It was odd, she thought, how neat and clean life wasn’t.
Before (before when exactly she wasn’t sure), there had been clear distinctions, strict rules, defined categories. Things were good or bad, right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant. Life was, for the most part, orderly, operating according to a series of rules she couldn’t name but clearly understood. It was a comfortable, coasting kind of life, and she liked it with the bland approval of one who knew nothing else. She missed it with the sharpness of one who realized the impossibility of a return. She fought at the unfairness of it with the half-heartedness of one who had finally realized that life really isn’t fair at all.
After all, she thought, fair was a thing of then, of before. A vaguely defined but fervently believed in ideal which now, she realized, rarely had a place in reality. Because, she rationalized, if life was fair they would be together. And even if they were apart, even if they had to be, then she would be content with her noble sacrifice. And even if she wasn’t content with it, even if she couldn’t be, she wouldn’t be reminded of the loss at every turn. He and all reminders of him would fade slowly away, dimming as days passed. If life was fair.
Instead the world sharpened and brightened, as if lit by her so-called noble sacrifice. It was another betrayal of before, where doing good was its own reward, and a reminder of after, where good was not easily defined. Before sacrifices were romantic and had no real ramifications. Before she had watched the end of Casablanca and smiled, thought That’s What I’d Do Too, and part of her had hoped for a moment like that one, a moment where she too could nobly give something up for the greater good.
The moment had come and she had, as she had hoped, done the right thing (though she now wondered if right even existed), but the screen of her life hadn’t faded to black as Casablanca’s had. She waited as she walked down the rocky surface, got in the car, and drove home, for the satisfaction to hit. She waited for the sweet resolve that she had done the right thing, the same feeling she got when Ilsa Lund started walk towards the plane, to wash over her. She waited.
It never came.
What did come was pain unlike the kind she had expected. It wasn’t the aching, muted, lulling kind she had assumed would follow her choice (for she wasn’t naive enough to expect no pain at all), but a stinging, pointed, unnerving one that refused her any real peace. She felt as if her edges were rubbed away, as if she was barely held back from flying apart in all directions. Life felt like those first few minutes after you realize your foot is asleep, when you pace slowly, gritting your teeth through the pain, waiting for it to let up and enable you to walk normally again. She waited for the pain to let up, for peace to come, for satisfaction from her decision to finally arrive. She waited for something part of her knew would never come.
Sometimes, lying in bed at night, she would think about going to him. Sometimes she would get to the door before thinking better of it. For underneath all the doubts and all the pain she was still Liz Parker, the girl who walked away. She knew she wouldn’t walk back, no matter how much she wanted to, no matter how much she wondered if what she’d done had been the right thing.
What was the right thing? She wondered that a lot now. She never had to wonder before. People, her family, countless after-school specials and episodes of Saved By the Bell told her what was right and wrong. The rules were neat and clean and didn’t seem to fit into her messy world anymore.
Maria's house was messy. The sink was always full of dishes, the dryer always half-full of clothes, the beds always unmade. It had amazed Liz as a little girl, visiting this wondorous land where you could eat ice cream in your bedroom and actually live in the living room. For Maria and her mother understood that life was messy and chose not to stand in its way. Her family, on the other hand, seemed to wage a constant battle against it. There were Spring cleanings every season and scrubbed floors every week. Liz Parker’s house was neat and clean and for a long time she saw life that way.
When she stopped seeing life that way, her room stopped being neat. It happened slowly -- glasses brought to her bedroom that she never bothered to return, laundry piled up and never done, items dropped and not picked up. Part of her bristled at her surroundings and waited for the urge to clean to strike -- the same part of her, she suspected, that still longed for the Casablanca ending. Most of her was simply past caring. Under the watchful and disgusted eyes of her parents the disorder grew.
“Liz!”
Her heart stopped -- skipped a beat -- started again, just as it always did on nights like this one. Part of her always hoped that if she peered over the edge of her roof she would see a face other than the one she expected, but a good part of her feared that, too. She reached beside her, found a wadded up napkin, and tossed it towards the voice that had called her.
There was a moment’s pause before any response, and Liz felt a small, now rare smile form on her lips. Then the voice returned. “I’m coming up.”
He was quick coming up the ladder, she noted, quicker than Max had been. But far less graceful with the dismount, she decided, as she watched him nearly stumble onto the roof.
The napkin landed in her lap with a glare. “What the Hell was that? Besides nasty.”
“I’ve been in your apartment, Michael, and it is far less sanitary than this." She tossed it back. “I didn’t feel like getting up.”
“I can see why,” he answered, eyeing her cluttered surroundings, though not critically. His eyes met hers and she saw something resembling admiration in them. “Parents having a conniption fit?”
“And a half.”
He nodded and a silence fell.
She leaned back on her chaise, took a deep breath through her nose, and felt muscles in her shoulders relax. It was odd, she had considered more than once, that one of the few places she found any comfort now was in Michael’s company. With Michael Guerin, the person who had unsettled her from the moment he walked into her fifth grade classroom wearing too-tight clothing and carrying a lunchbox popular two years before.
He hadn’t fit in her world, and that had disturbed her from the start. He sat alone at lunch that first day and it didn’t seem to bother him. There were none of the sidelong glances at other tables, none of the silent pleas for friendship that came part and parcel with being The New Kid in Liz’s world.
Soon she noticed that no one came to parent-teacher conferences for him, that he never had a ride home from school. He never had an excuse for being late or absent and eventually teachers stopped asking for them. In Liz’s world kids had parents, children were loved, and Michael’s very existence contradicted those facts.
He was always slightly messy, his clothes always dirty. He even sometimes smelled. He sat at the back of the class and didn’t pay attention, get sent to detention, and would pull down the same grades as Liz on tests. She knew because as teacher’s helper it was her job to hand them back. In Liz’s world, smart kids were in gifted, not detention. Michael Guerin belied that fact, and it unsettled her.
Michael Guerin didn’t fit into Liz Parker’s neat and clean world. So maybe it wasn’t so odd after all, she finally realized, that he fit into her messy one. Michael was another who recognized that life was messy and chose not to stand in its way. She looked at him now not as one who needed guidance but as one who had understood a truth long before she had.
She watched as he sat on the edge of the roof and ran his palms up and down his thighs, eyes cast up towards the sky. Up, and a little to the left. It was cloudy, the sky dark and unlit by stars, and she knew he saw nothing but memories. Her voice cut the still silence.
“I cursed out a customer tonight.”
The words were out of her mouth before she decided to utter them, something that happened frequently now. Before her words were always carefully chosen and considered, delivered slowly and softly to feed conversations or fill uncomfortable silences. Now they burst forth without asking permission in a hurried voice she didn't recognize.
Michael’s eyes fell down to earth and mirrored the surprise Liz felt at the sound of her voice. He responded to her comment with a single raised eyebrow.
She rested her chin on her knees. “I was waiting on Fred -- remember, the guy who always sits at table eight, sends food back and doesn’t leave tips?” She waited for the flash of recognition in his eyes and continued. “So today, I bring him his order and he starts getting on me about how I lack a ‘positive attitude’ and that when he goes to a restaurant he expects ‘capable, friendly service’ and that my lackings in both areas would be reflected in my tip. And I said,” she said, pausing and clearing her throat for effect. “That if he wasn’t happy with the service he could get his own damn food or go somewhere else because I didn’t give a flying fuck what he thought of my attitude.”
He raised his eyebrows and nodded approvingly.
A small smile pulled at her mouth. “It felt great. And strange. I feel like the part of me that’s always told me what’s appropriate and what’s not has just fallen away. I feel like I have Tourrette’s. Without the twitching. I’m acting like -- ”
Michael cut in. “Me?”
Liz nodded, unembarrassed. “Yeah, kind of.”
He nodded. “The ‘rents must be thrilled. A daughter who’s turning into a second-rate version of their former chief cook and bottle-washer.”
“Who said anything about second rate?” She shook her head and bit her lip. “They’re really not. I think they’d like to trade me in for a newer model -- better performance, fewer quirks. Liz Parker version 2.0.”
She was rewarded with a half-smile from the rarely amused Michael at her last comment, who swiftly recalled his impassive facade. His face, she had always noticed, betrayed nothing he didn’t want communicated, and often remained unnaturally still. His voice was similar in that respect -- he had an uncanny ability to remove all emotion from it, to mold it into an empty shell that imparted information with no inflection. She suspected it to be a survival tactic he developed somewhere along the line to intimidate people, and a successful one at that.
The only place he failed, she noted, was his eyes. Which was also why, she guessed, he so often avoided eye contact. It made him look shifty to most people, caused him to be the one most often followed in stores and stood behind during tests. To some it made him look scornful, as if he considered himself to be so far above those around him that he wouldn’t deign to look them in the eye. Those who knew him recognized it as another in his arsenal of survival tactics. Michael Guerin’s eyes hid nothing and he knew it, so he hid them from others at all costs.
He glanced at her for a moment before looking back up at the sky, catching hold just long enough for her to glimpse a flash of concern. He had been checking, she suspected, for any real signs of distress. Finding none he returned to the sky, waiting for her to speak again.
Because she was always the first to ask. On the first night, it had been he who initiated the contact, and that remained true through all their ensuing meetings. It was always his voice calling her name, always his face peering into the diner after closing.
After the day in the cave, he had called in his notice and somehow shifted his schedule so that he shared no shifts with Maria and, therefore by extension, Liz Liz had been comforted at the discovery, and had felt the bottom of her stomach drop out a week later when a watiress called in on one of Michael’s on-duty nights . It was 5:46 -- she remembered the exact minute, could still recall the glowing green digital readout on her alarm clock -- and she had instantly recognized herself as the only realistic replacement for the six to one Saturday shift.
They hadn't spoken all night. She had developed a rather simple method of avoiding contact consisting of two rules: (1) Never looking towards the kitchen when out on the floor, and (2) Counting to five before turning to pick up food after his hoarse “Order up”. It had worked, she suspected, because he was avoiding her as well.
She had felt him watching her while she counted the cash drawer for the night, and had been relieved when he finally fell into the seat across from her. She had looked up and met his eyes and suddenly found herself asking the question.
“How’s Max?”
For the second time he called his eyes from the sky to meet hers, his gaze carrying none of the surprise of before. He had been expecting the question, waiting for it, just as she had been waiting to ask it.
He leaned forward a bit and pressed his hands tightly together. “He’s Max. He tries to be stoic and fearless, but . . .”
“But?”
He paused before continuing, subdued. “He’s still not too great, Liz. He walks around in a daze most of the time, like he lost something and he can’t get it back. Which . . .”
His voice trailed off, and she understood the unspoken conclusion -- he had done just that, lost something he couldn’t get back. Just as they had. She rested her chin on her knees again, considering his words. It was wrong, she knew, that part of her was relieved at Michael’s answer. Relieved to hear that he wasn’t moving on, that he, too, still suffered. It was wrong, she chastised herself, and very selfish.
But nonetheless very real. As were other thoughts, other feelings, just as powerful. She could hear parts of her screaming at the thought of Max suffering, at the thought of the light she always saw burning within him dimming even the slightest. She could feel a burst of the guilt always bleeding in her soul, weakening and diminishing her with slow determination. Before, she would have thought it impossible to feel two ways about one thing. Now she recognized the shallowness of that assumption.
It was the guilt, she knew, that had brought her to Michael, and vice versa. Though Alex and Maria surely understood the pain of being without your love, only Michael understood the texture of the pain that came with the responsibility for the separation. She had known Michael understood from the minute thudded onto the bench across from her that night in the Crashdown, from the moment he let her see his eyes and she saw a part of herself looking back.
“How . . .” He always had a hard time getting the question out. She watched as he took a deep breath and focused on the grayness of the roof between his feet. “How is she?”
He never said her name. Liz paused, sighed, and considered her words carefully. She knew he was looking for an answer, The Answer. The one that would make everything all right, the one that would lift the weight from his shoulders and enable him to return to the world. She knew this because she hoped for the same answer every time she asked him about Max. She knew they both hoped for the answer neither could give.
“Most of the time . . . most of the time she’s just really sad. She’s not angry anymore, Michael. I think she’s come to understand, or at least accept, what’s happened. I know that she misses you. I know that she wonders about you. I know she’s really sad because of that.” She felt a familiar guilt needle her heart. “I -- I feel so bad, Michael, watching her wonder, listening to her talk about you, and not being able to say anything.”
She saw Michael’s head move slightly in a sign of understanding she knew others would perceive as an involuntary movement. She knew that he, too, struggled with this. It had been unspoken but clearly understood from the start that their meetings went no further than each other, a fact alternately comforting and stifling.
It was comforting because their time together was the only time Liz felt remotely at home in her skin. It was the only time the guilt subsided a bit, the only time the isolation faded. It was the only time her smiles, however small, felt real, the only time her words contained only truth. It was the only time she felt close to freedom. She knew that were the meetings to extend beyond each other that feeling would swiftly disappear.
It was stifling afterwards, when she was faced with her best friends and forced to lie. She would smile, say “Nothing” when they asked what she did the night before, and would feel another falsehood fall upon the infinite pile of untruths in her mind. She would feel her breath stolen at the betrayal she committed every time she didn’t tell Maria the one thing she so longed to hear -- how Michael was.
She knew what her answer would be if she ever did tell her: not good. His cheeks had hollowed a bit, and she could see a wildness at the edge of his grief that scared her. She often wondered at the weight Michael carried, wondered how long he could shoulder it without stumbling. It was the fear of stumbling, she knew, that caused the wildness she saw in his eyes. She knew he recognized the power within him and was terrified of where it may lead, terrified at what it had already done.
They had only spoken of Pierce once, and even then fleetingly. They tended to keep their meetings limited to Max, Maria and idle conversation, with liberal amounts of time appropriated for long comfortable silences. She couldn’t remember what they had been talking about or how they had gotten on the subject, but could recall with pinpoint accuracy the look in Michael’s eyes when he turned to her and asked if she could remember what Max had said when Michael had suggested they find Nasedo.
She shook her head, recognizing the question to be a rhetorical one. He looked away from her, a little to the right and above her head, when he answered. “He looked at me like I was nuts and said ‘Nasedo has killed.’ And that was that.”
She felt like someone had jabbed an exposed nerve she had forgotten, and struggled for a way to answer. For she had forgotten, caught up in her misery, forgotten about this gaping wound in Michael’s soul. Her mind flitted through countless answers -- that Max hadn’t known what he was saying, that he was different from Nasedo, that Max had been wrong, that he had done what was necessary -- and found every one wanting.
At a loss, she had been able only to reach over and take his hand, and remembered being surprised at how soft it was. She had thought Michael would have rough hands, scarred hands, hands that matched the life he had lived. It made her sad that he had smooth hands. It reminded her that he was, after all, just a boy. It was easy to forget that.
She watched him now as he sat unmoving before her, his elbows resting on his knees, and was reminded of that night not so long ago. She slid down until her feet hung off the edge of her chaise and used them to clear a space, watching them as they moved through the piles of wrappers and papers to find the cool floor. She sat within three feet of him and was debating whether or not to reach out and touch him when the decision was taken away.
“We’re leaving.” The words came with disturbing finality as he stood up and began to walk towards the window to her room.
She heard every syllable, understood each word, but the sentence made no sense. She craned her neck around to look at him. “What?”
He didn’t turn around. “We’re leaving. The four of us.”
“For how long?” The question came suddenly and her voice sounded funny in her ears. High, tinny, nervous. Desperate.
She watched his shoulders shrug and felt the bottom of her stomach fall out. “Why?” She spoke again in a voice that didn’t seem to belong to her.
He turned around now, his face impassive, avoiding her eyes. “I’ve been having these visions. Things I can’t explain but we all somehow understand. We have to follow them.”
“Follow them where?”
He walked to the edge of the roof and stared out. “We don’t really know. East, somewhere.”
She felt a flash of anger. “Michael, most of the Continental United States is east of here. You can’t just go wandering out there with no idea where you’re headed or what you’re in for.”
He turned around and she saw a coldness in his eyes when he spoke. “We kind of have to, seeing as how I’ve misplaced my alien vision decoder ring. Let me know if you come across it.” The sarcasm was thick. Before she would have thought it cruelty. Now she understood it to be fear.
She ran her hands through her hair, rested her elbows on her knees. “I’m sorry, I was just . . . ” Just what? Stupid, scared, angry? She knew the answer to be all of the above.
She heard him sigh and looked up to see him return to his original seat. “I know what you’re saying. I’d rather know where we’re headed too, but it doesn’t look like we’ve got that option. We have four weeks left before school starts, and if we want to go without raising suspicions we have to take off now. We can’t wait to figure anything out.”
She recognized the truth in his words as well as the fact that she could do nothing to change them. The revelation came with a strange calm, an odd sense of acceptance. Before, she would have railed on about the insanity of his decision, told him that there must be A Better Way. Now, she recognized Better Ways to be few and far between and that it’s usually necessary to go with what you’ve got.
The oddness of the situation still struck her as she considered Michael’s words. “Isn’t it strange to be arranging alien fact-finding missions around the Roswell High academic calendar?”
She raised her head and caught another rare half-smile. “I guess, but we all left normal a long time ago.”
She was returned to the night her grandmother died, a night that felt as if it belonged in another lifetime. In many ways it was, residing in the time not quite before and not quite after, the time during which the world around her began to realign. It was the first time Max Evans held her and the first time she realized that people she loved really could die. It would be nice, she thought, and peaceful, to go back to before, to a time when people lived forever and love was only a dream. It would be calming to go back to a time where making your bed really mattered.
“It’s late.” These two words always signaled the end to their conversations. It was a nod to normalcy in a relationship that was anything but. She watched as he stood and rubbed his hands together, then stood up with him, trying and failing to meet his eyes.
“You’re not coming back, are you?” The words left her mouth before her mind had processed them. She watched as his eyes flew to hers and then away again. “I mean, here. To see me. This is it, right?”
Her heart tensed, bunched up in her chest. She waited for him to shake his head, waited for an uncommitted maybe. She hoped for any answer other than the one she was sure he would give.
“Yeah,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. He met her eyes again and his words came urgently. “I have to make a clean break. I tried to that day I walked away but I didn’t. Not really. Not since I sat down across from you in the diner. I can’t decide if this,” he said, nodding towards her in a reference to their friendship, “Makes things better or worse.”
She wrapped her arms around herself and sighed, understanding his predicament to be the same one she faced. “It’s an impossible decision because it’s both.” The words left her mouth suddenly and she was surprised to find herself recognizing their truth.
“It’s better for us when we’re here but enhances the shittiness of the rest of the world the next morning. This,” she said, nodding as he had to refer to their friendship, “is comfortable because it’s not quite real. It’s a break from reality, from friends with broken hearts and the rest of the world that just doesn’t seem to understand. It’s cheating -- letting go but not really, holding on just the tiniest bit. I left Max so he could follow his destiny but had a hard time not shaking you when you said you were actually going to do it. I cheat every time I ask you how Max is, every time I make you hold something back from him by meeting with you.” She sighed before continuing on in a quieter voice. “The truth is, I made my decision without really knowing what it meant at all. I made this choice and somehow didn’t realize that what came afterwards would really, really suck.”
“Everyone does that.” She was surprised at how quickly he answered her. “No one realizes how bad pain really is until they experience it. The thing is, Liz, I can’t keep doing this, I can't keep this thread of a relationship with Maria alive. I have to keep her safe and the only way I know how to do that is to walk away and stay away. I have to."
"I understand." And she did.
He nodded and let another half smile creep onto his face. “No matter how much it really, really sucks.”
She smiled in return and reached out to tug on one of his sleeves. “Be careful, all right?”
She caught him rolling his eyes and punched him in the arm. He jumped, caught off-guard, and nodded. “I will be.”
And he left.
She stood on the roof with her arms wrapped around her and felt the tightness between her shoulders return with a swiftness she found remarkable. It happened before he even reached the ground, she thought, as she listened to the distant sound of his sneakers thudding onto the pavement.
She took a deep breath through her nose and let it fill her lungs. The air was empty now of Michael Guerin; the half cheap aftershave/half heavy sweat smell that clung to the air around him wherever he went had already been swept away by the night’s slight breeze. She moved to the edge of the roof to watch him walk away.
She would miss him, she realized, as she watched him lope down the street, hands shoved into his pockets. She would miss him more than the messages he carried. She would miss his Michael smell and its hint of unpleasantness, would miss the way he stumbled onto her roof but never quite fell, would miss how he was quick to glare and slow to smile. She would miss his fierce friendship and comfort with silences. She would miss his rough edges and dark corners and the way he looked at her messy life with a smile in his eye. She would miss him, she knew, for as long as he was gone.
He was getting to the end of the block and she wondered if this would be how she would remember him, his back highlighted by streetlamps as he walked away. Max and Isabel would return, she knew, for they loved their parents too much to leave either set behind completely. And Tess, she knew, would follow Max. Of the four it was Michael in danger of never returning.
She felt her heart jump at the realization. She wanted to tell him to slow down, wanted to tell him to shorten his strides and lengthen the pauses between them. She wanted to call out to him and have him turn back and nod at her in a Michael sort of way and give finality to the goodbye they hadn’t really said.
But she didn’t. She stood on her roof and watched the dark sky and hoped he would return soon, but didn’t follow. Because she was Liz Parker and she had kind of said goodbye if not really, and in her messy world that had to be enough.
END
