I love her.
I love Buffy.
I’m in love with Buffy.
There, I said. To my journal, granted, but Fred suggested I try it. Look at it on paper; see how it makes me feel. She is right. There is a difference between thinking it and then saying it, or rather, writing it. I couldn’t exactly say it to her. It didn’t feel right, but she knew. She guessed. I always have worn my heart on my sleeve.
Looking at it, the words “I’m in love with Buffy” seems strange. Because it’s more real now that I can see it. Writing it down gives it proof, makes it real, makes it have substance. Gives it wings.
My heart is racing…I do feel guilt. I feel I’m betraying Joyce. Saying “I love Buffy” is much different than saying “I’m in love with my dead wife’s daughter.” Such a different connotation. One says, “How nice!” the other says, “Sick bastard!”
But how can it be sick? She’s only eight years younger than I am, she hadn’t been living with us or even remotely close and . . . yeah, that’s where the “It’s not sick” brigade ends. The fact of the matter is she’s still my dead wife’s daughter. The fact is we’re both still grieving…but in the same way? I do miss her; she was my wife after all, but… I’m not grieving our marriage the way I was at first. I think it’s moved into something else. I’m grieving that person I was with her.
God, I hate this. I hate thinking these things. But I suppose this is what Buffy would call “taking a journey with yourself”. So, let’s go on a journey, self.
Fact: I did love Joyce. She was what I needed at the time. She gave me love and direction and care. She was a wonderful woman that I will never forget and not because she led me to Buffy. But because of whom she was. She taught me a lot, but I had to go further.
And now I am.
Fact: I might have never let go of Joyce. I would have stayed married to her, most likely, but I know, at least I think I know that I would have wondered if there were more for me.
I have a secret: I already was starting to wonder. Was there more for more in the world? Was I just content or was I happy? How much longer would I stay content? I’m guessing when you start questioning your contentedness that means it’s on its way out. It’s much more comfortable to stay the person who never asks questions and is completely content with life than to be thrust back in the world and have to deal with not only the world, but yourself.
I wasn’t thinking of straying though I wondered if there was someone perhaps that I was meant for – if there was someone that shared more of my interests.
Joyce and I got along well enough, but…but it was more that she took care of me. She was more a mother to me than a wife. God, that sounds so sick, doesn’t it? But I didn’t realize it then. I didn’t know!
Buffy doesn’t take care of me like that, but she does take care of me, and I take care of her. We look out for each other, support one another. She’s my best friend. She challenges me in ways that Joyce never did.
Joyce was what I needed then, Buffy is what I need forever.
I think that’s all I can do for today.
Buffy was nervous to see her father. She had no reason to be, but she was nonetheless. He was, after all, the proverbial asshole in this scenario and he should feel as such, but she knew he wouldn’t. Buffy always had a hard time understanding the motives of complete and utter assholes. They acted almost like sociopaths with having no remorse. It was amazing to her and man, it was a skill she wished she could perfect. Instead, things ate at her like a flesh eating disease.
Walking down the hall to his penthouse, she began to shake a bit, and her heart began to race. What was the outcome of this visit going to be? She could guess, but…she was so hoping for the alternative. She didn’t think the alternative – him being happy to see her—would happen, but goddammit she hadn’t learned how to not get her hopes up.
Rapping on the door, she held her breath.
The door opened and there stood Hank’s new wife, Judith. The blonde woman’s gray eyes widened. “Buffy!”
“Hi,” Buffy said, still not breathing properly.
“What are you doing here?”
“I was in the area and figured I’d come and see everyone,” she jammed her hands in her pockets. This had to be the strangest conversation ever. Judith had to know about that late night phone call, not only that, the woman knew what a jackass her father was to her; she was just too chicken shit to say boo to him. Yet here she was, standing before her “stepmother” acting as if she’d been on vacation (well, she sorta had been), and was back to just say “Hi!”
“He’s not here…he had a check up…why don’t you come in?”
Buffy nodded slowly, feeling strange about the whole thing, but figuring, hell, she’d come this far… why the hell not go further?
“I’m so sorry about your Mom, Buffy,” Judith said softly.
Buffy took a deep breath and nodded, smiling, “Thanks.”
“And I’m sorry that we weren’t…”
“Don’t worry about it,” Buffy said, shrugging it off. It wasn’t exactly a shrug-offable thing and yet she was doing it. Stepping inside, Buffy prepared herself to enter a world that she never belonged to and wasn’t sure anymore that she necessarily wanted to belong to anymore.
The thing that always struck Buffy about Judith was her perpetual positive spin on everything. She was like a 50’s housewife that never said a word against her husband, even if she happened to disagree with his actions, and raised her kids –two preteen girls –to be the same way. They were bouncy and happy—full of sugary sweetness.
She marveled that her father had managed to elbow his way into such a family. She figured that Judith had already been strong-armed by one husband and so didn’t manage to see that she was being strong-armed in the next one. She was used to it and just accepted things the way they were.
She flitted around the apartment while Buffy waited for her father to arrive home, chirping like a bird about this and that, and when her stepsisters came home (Eveline and Madeline), they chirped around her as well – sharing success stories from their classes in middle school, their outlook on attending the high school in the fall and their hope to maybe take a college course or two while there as well. They were honor students naturally, incredibly smart and unnaturally progressive for their age. At least Buffy thought they were unnaturally progressive. It could be that she was just jealous. She’d done well in school, but she was never ahead of her class—she wasn’t naturally smart, she had to work at her education, it didn’t come to her like it did to Eveline and Madeline-- the bookworms with matching glasses, gangly limbs and stringy long brown hair. They might as well have been twins. She remembered often feeling like Debbie Downer when she’d arrive on the scene with them.
“We saved you the Sour Patch Kids from trick-or-treating!” Eveline burst out with much excitement and tore off to her bedroom to get them apparently.
Madeline wrinkled her nose. “Why do you like them?” she asked.
Buffy smiled. “Because they’re just like me.”
“How?”
“Sugary on the outside, and sour on the inside,” and Buffy fought the urge to giggle at both Madeline’s bewildered look and Judith’s disapproving one.
“So, what happened when you saw him, pet?” Spike asked later that evening while he relaxed in his favorite lounger and Buffy relaxed in her hotel bed.
“First, let me tell you that Judith, my father’s new wife, has to be a pod person. No one can be that perpetually happy all the time. It’s nauseating! She’s like a Stepford Wife. I used to think that something was wrong with me when I hung around her. I mean, she has a positive spin on everything and I thought ‘Damn, I’m just a Negative Nilly’, but you know what? I’m not Negative Nilly, I’m just realistic. And she is not. I’m telling you Spike; she’s like Ted Kazinski in the making. She’s got notebooks somewhere of intrinsically plotted murders of those around her. She has to be a fucking loon underneath that saccharine sweet exterior. Either that, or someone is just gonna take her out one day. I’m convinced of this.”
Spike couldn’t stop laughing. “Oh, kitten, you do make me laugh.”
“Thanks,” and she smiled into the phone.
“So, how’d it go with your Dad?”
“Nothing big at all. I kind of guessed that. He didn’t really talk much…just sort of nodded at me acknowledging my existence and asked how I was. Judith invited me for dinner and I got the sense he didn’t really like that. I amused myself by swearing every once in a while and getting a death glare from her and my dad and giggles from Eveline and Madeline.”
“Such a bad girl,” Spike said fondly.
“Well, I figure if I don’t make myself laugh, I’ll cry. Tragedy and comedy are linked closely, that’s what you told me, right?”
“Right.”
“So, I can look at this as a tragedy if I wanted to, but why bother? I’ll just dig in my heels and make him talk to me. I’ll see if I can gain amusement from it and make him crack. I figure my sense of humor about it is what’s going to save my life.”
Spike sighed heavily. “Pet, I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t be. I’m fine.”
Famous last words, they both thought.
Chapter Twenty
“You what?” Buffy felt as though the man who’d helped create her had just punched her in the gut.
“I have cancer. Prostate cancer to be exact. I just found out yesterday,” Hank told her the next evening after an awkward dinner in which Buffy had gotten the impression yet again that she was not welcome. After that fun dinner, Hank had requested to have some alone time to talk with her. She thought maybe they’d have a real talk now, the kind where he apologized and she accepted with some hesitation--only after he promised to be a better father.
“Dad, God, I’m sorry--”
“I’m going to be fine,” he waved her off. “I want you to go back to Sunnydale, Buffy. Get yourself away from this. You don’t need it.”
“Dad, I’ll stay here. I’ll get another job and find a place to live so I can help out and-”
Hank shook his head. “No, Buffy. You have to go. You’re a twenty-five year old woman that needs to live her life, not hang around and have to deal with things like this.”
“Dad, I wasn’t around for Mom when she was sick and I want to be here for you--”
“Buffy, I said no!” Hank shouted, startling her. “Go home.”
Buffy stood stock-still. This was it. The moment she’d been waiting for. The moment of truth, the moment that was going to change her whole world – again.
“You don’t want me to stay not because of me, but because of you. Because it’d be easier for you,” Buffy said quietly.
Hank said nothing, just turned from her.
“Why do you hate me, Dad? What did I do? Is it because of Mom? Is it because I failed you? Is it because she married someone else?”
Still he said nothing, and that is when Buffy snapped.
“Why do you hate me?” she screamed at his back. “Why do you hate your flesh and blood? What the fuck did I ever do to you? Why do you love the kids that aren’t yours and hate the one that is?” She was screaming and crying, ranting and raving so much—repeating over and over her questions, that she barely noticed Judith come and pull her out, taking her not only out of the room, but out of her father’s life.
Standing with teeth chattering, Buffy stared at Judith who stood with her on the sidewalk just outside the building. How had that happened so quickly?
“Go home, Buffy. Just leave him, okay? Just leave him and don’t come back…spare yourself the pain,” Judith was saying to her, but Buffy didn’t comprehend what the woman was saying beyond ‘Leave’. Her father always wanted her to fucking leave! And the ones that wanted her to stay were the ones she left.
The blackness came then and surrounded her, shrouding her mind and her thoughts…the demon inside her that had lain dormant was back with a vengeance and all Buffy wanted to do was scream until the Earth shook.
“Baby, what happened?”
Buffy was sobbing into the phone, Spike was barely able to understand her, but he’d managed to decipher that she was back in her hotel room and that things had not gone well with Hank.
“He has cancer…he doesn’t want me here. He told me to go home and then…then J-Judith came and pulled me out of there, told me to go… why does he hate me, Spike? Why?” She sounded like a lost little girl and he had to guess that at that point in time, she was. There was nothing more he wanted to do than gather her in his arms and hold her. No matter how many times she tried in her life, it was never good enough and the little girl that loved her Daddy didn’t understand it, and because of that, the grown woman she was now didn’t understand it and so desperately needed to. It angered Spike that Hank could do that to her. Angered him beyond reason.
“He’s a bastard,” he swore viciously. “And he doesn’t deserve you.”
“You know…that’s what I keep telling myself but I’m beginning to wonder about that. I mean, if I’m such a great prize wouldn’t that make him want me around? Wouldn’t that make him love me? What does it take, Spike? What does it take for him to love me? I am his flesh and blood!”
“Buffy, honey, you are a great prize. He’s just so damn weak and pathetic—you shine baby. You’re the sun and he’s just dirt--”
“Maybe I shouldn’t shine then.”
“Buffy--”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired…”
She sounded so despondent and suddenly so far away – she did not sound like herself and it wasn’t the tears, it wasn’t the hurt -- something was off with her and it was frightening him.
“I think I need some sleep,” she said wearily.
“How about coming home, Buffy?”
“No… not now…”
“Why?”
“Because I’m so fucking tired. I can’t…I can barely keep my eyes open. My limbs feel so heavy. I feel like a dead weight.”
“Buffy, come home tomorrow.”
“We’ll see.”
“Buffy--”
His plea fell on deaf ears for she’d hung up.
Buffy stared up at the ceiling, her phone off and charging, the blinds shut in her hotel room, the room smelling almost moldy and dank. She needed air; she needed sun. Except the thought of moving from the bed was too much to even contemplate. It was positively exhausting to think about. All she wanted to do was stare up at the ceiling and try to make patterns and images out of the cracks and marks on it. Though, even that was proving to be tiring.
She felt as if she’d spent months as an insomniac and in a flash, the add up of nights spent not sleeping had caught up with her and her body was demanding its rest. Her mind was demanding reprieve. Of all the things she had cared about, suddenly she cared for nothing except to gain that rest she so desperately needed.
I’ve done it, haven’t I? I’m nuts. When simple things like getting up and going out for food become mountains I have to climb, then I must be at the break. I feel it, I feel it closing in around me...I need…and I can’t have…I am alone.
Spike was losing his patience. He’d called a thousand times and each time had gotten her voice mail. He was worried about her and was torn between catching a flight out to find her or just waiting to hear from her. Knowing his impulsive girl, she could be on her way at that moment.
Pacing in the kitchen and scratching his imaginary beard, he tried not to look at the phone. A watched phone never rings.
Turning to look out the kitchen window, he took a deep Buddha breath and shut his eyes. He was tense all over and this deep breathing thing was not helping the way Fred said it would.
Then his phone rang and he lunged for it. “Buffy?”
“Fred.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“No, I’m sorry, that was rude of me,” he shook his head, running a hand through his hair.
“How are you?”
“Stressed.”
“From the other night?”
“No, Buffy she’s upset…her father strikes again!”
“What happened?”
“He has cancer and he just told her last night. Then, he told her to go home. He shoved her out of his life again.”
“That poor girl.”
“So if I murdered him and pleaded insanity, would you testify as my psychologist in court?”
Fred laughed, “Of course.”
“I’m worried about her Fred.”
“I know you are, Spike. You love her; it’s only natural that you would worry. However, give her some breathing room right now. Let her know that you are there, but don’t smother her. That’s not what she needs.”
“Doesn’t she need the opposite of what he gave her? Love? Support? A little bit of smothering?”
“Let her come to you. Oftentimes when we push too hard with the ones we love, they run the other way.”
“Tell me again that it’s okay?”
“It’s not wrong of you to love her, Spike.”
“I can’t stop feeling guilty,” Spike whispered, his eyes shutting tight.
“Like I told you last night, it doesn’t mean that your marriage was a sham, Spike. Joyce was what you needed at the time and you did love her in your own way, but Buffy--”
“Buffy consumes my whole being,” he whispered. “She’s everything.”
Sitting on some steps leading up to some bank, Buffy plopped herself down with a Coke and Hamburger from McDonalds. She was still exhausted. It’d taken everything for her to get out of the hotel. When she couldn’t find a clean pair of socks, she started to cry. Then when she couldn’t find her hotel keys, she started to cry. All she seemed to be able to do was sleep, cry, and stare off into space.
Focusing in across the street at a truck with large steel tubes in the back, she pondered what it must be like for the car behind that truck. Was it freaky? She imagined it’d be freaky. What if one of those tubes fell loose? What if it went slamming into the car and right through the windshield? It’d sever their heads.
That’s be a horrible way to die. Though…would you even feel it? Maybe it’d be a quick and painless way to die? What about a gun to the head? Would that hurt or would it be so quick, you wouldn’t feel a thing? You just put that thing to your head…or, maybe in your mouth. Would I be able to put a gun in my mouth? The cold metal…my lips wrapped around it, my finger on the trigger…It’s probably all in the anticipation. Once the trigger was pulled, it’d be so easy. Pull, Bam, done. Dead. Forever. I wouldn’t be able to hang myself and slitting my wrists is out of the question…that’d involve pain, I’m sure. What about pills? When I got my wisdom teeth out those drugs knocked me out…that’d be sweet. I’d just go to sleep and not wake up. I wonder if aspirin would do it or maybe sleeping pills? And what if I were found? Christ, that’d suck. Just one more thing I’d have failed at! I’d have a do-over if I died. If I killed myself, I’d have a do-over just like Spike and I had a do-over Thanksgiving. I could come back and start over with a new life. Make better choices, do the right things…I could do it. I could do it…
“I need to take a break,” Buffy stated simply to the skinny nurse with tortoise shell glasses.
“We all need a break now and then, honey,” the nurse drawled, clearly unimpressed.
“Well, if I don’t get a break, I’m not sure exactly what it is I’ll do.” Buffy was losing her patience. She thought she was going to fucking die here!
“What are you saying exactly?” and the woman peered over her glasses at her.
“I think you can guess from just that. I don’t know what I’ll do. If you want specifics: I don’t know what I’ll do to myself.” Or what harm will befall me now that I’m in fact afraid to die.
That was all it took for Buffy to check into the local mental health clinic in Boston. Her thoughts of suicide had frightened her, the feeling that she could actually do it had scared her. She didn’t want to die, not really, but it seemed so plausible…and that’s when she became frightened that she was going to die. It would be the irony of her life to decide she didn’t want to off herself, and then end up being offed. She envisioned herself getting hit by a car, shot, murdered…she felt impending doom and it was suffocating her.
She felt the break happen in her mind the night before, from which carrying on as she had been had really just been leading up to this moment—the perfect moment in which she would feel a collapse of mind and spirit. Where the life would be drained from her and all her fighting and pushing through the blackness that threatened to take her over, finally covered her, encased her in its arms and carried her away in its sickness. It saw its window and it infiltrated.
There were of course the tears to contend with that belied the numbness that settled around her being. Once she started, she could not stop.
So, now, here she was in a mental health facility – not put quite on severe watch, but on moderate watch, and everything had been taken from her – anything potentially hazardous to her health and could be used to off herself, such as the small mirror in her purse for she could break the mirror and slash her wrists.
“I really don’t want to die,” she told the nurse that rummaged through her things. “I want to live. I just feel that I could die if I don’t get some fucking rest.”
The nurse said nothing and Buffy flipped her off when she left her room. Looking over at the empty bed next to her, Buffy wondered if she’d find herself with a roommate before the night was over.
The room iteself was fascinating to her. Everything was bolted down to the floor. And the windows had bars on them. She laughed at that. The TV in the too-white room was so far up in the wall she couldn’t reach it. She knew she had a remote, but she felt if she could reach the TV and its dials, she would have accomplished something. But, no.
Instead, she lay down; rolling over so that her back was to the door, effectively shutting out the world. Curling herself in a ball, Buffy stared at the opposing wall and let the tears that threatened to come just hang in the balance of either drying up or falling until her vision blurred from them.
What is wrong with me? she thought. who checks themselves into a mental health facility? Who convinces themselves they’re going to die like that? I’m going to be fine and I don’t need to check myself in to a fucking mental hospital because I tweaked myself out.
Except here, she felt she could say “I’m crazy” and it was okay. It was normal. Out there, in the big bad world, it wasn’t. She could tell Spike she was crazy until she was blue in the face and he wouldn’t get it. He’d laugh. Or he’d ask if she wanted to talk and what could she say? “I think I’m in love with you and I can’t be. So can you be a little less you so I can be a little more me?”
Spike being Spike made it difficult for her to shut off her feelings for him; Spike being Spike made her lose her head. Spike being Spike made her feel like a dirty girl when she thought of him holding her, kissing her and touching her. Wouldn’t he be surprised to learn that she’d often thought of him while fucking Angel?
Then there was her father. And her mother. And death. Death surrounded her. From the death of her family, to the death of the lies sold as truths, to the death of her mother, to the death of her father’s health that was now taken over by a disease, and the death of her rational facilities, Buffy felt death all around her.
Death was her art.
“I need to call my stepfather,” Buffy told the nurse when she came back to check on her. She hadn’t moved much, just rolled over to the other side and played the game of: “Who was the whack job that was in that bed?” with the still empty bed opposing her. She’d tried to play the game of who was in her own bed except it frightened her. What if their illness was attached to that bed and she somehow absorbed it inside her? That was the last thing she needed.
The heavy set nurse with orange frizzy hair pulling out of the bun she held it in gave her a withering look. “You didn’t call anyone to tell them you were comin’?”
Buffy sat up. “No. I just came. I didn’t know how to tell him. I was a little too paranoid about dying at the time.”
“Come with me.”
Buffy followed the nurse down white hallways that hurt her eyes to the nurse’s station where the nurse’s and a few doctors stared for a moment at her before attending back to their business.
Picking up the phone she was directed to use, Buffy dialed Spike. When she received his voice mail, she left him a message. “Hi, it’s me. I’m in a mental health facility. It’s called the Center for Health and Development. I don’t think I’m too bad off so you could probably visit. But maybe you shouldn’t…That might be bad… Goodbye, Spike.”