Long Time Gone

Louise isn’t sure what hurts more, the words or the slap across her cheek. All of it feels like slow motion, her brain is running too fast for the situation at hand. This is her sister, her own flesh and blood. Louise doesn’t think Emilia has ever laid a hand on anyone, let alone her sister.

“Ouiser-” her voice changes again as she realizes what she’s done.

Louise stumbles backwards, clutching her cheek. She tells herself she will not cry, repeats it like a prayer, but it happens without her permission. Tears begin to sting and well and inevitably fall, not out of pain or fear, but out of betrayal.

“Ouiser, I’m so sorry,” Emmy is crying too, “Oh god, what did I do?”

Louise can feel her knees threatening to buckle, her legs unable to bear her weight any longer. Before she can drop to the floor and cry like a child, Emmy’s arms are under hers, wrapping her up in the biggest hug she’s felt in years. Then, she lets them both sink to the ground.

That’s how their parents find them, crying and clutching each other like children on the cold linoleum floor of the kitchen. Their father doesn’t say anything, slips away to the bedroom with his jaw clenched and tension held in his shoulders. Their mother pulls a bottle of wine down from the top shelf of the pantry, sets it in front of them, kisses both of their heads, and follows their father.

They lock themselves in Louise’s childhood room with the bottle of wine and tears on their cheeks. For the first time in a long time, Louise lets herself feel. She lets the hurt and shame and fear bubble up in her chest and spill out past her lips.

She tells her sister everything, just like they’re children again. She describes her shitty studio apartment in Nashville with the unreliable heat and leaky faucets. She tells her about scraping by off of anything that landed in her tip jar until she lost that shitty studio apartment and it no longer seemed so awful. She talks about trading in her beloved truck for a car to sleep in, about inevitably pawning her guitar just to have enough gas money to make it back home. She admits that Nashville wasn’t what she’d hoped, what she’d projected it to be. Nashville had chewed her up and spat her out in three short years.

That’s how she rebuilds her first bridge, by cracking open her chest and pulling out every secret she’s kept about her life in Nashville. By putting her heart in her sister’s hands and asking for forgiveness.

*

It’s easier being back home with at least one person who has forgiven you. Still, Louise spends most of her days at Harry’s and most of her nights at The Bullet. She’s too broke to become an alcoholic so she mostly resorts to pestering Niall for town gossip and control of the jukebox. Some nights Liam and Sophia will show and pretend to be surprised to see her there, at the bar, alone. Some nights Niall is the only one who will look her in the eye.

She’s tired. She’d hoped that bone deep tiredness would disappear with home cooked meals and sleeping in a real bed, but that hasn’t been the case. Everything seems to be contributing to it, weighing her down and draining her out. She’s tired of the monotonous, memorized motions of picking strawberries for countless hours a day, everyday. She’s tired of the judgemental stares that set her skin on fire, not just anytime she shows her face in town, but at home as well. Most of all, she’s tired of being without music, without her guitar, without songwriting. Her life has become a tired and tedious task that echoes her life before Nashville, except even less colorful.

It’s a Friday evening, the sun just beginning to set, when Harry changes it all. Just like he used to.

Louise’s only plans (as usual) are to cash the check Harry hands her at the end of the day and to take a hot shower before winding up on a barstool at The Bullet.

“Do you want to stay?” Harry asks suddenly as they’re loading up boxes of berries, “For dinner?”

She nearly falls over. She looks down at her dusty boots and scraped knees and berry stained fingers. She should say no. She shouldn’t risk losing whatever sense of tolerance he’s built up for her. Things are tentatively okay, she can’t fuck that up.

But this feels like the first brick of a rebuilt bridge.

“Alright.”

She feels out of place as she sits at the kitchen table, covered in dust and sweat. It’s the same table they used to spend hours at playing board games and doing homework but it doesn’t feel the same. The same crooked chairs are around it and she knows if she ducks her head underneath, she’ll see her and Harry’s initials scrawled on the underside in Crayola marker. Nothing has changed, but it feels so different.

It’s strange, watching Harry flit around the kitchen, pulling pots and pans out like his mother used to. She sees so much of Anne in him that she has to look away. She can’t imagine losing both of her parents in such a short time span. She can’t imagine growing old in her childhood home all alone. She can’t imagine the weight of being Harry.

The Styles’ house is like a time capsule and she notices it more than she did the last time, when her head had been fuzzy with heat exhaustion. Family photos still line the walls, bills are still stacked on the counter, boots are still piled at the front door. She’s almost waiting for Anne and Des to walk in, kiss them on the cheeks and ask them how their day at school was.

“I miss them,” she confesses softly when he catches her staring at the photos on the wall as he lays a plate in front of her.

He glances over at the photo, him at about six years old with a goofy smile, holding both of their hands proudly. Something dark and unfamiliar flashes over his green eyes but he blinks it away.

“Me too.”

They split a bottle of wine over the meal and for the first time in forever they talk. Maybe it’s the wine or that bone deep tiredness from picking all day, but either way Louise can feel her chest lightening.

He tells her how hard it was, watching them both deteriorate one after the other. About how much they relied on him. He tells her about how he hadn’t realized how much work they put in in one day. Most of all, he tells her how his mother kept her warmth and his father kept his wit, until their very last days.

She tells him about Nashville, about how he’d hate it. About the neon lights and seedy bars. She tells him about all the songs she’d written and all the labels that had rejected them. About how Nashville had done exactly what he said it had, chewed her up and spit her out.

“Will you play me one?” he’s uncorking another bottle of wine, their dirty dishes forgotten in the sink before they’d moved to the living room.

She watches the red liquid slosh in their glasses, head spinning, “What?”

“A song,” he straightens up, nodding at the dusty guitar next to the piano in the corner, “Will you play me one? One I haven’t heard before?”

She swallows harshly. Her brain is hazy but even if it wasn’t, she wouldn’t be able to name a single song she’s written in the past three years that isn’t in some way about him. She isn’t sure she’s drunk enough to embarrass herself like that yet. She isn’t sure that’s the best way to rebuild their bridge.

Somehow, he talks her into it. Maybe it’s the wine or the pout on his lips, but either way she finds herself dusting off his old guitar and tuning it a bit. She’s nervous, but she can feel the wine kicking in and flowing warmly through her veins. It gives her a little more confidence, like the shot of whiskey she used to down before going onstage in some shitty Nashville bar.

She plays one of songs she avoids usually. One about apologies and regrets and wanting to turn back time. One about his heart and his hands and wishing they could both one day forgive her. She wrote it six months after she moved to Nashville in a drunken, pathetic haze. She kept it tucked away in a journal, pulling it out when her desire to self sabotage was at its highest. The first time she tried to play it live was the first time she was booed offstage.

It hurt her pride in herself more than anything else. She didn’t care if it was a shitty song, if it didn’t get her a record deal or another seedy bar gig. It meant something. It was raw and bleeding and real. That was why she played it for Harry, hoping to god he felt it too.

She doesn’t realize she’s crying until she sings the last line and she realizes she can’t look up at him. This isn’t about her, he shouldn’t have to see her cry over him after all these years. An apology isn’t supposed to be about your feelings, it’s supposed to be about your actions.

“Sorry,” her voice cracks as she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and sets the guitar aside, afraid to meet his eyes, “I-I shouldn’t have-”

“Ouiser,” his voice makes her head snap up, she can’t remember the last time he called her that, “Thank you.”

*

Louise starts staying for dinner a few times a week. Their incessant picking at each other has turned into banter again. It’s easier to have a few glasses of wine with Harry after a long day and play him some songs than it is to sit in deafening silence with her parents at home.

They’re just finishing up dinner with Pepper at their feet, hoping for something to fall the the ground, when they get the call.

It’s Liam and he’s absolutely frantic (so frantic that he doesn’t even question why Louise and Harry are together at seven o’clock on a Tuesday night). Louise can practically see his panicky hand motions and distraught worry lines. Sophia’s gone into labor.

Weeks ago she had asked Louise if she would come to the hospital. Louise had been a little tipsy and agreed with tears in her eyes, absolutely floored with honor, but it had never occurred to her that Harry had been invited too. She wonders, now, if that had been all apart of Sophia and Liam’s masterplan, to throw them together if they hadn’t started getting along by the time the baby was coming.

They take Harry’s truck (because he refuses to be caught dead in Louise’s shitty little Honda) and stop at her parents’ to pick up her gift. Harry drives and Louise fiddles with the radio nervously just like she used to.

She’s never been at the hospital for a birth. She’s never held an actual newborn baby before. Once her cousin had a baby but Louise was twelve and the baby was already a few months old by the time she met him. He proceeded to cry as soon as she was allowed to hold him and spit up all over her favorite sweatshirt. Louise had always thought maybe she wasn’t a baby person and she realizes she probably should’ve told Sophia that before she agreed to the whole thing.

“Stop doing that,” Harry grumbles as she flips through another fuzzy radio station, “It still drives me insane.”

She drops her hand from the dial, her stomach knotting for so many unknown reasons as she looks out the window. The sun is just setting, reflecting in the mirror as they drive toward the city. The light catches her hair and his profile and she can’t help but think of all the memories one rusty, old truck can hold.

“Why’re you nervous?” his voice pulls her from her head again, “They’re gonna clean it up before you get to hold it.”

“Him,” she rolls her eyes, “He’s a him not an it.”

Harry rolls his eyes back, “Whatever. So? What's goin’ on in there?”

“Nothing,” she shakes her head, glancing over at him, “Just nervous.”

“About what?” his brows knit, one hand on the steering wheel and the other playing with his bottom lip. He looks almost exactly as she remembers him in the setting sun, all tan skin and loose curls and tight muscles.

“I don’t know,” she looks away before he catches her, watching the miles race by, “What if he cries when I hold him? What if he doesn’t like me?”

Harry snorts, as if it’s preposterous, and maybe it is but it doesn’t feel it to her, “He’ll be like an hour old, he’ll hardly be awake enough to form an opinion on you.”

Somewhere, in the rational part of her brain, she knows that’s true. It feels more true coming from Harry, even though she isn’t sure he’s ever had experience with babies at all.

It’s dark by the time they reach the city and Louise is a bundle of nerves, clutching her gift in her hands. Harry seems fine, as if this isn’t a life changing moment for everyone involved. Sophia is bringing a brand new little life into the world and wants them, of all people, to be some of the first to meet him.

They find the waiting room on the third floor. Harry stops in the gift shop to buy some flowers and Louise lingers, watching. In another universe, the roles are reversed. In another universe, Louise never left, her and Harry end up happily together, inviting Liam and Sophia to the birth of their first child. In another universe, they are still happy.

He picks a beautiful bouquet of yellow flowers with a blue balloon attached.

They sit in the waiting room, surrounded by other nervous loved ones for what feels like forever. They don’t talk much, Harry thumbs through a magazine and Louise fills two paper cups with watered down coffee. She wonders, as the bitter taste hits the back of her throat, if he’s considering all of the possibilities she is. All of the what if’s and could have been’s.

Eventually, Liam bursts through the door with bags of exhaustion under his eyes but a blinding grin on his lips. He leads them down a white hallway, rambling on about how fast everything had happened, how happy he is that they have come.

Sophia looks simultaneously exhausted and radiant, clutching a little bundle of blue blanket to her chest. Her face lights up impossibly more when she sees them hovering in the doorway uncertainly.

“Jacob,” she smiles as she places the little bundle in Louise’s arms first, at Harry’s request, “This is your Auntie Ouiser.”

Louise giggles, all her fears gone, because it sounds so silly, being called Auntie Ouiser, but she takes pride in it already. She can feel tears welling up as she peers down at him, a little heap of wrinkly pink skin. He’s perfect. He’s pure and innocent and untouched by the harsh, heartbreaking world around him. Louise wants to do everything she can as his honorary aunt to keep him that way. She can't imagine the pain she caused to her own parents when she hadn't let them do the same, when she'd run away to do whatever she wanted with no concern for anyone else.

“He’s beautiful,” Louise sniffles, Harry peering over her shoulder, “Just perfect.”

When she passes him to Harry and she sees how well he fits in his arms, she feels an ache in her chest. A longing for something she could’ve easily had, but probably never will.

Just before they head home to let the new family rest, Louise hands Sophia her gift. A homemade jar of strawberry jam, berries courtesy of Harry and blue ribbon courtesy of one of Louise’s old dresses. She’d spent an entire weekend trying to get the recipe right with the berries Harry gave her, though no one else needs to know that but her.

She can see a glint in Sophia’s eyes as she kisses her on the cheek and whispers a teary, “Thank you.”

Louise and Harry stop for watered down coffee once more on their way out. He looks tired and she almost offers to drive back before she bites her tongue. She knows better than to think Harry would ever let anyone drive his truck, especially her.

They don’t speak much on the way home, each of their heads racing with their own thoughts, and when he cuts the engine in her driveway, Louise’s stomach jolts. It feels like all those years ago, it feels like sixteen all over again. Young and in love and with nothing to lose.

“Ouiser,” his voice brings her back to reality as she unbuckles her seatbelt, “I’m glad we went together. I couldn’t have gone alone.”

“Me too,” she smiles softly as she looks over at him, she means it and she can see that he does too, “Thanks for the ride, Harry.”

She feels her eyes on him all the way up to the front door. He doesn’t start his truck again until she locks the door behind her. She ignores the silly little flip her stomach does. She is not sixteen again. Harry does not feel anything for her except maybe a hint of tolerance.

She finds her parents at the kitchen table with two mugs of coffee. They don’t notice her at first, hovering in the doorway. They look younger, happier, in the dim yellow kitchen light, and a wave of emotion floods her chest. This is what they looked like before she left.

“Mama, Daddy,” she breathes, disturbing the moment as their heads turn to her, “I’m sorry.”