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“You’re thinking about Huey~”
Monica blinked out of her quiet reverie and looked from the window to Elmer, who was stretching as he came into the living room. She clapped her hands to her face in a mock-gasp. “How did you know?”
“Lucky guess,” he joked back, perching next to her on the arm of the chair. If her question had been sincere, he probably would have told her that she had a special smile that she only wore when thinking of her husband. Or, even more straightforward, he might have pointed out that she spent most of her time thinking about Huey. “What time did he get to sleep last night?”
“2:30. He won’t be awake for hours.”
“Wow, and here you are awake and clear-eyed at the crack of dawn. How’re you gonna survive until your sweetheart rolls out of bed?”
“C’mere,” was Monica’s response. She scooted over in the chair and grabbed Elmer by the waist to pull him down next to her; there was just enough room for the two of them to share the armchair, if they snuggled in close.
Elmer raised one eyebrow. “Well. Hello there.”
“Hello there.” She kissed his cheek and then rested her head on his shoulder, smiling again. “I’m in a good mood this morning.”
“I see that. It’s great!” He wrapped one arm around her, his own grin brighter than the morning sun. “Is it ’cause you were thinking about Huey?”
“Mm, sort of.” She remembered how Huey finally slipped into bed in the wee hours of the morning, remembered his hand closing around hers as he whispered an apology for being up so late and kissed her. She imagined taking a walk with him once he woke up, the spring air warm and bright on their backs. “There’s that thing you always say—warau kado ni fuku kitaru.”
“Yeah! ‘Fortune comes in by a merry gate.’ It’s my favorite idiom.”
“Well, it’s stupid,” Monica informed him, her eyebrows raised.
“Whaaat!”
“But it’s also true.” Her smile became thoughtful. “Happiness begets more happiness. I have Huey, and I have you, and both of you make me happy. And so I look around and I’m already so happy that I can see other things that are wonderful, too. It compounds itself.”
Elmer nodded. “That sounds amazing.”
“It’s overpowering,” Monica answered, “but in a good way. I wish I could describe it better.”
“I think you do a great job of explaining it,” Elmer assured her. “It sounds like it feels really nice.”
“It does.”
For a moment, her smile slipped as she wondered whether Elmer knew, whether Elmer could know, what that kind of joy felt like—but of course it wasn’t in his interests to let her dwell too long on a gloomy question like that.
“Can I ask you something?” he said instead.
“Hm?”
“When did you start letting yourself be that happy?”
Her smile turned into a wince. “Tactful as ever, Elmer.”
“If it makes you sad, you don’t have to answer.”
“No, it’s fine.”
The question cut right to the heart of how she had once been. Once, bitterness had been the only true thing about her and she had swaddled it in a cloak of pleasantry and falsity. And when she’d seen Huey doing the same thing, she’d concluded that she was justified: that anger was the only worthwhile response to pain.
“Do you want me to say that it was when the three of us shared the secret of the Mask Maker?” she asked. “Or when Huey told me he loved me?”
“Only if that’s the truth.” Elmer peered into her face as if trying to absorb her contemplations on the nature of happiness. “Is it?”
She shook her head. “Not quite.”
She had been happy then, true. But it hadn’t been a matter of letting herself be happy; instead, happiness had come upon her like a storm and she’d been carried away. She’d known all the while that she had no right to feel the simple joy that her friends allowed her, or at least believed as much. And when the Dormentaires had come—when she learned that they would threaten Huey to get to her—she’d found herself cast onto a rock in the tempest, but at least she’d been on solid ground again, bolstered by the familiar certainty that happiness could and would be stolen from her at any time.
“When I tried to say goodbye to Huey—” She shivered involuntarily at the thought. Elmer held her a little tighter, but he let her narrate her way through the painful memory. “He was so… defiant. Not at me. He was so angry that something had dared to reach in and interrupt our happiness, and I couldn’t get him to understand that—that of course they would steal away my happiness. That they had a right to do so. He refused to listen when I said that. I was—don’t tell him this?”
“Sure, what is it?”
“I was so frustrated with him. Elmer, he’s such an idealist. If the world isn’t the way he wants it to be, he’s so certain that he can reshape it. Hasn’t he ever beaten his fists against something unchanging and felt the walls closing in on him?”
Elmer smiled fondly. “He’d just say that the walls should be torn down, in that case.”
“Yes.” Monica bit her lip, tearing up a little. “And you know, he kept telling me, back then, that he would do whatever it took to chase the Dormentaires away from me. It used to scare me, because I knew he meant it, and I couldn’t make myself believe that he had any chance of stopping them. But I still gave into the happiness I had found with him. And I felt guilty about it. For years and years, I told myself that I should have left him and turned myself in like I meant to. I thought I was weak for choosing to run away with him.”
She’d envied his defiance, his determination that even if neither of them had a right to happiness, they could fight for it anyway. Sometimes, she could imitate that defiance; but others, she woke up in the middle of the night with the paralyzing certainty that the world would right itself at any moment and devour his happiness along with her own. She had lain frozen in bed until morning, making a thousand plans to escape so that she was the only one harmed. But then Huey would wake and she’d see his beautiful eyes and she’d see the way he looked at her and her resolve would crumble, and she would give in to happiness once more.
“I don’t know when I changed my mind,” she confessed to Elmer. “Eventually I just… stopped thinking about it. I told myself that all I needed was to be happy in the moment, and that even if I didn’t have the right to be happy, that didn’t change how I felt with Huey. With both of you. Nothing came to take my happiness away, and I started to believe that maybe nothing would come to take it away. So I eventually stopped being afraid.”
“Good.”
Monica caught her breath. The soft voice that came from above her head was Huey’s, not Elmer’s, and it was accompanied by a light touch on her left shoulder. She craned her neck up to see him standing behind the chair, his hair still mussed from sleep, his eyes worried as he gazed down at her. She blushed.
“I-I thought you’d still be asleep for a while,” she said.
“You sounded upset,” he explained, and his hand slid up her throat to caress her cheek. She leaned into his gentle touch as he spoke again. “You know that if something ever did come after you, Elmer and I would do whatever it took to destroy it.”
“I know.” She turned her head to kiss his fingertips. “I’m not upset, I’m just thinking about how much I love you.”
“Are you sure?” Elmer asked. She answered the question by turning her smile to him for his assessment. When he grinned acknowledgement, she took his hand and Huey’s and stood.
“Couch,” she said, no nonsense. “Let’s let Huey in on this cuddling action.”
“Cuddling action?” Huey repeated after her, dubious, but he let her pull him around the chair and over to the couch and down next to her. Elmer sat on her other side, and there was never any question that she would lean in Huey’s direction, but when she whispered “I love you,” she squeezed Elmer’s hand, too, and she meant both of them with her whole heart.