Frau Rosenclay, thanks for reading! Yes, there's definitely some sorrow; I seem to be unable to let it go when I write about Willow and Tara, but at the same time, I hope that there's hope in this, too. As for Hemingway, I actually haven't read "Garden of Eden"; should I? I'm not always crazy about Hemingway, but I do like his idea that every story is an iceberg, and only 1/8 of the iceberg should be visible. The rest is underwater. I like that idea a lot. Tell me about "Garden of Eden"....please!
And now...
Title: Bread. Part II: July.
Author: Tulipp.
E-mail:
tulipp30@yahoo.comFeedback: Yes, please, especially if it’s constructive.
Spoilers: Through BTVS season 5, “The Gift.”
Disclaimer: All characters and an occasional bit of dialogue are borrowed from Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. No copyright infringement intended.
Summary: Willow, Tara, and Dawn struggle to come to terms with the events of season 5, Buffy’s death, and an uncertain future. (Second of three parts.)
Acknowledgments: Thanks again to Ruth and darkmagicwillow and Ruby and J., all of whom showed me places that were off or incomplete or overly complete. This chapter is much better because of them.
Part II: July
Your hands are sweeter than nut-brown bread when you touch me.
Your shoulder brushes my arm—a south-west wind crosses the pier.
I forget your hands and your shoulder and I say again:
Nothing else in this song—only your face.
Nothing else here—only your drinking, night-gray eyes.
—Carl Sandburg, “Paula”
Dawn’s ears popped a little as the plane descended into a place that wasn’t California, and she wondered what she would say to her father when they got back to his house—her house now—and she stood in the kitchen of her new life.
She didn’t really know how she felt. She wanted to see her dad, but her stomach also hurt a little bit about leaving. She’d hardly even been anyplace other than California. Peering out the rounded window as the plane took off a few hours earlier, Dawn had been amazed at how small Sunnydale looked from the air. When you lived over the Hellmouth, she’d thought….everything was life and death. The world was always about to end, and sometimes it did. It was huge.
But from the air…well, it was just so tiny: Little streets. Little houses. And somewhere under the ground….tiny little vampires. And she was high above all of it, sitting in an airplane, feeling partly sad…and partly excited. She was heading off to a place where the breakfast menu every morning was not going to be Scrambled Sad with a side of Wishful Thinking.
Running a finger over the soft, buttery cover of the book in her lap, Dawn thought how strange it was to be sitting alone in the sky, sandwiched in between a heavy man with a shiny suit and a heavy woman with curly red hair. Not in between Buffy and her mother.
Not in between Willow and Tara...who hadn’t actually seemed that surprised when she’d sat them down at one morning and anxiously explained her news: she’d called her father, and he wanted her to come; of course he did. If Dawn didn’t know better, she might have thought that they were just a tiny bit relieved. If she didn’t know better. The truth was… she was more than a tiny bit relieved herself. It wasn’t that she didn’t love them; she did. But…but it was new where she was going, and the people there—at least her father and his secretary—were living. They were just living. And when she got there, she’d be just living too.
She had said goodbye to Willow the night before. It was Tara who had awakened her early the next morning, creeping into her room in the gray dawn and shaking her lightly. Tara who had pointed out the gray birds chattering on the roof when they’d pulled out of the driveway. Tara who had driven her to the airport and waited with her for the plane, alternately thumb wrestling and going for hash browns and orange juice.
“The plane’s going to be a little late,” Tara had announced finally, wandering back from the ticket counter, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her lace-trimmed jeans and stretching her shoulders. “I guess we might as well get comfortable for a little while. We could...” she considered, her eyes crinkling as a mischievous smile twisted one corner of her mouth. She pulled her hand out of her pocket and held out a fistful of tiny elastic bands. “Do you want to give me crazy braids?”
Squealing, Dawn bounced a little bit and then couldn’t help glancing around to make sure no one had seeing her acting like a kid. Tara folded herself onto the floor in front of Dawn’s chair and crossed her legs, resting one hand on each knee. Dawn set the pile of elastic bands on the seat next to her and wiggled her fingers. Tara hardly ever let her do crazy braids.
Tara’s hair was soft but not fine. It fell like feathers when Dawn let it sift through her figers, but it was heavy when she held it; strong. She liked that about Tara’s hair. You couldn’t really braid Willow’s hair, and Buffy had never let her. She would swat her hand away.
Dawn felt instantly sorry, instantly sad again, for thinking something bad like that, and she tried to focus on the fifth tiny braid, starting over Tara’s ear and weaving the hair backwards. But her hand shook and pulled a little.
“Hey, sweetie,” Tara said without turning around. “What are you thinking about?”
Dawn concentrated on the braid. “Maybe I shouldn’t feel excited,” she said quietly, and then Tara did turn around.
“I just,” Dawn stretched the elastic band in her fingers. “I felt happy for going to see my dad, you know? But then…feeling happy makes me feel sad again.”
“Did you ever make bread?” Tara said, and Dawn looked up in confusion. Sometimes Tara said the strangest things, and even when you wanted to just go with it….well, just sometimes Tara said the strangest things.
“If you make bread…from scratch, you know?…you have to let it rise.” Tara’s voice was calming, but Dawn still raised her eyes. She shook her head helplessly; she didn’t see the connection.
“Just listen,” Tara smiled. “It’s this lump of dough, and you have to punch it down, and then you have to cover it with a towel for awhile and leave it alone, and all by itself, it starts to rise up. It gets light and puffy, but then you have to punch it down again, and it rises up again. You know what I mean?”
“Um, not really,” Dawn said, noticing that Tara’s braids looked crooked from the front. She would have to start over. Right now, while it was still just the two of them.
“You have to have both, the punching down and the rising up?” Tara had said, taking Dawn’s hand in hers and looking at her closely. “To get bread in the end…you have to have them both.”
Now, angling for an inch more room on the armrest, Dawn thought she might write it down in the book Willow had given her: Tara’s thing about the bread. It made sense; at least it had at the time. But then the plane was touching down with a series of little bumps, and she peered out the tiny window at Not California, and she forgot about the book in her excitement to see her father. She copied the people next to her: waiting for the light to go on before unbuckling her seatbelt even though she could hardly sit still, then reaching for the bag she had stuffed under the seat in front of her.
One foot in front of the other, she edged off the plane and toward the train that she had been told would take her to the main terminal where people waited. She knew that every step took her a little further from her mother and her sister and the daily presence of two girls she loved almost as much. She knew that she was walking away from her family. But she knew that she was walking towards a different family.
Dawn stepped off the train, and followed the crowd toward the escalator, and as she rose on the moving stairway, she scanned the faces of the people coming into view at the top. Anxious faces, most of them, searching for the people they were waiting for. Maybe that was how everyone greeted planes from Sunnydale: never quite sure if their loved one was going to emerge, alive and whole, from a town where people routinely disappeared. A surge of relief as they caught a glimpse of tanned arm.
Then Dawn saw him. The lines of his face were familiar, and Dawn felt her throat tighten and her heart beat faster as she walked toward him: a little uncertain, a little nervous. She registered that another man she recognized stood just behind him—the secretary—but she had eyes only for her father.
He was just yards away now, lifting his hand in the familiar half-wave she hadn’t seen in months and months, and the bones of his hand looked strong and solid against the memory of everything that had crumbled.
Dawn smiled. And she ran the last few steps.
* * * * *
The house was empty when Willow woke, and for a moment, she felt confused, unsure what day or week or month it was. As she blinked in the sunlight, it could have been any of a dozen mornings that summer when she had woken alone, unable to say where Tara had gone or whether she had taken Dawn with her. But this morning was different. Willow felt rested. She had slept deeply, and she felt…a little better.
Sitting up, Willow saw her stuffed dog in perfect yoga position, face down on the rug with his little doggy rear end in the air, and she was glad to see him there. If he had been on the bed, in her arms, that would have meant she’d been clutching him all night to stop herself from reaching for Tara. But he was on the floor, so she hadn’t dreamed Tara wrapping around her in the night, Tara murmuring into her ear as she drifted into sleep.
“It’s okay to touch me,” Tara had whispered, and her fingers had traced the words on Willow’s hip. “It’s okay to need me.” It was progress, too, that the words had not pulled Willow wide-awake again. They were lavender words, sleepytime tea words, and they had become the pillow under her head and the sheet pulled up to her shoulder, and she had nestled in and slept in them. In Tara.
That was movement. That meant it was July now, and not June, and time was happening around them just as she’d known, but not really believed, it would.
All the same, as she strained to hear Tara in the shower or Dawn watching television or…anything…she could feel that the house was quiet, the bathroom—when she peeked around the slightly open door—empty of steam. Noting the dry towels and the closed blinds, she walked through to the hallway, still listening for any noise of girls in the morning and hearing none.
They had really gone, then, and she was—for a little while—alone.
Willow knew there would be no answer, but she tapped on the door to Dawn’s room anyway and waited; when no answer came, she had a moment of déjà vu. She could remember easing Dawn’s door open weeks before, holding the adopted teddy bear to her face and finding that the brown plush held nothing of Buffy’s scent. She had distracted herself by poking around in a snarl of beads and necklaces on Dawn’s dresser and finding…caught in a cheap, shiny chain…a dried flower.
She could remember reminding herself to have words with Anya about casually letting a teenager take home—even by accident—an intact sprig of Lethe’s Bramble. But even more, she could remember the shiver of recognition as she twisted the peculiar, branching brown flower in her fingers.
She had wished, then, that she’d had the nerve to do it, to wipe her and Dawn’s and Tara’s memories clean of the Big Bads that haunted them. But instead, she had sighed and tucked the bramble into the bowl on Joyce’s dresser where it had remained since. She still thought about it most days, still considered using it. It was a ridiculously easy spell; a baby could pull it off.
The temptation always itched more when she was alone in the house; Willow had noticed that early on, and she had kept herself busy to avoid it. Helping Anya run the store from her wheelchair, posting Xander’s on-line resumes, e-mailing Giles with updates. And working on the Buffybot—although Tara had finally convinced her that even with an imitation Slayer, they were no match for the forces of darkness.
“What happens if something goes wrong and the Buffybot slips a circuit or pops a rod or whatever happens and there we are in the alley with a bunch of demons?” Tara had asked, incredulous and gently scoffing. “We take up axings? Can you just picture me doing that?”
Laughing, Tara had raised an eyebrow and gone back to making soap, the latest development in what Willow teasingly called her lesbian commune tendencies.
In fact, trying to picture it was…impossible. Willow couldn’t see it. No matter how she turned the idea in her mind, squinted, turned her head…she couldn’t find an image of Tara holding up an axe or Tara fighting off vampires with her fish-swimmy fists that would come into focus. It just seemed so…not Tara. Willow didn’t know how else to put it.
Dismantling the last pieces of the Buffybot, Willow had run her fingers over the silicone cheekbones one final time. She had understood that she couldn’t hold onto Buffy that way. They couldn’t bring her back. Without Buffy, they were just…without Buffy. Buffyless. No longer in the Buff.
It hurt. God, it hurt, but it was the truth. Tara couldn’t be not Tara. And she herself….she couldn’t be Buffy. When she tried to be Buffy—to find a way to keep the Slaying going—she only succeeded in being not Willow. Not being Willow, she had corrected herself, but it sounded more true the first way. She couldn’t be not Willow. She could only be herself.
And with the thought, something strange had happened. It had been a hot July day, and even the basement had felt dry and warm, but with the thought something chill and dank had pressed up against her, raising the gooseflesh on her arms and the hair on her neck and then, just as suddenly, moved on. She had stood up abruptly, Buffybot pieces clattering to the floor around her, but there was nothing there.
And she was only herself.
She thought it again now, June becoming July once more as she eased the door to Dawn’s room open and peeked inside at the bare furniture, the blank walls. Dawn was still going to be Dawn but just somewhere else, and Tara was still Tara, and she…she was only herself. Always herself. Herself alone.
Except…except that she wasn’t alone. Well, she was alone in the house at the moment because Tara was probably still at the airport, but really…she wasn’t alone. They were.
Willow stood with her hand on the doorknob to Dawn’s empty room, it sank into her skin that she and Tara were…alone. Really alone. Alone for the first time in months.
Not in the “only two people in this kitchen and one of them better be making coffee” kind of alone. Or the “only two people in the shop for five minutes before Xander finishes playing healing touch with Anya in the back” alone. Or the “there you are on your side of the bed for seven hours and here I am on mine” alone.
No. They were alone now in the “when I look up from my calculus homework, you’re the only one in the house, and I kind of like it that way because we don’t have to close the door to our room so I can just grab you now” kind of alone.
Willow shivered. She could remember the last time she and Tara had been alone that way.
It had been just an hour, a brief recess from Glory and fear and death. Willow had pulled off her sadness with her boots. She had unclasped her fears with her earrings and cradled them in her palm, setting them gently down on the night-table: they would be safe and protected until she could come back to them. She had watched Tara slide off her sympathy as she slid off her jeans. They had looked at one another and smiled in a way they would never have let Dawn or Buffy see, not in those days. It had been relief, that smile. It might have been temporary, but it was real.
And then…they had touched one another, and it had been free and frolicky and actually kind of embarrassing, if Willow thought about it now. To be on your knees, pushed up against a headboard or a wall or a closet door so that all you could see was your own hand holding yourself up. To have someone very naked behind you touching your very naked places. To lose your balance and fall over and take your very naked person with you and to laugh, both of you, so hard that you fall over again and end up in a very naked tangle on the carpet. And then to look up and stop seeing very naked and only see your person and to reach for her….
Willow let go of the doorknob. It had been so good. For one hour, it had been so good. But everything had changed after that hour. They had never gotten a chance to get comfortable in their clothes again.
Until now, maybe. Dawn had gone off with her father, and Giles had called to say he would be staying on a few more months in England. Xander and Anya had finally decided to get one good thing out of the summer and go get married, and Willow and Tara were alone. No one to comfort but each other. No one to be with but each other. It was just the two of them.
Willow let her fingers graze over her hip and recalled Tara’s hand resting there the night before. It was just the two of them now, alone in an “I can hear you breathing when you stand inside my life with me” kind of alone.
Willow had to try out the picture in her mind, to see if the edges stayed blurry when she tried to imagine it. She was so used to being one in a group and two in a group that it was hard to visualize being just two together. And it was also sad and a little lonely because it meant that people she really, really loved were gone.
But—Willow heard the distant click of the kitchen door and began to pad quietly down the stairs—but it was also a little bit exciting. Was she a terrible person to feel that way? To feel a little glad and a little not-sad at that moment? Willow paused in the kitchen doorway for a moment and watched Tara backing through the door with canvas bags of groceries. Even from behind, she looked calm, almost peaceful, and Willow saw the picture in her mind sharpening, the blurred edges becoming crisp.
They were alone.
* * * * *
“Something smells good.”
Turning around to set her bags on the kitchen counter, Tara saw Willow hovering in the kitchen doorway, frowsy and rumpled in her pajamas. She looked so…cute, Tara thought with surprise. So young and pretty. It wasn’t that she was surprised that Willow was pretty; it was just…when had Tara stopped noticing that? When had she started seeing only the older, darker woman where there was also this young girl wearing a pair of Hello Kitty pajamas that Tara was fairly certain she’d swiped from Dawn?
She smiled and glanced at the kitchen clock. “You’re up early, in a noon kind of way,” she teased, and Willow ran her hands over her pajamas.
“They’re just so comfortable,” Willow said, the corners of her mouth lifting in a smile. She looked different, Tara thought. Hopeful. Eager in a quiet way. She watched as Willow reached for the cabinet where they kept the coffee, yawning and looking ten years old. Her pajama sleeve looked fuzzy, and Tara remembered that it felt that way, too.
She had woken up in the embrace of that fuzzy pajama sleeve…when had it been…only this morning? Yesterday? “I want to touch you,” Willow had whispered, and the words had been warm breath on Tara’s neck and pink cotton under her cheek and fresh air at the window. Those words had been her morning. She went soft for a moment, remembering.
“So?” Willow mumbled through her yawn.
“So what?” Tara handed her the jar of coffee from the fridge.
Willow spooned coffee into a filter. “So what smells good?” Tara watched Willow go through the entirely routine motions of sliding the basket into the coffeemaker and filling the carafe with water and flipping the switch, and for a moment she could scarcely speak. She felt overcome. She had gone through so much, lost so much and almost more, and now she stood in the kitchen watching her girlfriend make coffee. She was so lucky.
But Willow was still waiting for her answer. “Oh, I stopped to pick up a few groceries on the way home, and there was this new bakery, and I could smell it from the car, and…I don’t know…I just had to stop.” She nodded at one of the canvas bags and grinned sheepishly as Willow began pulling out white paper-wrapped packages. “I might have overdone it a little.”
“I don’t know,” Willow said, smiling shyly at Tara. “I’m pretty hungry.” The coffee bubbled into the pot, and when it spluttered out its last little splutters, Willow reached for two mugs. Willow liked her coffee strong, Tara knew, and she was learning to like it that way, too.
When Willow turned back around, Tara was holding one of the baguettes, still tucked into its paper cover, and she walked backward with it through the dining room, holding it out in front of her. Willow followed, balancing the mugs carefully, eyes on the bread.
They sat side by side on the sofa, Willow’s long legs stretched out onto the coffee table in front of them, and sipped their coffee. Willow reached for the baguette and ripped a piece off, and when she bit into it, she made a little “mmph” of satisfaction. Hearing it, Tara thought that everything felt different today, different lately. It wasn’t that things were perfect….she knew better than anyone that you couldn’t just shake off the death of someone you loved as if it hadn’t happened…but today….
“My mother used to make bread every morning,” she said abruptly, stretching her fingers around her coffee mug until they met in the middle. “Did I ever tell you that?” She pretended not to notice Willow’s sharp sideways glance. “Well, almost every morning,” she admitted. “Talking to Dawn at the airport made me think of it.”
Willow sat still for a moment, and then, a little too casually, lifted her coffee cup and sipped. Tara had told Willow little about her family, only dropped occasional bits and pieces for her to puzzle together. And she knew that Willow had only a dark sense of the Maclays: the glimpse she’d seen when her father and brother came to town, the taste she’d swallowed when she had restored Tara’s sanity.
“Sometimes at night, when I went to bed, I would feel so hopeless, like…nothing would ever change. My father would yell, and Donnie would….” Tara stopped, shaking her head. That hadn’t been what she’d meant to say. To Willow, her past had been pain, but it hadn’t always been like that. Not always.
Willow’s eyes were trained on her coffee cup, but her body was rigid with listening. Tara closed her eyes to get back to the memory she had wanted, and then she smiled a little, remembering. “I always knew when it was morning because I could smell the bread baking downstairs. My mother…she would get up really early and make the dough and let it rise, and then—I never needed an alarm clock because I would be lying there, kind of half-awake, you know?” Willow just listened.
“Well, I would just sort of drift in and out of sleep, thinking about what kind of day it was going to be, and then the air would go…buttery. I could smell the bread just starting to bake, and I knew it was time to get up. I knew that everything could be okay that day—normal—because my mother was downstairs, and there was bread….”
Tara faltered, her eyes full of an image of her mother, waist-long blonde hair twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck, arms bare and dusted with flour. If Tara closed her eyes and concentrated on the heat of her mug and the fresh scent of the baguette on the coffee table in front of her, she could almost be back there, in her mother’s kitchen. She could feel her mother sitting at the round brown table, sipping tea and waiting for her to slip down the stairs so they could talk a little while before the upstairs shower went on and her father’s footsteps sounded above.
There had been a small mirror hanging by the back door, hung on a nail with a ribbon, Tara remembered with a small shock. She had almost forgotten.
Once, she had managed to creep down the stairs silently; pausing in the doorway, she had seen her mother not at her usual place at the table but standing in front of that mirror, staring at her reflection. Silently, Tara had watched her mother lift one pale, slender arm and touch the image of her face in the mirror. She had looked…blank. As if she didn’t recognize her own reflection in that tiny mirror. As if she were looking at someone else. But she had caught sight of Tara then and turned toward her, toward the warm oven and the fresh loaf and her daughter, and everything had been fine.
Except that after that day, Tara had always been careful to step heavily on the creakiest steps when she came down in the morning.
The touch of Willow’s thigh against hers, just a whisper of contact, brought Tara back to the present with a start, and she turned up one side of her mouth apologetically and looked up through the hair that had fallen across her face. Tara lifted her legs onto the coffee table, too, so that her foot bumped up against Willow’s foot.
“She made it almost every day, right up until the end, when she was too sick?” Tara went on. “And then I would make it and take it up to her. She couldn’t always eat it, but she loved the smell. She said it made her feel human. I think I kind of understand now what she meant, you know? Just human.”
Tara turned to Willow again and this time came face to face with the rumpled red hair and the gentle green eyes and the bittersweet, morning scent of fresh bread. Willow said nothing, only held her gaze, but Tara could see that she understood: What she meant. Why she had told her now. All that she had said, and all that remained unspoken between them.
“How do you do it?” Willow asked finally, the lines of her mouth softening. “How do you forget everything you’ve been through and go on like you do?”
“I don’t,” Tara said gently. It was a window into Willow, that question, and she knew it. “I don’t forget. I try to remember; that’s all I can do.” She searched Willow’s eyes for confirmation. “That’s all we can do: remember.”
She watched as Willow’s lips pressed together, and she felt Willow’s fingers, still warm from her coffee cup, touch her cheek. “You’re so brave,” Willow whispered.
Tara shook her head dismissively. “Oh, Will,” she said, sighing. “When will you get it? My mother…she was the bravest person I ever knew, and all she really did was teach me some Wicca and bake bread.” Reaching to touch Willow’s cheekbone, Tara followed the line of her own hand up past the knuckles to her fingertips and an inch past that to eyes that were soft and wide open and green. Willow’s fingers were hot on Tara’s cheek, and Willow’s cheek burned under her fingers. It was the closest they had been in months.
After a moment, Tara let her fingers fall again, and Willow took her hand back to reach for another piece of bread. Wrapping her fingers more tightly around her coffee cup, Tara let her head drop sideways onto Willow’s neck and felt an arm slip around her shoulders. Closing her eyes, she felt as if the soft, moist warmth of home had enveloped her: A heated oven. A hotly damp kitchen. The scent of hot bread baked fresh.
To be continued in Part III: August.
"And I'm eating this banana. Lunchtime be damned!" -- Willow in "Doppelgangland
Edited by: Tulipp at: 1/11/03 8:43:15 am