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How many Jeremy Bearimies does it take to forget.
Forget Chidi's eyes, the way his hands always found Eleanor's, his forehead wrinkles when he disagreed with the argument a writer was making but wasn't far enough into the book to justifiably rant about it. Forget her own restlesness, the itch in her brain, not done not done not done not yet.
How many more Jeremy Bearimies until she's ready to go.
It was cruel of him, Eleaner thinks several sexy Chidis later, although he would not know how to be cruel if he tried. She must have rubbed off on him—and the joke goes unsaid, because there is no one to hear it—. Eleanor wakes up every morning to her Jeremy Bearimy calendar telling her exactly how long it's been since she lost him, how much longer she still has to go, no end in sight because she knows, she knows, she's not ready. She didn't need that gift. She didn't need that curse.
Her gift was Chidi, so very long ago, Chidi and his I've never been that certain about anything and then being so again. Chidi and I love you too a million times, and then a million more, until she started losing count. She watches the tape Mindy made over and over, tries to convince herself it wasn't a dream, it was real, there was once someone who loved her for real and she loved him back, and now he might be the smallest speck of dust in the universe but it was still real.
She doesn't help Mindy St. Claire because she thinks it's going to be Her Thing, what finally soothes her, what makes her feel complete. She helps her because Mindy's alone in that house with her warm beer and Derek, so far beyond her that he can't touch her, can't understand her—just like she wanted, Eleanor knows like she knows her own heart—, and there is no Chidi for Mindy, no Tahani and no Jason and no Janet, no Michael. There is only Mindy and her own swirling thoughts and her empty chest, and Eleanor knows that all too well, and Eleanor bites her lip and fiddles with the tape that changed everything and understands that she can't leave her. She can't leave her. It wouldn't be fair.
She helps Michael because it's the only thing that makes sense.
If you can't choose who you are, if you can't change, then everything they've been trying to prove for so long, everything they've fought for, is a waste of time as big and awful as the universe. Demon or not. Eleanor read Shakespeare in high school—that is to say, she dated Samantha Garcia the year Romeo and Juliet was mandatory reading, and when they broke up she egged her house and then spent most of her second period flushing Sammie's essay on it down the toilet, reading some lines in flashes of weakness before tearing them apart—, so well, what's in a name? Demon or human, what does it matter? She got called plenty of names too through her life and it never changed what she was in essence, and although demons are definitely gooey-er than humans, they're exactly the same in what matters.
She doesn't ask Janet how Michael's doing, and Janet never offers.
So it all comes down to her and Janet sitting on a bench by the door that Eleanor wants so badly to pretend that she wants to cross, and then they have a margarita, and then one more, and all Eleanor can think about is I don't want to die like this a second time.
"Not the second time. And technically not dying," Janet says, because as it turns out, she said it out loud. But Janet's eyes are soft now and full of something that was not there when they first met, full of feeling, and her voice reaches a register that it never could before and that Eleanor might even call tenderness, and she adds, "You're not alone this time. And you were loved, Eleanor, you were good." A pause. Because Janet is—always, thankfully, uniquely—Janet. "The margaritas weren't made the first time."
And Eleanor laughs, because what else is there to do, and she thinks of what else is different this time 'round. She finally read that forking book, to begin with. What we owe to each other.
"What do we owe to each other?" she asks Janet, but mostly herself.
Janet gives her a small smile and shrugs. She's looking at the necklace Jason gave her, tracing the initials with her index finger, and Eleanor has never seen her more human—or sadder. Is this what being human is? Being sadder than everyone else in the universe? Michael was a demon and he started caring and then he was something else. Janet, too, long before that. A bit late for these kind of revelations, but apparently, being human is giving a shirt. That's all it takes. Just giving a shirt.
"Jason waited, you know," Janet suddenly says. "To give me the necklace. And Chidi-"
"Yeah- he waited for me, I know."
"Yes, he did. He didn't sit on this bench, because he could never wait long enough to be ready to leave you. But he waited, before that." Janet silently refills Eleanor's margarita glass for the third time and tilts her head, just a little bit. "Who are you waiting for, Eleanor?"
And Eleanor knows the answer before Janet has even fully gotten the words out. Herself. She's waiting for herself. There's not enough Jeremy Bearimies to get tired of living when it took her so long to start, to find who she was always meant to be. Or not meant to, but. She made it, either way. She's not ready to leave it behind just yet.
So she sits on the bench and drinks, and asks Janet for the book and a pen made of red licorice, and in the end of What we owe to each other there are blank pages—because they always are, no ending is really so, is it—and she writes and writes and writes, far more than what should fit according to Earth rules of space, for far longer than she could track with Jeremy Bearimies. She writes about what they owe to each other. She writes about Chidi and his understanding, Tahani and her strength, Jason and his compassion, and she writes about Michael and Janet, too, somehow more human now than four humans were back at the beginning of it all—Janet refills her own glass and sips it slowly, eyes politely averted, fingers playing with her necklace—, and in the end she writes about herself and what she learned, what she found, what was taken and what was freely given.
What we owe to each other, she writes once again, and underlines it twice. There are so many things she could write. She gets that Scanlon guy and his neverending book now. But she shakes her head slowly to herself, because she knows. As much as we can, and then some more. And everything that matters. And trying trying trying. And at the very end of the page, which is the very end only because she has suddenly decided it is, she writes, in big dark caps, GIVE A SHIRT. Underlines it three times. Then she goes back to the first page and writes her name under Scanlon's, and then, after a moment, Chidi's and Tahani's and Jason's and Michael's and Janet's.
Eleanor closes the book and drops it on Janet's lap, jumps off the bench, stretches. She puts the licorice pen in her back pocket.
"Whenever you're ready," Janet whispers, and there's something in her eyes that wasn't there a Jeremy Bearimy ago, either.
That is the same door Chidi went through. Jason, too. The door Tahani might go through one day, and Michael. And maybe, if they're very very lucky, if someone gives enough of a shirt, if the universe is something more than dust and a bunch of weird eternal beings with terrible taste in bowties and TV shows—maybe Janet will have the chance too.
There are many snarky things Eleanor could say, as she stands and walks to the door.
But she looks back at Janet, sitting in the bench at the edge of Heaven with a book that now contains all the secrets in the universe, and with her brain that contains the rest. Janet, with her heart half on her collarbone and half turned to dust.
Eleanor smiles,
waves,
—and she walks through the door.
AND THERE IS NOTHING BUT DUST AND LIGHT
—or is there