101:Waiting

Jon put his guitar aside with a hiss of annoyance. 

His ability to concentrate wasn’t all that great when Chiara first left this morning, and five hours of waiting and wondering hadn’t done a damn thing to improve it.  The only thing that he’d accomplished was the complete annihilation of a song that was fine in the first place – and now the walls were starting to close in on him. 

In between bouts of slaughtering “Roller Coaster” and returning it to its original state, he’d talked to each of his kids for a while.  Subsequent lulls in the carnage had produced additional calls to his parents and John Shanks.  Now he was both tired of talking to other people and listening to his 33 rpm thoughts played backward at 45 rpm to reveal hidden Satanic messages involving the death of Owen Foster.

After rising from the chair, he crossed to the window, diligently scouring the nearby streets and parking lots as though it would make her appear faster.  Not that faster was necessarily better.  Part of him said that the longer it took, the more favorable the outcome.  The other part… was a nagging bitch that he was doing his best to ignore.

Speaking of nagging bitches…

Jon spun around to snag his phone from the table, deciding that he had it in him to make one more call that had a purpose beyond idle chitchat.  He’d never admit that insecurity was the force compelling him to punch the button for this particular contact, but if she could give him a little reassurance, he’d take it – no matter how ridiculously unfounded it was.

“Well, I do declare,” his Southern sister-in-law answered in the marked drawl used primarily to goad him.  “I’m lookin’ at my husband, so I know you’re not callin’ to deliver news of his death.  I kinda thought that’s about the only reason you’d ever call me of your own free will now that Disney is booked.”

Yeah.  This was a fucking mistake.

“Wrong number.”

“Jon!” Her laughing beckon caught his ear just before Jon touched the disconnect icon.  “I’m sorry.  I’ll play nice.”

“Ha!” 

“It’s true.  I’ll show you.”  His grunted cynicism hadn’t daunted Lilah in the least.  “John Francis, as I live and breathe!  It’s been simply ages!  I’m so glad to hear from you!  Now, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

Jon couldn’t hold back his snuffle of laughter.  Sometimes she was so far over the top that Scarlett O’Hara looked like a lifeless bore by comparison. 

“Ages, my ass.  I was at your house on Sunday, you damn fruitcake.  Stop being so… you, would ya?”

“Well, that might be a little hard to do since I am me…”

Her sarcasm and light humor pretty much told him what he’d called to find out.  Lilah didn’t have some deep, psychic sense of foreboding about Chiara or she would’ve already mentioned it.  Things were going fine with the boys.  The counselor was enjoying her kids.  That was all.

“Jon?  Something a’matter?”

“I would think you’d know,” he spouted dryly, pacing back to the window on fidgety feet.  At least it gave him something else to look at besides this empty hotel room.

“I keep tellin’ you I don’t know everything.  I just know what I know.”

Folding an arm across his chest and tucking that hand under the arm that held the phone, he decided that passing the time bickering with her was at least passing the time. 

“Which obviously isn’t much today.  But humor me, anyway.  Give me a reading on the counselor right about now.”

“Oh for freak’s sake.  I don’t dial people up like a rotary telephone and jingle into their heads.”

Jesus.  He was still trying to figure out whether she was really this colorful or if it was an act to jerk his chain.  The thought of either made him smirk and slowly shake his head.

“What?  I thought you got a stay-at-home job on one of those psychic hotlines.  Or did the lawsuits outweigh the pay?”

“Hardee har har, pretty boy.  What is it you really want?”

To know that the counselor wasn’t battling hurt and angry young men on her own.  To be assured that this damn thing was going to finally be over when she came back through the door.  

“You don’t have any of your bad feelings?”

“No…  Why?  What’s wrong?”

Good enough, he supposed, deciding to take it as final confirmation.  What choice did he have, really?

“Nothing’s wrong.  I’m just rattling your cage.”

“Hmmm….”  That speculative murmur sounded just like the dial of a rotary phone to Jon, and he knew without a doubt that she was doing her damnedest to jingle into his head. “I don’t believe you.”

“Too bad.  That’s all it is.  I’ve gotta go.”

“Where’s Charlie?  I thought you were with her?”

He kicked himself a thousand times in the mental ass.  Anxiety was making him behave irrationally and now he was going to have to pay for that irrationality.  

“She’s out with her boys.”

“Ah.”

How could one syllable irk him so completely?  How could a single… Hell, it wasn’t even a word, it was a noise, so how could it sound so frigging condescending?

“What?” he huffed, changing scenery by pacing into the suite’s bedroom.  At least memories of how he’d splayed her over that bed might distract him from uncertainty and annoyance.

“You don’t like bein’ a secret.  You wanna be with ‘em all right now, lettin’ those boys know that their mama has somebody on her side now.”

That was as good a thing for her to believe as anything else – and it was a little bit true.  He was going to be a significant presence in the counselor’s life in the coming days, weeks and months.  Her sons needed to get used to that idea and know that he wasn’t just dicking around with their mother.

“Kinda,” was what he settled on just to appease Lilah.  “Listen, I gotta go.  Tell Tony I said hi.”

“Sure,” she agreed absently without any intention of ending the call.  “Whatever those problems of hers…  They’ll work out, Jon.  I can’t believe any other way.”

He’d thought the same thing for the first four or five hours.  Now that he was approaching the sixth, things were becoming a little hazier.  “Thanks, I guess.  Talk to you later.”

Before his sister-in-law could offer any additional sage wisdom, he stabbed the disconnect icon and stared at the screen until it went black. 

Fuck it.  He’d had all of this he was willing to endure.

[3:47 PM]JON: You’ve been gone a long time.

The muscles that had gone steadily tenser over the last few hours relaxed just a fraction when the incoming message chime came almost immediately. 

[3:48 PM]CHIARA: I’m not much fun to be around right now.

His patience was at an end, and Jon wasn’t going to invest another twenty minutes and an equal number of messages to decipher the cryptic meaning behind that.  An impatient tap of the phone had a call ringing through.

“Hey.”

It was all he needed to ascertain that she sounded like shit.  The weariness and dejection in that monosyllabic greeting had his muscles tenser than they’d been before he called.

“I’m even less fun to be around not knowing what happened.  Where the hell are you?”

“I…”  The breath she paused to take was thin and reedy.  “I went for a run after I dropped the boys off and, when my legs… wouldn’t do that anymore, I came back to the hotel.  I’ve been in the parking lot long enough for stiffness to set in.”

A flurry of thoughts bombarded Jon’s mind, and none of them were very bright and sunshiny.  Things obviously hadn’t gone well, and it took every ounce of restraint that he had not to fire one question after another at her until she’d told him everything.

Stalking back through the suite to the same living room window that had held his attention for so long, he jerked back the curtain and scanned the cars below with purpose until he found what he was looking for.  Her silver SUV rental was down in the last space at the far end of the lot.

“Come upstairs,” he instructed gently.  As badly as he wanted to fire those questions and demand answers as fast as she could give them, there was something more important to him.  Jon needed her here, with him, so that he could assess the true toll that… whatever was taking on her.  “I’ll start a hot bath.  It’ll help with the stiffness.”

“Okay,” she agreed thickly with a wet sniffle before the line was dead.

Filled with a renewed sense of purpose, Jon strode from the living room, through the bedroom where he tossed his phone on the bed, and into the bathroom.  He wrenched on the faucets for a slow fill and, as he did, spotted a bottle of bath gel on the edge of the tub.  A douse of aromatic bubbles certainly couldn’t hurt anything, and the entire contents was dumped to brew while he went to greet the counselor.

Too impatient to wait inside the room, Jon opened the suite door to keep an eye on the elevator doors while praying that it wasn’t as bad as he feared.  She’d been so damn brave because he and the therapist kept pushing and telling her it was going to be fine.  Well, what if it wasn’t?  What if those boys had been more hurt than anyone suspected and had lashed out in their pain, hoping to wound their mother as deeply as they’d been wounded?

The guilt would eat Jon alive if that was the case, because she’d tried to tell him.  She’d wanted to wait, but he just fucking-well knew better than she did.

Fuck.  He was an idiot.

It felt like a frigging eternity before those elevator doors finally parted, but they finally did, and when she stepped between them…  

“Jesus,” he swore under his breath, completely unprepared for the effect a tragedy-stricken counselor would have on him.

With a painfully clutching chest, Jon held bare feet to the ground and forced himself to wait patiently as she made her listless way to him.  He hoped to God that it was only fatigue from the run and not a broken spirit that had her shoulders sagging, but when she was close enough for him to see the details of her tear-stained face… and bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes that still looked suspiciously wet…

“Come here, baby.”

Her lip quivered as she walked silently into his waiting arms, and Jon folded them protectively around her while pivoting on his heel to take them both inside the room.  The door closed behind them, and Chiara clutched at the front of Jon’s shirt as a weary forehead fell against his sternum, followed by sobs forceful enough to shake them both.

“Shhh…” he soothed helplessly, holding her as close as humanly possible and offering words that were going to be utterly useless.  “I’ve got you...  Just lean on me…  The worst is behind you…”

Over and over he murmured comfort while stroking her hair and absorbing the outpouring of grief as his own. 

He’d been so sure the boys would accept it for the old news that it was.  He’d seen first-hand just how much they loved their mother.  How could he have misjudged the situation so badly?

“Come on,” Jon coaxed when she’d exhausted herself into nothing more than quietly hiccupping tears.

Her wordless complacency as he guided her into the bathroom and undressed her was as effective in conveying the depth of her hurt as the soul-wrenching sobs.  His hard-ass, confident and independent counselor meekly took his direction and let him remove one garment at a time as though she were a child, and then stood to sedately wipe at the still-flowing tears while he stripped his own clothes.

After flicking off the water, he used both hands as a steadying force at her waist while coaxing her into the big tub.  Jon maintained that grasp as he stepped in behind her and, with a watery hiccup, she accepted the direction to sit between his legs and lie back in the circle of his arms.

“I love you,” he murmured into her ear, trying like hell to be a rock while his heart broke alongside hers.  “And I’m so fucking proud that you took back your life today.  It’s all downhill from here.  Every day will get better, I promise.”

It would if he had to talk sense into those boys himself.  They couldn’t do this to the woman who had given up her entire life to make theirs better.  They just couldn’t.  Jon wouldn’t allow it.

“I…” Her head shook against his shoulder.  “I… Can’t… I’m so…”

The broken words shredded his heart like a block of mozzarella.  Fuck, he hated this.  Hated it.  Damn Lilah and her faulty psycho radar.  If she’d just given him a clue, maybe he could’ve been better prepared.

There is no preparation for this.

“Shh...”  Soothing palms stroked wetly up and down her forearms and he intertwined their legs beneath the mountain of fragrant bubbles.  “Don’t talk. Just breathe and try to calm down.”

With another shake of the head she tried to sit, but Jon held her tight against him even as Chiara hiccupped, “You don’t…  It’s not… what you think.”

“What do you mean it’s not what I think?  The boys weren't... devastated, angry, cruel or all those other things that you were worried about?”

“No,” she avowed thickly, sniffing and wiping at her cheeks again.  “I went running because I was mad.  Once I worked off that angry energy…  That’s when the stupid crying started.”

If the boys hadn’t ripped her guts out and stomped them into the ground, then what in the world had happened?  To make her mad, no less?

“In that case…  You’d definitely better talk, because I’m confused as hell.”