Let the Broken Hearts Stand

[MurderWeasel]

((Jennifer Perez continued from the past))

It had been a long time since everything had seemed like it was going to go to pieces. It had been a long time since Jennifer had felt lost and alone and confused. Now, though, she was shaking, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling and feeling like her life had just been blown apart.

She was out of therapy again. She had a college degree. She was living on her own, and she was working, and she was mostly happy. Now, though, it was almost as if it was happening again. It had happened again, of course. She knew that much. She didn't pay close attention. She avoided the news, not out of fear, but from a simple desire not to artificially cause the resurgence of painful memories. She didn't mention her experiences to anyone unprompted, though she never hid who she was anymore. She was willing to discuss things with friends and family, though they largely were squeamish around the subject. For the most part, she passed for normal. Nobody she didn't know really remembered her time on Survival of the Fittest. She hadn't done much of note. The world seemed content to let her be.

And yet, earlier in the evening, some journalist had dredged up her number and decided to call to see how she felt on the fucking five year anniversary of the kidnapping. She had no idea why she'd been picked. They'd had a nice little discussion, during which Jennifer had said exactly fuck-all about the island or her feelings about the anniversary. The journalist had gotten bored and had hung up, and Jennifer had headed to bed and remembered once more all that she had lost.

It wasn't like it used to be, wasn't so bad or immediate, but it still hurt.

She tossed and turned for a while, tried to figure out some way to get some rest. Nothing. She didn't cry about what had happened now. She didn't do too much, just left a bouquet of flowers in the park every so often. It beat the fuck out of going to a graveyard and searching for tombstones that marked ground where no bodies lay. Sometimes she went by Bayview, too, to volunteer. She did the same stuff parents did, helped tutor struggling kids to the best of her ability, cleaned up trash, just helped out in general. The school had been very hesitant about her presence at first, but she'd managed to convince them she was just helping out because her brother was there.

He'd graduated almost a year ago now, and nobody at Bayview had voiced any complaints about her continued assistance.

Of course, she had free time less and less often. She was working full time now, subcontracting for some local theatre troupes and occasionally for television programs. When she did have spare time from those obligations, she did professional alterations. The money was fairly good, enough to keep her fed and housed in her two bedroom apartment and even have some left over for fun and savings. She had turned the second bedroom into her studio. It was completely filled with fabrics and sewing machinery—and come to think of it, her fucking serger had come unthreaded again earlier in the day, so that would require some concentration to get set up again. Then there was the time she spent babysitting her niece, whenever Monica and her husband needed a night off.

All the things that kept her busy also made what she decided to do this night feel more than a little reckless.

Fuck it. Impulse had its place. This had to be done.

Jennifer turned the lights back on and got dressed again, seized with a sudden energy. Tomorrow, it would be five years since she'd been taken, and she still had one thing she'd left undone, one last little thing she'd never quite gotten around to, one thing mooring her to the past.

She found her phone—it was an old model, just a few steps up the technological ladder from the one she'd lost on the island—and changed the message on her answering machine to say she'd had an urgent situation arise and would be out of contact for the next few days. Then she grabbed a duffel bag and stuffed it full of what she'd need: toothbrush, spare clothes, water bottle, portable sewing kit, CD player, a few bags of potato chips she had lying around. After that, she found her coat and hurried down the stairs, to the old car she grudgingly kept. Jennifer still walked wherever she could, but sometimes the need to deliver things or meet potential clients made perambulation impossible.

It was, she saw, four in the morning. She'd tossed and turned longer than she'd thought. Five years ago, she'd still been asleep. She'd slept well that night. She tried to recapture the feelings from then. Excitement, sure, and a little apprehension. After all, she'd never been away from home for that long before. She'd been nervous about her company, too. Maf was going to be there, and she didn't quite know where they stood, or where she wanted them to stand. Something to discuss with Melissa, maybe. She'd wondered whether saying that she liked him would be a rash choice, knowing all the time that she wasn't brave enough to ever actually go through with it.

She'd been so happy on the bus.

Her memories carried her halfway to South Dakota. At one point, she briefly considered calling Isabel and inviting her along, but it didn't seem right. The others would do what they needed to. Maybe she wasn't the first to make this particular pilgrimage.

Five years late, Jennifer was going camping.

She pulled into Badlands National Park in the morning, a bit better equipped after a stop at an all-night convenience store, paid her visitor's fee, and headed to the campgrounds. She wasn't sure she was at the right one. She had no idea where the school had been planning to keep them, whether there were cabins or a lodge somewhere around. There had been nearly three hundred of them. Maybe the plan had been to set up a few dozen tents. There was no way of knowing now.

It didn't really matter. Jennifer didn't have a tent and certainly hadn't reserved a cabin. She was going to be living in her car for the next few days. It would be alright. She'd slept in worse places. Certainly the island had been worse. She could remember it clearly, waking up with greasy hair and an aching back, propped up against a tree or a rock wall, heart instantly pumping full force, glancing around to make sure nobody was waiting to kill her. Since then, everything had seemed luxurious.

So she sat in her car and she played her CDs and she watched the sun rise and she tried to pretend that things had gone right. She tried to throw herself back in time, to be eighteen again and to have the world in front of her, to recapture her uncertainty and hope. No luck. She was twenty-three, alone in a car in a fucking national park, without a clue what she was doing beyond following an impulse that had seemed clever at the time.

Maybe it was healing she was after. Maybe she was chasing ghosts. Maybe she was looking for parts of herself she'd lost.

In some ways, what she missed most was the openness of the future. Back then, she'd had no plans. She'd not even known what she wanted on an immediate social level. It finally felt almost safe to acknowledge just how conflicted she'd been about the whole thing. Jennifer had always thought romance was something for later, for grown ups. She'd figured maybe she'd date in college or something, maybe figure out what was right for her then. She'd thought she'd find the right person, the one, after college, and then they'd get married and have some kids. She'd thought anything before was just a joke, just practice, maybe not even worth pursuing. Maf had made her question that. Then he'd changed and he'd died and she'd never figured anything out at all. Any steps she'd taken in the years since had ended in disaster. She couldn't shake the feeling that everything good would eventually end, that people couldn't be trusted, that she couldn't trust herself. The same was true of simple stuff like friendship. She'd made almost no lasting friends besides Isabel. Sure, she could get along with everyone easily, but trusting more deeply, making an actual connection, that caused her to shy away.

Maybe what she was really afraid of was replacing the people she'd lost.

Melissa had been a wonderful friend. She'd been a high school friend, though. They'd been able to talk about things, deep things sometimes, but things that high schoolers cared about, and then things that high schoolers who were doomed to die cared about. For a time, Jennifer had gone to the park and had talked into the air as if Melissa was there, just sharing her thoughts and talking about the world. What, though, would Melissa have said about stress from work? What advice could she have given Jennifer about dealing with her niece and her brother-in-law? It was the same with Maf and Nick. Would they even have recognized her now? Would they have had anything in common with her? She wasn't the girl who turned up in deserted parking lots to talk down strangers, not anymore.

Was growing up a betrayal? She couldn't say. Sure, they'd probably have all told her to move on, to fucking let go of things already. It had been half a decade. It was time to stop... well, not grieving, she wasn't doing that, but maybe time to end the mourning period. Maybe it was time to do something crazy, to say yes if someone asked her to dinner or to go along to one of the social gatherings or production parties she was always getting invitations to.

For now, though, she would just be herself. There was nothing to do here, nobody to enjoy her little vacation with. Jennifer knew she'd probably be home within two days, sheepish about the entire thing. She knew she'd probably never tell anyone what she'd done. It was important, though. On some level, in some way, this was important to her. It was a way of proving that she'd won, a way of showing that she'd still get everything she'd been promised, even if it was a little delayed.

---

In the end, she did go home before too long, but it was with a lighter feeling, a brighter outlook. She hadn't forgotten, but she was finally ready to move on. She was done hiding from her memories, done wallowing in them, done trying to figure things out. It was time to stop analyzing and start living again, to take life as it came and not worry about what sort of person that would make her, not worry about measuring up to some ideal. It was time to just let things be how they were and make the best of it all.

Somehow, in the end, she finally thought it would all be just fine.

((Jennifer Perez continued in the future))