All the Love in the Universe

Two. Galaxies of Waiting-Marie

"You are the love of my life. I am the love of your life. We are supposed to be together. I don't want to spend one more moment away from you: your heart, your spirit, your body, your mind. We need each other more than oxygen. Your denial of our love doesn't make our love less real. All it does is deepen the pain of our needless separation.

"Alec, I want to bear your children. I want to have a family with you. I want to take care of you, support you in any way you need. I want you to care for me too. I just want to live our love together, the way we both so intensely desire.

"I don't want to fight, deny, or pretend. I want to be real. I'm so tired of feeling like you have to choose between your band destiny and your love destiny. I'm so tired of bending over backwards trying to get John and Paulson to accept me. Accept us. It'll never happen. Their jealousy consumes them, and after Stevie, my face will always be colored by the tragedy.

"I wish you didn't have to choose. But if you were going to choose, I wish it would be me."

I tore the letter in half, then crumpled each half into a ball. I'd scrawled dozens of notes like this over the past seven months, and all of them had met the same end. The trash bin.

I wrote them for my own processing of emotion. Every time Alec left me, the numbness of the shock overpowered my entire consciousness. I often forgot to eat. The letters served as placeholders, a promise I'd made to myself that one day Alec would understand everything. They were practice sessions for a future meeting of the hearts, when the right words would tumble out of my mouth and into Alec's ears and suddenly make sense to us both.

They were also something to do to pass the time.

There was so much time, when he was away. When the boys were on tour, they invented little games and strategies for sweetening the time between concerts. They'd bounce ping pongs off each other's heads for points, wrestle, toss balls off the tour bus roof.

Now I was waiting on him.

My moods tumbled over each other like lion cubs fighting for a bone. Eventually, my spirit collapsed, and I stopped feeling anything at all. Through my deadened eyes of my soul, I stared at the posters that decorated my bedroom wall. There was Alec flanked by the trouble twins with the neon band name blazing above their heads: The TV Stars.

Below that poster was my own: Marie Santa Clara clutching a mic, commanding the stage.

That persona was a lie. I might be fearless in front of 40,000 clamoring fans, but backstage, I cowered in shaking fear. I lived in fear of every moment without Alec, and every moment with him. Every moment he was away, I longed for him; every moment he was near, he was contemplating leaving.

"Do you want me to stay?"

It was Henri, lingering in the doorway. His broad shoulders blocked the incoming sun.

"I'll stay as long as you let me."

"I know you will," I answered. I'd been lost in another long-winded Alec daydream.

I passed long hours conversing with him in my mind. I'd argue with him, strategize logical paths to winning him over, or emotional barrages of pleading. But no matter how I approached him in my imagination, I knew that in reality, he was a stone wall.

Well. Maybe he wasn't. But he answered to the band, who wanted me dead. They honestly did. I overheard them one night after Alec had fallen asleep next to me on the bus. They believed I was still out when they whispered, one to the other:

"It should have been Marie. Not Stevie."

They hadn't said they wished us both to survive that awful crash. They actually wanted me erased from the earth.

Sometimes, in my lower fits of delusional self-immolation, I agreed. But mostly, these days, I just felt paralyzed.

The seizures controlled my earthy existence. When I was upset about Alec, they popped my brain like rice cereal. My consciousness expanded and colors took on surreal import, music swirled alive in ethereal madness.

Life became a dream, and dreams penetrated existence more convincingly than life.

Oh, I'd invited batteries of medications. Two had worn off after time; one'd nearly killed me. Another had stupefied me; the last had muted my soul. I was now going a while without any, just to see what would happen.

Really, if I was being honest, I was secretly daring the disease to come for my heart again.

My physical heart.

After the accident with Stevie, a grand mal had stopped my heart; more recently, another had slowed it.

"Too slow," the resident had quipped when he she examined me.

"What does that mean?" I'd asked, drowsy.

In that inscrutable doctory way, she hadn't answered.

"Baby," Henri was suddenly beside me on my bed, caressing my freshly-cut pixie hair. He could easily guess where my heart was. "You can't go back and change that night. You can, however, change tomorrow. Alec is a human being, which means he's fungible. I know he's stuck in his ways. I know he's unhealthily, brainwashingly-so, attached to his henchmen. But that doesn't mean he's immutable. This is hard; it's not impossible. I know the difference."

I nodded hesitantly. He was getting to me. I felt my sinews loosening, my depression weakening.

"The West can still be won," Henri closed with. He kissed my cheek and gently rose, smiling down on me with a wink. "I love you, baby girl."

"I love you, fiancé."

"We'll plan the wedding tomorrow. I'll be downstairs straightening up for you before I leave. Anytime you want me, rub your lamp and POOF! I'll appear."

"You're the best groom ever," I said.

"Hey. I've got the best bride ever." Then, as he turned to walk out, "Alec is the stupidest, luckiest, most clueless poor little rich boy in the world."

That might've been the truth, and Alec himself would often admit it. But it didn't change his sporadic behavior. Alec had been reeling in loops of contrary emotions and actions that dizzied the world within and without him.

And, if Marie allowed herself to venture into the fullness of the truth, she knew these revolving doors of intention were spinning before the accident.

Henri was right about one thing: Alec and Marie had problems deeper than Stevie.