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here Good Samaritan (04/08)
In the morning, I heard her breathing next to me, soft and even. Her hand touched mine as light started to filter through the semi-opaque shades. Must be sunny out today.
"Beth," I mumbled and rolled over.
I slammed into the side of the bed and woke with a shot. Everything was stiff and unforgiving as I tried to crawl up off the floor. My neck felt like it had been used as a pendulum for a clock all night. Everything was woozy, and the sharp light gave me a headache.
I stumbled into the little bluebell-colored bathroom she had decorated when we moved in and retched.
After I had recovered enough, I splashed a little water in my face and counted. One. Two. Brushed my teeth mechanically. Three. Combed my tangled nest of hair. Four. Shaved. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
I walked past and checked on Superman. Nine. Ten. Eleven. His large frame was turned away from me, and he was still, though the blanket I'd laid across him last night rose and fell with each steady breath. Twelve...
By the time I reached twenty and went down to fix breakfast for the girls, I was okay.
Really.
*****
"Yes, I'm fine," I heard him say, muffled, through the door as I ambled past with a laundry basket. The words brought me to a full stop, and I stood there in the hallway breathing softly.
The door was open just a sliver, enough that I could see his faint silhouette in the darkness beyond. The blanket was wrapped around him protectively, obscuring my view of the telltale red and blue of his uniform. He faced the opposite direction, perched at the edge of the mattress, slouched and crumpled. Sitting in the dim triangle of light cast through the crack from the hallway.
This was the first I'd seen him awake since yesterday, and I had checked in several times between chores. Everything about him spoke of exhaustion. Of lingering sickness. Like the moments following a fever when you become aware again. Your body aches, and your pupils fix once again on something solid, only to be swept away moments later into the unaware. To rest. To recuperate.
Except Superman hung suspended in the ebb of the tide, being pulled to sleep but wanting to stay awake, and he was paying for it. No, he still wasn't well, and was definitely far from fine. But in this case, he may well have just meant to say he was alive. Which, at least now, wasn't a gross overstatement.
But who would he be talking to? He'd seemed rather adamant that no one know he was ill, so I found it hard to believe that he was talking to the press or anything like that. Of course, the man had to have *friends*, Jake, I chastised myself. Lois Lane and Clark Kent of the Daily Planet, for example. Lord knew the trio had been mentioned in any number of scandals on the news, though I'd never believed a word of them.
"Really, honey," he continued, "I'll be fine in a few days. I'm just... very tired."
My jaw tumbled open. Honey. An unexpected word.
Superman had someone he called honey?
My heart clenched briefly in my chest, and the images that had been threatening to tumble forth since I'd found him in the parking lot struck me with abandon.
I thought of Beth, pale and swathed in white blankets, her eyes growing dark as the life seeped out of her. Honey, please don't die, I had said. I'll do anything. Don't leave. Honey, please, don't leave me here.
Honey.
Her hand had been in mine, cold and growing colder. Bloodless. I'm ready, she'd said, and I'd been mad at her for giving up. Mad... And happy that her hurt had ceased. Exhausted. Worried. And then, I had been nothing.
Her hand had slipped down onto the sheets. No grip left. She wasn't holding on anymore. Steady beeping had turned to a moan. Annie and Claire had been so confused, whimpering. How was I to explain?
Honey.
My back met the wall behind me, and my breath knocked funnily in my chest. I slid down the cool surface like liquid bones as my knees turned strangely gelatin. The laundry basket fell from my grip, muffled and quiet. The overflow came loose, and a few shirts and other things surrendered to the floor along with me in a soundless heap.
I hadn't meant to think of her. I hadn't. Why couldn't the memories go away? Even after so long, after ages of ignoring them, they were still colorful, painful, bright. Sharp like thorns. They didn't fade.
I tried to start counting, but couldn't get past two.
Honey. Honeyhoneyhoney.
Superman hadn't said it like the person on the line was a simple friend. And he didn't strike me as an individual who would treat an acquaintance so diminutively.
Honey. He spoke like I had once spoken to Beth. Honey.
I blinked furiously, trying to ease the sudden sting.
"I think the plane I rescued was rigged," he was saying. "We'll have to look into it... Yeah, possibly related to what we thought about those gun runners... I got sprayed with it from the engine exhaust, I think. To be honest, I don't remember much."
What must it be like to be honey for the Man of Steel? How to share him with the world? Days ago, I would have thought it a comfort to know that my lover was invulnerable. But now, I knew that even Superman could be hurt. Killed. Invulnerability was a white lie. And that knowledge must have been no comfort to whoever he left at home, not when his entire existence was about putting himself in harm's way to stop harm from happening to others.
God, it must be terrifying. Five minutes away from rampant news footage and he could be dying. Painful. Agonizing. Alone.
He *had* been yesterday.
How could she do it?
How could she?
"No," Superman said, "I barely got it down onto the runway. All those people almost..." He gave a tortured sigh, and his voice had grown wearier with each syllable, as though the weight of the plane were still pressing down on his shoulders, vehement, forcing him to the ground.
There was a strangled sound before he recovered what was left of his voice. "No, I don't think I will be able to fly for a while yet. But really, I'm fine."
I must admit my previous exposure to the Man of Steel had been entirely through the news and occasionally through the radar system at our airport.
"Arlington. The man who rescued me is letting me stay here."
On the radars, he was a blip in my existence, barely worth noting because we had long figured out he knew how to avoid hitting planes, and after the first few encounters, we'd stopped frantically trying to circumvent them around him. Better to let him deal with it.
And in the news, he remained stiff, stoic, and formal. Clinically filtered. Humane and kind, yet cold. Sort of like a room at a hospital. Immaculate.
"It's a suburb of DC... Yeah... Virginia." Superman paused to chuckle, followed shortly by a dry, unhealthy sounding cough, but he seemed to pay it no mind. "Come on, honey, I know you've been here before... Well, yes, I'm sure preparing for your interview was a bit more important..."
Sure, bits of emotion had slipped through over the years he had been on Earth. Smiles of relief, gratitude, and genuine happiness. Haggard and pale after thirty straight hours of rescue relief from fires, floods, earthquakes. On one occasion I even remember thinking he looked angry. But for the most part, when he was in the public eye he remained distant and aloof, to the point where I had begun to assume it was just his nature.
And now he was in my spare bedroom. Chuckling, sick, and talking to who I could only assume to be his significant other. His wife. Who would have thought?
I certainly wouldn't have thought it. Not before this.
He wasn't from Earth. Who knew what his actual feelings were? He had given more to humanity through his actions than I could begin to fathom. And so I had never thought much more about his rigid disinterest in the warmer things life had to offer.
"Listen. Shhhh. It's okay. I'm fine. I swear, I will be good as new in a day or two."
A flash of Beth nipped at me. It's nothing, Jake. I'll be fine, she'd said, annoyed, despite me asking more than once if she was all right. And then she had collapsed.
"I know you do. I'm sorry."
Now, I knew. I knew just from his tone of voice. His words. His carriage. The fact that he had someone at home, waiting. Hoping. Someone he had to console, and support, and assure, just like Beth had tried to do for me. Someone who would be just as distraught were he to die as I was during Beth's final days. I knew everything he put out on the table for the media to see was a complete facade. All of it was a lie.
My reasoning, perhaps along with the rest of the world, was dead wrong.
In his unguarded moments, emotion poured from him like water through a sieve, his feelings as strong as his famed muscles. And at the precise moment I realized this, I felt that, if there was an alien in this house, it certainly wasn't him.
"I love you, too. So much it hurts sometimes."
Honey. Beth. Slipping away. The sight of her in my mind's eye, raw, refused to go away, no matter what mental exercise I tried. My thoughts raced rampant.
The Man of Steel wasn't quite so alien after all, and the realization of it began to make me feel starkly inhuman.
He had someone who loved him, whom he loved in return. Someone to go home to, like I used to have.
The Man of Steel loved.
And just when I thought I had a vague handle on it all, he blew me away again.
"Yeah, put her on... Hi, sweetheart! I'm so very sorry I missed your recital yesterday."
I sat in awe. Who would have ever begun to think, to fathom? It seemed a miracle that it was even physically possible. Perhaps he had adopted. But then, was it really any of my business how it'd happened? The feelings were as clear as a window in the throes of Windex.
"You did? Oh, I'm so proud of you! Did Mommy take you for ice cream to celebrate?"
His voice grew stronger as he spoke. Full of life. As though whatever force had flowed out of Beth was flowing in reverse for him. Fuel. I could almost hear his smile. Cracking wide. Happy.
I tried to remember the last time I'd even contemplated taking the girls out for something fun.
The inhuman feeling grew.
"Haha. Well, this 'lummox' will be home in a few days, and then we can all go, regardless of what Mommy says."
How could this man who saw death every day, who had a career in policing human cruelty, have room in his heart for all of this? How could he have a family? How did he manage? How did he feel at all?
When he was aloof, he made much more sense.
"Yes, of course there will be chocolate."
Don't leave me, Beth. Don't leave me alone. Cold and growing colder.
Why did I feel like something had been ripped away from me at this revelation? I felt a peculiar numbness where everything used to feel normal.
And it was frightening.
Perhaps because I started to realize just how *abnormal* it really was. Not even Earth's resident alien held the same vice, where before he had been, if anything, reassurance that nothing was wrong with me.
My eyes started to sting again.
On that day, Beth wasn't the only one who had died.
Claire and Annie had sat in my lap, crying, wondering when Mommy was coming home. I hadn't been able to answer. I could remember every crevice and contour of Beth's cold hand as it had slipped away and the last of her heat had spread into my own skin as though I were a siphon. I could remember how her eyes, glassy with pain, had stared into my own, and then her cheek had twitched, and the focus of her gaze had gone away to something far behind me, or perhaps far above. I could remember down to the infinitesimal detail of the moment she left me. I could describe, but how was I to explain?
How was I?
Annie had been two, then. Claire four. And I had felt like eternity in the face of that youth. Like time had seeped into my bones and collected there like toxic waste.
"Okay. Can you put Mommy back on?"
No, I had died with Beth, and never realized it until now. The stark contrast I was now seeing was stirring and churning my insides back to life. Enough to realize something was missing. Something very important.
But I still didn't understand.
How did he do it? Live?
And how did she? Live knowing?
"Hi again. Yeah. Well, I do need to go. I don't want to tie up this man's phone line for too long."
I knew now from experience I would have withered long ago. I *had*.
"I love you, too. I'll try and call later."
I couldn't remember the last time I had said I love you. Even to my daughters. I blinked. I really couldn't. Even when I thought very hard.
"Bye."
As he hung up the phone and sighed heavily, I swallowed, deep in my throat. But the lump wouldn't go away. I couldn't move. My muscles seemed to be sticking their collective tongue out at me, and my knuckles gripped impotently at the laundry basket.
"How," I said, my voice broken, before I could stop myself. "How do you do it?"
Through the sliver in the door I saw him turn toward me. His face was pale and sallow. And his eyes, though slightly sunken, widened in horror. I realized he was terrified.
"You weren't supposed to hear any of that," he said, though there was not much conviction in his voice, and what little blood was left to temper his pallor receded so quickly I thought he might be in the process of fainting. What a laughable pair we would have made.
"I thought I was alone," he added.
It must be hard for a man who could normally hear someone coming from blocks away to suddenly be immersed in insensitivity. But I didn't even feel shamed over my blatant eavesdropping.
I felt detached. And cold.
I made no effort to stand. "How do you do it?" I repeated.
His tired eyes took me in, and I was surprised when the first words out of his mouth weren't, "Do what?" He inhaled deeply, looking very far from the Man of Steel at this moment, and he told me, "I just decided to. And it was worth it."
*****
TBC...
(End Part 04/08)
