I will commit my soul to your door tonight, and I'll last 'til the gas fumes float on higher
She loves her sister. She does.
She wants her to be happy.
But all of that love, and all of that want, does nothing to stem the rapid, head-swimming agony in the days that follow. She imagines their reunion in a thousand different ways, a thousand different times. She looks at it from afar with breathtaking clarity and then under a jeweler's lens until each and every refraction of light has her seeing stars. She feels it like pressure around her throat, like a dagger to her breast.
At least they will be happy, she tells herself.
Beth was so relieved to know of their daughter.
Sabbath will forgive him.
The tears do not come. She does not feel her back wracked with sobs. In some ways, she feels completely and totally hollowed out. She remembers the way that he had so clearly told her that he could never love her—so kindly, so gently that it makes her stomach twist with sickness. She remembers the way that he had moved around her toward her sister, as if she wasn’t there, as if she never existed.
It is easier when she feels nothing.
But she does not feel nothing when she finally sees him coming. She swallows and buries it; she pulls the poison into her belly and lets it simmer. She is grateful that she has sent Gospel off to play today—let her have her fun, her adventures—but she misses the shield that her daughter provided. She could be watching her instead of staring at the ground, her worry forming a furrow in her brow.
He says her name once, then twice, and she wishes it did not sound so soft. But for all of the arrows lodged in her heart, she forces herself to pull her elegant head up, the skin drawn just a little tight around the mouth the way that her mother’s always did when struck by some impossible sadness.
“Bethlehem,” she forces herself to use his full name, reminding herself that the shortened version is not hers to say. He is not hers to claim in such small intimacies. She wonders, for a second, if she should be angry that he had not been able to piece together her relation with Sabbath—or, perhaps, if she should wonder if he had—but the anger does not come. Shame, guilt, for her part, but no anger.
Just the ringing bells of her loneliness as they clash and clang inside of her lonely head.
in a dying love I'm nothing but a stone cold liar but, oh, I got an iron in that fire
