Something Like Peace

For one bewildering moment, my grief-numbed mind refuses to grasp what I find before me and instinct throws me back, stumbling against the wide desk in my haste.  The shock of its sharp corner digging into my back recalls good sense and I glance back to get a better look at the dark figure that overwhelms the far corner of the room.  In the intermittent half-light provided by the swinging shutter, the Balrog’s baleful glare glows from its shadowy form, the only hint of color in the large coal sketch, all the more menacing for its lack of sharp detail, all formless darkness, as it had been in truth.  The crack of the shutter startles me from my observation of our fallen enemy and I turn back to the reason I had entered the room, though reluctantly, in the first place.  Reaching over the desk to open the window, my eye falls on another piece, half-finished and abandoned two months since, but painfully relevant today.  There she stands, my love, not three days in the ground but joyous and full of life, of the life that has ended hers, and by extension, mine.  I rub my eyes, painfully dry today, and start to open the window, to secure the clapping shutter and retreat to my own dark rooms in the small house.  Crickhollow is still mine, Frodo’s parting gift and my sanctuary in more unsettled times, but I have not returned in many long years, busy and content.  It appears that Pippin still comes often enough, and I cannot begrudge him the calm and privacy that I know is absent from his life.  I had no idea what he did here until today, and though my nights are now long and untroubled, I used to wonder where my cousin had locked his own darker memories.

Wind sweeps across the desk and into the room, sending the portrait floating to the floor, and a pale sound rises behind me, like the fluttering of many wings.  I turn to stare round at the walls, every inch covered with parchment upon parchment, unnoticed in the motionless half-light when I entered, and now alive with the breath of wind I have inadvertently let in.  Curiosity tugs gently at my battered soul, of the sort I’ve so often reproached my cousin and I find myself securing the shutters wide open for better light.  There are hundreds of them.  Portraits, landscapes, cities and scenes follow each other and sometimes overlap, some fully detailed renderings and others bare sketches, mere suggestions of mood and place.  My own face and those of all our friends and companions look out, memories of our younger years and reflections of our present lives mingled without discernible order.

“Merry?” His clear voice rings out in the hall, and I stand caught amidst his private thoughts like a child with a pilfered pie, unable to speak or run, and already deeply sorry for my trespass.

He pushes wider the half-opened door and steps in, a curious frown upon his face and looking very much for a moment like his father had when we were young, displeased but ready to hear the truth of the matter.

“I…  I’m sorry, the shutter…”

 His smile banishes the lines from his face.  “I always meant to share.  Someday.  I guess today’s as good a day as any,” he says with a shrug.  Reaching down to pick up the fallen portrait, he smiles sadly.  “I was going to finish it this week.  I don’t know if I can now…”

A lurching sob squeezes the breath right out of me and I find my face pressed against his solid shoulder, warm hand on my neck, and I push down hard on the dark wave of sadness that wells up without warning, crushing the frail remains of self-control.

So much unfinished, so much undone, now never to be completed.

The years without her stretch endlessly before me, and I can only weep.  Why didn’t the world end with her last breath?

***   ***   ***

I have been waiting for this.  It has been three days since Estella’s death, three days since I found him gazing blindly into the distance, a single step from the Brandywine’s dark embrace.  The few others who know of this say it was a passing moment, an extreme instant of a grief that will fade, yet still I fear; I fear so much for him.  I know him too well to heed their reassurances, to be fooled by the quiet face of sorrow he shows to the world.  Once before, I saw him look longingly to the other side and every day thereafter was conscious choice for too many long years, until living again became a happy thoughtless habit.  I wish I had been the one to make the choice an obvious one, but it was Estella that had truly broken the darkness behind his eyes.  And now, bereft of her spirit and her sweet council, who will push back the empty night?  I have not the words, not these words that he would know to say, and I have not the kind of courage, of love, that she did.  I do not know what to do, save to stand here with him, to remember him to himself, and simply hope that this time it will be enough.

“I will finish it.  The child should know how happy his mother was to have him.”

“Thank you.”

I don’t like anyone watching me work, which is why I hide this one small thing from them all, but this is different.  This is Merry, this is my brother’s heart, and if there is no balm for him in forgetfulness, then it must lie in remembrance, and that is one of the few things I can offer.  Even now he is considerate, moving to stand by the empty grate as I work slowly in the bright sun that streams in through the window.  She was my cousin twice over, our Estella, with her Tookish spirit graven in the high cheekbones and pointed chin, yet so beautifully rounded out by her father’s generous heart.  Glossy brown curls tumble across her shoulders, lifted lightly from her face and neck by the same ruby ribbon all these long years.  I remember her as a girl, as a bride, and as a mother and a healer too, and the joyous warmth in her brown eyes is the key to making this more than some pale likeness.  A few more strokes, a smudge of light, and I must choose to call it done, closing eyes that ache with restrained tears.  His hand is light upon my shoulder, and I look up to find him smiling, just a little, and it is like a promise:  to try, to live, to endure.  Maybe it will be enough.