"Until A Little Light Gets Through"

S02E09

Helen: "You are all over him! Nothing is good enough. Talk about letting him grow up…how's he supposed to do that with you breathing down his neck?" Will thinks his task is to turn Kevin into a man. And you know, those boys who have been turned into men through a combination of heckling, nagging, berating and browbeating…those are some really well-adjusted men, I tell you what. Helen snaps, "What kind of man? A man who hates his father?" Yikes. Things sure have changed since Kevin's accident. Will stopped pushing Kevin altogether -- probably overcome with guilt -- leaving Helen to do all the pushing. Will says he's going to take a shower. Helen: "Yeah, you do that." As he disappears around the corner, he adds, "I don't forgive that statement." Helen calls out, "I'm not asking you to!" She takes her ice cream container to the sink. Glancing outside at the storm, she has a vision: Kevin lying on the sidewalk. Just lying there, almost looking asleep; not bloody or covered with broken glass or anything. The doorbell rings while Helen's trying to cope with this image. She calls out, "Are you gonna get that, Will?" No answer, and the ringing becomes more insistent. Helen heads for the door, and the picture becomes watery as we float back to the lawyer's office, coming up on the fish tank there.

The lawyer recaps what Helen's said so far, asking what happened after the doorbell rang. Helen: "The police…" She looks down at her hands.

Later that night, Helen's lying on their bed reading, and Will's doing sit-ups on the floor in front of her. This? This is not good, people. Why's he doing sit-ups all of a sudden? No good can come of middle-aged TV husbands doing sit-ups. "Okay, this time I mean it…" Helen, not taking her eyes off her book: "You're gonna start running again." Will: "I'm going to set my alarm for five-thirty." Helen mutters, "Not in this bedroom, you're not." Will pants, "You want me to get old and fat?" Helen kisses him: "As long as you do it with me." Will stops exercising, and asks, "Did you buy something expensive?" She says she had her deposition today, and recalled how horrible she was being to Will the evening of Kevin's accident. Will says she wasn't. She takes a breath and says, "I remember something else…right before the cops came to the door…I…had this vision…this image of Kevin lying on the ground in the rain. I saw it. What do you think that was?" Will doesn't answer right away, so Frink does: "'I don't know, but it makes me damned uncomfortable.'" Will just says he doesn't know, and gets up and walks away. Off to do some more sit-ups in another room, I guess: seems like he's starting to think that if he has to choose between his catechism-studying, vision-having, God-believing-in wife and Lucyfer, he'll take his chances with the devil he doesn't know. Helen just stays put, thinking. Will finally sits on the bed, saying he wants to invite Lucyfer on Friday. Helen rolls her eyes before rolling over to face Will. We can't see her face, but it's easy to picture from Will's response: "That's what you do, Helen. You invite the boss over. We had Roebuck over. That's what you do." She just keeps giving him a look. "I mean, if Friday's a big problem..." Helen: "It's not the day, it's the person." Will suggests, "Maybe you could meet her before you fully commit to hating her." Too late, bub. And Helen doesn't even know the half of it. Helen: "So after I feed her…then I can hate her?" Will: "With complete abandon." Bit of the Fat Tony voice there. Love it. He comes prowling toward her, but he must be high if he thinks that's going anywhere, because Helen scoots out of his way, sitting up and clearing her reading material. They each turn to their bedside tables and start setting their clocks.