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When Mark had moved to Kier after the accident, everything of Gemma's had come with him. He couldn't stand to leave any of it behind. Leave any of her behind. The beckoning cat from their Japan trip, her socks that had too many holes in to still wear, even the shells she had hand picked from every beach they had ever visited. It all came. As a consequence, even two years on, the weight of Gemma's presence echoes in every part of a house in which she has never even stepped foot. Sometimes, she makes herself known, like a pencil pressing through tracing paper. Mark feels her in the quiet of certain evenings. Or in the flickering of the flames in the hearth that almost resembles the way her hair tumbled down her back after she had washed it. Or the books on Russian literature gathering dust on the bookshelves. Or the cupboards full of cooking ingredients only she knew how to use.
Mark only ever has take-out for dinner now. The bins stagger under the sheer amount of empty takeaway containers, piling up into a crude mess that overtakes his kitchen. He's run out of trash bags as well at this point, which hardly helps the situation. Mrs Selvig’s rantings don't exactly make him enthusiastic to take the trash out either.
It’s one of these days, when the trash piling up starts calling to Mark to do something about it, that the gentle traces of Gemma's imprint on the world unavoidably come to fruition once again.
“For fuck's sake.” Mark murmurs frustratedly, pushing down on the overflowing trash can as he tries to cram yet more containers inside. The bin fights back. With each shove from Mark, more snack wrappers are ejected and flutter to the floor, where they join the multiple other bags of trash that Mark has neglected to take out. The kitchen is practically swimming in it.
After a few long minutes of Mark engaging in a very serious power struggle with an inanimate object, he finally accepts defeat, grunts exasperatedly and straightens up, looking around the kitchen for a solution to his overflowing bins to magically appear to him.
The cupboard under the sink is slightly ajar. An idea occurs to Mark and he makes a beeline towards it, flinging open the cupboard door and wrenching out a spare plastic bag from within. Instead of emptying his trash and buying some new trash bags, he will simply find more receptacles in which to put his trash. It’s genius really.
Satisfied with his (false) solution to the problem, Mark brings his plastic bag back over to the pile of trash in the corner. On his way, something falls out, light and papery, and gently floats to the ground. He catches it in the corner of his eye, and turns to see what fell out of the bag. It appears to be a receipt.
Mark swoops down to pick it up off the ground. He was right. A grocery store receipt, from almost three years ago. Mark takes one look at the list of items bought, and a slick, slow dead weight drops into his chest. Something tugs at him, in that familiar pit of despair that sits below his ribcage. It begins to tear at his carefully sewn together edges, and suddenly all Mark can remember is her, and him, the harsh fluorescent lights of the grocery store, and Gemma’s distressed voice.
“Surely there’s got to be somewhere we can get them!” Gemma cries.
“It’s winter, they just don’t grow this time of year, Gemma.” says Mark, attempting to placate her.
“But I've seen them here before!”
“Alright, maybe they just ran out of stock. Or they didn’t grow enough. Y’know, because of the snow.” Mark gestures to the window of the small grocery store they stand in. Outside, the snow falls fast in flurries typical of your average February in Ganz.
Gemma sighs deeply. Around them, people bustle past, busy finishing their late afternoon errands. Mark steps forward and takes Gemma’s hand in his, drawing her closer towards him where they stand in the middle of the aisle.
“They’re just strawberries, Gemma. We can get anything else." Mark tries to sound comforting, but it comes out harsher than he meant to.
Gemma is silent, and she bites her lip in that way she always does when she’s trying to act like she doesn’t care. But she does. Mark’s heart pounds guiltily, and in an attempt to redeem himself, he pulls her gently by the hand over towards the fruit section.
“Okay, let’s try and find something as close to strawberries as we can get.”
He surveys the selection before him. There’s mountains of avocados (far more than seems normal for such a small grocery store) as well as apples, pears, bananas, clementines, grapes, blueberries, kiwis and even pomegranates. Mark reaches out to pick a pomegranate up and shows it to a despondent Gemma.
“There you go. Red fruit! That’s almost a strawberry, right?”
Gemma stares at him pointedly, the disappointment vanished from her eyes. Now she is analysing him. Like one of her texts. Diligently, she picks him apart before her like he is the richest volume of Turgenev. Mark stifles a tremble under her fierce gaze.
“I know what you’re doing.”
“What?” Mark feigns innocence.
“You’re trying to solve the problem again. With your teacher brain.” She pokes a finger into the centre of his forehead, burrowing into it like she can reach said aforementioned brain. “We don’t need an alternative, or a similar option or anything like that…”
Gemma takes the pomegranate from Mark's hand and puts it back amongst the other fruit. “It wasn’t about the strawberries, Mark.” she sighs, and looks up at him, now calm and composed. “Plus, pomegranate seeds get stuck in my teeth.”
Gemma frowns in a way that Mark finds completely captivating before she turns back to the array of fruit, sticks her hand out and picks something at random. A bunch of clementines, bundled together in their netting bag. They go into the basket that Mark holds in his other hand.
Straightening up, Gemma then checks her phone for the grocery list and addresses Mark. “Okay. Did you get the milk?”
He nods.
“And the butter?”
He nods again.
“Aaand the rice?”
Another nod.
“The lettuce?”
Mark’s eyebrow furrow. “Uh…”
“It wasn’t on the list. I was just testing you.” Gemma grins playfully. “You passed. Let’s go check out.”
Gemma takes the basket off Mark and heads to the front of the store, Mark trailing behind her a little like a lost puppy.
As Gemma checks their groceries out, Mark entertains himself by perusing the visual assault of Valentine’s Day decorations by the door. “Today is the day!” screeches the loudspeaker overhead. “Share the love with our 2 for 1 deal from our selection of deluxe chocolate boxes and fresh local flowers! While stocks last, offer ends 15th February.”
The wall is covered in sickening, unpleasantly bright red and pink themed cards, each with nauseating displays of puppies in love (“I woof you!”), garish cartoons with weirdly sexual punchlines and poorly executed “abstract” illustrations that seem to Mark to just be shapeless blobs. Beneath the cards are piles of boxes of chocolates which Mark knows probably taste cheap and bitter, and a dilapidated selection of bunches of flowers that are mostly already in the wilting stage. Mark grimaces and looks away. Thank God he doesn’t have to worry about indulging in any of those “gifts”.
Gemma has finished paying for the shopping, and so her and Mark leave the store together, gloved hands slipping into one another’s grasp, into the endless sleet of snow.
By the time they arrive back home, it is dark outside. Gemma lights the tiny fire that sits in a fireplace in front of their worn out red sofa. Mark lies the groceries in their plastic bag upon the kitchen island. Slowly the lamps go on one by one, and soon the apartment is bathed in a soothing amber light. Mark and Gemma's snowboots sit together by the door, the snow melting off them onto the doormat. Accompanying the boots, their coats hang next to each other on hooks on the wall, gradually dripping water onto the carpet as they dry.
Mark watches Gemma lazily as she bustles around the apartment, tidying up her work books on the dining table and pulling the curtains in the living room closed. The amber firelight ripples off her long dark hair, casting shadows onto the wall. Mark watches her hands, nimble as they tidy her workspace and grasp the curtain fabrics, and her eyes as they dart quickly around, always anticipating her next move. She looks astonishing tonight. It is one of Mark's favourite activities, to just watch her be. Gemma finds it strange, obviously.
She repeats this viewpoint as she wanders over to him by the kitchen. “Are you staring at me like a weirdo again?”
Mark straightens up from where he had been leaning on the kitchen island and nods, smiling unapologetically. As his body registers the change in light and floods him with a wave of drowsiness, he stretches and breaks into a yawn.
Gemma watches him incredulously. “How are you tired already?”
“It’s a tiring job, watching you all day.” Mark grins.
Gemma swats at Mark exasperatedly as he heads towards the sofa and the warm flickering fire. In the kitchen, Gemma begins to open the cupboards, ready to make dinner.
Assuredly, Mark would offer assistance if he thought he would actually be of any help. Most times he has attempted to help Gemma in the kitchen, it has ended with her banishing him to another room so she could finally have some peace and not have the food burning for five minutes. Mark is perfectly happy with his arrangement.
He sits by the fire and turns on the small TV. The voices, along with Gemma’s clattering of utensils, the eventual hiss of hot food and her faint humming wash over his head like static, lulling him towards sleep.
Mark and Gemma don't take long to finish their so-called “Valentine’s Day meal” once she has woken him up from his nap on the sofa. It is hardly a special affair, despite the festivities of the day. They agreed a long time ago to forego the extraneous effort of Valentine's Day in favour of putting their money towards bigger birthday celebrations. The gleaming red electric guitar that Gemma got for Mark’s last birthday sits pride of place in the corner of the living room as evidence. It was worth any amount of Valentine’s Days.
At the table, Gemma fidgets with the ring on her finger as the conversation winds down. She seems as if she wants to say something but doesn’t know how to start. Mark watches her, waiting patiently. And after a moment, she speaks.
“I was going to do a thing.” she confesses awkwardly. Her voice is low, quiet amongst the hum of the apartment and the crackling of the fire.
“A thing?” Mark questions.
“With the strawberries.”
Mark is silent for a moment as he tries to work out what she means. Then it registers.
“Oh! For Valentine’s Day?”
Gemma nods shyly and Mark stifles a small smile.
“Gemma, we agreed we don’t do Valentine’s Day!”
“I know!” Gemma cries, throwing her hands down onto the table impassionedly. “It was going to be a secret. It wasn’t going to be big, it was literally just because I know strawberries are your favourite and I saw this stupid strawberry bouquet thing online-”
“A strawberry bouquet???” Mark grins incredulously.
“Don’t make fun!” Gemma exclaims, pointing her index finger accusingly in Mark’s face. “I just thought it would be nice, and sweet, but the stupid store just decided to not have any strawberries. I guess the whole of Ganz is completely strawberry-less-”
“Probably because of all the other people making strawberry bouquets.” Mark says seriously, teasing, and this time he deserves the swat that Gemma strikes him with. It does nothing to wipe the shit-eating grin off his face though.
However, Gemma looks so embarrassed and disappointed sitting across from him, and Mark’s heart softens, so he sobers up and grabs her hand across the table, squeezing it reassuringly.
“I’m sorry, Gemma. I’m sure it would’ve been absolutely fantastic. I would’ve loved it.”
Gemma meets his gaze, forgiveness already warming her eyes.
“Yeah, well. Whatever.” She shrugs her shoulders dismissively.
“Tell you what we do have though…” Mark begins, getting to his feet and crossing over to the kitchen and picking up something from the counter. When he returns, Gemma sees he is holding the bag of clementines they picked up at the store. “...is these beautiful Ganz local-grown clementines to enjoy!”
He lays the bag down on the table between them and breaks it apart to pick out a clementine from the pack. Mark begins to peel the clementine and the scent of citrus bursts out of the orange and floats up to meet Gemma, cutting through the hazy, warm evening air. She watches him peel it all in one long coil and is mildly impressed - she’s never seen him do that before.
When he is done, he carefully splits the segments up and starts to arrange them on the table in front of Gemma. Confused, Gemma watches him closely. Then she sees it. The clementine pieces are laid out in a circle, edges pointing inwards, to form a shape that vaguely resembles a bright orange flower.
“Is that… a clementine bouquet?” Gemma asks, grinning.
Mark flourishes his hands proudly towards his creation. “It’s a clementine bouquet! Well, it’s part of one. It's the beginning of one, at least.”
Gemma laughs at Mark’s bizarre creativity. Always trying to fix the problem. She reaches out a fond hand and cups Mark’s face, faintly stroking his cheekbone with her thumb.
“It’s very creative, my love. I love it. Thank you.”
Over the next hour, Gemma joins in with the clementine bouquet construction and the table comes alive with countless arrangements of orange segments in layered circles. Mark and Gemma discuss other inferior antiquated Valentine's Day traditions, how Gemma's students seem to currently for some reason be lacking motivation to study Russian literature (what an absurd concept!), how Mark still needs to call someone to fix the drainage on the washing machine, how maybe it might be time for them to think about getting a dog, whose turn it is to shower first tomorrow morning, and how, if it had to be a real life flower, the bouquet would definitely be made of marigolds.
Of course, the only natural sequence of events once having constructed this elaborate display of orange segments, is to eat all of them one by one. By the time Mark and Gemma begin to clear up dinner and head to the living room to watch TV, their fingers are sticky with clementine juice, pith stuck under their nails with small, scattered stains on their clothes from Mark’s genius idea to try and land the orange segments in each others mouths, which both of them were equally terrible at.
In front of the television, with Gemma’s head on his chest, his hand toying with hers lazily, the house warm and full and bathed in amber light, with him and Gemma still smelling like citrus and the sound of Gemma's occasional light laugh at the programme they are watching, Mark allows this feeling of complete, enormous contentment to fill his chest like a balloon inflating. If nothing could change, he would live in this moment forever.
In the cold empty light of the kitchen, Mark’s hand holding the receipt begins to tremble. The world around him begins to fracture as the black ink on the receipt blurs and runs, the words losing all meaning.
The house around him suddenly feels even heavier. Gemma’s memory seeps instantly through his skin like cold rain on a freezing winter day. His legs feel as though they are about to give way beneath him. Looking down at the receipt, Mark actually sees her, her dark eyes glinting back at him through his mind’s eye. And the pit that sits below his ribcage that he once named loss throbs and smarts, like a physical wound dug out by a knife. He wishes it was nine o’clock, so he had a way to escape this gnawing into his soul. To engage in this temporary suicide, a tranquiliser for the despairing. To escape this pulling at him, a constant and persistent tugging, forcing him to remember the absence that sinks into his bones as he sleeps every night. He wants more than anything to escape it.
But he knows, that even there, it follows him still. You feel it down there too. You just don't know what it is.
In his hand, Mark crumples the receipt tight in his fist, as if he hopes that by squeezing so hard the receipt will turn to dust in his hand and he will never have to be reminded of everything he almost had forever. The aching in his chest suddenly becomes fuel to a fire of rage, which swims swiftly up from Mark’s stomach to his head, igniting in a blaze of fury.
The next few minutes happen fast. Mark crams the crumpled up receipt into the pile of trash sitting in front of him. He pulls the trash bag out and ties it tightly, moving to deposit it by his front door. He then does the same for the other bags of trash lying next to his bin. Throwing his snow boots on in less than a second, as well as a coat, he drags all the odious bags of trash out into his front yard. Too big to all fit in the garbage bin outside, some of the bags are simply left to lean up against it, but at least they're gone. They're all gone.
When Mark re-enters the house, it looks larger than it has in a few weeks, with so much floor space freed up from the garbage bags. Mark tries to focus on this, and the fact that he finally tidied up, rather than what exactly he actually tidied up. The plastic bag he had retrieved from the cupboard under the sink goes right back into it, and Mark vacates the kitchen as quickly as possible, deciding to head to bed early.
It isn't until he is lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, that he unavoidably begins to think. And once he starts, he can't stop. It’s all the receipt’s fault. It broke through a carefully constructed dam that he had built up against any and all possible reentrances into his grief.
Above all, he feels mean. He feels Gemma's disapproval like a stain on him. What he did was unnecessary, and cruel. It only hurt himself, and the memory of her that he holds imperceptibly close to his being. He is reminded of something he said to Alexa on their date. That he felt that sometimes Gemma would be ashamed for the way Mark had let her death derail and deconstruct his entire life. And other times he thinks she would just be pissed that she was dead. Pissed that she was unable to be here to tell Mark to go and dig that receipt out of the fucking trash and stop leaving her memory to be dirtied out with the old Pip’s containers. Pissed that she was unable to tell him to get a haircut already, clean the dust off her old books, change that lightbulb and put batteries in the smoke detector, for fuck’s sake. And Mark is angry too. He is also angry she isn’t here to do any of those things. But more than that, he wishes she was here so that he could apologise. For anything, for everything. He wishes he could beg for her to never leave again, or if that isn’t possible, beg for her just to teach him how to live with her ghost.
Mark closes his eyes to try and block out the thoughts, but orange segment marigolds begin to pop up behind his eyelids, blooming and wilting, growing and shrinking and morphing into a thick syrup that drips, drips down his throat until he is choking on it, jerking upright in bed suddenly as he coughs and wretches over something that never existed. The orange of the flickering fire in their apartment, the orange of the marigolds, the orange of the sunrise outside the hospital on the day she died. He drowns in it.
And finally Mark breaks down, hunched over in the bed he still leaves a space for Gemma in. Sobbing brokenly, heaving on waves of grief that crash over him as the tears stream from his face onto the bedcovers. He is sorry. He is so sorry.
When the tears grant him a reprieve, Mark gets up silently and heads to his front door. Without bothering to put on a coat or boots, he ventures out into the cold, dark, snowy night towards his trash bins. The icy, biting cold of the snow centres him. He embraces it, as well as the pain that begins to generate from it as his body urges him to seek warmth. It is his punishment. His atonement. He falls to his knees by the trash and sluggishly draws a bag towards him.
The receipt isn't in the first bag. Nor the second. Mark continues to shiver uncontrollably, but he refuses to give in. His hands are an astonishing pinkish-purple, with his feet an deeper shade of mottled purple and blue. He expects, if he could see them, his lips would also be blue. Trash surrounds him, and he knows Mrs Selvig is going to be calling him incessantly about the mess tomorrow. But he doesn't care. He just doesn't care about anything. Anything but this one scrunched up scrap of paper.
The third bag yields no luck, and Mark is desperate. Only one bag remains. It seems fitting perhaps, that it would be in the last bag he searches. His own doing, as always.
He feels it before he sees it. The firm edges of paper, crumpled into a loose ball. He pulls it out knowing he’s found it. And there it is. Delicately, he straightens it out in his hands, trying to smooth out the creases. He holds it like an artefact now, rather than something out to get him. It is something she once touched. Held. If only for a moment.
Finally, Mark goes back inside, leaving the trash in a mess in his front yard. His feet and hands ache as he steps through the door into the warmth of the house. Worse, his ears sting, his lips are frozen and cracked, but at least now he holds the receipt tight in his hand, and he is redeemed.
Mark returns to his bedroom, with the covers still spotted with tears and thrown back in his haste to make it out into the snow. He sits on the side of his bed, brushing off the snow from his feet and the knees of his pajamas. As he sits, his eyes begin to wander the room, before settling on his dresser. And more particularly, the photo on top of it. Of Gemma in her parents’ garden, on their visit in the previous summer. The gleeful crease of her eyes and the knowing, sarcastic smile she would give Mark when she noticed him trying to snap a picture of her in secret.
And suddenly Mark knows exactly what to do. He is at the dresser in seconds. In his hands, he folds the receipt carefully in half, and then half again, until it forms a tiny rectangular slip of paper. There, he tucks it neatly into the corner of the photo frame, next to Gemma, as a reminder to himself that in erasing the bad things, he erases all the good things as well.
As he gets back into bed, Mark feels that same weight of Gemma, pressing through like a pencil on tracing paper. Except, this time it is warm, and fills his mind with memories of them when they first met; their coffee shop dates and library “study” sessions; mountain hikes and lakeside proposals; the great organ in the church at their wedding and Gemma promising not to cry (failed miserably); the tulip fields of their honeymoon; the time Gemma told him, with hushed whispers and baited breath, that she thought she was pregnant. The way the world opened up to him with every day she spent in his life. And the way the years bled into each other - there was no such thing as a life before Gemma, and he never imagined there would be a life after her.
His mind begins to spiral, taking advantage of Mark’s rare openness in remembering Gemma. He is flooded with the essence of her, of things he forgot he even knew about her. Her beautiful laugh. The way she inherited phrases from her English mother (“Get all your ducks in a row first!”). The enchantment with which she ventured into the world of the arts and the passion she imbued into her teaching. Her insistence on sleeping with the door ajar to let the light from the hallway in. Her always sneezing twice. Her joyful embrace of every animal they ever encountered. Her always double-knotting her shoelaces. Her hatred of white bread (“It tastes fake!”). Her scorn for cardigans (“You just look like a bag of potatoes. You’ve got no shape.”). Her one wonky finger from when she broke it as a child and it never healed right. The freckle on her thigh which Mark so loved to worship. Her jumbled rolls of abandoned knitting, only ever indulged in to allow her the time to think. Her spectacular cooking, which was never once anything less than perfect. The pair of pajamas she has had since her and Mark first got together all those years ago (“They still fit me, why would I get rid of them?”). When she called him “my love”, or, even better, when she called him her best friend.
Mark loves all these things about her. Equally. And he misses all these things about her, perhaps even more. But he knows, even as he tucks himself back into bed and turns over to try to get to sleep, that, if given the choice, he would do it all over again, every time. Without hesitation. Without question. Without fear. For her.