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CATERINA OFTEN IMAGINED FINALLY staring at the face of the man who made her laying on the cold slab at the mortuary. Imagined if the frown lines between his eyes would seem more prominent, or if the thin lips that used to hold thin, short cigarettes captive would shrivel and crack. Wondered if his already receding hairline would turn from pitch black to ashen to white, if his striped dress shirt would be stained red.
It hardly mattered now. He was cold and purple and green, and left all the weight of the world on her shoulders. It hardly mattered, because in no scenario that she replayed before she closed her eyes at night, for over a decade now, did she let a stray tear escape her eye, or a breath hitch in her airway.
The mortuary of Birmingham General was a basement space, with no source of light but the one that hung above her or came from the staircase that led to the more lively parts of the hospital. His body was covered with a thin white sheet pulled up to his chin, with only his head peaking out.
She doesn't acknowledge Thomas until his hand is on her shoulder, squeezing slightly in a manner which was supposed to comfort her. Only, she doesn't feel like she deserves to be comforted at all.
"Is it wrong that I feel no sense of guilt?" Caterina asks into the empty, emotionless voice bouncing off the green and white tiles, "I should, he fathered me. He put clothes on my back and a roof over my head."
She was an orphan now. Or had she always been, since her parents failed to play their nature given roles?
"Father's rarely give much more than disappointment and unwanted lessons."
She takes his words and buries them somewhere close to her heart. Tommy's hand doesn't leave her, only trails down to rest on her waist. The air is chilly, and the pungent smell of alcohol and death leaves her wanting to bury her head in his shoulder. She can't peel her eyes off the white sheets and the white corpse.
"You know, I never met him," he says, almost conversationally, "Didn't have the opportunity to ask for your hand."
There is drumming in her ears, loud and dissonant, that resembles the one of her beating heart. An unspoken question, a sentence, floats between them in the musty, death-ridden air that never felt so very alive until know. Unspoken and inevitable, it was, because from the moment they met it was so unquestionably mean to be; Thomas and Caterina, Tommy and Cat. Absolute like the rise of the sun, and fall of the rain; intricate in every single way that made it disarmingly simple.
She was young, but he wasn't, and their line of work allowed no weaknesses or rest. Somewhere along those lines their found reprieve in each other's existence.
"He wouldn't have given it to you, anyway," she mused lightly, "Several presentable, well-bred suitors tried to court me before, but they were either shot down by him, or thrown out by me." Some she remembered with a chuckle, some with a belly of inky dread. Cat spared an amused glance Tommy's way,
