Chapter Nine - Paul #2
There are tears in my eyes as I set the comic book down. The tears form right as one of the giggling girls turns and spots me walking off.
“Who’s that?” she asks her friends less than discretely.
I’m making for the door as her friends answer, but I can only make out one reply.
“Some poor little boy, looks like.”
Tinkling laughter follows me out the door.
And then he took me home after, held me in his arms.
Said he’d never let me go.
It’s hot.
We never went to the abandoned place this time of day, mid-afternoon when the heat is at its peak.
I wipe sweat from my forehead with my arm.
I’m sitting on the countertop, surprised it didn’t break, but it creaked a little.
The one-eyed squirrel is just where we left it, like it just waits and waits until we come by.
I feel as if I owe it an apology for coming here alone.
The pile of bottle caps are next to me. You’d think we’d been trying to build something.
You’d think we’d each added a piece, one by one, for a purpose.
But it’s just a pile of bottle caps.
It means nothing.
I don’t know why I’m here. It’s not like he’d be here waiting, with an explanation, with an apology, and my relief would be immense.
That’s the sad part. That I’d feel that way after days of nothing, after all of this, I’d be okay.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t be a fool, but there was no stopping it. There was no helping it.
Maybe that’s what it was.
A fly buzzes around my head, and I wave it away.
I hear a car on the street and it seems for a second that it’s slowing down, but it moves on.
I don’t even care if it’s that same square again, come to chase me out of here.
Maybe the guy wouldn’t care so much if it was just me. He probably wouldn’t even notice.
I wonder what would happen if I just sat here.
All day, all night, and just stayed right here.
Just sat right here on this busted countertop with the flies and the bees and didn’t move, didn’t do anything else ever again.
Aunt Amy would look for me, of course, but she wouldn’t think to look here. This place was special, our own.
My eyes sting.
So, I couldn’t even count on her finding me. It would just be him, it would have to be him, and he’s gone.
My eyes blur.
I say it out loud. “He’s gone.”
The walls seem to sag a little at this news. The droopy-eyed windows get droopier. The squirrel’s one eye seems to get a little misty. This is just a stupid pile of shit now. A place nobody wants.
I get down off the countertop.
I reach over and smack the pile of bottle caps to the floor, making a racket, frightening a pigeon nearby, its wings fluttering and feathers flying.
I turn my back on the mess, the thing we’d built, for no reason, but it doesn’t matter now.
He’s gone.
I’m at the part where éponine has taken a bullet for Marius.
I used to read this part with sympathy, but I always knew—like anyone who reads this knows—that Marius wasn’t meant to be with her.
She was going to die and she wasn’t pretty.
Hugo wrote her as looking so malnourished as a teen that she looked middle-aged.
She was missing teeth, had hardly any clothes, and drank too much with her sister.
She was supposed to contrast with Cosette, because they’d grown up together with the scummy innkeepers.
The Thènardiers put Cosette in rags, they didn’t take care of her, but they spoiled éponine.
So it was fitting, some kind of universal justice, that Cosette would grow up to be desirable and éponine would not.
Marius wasn’t meant to love such a spiraling disaster, such a tragic casualty of poverty and corruption.
So, I used to think it was good éponine died when she did. Her life would have gotten worse, after all. She would have ended up alone in a room with peeling paint, stained curtains, prostrate by a dirty fireplace, with a bottle in her hands and tangles in her hair.
It was her lot. Someone must bear the burden of unrequited love, and she is the patron saint.
I would read right past this part, over and over, countless times, allowing éponine to pass into the night like the smoke from a snuffed-out candle. Then I would just move on, like everyone moved on, including Marius.
And now I take her last words like a knife into my chest. And then, do you know, Monsieur Marius, I believe I was a little in love with you.
I say the words to myself. I believe I was a little in love with you.
I do it again, as Aunt Amy comes into the sitting room to turn on some dinner music on the High-Fi.
It’s a low, waltzing tune that I don’t recognize.
It clashes with my mood, fingernails on slate that I can feel in my teeth.
And within it, I can almost see poor éponine, disguised as a boy, dying in the arms of someone she loved.
And he just let her die.
He did.
I nod to myself. How did I not see it before?
Marius could have lifted her up and taken her to a physician.
He would have found one in Paris somewhere.
Javert would have helped. Jean Valjean. Cosette, even.
I can see it now. He whisks her away from the barricade and takes her to safety, covering her bleeding wound with his own coat.
And it’s an entirely different story after that.
Maybe Marius would have forgotten all about his revolution.
His Cosette. His friends. Maybe he would have felt some tenderness for a girl who nearly died so he’d live.
But he let her die.
That thought settles in me; it nestles so deep down in the crevices that it sprouts roots.
I believe I was a little in love with you.
My heart pounds against my ribcage like a lunatic trying to break out of a cell. It’s true. Marius let éponine die. He didn’t love her back and that was why. And she gave it up all too soon, all too early. Marius was sure of how she felt. He could see it written all over her face. He knew.
“Paul, dinner will be about ten minutes,” Aunt Amy calls from the kitchen.
He let her die.
I see it all now with new eyes, as if my old friends have removed their masks to reveal their true selves. It’s like changing the camera angle in a film, just so, to see the villain hiding in the shadows all that time while the hero thought he was safe and alone.
“Paul?”
She could have been saved.
“Paul?”
But he didn’t do it.
I hear Aunt Amy near me, wiping her hands on her apron. “Paulie, what’s the matter?”
“He let her die,” I say, so quietly.
“I beg your pardon?”
I feel like I’m outside of myself, watching, as I launch my book across the sitting room. It smacks into the wall, knocking down a decorative plate, breaking it. Aunt Amy jumps back.
I shout, “He let her die!”
“Paul!”
I stand. “He let her die!”
She reaches for me. “What’s wrong with you?”
I pull away from her. My hands are fists, beating against the winged-back chair. “He let her die !”
Aunt Amy’s grip on me is firm, her big man-hands on my shoulders, pulling at me, getting me away from the chair. And I continue, “He let her die, he let her die, he let her die!”
“Paul.” Her voice is softer, but her arms around me are rough and tight like a straight-jacket.
I fight her, try to pull away from her, but the tears are streaming and there’s no way for me to stop them. I fall to my knees, I can’t fight it, and so I weaken and fold like a collapsing tower.
“It’s all right, Paul—it’s all right—”
“…just let her die…” My voice sounds weak and faraway.
“It’s all right…”
“…let her die…”
And somewhere I see myself, in his arms, telling him before my death dream ends:
I believe I was a little in love with you.
Aunt Amy draws me a hot bath.
With bubbles.
Because, clearly, I am a child. A child who just threw a tantrum. And now needs his bubble bath.
But I don’t want to turn my nose up at the hot water with Avon bubbles, so I get in.
I hear Aunt Amy down in the kitchen, and I have a sudden ache in my chest for her.
She would know more than anyone what it’s like to be left behind.
She had to watch all her friends get picked, like flowers being plucked from the garden, and walk down the aisle with their fathers.
Daisy, Iris, and Rose. Nobody wanted Aunt Amy, large with misshapen petals, and she endures this.
Before I showed up with my problems and the cops, asking her to shelter me, she endured it alone.
As I let the hot water relax me, I wonder if I’ve dreamed this too.
I wonder if I’ve dreamed everything into life, including my own family and what a cruel thing the mind does.
When I wake, will my mother be alive? Will Pops be by the bedside, worried?
Will Aunt Amy be married, and I’ll have cousins that come to my birthday parties because I’m neither too young nor too old?
I sink into the water until it covers my head, the sound of it rushing in my ears.
Then nothing but my own heartbeats, counting…
Waiting.
I pick up the broken decorative plate off the carpet.
It looks like something my grandmother had, and it might well be. It’s broken in three places. I find some craft glue and carefully begin putting the plate back together. I sit on the floor, concentrating, until Aunt Amy appears above me, smelling like oregano.
“Don’t worry about that right now, Paul.”
“I’m almost done.”
“I made some soup for you.”
I glance up at her.
“Come on. Before it gets cold.”
I abandon the plate and sit at the kitchen table. Even though it’s near ninety outside, the sight and smell of chicken vegetable soup makes me feel chilled — and a foot smaller and ten years younger. There’s even a plate of buttered bread.
“I’m not sick,” I say. “I’m just —”
“Just have some. You’ll feel better.” She takes a seat across from me with a glass of wine and a plate of cheese and crackers.