She realized that she'd been staring at the cold, congealed food for the better part of an hour. She'd been sitting, just sitting, because she didn't have the energy for more. There weren't any tears left; she'd cried all those while she had waited for him.

Finally she got up, and carried the dishes of vegetables and rice into the kitchen. The beans had a crust of dry skin and gravy, accumulated over the two weeks of waiting, thirteen days of dinner gone cold. Fit only for the recycler, assuming she could scrape the solidified mess out of the bowl. The top layer of rice was also dry, dry as sand. But beneath the top layer the rice was still tender enough to scoop into another container, to add to some broth and make a meager soup. The gelatinous glop clung to the spoon. She kept tapping the spoon against the edge of the container, consciously trying to quiet the rapping, hoping it wouldn't disturb him.

She heard a wet choking cough from the bedroom, and then heavy footfalls and the sound of retching into the toilet. This time he didn't need her. This time she didn't have to hold his head while he vomited. This time she didn't have to have her heart torn in half as he poured out his pain and disappointments while his stomach tried to heave up what he'd drunk to kill the pain.

Half the time he didn't even remember that she'd been there, wiping his face, sympathetic, supportive.

Some of the time he was sober, and then it was wonderful. He'd forget his private demons for a while, the ones that no amount of drink could kill, and he'd charm her with his daft humor and woo her with little culinary delights. They didn't have a lot of money, and it didn't matter. She lived for those good moments.

But the good moments had become rare. Sometimes he'd drink, and drink, and finally find his way to her at some ungodly hour. Sometimes he was too drunk to remember anything later, too drunk to remember vomiting on the floor, stumbling into furniture and knocking her few treasures to the floor, too drunk to recall his criticisms about the relative poverty in which they lived. Her family had been poor, and she lived in fear of being that poor again, of having to choose between food and better filtered air and water.

Sometimes it was a mercy that he was too drunk to remember.

And when he wasn't drunk his thoughts turned to Earthforce. He blamed himself constantly and when, at first, she'd protested that it wasn't his fault, that he couldn't hold himself accountable for everything, he'd told her angrily that she couldn't possibly know anything about his private hell. He'd gone on a binge that night, one that made him so sick that she'd finally done the unthinkable and summoned a medtech. She'd have to spend some of her savings to cover the expense. The medtech was unimpressed--it was simply another drunk to add to his log of calls for the night.

The tech had asked "How often does he do this?" and the embarrassed silence that followed was answer enough. The tech had noted her smeared makeup, the sour stains on her dress.

A perfunctory scan, hypos of detoxing compounds and injections of vitamin supplements, then a script for something to ameliorate the inevitable hangover, and a notation in the billing system that treatment had been rendered. The male tech had snapped up the case, ready to leave. "You should take better care of him," was his bored opinion. "And you might make more of an attempt to keep his interest." She heard his words again and again in her mind as the tech walked down the corridor and disappeared from sight and hearing.

The mirror was a cruel arbiter. The woman in the mirror looked worn out, pale, plain, old. The worry and the heartache had done that, and now...was it her fault that he drank? Wasn't she enough for him? Somehow she was letting him down, not doing what he needed her to do as his lover. If she got it right, if she was enough, then he'd change. He'd stop drinking. He'd stop, because he loved her.

But she hadn't gotten it right, because it happened again. This time he'd been gone almost two weeks, gone without warning or word. The fresh vegetables had been an obscene expense, and she'd tried so hard to get them cooked perfectly, with the correct tenderness but without overcooking them. The effort had already been wasted by the end of the second hour of waiting.

On the fifth day she began calling the infirmaries and clinics. On the eighth day she filed a missing person report with the dome authority. She couldn't concentrate at work, startled every time the comm unit reported an incoming call. Finally her manager sent her home, saying she looked like death warmed over. It was a kindness: he'd logged it as illness, so that she wouldn't be docked for missed work.

The thirteenth day, he was back, helped inside by an Earthforce lieutenant commander who then left without so much as two words of explanation. Her questions and pleas as to where he had been were answered with nightmarish descriptions, bizarre hallucinations that must have crawled from the bottoms of the bottles he had emptied, into his mind. And then the last strand of her control broke and she screamed at him that she'd tried her best, that she couldn't do it by herself, that if he loved her, he'd change, he'd work with her to beat the drinking and the recriminations.

For a few moments, he'd become quiet, thoughtful, lucid. He gave his promise, made a commitment to do better. He looked into her eyes and swore that he loved her, that she meant everything to him. That she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

And then the moment passed, and his body fought to metabolize the excessive amounts of alcohol. She cleaned the vomit off the floor and wiped the last sticky bits from his mouth with a wet towel. She didn't look in the mirror when she went in to wash up.

She knew what she would see.

"I don't understand you, Michael. We've got a good life here. We've got history. You've met this Sinclair character twice...now you're off to Babylon 5, just like that. Doesn't what we have mean anything to you? You think you've got something to prove, that somehow maybe taking this job will mean that the last five years didn't happen. I'm part of those years, Michael...and I will not go to Babylon 5 with you. It's got to be one or the other, Michael. When you make up your mind, you know where to find me."

"I don't understand you, Michael" © 1998 Cathy Faye Rudolph

(Babylon 5 and its characters were created by JMS, and belong to Joe and Warner Bros, and are used without permission. The rest belongs to Cathy Faye Rudolph.)