Work Text:
Mark paces in the hotel parking lot, moving in circles around the stagnant cars. He has a phone by his ear and a frown on his face. Gemma recognises his worried frown, can distinguish it from all his other frowns – his concentrated frown, his angry frown, his sad frown. The gestures of his free hand seem frustrated, but Gemma knows him. She knows that he gets brittle when he’s anxious.
This part of him, the part of him that was roughest, seems rougher than it used to be. It was a part of him that she tried to understand, tried to offer love, but often worried she couldn’t quite reach.
His face smooths when she catches his eye. It usually did, in their old life. The familiarity brings Gemma some fragile relief.
I’m sorry, Mark mouths.
Gemma shakes her head to tell him it’s alright. She sinks into the nearby chair to demonstrate ease she doesn’t feel – for his sake, she tells herself, trying not to fret over his slouched shoulders, his heavy eyes. She keeps her eyes fixed on Mark for the remainder of the phone call, which seems to last a long time, as all moments have since she was torn from him. Twenty-five lives ago.
When Mark hangs up the phone, he points upwards, telling her that he’s coming upstairs. Gemma closes her eyes for the time that he’s out of her view, bracing herself for the moment where she is pulled through a doorway and back inside a colourless room.
She has been told that, for now, she is safe. She is off Lumon’s radar, out of their reach. The way that Devon and the shifty Ms Cobel are talking, Lumon is not in a position to be chasing her, anyway.
And yet, Gemma can feel dozens of eyes on her. In the light, in the dark, she sees their intrigue, their scrutiny. She feels fingers on her skin and in her mouth, digging for blood. She hears the voices that never answered her questions about phantom pain.
The door opens, and before Gemma can shiver, Mark puts his hands on her. He lifts her halfway out of the chair so that he can squish in beneath her. She folds into him with gratitude, her trust in reality restored by his touch.
“Is everything alright?” Gemma asks, softly.
Mark trails his fingers over her hair. “Yeah, baby. Everything’s fine. I have… I have good news. We can go back.”
Gemma is almost as surprised by the news as she is by its delivery. She would have expected him to come into the room yelling with excitement about the chance to go home. But he sounds as wary as she has felt since the moment of her escape.
Perhaps he shares her doubt. Gemma stares at him, trying to understand.
“Lumon’s gotten a lot of bad press lately,” Mark says. “The company is shutting down, the Eagans are on trial. It looks like severance is gonna get outlawed. Cobel says we’re safe to go back to Kier, if we want.”
The want in her chest swells to a size that seems extremely foolish.
“We can go home?” Gemma whispers.
Mark gives her a mournful look. “Well, not exactly. You know the house is, um – ”
“I know,” she says, squeezing fistfuls of his sweater. “But we can go to your new home, right?”
“Right. Except – it’s not a home. It’s barely anything.”
For a flash, Gemma returns to the blank walls between which she slept underground. She considers the scruff on Mark’s chin, the hair hanging low on his temples, the faint smell of alcohol that clings to his undershirt. She swallows.
“And it’s a company house,” Mark says, looking away from her. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to take you back to Lumon property. The idea of it makes me feel sick.”
“I don’t care,” Gemma says. She does, of course she does, but not in the way that he’s worried about. “It’s your house. Your bed. Did you keep any of our old things?”
“Gemma – ” Mark almost sounds indignant, but the pain softens him. “Yeah. I kept everything.”
Her heart beats a fraction faster. She thinks about her books and her trinkets, her clothes and her jewellery. All that proof that she lived, that she used to be whole. Mark thought she was gone, but he still took care of her things.
“It’s all in boxes,” Mark adds, his tone apologetic. As if the safety of sealed boxes somehow lessens the significance of his lingering love. His hopeless heart, brought back from the underworld, changed but intact. He seems so happy, despite so much.
Gemma knows that she won’t find her life at the bottom of those boxes. She knows that they can’t set out their old things and pretend that the world never ended. When she thinks about how her soul has been splintered, she doesn’t even want to try.
She can only hope for something new. Something similar, if she’s exceptionally lucky.
The house is worse than Gemma was expecting. A shadowy set of squares, haloed by clouds and buried in snow. Mark surveys it warily, like a hero in an action film, staring at the monster intent on tearing through the city.
It isn’t enough to hold her hand, so he’s got her pressed against his side, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. Gemma has no desire to put any distance between them, even when it complicates walking. They crunch through the snow slowly.
By the front door, Mark hides his face in Gemma’s hair.
“Okay,” he mumbles, less to her, more to himself. “Okay.”
He fumbles with the key in the lock, then pushes the door open. Gemma looks at Mark, uncertain what to say. He won’t meet her eye, and he is staring at the bureau in the hallway as though he expects a ghost to fly out from behind it and descend upon them.
It’s only a house, she thinks. It only has the power they give it.
Gemma knows it isn’t that simple. She gets a fresh reminder when she tries to step inside and finds herself lurching violently backwards, falling into Mark’s arms.
“It’s okay,” he says, catching her with ease. “I’ll go first, it’s okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Gemma says, sighing at herself.
“No, honey. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
Mark walks over the threshold and remains steady, himself, his hand a familiar shape in hers. Gemma makes it through without interception from her other parts. She gives Mark a wan smile she means to be grateful, then follows him through the gloomy house.
The Lumon architecture is easy to recognise. The absence of colour and sentiment, the round furniture, the unnatural lighting. The underlying suffering, a cause and an effect.
Gemma looks between the living room and the kitchen for a trace of her husband. It’s spotless, besides the two empty lager bottles in the sink. Mark has always been tidy, she thinks.
She can picture him here. Sitting on that stiff couch, clutching a bottle, his eyes red and blank. Shuffling through that cramped kitchen, making coffee, pressing his head against the counter while he waited for it to brew.
Heartbreaking as these guesses are, Gemma finds that they humanise the scary house. This place sheltered her husband for two years. He wasn’t happy, but he was here. He was safe.
“So,” Gemma says, fighting for composure. “The living room, the kitchen. What else have you got to show me?”
Mark chuckles sadly and plants a kiss on the top of her head. He guides her to his bedroom, which looks more lived-in than the rest of the house. The bed is unmade, the doona draped hastily over the pillows. One door of the wardrobe hangs open. It’s obvious that Mark was in a rush, the last time he was here.
There’s a photo frame on the dresser, a photo of Gemma. She sits among greenery, smiling warmly over her shoulder. Gemma recognises the day, the photo, but not the frame. Mark must have printed it out after he lost her.
They had photos up in their old house – photos together, photos with family, photos with friends. Of all those beautiful memories they captured, this mundane Sunday morning was the one he thought crucial to put on display. A picture that depicts Gemma alone. She wonders what it says about him that he didn’t want to look at himself standing next to her every day.
Gemma is surprised when tears appear in her eyes. She has no reason to be so moved by this picture when she understands the love that Mark has for her. It was a running joke among her friends – there are loving husbands, and then there is Mark Scout. Lucky Gemma, she has a man who adores her, who worships the ground she walks on. Over the years, she got used to it, she stopped feeling bashful about it. It was why she told that monster she didn’t believe him, the day he said that her husband had remarried.
She knew he was lying, but she had no way of proving him wrong. Part of her had worried, and then felt ashamed for worrying. Why should Mark be frozen in time with her, caught in the cold of those looping days? Why shouldn’t he have the daughter she couldn’t give him?
“Gemma?”
Mark follows her gaze to the photo frame and frowns. His look of confusion shifts into one of guilt, which is the last thing Gemma wants him to feel. She turns in his arms and puts her lips to his cheek, his neck, clutching him tightly.
I’m sorry, she thinks, tries to convey with her hands on his back. She would say it out loud if she didn’t know that it would upset him. But there’s nobody else to apologise to him, nobody else who could mean it more.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she says in her head. This shouldn’t have happened to you. My sweet man. My love. I’m sorry.
They spend the rest of the day in the basement, where Gemma’s life has been neatly filed into plastic tubs and cardboard boxes. She suspects she would feel more disturbed by that reality if not for the fastidious way that Mark has organised her belongings. Gemma’s crafts is scrawled on one container, Gemma’s winter clothes on another. Gemma’s shoes, Gemma’s thesis research, Gemma’s books.
Love is present in every shaky signage. It makes it easier to face all that was real about her death. She can even muster some smiles for forgotten treasures, particularly her books, the creases on the spines and the dedications written in the front pages. Love from Mark in black ink, blue ink, invisible ink.
“I missed books with covers,” Gemma murmurs.
Mark gives her a fretful look. “What do you mean?”
Gemma hesitates, unwilling to distress him, unwilling to lie to him.
“They gave me books – these books,” she pauses. She wonders how they knew about her collection, then pushes her curiosity away. “But they were bound in plain white covers.”
“Hm. But the contents were the same?”
“Mostly, I think. They were translations.”
His mouth twitches. “Their version of a benefit, I guess.”
“I guess.”
Gemma pictures unknown fingers on the book she holds and drops it back into the box with a sigh. She puts her chin in her palm and stares at the empty pots gathered in the corner. The pot closest to her is made of porcelain, and once held a flourishing orchid. Her father once looked at that orchid in awe for most of a meal, sat around the dinner table.
Seeking a distraction, Gemma kneels before another container. She is pleased when she finds it full of hats and scarves, arranged alongside her jewellery box. A pang of joy hits her heart, looking over her rows of dangling earrings. She picks up one of the glinting gold leaves she used to favour, hangs it over her finger to inspect it.
Mark is trying not to be obvious about watching her, but Gemma feels the weight of his mournful gaze. She lifts her face to meet his disbelieving eyes.
“Sorry,” Mark says. “This is surreal. I never would have packed your things up like this if I had thought – ” He sighs, cuts himself off. “There’s no point in even saying that. Of course everything would’ve been different if I had known.”
“You couldn’t have,” Gemma says, quietly.
Mark dedicates several moments to staring at his hands where they are folded on his lap. He seems to be deep in thought.
“I’ll never find an adequate way to apologise to you,” he says, eventually. “I could tell you I’m sorry every day for the rest of your life and it wouldn’t be enough.”
Gemma takes a deep breath. Somehow, she manages to hold onto her composure.
“I’m not upset about anything you did when you thought I was dead.”
“You don’t have to lie to me, Gemma.”
“I’m not,” she insists, her chest clenching. “I’m upset when I think about you alone in this house and hurting, but I’m not upset about – about anything you did to cope.”
An ugly part of her is even flattered. It is clear that Mark had no intention of moving on from her. Two years later, he was still clutching her memory to his heart, letting it bruise him, feeling her in the only way he had left. He kept the weight in her absence, twisted the empty space into a heavy presence.
“I never thought you’d see me like this,” Mark says, with a wry chuckle. “I didn’t think I had any reason to…”
For once, Gemma is grateful that he doesn’t finish his sentence. She rises from her spot on the floor and joins him on the couch. He accepts her hand, runs an unsteady thumb over her knuckles, tracing silent words of love on her skin.
“We can’t stay here,” Mark says.
Gemma nods in agreement. “Do we have anywhere else to go?”
“Technically, we have everywhere else to go. I don’t want to stay in Kier. Do you?”
“No. But I don’t know where else I would want to go.”
The concept of a different town seems abstract to Gemma. She has spent all of her recent days underground, in a bunker outside mundane reality, in a country that thought her dead. Leaving Kier seems hazy, meaningless, even as she shares Mark’s inclination to run. It is only logical that they get far away from this city and its bleak basements, as soon as possible.
“I don’t care, either,” Mark admits. “As long as I’m with you.”
This, Gemma understands. This feels solid when everything else is transparent. This was true before she died and while she was dead and after her death ended.
She wants to go home, and her home is with Mark.
In the days that follow, Gemma finds more photos of herself. They emerge from hiding places; one clamped beneath a lamp, another sitting between a pair of books. Most of them are inside drawers. The first she finds that features Mark, she clutches to her heart. One she finds is held together by tape – torn to pieces, painstakingly reassembled.
The woman in the photo is happy. Surrounded by pink blossoms, donning a wide-brimmed hat. Beaming at the man she loves.
She is from another time, a time untouched by tragedy, but she is shown in fractures, as was her fate. Gemma only wants to give Mark grace for the ways he handled her death, but it brings her some sharp pain, imagining him tearing this photo apart.
Was he angry? Sad? Gemma doubts she wants the answers. He regretted it, she consoles herself, trailing the prickled edge of the tape. He stuck her back together. It might have been the next morning, after he sobered up, or it might have been the moment after he realised what he had done.
“Gemma?” Mark calls from a nearby room. “Honey, where are you?”
There’s a note of panic in his voice. She shoves the photo under his bundle of tea towels and pushes the drawer closed.
“I’m here.”
Mark reaches for her hands and looks over her form, perhaps checking her for injuries, though she couldn’t have possibly acquired any in the fifteen minutes they were apart.
“I’m okay,” Gemma adds.
“Right,” Mark says, shaking his head bashfully. “I’m sorry. Um, do you want to sit for a minute? I’ve got something to show you.”
He sits at the kitchen table, putting down his laptop. He doesn’t open it, not even when Gemma joins him. She takes in his visible hesitation and resists the urge to frown.
Mark clears his throat and unfolds the laptop. The screen is open on a real estate website, a listing for a white house with a blue door and big windows. It strikes Gemma as a family home, possessing the rustic elegance that befits young children and golden retrievers.
“I looked at towns closer to Kier, but it’s all Lumon territory. Cobel gave me some names of places she thought were safe, but I don’t exactly trust her, and I thought it’d be rough, living somewhere we’ve never even heard of.”
Would it? It’s possible that Gemma’s definition of difficulty is skewed. She remains neutral on the topic of where they should go. She only cares about Mark, about having plenty of places to collapse against him and sit in peace. Theoretically, they could do that in any town.
“Okay,” Gemma says.
“There are plenty of options,” Mark says. “And we don’t have to decide right away.”
“I already told you, I don’t mind where we go. You can choose.”
“It really should be your choice.”
She wonders why he is bothering with the pretense of power. If she has any, its nature is limited, and Gemma takes no comfort in illusions.
“Honey,” Mark says, his voice tender and raw. “Will you please talk to me?”
She used to bite the hands of her captors, used to claw at their throats. She used to fight for a chance to use her voice. Now, her tongue feels too heavy for words.
“I don’t care where we go,” Gemma murmurs.
Silence hangs heavily over them. Gemma feels a rush of sympathy for her husband’s taciturn tendencies, an understanding she never had in their old life.
Sometimes, there is simply nothing to say.
Mark breaks the silence. “Well, I had a thought. Maybe we could go to your parents’ town. Then we wouldn’t have a completely blank slate, you know. We have a lot of happy memories there.”
The house on the screen looks less bright, now that Gemma knows why Mark is presenting it to her. She blinks at the address, embarrassed that she didn’t look for it before. It didn’t feel important enough to check. It didn’t feel real.
“You know I haven’t spoken to them.”
“You know I think you should,” Mark says, carefully.
Gemma stares at him with eyes that feel desperate. “And tell them what? I’m not dead, but the person you know is gone. I’m in fragments.”
It’s bad enough, selfish enough, that she’s holding onto hope that Mark will love what’s left of her.
“Meeting me again would be like losing me again. It would be like opening a wound,” Gemma says. “They were right to mourn me. You were right to mourn me.”
“Gemma,” Mark says, sounding completely shocked. “Gemma, please tell me you don’t actually believe that. I am desperately relieved. I don’t have the words for it. You have to know that.”
His sincerity is unmistakable. As is his desperation. Gemma can’t find the strength to comfort him. She feels that same weight in her mouth from before.
“Sweetheart,” Mark says, cradling her face between his hands. “Gemma, sweetheart. I know this doesn’t feel like happiness right now, but it is. I’m so, so happy that you’re back. I love you, I love you, I – I never stopped loving you. I never stopped thinking about you. Every minute you were down there, you were loved. You were you.”
She thinks about her shredded photo, her shredded mind. The tubes of blood, the different outfits, the labels on the notebooks. Gemma never had an aptitude for numbers, she was always a humanities girl, but she can remember stories about rabbits and babies, tortured by people in lab coats. She doesn’t remember how those stories ended. Did the rabbits escape? Did the children grow tall?
Gemma sniffles. She leans into Mark until their foreheads touch.
“You’re still you,” he whispers. “All you have to be is who you are now.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?” She realises that she is crying, but she surges on. “You don’t have to stay here with me just because you married me when I was whole.”
“Gemma – ”
“I want our life back too, but it’s just not possible. I’ll never be the same. I’m – ”
“Please don’t apologise,” Mark says, rather harshly. Gemma sees him make the effort to calm down, breathing through his nose. “Gemma, you were in hell. I thought you were dead. Of course things are going to be different than they were – I don’t care about that. I’m not trying to recreate what we had, I’m trying to get you somewhere safe.”
Gemma blinks at him through her tears. The longer she stares at him, the more possible it seems that he’s telling the truth. After all, he is different, too, and she knows she doesn’t care about any of the changes in him.
“Is that okay with you?” Mark asks, raising his eyebrows, smiling shakily.
“Yeah,” Gemma admits. She moves her face to his shoulder and takes a deep breath.
Brickim is a tiny town on the border of Pennsylvania. Devon vouches for it, drawn in by its well-rated kindergartens and absence from news cycles. Mark confirms that there are public botanical gardens and libraries before asking Gemma for approval. She grants it without hesitation.
Mark doesn’t want to bring much from the Lumon house, only the contents of the basement and the wardrobe, the photo frame on the dresser. Walking through the house for the last time, it occurs to Gemma that it looks unchanged from the first time she saw it, even with everything that made it Mark’s taken away. All packed in the car, in the boot and the backseat. They don’t have enough bulk to justify a moving van.
Gemma is looking forward to the long drive. She hopes that pushing her foot down on the peddle and watching the scenery change around her will help her to internalise the reality that she’s leaving this dark place behind.
They make a stop at a gas station. Mark steps outside to fill up the car and Gemma looks over a catalogue for a homeware store she once favoured. Everything looks so similar, arrangements of timber in hues of brown. Gemma finds it funny when she finds preferences emerging. She likes the lamp with the big pleated shade. She likes the two-tiered coffee table. They could put their heavier books on the lower platform, she thinks. She circles everything she likes, feeling closer to her own hands with every choice she makes.
She gives the catalogue to Mark when he gets back, wanting his opinion.
“These look great,” Mark says. “It might take a while to set everything up. The house will be empty at first. Not that the Lumon house wasn’t empty, but, you know.”
Blank walls, blank floors. Those will be reminiscent of the life she’s leaving behind, but Gemma finds that she isn’t concerned about the possible reminders.
“It won’t be empty,” Gemma says. “You’ll be there. I’ll be there.”
That last part seems dubious, but she knows it’s real. It’s been weeks since she got out and the world remains stable around her. She interacts with it all the time.
“Yeah, baby, exactly,” Mark says, sounding very tender. “I think it could be fun, setting the house up. Devon was telling me that there’s this big monthly market in Brickim, it’s supposed to be good. Maybe we could all go and pick up some furniture there.”
Gemma smiles. “That does sound fun.”
Not that he would know. Gemma put so much care into assembling their first home, hunting for chairs in op shops and rugs in homeware stores. She used to get grumpy when Mark told her he didn’t mind what colour linens they picked. “It’s up to you,” he would say, then become bewildered when she frowned at him.
This time around, Gemma doubts anything similar could occur. Mark doesn’t take their happiness for granted anymore. It will be a long time before anything she has to say – about tablecloths or composting or her mother – could possibly bore him.
“Do you have any ideas yet?” Mark asks her. He sounds earnest in his curiosity. Vulnerable. Please talk to me. Tell me about a future where we can be happy.
“I’m working on it,” Gemma says, dragging his hand to her mouth.
When they reach the new house, Gemma tries not to compare everything to what they once had, but she finds it difficult to repress the observations.
This house is smaller than their first, a brown cottage with a brick roof, overlapped by a large tree. It’s less modern. The colour scheme is darker, per Gemma’s request. She wants to avoid stark white, but she knows that they’ll need to be strategic with their furniture to keep the interior, with its hardwood floors and its black-framed windows, from looking drab.
The garden is enormous and entirely unkempt, a mass of shrubbery and wildflowers. It will take a lot of work to wrangle it into a state of order. Gemma isn’t sure that she’s up to the task, despite what Mark said to the real estate agent during the inspection about his wife having a green thumb.
She mentions her doubt to Mark. He seems unperturbed.
“No rush,” he says. “We’ve got time.”
Mark gets a part-time job at the local university as an academic advisor, sitting in the library and helping undergraduates with referencing. Gemma hopes he’ll be patient with them. He can be brusque, especially when he’s bored, and she knows he’s overqualified for the work he’s doing. He says he doesn’t want to go back to teaching and she won’t challenge him on that, not when he lost his job at Ganz the way he did, not when he’s been so accepting of her new neuroses, however inexplicable.
Returning to work has been deemed an eventual goal for Gemma. She used to be social and competent, but now she withers in the presence of strangers, now she blanches at the thought of signing a document. Mark is adamant that she needn’t think about it for now, that she should focus on the present moment, on beginning to feel better.
What a long beginning it has been.
Gemma rises with Mark every morning. They share simple breakfasts, slices of toast and cups of coffee, sometimes in the kitchen, more often in the garden. She lingers in the grass after he is gone, turning the pages of old books, basking in the presence of the sky. Then she goes for a walk, hoping to stretch her nervous limbs. It seems like the least she owes the exiled women in her head is to fight the urge to furl up.
A fortnight into this new routine, Gemma’s walk brings her to the town’s main street. She feels a sense of danger, a sense of accomplishment, as she trails the glistening concrete with her arms wound around herself.
Most of the storefronts, she passes without consideration, but she pauses when she spots a vibrant rose in a window. It sits in a lush bouquet, accompanied by lilies and speckled in baby’s breath. Gemma stares at the flower shop, the gold paint rimming its windows and its heavy oak door. There’s a large ivy-adorned mirror inside, making the quaint space appear larger than it could be.
The greenery beckons Gemma inside, speaking to her in a forgotten language. She answers the call on tentative feet.
Behind the counter, a woman waves at Gemma and gestures to the phone receiver clamped under her cheek. I’ll be with you in a minute, she’s saying. Gemma smiles without much effort, endeared to the woman for her proximity to flowers and her kind smile. According to her nametag, her name is Meryl.
Left alone, Gemma turns to the plants blooming all around the store. The beauty of each petal, each leaf, overwhelms her. She wants both to load her arms with pot plants and dart out the door, away from these reminders of loss.
In the end, she compromises with a bundle of seaside daisies.
“Hello there,” Meryl says, when Gemma returns to the counter. “Lovely choice.”
“I thought so,” Gemma says. “I like seaside daisies. Resilience, new beginnings.”
For a moment, Gemma worries that she has misremembered the symbolism behind the tiny flowers, but Meryl looks impressed.
“You know your stuff. New beginnings, that’s right. Are you new in town?”
“Yes. My husband and I just moved here.”
It brings Gemma immense satisfaction to drop a ‘my husband’ in casual conversation. She is helpless to the soft smile that crosses her face.
“Newlyweds?” Meryl guesses, grinning.
“No, actually. We’ve been married for six years.”
This is her first time counting those two years in that figure, and it feels better than she was expecting. It makes her feel less abstract. As Mark has said, she was loved during her time locked away. She has always been his wife.
“You’re simply in love, then,” Meryl says, laughing as she fiddles with the register.
“Yes, very much in love,” Gemma admits, feeling warm again. “We’re lucky.”
A default response from the old days. It still feels true, Gemma realises, despite the mountain of evidence she has gathered to the contrary.
“Sounds like it. Cash or card?”
Gemma carries on with her walk, the fuchsia daisies tucked under her arm. She thinks she draws some strength from their cheer, thinks she might be holding her head higher.
Before long, she reaches the university campus, the courtyard behind the library where she meets Mark on his lunch breaks. There he stands, on the steps of the building, moving steadily away from the young woman who addresses him, barely concealing his desire to leave the conversation.
A student, Gemma supposes. She doesn’t want to interrupt them, but Mark spots her from afar. Perhaps she is conspicuous with her daisies. The smile he gives her is more earnest than usual, less tinged by melancholy.
He makes his excuses to the student and jogs in Gemma’s direction, his arms opening for her.
“Hey!” Mark calls. “This is a nice surprise.”
Gemma steps into his embrace and greets him with a kiss on the cheek.
“I found the florist,” she says.
“You didn’t get a plant?”
She shakes her head, offers no elaboration. Mark doesn’t push her, only brushes his fingers over the blossoms with an air of appreciation.
“These will brighten up the house,” he says.
“That’s the hope. How has your morning been?”
“Ordinary,” Mark says. He once used that word to complain about feelings of boredom, but today he sounds oddly relieved. Gemma can tell that, these days, he is grateful for the quiet.
“And now it’s wonderful,” he adds, tucking a tendril of hair behind her ear.
Gemma sways in his arms, charmed and giddy. She is reminded of the early days of their romance, how his attention rendered her adolescent.
“I’m sorry I brought you flowers instead of food.”
Mark laughs softly. “Oh, that’s alright. I packed some sandwiches.”
They share salad sandwiches on a nearby park bench, their knees pressed together and their elbows entwined. Mark tells Gemma about his students and Gemma tells Mark about Nabokov in the garden, Meryl in the flower shop.
It’s been a successful morning, she decides.
There are hands in her hair. Gemma turns on her cot, away from the pictures she has pinned to her wall. The figure behind her stands in shadows, but she recognises him. She knows those gleaming eyes.
“Gemma,” comes his crooning voice. “It’s almost time.”
Frozen on the mattress, she stares at the indistinct face. It seems pleased by her reaction, meeting her open-mouthed horror with a slight smile.
“Are you ready to move on?”
Gemma vaults off the cot, ducking under Dr Mauer’s hands and scrambling for the corner of the room. Unless he opens the door, she has no way of leaving these walls. There’s nothing sharp in here, nothing she could use to hurt herself, nothing she could use to defend herself.
There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
She stands in the corner, feeling foolish and helpless and determined not to succumb to whatever malice waits in his outstretched hands.
“Don’t,” Gemma exclaims, when Dr Mauer takes a step in her direction.
“Now, Gemma – ”
“Stay away from me!” she insists.
“Be reasonable,” Dr Mauer coaxes. “You know I do not want to hurt you.”
She lurches for the nearest chair and drags it in front of herself. This chair once made a decent weapon – she brought it down on him with such force that she knocked him unconscious, but not for long enough. That escape attempt, like all her others, failed. Still, it brought her some grim relief to watch his form crumble. Human, after all. As weak in body as he is in mind.
Rough-fingered man, locking a woman outside her own mind and taking her memories for himself. Growing fond of her in the entitled way that a lonely man does, thinking himself benevolent for forgiving her stabs at rebellion.
Gemma looks away, sickened to be seen by him.
“Stop,” she gasps. “Stop it, stop it, stop it.”
“Gemma,” he says again, but his voice sounds different. Worried. Warm.
Instinct makes her heart leap, but Gemma restrains the burgeoning hope. Dr Mauer was watching her for months, possibly for years. He knows what Mark sounds like, and he probably knows how to emulate his voice.
Gemma puts her hands over her ears. “Stop it! Stop it! Leave me alone!”
“Gemma, honey – Gemma. It’s alright. I’m gonna stay here, alright? Right here. I won’t come any closer.” The voice is frantic now, jumbled. It sounds so much like Mark. Eerily, exactly like Mark.
She blinks in the dim room and finds that the man looks like Mark, as well. He crouches by the corner of the bed, shirtless and sleep-rumpled, his hair sticking up on one side. It would be comical if she could trust it was real.
The bed looks like the bed in their new house. The house they got after she left the room where Dr Mauer could reach her. She chose that doona cover with Mark in a homeware shop – it is pale green and white, patterned with leaves. Pretty. The blanket has been dragged off the mattress. It trails across the carpet, tangled around an ankle.
Gemma flexes her foot and realises that the ankle belongs to her. The texture of the doona is familiar on her skin, a soft weight that has accompanied her sleep for weeks.
“Gemma,” Mark says her name, slowly. “Are you alright?”
She stares at him, trying to understand what has happened. In what room is she sitting? Through whose eyes is she seeing? She searches for signs of deceit in the man looking back at her and finds none. It isn’t Dr Maur. It isn’t a masked imposter. That is her husband. That is his furrowed brow, those are his laughter lines.
“Mark,” Gemma murmurs, dazed.
Mark melts with relief, his bare shoulders sagging. “Yes, it’s me.”
He shifts towards her on his knees, his arms reaching out, and Gemma recoils, cowering closer to the dresser. Her hands tremble with the need to be close to Mark, but her heart is pounding in her chest, screaming about the danger she’s in.
“Sorry, sorry,” Mark says, scooting back to the corner of the bed. “It’s me. It’s Mark.”
“Dr Mauer,” Gemma says, her voice small. “Is he here?”
A furrow appears on Mark’s brow. “What?”
“Is he here?” she repeats herself, more urgently this time.
Mark looks alarmed. “Gemma, there’s nobody here but you and me.”
Gemma commands herself to breathe. She considers their bedroom: the dishevelled bedding, the floor lamp in the corner, the photo frame on the nightstand. The floral rug on the carpet, the sheer curtains on the window. They cracked it open at dusk to usher in the faint breeze, but it has since grown into a strong wind that makes the curtains float.
“Gemma, you’re shivering. Can I get you a sweatshirt?”
Observing the goosebumps on her calves, Gemma musters a nod. Mark telegraphs his movements on the way to the wardrobe, reaching in slowly, handing the sweatshirt to her from as far a distance as he can manage.
Gemma is overwhelmed by his tact, all the more because she knows it doesn’t come naturally to him. Seeing these efforts, Gemma reaches for him. She takes his wrists and drags him close, buries her face in his chest and shudders. Strained, pitiful sobs fill her throat with a bitter taste. This is the subdued way she has trained herself to cry.
Mark doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t demonstrate an ounce of distress, nor surprise. He cradles her in his arms, gains some leverage to pull her into his lap.
“You’re alright,” he whispers, rocking her like a child. “It was just a dream. I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got you.”
Most nights in that shadow world, this was all she could think about. So often, she thought that if Mark was there to hold her afterwards, she could bear anything that Cecily or Dr Mauer asked of her. Any number of rooms, any number of wounds. She would do it all in exchange for a moment with Mark.
“Is this real?” Gemma asks through her tears.
“It’s real,” Mark says adamantly. He uncurls her fists from where they’re tucked into her sternum, puts one palm on his heart and the other across her own.
Both sets of heartbeats are erratic, pulsing in alignment that makes Gemma want to smile. She hopes that doesn’t make her twisted, enjoying the fact of their shared feelings, even when those feelings are so painful.
“Feel those?” he asks her. “They’re all over the place, but they’re there. They’re real.”
They’re there and they’re real. Real, real, real. Gemma fixates on the word until it seems possible, until she can bear the thought of leaving the sanctity of this safe chest, these strong arms, and facing the unpredictable world.
It isn’t as horrible as she thought it would be, looking up into the darkness. Mark’s face is solemn, full of thought and full of love. He stares into the middle distance, running his fingers through her hair.
Gemma couldn’t guess how long she’s been crying, how long he’s been soothing her. She notices that the colours in the window have changed.
“Hey,” Mark says, noticing her gaze on him. “Are you alright?”
He looks bashful as the words escape him, because obviously she isn’t alright. But when Gemma considers his question, she realises that she feels a sense of relief for her earnest tears. Dr Mauer is a fading memory, a figure from a nightmare. Gemma is in her husband’s arms, weeping loudly in a private room.
She has no audience. Only the man she loves, the man who loves her.
“Relatively,” Gemma sighs, her head falling backwards on his shoulder. She gives him a wry smile, the sort of smile that would express embarrassment if she was with anybody but Mark. He exhales, relieved by her return, and presses his lips to her forehead.
“I’ll make some tea,” he says. “Early start for us today.”
In the kitchen, Gemma checks the clock on the microwave and sees that it’s past four o’clock. Mark has to be at work in five hours. She would send him back to bed if she didn’t know her concern would fall on deaf ears.
“What’s your poison?” Mark asks her, sifting through their drawer of tea.
Looking at him, she aches with such love that she becomes distracted, and has to be asked the question again.
One evening, Mark returns home from work with a bundle of wool. The colour is somehow both pale and vivid. Light red, dark pink. Gemma is reminded of poppies, of the beautiful dress in her wardrobe that she can’t imagine wearing again but couldn’t bear to throw away.
“The colour reminded me of you,” Mark explains, setting it on the kitchen counter without another word. “Dinner smells great, hon.”
Gemma knows what he’s doing, and she appreciates that he isn’t making a fuss about it. He wants her to return to her crafts but he doesn’t want to interrogate her about why she hasn’t yet. Perhaps he knows that the answers elude Gemma, as well.
The next morning, after kissing Mark goodbye and sending him off to work, Gemma rummages through the drawer where she knows she stacked her art supplies. She finds a pair of steel knitting needles and gets to work looping the woolly thread around the points.
As far as she knows, her hands have not knitted for two years. Gemma is relieved by how easily the practice returns to her. Before she can think too much about what she is doing, ten stitches appear. Then fifteen, then twenty.
The neat little loops bring Gemma gentle pleasure. She puts down the needles to make a cup of green tea. She picks them back up, takes them to the veranda, sits in the hammock while her fingers flow over a new row. Ten stitches, fifteen stitches, twenty stitches. She pauses between rows for sips of tea.
It feels good to use her hands. Gemma fixates on the motions of her fingers, the clacking needles, the weaving wool. She is stitching it into one long piece, using the simplest method she knows to make a scarf. For Mark. She spends some time fantasising about surprising him with the final result, but by the afternoon, she runs out of wool. She’ll have to ask him where he got the ball.
The scarf is finished within days. Gemma slides the final stitch off in the early hours of the morning, shaken by a nightmare that was not violent enough to rouse Mark. She stares at the pristine rows, remembering the scarf she knitted for Devon almost ten years ago, how she said it looked like store quality.
It does look like store quality, Gemma thinks proudly. Emotional, She winds the warmth around her palms and her wrists. This is what her hands can do. Spin a fragile thread into something whole, an intricate balance of configuration.
Gemma feels as though a switch has been flicked. After the scarf, she can think of any number of ways to keep her fingers busy. On a Saturday morning, she chooses a pencil, begins sketching aimless lines on canvas paper. A scene forms, a sterile hallway that leads nowhere, a twisting labyrinth of white.
Mark, looking over her shoulder and seeing this picture, stiffens. His face twists with unease, struck by an emotion he does not recognise. Gemma knows that he could extrapolate enough from looking at the picture to be revolted by it, but she senses that his distaste is not felt only on her behalf.
“What is it?” Gemma asks.
“Nothing,” Mark says, slowly. “I just think my, um. I think the other guy spent some time running through those halls.”
That gives Gemma an odd rush. All those days that these bodies were in proximity to one another… It’s too strange to think about, and somehow, heartening. There were occasions that they were together, even when they were apart.
“He probably did.”
Gemma puts her hand on the back of his neck, below the space where he split himself open. She cards her fingers through his hair, as though a soothing gesture could make any difference in the pain written there.
A pain so profound it created a new person.
She sighs. “We wouldn’t be here without him.”
Mark is quiet. “I know.”
He’s dead, Gemma knows. It unnerves her to consider, though she knows he was different from Mark, younger and sweeter. He guided one of Gemma’s innies through this hallway; followed her outside the door, giving her back her husband, killing himself in the process.
His was not the only sacrifice made that night. Cobel described a close cohort in Mark’s innie’s department – innocent souls that died along with Lumon. This was what they were fighting for, she knows, a world without severance, a world where people could not be born to endure a stranger’s discarded pain.
They’ll never know the extent of their success.
“Do you ever think about him?” Gemma asks.
Mark makes a sad grumbling noise. “I try not to. I have a lot of regrets about him – but then, I don’t, because it’s how I got you back.”
Gemma bites her lip.
“It’s hard to know where to start,” he says. “I knew it was fucked up, but I did it anyway. I was beyond caring. And it helped. It kept me going. But I never stopped hurting, and I know he felt it too.”
“Do you?” Gemma asks. She represses bizarre envy; she has never shared knowledge with the women in her head.
“I’ve been told he did,” Mark explains. “Petey, remember?”
She nods. She hesitates, then says, “It must say something that you trusted him out here. He should have been a stranger to you.”
“You trusted me too,” Mark says. “Your innie. She didn’t know me, and I was covered in blood, but she gave me her hand when I told her we were married.”
Number twenty-five. The youngest of her innies. She had a better fate than the others, she got to feel Mark’s love, but she’s buried like the others now. Gone.
“What was she like?”
“She was like you,” Mark says, with some fondness in his voice. “Graceful. Quick-thinking. Discerning. She was also… completely terrified.”
“She was less than an hour old,” Gemma says, quietly. “I think you were onto something, trying not to think about this.”
Mark gives her a wry smile. “At least it’s over now.”
She hopes it doesn’t make her terrible to be grateful for that. There’s nothing to be done for the people who worked in Lumon, except to pay her respects to their losses. She knows that she owes her safety to a silent massacre.
Gemma finds a hazy shade of grey to fill the hallway with the eyes she worries cling to her. Mauer, Cecily, the Eagans; monsters known and unknown. She draws dozens of eyes, gleaming on the floor, winking from the ceiling.
Wonders, as she closes the cover, if the horror might stay sealed inside.
The waiter leads them to the corner of the dining room, where Mark rushes ahead to pull out Gemma’s chair for her. She sits, still reeling from the surprise of an impromptu date night, complete with flowers that Mark waited for her to put in a vase before they left. It brings Gemma warmth to imagine those roses glowing in the moonlight, back home.
There is a flickering candle and a carnation in a glass jar on the table. Mark sits primly, looking very handsome and somewhat nervous, reminding Gemma of their early dates. He’s never been good at feigning nonchalance, not when something matters to him. Gemma has always loved that about him.
“I have to tell you something,” she says, leaning over the table. “It’s been a while since I went on a date. I might be a little rusty.”
“That’s not funny,” Mark says, his tone flat and his grin wide.
In their exceptional circumstances, they look at each other and see many things at once. A friend, a partner, a spouse. An interest, a certainty. They exist in multiple places: their nerve-wracking beginning, their fumbled happiness, their second chance.
This date is their first and their thousandth, and it goes well.
Beneath the trauma, outside the twin chips that lay on matching pillows each night, they are the same people. They carry the same love. It has withstood an impossible ordeal, their love, and there’s joy in that. Triumph.
Mark leads Gemma outside the restaurant with his hand on the small of her back. It feels warm and intimate, standing with him in the parking lot, among golden streetlights and the shadows cast by looming trees.
He stops some metres short of their car so that he can gaze across the foliage.
“I’m happy Devon picked this town,” Mark says, absently. “It’s nice.”
“Very nice,” Gemma agrees.
Gratitude overwhelms her. That choice had been out of Gemma’s depth, for reasons that seem murkier the more stable that she feels. She is lucky that Devon chose so well. It’s a relief to stand in this sleepy town, where the girl in the bakery remembers her name, where people wave at each other in the streets, sometimes stopping to exchange pleasantries.
Here, Gemma can be a nice woman with a nice husband.
“This is very nice,” Mark adds, trailing his fingers over the neckline of her dress.
Gemma tries to keep her shiver discreet. It embarrasses her, sometimes, what little it takes from him to make her stomach swoop. At least she has a similar effect on him; he’s wide-eyed over a long dress with a modest neckline.
It is red, she supposes. And he has some memories of her wearing it, of getting her out of it, from her more vibrant days.
“Thank you. I was trying to impress someone.”
“I’m sure he was very impressed.” Mark’s fingers glide over the sensitive skin below her elbow. His path ends with their fingers entwined. Gemma is ruminating on the simple pleasure of contact when he lifts their hands up and twirls her under his arm.
Soft laughter escapes Gemma. The world rushes around her, blurs of black and orange, faint green, the brown in Mark’s eyes and hair. She feels dizzy even when she stops spinning, caught in his look of reverence.
His free hand finds her waist and pulls her in close. He rocks her slowly, starting a dance at the edge of the dark parking lot.
Gemma doesn’t have it in herself to make a fuss about what might be unusual about this. She presses her forehead into his and sways with him, unquestioning. When she thinks about their marriage, it seems less whimsical, more like a logical impulse. A reasonable expression of this love.
Dancing with her husband, she feels as happy as she ever has in memory.
Gemma hears the door open and rises from her seat on instinct. She is consumed by excitement, the same excitement that fills her every time she hears the key turn in the lock and knows it means Mark has come home.
The afternoon has gotten away from her. She spent a great deal of time in the garden, uprooting weeds and gathering fallen branches, but she grew distracted by the appearance of the large orange cat that occasionally visits. She abandoned her gardening gloves to sketch his portrait – he remained perched on the fence, posing quite obediently – and lost track of time.
Now, Gemma discards her pencil and walks to the living room, eager to see her husband.
The difference is obvious in the first glimpse she gets of him. He has gotten a haircut. His hair is the shortest she has seen since she got him back, as short as it was before she lost him.
Gemma’s mouth falls open with surprise. She darts forth, her hands reaching out. The sight of his clarified face makes her beam.
“Hello, handsome,” Gemma coos, cupping his cheeks.
Mark laughs bashfully. “That much better, huh?”
“Yes,” she says, deadpan, just to make him laugh. “No, of course not. You’re always handsome, whatever your hair looks like. But you look – ”
She cuts herself off, not wanting to hurt his feelings. Mark does not seem worried about that possibility, perhaps because he understands the depth of her good will for him.
“How do I look?” he asks, softly.
Gemma runs her fingers through his shorn locks. She recalls his unfinished sentence in the basement where he hid the evidence of their happy life – I didn’t think you’d see me like this. I didn’t think I had any reason to take care of myself. Today, he looks like he sees a person worth keeping upright in the mirror.
“You look like you,” Gemma whispers.
Mark’s eyes appear to melt. “Yeah, well. I feel like me.”
Frenzied with affection, Gemma leans upwards and aligns their lips. Mark responds with fervour, kissing her greedily, the shape of his smile stretching over her skin. The longer she stands here, the more she wants from him. It isn’t enough to taste him, she has to devour him.
“My baby,” Mark is murmuring, as he scatters kisses on her jawline. “My baby.”
He takes her by surprise when he lifts her off her feet, gathering her in his arms and carrying her to the couch. The walk there is graceless, gentle despite the effort. Mark drops her onto the green cushions with painstaking care, then crawls over her and covers her face in frantic, tender kisses.
Mark pauses when their noses brush. “Can I tell you something embarrassing?”
“Always,” Gemma replies, her smile amused.
His expression is thoughtful as he takes in her face. He brushes his thumb over her cheekbone, the contact so featherlight she feels a tickle in her spine.
“I teared up a little when I saw my reflection,” Mark says. “I didn’t look until they told me I was done. When I saw myself, I had this thought. It’s been a while since you looked familiar.”
Gemma recognises that feeling. She felt a version of it underground, when she got back from visiting the different rooms and was given permission to remove the wigs they demanded she wear. It was a persistent relief to see her real hair spilling out, the long dark waves falling once more down her back.
“I don’t think that’s embarrassing,” she says, nudging her nose into his cheek.
Mark smiles brightly and leans down to keep on kissing her.
“Good morning, Meryl!”
“Morning, Gemma!”
This pair of greetings has marked the beginning of the past several Monday mornings. Gemma visits the florist every week to replace the contents of the vase in the kitchen table.
Today, Meryl answers Gemma without looking up from the bouquet she is arranging. She peers at the flowers through her tortoiseshell glasses, holding a gerbera in one hand and a tulip in the other, debating where to put which.
“They’re dark for chrysanthemums,” Gemma says, surprised by the purple blossoms in the bundle. “Beautiful.”
Meryl flashes Gemma a smile. “Your good eye strikes again.”
She often compliments Gemma for her knowledge and taste when it comes to botany. Each time it happens, Gemma is struck by pride; the display in this store is lush and bright, the meticulous craft of a talented florist. Gemma is flattered by Meryl’s approval, grateful to be recognised for an old joy, not yet reclaimed.
“I’ve always loved plants,” Gemma says, shrugging.
She’s gone too long without them. Pale substitutions have brought her some solace, hand-drawn sketches and flowers with death dates. But no more.
Gemma is resolved to rebuild her collection. She will not leave this shop without a pot plant.
“A peace lily,” Meryl says, turning its black container around on the counter.
Gemma feels oddly jittery, as though she is doing something she should not.
“I thought it was a good beginner plant,” she says.
Meryl gives her a curious look. “You don’t seem like a beginner to me.”
There once was a house with plants growing in every room. Looking after those plants was second nature to Gemma, a given part of her day, as commonplace as eating a meal and going to bed. Some of those plants, she nurtured for years.
“I’m not,” Gemma admits, her smile tremulous. “But it’s been a while since I had plants.”
More curiosity blooms on Meryl’s face, but she has the tact not to prod any further. “Well, peace lilies are hardy. A good choice for a beginner, I agree.”
She spins the peace lily carefully around, finding the barcode and scanning it.
“There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you, Gemma.”
It seems like an ominous question to Gemma. She tries not to buy into the dread that threads up her spine.
“Yes?” she asks, forcing her voice to remain steady.
“You aren’t a florist, are you?” Meryl asks.
“Oh, no. Not at all. I – I was a university professor. I taught Russian literature.”
This confession tugs rather brutally on Gemma’s heartstrings. She knows they landed on this topic by way of politeness, but she finds her patience wearing as her old bruises are poked with blunt fingers.
Meryl smiles. “I can imagine you doing that. So your familiarity with plants is a hobby? You’re not professionally trained?”
“No.”
“Would you like to be?”
The breath seems to disappear from Gemma’s lungs. For a moment, she is suspended in disbelief, staring at Meryl and waiting for her to say something realistic. This isn’t how job opportunities work, not today.
“Are you offering me a job?” Gemma asks, slowly.
“Nothing gets past you, professor,” Meryl teases. “I want to cut back on my hours and I don’t trust my granddaughter to man the shop alone. She doesn’t know her pansies from her petunias. And here you are, spot on with your plant recommendations, rattling off flower symbolisms like a botany book.”
Meryl puts her palms on the counter and leans forwards, her face smug.
“I think it’d do you good, Gemma. It’d certainly do me good.”
A startled laugh is extracted from Gemma. “It would do me the world of good.”
She gets a 25% employee discount on the peace lily, which seems rather ludicrous when she hasn’t started the job yet. Gemma walks home with a spring in her step and a smile on her face. A sense of hope in her chest.
For months now, she has looked to the future and seen something warm but vague. It grows more distinct every day. Now she has some clarity, a possibility.
When she returns home, Gemma transfers the peace lily to a ceramic pot. She puts it in the kitchen, sliding it carefully across the floorboards, just outside the reach of sunlight. She feels the weight of her new responsibility, as she traces the edge of one shining emerald leaf. There is a chance she will be watering this plant for years to come. She only needs to trust her capable hands.
Unable to resist sharing her exciting news, Gemma calls Mark in the midst of his workday and tells him about Meryl’s offer. He recognises her joy and reciprocates it with ease. His voice is as sweet as his words, telling her that this would be perfect for her, that she belongs among flowers, dedicating her days to beautiful things.
“As long as it’s what you want,” he says. “That’s all I care about.”
“I know, baby,” Gemma says, feeling safe, feeling loved. “Thank you.”
She notices that the sun has moved, that its rays are touching the outer leaves of her new plant. Gemma takes a moment to appreciate the wobbly green glow before she pushes the peace lily back into safety.