Word Count: 3043

He didn’t want to go back to the house.

If Paris’d had it his way he wouldn’t have, but his mother kept insisting. After the first few “no”s and “I can’t”s and “I don’t want to”s, his mother’s patience had worn thin and her kind but overly concerned requests had turned stern. He probably could have gotten out of it if he’d let her hear a tremble in his voice or faced her with tears in his eyes, but he was too tired to dredge up even some small piece of his despair. He kept it far beneath the shield of numbness; it was the only way he knew how to go on.

And so, when he ran out of arguments and excuses and reasons to avoid the little house he’d lived in for seventeen years and one month, and when he finally grew tired of his mother calling him at least five times a day to harp and nag and beg him to stop hiding himself away, Paris agreed to join her for a few hours and return home.

He supposed he owed it to his father, after everything, to look through his things and decide what should be kept and what should be thrown out or given away.

He had Chris drop him off. It was an effort to make himself get out of the car when they arrived. Chris was no help; the hand squeezing his and the kiss to his forehead were both reassuring, but this was one thing that Chris would not push him on.

“You don’t have to do this if you’re not ready,” he said.

Paris didn’t think he was ready. He could barely eat, he hardly slept, and most days he wanted to do nothing more than curl in on himself and disappear. The grief was still too fresh. He could still hear his father’s voice, could still feel his father’s hand, could still see his father’s eyes so clearly in his mind it was like he hadn’t even left. Any reminder to the contrary would only disrupt the tenuous balance of this state of okay but not okay, coping but not coping, mourning but not mourning that he’d been in since Friday.

But the longer he avoided it, the harder it would be, and so he forced himself from the car and quickly waved to his boyfriend, crossed through the rusty front gate before he could so much as think about what he was doing, and grasped the doorknob with a determination he didn’t feel.

Then he was inside.

Nothing was different, but it wasn’t the same either. The table was littered with albums and glossy photos spilling from a cardboard box instead of empty cans and discarded bags of junk food. The TV was on, which was familiar enough, but instead of the mindless reality shows his father enjoyed, the screen showcased some moderately attractive news anchor in the midst of their quest to enrage, depress, or reassure the nation with a barrage of mostly grave but sometimes uplifting news.

Paris scowled at it and searched for the remote. He found it under a pile of pictures of himself as a toddler. He ignored the photos for the time being and took out his frustrations by viciously mashing the power button on the remote control. The screen went dark; the rest of the world disappeared with it.

“Baby?” his mother’s voice rang out from the kitchen.

She walked out with a mug in each hand, staring curiously between him and the television.

Paris thought she looked tired. She’d seemed relatively okay when she’d joined him at the Gallos’ on Easter Sunday, but that could very well have been because she’d been making an effort to keep her composure. Without company she seemed somewhat less put together, her hair mused and thrown up into a messy ponytail, her business attire discarded for sweatpants and an old t-shirt. The shirt had thinned and faded in spots, but Paris recognized the logo for his father’s store.

He remembered she used to wear it when she’d helped out at the register, a long time ago, it seemed, when he’d been very small. He never would have thought she’d kept it, and he swallowed thickly to see her in it now.

“Why did you turn off the TV?” she asked him.

“I don’t like watching the news,” he said. “It pisses me off.”

“I only had it on for background noise.”

Paris shrugged and tossed the remote control onto the couch.

“Did you want some hot chocolate?” his mother asked. She offered one of the mugs to him. She’d topped it with whipped cream and a drizzle of chocolate syrup, just the way he liked it.

“I guess,” he said, and took it. He clasped both hands around it and brought it up to his face. He didn’t drink it yet, but inhaled the smell of chocolate and let the steam warm his cheeks.

His mother moved around the coffee table to sit along the edge of the couch, setting her mug down on a coaster she must have dug out of somewhere. Probably the junk drawer in the kitchen. He and his father had never bothered to use them.

She smiled a small, wistful smile and patted the seat beside her, encouraging him closer. Paris took a seat on the floor instead, clearing a spot on the coffee table for his mug while his mother went back to sifting through pictures.

“I found these in your father’s closet,” she explained.

Paris ignored the pictures in favor of looking at his mother. She was as alike him in appearance as his father had been different, from her hair to her nose to the shape of her face. Even her hands—thin, long-fingered, and elegant—bore a strong resemblance to his own. He could have been looking into a mirror if not for her striking curves and the gray-blue color of her eyes.

He knew exactly what his father had seen in her all those years ago—she the charming young college student yearning to escape a dreary home and an inattentive family, and he the reserved traveler made weary from a few years in France spent in the fruitless pursuit of a dead or dying dream. Henri would have seen Paris’s mother as something lively and vibrant in a life turned bitter and lonely. She was beautiful, voluptuous, but hard-working, earnest, and tenacious, too.

Unfortunately, Marissa Reeves made a better student and a better working-class woman than a wife.

“Look at this,” she said, pushing one of the pictures into Paris’s line of sight.

It showed his mother on the beach, lovely and smiling a dazzling smile, no older than twenty, in a blue two-piece Paris was sure his father had quite enjoyed. She crouched low in the sand and surf, holding steady a blond haired baby. By the date on the back Paris knew he’d only been a year and a half, still a baby but fast approaching toddlerhood. He wore a hat to shield his face from the sun and keep his scalp from burning, and someone had pulled a pair of purple shorts over his diaper. His tiny feet sunk into the wet sand. His father wasn’t present in the picture; Paris assumed he’d been the one to take it.

“Look at how little you were,” his mother observed. Her voice went from casual to something fawning and nostalgic.

“I was a baby,” Paris said. “Of course I will little.”

“But you were always the sweetest little thing,” Marissa insisted. “And you loved going to the beach. This was one of the few times your father and I were actually able to take you.”

Paris decided not to say anything about it. He didn’t know what she expected him to talk about; he didn’t even remember it. He turned back to his hot chocolate instead, bringing his face in close to lick at the whipped cream and take a careful sip of the sweet, scalding liquid beneath.

“Here’s one of you and your father.”

His mother shoved another picture at him, set on the drier part of the same beach and showing his father, thinner and less beaten down than he’d been in the end, sitting in the sand under an umbrella with Paris asleep on his lap.

Henri had been a fairly good-looking man in his prime, maybe not handsome in the same way Chris was handsome, but there was something appealing to his average looks. His hair was thick, wavy, and a rich brown, not streaked with gray as it had been in his final years. His nose was somewhat big and a little beak-like, but he had large, bright eyes, long, dark lashes, high cheek bones, and full lips. He was not very tall but not nearly as short as Paris was, and rather than the heavy-set physique he’d developed over the last eight years, he looked thin but athletic in the picture.

In fact, Paris could see more of himself there than he had as his father aged, when weight and premature wrinkles came to take away Henri’s charm.

He had his father’s cheekbones. And his mouth; Paris thought his lips looked more like his father’s than his mother’s, which were not quite as lush.

“He used to love it when you fell asleep on him,” Marissa said, smiling at the picture as one reliving a series of fond memories. “He never said so, but I could tell. He wouldn’t let me move you until you’d woken up.”

She showed him more pictures, some of he and his father together, some of her with him instead, some of the three of them together—trips to the beach, to the park; his first day of kindergarten, sitting out on a sidewalk during a parade on the Fourth of July; birthday parties and neighborhood barbeques; ballet recitals, drawing behind the checkout counter at the store, opening presents at Christmas by a tree decorate with messy, glittering ornaments, child-made in art class. A lot of it Paris remembered, sometimes clearly, sometimes faded beneath the haze of time, but there were many days captured on film that he was seeing for what felt like the first time.

He noticed a few things as the years progressed. Not only did Henri grow older and the smiles more strained, but the baby and the little boy Paris used to be slowly but surely came into his own. It was subtle at first—a flash of pink here, a ribbon there, paired with the sort of shorts and overalls one might expect to see on a young boy. Then there was his hair, fair and curly, not too long as a child but never cut short, styled in a way that looked commonplace before the headbands and the brightly colored hairclips arrived on the scene by the time he started school. The skirts came last, when he was old enough to decide that he liked them better.

His father didn’t hold him in those pictures. His mother did, with the same blinding smile she’d shown when he’d been a baby, but Paris watched the years progress in photos, as his father became a more distant figure, lingering in the background or keeping to himself entirely.

Paris would have liked to blame it on his parents’ crumbling marriage; he knew that wasn’t all, though it would have been easy to pretend.

“Did it ever bother you that I wasn’t normal?” Paris asked. He’d finished most of his hot chocolate in the time it had taken them to look through the entire box of pictures, and the coffee table was very nearly covered by them.

“Who says you weren’t normal?” Marissa replied.

Paris held up one of the pictures to demonstrate. “Not very many boys dress up as Minnie Mouse for Halloween.”

His mother smiled and took the picture from him to fawn over it. “You were happy and healthy,” she said. “That’s normal enough for me.”

“But I was different.”

“Baby, you don’t think I knew that when you were very little?” she asked, setting the picture down to look at him. “I knew, and it never bothered me. It might have been a bit of an adjustment at first, but I didn’t look at it as anything wrong with you. You were still perfect.”

“You were a lot better about it than dad, then.”

His mother’s smile dulled but didn’t fade completely. “It was harder for him,” she admitted. “It’s harder for a lot of men, I think. He thought you’d want to play soccer or baseball, but he was okay with the dancing at first. It’s not like boys don’t dance, too. Then when you were older and it was clear to us that you preferred certain clothes and that you might be… different... he struggled with it. He blamed me for encouraging you to dance, he blamed himself for not being firm enough with you…”

“It wasn't because I danced,” Paris argued. “I don’t like ballet because I’m ... whatever I am... and I’m not like this because I like ballet. It’s not because of you, or because of the clothes either. I wear what I feel comfortable in.”

“I know that, Baby. Your father just… it’s not always easy to adapt when you expect one thing and get another. He never blamed you for it, he just didn’t understand. He’s not the only one. Our neighbors, your teachers and classmates… hell, my sister was even worse about it than your father.”

Paris stared down into the remnants of his drink, wrapping his hands around the mug again as if searching for an anchor. He could feel the emotions building—slowly, seeping through little nicks and cracks in the numbness to tighten his throat and p***k at his eyes.

None of this was easy, not the conversation or the memories, and being in this house again, looking through pictures of himself as a happy child, made it even more difficult, because he’d never been able to talk to his father about any of this. Now he knew he should have. He should have had more courage. He should have realized sooner than he did that Henri LeFay was not all harsh words and narrowed eyes.

“He accepted it… in the end…” Paris said.

Marissa’s smile grew wider again, but it was distorted, twisted with sadness and a relief that had been a long time coming. “Did he?” she asked quietly.

Paris nodded. He took a breath through his nose. It sounded pitiful and wet.

“He told me that… that he knew I was good. He told me to keep dancing,” Paris said. It was quick now, the way the emotions rose in waves, thickening the sound of his voice as his eyes stung with a burning dampness. “I think he was proud of me.”

His mother closed her eyes and lowered her head, and Paris knew she felt much the same as he did, though she did a better job of holding it in. He wondered how much she’d cried since he’d called her to break the news, or if she’d managed to keep her composure the entire time. Now her shoulders shook and she took a heavy, shuddering breath. It was clear to him that she hurt, that she felt just as much sorrow and had just as many regrets—if not more.

After a few more moments had passed, his mother slid off the edge of the couch to join him on the floor. She knelt in front of him, and when he made no move to pull away she gathered him into her arms and held him tightly.

“It’s okay, Baby…” she said—a soft, quavering whisper in his ear. “It’s okay…”

“He said…” Paris tried, but his chest hurt and his breathing was too fast to get it out at once. “… he said he… he said he loved me…”

And then he broke, because saying it made it real, and acknowledging that it was real meant that he’d never be able to say it back.

For the first time since Henri had grabbed his hand and held it tightly, since he’d been wheeled away out of sight, since Paris had sat waiting, only to be told he’d waited in vain, since he’d run and escaped and hidden himself away, since he’d drowned himself in the numbness, and found solace in Chris’s arms, since he’d woken up and refused to let himself feel, Paris finally, truly cried.

He wished he could remember his father as he’d been all those years ago on the beach, young and healthy and handsome. He wished he could remember his parents in love, his mother smiling and his father staring at her like he saw the universe in her eyes. He wished he could remember a time when his father hadn’t been so glum, when he’d been content and satisfied, when it hadn’t mattered that he’d never made it as an artist, because he’d had a beautiful wife and a perfect son and a long, happy life ahead of him.

But he didn’t remember any of that. He remembered the bickering and the arguments. He remembered the looks of dissatisfaction, of discomfort. He remembered the grumbling and the glaring. He remembered his mother leaving, and his father, sullen and defeated, letting her go. He remembered his father wasting away on the couch, losing himself to a depression so deep it ate away at everything he used to be. He remembered the final goodbye, and all the things he hadn’t known how to say.

It hurt, more than broken toes, more than the broken wrist he’d had a year ago, more than any wound he’d ever had as a senshi, because it came from a place deep inside, his heart or his soul or someplace like it, some vital part of him that would never be whole again.

He let it out because it had nowhere else to go, and he let his mother hold him because it was like being a child again, and he could almost hear his father’s voice in the background, low and rough but contented, fulfilled.

“Je t’aimes… je t’aimes… je t’aimes…”