From Part 2 ...
Lois sat on the sofa and pulled her knees into her chest.
She was alone.
Literally.
But worse, much worse, she was totally isolated. No one could push through the cloud to be with her. And she doubted she would ever again have the strength or the will to escape.
ADRIFT
Part 3
Lois was still hunched on her sofa when a rap sounded on her window. Automatically, she stood and drew back the curtain, never considering the impracticality of a visitor being outside her third floor window.
Superman hovered outside. She stared. She’d reported on many of his rescues in the past two weeks, but hadn’t been this close to him since they’d stood outside the LexCorp building after he’d bored through concrete to rescue her from the underground cell.
She opened the window and he stepped into her apartment. “Lois,” he said. “I heard about your parents. I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry you weren’t there?” Her words erupted before she had chance to think.
He flinched, but accepted her hostility as if it was due him. “Yes.”
“I guess even you can’t be everywhere,” she said, coldly. Even as she spoke, she was aware of a vague curiosity about the origin of such animosity. It wasn’t his fault. But her voice hadn’t belonged to her since she’d faced the police officers at her door.
His face was impassive – the same expression he’d worn in the hundreds of photographs published since he first appeared in Metropolis. “I’m sorry,” he said again. His voice was pitched low and steady, but she sensed his condolences were genuine. “Is there anything I can do?”
<Give me my parents back>, she screamed in her head. She covered her mouth with her hand, grateful this thought at least, had stayed unspoken.
His jaw flexed and she wondered if the ability to read minds was another of his powers. “Would you bring my sister, Lucy?” she asked, smoothing the hard edge from her voice.
“Of course.”
“I ... I have her number,” Lois said and felt herself colour. “But I don’t know her address.” She felt an unconquerable need to explain. “We’re not that close.”
His hand lifted, as if he had considered reaching for her, but then it dropped. “What’s her number?” he asked.
Lois picked up her address book and held it towards him, open at Lucy’s number.
He glanced at it. “I’ll find her,” he assured her.
“Thank you.” It was formal, but at least she had managed to stifle the accusatory tone.
He stepped towards her window.
“Superman?”
He turned, one red boot already on her window ledge.
“Thank you for getting me out of Luthor’s tunnel.”
He nodded cursorily and flew out of her window.
Lois turned away. She started towards her bathroom, thinking to have a shower. Half way across the room, she turned and moved towards the kitchen, thinking to have breakfast.
Instead, she went back to her sofa and sat, staring ahead.
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After what seemed a long time - although the clock had moved less than five minutes – the soft knock sounded again on her window.
Lois’s stomach lurched.
Lucy.
Somehow, her sister’s arrival peeled away the opaque strips of this nightmare and set her inescapably face to face with the caustic realities. Mom was dead – lying cold and finished in the morgue. Dad was dead – still and inanimate and done with, when only yesterday ... *yesterday*... he had had life.
It didn’t seem possible.
It *wasn’t* possible. Yet it was.
Her heart pounding, Lois went to the window and opened it.
Superman came in, alone.
“Where’s Lucy?” she said, panic piercing her words.
“She’s fine,” he assured her. “But she didn’t want to come.”
“What do you mean she didn’t want to come?” Lois demanded, her voice shrill.
“I offered to bring her and she refused to come with me,” he explained evenly. “She said she’d rather drive.”
Lois experienced a bizarre mix of pure relief and high-grade anger. She wanted to scream – not words, they simply wouldn’t form, but she craved release. Now was not the time, so she suffocated it. “Thanks,” she managed. A sudden, sickening thought permeated her mind. “She *is* coming?” she asked, aware of how pitifully needy she sounded.
“She said she would,” Superman said. “She said for you to go ahead and make the arrangements and whatever you decided would be fine with her.”
“How is she?” Lois asked shakily.
The impassive eyes seemed to soften. “She’s grieving ... in shock.”
The cloud closed in further, engulfing her.
Superman hurried to the window. “I have to go,” he said, quickly. He was gone with a gush of cool breeze.
Seconds later, a knock sounded on her door. When Lois opened it, Clark stood there, dressed casually in jeans and a shirt.
“I've brought breakfast,” he said. He skirted past her and put the coffee cups and paper bags on her countertop.
Lois stared at the food as the aroma of the coffee teased her nostrils. She was overwhelmed by the sharp reminiscence of the night Clark had walked in with coffee and hamburgers. The night Superman had rescued her from Luthor’s tunnel. The night she and Clark had written their first big story together. The night she had teased him about knowing his password.
The memory was like something she’d watched in a movie – other people in another world. A world protected and safe. A world where people lived each day, blithely assuming the possibilities could not happen to them.
Clark swept her into his arms and held her against his warm, strong body. Lois allowed herself to languish in his hug. But even this close to him, the cloud didn’t dissipate, the numbness didn’t recede.
He was outside the cloud. She was inside.
Alone.
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The next three days passed in a blur for Lois. They were such long, exhausting days. It felt like she’d crammed a month’s worth of survival into the hours since she’d opened her door and seen the two police officers.
It was early evening. At her insistence, Clark had gone to the Planet. Until now, he had barely left her side. He’d slept every night at her apartment – starting on the sofa, but ending up next to her as she fought and was defeated by the onslaught of fear and grief and images and loneliness.
He had held her and comforted her and never once let them cross the line of intimacy. She had no doubt he was the most decent human being she had ever met.
Uncle Mike had dealt with getting the bodies released and bringing them to Metropolis. He was catering for the post-funeral afternoon tea, to be held at his cafe.
Lucy had called twice. Eventually Lois had managed to get a definite commitment from her that she would arrive the evening before the funeral. The numerous times Lois had called her, Lucy hadn’t answered.
Lois had spent many hours with the funeral directors, planning the service.
She remembered walking into the funeral home. It was painted cheery blue and had a vase of bright yellow flowers on the table. Paintings evocative in their serenity adorned the walls.
Yet the underlying morbid atmosphere had seeped through the surface decor and convulsed her stomach so unrelentingly, she had feared she would vomit.
Clark had understood. His hand had found hers, and somehow, she had kept functioning.
The second they’d sat opposite the tall, greying woman exuding plastic efficiency, Lois had decided she would pretend they had been a normal, happy family. She’d done it often enough before. It shouldn’t be that hard to maintain the mask.
But it had been mind-numbingly hard. The woman’s questions had aggravated her pain, torching her insecurities and uncovering the festering underbelly that had been her family.
Burial or cremation?
Lois had no idea what her parents would want. She’d never talked to either of them about their preferences. She hadn’t thought she would need to. Not yet.
Burial, she decided. Illogically, it seemed less final.
Would her parents like to be buried in a shared grave?
No! Mom would rather be anywhere than with Dad.
Yet, they *had* been together.
After agonising for what had seemed like an eternity, she had decided on two graves, next to each other.
Would she like to view the bodies?
The thought caused her to recoil in horror. *View* them? *Why* would she choose to add further fuel to her already tormented imagination?
One question, at least, had been easy. One funeral? Or two?
One!
Lois was absolutely certain she could not go through this twice. That her parents may not want to share the final vestige of their lives, she pushed deep into the ravines of her mind. Every time she thought about the funeral, a paralysing panic erupted inside her. The funeral was a bleak and unforgiving mountain to be climbed and she had no energy to even attempt the foothills.
What music would they like?
Musically, as with everything else, her parents had been poles apart. Mom liked opera; Dad despised it as whining, nonsensical trash. Dad liked rock and roll, which Mom always claimed gave her a headache.
Eventually Lois chose a song she didn’t recognise because the woman said it was popular at funerals. And, if she didn’t know it, it couldn’t jolt any response from her. Could it?
Who would do the eulogy?
Uncle Mike would do it, but Lois knew her mom would be slighted that she hadn’t been represented.
Perry would be perfect – composed, steady, sympathetic – but he had never even met them.
Clark would do it if she asked – but it was unfair to even suggest it – and he hadn’t met them either.
Lucy would refuse. She clearly wanted as little to do with this as possible.
She could get someone impersonal, the minister maybe, or one of Dad’s colleagues. But having no one close who cared enough to speak on their behalf seemed to ram home unbearably the pathetic nature of their family bonds.
She couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t expose her family’s brokenness so publicly.
So ... it had to be her.
The searing thought of it tormented her so much, she *had* emptied her stomach twice. Thankfully, she had been at home and had got to the bathroom without embarrassing herself.
She didn’t know how she was going to get up and talk about her parents. Just thinking about it turned her legs to jello and her ribs to a flimsy cage which collapsed in on her lungs.
She didn’t know what she was going to say.
The truth?
Right.
Mom was a selfish, self-centred individual who rarely saw beyond her own needs and wants. Her most finely-honed skills were in manipulation and heaping guilt upon those she professed to love when they didn’t meet her demands.
Dad was a selfish, work-centred individual who had never grasped that being a father and a husband involved more than paying the bills.
Together, they were a self-destructive time-bomb which had, eventually, exploded. Unlike most bombs, the damage before the explosion was just as destructive and just as long-lasting as the damage of the explosion.
Lois stared at the blank sheet of paper in front of her. Two days. The funeral was in two days. She was a writer, but a writer devoid of words.
She hurled the pen across the table and watched it plummet to the floor. Her posture wilted, head buried in her hands.
Her unshed tears had congealed into a huge, cold, metallic ball which was lodged in her stomach. She longed for release, but nothing could crack the surface.
A knock sounded and Lois stood mechanically with a body-jarring sigh. She reached for the door without checking through the peephole, sure it would be Clark.
She opened the door and froze.
“Lois,” said Sarah Crawford. “I’m so sorry.” Sarah stepped forward, pulled Lois into her arms and held her there. “What’s happening?” she asked, as she released her.
Sarah’s question threw her. “Well, my parents were killed,” Lois said blankly.
Sarah smiled through damp eyes. “I *know* that. But you get so tired of people asking ‘How are you?’ when you have absolutely no idea how to answer them.”
“That’s so true,” Lois said with a rueful sigh.
Together they sat on Lois’s couch. “So ... talk,” Sarah said.
Sarah’s matter-of-fact manner loosened Lois’s tongue. “I’m doing the eulogy and I don’t know what to say,” she said tonelessly. “Most of the time, I can’t believe it has happened and I’m waiting for one of them to call me. Every time the phone rings, I think it’s them. But, it’s not, of course.”
Lois stared at her hands, as one fingertip distractedly picked at her thumb nail. “I keep thinking mindless things like, ‘I should see what Mom thinks of this.’ Then I remember and it feels like my heart is being stabbed.”
Lois snatched the blue cushion from next to her and clasped it to her body. “I feel like I’ve been cut adrift. And I’m bobbing around in a great big ocean like a little cork, and I’m terrified I’m going under.”
Sarah’s hand reached across and covered Lois’s.
“The stupidest thing,” Lois said, “Is that I’ve spent the last fifteen years trying to free myself from those ties.”
“But the ties were there,” Sarah said softly. “Hidden maybe, but there. You could always choose to go back.”
“Now there is no going back. There’s nothing to go back to.” Lois made a rough sound in her throat as she swallowed down her grief. “For the first time in fifteen years, I want so badly to run to Mom or Dad and be their ... their little girl again.” She shrugged. “Instead, I’m the big girl with the decisions and the responsibilities I’m completely unprepared for.”
“In some ways, this is harder than losing someone who was the joy of your heart.”
Lois regarded her with rank disbelief.
“It is,” Sarah insisted. “Last year, my grandmother died. She was a bitter and unlikeable woman. When she died, I felt very little for her – but a whole lot for me. A whole lot for what I could have had, but didn’t have and now, never would have.”
Lois stared at her, slowly shaking her head, her throat convulsing. “That’s exactly how I feel,” she whispered. “I mourn more for what could have been than what was. But I can’t let anyone know that.”
“And that is so very, very hard.”
Lois was silent as Sarah’s words settled into her mind. “Was it different when your husband died?” Lois asked.
Sarah smiled, even as a fresh batch of tears welled in her eyes. “I loved David so much. And I miss him ... and the thought of never being with him again feels like I’m being torn to pieces on the inside, but ...” She wiped her damp cheeks.
“But it feels like it should feel.”
Sarah nodded. “And that’s a comfort.”
“I’m so angry,” Lois rasped.
“With them?”
Lois nodded fiercely. “So angry that they left me. So angry that they never realised we had limited time together and they wasted so much of that with their stupid, meaningless conflicts.” Her voice had strengthened and risen, and it felt good to batter against the pervading cloud instead of passively succumbing to it. “And angry at myself that I didn’t confront them and demand they see past their selfishness and work on making our family into something worthwhile. And I’m *so* angry they left this mess and I have to deal with it.” Lois stood and paced the room. “How sick is that?”
“It’s normal to feel angry,” Sarah said, her quiet voice contrasting with Lois’s angry outburst. “I was even angry at David for a little while – for leaving me alone when I needed him so much.”
“What about the guilt?” Lois demanded. “Is that OK too?”
“What are you feeling guilty about?”
“How angry I am. How if they walked through that door right now, I’d scream at them for half an hour before I’d even think about hugging them.” Lois swallowed against the rising emotion. “How confused I am. How indecisive. How sometimes I struggle just to breathe and it takes so much effort to do the most basic things like deciding whether to sit or stand. How I can’t be there for my little sister, Lucy. How we have such a non-relationship, she has shut me out completely and would rather be with the adolescent-barely-out-of-high-school-boyfriend she’s known for three weeks. How I just accepted we weren’t close and did nothing to try to repair it.”
Lois slumped against the wall, her momentum depleted. “And I’m *so* exhausted,” she said dolefully. “It’s like every last ounce of energy and life has drained away and nothing I do ...”
Sarah stood and put her hand on Lois’s arm. “What you’re feeling is completely natural. You had deep issues with your parents, issues which also influenced your relationship with your sister. Like all of us, it was easier and simpler to bury these issues and hope they would, somehow, fix themselves in the future. But now, you can’t bury them. Now, they’re there, in your face, in your heart, right there, every time you turn around, there in every thought, every emotion.”
“I suck so badly at this.”
Again Sarah smiled through her tears. “We all suck so badly at this, Lois.” She leant forward, into Lois’s eye line. “Stop thinking there’s a right way to do this,” she said earnestly. “There isn’t. You just get through it the best you can.”
“Will it *ever* stop hurting?” Lois asked.
Sarah sighed. “The intensity will lessen, but no, it won’t ever stop hurting.”
Lois frowned at her, but Sarah didn’t flinch.
“I’m not going to promise you things will be better than they will be,” Sarah said. “The truth is you will never have your parents again. You will go through milestones in your life that you long to share with them – marriage, children, success, heartache, memories, something as simple as a shared coffee – and they won’t be there. That’s the reality. But the reality is also that there will be good things in your life. There will be things which make you smile and laugh and glad to be alive.”
“I can’t imagine ever laughing again,” Lois said and winced inside at the forlornness of her tone.
“You will, that I *can* promise you.” Sarah’s hand squeezed Lois’s. “How’s Clark doing?”
“Clark’s been amazing,” Lois said dutifully.
“So there are two corks bobbing around together?”
Lois shook her head. “No. He’s here with me, but he’s not there.”
“Let him in, Lois,” Sarah said quietly.
“I can’t,” Lois said and she could hear the hysteria weaved through her words. “No one can get in. And I can’t get out.”
“Clark seems to be a very understanding guy.”
Lois slumped back to the sofa and pulled her knees up against her chest. “But he doesn’t *understand*.”
“What doesn’t he understand?”
“He doesn’t understand my family. He doesn’t understand how I’m feeling now. He doesn’t understand how ... disconnected I feel ... from everyone ... including him.”
Sarah sat next to her. “Try to reconnect with him.”
“I can’t.”
“Try. Try to explain. Try to let him in. Try to let him feel this with you.”
“I didn’t mean to shut him out,” Lois said woodenly.
“Of course you didn’t. But let him in now. You know he wants to help you. Be honest with him. Tell him you’re confused. He is too.”
“But if this were his parents, he would be feeling ... right.”
“Are you worried he’ll judge you?”
“No,” Lois said. “Not Clark.”
“Then don’t pretend,” Sarah said. “Not with him, certainly not with yourself.”
“I’m doing the eulogy,” Lois said plaintively. “I’m going to have to do some pretending.”
“Are you scared?”
“Petrified.”
“Of what?”
Lois shrugged. “It sounds so selfish.”
“Lois! You’re feeling what you’re feeling. What are you scared of?”
“Standing there, bawling my eyes out, in front of everyone. Failing my parents, embarrassing myself, not being good enough.”
A knock sounded at the door. “Clark?” Sarah guessed.
Lois nodded. “Probably.”
“He wants to be with you in this, Lois. Let him.”
Lois felt her shoulders slump. “Be ... before this,” she said in a hollow voice. “Being with Clark brought such joy. Now ...” Lois looked down. “Now, I just can’t care whether he comes or not.”
“That is natural.”
“It’s scaring him. I can see the confusion and despair in his eyes ... but I just can’t do anything about it.”
The knock sounded on the door again, gentler this time.
“When was the last time you held him?” Sarah asked.
“He holds me all the time.”
“No, when was the last time *you* held *him*?”
“Before ... before all this.”
Sarah stood. “Do it. Do it now. He needs you.”
Lois nodded, not sure she had the energy, even for that.
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Clark had paused before knocking on Lois’s door. He could hear voices inside and deliberately kept his superhearing off.
He was shocked and disgusted at how great was the temptation to turn away and use the fact she had company to escape.
Not escape from Lois, of course.
But the aura of death was here and it had seeped into him and was eating him away from the inside out.
But there was no escape for Lois. And he’d promised her he was with her.
He just hadn’t realised how incredibly, incredibly hard this would be.
Lois – his beautiful, vivacious Lois – had gone. She’d perished, even as her body struggled to live on.
His heart splintered for her. If only he could lift some of the pain from her. Take it upon himself and ease her suffering.
But he’d been so ineffective, so powerless she had withdrawn from him. He’d clung to her, desperate to keep her close, but she’d slipped away as surely as oil in a clenched fist.
The door opened and he saw the two women. He smiled politely at them, knowing it was a feeble effort, and stepped into the room, waiting while Lois said goodbye to Sarah Crawford. That he was standing exactly where he’d been when the knock came that had changed everything was a thought he viciously banished. He deliberately stepped away, as if moving physically would shut down his memories.
It didn’t. Despite the heaviness, this apartment was full of the best of his memories. Memories of Lois – so happy, so open, so relaxed. The night she’d lay across his lap and teased him about hacking into his computer. The evening he’d arrived here to pick her up for their first date.
And then there was the memory of his buttons.
With a start he realised that was three days ago. Three days. It seemed like a lifetime. So much had changed and he couldn’t see a way back. Lois had changed forever. How could she not? How could he even be thinking like this, thinking about what *he* had lost, when she had lost so much more?
Yet, one thing he knew. One thing which eroded his spirit a little more each hour. It was the knowledge that if their positions had been traded, he would be clinging to Lois, not pushing her away.
He watched as Sarah hugged Lois and left. Lois shut the door and turned to him.
They faced each other – like two strangers, he thought. Two strangers thrown together in a situation neither were equipped to deal with.
He looked at her, a part of him wanting to smile just to give her a jot of encouragement, a bigger part knowing she had no reason to smile.
She looked at him. At his face. Into his eyes. She hadn’t done that in days. She had stared into the nothingness, like everything was a blur and she couldn’t force herself to focus.
What he saw in her eyes caused his heart to leap. She didn’t smile, but there was a lightening in those exquisitely beautiful brown eyes, as if ... almost as if she was pleased to see him.
“Clark,” she said, sounding more like Lois than she had since the beginning of this nightmare.
Instead of clutching her to him, which he had done repeatedly, Clark held out his arms and waited. Waited for her to choose to come to him.
She did.
She stepped quickly into his arms and clung to his neck like only he stood between her and capitulation.
“Aw, Lois,” he breathed. <I have missed you.> He couldn’t voice his distress, this wasn’t about him. Could never be about him. But it felt *so* good to have her, responsive, in his arms again.
They were together.
And together, they could do this.
After a long time, she unwound from him, but didn’t step away. She looked up at him again. “I can’t think of anything for the eulogy,” she said. Her chin wobbled. ”Would you help me? Please?”
“Ah, Lois,” he ground out. “Of course I’ll help you.”
She walked to her table and he put his hand on her back. Somehow, that simple touch bridged an ocean of detachment. He picked up the pen from the floor and sat down beside her. He looked at her blank piece of paper. “Tell me something you remember,” he said gently. “Anything.”
“I can’t think of anything except the fights,” Lois said.
“What’s the best memory you have of your dad?” Clark asked.
“My dad?” she said, as if the question was unexpected.
“Your dad. Sam. He was a doctor, wasn’t he?”
Lois nodded and tiny creases appeared in her forehead as she sifted through her memories. “When I was little, really little, he would call me his Princess.”
Clark wrote that. “How did you feel when he said that?”
“Like I was his, like I was special to him.”
Clark wrote again.
“Except as I got older, it became obvious I had disappointed him so much, he ...”
Clark put his finger on her mouth and shook his head, staring into her lovely, sad eyes. “I know the bad stuff happened, honey, I know it seems like that is all there is, but somewhere, amongst all that pain, we’re going to find some good memories.”
“OK.”
“Anything else?”
She had begun to shake her head when she remembered a long-buried event. “Both of my front teeth were missing and I didn’t want to go to school because one of the boys had been teasing me. My dad said I didn’t need front teeth to be the smartest and the prettiest girl in the whole school.”
Clark wrote, trying to hide the smile which just sprang to his face as the picture formed so vividly in his mind. “What’s the best memory of your mom?”
“When I was six, she took me to a special store and let me choose whichever dress I wanted. From the entire store.”
Clark scribbled more notes.
“Except –“
Clark looked up from his notes. “No ‘excepts’,” he reminded her lovingly.
“Except she hated the one I chose,” Lois said quickly. “But she still let me buy it.”
Clark smiled at her. “You’re doing fine,” he said. “What else?”
“When I had the chicken pox, she played chess with me for hours, even though she hated the game and I won every time.”
Clark wrote again. He continued asking questions and probing and encouraging until he had a pageful of scribbled notes. He got a fresh piece of paper and, with a little thought, composed her memories into a piece of writing.
He pushed it across the table and watched her while she read it. When she reached the end, she slumped back in her chair and looked at him, eyes bright with relief. “Clark. Thank you.”
He smiled hesitantly. “We can do this, honey. We can do this together.”
She lurched from her chair and threw herself onto his lap. She curled into the crook of his neck and relaxed against him. “I’m sorry,” she said, as he closed his arms around her.
“Ssshhh,” he crooned, as he kissed her cheek. “We’re together, honey. We’ll be all right.”
