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eilidh-eternal · 7 months

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You don't like silence

Part of the Metanoia series | Part 1 | Masterlist |

The house is silent, but inside your head a brumous storm swirls, wispy tendrils of fog curling around delicate gray matter.

Your routine—watching Johnny walk Isobel to school, going to work and coming home, just in time to glimpse Johnny leaving to retrieve her—has changed.

You still watch from the window, mug bleeding warmth into cold, stiff joints from between your palms. Peer around the curtains every morning as the pair amble down the pavement together.

A new month brings a steady influx of meetings and end of quarter reporting, projected sales and last minute production tweaks, but your days are no busier than normal. Rarely miss a lunch break. Leave no later than three each afternoon.

Dinner, if you have any, is ready by five.

Even so, restlessness lingers in the midnight moons hanging beneath your eyes, darkens the air around you with somnolent clouds, and you list in the torpid deluge that rains down.

Sleep evades you altogether most nights, and you’ve made a game of picking out patterns in the knockdown. Faces, animals; nebulous, nameless things.

Some nights, when the faces of strangers, burned into your retinas, find their way into the patterns of textured drywall, you listen.

Isobels room must be on the other side of yours, beds sharing a wall. On the nights you manage to make it upstairs, you can hear them both. Isobel’s slow and measured pronunciations. The lilt of Johnny’s voice, filling in the blanks where she pauses on a word she doesn’t yet know.

They’ve finished all of her animal books, which means the imitated roars of big cats and bleats of farmyard animals have morphed into exaggerated accents. Sing-song rhymes about the importance of kindness, accepting differences, and other life lessons told through colorful illustrations and whimsical narratives.

Every now and then, if you’re lucky, she falls asleep within a few pages, and you can pretend that the low, pillowy rumble of Johnny reading is just for you. A gentle coaxing made of velvety words, swaddling your mind, heavy with exhaustion, and cradling it to his chest against the maelstrom you’re spiraling in.

Sometimes she stirs, woken hours later in the placid, milky hours before dawn, just as your eyes begin to droop. Tiny feet patter across the hardwood like rain, muffled in uneven intervals by what must be a rug or runner in the hall, on her way to Johnny’s room or the washroom maybe.

You wonder if it’s full of frilly, feminine things, her room. Pinks and purples, dolls and plushies. Does she have princesses or ballerinas on her bedding? Do posters and drawings line her walls or does floral, pasted wallpaper?

She likes Mulan, you remember. A warrior. Fighter. Soldier. Like Johnny.

Probably not so frilly, then.

Perhaps they could make a fighter out of you. Press you into the mold of their little family–strengthened by loss and galvanized with love–and breathe life into clay limbs. Carve a soldier from the malleable earth. Shape you into something useful.

Now, most of your nights are spent huddled in the living room, listening to the droning of the television. Throw blankets suck you down into the sofa like quicksand and each breath draws them tighter and tighter around you, filling pockets of air with crushed velvet and fleece. Tonight, you let them swallow you whole. Sink willingly into a latibule of plaid and warm cashmere.

The cold and quiet of your empty home isn’t so bad when you can hear Johnny moving about on the other side of the wall. Isn’t so unbearable when the warm timbre of his voice chases away the numbing fog that muddles your head.

There are nights that he calls you, like he knows. Knows that you're drowning in the silence.

He does that now, after he puts Isobel to bed for the night. Calls to ask about your week. Casts a lifeline into the churning ocean between you, procellous waves lofting you on spuming peaks, and calls your name from the battered, broken shore.

A lighthouse calling to a ship, lost in the mist on a perilous sea.

Last Thursday he asked about the cookies you made with Isobel. Asked if you would be willing to share the recipe with him–teach him–so that he could make them with her for a school event coming up in the spring.

The tenderness with which he speaks of her is a balmy breeze for your gelid heart. Soothes the burn of ice floes in your veins. Melts weeks of tension from aching muscles.

Now, his voice is somber, pensive, as it filters through the lack of insulation between you. “Friday. No, ah havnae told ‘er yet. Jus’ got the call.” He pauses, and you think you hear a muffled sigh. He sounds tired, too, accent thicker than honeyed whiskey rolling off his tongue, dropping consonants in favor of deep, throaty vowels. “Aye, ah ken. She’ll be happy tae see ye though.”

He’s on the phone, talking about Isobel. They must have family visiting soon, or a family friend if Isobel knows them well enough to be excited.

You wonder what the MacTavish family is like, if they’re a rowdy bunch. If they’re a large, extended family. Johnny seems like the kind of man who comes from a close knit community, one where you grow up down the street from your cousins and spend summers terrorizing small towns together.

“I’ll talk tae ‘er in the mornin’. Ah- No.” There’s a pause again, and even with layers of sheetrock separating you, you can feel the weight of his silence. “No, Mam. She’s… ah worry. Leavin’ ‘er like this. Piss poor timin’.”

He’s leaving? Without Isobel?

It’s muffled through the wall, and you feel like you can’t have heard that correctly. He mentioned the army, but you had thought, with a child at home, that his work wouldn't be the sort that requires travel.

Ice floes turn to glaciers in your chest, frozen spikes threatening to pierce brittle, fragile muscle, and the clouds swirling overhead descend upon you.

Lost in the mist, and he’s leaving.

He’s leaving, and he’s taking the sun with him.

“Ye cannae keep it from the lassie forever, John. Ye havnae even told 'er what ye do?”

Christ, this woman…

“She knows ‘bout the army,” he defends. “Cannae say much more.”

Fenella MacTavish clucks her disapproval. “Ye’re heids full of mince.” Dishes clatter and a cupboard closes a bit too forcefully on the other end of the line.

Johnny runs a hand through the disheveled strands of his hair, overdue for a trim, well outside of regulation length. “Mam—”

“Dinnae ‘Mam’ me,” she cuts in. “John Alexander MacTavish, ye tell that lass what she’s gettin’ herself intae—or I will.”

“Mam,” he tries again, voice pitched low, “Not yet. Cannae send ‘er off, naw like I do wi’ Bell. It’s safe enough here.” You’re safe with him here. “Dinnae like knowin’ she’s alone—Christ, I can hardly stand tae have the wall between us when I ken she’s hurtin’—but there isnae anythin’ I can do that’s naw already been done. Kate’s made sure of that.”

Fenella huffs and he can’t quite make out the garbled muttering on his end, but he has a fair idea of what his mother is blathering about beneath her breath. “Kirsten—have ye gone tae see 'er?” she finally asks, mercifully shifting the conversation out of your direction. “Has Isobel?”

“No,” he admits, and guilt twists in barbed coils through his chest.

He’s been meaning to, to drive up for the weekend and take her to visit her mothers grave, now that she’s older. Stay with her gran and look through the old albums. She's only ever seen the few photos they have at home, hanging in the hall near the kitchen.

Sometimes she asks about her. If she liked the things she likes. The way rain freezes on the tall grasses and tree branches in the winter, making glass gardens of trellises and window boxes. Extra whipped cream and blueberries for her pancakes.

If she would have walked with them to school in the mornings. Take her to the park down the block in the summer. Hiking in the fall, looking for wisps darting about beneath the fallen abscission.

Isobel is so much like her mother there are days Johnny swears it’s her refusing to eat the dinner he’s made. That it’s her complaining about cold weather and overcast skies in the heart of winter, bemoaning how long they have until spring revives the land. Swears it’s her voice that wakes him in the middle of the night. Her ghost, standing in the dimly lit doorway of his bedroom, a blanket pulled ‘round her shoulders and a teddy dangling from her hand.

“I’ll take ‘er, then.” Johnny can hear the grief that tempers his mothers voice, turning anguish to steely resolve. “I’ll come by tomorrow evening, let ‘er have a few hours with ye at home before ye say yer goodbyes.”

“Thank ye, Mam,” he says on a strained exhale, lungs rattling with fragments of his own grief. It slices into old wounds until pockets of air become sanguineous aquifers, bubbling up in his throat and leaving a sour, metallic taste on his tongue.

“I meant what I said earlier,” she reminds him. “Ye tell yer lass. Dinnae leave ‘er in the dark like ye did Kirsten.”

The line goes silent and Johnny sinks back into the old corduroy sofa, pushed up against the wall beside a shelf overflowing with picture books in the living room, and a ragged sigh unfurls from his chest.

The television across from him is dark, turned off when he took Isobel upstairs for bed, but he can hear an old rerun of Taskmaster playing softly behind him.

He listens, every night, for you. For the sound of your fridge, opening and closing. The soft ‘clink’ of porcelain against granite. The oven timer or the microwave.

He prefers the former. Knows, after these last few weeks, that you cook when you’re in a good mood. Usually go to bed soon after. The sound of the microwave precedes long, muted evenings and little sound from your side of the wall. He won’t hear the stairs creak beneath your sluggish feet until the wee hours of the morning. If at all.

He listens in the mornings, too, while he makes Isobel’s breakfast. Makes sure he can hear you doing the same. Smiles to himself when he glimpses movement in the window beside your door, a miniscule swaying of the curtain, and he holds Isobel’s hand a little tighter as they navigate lingering ice patches on the pavement.

The phone call with his mother, making arrangements for Isobel, masked the sound of your movements earlier, and his fingers twitch against his leather phone case.

When your side of the wall is quiet, he knows a storm is brewing; that you’re sitting in the eye of it, waiting for the walls to close in around you.

He doesn’t know if you’ve eaten tonight. Can’t hear anything beyond the muffled television and occasional creak of the sofa beneath your shifting weight.

So he calls.

One… two… three… four… “Hi, Johnny.” Soft and breathy. Like the air the words are spoken on has borrowed from the softness of your lips as it spills into the receiver.

This is the way you sound when you’re tired, he’s learned, all soft and rounded syllables. Too exhausted, even for your own nervous habits. You don’t have the bandwidth to explain every little thing like you normally would; don’t bother with rationalizing your actions aloud.

“Hi, bonnie. What’s cookin’?” It’s cheesy as hell, but it earns a huff of a laugh from you and it tempers the jagged edge of his worry—a knife, lodged between his ribs.

“I, uh… I had leftovers. Takeaway, from a work thing.” He’s never seen you with takeaway. Always canvas bags full of groceries and the occasional frozen box dinner.

How empty is your fridge? When was the last time you went to the grocer?

“Didnae take ye for the ‘easy’ type. Ye always make me work for it.”

“Work for it?” He can picture the pinch of your brows. The way your lips quirk to the side when you’re confused.

“Aye, got me makin’ puppy eyes an’ beggin’ for yer scraps.” You laugh again, more of a scoff, but it eases some of his worry all the same.

“When have I ever made you beg, Johnny?” He’s been begging any higher power that will listen to see you smile again, and he’d give anything to see the smirk he knows is dancing at the corner of your mouth right now.

“Could do it tomorrow,” he blurts before he can think better of it. “Come over. Show me that recipe again.”

Don’t make him tell you he’s leaving over the phone.

“I thought… you said the charity event is at the end of March, right?”

“Aye, but I think I’ll need a few lessons ‘fore my bakin’s fit for auction.”

He needs to know—needs to see—that you’re well before he goes.

“And you want to start tomorrow?”

“Why not?” He’d have you baking in his kitchen now if it weren’t for the late hour.

There’s a stretch of silence, interrupted only by the faint crackling of static and the sound of your breathing. “Do you have flour? Sugar? Anything to bake with?” you ask, and he answers with a proud ‘yes’. “Okay… okay. I can come over after work tomorrow.”

“I’ll ‘ave Bell home early then. She’ll want tae help.” Your amused sigh echoes across the line, followed by the faint rustling of fabric and then the soft pattering of stocking-clad feet over hardwood, fourth and fifth step creaking softly as you climb the stairs. “Off tae bed?”

Another sigh–on the tail-end of a yawn, he realizes. “Yeah. Well, trying. Don’t get a lot of sleep these days,” you admit, and though he’s successfully abated the storm of your thoughts, he wishes he could disperse it entirely.

Be the shelter you seek, at the very least.

He’d nestle you in the warmth of his bed, tucked close and sleeping soundly in the cage of his arms. Anchor you to him with a leg hooked between yours, whispering adulation against the howling, taunting winds.

He would make himself a rock to let your tempestuous thoughts batter and besiege. Weathered and whittled down to pebbles on a beach, he’d roll in the undertow alongside you. And when he is but sand on the ocean floor, still, he would drift and settle wherever the storm of you takes him.

“I used tae read for my sister when we were weans. She’d wake, spooked from a dream, and come tae my room in the middle of the night.”

“You have a sister?” A door clicks closed and blankets whisper over sheets as you settle in for the night. “What’s she like?”

“A lot like our Mam. Headstrong. Stubborn.”

“Are you the oldest?” You sound further away. Muffled. Like you’ve got the blankets pulled up to your nose and the phone beside you on the pillow.

“I am,” he lilts.

“She gets it from you, then,” you murmur, and his chest tightens.

“She got a fair number of things from me, I’d wager.”

He continues on, speaking just above a low, gravelly whisper. Reminiscing his early years and the trouble the two of them got up to. Thick as thieves and wild as the kellas cats roaming the highlands.

Your interjections dwindle, turn to soft hums and slow, even breaths. Sleeping.

He listens for a few more minutes to the soft, sweet sounds you make, little chuffs and sleepy hums, the susurrations of shifting sheets and nightclothes, and he whispers into the darkness, “Goodnight, sweet girl.”

Work passes you by in a blur, meeting after meeting chipping away at the hours and minutes ticking by on the analog clock perched on your desk.

The drive home is uneventful and it feels as though you’ve passed through a wormhole somewhere along the way. Can’t quite remember making the turn into your neighborhood from the main road.

Normally, Johnny would be leaving to retrieve Isobel from school right now, but as you gather your things and step out of the car you hear your name being called from several houses down.

Braids bounce and red wellies squeak as Isobel darts ahead of Johnny, weaving around patches of ice to get to you, and you step up onto the pavement just in time to keep her from running into the road.

She barrels into you, wrapping her arms around your leg and smooshing her face against your slacks. “Ye’re back!” she squeals, fingers curling into the fabric.

She’s leaving.

Your hand settles atop her head, soft wisps of curls tickling the pads of your fingers where they’ve escaped their plaits. “Where did I go?” you ask, and she tips her head back to look up at you.

“Bubby said ye were busy with work. Sometimes he gets busy too, and I have to stay with my gran.”

They’re both leaving.

Johnny’s caught up with her, lingering a few steps away near the walkway leading to your door. When you look to where he stands, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, windbreaker bunched up around his forearms where a tattoo peeks out, the corners of his eyes glimmer.

A smile curves the corners of his mouth, and it’s an odd mixture of grief and happiness that flickers there in the crook of his lips and set of his brow, sloped upwards and creased in the middle. His hair is longer than you remember, scruffy sides and tufts of mohawk curling at the ends, loose strands tousled around his face.

Wind blows at your back and a single tear tracks down the sharp plane of his cheek, disappearing in the dark shadow of stubble that lines his jaw.

“I have been busy with work,” you confirm, peering down at Isobel once more. “But I didn’t leave.”

You’re staying, and they’re leaving.

The wind picks up and she presses closer, shielding herself from the cold behind your frame. “Let’s get ye inside and put yer book bag away. Then we can catch up over cookies an’ milk,” Johnny says as he closes the distance between you.

“Cookies?!” Her excitement carries on the wind, and his smile sharpens, bright and hopeful, but the whetted edge of sorrow undercuts the warmth.

“Aye, but we’ll have to make ‘em ourselves.” He brushes a stray lock from her eyes, fingers brushing against yours where his hand settles beside it on her crown, and dread blooms low in your stomach where warmth should.

She ducks away from you both, bolting towards their front stoop, and you’re left with both of your hands hovering in the air, his half curled over yours, staring after her.

You pull away first, adjusting your bag on your shoulder. “I just need to sort this–” You gesture to the tote full of binders and your laptop. “–and I'll be right over.”

He fishes his keys from his pocket and takes a step back, towards Isobel. “We’ll be waitin’,” he says with a wink, and turns to take her inside.

There's flour in your hair and matching handprints on your slacks, and neither Johnny nor Isobel have fared much better. You’re all a mess, and the cookies you’ve made are tantamount to your disheveled state–lumpy, dry masses of something more closely resembling a biscuit.

“Dunno what ah did wrong,” Johnny muses, breaking one in half and inspecting the crumbly texture.

You sit beside him at the kitchen table, watching Isobel dunk half a cookie into a glass of milk. “It’s the butter and flour. The ratio is imbalanced–not enough fat.” She doesn’t seem to mind, stuffing the entire piece in her mouth and readying the next, fingers covered in crumbs that fall in her milk.

Johnny shifts beside you, sliding out of his chair and taking a bite out of his cookie as he moves towards the fridge. “Still tastes good,” he says around a mouthful and pours two more glasses, placing one down in front of you when he returns. “But I’ll need another demonstration when I’m back, I think.”

You take a cookie from the plate in the middle of the table, breaking off a chunk to dunk in your milk, and ignore the mirrored sensation in your chest. You knew this was coming. You know he’s leaving.

“When you’re back? From where?” you probe. No need to dance around the subject.

He shifts again, uncharacteristically nervous, and speaks softly. “Have to leave for a little while, for work,” he explains. Your cookie turns pliant between your fingers and you bite off the softened corner, chewing slowly while you listen. “Willnae know where they’re sendin’ me to until the briefin’.”

“When are you leaving?” You stare down at the crumbs swirling in your glass.

“Tomorrow morning.”

The foreknowledge of his impending departure doesn’t make the break any cleaner. The fracturing feeling in your chest widens into fissures and chasms, jagged edges crumbling, tumbling down into the festering darkness.

When you lift your gaze you find that he’s been watching you–studying you–and his hand has crept across the table, close enough you can feel the warmth of him. “How long?” It comes out wobbly. Unsteady.

You’re drifting out to sea again.

“Few weeks. Maybe a month.” Your chest feels like it’s caving in.

There’s a knock at the door. A canary in a coal mine, warning come too late.

“Gran!” Isobel’s chair nearly topples as she pushes back from the table, racing from the kitchen to the front door.

Johnny’s hand covers yours, long, callused fingers curling around your clenched fist and squeezing. “I’ll be back before ye know it,” he murmurs, smoothing a strand of hair away from your face and tracing the curve of your jaw as he stands.

He only goes as far as the kitchen doorway. Your heart’s already somewhere in the North Sea.

“Hi, Mam.” He’s greeted by an older female voice and pulled into a hug by a woman a whole head shorter than him. Isobel hovers nearby, bouncing excitedly from foot to foot, and tugs at the older woman’s–her grandmother’s–cable knit sweater.

“Gran, come meet our friend!” she says, and tugs again until she lets go of Johnny.

You stand from the table on wobbly legs, fighting to balance your listing emotions and put on a warm smile as Johnny’s mother slides past him into the kitchen.

The resemblance between the three of them is uncanny. Johnny shares his mothers dark coloring, rich hair and warm skinned, and they all have the same eyes–steely hues of grey-blue, spiraling outwards from inky pupils like storm cells.

“So, this is the lassie next door ye willnae stop glaverin’ on about?” she asks no one in particular as she openly appraises you.

“Mam–” Johnny begins, a simmering warning, but she holds up a hand to silence him.

They carry themselves in a similar manner, in the set of their shoulders and broad stance. She may not stand as tall as he does but she’s no less imposing, and it’s an effort not to squirm under her scrutiny.

Seconds feel like hours as she looks you up and down, cataloging the flour on your pants and in your hair, glancing to her left where Johnny stands in a state of equal disarray, and a knowing look flickers like lightning in her storm cloud eyes.

“It’s good tae finally put a face wi’ a name,” she says, smiling, and pulls you into a hug, too. “Call me Fenella, or Fen, whichever ye like.”

You return the gesture hesitantly, looking over her shoulder to Johnny for guidance and finding none. He simply smiles back at you from where he leans against the doorway, something unreadable in his expression lingering beneath it.

“It’s nice to meet you too… I- I’d love to stay, but should probably be heading home. I have an early morning and wouldn’t want to intrude on your visit,” you say by way of excuse.

“Ah’m naw stayin’ long, dear,” she explains, finally pulling away. Isobel returns to her side, pressing her shoulder to her thigh, and Fenella’s hand settles on the crown of her head. “Here tae take the wean for a stay wi’ her gran.”

“Is yer bag ready, leannan? D’ya have all yer books for school?” Johnny asks from where he stands, hands having found their way into his pockets again. His shoulders droop, broad frame deflating before your eyes. Leaving her behind, even with his mother, takes a toll on him.

Isobel leans around her gran to say, “I’ave all my books. And Mr. Ghost.”

“Goan an’ get yer things then, Bell,” Fenella ushers her out of the kitchen, climbing the stairs behind her to her room.

You watch until they disappear above the half open staircase, but Johnny has been watching you. Watching you navigate the shoal of your emotions, razor sharp rock scraping against a flimsy hull.

“C’mere, lass,” he entreats, one arm outstretched towards you, and your feet move of their own accord, carrying you forward until his hand settles on your shoulder, momentarily moored in the eddy of a tide pool. “Didnae mean to tell ye in the middle of… this.” He gestures above him to the sound of footsteps overhead. “Only got the call yesterday.”

With your hands folded at your front, you stare down at them, picking at a loose thread on your sleeve. “It’s okay. I understand—”

“No, lass, it isnae okay,” he interrupts, hand gliding up your shoulder, your neck, and coming to rest on your cheek. He lifts your gaze back up to his and he’s wearing that nameless emotion, staring down at you with a pained expression.

This hurts him as much as it hurts you.

“The job I do, it isnae always… predictable. Dinnae get much warning when I’m called in for assignments. I should have warned ye…” his thumb traces soothing arcs over your cheek, but it does nothing for the gaping hole in your chest. “I’m sorry… I should have—”

“It’s okay, Johnny. Really.” The lie feels like rubbing salt into a wound, burns the back of your throat like you’re speaking around a lump made of sandpaper, and your voice comes out scratchy and raw.

His hand lingers on your cheek, eyes darting from yours to your nose, lips, cheeks, brow. Memorizing.

“Let me walk ye home?” You nod, unsure if you can speak around the cordolium lodged in your throat, and his hand moves from your cheek to your waist, guiding you through the razor rock and churning tide to the front door.

His arm remains firmly around you, fingers digging into your softness as he escorts you across the meager expanse of your lawn.

There’s an SUV, still running, parked in front of both houses and left to keep warm while Isobel gathers her things. She and Fenella step out into the brisk evening air just as you and Johnny reach the top of your stairs, and Isobel waves to you as they descend. Your arm feels leaden as you lift your hand into the air, waving back to her.

“She‘ll miss ye. Talks about ye all the time,” Johnny says beside you, unwilling to let you go just yet. “I’ll be missin’ ye too,” he admits, and you thought you’d found the bottom of the pit in your stomach. Thought you were already lying at the bottom of it.

You were wrong.

The well of your affection for them feels bottomless. The floor crumbles, residual tremors of the quaking in your chest, and you’re falling, falling, falling…Even with his arm around your waist.

You fell in love with the man in front of you. Fell in love with the darling little girl climbing into her grandmother's car. You’re already in love with Fenella and her dedication to her family.

You’ve been falling this whole time, no safety net in sight.

“I- …” Your voice cracks, and you try again. “I’ll miss you, too. Both of you.”

You’re falling, and they’re leaving.

There’s little warning, just a tug of your blouse, before you’re being folded into his arms. A wide palm cradles your head to his chest, fingers threading through your hair, and he presses his cheek to your crown.

“Won’t be able to use my phone a lot, but I’ll call when I can.” He murmurs his promise into your hair. “If… if I’m not here an’ somethin’ happens… I gave my Mum yer number. Saved hers in yer phone when I gave ye mine.” He pauses. Sucks in a shuddering breath before he continues. “Whatever it is, she’ll help.”

You nod your understanding and he pulls back just enough to see your face, guides your head to look up at him and says, “Promise me. Promise that ye’ll go to her if ye need anythin’,” with a desperation you’ve never heard from him.

So you make another promise. Let your eyes flutter closed as he presses his forehead to yours and ghosts his lips across the chilled skin of your brow.

And then he leaves.

Isobel is sorted, buckled into her car seat and saying her goodbye’s to Johnny, and Fenella MacTavish stands beside the driver’s side door, watching.

She’s said this goodbye a hundred times. Sent him off to god knows where to fight a war she’s never heard of. It never gets easier.

Isobel’s door closes, and her son turns to her with pain in his eyes. “I hate leaving ‘er.”

“Which one?” she intones, and Johnny leans his hip against the B pillar.

“Both of them. The three of ye.”

“Then make sure ye come back tae ‘er–tae all of us,” she advises, and pulls him into one last hug. “I cannae bury another child.”

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