After ruining their date, Sam heads over to Sookie's house and finds Bill comforting her in the aftermath of discovering Adele's body. Andy Bellefleur, of course, assumes that it's somehow Jason's fault because that is his whole personality. Too much Sam/Sookie weirdness leads to Sam getting aggressive with Bill, finally, and they sniff each other and growl and do all the things guys do.
At the wake, Jason gets all v-juiced crazy and attacks Sookie, so she takes a valium form Lafayette and manages to sleep through her own murder. Which doesn't go as planned, although we get confirmation that Bill can tell when she's in trouble -- and can't do anything about it if it's daytime. Oh, and Jason is a total junkie for V, and throws Andy Bellefleur about six feet. So it's a 50/50.
The funeral goes about as well as you might think, between Jason inviting their evil uncle, Tara's drunk bitch mother showing up with some kind of exorcism pyramid scheme, and Sookie screaming at the whole town of Bon Temps, and their respective brain waves, to shut the fuck up.
Tara and Sam hook up again, slightly more for real this time, but Tara freaks out because Randi Sue and Jason are fucking door. Because yes, he's back on V even though he smacked his sister around; what Tara doesn't know is that Jason's crying his way through it, because he is completely fucked up as usual.
Sookie takes about half the episode to cry and eat a pecan pie. Then she puts on a huge billowy white Gothic gown and goes flitting through a graveyard, and Bill throws the doors of his haunted mansion open and then sweeps her into his arms, and it's totally freaking dumb to the point of being awesome.
In other news: Tara forgives her mother, I guess; Anna Paquin has breasts; Sookie becomes a fangbanger. Man I thought losing your virginity to a werewolf would be bad but this was something else. week: Lizzy Caplan!
Sookie stares down at Adele's giant pool of blood on the kitchen floor, while Tina the cat is content to lick at it, like animals do. She falls down on her knees, shrinking back and gasping as it touches her. She stares, almost sick, and Bill arrives, hurling her to her feet. She stares at him, terrified, and uncomprehending; he calls her back to herself. "Sookie. It's me. Sookie. Sookie, it's me." She finally recognizes him, in the field of her twenty-yard stare, and falls into his arms.
Someone else comes onto the porch and Bill stares, listening, while Sookie cries in his arms. When the door squeaks, out come the fangs, and before you know it he's got Sam against the doorframe by the throat. Sam shouts at him and Bill demands to know what he's doing there. "I was making sure that Sookie got home safe. The door was open..." He asks what Bill's doing there, and Sookie tells Bill to drop him. Bill's fangs disappear and Sam sees her clearly for the first time, in a child's dress, covered in blood. He's shaking, with spit on his lips. "What happened?"
Later, Sam puts a blanket around her shoulders while Detective Bellefleur and Sherriff Dearborn investigate the scene; Mike and Neil the Kreepy Koroners are in there too. Sam tells her to get some rest, but she can't; she can hear it all. The partial prints on the sink that lead nowhere; Bud's nausea at the blood on his boots, his worries about his family; Andy sternly telling himself to pull it the fuck together if he's ever going to get any respect. Mike marvels at the wounds: ...Cut her up real good must be thirty stabs throat's wide open holy hell we got ourselves a serial killer here. Andy mourns for Adele (...Poor woman stuck raising these bad-shit crazy Stackhouse kids didn't deserve this I...) Sam calls her back to herself. "Sookie?" She stares at him, in the sudden and temporary silence. "Maybe I could use a little air," she says matter-of-factly; he stares at her helplessly as she stands.
On the porch, she pulls the blanket tight around her. It belonged to her Gran. This house, the dress she mended, the food she made, the cat she fed, the love she gave them. It all belonged to Gran. Sookie most of all. The cracks in the china and the place where she made Jason fix the front stoop when it was sagging last summer. Lavender and basil and thyme in the garden. This house smells like her. The cracks in the foundation, the sound it makes in the night, the fourth step on your way up groaning in the night; Gran's eyes on you everywhere, knowing when you were bad and when you were good. She's dead, but the house still smells like her and the dishes are where she likes them, and even on the porch she's everywhere, her arms are still around you.
She's all around you; absence is the opposite of presence and she has not been edited out, deleted, so what the fuck was that in the kitchen. Circus blood and one singular absence: her heartbeat in your mind, like a voice in your head all the time saying That's my Sookie, beautiful granddaughter, beloved of God, most favorite daughter, keeping you safe all through the night: that's gone. It was a lifeline and it loomed large, all the time: those constant words of love and protection and hope and pride and home. It was an anchor; it was the sound and the feeling and the very book of love and that voice, now, is silent. The space it left fills up with everybody else. This house smells like her. The dishes are where she likes them.
Sam stares down at Sookie, staring at the empty world with blood on her knees. "I never should have left you alone." But that wasn't Sam. It's not Sam's fault she's alone. "I lost my temper and I shouldn't have..." Oh, right. That. The date that went wrong. "Do you think you could apologize to me some other time?" He takes her hand, begging to help, to be of service. To apologize with deeds, not words, the way he does best. To find the space Gran left, still warm, and climb inside; to put his arms around her and protect her all through the night. (... Hold you make it better I'm the one I'm so sorry sorrowful soft skin...) Sookie pulls her hand back and tells him to cut it out; he is embarrassed.
They listen to the radio chatter from the police car. There was something else, a kind of silence. What was it? Before Sam rubbing himself against the cracks of the foundation like a dog after its fatty beef, before Andy and Bud and Mike and Neil, before thirty stabs, before the prints on the sink. Before all the words, when it was just silence. Listening to the rushing sound of fear and the ringing in her ears, there was something, some relief, a feeling she remembers, what was it? What was it blocked out the sound of death? That helped. Would that help? What was it, that sound? Ah. "What happened to Bill?"
Sam's face falls further but he knows it's right. It is what a man would do. He heads off to look for Bill and Sookie doesn't look up; she thanks the space where he was standing.
Sam enters the bedroom and stares at Bill, gruffly telling him to go find Sookie. Bill asks if he's got anything to add and Sam tells him, hackles up, to stay away from her. They recognize each other. "You know, Sookie doesn't take kindly to people making decisions for her." Sam begins to circle him, threateningly: "You don't need to tell me who Sookie is. I know who she is. I've known a long time." Bill points out that this, tonight, is neither time nor place for Sam to mark his territory. "There's a woman lying dead downstairs. She wouldn't be there if it weren't for you." He leans in, baring his teeth: "If anything happens to Sookie, I promise I'll be sharpening a stake with your name on it." Bill doesn't look away, so Sam leaves. And when he's gone, Bill notes the screen of a window, and the vertical slit in it. He was already sure it wasn't a vampire, but that proves it.
Coroner Mike is excited: "Looks like she put up a hell of a fight. See those defensive cuts on her hand? Straight to the bone?" Neil agrees that it's "hardcore"; there's nothing dark or deep or meaningful about being the coroner's apprentice. It turns out it's just a job. Bodies don't tell you anything real, don't answer any questions or reveal any mysteries. The only mystery our bodies contain was gone before he got there.
"Psycho son of a bitch, going after her all the way that way. Just about the sickest thing I've ever seen," Andy grits, but Bud's seen worse: "There was a murder about six years ago. Lady snapped, blew her husband's head off while he was watching the game. Big chunks of brain all over the TV." Andy asks him why she did it, and Bud looks at him: "Guess she wanted to watch something else. How the hell would I know, Andy? People don't murder because they're right in the head." Andy brings up Jason Stackhouse again, and Bud's like, "This is his grandmother." Andy, obsessed as ever with Jason and Jason's body, is convinced he's enough of a "little perv" that he could do it. He's so wrong. "Adele did bring the fang into a church. Sure that ruffled more than a few feathers. If he didn't do it himself," says Bud. Obsessed as ever with vampires, the strangeness of them, the life and death and sex around them. He's wrong too. Andy protests that "Vampire Bill" told them about the pool of blood, how it wouldn't be there if a vampire were close, and Bud laughs angrily at him. "Vampire Bill? You're on a first-name basis with that bloodsucker now? These things are crafty, they've been killing long enough to know how to cover their tracks..." Bill enters, interrupting. "Am I interrupting?"
Andy: "Whoa." He starts to tell Bill to vacate the crime scene, but Bud waves him off. "I suspect Vampire Bill's been around a dead body or two before. Isn't that right, sir?" Bill doesn't look away, so Bud changes his tone. "Friend of yours, wasn't she?" Bill takes too long to answer, actually considering the question before realizing she was. That made me sad. He didn't even know; his reeducation hadn't even progressed far enough for him to know Adele was his friend; technically Adele Stackhouse was his best friend. Maybe his only friend, in the world, and now she's gone. Bud takes off his hat for that.
"Well, we got a couple more questions for you. Do you mind?" Of course not. In the parlor, Andy asks if he was there when Sookie found the body, but that's not exactly true. He arrives the second after. "Kind of late to be making house calls," Bud says, and then reminds himself that vamps don't sleep. "They sleep," Andy corrects him spicily, "Just not at night." Bud asks Bill if he makes a "habit" of visiting Sookie in the middle of the night, managing to imply he's not only a serial killer but a sex maniac besides, and Bill patiently explains that they had "certain personal matters to discuss." Specifically to the effect that her plan to make him jealous worked so incredibly well that neither of them knows that's what she was doing.
"When I heard her car in the drive, I came across the cemetery." Andy's impressed at that, and Bill reminds him that "heightened senses" are part of the whole bloodsucking experience. Andy nods and asks if he heard anything else, like maybe Jason Stackhouse's pickup truck, but he didn't. The whole Andy/Jason thing is kind of at an all-time level of ridiculousness here. I'm so sure he killed his grandmother, Andy. But I like how blind and hateful Andy and Bud both manage to be, trying as hard to be right as they are to prove the other one wrong, because I like where it puts Andy: on Bill's side, just like Bud's on Jason's side. As always, the minotaur's the only one knows the way out and he's the first one we go after.
"Lot of folks would not be too keen on a vampire moving in the door," Bud says, speaking from inside his experience, "But Adele Stackhouse, she welcomed you with open arms, didn't she?" Bill says, with something like the memory of the ghost of grief: "She was very gracious, yes." Bud lines them up. All those dead whores. "So. Maudette Pickens, Dawn Green, Adele Stackhouse. They were all very gracious to your, uh, people. That's just about the one thing they had in common. Now is that one hell of a plus-size coincidence, or what?" he asks, with a creepy smile barely hiding his hate. Bill responds that it's not a coincidence at all, surprising even Andy. "I suspect whoever did this is targeting women who associate with vampires." Meaning that even Bill knows this is Sookie's fault. "You can't be serious. Adele Stackhouse and a vamp?" No. Bill knows Adele wasn't the target.
But I wonder. I think the links between Maudette and Dawn and Adele are closer than we can admit, because sex is always implicit. Adele did more for vampires in Bon Temps than anybody: graciousness on a world-changing level. If the show's about a moment of social change, Adele signed her own death warrant. In the collapsed recollection of your children -- your life, told through a thousand soundbites and monochrome memories -- Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy died the same day. Marilyn, and Lennon. Your gods. Your nation broke, the way it's breaking now again, and any time you wonder why we are the way we are, remember that: We all wonder where we were when JFK -- or Lennon -- died, for a moment, before we remember that was before we showed up. We live in your dreams.
Sookie listens to the radio chatter, out on the porch, the youngest girl in the story. The innocent, the orphan, whose world got bigger until it broke. "I should probably call Jason." Sam offers to call him, and she swallows and nods, thanking him quietly. And off in a hotel room in town, Jason snores, and picks up his phone -- "Shake that ass!" -- and throws it through a shutter with v-juice power, shattering the blind. Randi Sue moves closer still; he clutches at her hand as he sleeps. Wanting her so much closer.
Bill precedes the procession from the house, as Sam listens to Jason's voicemail message. "Bill, what's going on?" He tells her they're moving the body. They're taking her -- it, the body -- out of its house. Her home. Andy tells her to sleep somewhere else, somewhere safer, and she doesn't give a single moment of thought to it. This is home. It smells like home, all the dishes are where she likes them. Even Bill protests but she persists, even as the parade passes by. "This is my house. I'm staying right here." Neil from Kentucky stares, head-on at her and us for the first time, and she flashes on him at Fangtasia. (Please God hope she didn't recognize me at the vampire bar I look different it was dark and...) She tears her eyes, her mind away, and Bud Dearborn -- a friend of her family forever, a person she was trained to trust and to rely on; the man who would have saved Jason from Momma Thornton on the day of the Captain Morgan -- is sickened. Just looking at her face. ...Dumb luck you're not in that bag right now screwing that vampire...
Sookie's face changes and falls, as the world gets bigger: People die. Sheriffs hate. ...You could be ... The world of grownups, infallible and luxuriously protective and smart and well-intentioned, that world is gone. That world never existed. Sometimes adults turn on you; she learned that a long time ago. We learn it every day. But once the authorities fall down on the job, what's left? Sit at a red light at three AM and contemplate the meaning and the significance of that red light: Bud Dearborn is a sign of faith and strength, but he is not those things, any more than the corpse means home. People die. Sheriffs hate. And his words, so soft and unctuous beneath the thoughts: "I'm truly sorry about your grandmother..." She's done with him; from the list of the trusted he is removed. The one thing you want adults to do, they fail; the sheriff of the town is a monster, gleeful in her tragedy. "You all done in there? Because I'd like to clean up, if that's all right." Bud and Andy leave; Bill promises Bellefleur he'll take care of her, as long as he is able.
Bill and Sam agree she shouldn't be alone; Sam offers her his trailer, saying he'll sleep at the bar, but she looks from one to the other. Home is gone. Safe is gone. "I'm as safe here as anywhere," she says. And she's right. What has happened is fangs in flesh, or planes in buildings: the place where you were safe, you are not safe. Adele was her home: she was indistinguishable from the place and from the idea both. She was safety, and she wasn't safe, even in her place of power. "Besides, I got both of you to protect me, haven't I?" Not both. Bill, embarrassed, reminds her he has to go: it's nearly dawn.
Bill's eyes linger on hers as he promises to return; Sam, of course, immediately steps forward: "I can take it from here." They face off, but it's a tale as old as time; she and Bill look into each other's eyes, both pleading. "Don't worry about me," she says. "Go." She watches him leave, and thinks for a moment. Broken, and lost, and numb. She has joined the orphans. Of all the people in the world there are two kinds: orphans and not-yet-orphans. Those without the net, however tenuous, and those who have a home they can go to, when the world becomes too large. She has gone from one world, one kind, one joy, and into another place. But the house stands, the people and the family stand, and if it will mean home someone will have to make that happen. "There's an extra mop round back. would you mind getting it for me?" He's terrified; he can smell it from here. She won't be dissuaded. "Gran took a lot of pride in her home. She wouldn't want anyone to see it like this." She goes around him, heading inside. He is horrified. But the way to a girl's heart is through her stomach. Tina drank deep. This is a way of replacing absence.
Sookie Stackhouse sits like Alice Liddell, in her gloves, at the side of a pool of blood. It is an object without meaning beyond the fact that what was once alive, once home, is now dead. It was an animating force, and now it is garbage. It needs to be taken care of. It's a lovely, troubling image, this: the girl, in her frock, kneeling by the blood, gloves to the elbow, taking up her cloth and scrubbing it clean. Tiny against the tall white walls, spattered with the fight, and the hate. The way she defended her home. With Sookie on a date and Jason on the ground, with the whole town wondering if vampires are people too, she stood in this room and she told death to wait awhile. She fought with hands, down to the bone she fought, and with words she pled. Death's not blind, it's deaf.
It is a sign and a story but it has nothing to do with home, and less to do with Gran. What's to do with Gran is this: she was home. She took pride in her home and she opened it to everyone: Sookie and Jason, Hadley, Tara Thornton, Bill Compton. A woman's power, in her day, was her home, and she took full advantage. And when monsters entered, she revoked their right to entry like a priest to a vampire. Her home was the refuge at the end of the world: when your parents are dead, when the grownups turn on you, her arms were open wide. She was proud of her home as she was proud of her soul, picking and scrubbing at every mark and blemish until it gleamed. That's Gran. Not a body in a pool or a memory or a victim, but this house all around you. It's what she would want. And fulfilling that brings her closer than a blanket wrapped around your shoulders; fulfilling that, applying object washcloth to object pool of blood, means feeling nothing at all. When she dropped to her knees that was Gran, that was the sign and meaning of horror, a story about loss and the ground dropping out from under you and your blood-soaked knees. This isn't a story, it's an act. It is deliberate and meaningless, and deliberately meaningless, but it's what she would have wanted. The smell and the feeling of her all around, the silence where her thoughts once were: they all want the evidence gone.
Morning. The wake. That's always the worst bit. Maxine Fortenberry's tuna casserole knocks on the door and Maxine Fortenberry's tuna casserole is directed to the kitchen by Sam. And all through the house, Maxine Fortenberry's tuna casserole could hear, if it could hear thoughts, the thoughts of all the watchers and the gawkers: ...that Stackhouse girl hasn't come out of the kitchen ... heard she hasn't cried a single tear ... you know she's been going around with that vampire... The voices fade into voices, until you don't know what's said aloud and what isn't. Sookie sits in the kitchen, while Tara and her cousin Lafayette take care of every little thing. Maxine pays her respects, but she lives for this shit.
Maxine Fortenberry says, "I am so sorry for your loss," but what she means is, "I am a person who cares about tragedy, I am a person who wants part of your tragedy: I will tell stories for years about the comfort you needed, and how I gave it, in your tragedy, a story about me. Eat this tuna casserole; in it is written and inscribed every hateful thought and every hungry moment of her death. They've cleaned up the blood and for that I do not thank them; oh, to be a fly upon the wall when he stuck it in. Not you, not Adele, not Jason or the rest are the story here. Show me your tragedy. Open a vein. Let me taste."
"Um... Gran often talked about you, so... Thank you." And what it was Gran said? Unprintable. The kind of woman who spends her life praying she or her relatives will have a child afflicted by something, a mental disability or sensory difficulty, deaf or blind, or some bodily infirmity (but not mental instability, never that, nothing that could reflect on her) so that she can play the victim. "Did you just say 'retarded'? That offends me on a basic level. Let me tell you about my son's nephew-in-law, whom I've met twice in ten years, who has Asperger's Syndrome. Words hurt like a fist." A vampire and nothing less. The kind of overbearing, empty bitch that keeps Hallmark in business. Adele would spot her without a second look, and never afford her the second one. Adele wanted people's love for its own sake, not Maxine's sniveling love of horror and its uses, not the propaganda and excitement tragedy provides.
At the sink, Tara's grossed out by the sheer number of tuna cheese casseroles that seem to be speaking the language of grief for everyone attending. It's not even a joke. I don't even think there's a possibility of cramming enough food into this scene to reach absurdity, given the absurdity it actually contains. Is that a southern thing? (Would it be Maxine of me if I told you that's what that's like? Daddy got so sick of the fucking food showing up all the time he said it would be more efficient if they just came and sewed our buttons on, or organized his albums, or fixed the VCR, instead of all the cooking. Daddy is full of bon mots, but that's the one I remember best. That, and him telling the church ladies to leave the planned organ rendition of "Here Comes The Sun" off the program, so people would really freak out when his friend Robbie suddenly started playing it behind the rood screens. And they did, it was a showstopper. It's what she deserved.) Lafayette asks after Jason, and Tara -- suitably raw considering the last thing she did was toss garbage on his head while he played out I ♥ Huckabees in the dirt seconds after pledging his eternal love -- spits back a response, Cain to Jason's Abel. Lafayette does a great move, kind of pointing at her with one finger and then dropping it. It's incredibly eloquent, this little movement, but I can't explain it. He helpfully translates: "Bitch."
Maxine sucks deep. "Adele was an angel sent from Heaven. Too good for this world. We're all going to miss her so much..." But inside, oh. (...heard they almost cut off her head I don't see any blood I should have gotten here sooner maybe I should have brought my red velvet cake instead...) Sookie stands, done with it, done with the world of ugliness, with the contrast between the word and the deed and the thought behind the deed. Because we accustom ourselves to the failings of others fairly early, but this isn't a game, it's not a conversation: we're talking about a soul and thinking about a body. Maxine loved the soul; she wants to see the blood. As fucking hot as he is, I would almost like Hoyt to be the killer, just to embarrass Maxine. Give her a steaming cup of real drama and watch her fold. It's not as easy to martyr yourself when it's your own.
Sookie bumps into Arlene, looking a fright. She babbles at length, in tears, mascara running dramatically down her face while Sookie stares: it's impressive, how intense her breakdown has been. Especially knowing she's just another Maxine. Another person who blames her, thinks she's a fangbanger, thinks she called down God's wrath as easy as lightning. Who mourns that it was Adele got struck. "Now, if you need help with ..." Sookie nods with a friendly smile, she's heard it from everyone else in Bon Temps, if you need help with anything, blah blah... then she gets confused, as Arlene keeps talking. "Help with moving, or anything at all..." Sookie babbles: she isn't moving, who's moving? Not Sookie. Sookie's not leaving. This is all the Gran she has left; it's all the world she has left. Even vampires get coffins, when the world gets too big. It smells like her; the dishes are where she likes them.
All talk is advertising. Sookie knows it, because she sees both inside and outside at once, but spend a day in silence and you'll see what I mean: the way the words reverberate inside, showing you your propaganda: not what you really are, but who you want to be. There are those who speak of grieving and wish to be seen grieving, and those who grieve where words don't go. There are those who speak of loving and wish to be seen loving, and those who love where words don't go. You talk about hurting when you're not hurting; you stay silent when you are. You don't speak of grieving when you're grieving, any more than you talk dirty when you're coming. The wake, the funeral, they're for the living to be alone together because we can't share this. As much as I love you, there are sparks we can't truly share, locked in these bodies as we are. That's the animal truth of the reverse cowgirl: We only truly feel things in wordlessness, because we are alone.
"But honey, with it happening right here..." Sookie shakes her head. This is home: "I have far more good memories of this kitchen than bad ones." Arlene gets it, and congratulates her on that outlook: "You know, you really are smarter than anyone gives you credit for." Sookie looks at her, and she apologizes for that too. But there's a greater violation: Sookie whirls at the refrigerator door opening, and screams at Maxine. "Maxine Fortenberry, you put that pie down right now!" Putting her hateful hands on the pieces of home. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of your pain, crawling across the surface of that pie, tasting your grief and telling the story.
Someone calls from the parlor, "Come here, she's losing it!" Sookie stands in the kitchen, knees knocking, breath coming hard, holding the pieces of home in her hands. "This is Gran's pie!" Maxine apologizes, she was just trying to help, and thinks about how she spent the whole morning making her casserole, so that Sookie would recognize what a good woman she is. And all the thoughts go wild, sticking Sookie to the floor: crazy as a bedbug, knowing she killed her grandmother. She knows that already, she doesn't need the confirmation. Tara drags her upstairs for "girl time," dragging Lafayette hilariously behind, in case he didn't know he was included.
Upstairs Sookie notes she shouldn't have lost it; Tara tells her not to worry. "...That stupid old bitch ... been sticking her nose where it don't belong for years." Lafayette murmurs encouragement: "If she talked any more shit she'd be shaped like a toilet." Tara and Lafayette laugh quietly together as Sookie stares: they're more freshly acquainted with horror than she is. Lafayette apologizes for laughing, but Sookie's realized something. The pie plate is small, in her hands, and cold, and hard. "Gran's gone. She's really gone." Tara's voice is heavy with sympathy, and love: we've reached that point, have we? "Yeah. She is."
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I can't even think straight." Tara notes that it's impossible, Lafayette humming support behind her: "How can you, with all these circling buzzards? You know, you're not here to entertain them. You don't have to dance for them. You just have to feel whatever you're feeling." Sookie's not feeling anything. Is that okay? Is it weird to be numb? Should she be guilty for that too? "Numb is good. Numb's probably what you need right now. Stop worrying about being so appropriate." And of all the things, this is the best thing she says: "This is not an appropriate event." It's endemic to Sookieness to look for the right behavior, the line of best fit; she's crazy, retarded, prone to acting strange. Her whole life is looking for the appropriate: pretending to be normal, acting on what normal people already know. This is the one thing nobody knows how to do, and somebody needs to tell her that.
Sookie looks from one to the other of them: "Thank you for getting me out of there. I haven't had a single minute of silence. Can't seem to block anything out right now." Tara offers to shut them all the hell up, to Lafayette's quiet chuckle, and Sookie says it's not that simple. "It is," Lafayette says, producing a baggie of pills: "Your wish... It is my command." Sookie shrinks back: "I don't do drugs." And what would Gran think? "Sook, relax. This is not drugs. This is just a Valium." Couldn't have said it better myself; he makes a cute face and Tara laughs ruefully. "Tell you what. Put in on your nightstand, just in case you change your mind." He heads out to check on the buzzards, and Sookie looks at him for the first time in six episodes. She entrusts him with the pieces of home and he promises to protect them with his life.
Jason's coming down, bright lights flashing on the periphery, music loud, speeding toward work. Rene sees him coming to the site and worries; Jason wipes the sweat from his forehead and joins them, looking all a junkie mess. They stare as he throws out excuse after excuse, alarm clock and phone lost, the world jerking and jump-cutting in front of him as he tries to come down. Hoyt touches his shoulder, and Jason gets scared.
Tara offers to call Sookie's cousin Hadley, with whom she shares more secrets than we know, and how they marked her: "No one's heard from her for in over a year, since she ran away from that rehab Gran paid for. I don't even know how to get hold of her..." I wish Hadley would come to the funeral; I wish she'd bring a gun. And Bill? Sookie looks at her like a racist: "Tara, he can't go." Tara remembers, and Sookie's like, "You don't know a bunch of vampires, so you're allowed to forget the daytime thing. Takes getting used to." Tara's not sure she ever will: "...What, not everyone is as open minded as you, shoot me. You should hear the things people are saying." Sookie is like, "Obviously I fucking do."
But Bill didn't kill Adele, and Tara knows that. "No one is blaming Bill... Exactly." But everybody is blaming Bill plus Sookie, including Bill and Sookie. "Didn't you tell me he had scary-ass friends?" Sookie swears they're not all like that, but surely Bill's hypothesis -- that Adele wasn't the target -- hasn't occurred to him alone. Death reminds us that we are fundamentally alone; that we spend most of our lives trying to be less alone, through sex or words or the chains we wrap each other in. That's what funerals do. "I'd fuckin' lose it if anything happened to you. You know that, right?"
Yes. But in all the mess last night, the horror and the fear, the thing that kept her solid was Bill. "When I'm around him... I don't know how to explain it exactly, but it's like I almost feel normal." In the background a truck screeches to a halt and the door slams. Downstairs, Jason runs in, casting angry looks around, looking for a target. He heads upstairs. Sookie only says his name once before he's knocked her onto the bed.
"It's your fault! Gran is dead because of you. It should have been you!" Maudette, he saw the video. Dawn, he could have loved. Adele was a different story. This a circle, drawn around him, pulling tight as he's heading into the labyrinth. The only link he sees is the one that makes her filthy; the trap he feels caught in. He let it touch him, he let it crawl inside and now it lives there. And his sister is just as dirty as he is.
Tara shoves him away, but he's not stopping. "She's screwing a vampire, Tara. A fucking vampire!" A vampire who, she points out, was there for Sookie when he wasn't. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Is that how your grandmother raised you? To beat on your sister? Look at you!" She breaks into angry, hot tears, shoving him back out of the bedroom, linking this violence to the sex to the drugs: "I don't even recognize you anymore! Get the hell out of here. Get out!" He leaves the safety of that space reluctantly, sad eyes on his sister as Tara shoves him out and locks the door and falls back on the bed with Sookie, who shivers and reaches down for the Valium. Word, girl.
Embarrassed, sick and grieving, light jerking in his vision, Jason runs away from the scene of his crimes and is help up by Detective Bellefleur. He tries to get past three times, but makes the mistake of calling him "Andy." He can't remember the girl's name, or phone number, because he can't find his phone, so now his fake Tara alibi is as questionable as this new one. Andy calls this suspicious and Jason asks if he's honestly fucking suggesting that he killed Adele. He doesn't wait before tossing Andy angrily across the yard, denting a truck. He speeds to his truck and flies away, even as Lafayette is staring: "You're a stupid bitch, Jason Stackhouse." Yep, that about covers it.
Inside, Maxine drinks deeply. "Jason Stackhouse tossed Andy Bellefleur like he was nothing but a ragdoll!" Arlene says even the men -- "thicker than walls!" -- on the Friday Night Smackdown Rene watches couldn't do that. Lafayette refills their sweet tea and covers like a good dealer: "You know Jason, he works out a lot. He's real strong." Maxine doesn't care, because drama, and Arlene just gives Lafayette a look like he's fucking Jason. Tara comes down the stairs clapping her hands, ordering everyone out. The holdouts, of course, are Arlene and Maxine... And Sam. "Look, I get it. But right now she needs to be alone... You're a good friend. Now get the fuck out of here. Please." She chases off the stragglers, and Maxine is awful some more on her way out, picking at the buffet the way she picks at anything else. For what's left.
"What the fuck is it with white people and Jell-O? I don't understand." (Lafayette is apparently the only one that got the memo that said he had to deliver at least one "white people they be like this but black people they be like this" joke a week.) Tara stares at the insane amount of food left over, and he tells her to toss it: "Sookie does not need no bad juju cooking. Way to a man's heart is through his stomach, that shit is as true as gold. Put some love in your food and the folks will taste it. Smell this: you can smell the evil and nastiness coming out that cornbread." Tara eats a piece and remarks it feels fine, and he tells her she'll regret it. "Watch."
Watch Sookie sleeping; the squeaking sound as a door opens on her, and then a blue shirt with white stitching, and hands around her throat. She gasps out his name, choking; he wakes, on the cold ground. Beneath Bill's house there is a little room, where the world touches the cold ground, and that's where he sleeps. His eyes fly open and he looks at his watch: the sun is only just setting. He screams, pulling desperately against gravity. He can barely get his off the cold ground, no matter how hard he tries. He's dying, while she's dying, and he can't do anything about it. He can't make her alive again. The earth pulls at him: home.
Downstairs Lafayette sweeps up while Tara picks up furniture with one of her She-Hulk pinkies; she's wondering if she should check on the recently throttled Sookie (Lafayette: "Trust me, that child is dead to the world right now") just as the door flies open and Bill zooms through the house, up the stairs, to her side. Tara and Lafayette follow the blur -- Lafayette wielding a deadly broom -- as Bill shakes her awake, terrified that she's gone. I think he really does love her. She finally wakes, looking at him through a valium haze. But if she's still alive, it must have been a dream, right? A silly dream, hers or his, nothing to be concerned about. A natural consequence of all that's happened.
(I don't actually believe that. If you've ever taken a Valium you probably don't either. I see her pulling a Ruby In The Smoke sometime in the near future and randomly producing the face of the killer. I don't know why she didn't die, but I think that really happened. And if it didn't, it was her dream, not his. But I don't think she'll remember this conversation either, so it hardly matters.)
"Don't worry," Bill says, even as she's slipping away, "I'm not going anywhere. Go on." She drops back again, into sleep, and pulls his arm around her, just like Jason when she's sleeping. He pulls his hand out of her grasp and looks at her from the edge of the bed, like he's praying. Later, Tara watches him on the lawn, standing, staring up. He looks beautiful, and strong. He looks like Lloyd Dobbler. "Do you think they're capable of loving a person?" Lafayette joins her at the window and wonders what all they're capable of. That dog joins him on the lawn, of course, and they both look up, standing strong, like men. Bill smiles down at the dog and takes a sip of his TruBlood; the dog whuffs a hello. When is a spoiler not a spoiler? When it's got a huge neon arrow pointing at it for six weeks in a row.
Funeral. A woman sings at the lectern, Jason's jittery legs go crazy, Arlene weeps with Rene beside her, just behind Sookie. Lafayette's in a suit, without his usual headgear; Terry Bellefleur is going nuts as usual. Jason sweats and shakes. "Oh sinner, come home," she sings, as Jason wipes eyes with necktie. The preacher stands, to gather the life of Adele Stackhouse: "To celebrate the time she enjoyed here on earth, and to thank you for each precious moment..."
A creature arrives, in the daylight, in a wheelchair, pushed by Neil the apprentice. A jolt runs through Sookie and she squeezes Tara's hand until it hurts. Jason doesn't know anything; he taps the creature's knee with a fist. She stares at it, even as the preacher speaks. Its head is bald and wrinkled; its eyes contain a multitude of sadnesses and sins. She is revolted; she asks him what the fuck he's doing there. Uncle Bartlett. "But even as we grieve, we shall be comforted knowing that she's in peace now in the Lord's kingdom. And there shall not be more death." Nothing is lost and nothing is forgotten.
"Uncle Bartlett, what are you doing here?" Bartlett can barely meet her eyes: "She was my sister." Sookie's not having it; Sookie knows the boundaries more than anyone alive. It's how she stays alive. "You haven't been part of this family in a long time." He looks back at her, in silence. "Sook, come on. Give the guy a break," says Jason. He doesn't know anything. She is marked; her mind was never her own, but her body was once. The preacher says her name once, twice, calling her to the lectern to deliver a eulogy. She stands unsteadily, nodding at Tara, and heads to the front as Sam watches. Bartlett looks away.
"Adele Stackhouse was everything to me. She wasn't just my grandmother, she was my parent, my teacher... And my best friend." (...oh please if it weren't for you she would be alive ... what's this world coming to, a vampire giving a eulogy ... I thought she was a good girl I guess you can never know ... you should be in that coffin and we all know you...) Sookie clears her thoughts, with Bartlett looking on. "To say she'll be missed just doesn't cut it, because I can't even imagine a world without her in it. She was always there, with a kind word and a hot meal, and a shoulder to cry on. Not just for me, but..." She swallows. Bartlett nearly weeps. (...forgive me Adele please forgive me I never meant to hurt anyone but I couldn't...) "For everyone who knew her." (... poor pathetic thing she is as nuts as nuts can be ... sleep with your grandmother's killer she is dead because of you...) "Shut up!" Sookie finally screams. Don't they know she knows that?
"All of you, shut the fuck up!" They gasp, and think twice as hard. (Look at her cursing ... this whole world's just ... plain crazy lock her up and throw away the key.) Sam is shocked, staring at her; she gives up and runs. Just hauls ass. Tara watches sadly as Jason throws himself after her; the preacher asks for another speaker. "I've got something to say," a woman says, in an unforgettable, shaking voice. Tara closes her eyes; Lafayette puts his hand on her shoulder. Momma Thornton, shaky on her pins, makes her way around the assembled group; Tara grabs at her as she heads for the lectern but there's no stopping her. "Oh my fucking God, girl. This is about to be ugly."
Momma Thornton takes the stage. "I didn't know Miss Stackhouse like a lot of you did. But the few times I did meet her... She was nothing but kind to me. She was a good, God-fearing woman." Her eyes slide off her daughter; she continues. "And when I was... Going through some bad things, my daughter would go stay with her. And I always knew she'd be just fine. Adele Stackhouse took care of my baby when I couldn't." She's speaking to Tara now. "And I'll always be grateful for that." Her loneliness is private; all loneliness is private, just as all grief is private. Like any funeral, we attend alone.
Jason chases his sister through a graveyard, completely alone, having fucked up in more ways than he knows, calling her name. "Sookie, just hold on a sec!" She barely pauses. "Why, so you can hit me again? Go ahead, tell me it's all my fault. Tell me how much you wish it were me in that coffin." She shakes her head, meaning it: "I deserve it." My first thought, when I could think it, was the same as yours when you heard: that I was to blame. But you didn't see her there; you didn't know it in your body, that it is true.
"No, I'm sorry." Almost weeping, he steps closer, begging for forgiveness, but she steps away. Her body is a territory, and it is hers. Without home, among the orphans, it's all we have. "Well, I didn't mean to hurt you. You gotta know that." Hurt? The hitting? That was nothing. That was nothing, compared to what he did . "You invited Uncle Bartlett!" He doesn't know; he honestly doesn't know. Jason swears, to her terrified eyes, her shaking hands, that Bartlett deserved to be there. "Look, I know he and Gran had their problems, but whatever they were, it don't matter no more. Cause that's what a family does, we forgive each other." Sookie's amazed, as ever, at her brother's ignorance of subtext. He has no idea what he's talking about. Jason stares at her, alone in his grief. They have joined the orphans; their family is each other. "Sookie please. I mean, we're all we got." But Sookie knows better: "We've got nothing." We are alone.
She walks away, and he knows she's right. He's got nothing. There's too much death with us today; he needs more life. When you see the sparks you remember that none of us are alone; when you see death and that dead confusion and rage in her eyes you realize that's all we are. A body, any body, is just a naked dangling signifier for a mystery you forgot. He almost falls over with the weight of it, jerking at his jacket tails like a child. They're both right.
Maxine puts away her handheld fan and waves at Momma Thornton like a waitress at a busy restaurant: "Hey. I was moved. Very moved." Maxine was moved; she had a feeling, she was moved by what happened. You hear? "You know, you should come to our Descendants of the Glorious Dead meeting," she offers. To the only black lady at the funeral. Fucking Maxine. "That some kind of support group? I went to one of those AA meetings once. They were nothing but a cult." Maxine's undone as far as responding, but Tara saves her, grabbing her elbow and jerking her away even as Momma tries to introduce her to Maxine. "We met. Like a hundred times too many. Excuse us." Maxine hates Tara some more, but Tara couldn't care less.
"What the hell are you doing?" Momma begs her to stop, she's hurting her arm, and Tara thinks that's rich. "The last time I saw you, you were beating my head with a bottle." Momma weeps. "Oh, sweet Jesus. You poor child. I'm so sorry." She puts her arm around her, and Tara takes it like a ragdoll. Her body is a territory. She peels her mother's arm from around her back. "You had no right to speak for that woman. She was more of a mother to me than you ever were." Without saying she's grieving, she grieves. "She took care of me. She fed me, she put clothes on me. She called Social Services on you twice. You hated her guts." Momma protests, but Tara remembers: "Yes you did. You used to call her a white devil bitch."
Momma shakes her head. "No, Tara, that wasn't me. That wasn't me that said those things." Tara shakes hers back. "Just 'cause you were too drunk to remember don't mean it never happened." But that's not what she's saying: "Just listen. All those terrible things I did to you, it wasn't me who did them." Tara shakes her head, confused. "I have a demon inside me." After a beat, Tara's like, "Um, what?" Yeah. Demon actual. "Living and breathing inside me. Eating me up." Tara cracks up, because fuck you, and no amount of God-fearing bullshit from Momma's stupid mouth is going to stop her. The latest Get Out Of Jail card in a long line of them: not too far off the Jesus thing, but with a twist! "Don't you laugh at the devil, Tara Mae, because this is as serious as cancer."
"I'm sorry, you have a demon inside you? Oh fuck me, that's too good." Momma breaks down, being honest: "You have no idea on what I'm going through wrestling with this demon. I try and do right, I try so hard... but it breaks me down, and poisons everything." Sounds like Tara. "I want to be the momma you deserve. I can make up for everything, I can. It's not too late." Everything you ever wanted to hear; like Sookie's mother and her grandmother, coming back from the head. It was all a mistake, an unfortunate coincidence. I never meant to hurt you. "I can't do this alone. I gotta get it out of me. And it's very expensive..." Tara almost vomits. "And that's why you came to this women's funeral? Because you want money?" Momma says she has nowhere else to go, but Tara's done. She stalks away, and Momma's screaming: "Tara, please. Don't walk away from me, I'm still your momma. I need you." They are orphans; we are all orphans: "You're all I've got!"
Sookie walks randomly through the graveyard, finds the old section. The Glorious Dead. The grave is half-covered, in leaves of ivy. She kneels and stares down at it, wiping them away: William Thomas Compton. She jumps back. He is dead.
Jason shivers as they pay their respects; they speak but he can't hear them as he jerks and shakes. If you can put a name on it, if you can name it and the way it feels, if you can name the demon then you can feed that demon. A whole life spent wondering what that aching pain was, and here it is; a whole life spent wondering what was missing, and it was there all along. Loneliness, that no body can shake, and fear, that no amount of love can erase. Andy threatens him as he goes, but Jason's too far gone to care. In his truck he yanks and pulls at his necktie, exposing his throat, sweating through his shirt, crazy and breathing hard. One last bit, one drop in the glovebox, in a clean little baggie. Give it a name. The opposite of death is life. Feel it driving through you, let it take the wheel for just a moment. The second drugs stop being acceptable is when you can't do without them, yes, but this isn't drugs. It's just a Valium. He cranes his neck, opens his mouth wide, wanting it more than anything.
But the V is life and life, today, is all too much. There is only one person that could possibly offer him comfort. He punched her in the mouth, and then committed a crime he still doesn't understand. He has joined the orphans and been deserted by his sister. What if he feels it more? What if this drop enters his heart, and it begins to beat, and the blood that flows through him pulses with sadness? He tosses it out the window: be a man, be strong. Somebody has to be strong. We can't all go running off in the middle of a funeral, dancing across a graveyard, bitching about uncles and this and that. Somebody's got to feel this. Somebody has to miss her.
He is not a man. He is a boy, terrified and broken-hearted, and there is no one left to share his pain. He digs through the dirt and grass and garbage, under the truck and on the ground, desperate for his drug. He is completely gone. This is not an appropriate event.
The gravedigger winds the gears and the body slowly, quietly, gracefully descends into the cold ground. This is not all that we are. Adele's real body is back home, where it smells like her. Sam joins Sookie and watches the body descend. "I liked your speech. What I heard of it, anyway. She looks at him. Especially the part when you told the town to shut the fuck up." Sookie almost grins, staring at the coffin: "Yeah, I'm a real crowd-pleaser." Sam begs to take her home, and offers her elbow; she takes it. In the space they leave behind, the coffin comes to its rest.
On the porch, Sookie stops to dig out her keys; Sam tells her to take a bath and begs to stay with her, to watch movies with aliens, romantic comedies. To be of use, to be helpful, to keep watch, to bark when he gets nervous, to lick her hand until she smiles. "Sam, not now. I just... I need to be alone." He nods and she heads inside, thanking him. On the porch, he breathes the enormity. Tara walks up, shoes in hand, from the graveyard. Sam tells her Sookie wants to be alone; they agree they don't want to be alone. Nobody ever does. That's what death tells us.
The stupid thing about death is that it doesn't really matter what happens : life is a party and everybody's invited. And when you die, you're not at the party anymore. When they told me about death that was how I formulated it, and that's still the worst fucking thing I can think of, twenty-something years later. The whole system is stupid. I keep writing these paragraphs about that over and over and it just seems really whiny and selfish, but it's like: people are only dead, actually painfully dead, when you want to tell them something, to make them laugh or because it reminded you of a thing, or when ask them something, because they're the only ones that would know what you mean, or remember the fact you want to remember. The rest of the time they're just... drifting, like 90% of the people you've ever met, or even loved.
I've got people on Facebook I love deeply that I haven't talked to in five years, ten years, but the possibility that I could is implicit. If I wanted to get in touch with so-and-so from high school I could do that in a snap: that's exactly as far as relationships were meant to stretch. Which I love, because it used to be taking their number and never calling, which is more actively dismissive but something I'm hardly above. The possibility, the thought of them, alive, in you: that's something, because you can think of them a hundred times a day and know that you have the possibility of telling or asking them something, and often it is enough. They're doing the same thing. Your love is an alive thing that stretches from your body wherever it is, to their body wherever it is, and you don't even need to know those locations in order to feel that. But death says: no way. Death is a bunch of bullshit compared to Facebook.
Which is just one of the many ways death is tacky, because death also says: you know how you're utterly, irrevocably alone? You have an infinite number of doors inside you and every single door opens onto a singular, unimaginable world, and all you want is for somebody to step inside one of them and take a look around and feel at home there. For somebody to take a good sniff of that house and understand that it smells like you, and say that they wouldn't mind living there. You want to invite someone inside you, to look at all your bits and understand them, see them, hear the words you can't say; to look at the sparks inside your skin and know how alive they really are. And that is never, ever going to happen, says death.
If I stared into your eyes for a million years, if she sunk her teeth into your flesh, if he fucked you for the rest of your lifetime, you would still be alone in there. Sam could follow me around all day long like a dog with a bone and while that would be almost optimally hot, it wouldn't solve the existential equation any more than drugs do. Neurologically speaking, love is just a flying leap under the assumption that what's inside your sack of guts is close enough to mine that we will be less alone.
And of us all, Sookie's the only one with personal experience enough to know how little that means, because only Sookie has been trained by life to understand how ugly those unspoken thoughts can get, when we keep them in the echo chamber and never let them out. It's what brings her and Tara into loving each other: she loves Tara because Tara knows all this and doesn't give a fuck, while Sookie looks at it and knows that if there's no rules inside your head then all that matters is being firm about the rules. But what neither of them know yet -- and Jason does -- is that we could spend a lifetime talking and never really get anyway, because the words are preferable but they're still just advertising. But no matter what, it's not going to stop us, and the world turns on that: we spend every second of every day trying to climb inside each other and disprove that futility, and that is terribly dumb and it is wonderfully brave.
The empty house, Gran's clean floor. Sookie stares at the place; there's a dripping sound. She steels herself and walks inside. She takes the pie out of the fridge and sits calmly, removing the plastic. She takes up a fork and pauses, then the first bit from the center. The way to a man's heart is through his stomach, that shit is as true as gold. Put some love in your food and the folks will taste it. Smell this: you can smell the love and sweetness coming out of that pie. It tastes like home. It tastes like sadness and it tastes like absence, but she chokes it down around her sobs. It smells like Gran; it tastes like love. Like she's still here, every bite a word or a peck on the cheek or the strongest hug on the worst day. It tastes like life. And by the time she's done, all that's left of Gran will be hers, smell and taste. She weeps and takes it in; it is a duty no less profound and no more insane than sopping up the blood. It is a funeral; we attend alone.
Sam and Tara pull up to her motel room. All around them is life, unbounded, joyous, silly. An obese couple waves to her over their fried chicken as the children bitch and squabble. It's life. Tara lets Sam in as a woman nearby threatens somebody with death, breaking a bottle. She laughs: "Don't worry. She says that all the time." The discuss how sad it is as Tara offers him a warm beer from the shopping bag near the door, and sits on the bed. Sam's amazed at the relative squalor, making her uncomfortable: "I thought you were staying with Lafayette?" Yeah, until she discovered the webcam in his bathroom, she laughs. "No way I'll let a bunch of pervs watch me pee." It never occurred to me to wonder where my line is. I'm going to have to think about that some more.
Sam joins her on the bed, laughing, and says she should have told him. "Why? So you could ride up on your white horse and save me?" He rolls his eyes, frustrated, and bitches about how she turns everything into a fight. "Why is it so hard to let someone be just nice to you?" Tara pulls it together and suggests that it's her bad self-esteem and can't express her real feelings except through sarcasm. As usual, she's telling the truth so big it sounds like a lie. She tries to do right, but it's hard. It breaks her down and poisons everything. He tries to leave and complains of always being teased: Tara, Sookie. Give a dog a bone! She beats him to the door, slamming it closed with her giant muscley arms. "I don't want to play games," he protests. "I don't want no strings. I just ... I want something real in my life." Tara feels the same way; she glimpses a spark in him and takes his face in her hands, studying him. She puts her arms around him as he swears it's real. "If we do this, we really did this." She nods and puts her forehead to his, kissing him softly, and then harder.
The whole pie is gone. Sookie wanders out of the kitchen, turns back to look at the empty plate one more time. The last pieces of home, gone. She stares at herself in the mirror, taking down her hair. Off comes the jacket, and then the dress. Who's that in there? An orphan. A girl without a home. Retard, psycho, Stackhouse trash. A fangbanger. A whore. A girl without a home, like any outcast, can be anything she likes. What would that be? What would solve this problem? How can she feel less alone, without feeling invaded? What makes her feel good? What replaces this fear and loneliness and desperate sadness?
She pulls on a flowing, ridiculous white gown. Puffed sleeves and a mile-long hem, like the movies, like a princess. Like a virgin, unmarked. Untouched territory. What was Hadley thinking, when she left rehab this last time? Did she feel like a prisoner, locked in a castle that wasn't her home? Or did she just look down at herself one day, or into the mirror, and realize it was time to claim that territory for herself? Sookie stares out the window, at the setting sun.
As it hisses on the horizon Sookie hurls herself from the house, down the road and across the field, into the graveyard. Bill wakes and throws the doors open; the Compton house takes a breath of night as he runs onto the porch. He can feel her coming, or it is a wish. She is coming to him across the graveyard. He closes his eyes, straining for her, and finally smiles: There she is. He meets her on the field, under the moon, and they kiss hungrily. Less alone. He's known death, a hundred years of death and the loneliness that follows. He alone knows just how hungry her skin must be. He brings her silence, and forgiveness, and like Adele, no judgment whatsoever. Only love.
For one night we are all Jason Stackhouse: climbing into each other's skin the best way we know how, to shove a burning brand into the face of death and say, "not today," and "not ever" and "I am not alone." Looking for those sparks across his skin. Tara screams wordlessly and falls back on the bed, muttering profanities as Sam chuckles above her. He looks down into her eyes; the couple door comes to an annoying reconciliation. The woman tells the man she loves him, so much; he says he had to come back. She's all he has, now. "I need you," says the woman, who is Randi Sue. "I need you so fucking much. You're all I've got." Tara stares and thinks about need, about orphans. Jason, Sookie, Sam. All the people she loves are orphans. And she's not; she has deserted her mother, who is all alone and in over her head. She shrugs Sam off, and he's confused. "Tara, what just happened? Did I do something?" She puts on her funeral dress and shakes his head, tossing him pants. "It's not about you. I'm sorry. I'll see you at work, okay?"
door, Randi Sue rides Jason's v-juiced dick, facing away from him, sending words and moans out into space, screaming how much she loves him. All words are advertisements. He lies below her, finally alone, and grieves: for himself, for Tara, for Sookie and Adele, for Hadley and Bartlett, for the drugs and his complete powerlessness, for himself as an orphan, as an abuser, for Maudette Pickens, for Dawn, for the exquisite loneliness she rides. Nobody sees it. He grieves most purely of us all.
Bill lays Sookie down by the fireside, in her white dress, on a pillow and a blanket of velvet red. He kisses her, reaching behind to open up her dress. Cat Power kills all boners but those of the undead, it is a fact. She pulls him down to her, and he kisses her softly in the firelight. He's never looked so human, or so strong. He kisses her neck, takes her thumb in his mouth; she rakes a hand down his back. That's what does it; he's embarrassed, as ever, by his body's responses to desire. His fangs pop out and he hangs his head upon her breast. She asks what's wrong, and he shows her. She considers him; his shame, and his beauty. He looks for the fear, but it melts away, from her face. There's nobody watching, now. She's not afraid, anymore: just curious. She guides his head down, kissing him softly. There's just the two of them, pressing desperately, skin against skin. Trying desperately to be whole:
Tara comes home to Momma Thornton, passed out on the couch. "I knew you'd come," she says. You're all I've got. She holds out a hand, and Tara lies down beside her on the tiny couch, their arms around each other, and they sleep.
They're both naked as he kisses her neck. It's getting harder. He tries to resist, tries to be there with her, to continue his education. She looks up. There is literally nothing stopping her and nothing stopping her. They are all alone. Whatever might happen, it's already happened. Hated? Done. Murder attempts? She doesn't even know how many. Family dead? Check. Self-worth? In hand. Gran is dead. Bill is dead. She loves them both. He is the silence. There's nothing to fear, at all, anymore. The world is big.
The way to a man's heart is through his stomach, that shit is as true as gold. Put some love in your food and the folks will taste it. You can smell the love and sweetness coming off her, the orphan girl, making her first grownup decisions. This feels like home. It tastes like sadness and it tastes like absence; it tastes like love. It tastes like life. And by the time he's done, all that's left of the orphan girl will be hers and his, smell and taste. This body is her territory, to mark as she chooses; she chooses him. She claims her skin, her body, by offering it to someone else, out of love. She says when and she says who. I don't know how else we heal.
"Do it. I want you to." She arches back, offering her neck. If we do this, we did this.
He hesitates, and then sinks deep, blood flowing out around his mouth; she pulls and grasps at him, moaning and gasping, neither in pain nor pleasure. For a moment they are less alone.