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a-secondhand-sorrow · 4 years ago

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growth in the grey areas

The @sincerely-us gift exchange is always SO much fun to participate in, and I’m so happy to share my gift on this summer’s holideh. As a fun little surprise for @thatfriendlyanon... we are 2 for 2! thank you for your gorgeous prompts and I hope I could do them justice 💜 (here’s an ao3 link!)

***

Imagine, if you will, a dollhouse.

Imagine the façade first; imagine perfect white siding, trimmed and shaped plastic shrubs, pristine windows with freshly-painted sills. Now travel inside, moving past stickered-on wallpaper and furniture you are free to arrange at will. See the people living inside, their hair perfectly shaped and mouths curved into perpetual smiles. Nothing is complicated or difficult - there are shadows and there is light, and they never mix. There is Good and there is Bad, nothing beyond.

Imagine, if you will, that the Murphy family’s house is a dollhouse.

It truly has every appearance of one, from the shrubs to the wallpaper to, at first glance, the people inside; carefully curated with a precision only money can buy, packaged together in a box to nod your head at as you pass in the store and not look at much for longer.

Now, if you will, crack the dollhouse open right down the middle.

You’ll first see the house, as impeccable as always, but the people inside are not congregated together in the kitchen as they were before. Only the newcomer remains in the kitchen, far less of a newcomer than he thought of himself. Slide your eyes to the left, over to the other half, and you’ll see gray hair slicked back carefully and a painted-on shirt collar recently undone from hands worrying it standing over a box of memorabilia, a permanent crease molded between his brows. Slide them up over floors and walls to see hundreds of pages clutched between an ever-impeccable hand, another hand pressed to mouth to stifle something while seated on a bed that is not her own. And, finally, locate the final person, doll, pawn - over the grid of plastic that separates all of them, find her one room over, curled into a position you didn’t know she can manage, her hands pressing to her face as though they alleviate building pressure. Imagine, if you will, them - that whole picture.

If you understand what it is to be falling apart inside a picture-perfect life, you may begin to understand what it is to be a Murphy.

I. something shatters

Evan read once that, after a sonic boom, all is deathly silent. Surprisingly, that isn’t because all machinery and living beings present are completely destroyed; no, the silence is from the explosion itself. If the force is powerful enough, it will create a vacuum where air levels are so low that sound doesn’t travel. You could curse, you could scream, you could beg to go back in time for a minute or an hour or a year and it wouldn’t matter. Your lips would move and no sound would escape. That was what true silence was.

He passed physics as a freshman, so of course he understood that concept in theory, even if there was always a part of his brain that never fully registered just how awful and harsh and real that vacuum could be.

He never understood until he uttered those words, those explosive words, in the Murphy’s kitchen over the sounds of phones ringing and the people he’d grown to love breathing and speaking. He never understood until they rode the explosion out and away. He never understood until he was left in the aftershocks, no air left for him to speak with.

He wishes he’d understood that before, that kind of choking silence. Of course, that may just be guilt. Heidi always says that guilt is the most unproductive emotion - it’s useless, he can hear her say in his mind in between sniffles, you can’t go back and change the past - but he knows he has no hope of curbing the swell of it inside of him all the same.

His ride was, originally, Zoe. How funny that seems looking back with hindsight. Not even an hour before, he’d felt that he belonged enough to have a guaranteed way back to his house, to monotony and crushing stability. He’d been able to rely on that tiny routine.

Without it, he feels liable to break apart and shatter into a thousand pieces.

He still has to get home, though, and so he curbs that particular impulse and accepts the fact that he’s just ruined the only good things in his life. (You were bound to ruin them when you first lied to them, something in his mind says, which is nothing he doesn’t know already.) He never sat down, so save for a brief pep talk (or mental beration) to his feet to get them moving he manages to make his exit from the Murphy household swiftly. Evan walks the whole way home, and he knows that he must pass some landmarks - trees, houses, even Ellison Park is on the path back. But when he reaches his front door, he can’t remember anything about the walk. The only thing that reminds him of the walk he just made is his aching feet. And, of course. the house in front of him.

Heidi’s car is out front, and he’s not sure whether to be terrified or relieved. He’s not given a chance to settle on one or the other before his right hand is cold on the handle of his front door as his left stays firmly planted in his pocket. The interior of the house is maybe a degree or so warmer than the outside air, and the contrast lands softly on his cheeks for a moment as the door clicks shut behind him.

His mother sits on the couch in the living room, only ten or so feet from the door. She’s still wearing her scrubs, but her laptop is on her lap all the same. Their eyes meet, and Evan knows he won’t be able to brush past her and get to his room. The suspicion only confirmed when she opens her mouth, and that’s when he finally places the expression on her face; shock.

“Have you seen this? The note that Connor Murphy...?”

Evan nods, finally closing the distance between the living room half of the room and the entrance part. His limbs warm the further in he walks, but his hands continue to fiddle with his sweatshirt hem all the same, his neck bowed. He can’t bring himself to meet Heidi’s eyes.

“It’s all over everyone’s Facebook.”

She looks back at her computer screen.

“Dear Evan Hansen…” She shakes her head slowly, letting out one long sigh like a deflated and punctured balloon.“Did you… you wrote this? The note?”

Evan nods again.

“I didn’t know.”

“No one did,” Evan says, taking a tiny step forward. He gestures with one hand in the rush to assure her, still at the level of his hem.

“No, that’s not what I...I didn’t know that you...that you were…” Her voice can be so soft, so gently imploring, almost tenuously polite even to her own son. Like she’s terrified of saying the wrong thing, and she knows how to cushion her words in case it goes wrong. Hearing something that sounds so similar to his own brain pains him for a moment. “...hurting like that. That you felt so...I didn’t know. How did I not know?”

“Because I never told you.”

“You shouldn’t have had to.”

He shakes his head, bowing his neck further and pressing his lips into a line.“I lied. About...so many things. Not just Connor. Last summer, I just...I felt so alone…”

She speaks again as she always does, right in front of him when he needs her presence - soft, supportive, her voice gravelly with how serious it is. “You can tell me.”

Shaking his head against the building pressure of tears, Evan chokes out “you’ll hate me.”

“Oh, Evan.”

“You should. If you knew what I tried to do. If you knew how I am, how,” the hand gestures return with a vengeance, emphasizing nothing in particular. “...broken I am.”

“I already know you, and I love you.”

That gets him to break. He’d been slowly edging forward towards the couch throughout the conversation, but with that, he drops to perch on the edge of the cushion.

“I’m so sorry,” is all he can say, and Heidi takes his hands with a gesture that makes him feel more seven than seventeen, and it’s then that the vacuum around his throat finally lifts and he falls apart.

***

He feels like a goddamn fool.

Larry should be - well, he should be furious, shouldn’t he? This kid waltzed into his life, his family’s life, to build up some fairy tales about what his son was supposed to be and then he has to go and tear it all down just when they need them the most. He should be blind with a white-hot rage, like the one he’d felt when they got the call that early September day. He should be breaking things and making shout-filled phone calls.

Anger can be quiet, he reassures himself. Anger can be silent. Anger can be standing up from a table and staring down someone who lied without saying a word. Anger can be walking so that your steps make no noise against the floor and keeping heavy eye contact, being the last to leave the room. Anger can be leaving a kid who made a mistake to fend for himself when he was practically the son you never really had an hour before.

Larry passes a hand over his face with perhaps more force than necessary.

God, he’s not angry. He’s just a fool.

Connor’s been buried six feet under the ground for over three months, but Larry still half expects to hear him call him a fool to his face. Or probably some expletive-riddled alternative. When the words never come, he appears strangely off-balance. He tilts right where he stands in the garage, driving his fist into the nearest object - conveniently, a wall. His knuckles crack on impact and he regrets the eruption immediately but still, he doesn’t shed a tear for either the punch or for his son.

Apparently missing Connor turned Larry into some faded and worn version of his outbursts.

That thought sobers him right up, and he takes a deep, controlled breath in response. The movement reminds him of his daughter, how she does the same over almost every family breakfast and trying conversation. He’d be admiring her self-control if he wasn’t lacking so much himself. Still, he manages to calm himself enough that he lowers his fist from the wall, wincing all the way as his skin snags on the rough concrete. He turns back to his previous task. Any given member of the family would scold him at the sight of the baseball memorabilia, a fact that he knows well and has tested one too many times. The cards are an addiction he can’t quite kick, but it’s a preferable one to pulling out the whiskey in his desk drawer. Or whatever the hell Connor had been hooked on. Dealing with the memorabilia is easier than dealing with the mediocre reaction and the stew of feelings he has. Breaking down into tears would be easier. Flying into a blind rage would be preferable. Instead, he’s just sedentary and mindlessly occupying himself.

Larry knows that he should be joining his girls, trying to be strong, to kick away habits in favor of human connection. He should be allowing himself to process grief in a natural way, as the grief counselor said at the very beginning of this whole nightmare. In so many ways, he’s right back at square one. But at least this time around, things are not as hazy. With Evan and his stories and his emails - things were better, happier. But they were fuzzy, too. Now he’s wide awake, but he can’t find it in himself to tear away from the all-consuming sorting and looking and sorting and looking that the garage requires. The task is a thousand times emptier without Evan asking questions and filling up the negative space in the garage in a way he rarely filled up any other rooms, but it’s a distraction and a release, and Larry - who has always, always been a fool - takes the piles of Orioles cards under his hands for the blessing and curse that they are.

***

“I deluded myself to think that - to try and justify it as though maybe, maybe I wasn’t the only person who craved a normal life - who craved being accepted, being part of something bigger than myself. It’s no excuse, I know that - there is no excuse. But I hoped that I was helping other people when really all I was doing was bolstering myself. I hoped that maybe I wasn’t the only broken person.”

The only broken person.

From the moment Evan spoke those words, Zoe hasn’t been able to get them out of her head.

So many other parts of his speech present themselves for her to mull over, to cry over, to scream and be furious about. After all, quite a bit of deceit was revealed. The freshness of their presumed break-up, their family tensions being aired for the whole internet to see, and, of course, Evan’s backdated and misread and completely and blatantly nonexistent relationship with Connor all battle for dominance on her heavily-weighed mind, but above all are those echoing words.

The only broken person.

When she reaches her room, where she’d run out of force of habit rather than any real intent, she collapses back against her door. It clicks satisfyingly against the frame. She barely hears the sound before she’s cringing away. Something about the combined sensation of the door moving and the unexpected sound clash in her mind. Zoe expects the door to crash open at any second, and she chokes on tears and sobs and the stilted, heavy air in her room as she tries to put as much distance between the door and her as possible.

It takes a moment for reality to return to her, and she stills halfway between her door and her bed, the hardwood floor biting into her calloused fingers and sensitive palms. Her head aches, her heart aches, and all she can think is the only broken person, only they’re not in Evan’s voice, they’re in hers. The words drip with so much Murphy family venom that she can feel them trail a burning path down her throat and brand themselves into her upper mouth until her vision fills with little white dots.

But Zoe is nothing if not resilient. She has always been the last one standing, the strongest and sturdiest, the one with the best poker face who is willing to play the game. And so Zoe pushes herself up in a wave, hands to elbows to give herself the momentum needed to move upwards. Once she finds her feet she staggers forward towards the bed. She can barely see in her darkened room. The only light comes from the stars outside her window, but they’re blurred around her tears. She curls onto her duvet without crawling underneath, bunching it between her arms as though it could be another person instead of just fabric. For a moment the blanket might be Evan - she’s grown so used to his weight beside her that lying without him is cold and lonely by contrast. And a moment later she can even imagine it’s Connor like it had been when they were little kids. No matter what she thinks, however, it really is just cloth.

It’s a step up from lying on the ground, at least. A small comfort in a day that has been filled with anything but.

She’d told him she loved him in this room. On this bed, this duvet. He’d told her that he loved her, and she’d felt safe, certain for the first time that no one was on the other side of the door. That they were truly alone in her room, the rest of the world falling to the wayside. He’d murmured the words into her lips, peppered them across her face with her freckles, spoke them each time with a reverence deeper than any devotion she’d ever heard until she was incapable of doubting the truth in the words. Not a single moment passed where she doubted that she was loved while they were together.

In the aftermath, she has to doubt every single moment, and that somehow makes everything worse.

So much hurts. There is a Connor-shaped hole in her that he punched into her himself, one that Evan expanded and twisted with his declarations that Connor really did love her, that he didn’t want to hurt her. And there’s a new Evan-shaped hole in her chest and in her bed and in her soul that she never would have expected existing in August. Her phone won’t stop ringing, either, and the ringtone her friends picked out as a joke about how bubbly Zoe was is starting to repeat so incessantly in her head that she’s ready to crawl right out of her skin.

She could put her phone on do not disturb, but instead, she throws it as hard as she can across the room. Some part of her, the part of her that shadowed Connor incessantly and took some sick pleasure from the familiar rhythm of her parent’s fights, wants desperately to hear the phone shatter. But it’s thrown from an awkward angle, so her hopes aren’t high for destruction. All the same, when she hears it buzzing against the floorboards she is disproportionately disappointed.

Zoe wants to scream. She wants to get up and really shatter her phone like Connor and Evan shattered her family. She wants to settle on her heart and her soul by feeling either love or hate and not some jagged mix of both. Mostly, though, she’s tired. She has always been the strongest of all of them, the last one standing, the ever-composed and happiest, but her legs are beginning to shake under the strain of standing stock-still. For the first time, she thinks she understands why her family takes to shouting under the slightest duress. Anything must be better than leaving everything she experiences to weigh on her chest until she holds so much that the pain of it all starts to jolt her.

Maybe the most suffocating part of the whole situation is that she knew all along. Knew that his lies were too good to be true. Knew that Connor would never say those things, even if he didn’t hate her (and now she’ll never know whether he did.) Knew that Evan’s stories, for all their sincerity, didn’t hold up to any given timeline. From the moment he sat at her dinner table and fumbled over a conversation about the wretched skiing trips, she knew not a word that came out of his mouth was true. If she looks back, she knows she never really believed him. But instead of saying anything, she kept her mouth shut just like she always did. She swallowed her pride and his lies because they went down easier than the idea of never knowing for certain, of living the rest of her life in limbo over what Connor thought of her. They hurt less than the idea that she’d helped lead to his demise.

She knew all along, but she went along with his story all the same because the cracks in her sentry became more pronounced day after day, the chest-crushing anxiety that sometimes made her wonder if her heart finally succumbed to a heart attack and the blatant disregard for her own physical safety as she moved through her day only multiplying into dizzying numbers. She splintered under the constant pressure and the unrelenting lights like she never had before, and she was seconds away from falling to the ground before Connor died and even closer than that when Evan walked into their lives. Before that dinner, she had wished with a futile hope - one she couldn’t remember using since she was small - that Connor hadn’t taken so much from her, including the only way out. His pain overshadowed everyone else’s, and once he was gone nothing was left to hide hers behind. Evan’s lies eased it, propped her up. Maybe that’s why she grit her teeth, flashed a smile, and accepted it.

Connor may have been broken, and Evan too, but they were far from the only ones.

Zoe curls further into her bed, searching for something solid to grip onto, before she pushes herself upright just as she always does.

***

Cynthia runs out of tears sometime around the fortieth email.

It was bound to happen at some point - she can only physically produce tears for so long, after all - but she can’t help but feel hollow as her eyes dry and her breaths begin to steady out. Her head begins to grow heavier with the familiar fatigue that follows crying, but none of the satisfaction follows it. No resolution to the truth that made her cry appears. She wishes she would just continue crying instead of sitting still and empty on her son’s bed.

Instead, she turns another page and reads until her eyelids dry out and her eyes catch on them as she moves them back and forth, left to right, as though her life depends on that one action.

Now - now she can see it. How much each one of these, even the ones from ‘Connor,’ just drip Evan all over. He’d had her fooled, he truly had, but now that she knows he wrote them she can’t unsee it. The words are a little too stiff and structured to be her son’s. They are so much like Evan himself, pieced together to try and make others happy while sacrificing his own happiness. Common sense dictates that she’d miss that at first when she barely knew him (and barely understood Connor). Now that she knows him so well-

Well. Maybe she doesn’t really know him at all. That’s the thought that really stings.

Cynthia looks up from the page. Her daughter had made it a foot or so into Connor’s room without Cynthia hearing at all. A pang of guilt hits her as she takes in Zoe’s bloodshot eyes and eerily still features, save for the bottom lip being worried between her teeth. She’d been forgotten again. Cynthia had forgotten her again.

The severity of the guilt feels dampened, somehow, but she’s not quite sure why.

Zoe doesn’t say anything. Where Cynthia is so accustomed to Connor’s explosive words, Zoe is always silent, something Cynthia never quite wraps her head around. The opposite is also true, of course. Where she is used to Connor’s weighty silence, Zoe always manages to surprise her with a sarcastic mutter or an occasional scathing sentence. Only since his death has her voice ever raised above a normal speaking tone when speaking with her or Larry, and only then to scold Cynthia for defending Connor.

Something has to replace Zoe’s occasional shouting at Connor, Cynthia supposes, but the earlier guilt crawls back and kills the thought.

Instead of speaking, Cynthia just watches as Zoe crosses the line of bookshelves on the front wall and nestles herself comfortably on the floor between two of them. The location is an odd choice, but Cynthia can’t find it in herself to be surprised.

(Of course, Cynthia wouldn’t know that that spot is where Zoe always used to sit, mostly in middle school before Connor completely tore their relationship to shreds. Back when Connor would let Zoe sit and do her homework while he drew or read instead of chasing her out of the room if she so much as crossed a foot in front of his door. She wouldn’t know how many hours Zoe spent quietly consoling Connor and curling up to sleep on the floor in the months before Connor kicked her out and she was forced to sleep in front of his door instead, just so he knew she was close.

Zoe stopped halfway through freshman year. She had to. But the habit of sitting nestled between the two bookshelves remains two years later.)

Cynthia doesn’t speak. She doesn’t know what she would say if she did. She just sits, and Zoe sits near her. After a beat, Zoe holds one hand out expectantly. Cynthia divides about a fourth of the emails off the top of her stack after only a moment of deliberation to hand them to her. They look so large in her daughter’s hand, and Cynthia is abruptly reminded just how young Zoe is. She recognized the same fact the night that Connor - well. Zoe had a similarly lost edge in her eyes that night. Cynthia had looked into those eyes, the eyes that Zoe and Connor shared, and that's when Cynthia realized no one had ever taught her this. She’d read her fair share of parenting books once Connor started to go downhill, but no one prepared her for that moment. For the look in Zoe’s eyes when she realized Connor was gone, when Cynthia was the one to tell her for good. No one can ever teach you how to handle that.

That was the first time Cynthia realized just how young Zoe truly was since normally she was so carefully guarded and built up that she seemed several years older. But Cynthia had let herself forget, again, how young and small her daughter was.

Now Zoe, the version Cynthia is truly seeing for the first time, flips through pages at a rapid speed. Her eyes scan over every line.

“I can’t believe I read these,” Zoe whispers. Cynthia can’t tell if Zoe meant for her mother to hear it or not. “I can’t believe I…”

“Believed it?” She offers, bitterness curling into the words. They’re nasally, probably because of all the crying. Zoe doesn’t respond, just flips another page with a light scoff.

They read in silence for some time. A shadow falls across the doorway. When Cynthia glances up, it’s to see her husband leaning against the doorframe. His lips are in their same perpetual thinned form, his forehead creased and the corners of his eyes hardened.

No one taught her how to fix any of this. She should know how, shouldn’t she? It should be on her to fix this. Not a group of teenagers who can barely hold themselves together while they scatter, no, it should have been her to provide that for them. She should have taken on their burden, their pain, because that was her job. She was too caught up in her own grief to save theirs and so they acted rashly and painfully, just as she has done by trusting them, just as Connor did - she can’t let this all happen again, not when circumstances are so dire. She must fix everything for them.

But Larry is in Connor’s room, instead of hiding away downstairs, and so when he holds out a silent hand for more papers she relinquishes half of her stack without much thought. And the three of them stand their ground, flipping through fabricated pages silently but together. They are closer together than they’ve been in years.

It’s a start, maybe.

Cynthia - for all that has been torn away from her day by day, second by second, as Evan’s lie crumbled apart slowly - can hope.

***

II. and slowly, quietly, imperfectly

Heidi insists on a session with Dr. Sherman first thing the next day.

It’s a Saturday, so he can’t really deny her request. And she’s already bartered for the whole day off, or so she informs him.

That early winter chill fills the air, the one that makes him feel weirdly like a little kid. Everything is cold enough that snow should coat the ground and purify the landscape, cover in every broken crevice in the ground until the world is a blank slate. But it’s too early for that kind of snow, and he has to settle for greying skies and cheek-stinging wind. The weather is perfect for curling up under the covers with someone you care about, or for visiting your therapist and probably crying until your throat hurts.

But Heidi held him close for so long the night before, and when she’d pulled away it was only when he’d initiated the separation. She had only strayed away from him to make him the matzo ball soup she always made him when he felt sick, anxiety-based or otherwise, as a little kid. Eating it is like stepping into little Evan’s life for just a blissful minute, and for that time he remembers just how much she loves him. It tastes like he thinks caring about someone feels, and Evan is certain he won’t be able to argue with his mother again.

Maybe that was her intent all along with the soup. That would’ve been a pretty impressive con.

Almost all of the Dr. Sherman session is spent spilling his guts of every secret he’s kept over the past few months and chose not to share. All Dr. Sherman does is regard him over his steepled fingers for a moment, nodding all the way. He thought saying everything out loud would make the guilt in his stomach curdle and choke, which it did - he had to stop several times just to catch a breath when recounting everything, and he’d swear he was seconds from passing out or throwing up or something - but by the time his session is over, his soul feels a bit lighter, too. Like a weight has been lifted off of his shoulders. He’s been experiencing the same sensation since standing in the Murphy’s dollhouse of a life to tear it to the ground - like for once, he can sit up a little straighter and nothing will come crashing down on him. Fewer things can crumble from the sky when everything is already lying on the ground in the rubble.

Heidi’s car waits for him outside - he sees it from the window of Dr. Sherman’s office - but when he finally exits with slightly bloodshot eyes he sees her sitting in the waiting room. She doesn’t fidget like Evan does, her entire body almost wearily still at most times, but he catches her teeth biting at the edge of one nail before she’s up and facing Evan and Dr. Sherman, composed as ever.

Afterward, she’ll ask all kinds of questions about his meds and how the session was and if he’s really okay. But for then it’s kind of nice to just have her there at all. Evan isn’t naïve enough to hope that she’ll be back again, but for that moment he draws strength from her arm looped in his and the warm car he knows is waiting outdoors.

“I’m a bad person,” he says once he’s buckled up in the passenger seat. Before Heidi reaches over to take his hand, he doesn’t realize his hands are shaking. “I’m a terrible person. I knew that, I did, but I couldn’t realize how much - just how terrible.”

“You’re not,” is all Heidi says.

“I am. I did terrible things, and I can’t fix them.”

“You are not a bad person, Evan,” Heidi repeats, a little more forcefully. “I’m your mother. I know you. If you gained something from this situation it was...accidental. You’d never have done this if you didn’t want to help them.”

“But I didn’t,” he parrots, ignoring how completely she understood his motivation without him explaining it to her. “I mean - I wanted to help them, but I knew what I could gain. I...I knew I was hurting them but I did it anyway. I never helped them.”

She’s quiet for a moment, her other hand reaching to cup his left hand. “The world isn’t so binary, Ev,” she finally settles on. “This may have been bad, but you’ll find a way to balance it out. Just because this hurts now doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person forever. If you were truly bad you wouldn’t feel like this.”

He shrugs, trying to hide his burning eyes.

“You’re a...a good person, with a kind heart,” she says, pushing past Evan’s noise of disbelief. “You did something bad. But I know you, Evan. You’ll make it right. Life is messy and complicated, but you love so fiercely, Ev, and you care so much. You’d never want to hurt someone. That doesn’t make you bad. No one is really bad or good, anyway. We live in a complex, dark world, and you’re about as good as they come.”

At last, he shakes his head to break the fog around it. “You have to say that. You’re my mother.”

With an airy laugh, she withdraws her hands, choosing instead to wrap them around the wheel. “Maybe so,” she says, her crooked grin returning. Evan smiles back at her.

***

A Jazz Band concert is scheduled for the next week.

Zoe practically begs off sick. God, she wants to beg off sick. She doesn’t want to plaster a smile on her face (because she can’t do that without thinking about him) and she doesn’t want to look out to the audience and see her parents looking politely interested but privately bored (because that’s him all over, too) and she really doesn’t want to play guitar in front of everyone.

That’s him, too. Both hims. Every all-consuming him in her life.

But if there is one thing Zoe has inherited from her family, it’s the all-consuming need to arrive where she’s supposed to at the time she’s supposed to. Her parents did, too, so they drive her and wait for the performance. Half-asleep, her feet make the journey backstage with her guitar case clasped in hand. She nods absently to some of her classmates, at least the ones who are nice enough to acknowledge her with some warmth. Between the letter and her relationship and subsequent breakup with Evan, most had taken to ignoring her or sending icy glares in her direction. Any true confrontations normally take place behind a screen, but Zoe is still distinctly shut out from most of the school.

As she pulls her guitar free from the case and begins tuning it back to standard instead of open D, as she’d tuned it for the sake of an earlier song and was too lazy to change back, a girl who plays sax compliments her outfit. That comment is probably the nicest direct thing anyone has said to her since the letter came out. Though Zoe only abstractly remembers picking out an appropriate outfit and applying her festive winter makeup, she scrounges up a smile and thanks her classmate all the same.

The smile untucks something from the corner of her brain, and suddenly she’s extremely hopeful Evan won’t be there.

He has no reason to be, she reminds herself when trailing out towards the stage. He has no reason to be, she repeats as she sits and everyone settles on stage and in the audience. He has no reason to be, she reminds herself as they launch into the first song after the director’s brief remarks. Don’t look. He has no reason to be here.

She looks anyway.

Zoe hopes that’s not his outline lurking towards the back of the theater. She really hopes he wouldn’t put them both through that. Zoe has to be at the concert, of course, since she has no choice. But Evan - Evan was at liberty to make the decision to stay home. Evan could stay away from this experience and spare them both a bit of pain. God knows they both have more than enough hurt to last a lifetime. For him to see her now would be too familiar, too intimate. After all those hours in her room, him tracing her movements with his eyes and applauding enthusiastically after each and every song - tracing the curve of the unconscious smile with his eyes while she played and then tracing it with his own mouth, both their hands tracing everywhere, every outline, every happy little smile line - him being in the same room is too much.

She knows it’s him. Not realizing the figure is him is probably impossible, when she knows - knew - knows him so well. But she pretends she doesn’t recognize him all the same, letting her eyes fall back to the other side of the theater, a stupid little fake smile tucked in her lips and her fingers plucking out the familiar melody.

This is one of her first Jazz Band concerts without Connor. Although he normally sank so low in his seat that Zoe assumed he was sleeping, he was always present. And in her haste to forget Evan she remembers Connor all over again, because the two are forever and always linked directly in her mind. One doesn’t come to mind without the other lurking just behind.

She half-expects to see Connor in the audience all the same, but when her gaze falls to her parents, they are only the two figures visible.

Her fingers never slip on the strings, but she forgets where she is for a moment. Instead, she is back in her room, Connor sunk low in her beanbag, clapping politely as she strums a basic chord progression. If she strains she can remember his eyes, how they softened and narrowed to see her, like looking into a mirror as always. Gentle, almost, although the word is laughable to her now. And then a fresher memory, when Connor’s eyes fill with steel and snatch the guitar from her grasp - the siblings are quiet now because Cynthia and Larry are asleep, but his words carry with the harshness laced through them. Anger, too. Not his normal anger, not senseless, not splintered doors and screaming “fuck you” and the bitter scent of destruction, but instead something edged in concern, like an overused washcloth and a scabbing wound and blood sharp on her tongue from biting her cheek. Her memory is blurred because she was tipped over that hazy edge of intoxication where everything was cause for giggles and everything was a thousand times more consequential, but his eyes are clear where everything else is soft at the edges. Her intoxication causes his angry eyes - she drove herself home alone well past midnight, and he took it upon himself to be concerned. She has her own anger couched between giggles. Don’t pretend you don’t do this all the time, Connie, I’m just trying to be like you, you know, that’s all I ever wanted. And Connor’s strained voice just barely reaching normal volume, stone-cold sober for once, saying take that fucking back, you don’t want to be me, I’m a fuckup and you’re- when Zoe, startlingly honest in a way only being high can provoke, replies oh but I’m already as good as dead on my feet so I might as well do as you do, what’s the point in pretending I’ll ever be okay while you destroy yourself, can’t I want this-

Connor takes the guitar from her hands and smashes it to pieces against her dresser before she can finish, and then she’s back on stage with applause filtering through her ears.

***

Evan stands in the back of the auditorium, watching Zoe play guitar with an intensity he can’t remember watching her with before, and suddenly it’s difficult to breathe.

Evan is no stranger to panic attacks, but this is not the same throat tightening that panic brings him. Panic is sharper and quicker, but this is all-encompassing and gradually taking over his lungs in a new and more frightening way. Tearing his eyes away from her, striking on the illuminated stage as she always is, he makes his way out of the double doors and into the empty hallway before he can even begin to understand why his breaths are difficult to come by. Guilt is a familiar force behind his pricking eyes, and he falls back against the (blessedly empty) corridor wall with perhaps a bit more force than necessary, his head tilted back to hit against the stone wall before the rest of his body. Guilt. Shame. Longing. Love. All of them are spurred from the sight of Zoe for the first time since the confession, and they make a bitter combination burning down his throat like the unwanted sting of alcohol. They’re just as all-consuming, too.

Evan brings his hands to his face and just tries to breathe.

(It’s difficult because he used to breathe the same air as her. As often as she’d taken the air from his lungs she’d gifted it back to him, easing the painful jolt of being alive with a small smile and her hand in his. He’d stolen hers in return, cut her off mid-song to feel her breath in a hot puff against his lips until it hitched in anticipation of his lips pressing to hers. Those safe moments where they breathed easier even though they shared almost every breath, every joke and giggle and sentence buried into each other’s mouths. She made it so easy and natural where now there is only difficulty. Just seeing her makes it impossible to get air into his lungs. It’s difficult because he’s reminded that he loves her too much to be healthy and he’s lost the right to do so.)

Once he catches his breath he pulls his phone out. He doesn’t have a ton of options, but he hesitates all the same. Finally, he sends his mother a text, and she responds at once, so she must be out of class.

Leaving is probably the safest option for everyone involved.

He leaves his haunt outside the auditorium doors, opting instead to make the trek outside and wait. As soon as he’s out of the door there’s a shock to his system, the cold night air washing over him like a bucket of freezing water. He breathes the air in anyways, and it goes down easier than any of the air indoors had. From the corner of his eye, he catches a flash of silver. His mother’s car.

Evan meets her halfway, jogging to meet the car and open the door quickly.

“Hey,” she says, hesitant and cheery all at once. Her class must have gone well. She opens her mouth again as though to speak, but the words die on her lips. When Evan is silent, she tries again. “How was…I mean, did you talk to-”

“It was fine,” he cuts off. His voice is soft out of fear that if he gets louder he’ll get emotional. “I didn’t. I saw them, but I didn’t... do anything.”

“That’s okay,” she hurries to say. “That’s perfectly fine, sweetheart. It’s probably better that way.”

Evan nods, tilting his head to hit the window pane.

“I guess you just want to go home?” Evan nods mutely for a second time. “I’ll order a pizza or something, yeah? That sounds good?” With Evan’s third nod and a subsequent little smile on his face, Heidi nods herself and finally shifts back into drive.

***

Admittedly, they have a little difficulty focusing on high school jazz band jazz, but Larry and Cynthia make the attempt valiantly anyway.

In normal times, or times of pride instead of grief, both of them excel at small talk. Be it career schmoozing, dealing with extended family, or interacting with anyone from Connor and Zoe’s schools, it’s a necessary evil for almost every aspect of their lives. They have small talk down to a fine art, always ready to uphold their image and chat with a friendly face.

It is not normal times, but they try anyway.

The first parents they see avert their eyes and hurry through the theater doors before either of them open their mouths. The air is stiff with all the eyes on them, but the gazes are quick to drop away when they glance around as no one is keen on making eye contact. Cynthia goes out of her way to say hi to one of her friends from the Parent’s Association, but when she’s only met with a strained smile and a wave, the Murphy parents wordlessly decide to cut their losses and just find seats.

By force of habit, they sit leaving one seat open on the aisle. Neither says anything about it, nor do they move to fill the seat. Better to leave it empty than to pretend they didn’t wish it was full.

As far as Larry is concerned, the concert can’t be over quickly enough. That urgent coil only grows in his chest when the kids file out and settle down on stage. No one exactly looks like they want to be at a Jazz Band concert because they are a bunch of high schoolers on a Friday night with better and stupider things to be doing. Impatience threads through everyone, and as an event the concert appears to be doomed.

Cynthia’s gaze bounces between the students on stage, but Larry focuses on his daughter, his vision practically tunneling to her. Her eyes steady on a point towards the back wall, but her smile doesn’t waver throughout. Larry absently wonders if she’s employing the technique she used in middle school back when she had terrible stage fright, where she focused her attention on a focal point in the back instead of looking around the audience. He can’t blame her if she is. But towards the bridge of the song (at least, Larry thinks it’s the bridge. He never can tell with jazz) her eyes slide along the rows of seats until they land right by him and Cynthia. Zoe’s face tightens almost imperceptibly, her grin thinning just the slightest bit. A shadow passes over her eyes, and Larry’s sure that if he weren’t her father he wouldn’t notice. Her eyes divert a moment later, but the shadow won’t get out of Larry’s head.

It's the closest he has seen to Connor in a long time.

The rest of the evening passes without incident, which is all they can truly hope for. They greet Zoe in the hallway afterward. Larry is a little late, as he made the trip back to the car for Zoe’s bouquet. When he nears Cynthia, he can see that she’s finally gotten ahold of Zoe. Her eyebrows pinch together just slightly as her hands lightly rest on their daughter’s elbows. Still, Cynthia practically radiates pride, and neither Zoe, Larry, or the other students and parents are heartless enough to take that away from her.

Larry presents Zoe the bouquet with very little ceremony, simply bending down to press a kiss to her cheek. Zoe rolls her eyes when Larry straightens, but her unconscious smile is back all the same.

“Congrats, kid,” he says, gesturing to the flowers.

“It’s the same thing I’ve been doing since middle school.”

“It’s damn impressive-” Larry starts, but he never finishes the sentence.

“Didn’t you help arrange some of those?” Cynthia presses with little preamble. “That’s a first.”

“I mean, kind of?” Zoe replies, making a vague hand gesture towards the auditorium. “It was a first, yeah, but I didn’t really do-”

“Nonsense, I’m sure it was all your-”

“I really didn’t-”

“Either way,” Larry cuts in, raising his voice just a little to cut off their identical, increasingly frustrated tones and scrunching faces, “We’re proud of you, Zo’.”

“We are.” Cynthia seizes her in a sudden hug, and Zoe pretends to gag again, but Larry is pretty sure it’s at least seventy percent for show.

***

III. it all mends

Zoe drives herself to the orchard.

She can’t even get out of the car. She doesn’t think that’s why she drove there at all, really. She didn’t really intend to get out and exist in that space - the one that screams The Connor Project all over and hides Evan in every shadow. She didn’t really intend to do anything, after all, except for getting in the car. Her hands guided her to her final destination.

Maybe the intention, all along, was just to see it. She hasn’t even seen the outside, and that strikes her as wrong, for some reason. Because a dull ache won’t leave her chest, and seeing the orchard will either ease it or transform it into a sharp pain. At this point, she’s willing to take either over the constant, infuriating, numbing guilt and grief slowly gnawing away at her.

It helps a little, and a little goes a long way.

Even though she just sits in the car, the air is easier to breathe, somehow. Knowing that something new, something with the possibility of a future, came out of the Connor Project Fiasco is...nice. What they did wasn’t completely in vain. Something will live beyond Connor, beyond all of them, that shares his name.

A kind of karmic balance is in that cycle, Zoe thinks. For all the pain Connor caused her, something beautiful will share his name forever. Other kids can go to the orchard as they did, grow up and older and more mature. Maybe those kids will gain just an ounce of joy from the growing trees and emergency-landing lake. Maybe the bad things he did don't have to mean he’s remembered as bad forever. Maybe this orchard will be the grey area in Connor’s memory, where black and white mix and mingle and lay out some kind of future.

That grey area can live in her, as well. Because Connor was the brother who made her life a living hell with his fists and his raised voice, but he was also the brother that taught her the constellations and drew her doodles of flower-wielding superheroes as an apology until he hit middle school. He may have given her nightmares throughout her teen years, but before then he was the one to chase them away with an arm slung around her shoulders. He protected her and made her need protection all at once, and at that moment outside the orchard, with her head cradled in her hands as she sits in the driver’s seat, Zoe realizes she doesn’t have to remember him as one or the other. The good and the bad of what he was can be simultaneously true.

It’s that thought that accompanies her home safely and in relative peace.

***

Evan lies sprawled on his bed.

In terms of sitting down, sprawling quite different from what he’s used to. Normally he is a huncher rather than a sprawler, always sitting with his legs crossed or folded and curled over a book or a laptop instead of lying horizontally.

In that context, he’s definitely branching out in this new horizontal - or really diagonal - position, all across his bed at an obnoxious angle. He takes up space in a way he never used to, and for once, his spine doesn’t curl reflexively as though in a shell. A journal is nestled under his fingertips, the possibility for creation only seconds away. He’s sure the succulents nestled around his room in little bursts of green help ease the flow of oxygen into his lungs.

It’s a nice day.

It’s nice to let it just be a nice day. He’d never appreciated nice days before, really.

“Lazy day?” Heidi says, popping her head into his doorway. He nods absently, bent over a page with a pen clenched in his hand, before he really looks up and smiles at her. She smiles back. “I’m leaving for a shift in five. Enjoy it!”

“I will,” he promises, his voice quiet and steady. She smiles again.

“You’re like a cat, always curled in the sun,” she comments with an easy finality before leaving his room. And, well. Evan can’t really dispute that fact.

***

When Cynthia drives to the orchard, Larry is absorbed in his phone on the passenger side and Zoe gazes out the window in the back. They used to make that drive all the time, and something about the path is achingly familiar. As with all familiar things, it makes Connor’s absence clear as day to Cynthia. At this point, that ache is almost comforting to her. Though never quite gone completely, missing him has begun to dull out into something not as noticeable. She almost feels guilty that the experience has eased for her; some part of her thinks every day should be as painful as the first was. Maybe that’s what Connor would have wanted, or maybe he would have wanted to just disappear from their minds completely. She’ll never know, and she refuses to make up her mind about it, so she leaves herself to be guilty alone.

Once the familiar gate of Ellison park comes in sight, Cynthia parks the car in record time. They each grab an assortment of items and hurry past the plaques by the entrance. The day is too nice to spend fighting back tears.

Larry spreads a picnic blanket, and Zoe lays out their food with a practiced precision and a critical eye for plating. For once, nothing plastic hides in their movements. They really appear natural and relaxed. If Cynthia didn’t know better, she may say they look happy.

It may be the closest they ever get, though what that says about them Cynthia doesn’t know.

The Murphy’s are content to eat in silence. None are particularly adept with words, and fighting would only sully the beautiful afternoon sunshine. That’s why no one argues when Larry pulls a book free and flips it open. The same applies to Zoe popping in a pair of earbuds and scrolling idly through her phone. (Cynthia almost lets a snarky comment slip about enjoying nature instead of her music, but she bites her tongue at the last second.) That leaves Cynthia to enjoy the park, and she does so from her spot seated criss-cross on the ground. She gazes out to the horizon line. Saplings dot the bright sky, new life growing where destruction and deadeends once dominated. Their tiny frames stand in silhouette against the blue, and Cynthia's eyes burn a little with the contrast.

Change buzzes in their air and clings to her skin, and for once it seems like a good thing. A positive thing. Loss brought them to that point, and loss will trail them for all their future days, but the product of their grief is also the reason those trees will fight year after year and grow into something large enough for someone to climb and find comfort in. Some kind of balance is in that, isn't there? Some kind of benefit to living in the grey area between past pain and future hope. She and Zoe catch eyes over the edge of Zoe’s phone, and Zoe gives her a tiny smile. Her freckles, inherited from Cynthia, wrinkle a little in response to the movement.

“It’s balanced,” she says softly, as though she read Cynthia’s thoughts. In the afternoon light, she almost looks like Connor used to. Cynthia, as Connor’s mother, will never see the similarities end. But somewhere in Zoe’s eyes is hope and life and a bright, albeit tumultuous, future. She will never see that in Connor’s eyes, although the two sets are so identical they were often mistaken for twins.

Cynthia nods, and her responding smile is genuine and strained and a little bittersweet.

For once, the ground is even beneath their feet, and that may be enough to go forward.

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