The fact that Victor could only come up with a response as lame as the admission that he didn't remember something of great importance to Max was not a surprise to her but it was offensive considering that Max was trying to really take Victor at his word that he wanted to hear what was important to her. But she had put herself out there and now he had hurt her. "That figures," Max snapped, " I tell you that I've stuck with you for two reasons and you can't even remember one of them!" She folded her arms across her chest, hardened her expression, and locked her chin into the, "I am never looking at another thing in my life again" position.
Leer was struck by how deeply this affected him. He wanted so badly to be able to remember anything about her but he could only remember the past he had with Catherine. One extremely odd thing about this moment though, was that he had seen this exact expression on Catherine's face, Max may as well have been Catherine in this moment, her body language, even her breathing and the way she held both of her hands under her upper arms when she crossed them was exactly the same, and that meant that he was in trouble. "I'm sorry,' he said, knowing full well that he would get nowhere with a simple apology. Max remained unmoved. Leer was not a mind reader, but he didn't need to be to recognize that Max was silently fuming. He was just about to say something equally generic and meaningless when something unpredictable, almost magical and absolutely vital occurred. He remembered something.
Unconscionably, inexplicably and conveniently, Leer remembered a moment from Victor's life. Unconscionably, because it wasn't just any memory, it was precisely the memory he would have been remembering if he truly was Victor. Inexplicably, because he wasn't Victor and conveniently, because it was the memory that Max needed to hear to feel that there was any reason at all to continue living with Victor. She was so confused over Victor, Tommy, wrong, right, Farb or Farblessness, that she was about to snap. That one slip into old Victor made all of the feelings of desperation return in force.
"I went to sit with your mother," Leer said. Slowly, Max lifted her eyes to him. As her eyes met his he could see tears welling up within them, and beyond the tears, everything else. He saw her nervousness within that moment - felt that she was struggling with an uneasy attraction mingled with a fearful hope, toward and about Victor. He saw a scared little girl who couldn't understand why her mother was taken from her, why her mother could spend hours at a time staring into space, as if her mind was elsewhere on some fantastic voyage - only to return to a chaotic, confused and thoroughly uncomfortable state - Then, moments later, behave as though not a thing was wrong with the world, the doctors were doing their best with her and surely she would be leaving the hospital any day but MY how her Max had grown, why only yesterday she was skipping off to her first day of school with that darling little Alonso boy, such a nice, quiet boy. "But everything changes, by Farb, doesn't it Max?" her mother would say, nearly every day for years at a time, until the day that Max decided to stop putting herself through it. Leer saw all of this in a single moment, a moment which seemed to hang in the air like smoke after fireworks. Then Max fell into his chest and sobbed, hugging him like he was the only sure thing, the only thing that was real in the entire universe. Like she needed to hold him in order to survive, so close and so tightly, like she would never let him go. They held one another like that for so long that their breath became one breath, their hearts beating a single beat.
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