against the kitchen counter and explained, "I didn't mean to-"

"It's fine, I mean it’s been... a while."

"Yes, I suppose it has. Been… a while,” she handed Sloan the butterknife and pulled out an old, soft rag from a drawer. “Sloan, to be frank, I've been waiting for you to lose it. To... crack. I’m a bit worried that you haven’t yet." She eyed her suspiciously and smoothly added, "It caught me off guard, is all - your joke."

Sloan furrowed her brows severely before demanding, "What joke?"

Emily snorted "touché" as she threw the rag at Sloan, making them both chuckle. She heaved a rather heavy sigh as she opened the cabinet under the sink. “I need a drink. Do you need a drink? I think we need a drink."

"Oh," Sloan dismissed the offer with her hand. "No, I’m, I've never been much of a drinker."

Emily glanced at her as she poured out a double whiskey into a mug and asked, "Are you sure about that?"

“Apparently not,” Sloan answered, accepting the drink and shuddering after her first sip.

"All liquor tastes better once you have enough of it, trust me. How about I put a record on,” she picked one up Sloan cleaned earlier, inspecting it. “This one. I always liked it when my parents played it,” she paused to blow the dust off the record player. “I mean, Simon and Garfunkel were oldies even when my parents were young. They loved them all the same, though.”

Sloan could not help but smile a little, happy to have coaxed Emily into storytelling-mode.

“Charlie loved them more, even. He was obsessed and could tell you anything you wanted to know about any album he owned. Where it was written, the birthplace of any and all contributors, the key the song is in, all of it. He had such a memory for that kind of thing, those details that no one else would bother to or could possibly retain. And he could just appreciate it more than most; I don't know how he could always do that. Anyway, he always said these guys' music felt like reading literature but with a ‘perfectly crafted melody that could turn any prose into poetry,’” she shook her head lovingly. “I’m still not sure exactly what prose is. He told me many times but I... it never stuck.” She placed the needle on the record and went back to her bookshelf moving as a silky-smooth melody came from the record.

While she went back to work, Sloan let her shoulders relax, pleased with the dulcet nature of the album which, half a minute later, made Sloan jump out of her skin.

Emily laughed as she watched Sloan process the complete change of pace the next song offered, “They got you. Nearly a hundred years later, and they still got ya.”

Sloan settled into the rest of the album, deciding early that she did not particularly care for it but that she ultimately did not want to be rude. Emily was bopping along with it, her face brimming with nostalgia as she repeated lyrics of choruses which she had forgotten she knew. She performed parts of it when a song called for it, and Sloan shrugged off the foreign nature of laughter in her chest and warmth in her cheeks. She took another sip of whiskey, whose flavor was all of a sudden much less sharp than it had been before, and got back to her work, keeping an eye on Emily for entertainment.

There were songs of their nation, lovers, and old friends. They were all easy to hum to, and Sloan felt the songs growing on her over the course of the album.

That could have been the second glass of whiskey she poured for herself, but that was beside the point - Sloan was enjoying herself.

What kind of a name is “Garfunkel” anyway?

While Emily changed the album over to the B-side, Sloan brought her mug of whiskey to the window and looked outside.

She did not stare, as before.

She looked.

It had snowed. The scarce evergreen trees were finely dusted with it. There was snow clumping in patches on the ground and clinging to the spiny brown branches of the bare oak trees. Tiny water drops fell off icicles and bounced off the russet fallen leaves on the forest floor.

How did I miss the snow?

She padded to the door and shoved her thick wool socks into a pair of ill-fitting leather boots. She walked outside, glancing up at the bright grey sky as muted music drifted over her shoulders and into her ears. She carried her cup in both hands as she walked down the stairs and onto the dry, brown grass.

For the first time in a month, she walked around the little island with genuine curiosity. The bright, hazy light filtered through the skeletal trees and reflected off of the melting icicles. The light glittered and seemed to dance as Sloan happily crunched along on the patches of snow and dead leaves.

Oh, I do love snow.

She hummed with the now-faint music as she wound her way around the cabin into frozen, unknown corners behind the house that seemed forgotten by time itself, based on how the withered vines wove together even more paint cans and tools than there were around front. She squatted down and lifted a bit of forgotten firewood, giggling when she found a small family of rolly pollies.

She looked up when she heard the chittering of a squirrel in the woods beyond the island and found two fighting, swinging from branch to branch and barking at each other.

Amused and enthralled, Sloan watched as their duel took them to an old, handmade birdhouse that she now noticed was visible from the circular window in the loft she slept in. She took a sip of her whiskey as she wondered if the birds and squirrels missed their old caretaker. She figured he probably gave them nuts and seeds and breadcrumbs and imagined that he sat with them often, maybe watching them with this exact cup in his hands.

How sad!

Her frown faded away the moment she realized a few flurries fell from the sky. She held out a palm and watched the snowflakes collect and melt in her palm. She snickered, her nose wrinkling as a big fat flurry landed on her eyelashes.

The delight immediately draining from her face as she heard tires.

She staggered ever so slightly as she stepped over and around the interwoven junk under the A-frame’s supporting beams. She watched from behind an empty tin trash can as a familiar truck approached. She had no idea how loud her breathing was but hoped it was quiet enough.

“You son of a bitch!”

Sloan heaved a sigh of relief as heavy footsteps pounded down the steps above her head.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Sloan came out of hiding to join Emily as she berated her husband.

She made it around to the front of the cabin and watched as Emily bolted across the bridge to throw her arms around Peter's neck. She smiled at Peter's grin as he looked down at his endearing spitfire of a wife who was chastising him and likely leaving bruises with her fingertips as she prodded his chest for emphasis with each curse.

Peter looked up for a moment to wave at Sloan, and she answered with a wave of her own. He clearly had not shaved in weeks, maybe since the last time they saw each other. He looked a bit thin as he helped his wife clear out the bed of the truck with more food and supplies, including a fishing pole. They moved quickly once they realized the snowfall was picking up.

They had just gotten everything onto the ground as Sloan crossed the bridge to approach them, her arms wrapped around her torso to shield from the wind.

“...and I don’t care if they were monitoring radio channels, you still should have found a way to tell us. Christ almighty, a carrier pigeon would’ve done the trick, Pete. You-”

“I imagine you have a story or two for us, Peter,” Sloan interjected.

“You bet your ass he does,” Emily growled. “He better have a thousand for how long it took him.”

Peter rolled his eyes and gently said, “I have more than that, Miss Sloan.”

Sloan shivered and watched as he opened the truck door and reached under the seat for an ancient, cracked shoe box. He strode over to her, carrying the box as if it were a holy relic.

She took it.

He didn't...

Her bottom lip began to quiver as she read her mom’s handwriting on a piece of peeling tape on the lid.

Coconut.

Her knees hit the dirt just as the wails started ripping from her lungs.