Chapter 33: Filling Holes

On Saturday, the night before their departure back to the city, Burt and Blaine ended up watching ESPN together mindlessly, without really knowing what game was on. The others busied themselves with various things; Kurt was gathering the remainder of their stuff to pack it, Carole curled up in her first husband’s armchair with a book and fell asleep soon after, while Finn went out for drinks with Puck. The living room was still, except for the low voices coming from the TV and an occasional tiny snore from Carole in the corner. Blaine tensed a little, internally torn by the thought that had been nagging at his brain for the last week. This was the perfect moment to act on it.

‘Burt?,’ he began timidly.

‘Yeah, Anderson?’

Blaine hesitated, turning his eyes away to the flat screen. All he was seeing were colourful blurs. He couldn’t focus on anything.

‘Could you tell me what it was like?’ His voice shook a little. He clasped his hands tightly together to keep them from trembling too. He could only hope he’d manage to calm himself down enough not to let things get ugly.

‘What?’ It took Burt a couple of seconds to realise what Blaine meant. ‘You mean that accident.’

With a tiny nod, Blaine mumbled, ‘Yes.’

Burt shifted uncomfortably on the couch, rubbing his forehead with his palm and leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees. Within the short moment, he seemed to have aged a decade. His forehead creased in a mixture of pain and worry.

‘Kid, you sure you wanna know? That day was one of the worst days I had to go through in my life. Right next to Kurt’s mom dying and getting cancer. You really wanna hear it?’

The decision had been made, no turning back now. Blaine swallowed and nodded.

‘Okay,’ Burt said cautiously. ‘I hope you know this is gonna be hard. For you, and for me.’ He paused, gathering his thoughts and the memories that had become hazy after so many years, as his eyes wandered unseeingly around the room.

‘You know, some people when they go past an accident on a highway can just go past. They just think it’s not their problem and they go their own way, not caring one bit about whoever it was that could’ve gotten hurt. It’s not their business, they brush it off and not think about it twice. Their minds are wiped clean of the experience of seeing death with their own eyes. Or at least a near-death experience. That doesn’t really matter. Others, they get excited when something bad happens, they see someone else’s tragedy as entertainment. They probably wouldn’t stop to help, they’d only stop when the police and ambulances are already there, so they don’t feel guilty. I’m no shrink, but this is what I saw that day. Nobody stopped for a while. And then, when they did, it was just to watch from a safe distance.

‘I could tell your car had been there for a good moment before we saw it. We couldn’t hear the accident, you know. Maybe it was the rain, it was raining pretty heavily since morning. Maybe that drowned the crash, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, I could see a line of cars that just went past. Those people saw your car on the roadside and just didn’t care.’

He sighed deeply, running his hand over his face as if to wipe it of sweat that wasn’t there. Blaine could swear he saw the man’s fingers tremble. He tried to detach himself from the story, make himself believe for the moment that it was somebody else’s. It wasn’t exactly working, but his heart wasn’t speeding up much over its regular nervous pace.

‘Sometimes I think I wouldn’t’ve stopped that day if it wasn’t for Elizabeth. Kurt’s mom, um, she was- she was an exceptional woman. That sensitivity, compassion, that empathy that Kurt has? That’s all her, you know? She was really good with people, she could always give the best advice, the best comfort. When someone was in pain and she saw it, there was no way she would turn away from them.’ Burt smiled unconsciously at the image of his late wife smiling kindly in his mind. ‘And when you spent enough time with her, it kinda rubbed off on you. She could turn me into a real marshmallow. She did.’ He chuckled, but his expression immediately turned back to a pained frown.

‘Car crashes are- They’re kinda made to look much more glamorous and much less tragic in movies. So when you see a real crash, with real people and real wrecks of cars, it’s a shock, you know? It’s not that before you didn’t know that on the screen it was all pretend, nobody got hurt and all that. Or that you thought every car crash is a result of a car chase and ends in an explosion. You don’t really realise how breakable cars can be until you see them tangled and deformed like a beer can when you step on it.’

A moment passed in silence. Burt could feel the stinging wetness coming to his eyes and putting a strain on his voice. Blaine was holding it together, so he had to keep calm too, for the kid’s sake.

‘At first I thought there was no way anyone lived. It was terrifying, going up to that wreckage and not knowing what I’d see there. When I was really close, I saw movement in the back seat.’

For the first time since starting his story, Burt looked Blaine in the eye. But Blaine couldn’t really see it. He felt as if suddenly a dam cracked in his mind, and a thin stream of far-off memories trickled back into his consciousness. He could see his mother smiling at him from the front seat, and the tiny suit he was wearing that day, along with his first ever bow-tie. He remembered Cooper rolling his eyes next to him in the backseat.

And his father’s anger at him when he asked to go back for Winnie.

Blaine blinked a few times, trying to get his mind to focus on Burt, but he could merely hear the words; his vision was occupied with an onslaught of a series of images popping up before his eyes like a slideshow on a loop.

‘I got you out before the ambulances came. I thought that, you know, it could’ve easily been us, not you. Kurt, not you.’ Burt shook his head. ‘And then Ellie died and it got even more real to me.’

The story didn’t have a proper conclusion, but Blaine could tell that was the end. He was squeezing his eyes, almost hyperventilating to keep himself grounded, though it only made him even dizzier than the memories that kept flashing through his mind.

But for the first time in his life, he felt there was a continuity in it. Until now, he used to feel like a huge gap had been ripped off in his childhood, depriving him of months and months of memories. Boo’s memories. The memories that made the little boy alter withdrawn and depressed.

And somehow, despite the misery they were filled with, they made Blaine feel whole.

He took one more breath and opened his eyes, glad to see the Hudson-Hummel living room, undistorted with images of years long since passed.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Burt smiled sadly at him.

‘You’re welcome.’ He got to his feet in a slow and tired motion. ‘You know, sometimes throughout the years, I wondered what happened to you. But I didn’t really think I’d ever find out.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Every Thanksgiving. Every time I saw a little guy in a bow-tie.’ Burt shrugged, brushing off the ridiculous sentimentality of his words. ‘You turned out okay, if you ask me, despite all the crap that life handed you.’

‘I’d like to think that I did,’ Blaine said quietly, as Burt left the room patting him comfortingly on the shoulder.