Homesick

by >>Jae

"So I've been thinking that maybe I should go home," Rory says.

"What, now?" Ryan says, sitting up on one elbow. "It's, like, two in the morning."

"No," Rory says, sliding one hand up his arm, tugging him back down. "No, I meant, home home. Stars Hollow. Just - not for a real long time or anything, just for a while, I have work and everything, but just for a while. A visit. A while." Ryan doesn't say anything and Rory starts talking, quicker, louder. He was really just thinking for a minute but he kind of loves when she does this. Maybe once he would have thought she was showing off or making fun of him in some way he was too slow to get, but long before he'd met her he'd figured out that this was just how smart people filled awkward moments. He missed it, before Rory.

"It's just been a while, and my mom is not adjusting to my being out here. Not at all. I mean, I thought that once she got used to it it'd get a little easier, but it's actually getting worse. Last night she said to me on the phone, she actually said this, 'Little poor children have whole government agencies devoted to taking care of them, but you don't see any huge bureaucracy devoted to taking care of me, and if anyone needs one I need one. There's no fat government workers living high off the hog leaving work at three o'clock and collecting a big pension at the U.S. Department of Lorelai. In fact, there isn't even a U.S. Department of Lorelai! Clearly I need you more than the little poor children and you should come home right away.'"

Ryan laughs a little and then Rory says, quietly, "And I miss her, too."

Ryan stops laughing because he likes when she goes off on some crazy tangent, but what he really loves is the way she follows it with something serious, says it fast and quiet but she still says it. He missed that, too, before Rory. He tried to explain it to her once, why he liked it, the way she knows how to hide things, knows how to hide from things but she says them anyway, fast and quiet and real. He tried to explain it to her, but he fucked it up somehow. She just tilted her head all the way over and scrunched up her nose and said, "Yes, yes, I'm a brave little toaster," and he couldn't tell if her face was flushed from pleasure or embarrassment or just from almost being upside down.

"I know," he says, and Rory leans forward and kisses him, taking him by surprise. Before he can respond she's pulled away, her fingers darting up to touch his mouth gently, briefly. It's a strange gesture, not one of hers, intimate and slightly formal, like a look shared by immigrants who pass each other in a foreign city. Ryan knows the gesture, the look, although he hasn't learned it from Rory. Longing is its own country, and Ryan knows its gestures and its language like a native.

"I'm just - I'm homesick," Rory says. "Isn't it a weird word, homesick? It should mean its opposite - I mean, that's why I came here in the first place, because I was sick of home. Not sick of it totally, but I decided, and I knew it was the right thing, but I decided that I needed to get a little distance so I could see what it was I wanted and what I was just used to wanting, and I was expecting to miss things, people, I thought I'd be homesick, I guess I just didn't expect it to feel like this. Like - like this."

"Sick for home," Ryan says, and Rory smiles and kisses him again. This time he catches her fingers before they press against his lips, catches them and then lets go.

"Yeah, I guess it is the right word after all, because it is like a sickness. I feel it physically. Not like I'm going to throw up or anything, don't worry, but it's like Stars Hollow is this virus they put into you once you've lived there longer than a year, or maybe even a day, and then whenever you get too far away or stay away for too long it activates and you're just never going to feel right until you take yourself back where you belong. Back home." Rory lays her head on his shoulder and says, quickly, quietly, "I want to go home."

Ryan doesn't say anything, because he doesn't have anything to fill awkward moments, or painful ones. He used to break things, hit things, but he doesn't do that anymore. The words haven't come to take the place of the violence, but he's learned to make do with silence. Then, because he's trying not to do that anymore, he follows the silence. "But - I mean, can you go?"

Ryan can't read the look in Rory's eyes when she lifts her head from his shoulder. He says, "I mean, can you afford to go? It's gotta be an expensive trip."

He can read the look in Rory's eyes now but he doesn't turn away. It's not like they talk a lot about money but Ryan knows they pay the kids in her program for shit. He didn't want to ask in the first place, because it's not like there's not anything he can do about it. He only makes about shit plus four dollars at his own job, and he gives Theresa two hundred dollars every other week and now that the baby's getting bigger, he's been trying to give her more. There's no way Ryan can chip in for a plane ticket, but he remembers generosity and he knows that there are other things to give. Once he thought those other things were almost as helpful as money.

She doesn't need them, though, because she just says, "Well, yeah. I mean, if I even mention coming home, my mom and my grandparents are rushing the airport."

"I just - for some reason, I thought things were a little tight for your mom."

"Well, maybe a little, but I mean, not so much she can't buy a plane ticket."

"Oh," Ryan says. "That's good."

After a minute Rory stands up and walks over to the window across from the bed. Her T-shirt barely covers her ass, but she pulls the curtain aside and stands there looking out. It's not a bad view, not just Rory but the view out the window, too. In daylight it's almost ugly, just the beat-up road that runs in front of Ryan's house, separated from the highway by an overgrown vacant lot. At night, though, the road and the lot sink into the darkness, and all he can see are the lights of the cars out on the highway. He likes to sit up in bed with his hands behind his head and watch them sometimes, the way other people watch the stars.

There's no moon tonight, and the streetlight's been busted for days, but he can see Rory by the light spilling from the closet. He broke the little chain that dangled from the light bulb, and now he can't turn the light off. One day he'll get around to just unscrewing the bulb, but it's hot to the touch and he keeps forgetting. Usually he doesn't mind the light, anyway. He doesn't hardly notice it except when Rory's here.

Rory shifts toward him, and her hair swings and sways, glossy even in the dim room. It's rich girl hair, the first thing he noticed about her. When he saw her at the coffee shop, he thought it was what made her look familiar, that and the pang he felt when she smiled at him with her white even rich girl teeth. There are things he's spent a long time teaching himself not to want, and rich girls are pretty close to the top of that list. He still looked, though. He told himself it was because he had discipline. He could look because he wouldn't let himself do anything. And if part of him thought maybe that wasn't discipline so much as fear, well, that was all right. He still wouldn't do anything.

He didn't have to, though, because Rory did. She said, "Hey, I know you - the 13th Street Y, right?" She walked over with her coffee extended out toward him. Then she laughed a little, and switched hands. "I work with the older kids. I've seen you there."

She had. Tuesdays and Thursdays were his days to pick the baby up at preschool. He'd probably seen her, but he hadn't noticed. There were always a couple of rich girls rotating in and out of there, mixed in with the regular women who worked there, volunteering or interning or whatever, finding themselves somehow by helping the little poor children. Ryan could almost mouth the words he knew she'd say next.

"Your little girl's adorable."

"Thanks," he said, and then, quickly so they could get to the end of the conversation, "Yeah, we did have her real young." Except he said it a little too quickly, because she hadn't actually asked yet. She burst out laughing, and he took her coffee from her so she wouldn't spill it.

"People ask me that a lot," Ryan said.

"I guess so," she said. "But I think sometimes it's better, you know, have kids young, get it out of the way, you can run around with them when they're little, have fun and maybe you even still know who Hilary Duff is when they talk about her, and then by the time they're grown, you're still young and you can have your own life, run around on your own and have fun. Although maybe somebody should tip my mom off about that having your own life thing, because she's already called me three times today and it's not even nine o'clock. I mean, the woman isn't forty years old yet, she's too young to be living vicariously. She should still be living cariously!" Ryan laughed a little, and she said, quickly, seriously, "I'm Rory and I don't know a soul in town except three other women who work at the Y and twenty-six fourth graders."

"Ryan," he said, and gave her coffee back to her. Rory's smile bloomed again, slower and sweeter than before, and this time there was nothing familiar about it at all.

Now there's nothing he knows as well as that smile, almost nothing, even when he can only see half of it as Rory looks out the window. It's not like he ever thought she was just like him, he always knew she wasn't. She's smarter than he is, always has been, and she's always had something else too. Even that first day he knew she'd figured out how to cross over, and everything since, her rich-girl job, her student-poor apartment, her talk about books, hell, just her talk, everything only confirmed it for him. Maybe once he would have avoided her just for that reason. It hurt him a little, to see her so successful when he'd failed, although he wasn't sure you could even call what he'd done failing. It wasn't like he'd crossed over on his own. He'd been dropped down into that other life, like an accident, like fate, and then he'd torn himself out again. The ragged edges still hurt, especially when he looked at Rory, but he didn't stop watching her. He had to learn what she knew. He had a daughter now, and one day she was going to want to cross over.

That was the reason, he told himself, but it wasn't the only reason. Ever since Rory smiled at him that first day, he couldn't stop watching her. For his own sake, and for hers.

"I love watching the lights on the highway," she says, her body half-turned toward him but her eyes still on the window. "Each little blur, you know that's one person sealed into their own car, sliding by us without even seeing us, all sealed into their own life and we'll never know anything about them. I think it's not fair, sometimes, that we only get one life to try. We should get more, don't you think?" She laughs a little and says, "I guess everybody thinks that, don't they?"

Ryan doesn't give a damn about anyone out on the highway. He's only ever wanted one other life.

"Although I guess I get into enough trouble with the life I've got," Rory says. "I've been feeling lately, it's strange but it's this feeling like I'm living a double life. Or not so much that I'm living it, but that it's being lived. That I'm here, with you, living this life, but that some other Rory, one that's still me somehow, is back home living that life at the same time. Like when I go back I'll just slide into that life like nothing's changed, and nothing will have changed, because I've been there all the time. And I'm not sure what will happen to the life that's being lived out here, when I go."

It's things like that that first made Ryan think Rory wasn't born in that other life, that she had crossed over the way he had but that she'd figured out a way to get to stay. He feels like there's another life, too, his own life going on without him somewhere. His real life. Glimpses of it steal up on him sometimes, when his defenses are down, when he's half-remembering a dream just after he wakes or when he's listening to a dreamy girl count the cars going by on the highway. The images are clear and certain, a boat skimming over a wide blue ocean, a bright classroom full of students, a smile so familiar he catches his breath with longing. At times like those Ryan feels like he can almost tear a hole and drop back into that life. But the only way he knows to cross over is the way he did it the first time. The only way he knows is to want it so much you don't even know you want it, you don't know anything but how much you don't want what you already have. You have to want so much you'll hurl yourself out over the darkness, blindly, violently, like a crime, like an accident, like fate.

Ryan doesn't want anything like that anymore. He can't. He has a daughter now.

"When are you going?" he asks.

"Thursday," Rory says. "My mom bought my tickets this afternoon." She comes back to the edge of the bed and sits down, one leg tucked up under her. "I'll be gone a week, I think, I don't think I can get away with any less, I mean there'll have to be time for the Festival of Rory's Return which will feature a laser light show and a Rory Look-Alike Contest judged by my mother, and I know you think I'm kidding but I'm not, even though sometimes I wish so much that I were the type of person who would be able to kid about this because it would never in a million years ever happen to me, but I'm not that person and I'm not kidding."

She takes a quick breath and then says, "But I'm coming back."

"Good," Ryan says. He believes her. She'll come back this time. Rory smiles at him and he smiles back. If he closes his eyes, he can picture her in that other life, in her life, not so much from the little bit she's told him about it but because he's finally realized what she carries around with her. She never crossed over. She can go back, because she never really had to leave. She can go back, because that life is always there, waiting for her. It's always been hers.

Ryan closes his eyes and glimpses of his life steal over him, glimpses of his real life, his only one. His beat-up car, his beat-up house, his beat-up road. Theresa's bruised eyes apologizing every time he sees her. The Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other weekends that he lives for. He opens his eyes and he sees Rory's smile, a little worried this time, and beyond her the lights of the cars speeding past them on the highway.

"I'm coming back," Rory says, and Ryan smiles at her.

"I'm not going anywhere," he says.