Pacifier

🌿 Sam 🌹

There was nothing I could do so I held her. Just held onto her, kept her close to me. She didn't shake.

It wasn't like last time. She didn't scream, didn't cry, didn't fall apart in my arms but somehow I still knew. If I let go of her now she'd disintegrate.

So I held onto her.

She was a girl who had lost too much in too short a time. Lost more than anyone should be able to lose in one lifetime. It wasn't right but there was nothing I could do.

So I just held her, kept holding her.

I watched the screen, watched the subtitles as a news reader read her lines. Her eyes looked into the camera but she wasn't looking at us. She was just looking out at the autocue reading the lines of this story as she'd read the lines of any other. And to everybody else this meant just as much as any other.

It was only Della whose heart had been broken. She was the only one Larry had to leave behind.

And Della stood now, hollow, leaning back against my chest, held up only by me, my arms wrapped around her from behind, bracing her like a seatbelt might to protect her from the blow. The fallout. The crash.

She was breathing but barely. Her lips slightly parted. That small smile had faded and the question on her lips she'd been about to ask me, that had dwindled and drifted and was lost, didn't matter anymore.

I wanted to sweep her up and take her back to the car, I wanted to take her far away from here, from Manchester and that family, from the Reids and the Lewises, the McCanns and the Bonds and Blakeways. I wanted to rescue her from all their shit all their swampy, bloody lives.

But instead we just stood still.

She reminded me now of how she had been in the aftermath of her Nanas death, when the dust had settled and the days had past and she'd stopped eating, stopped sleeping. Just stayed in bed, laid down to die.

She had that hollow, lifeless look about her once again and when I did take her hand it was cold. Like the life had been drained from her all over again. Because it had.

"Shhh," I breathed into her hair, cradling her close to me, hushing her though she hadn't spoken and she didn't look to me like she could.

I wanted her to cry, crying would have been easier to sooth than this, crying might have helped her. This was worse, this silent, still grief, she was stricken and still and I felt helpless with her in my arms.

"We need to go," she said, her voice still and distant. She was swallowing it down, compressing the pain somewhere inside her so that when she spoke she didn't sound sad, she didn't sound shaken but I could still hear the pain.

"Aye," I said softly, gentle as I bowed my head to hers, looking out at the hospital room, looking around at the strangers who had noticed us and the strangers who hadn't.

Some of them couldn't take their eyes off her. The girl who, despite her stillness, her silence, grieved publically, her heartbreak gushing from her as if their was an open wound through her chest, bleeding out into the room.

"cmon," I whispered, glaring at those who couldn't take their eyes off her. Those who wouldn't let her go unseen.

When I went to walk away she didn't move. Her eyes were still on the screen, still on her brothers mugshot. A cruel image to use to announce his murder to the world. Paint him as a criminal, dilute the sympathy. I swallowed a lump, my jaw tight, clenched. Not with anger for Larry but with a desperation and a ferocity to protect Della. I'd have killed whoever had put a bullet through her brother just for the pain they had caused her.