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A movie about dreams and hope, about children and their big hearts, about parents and their missteps, about endings in all their forms, and about art and how it sustains you, leads you out of the darkness, and shows you a new light.
It’s an inconspicuous package at the beginning.
Henry grabs it from the brownstone’s doorstep on his way in from the Shelter. It’s addressed to him, in handwriting he doesn’t recognise, and big, but Henry gets a lot of mail from lots of people so he doesn’t think any more of it. It can’t be anything bad if it’s been cleared by security.
Alex meets him at the door; it’s an unusual day where Henry’s own meetings ran longer than Alex’s. He loves working at the Shelter but it can be hard– draining when you’re just trying to help people and there’s mountains of red tape in the way.
“Hello love,” Henry murmurs into Alex’s neck, melting into him and bringing his arms round him to pull Alex tight against him.
Alex takes a deep breath in, burrowing his face in Henry’s hair. “Hey baby.”
They stand like that for a moment, wrapped up in each other. It might be Henry’s favourite part of the day, being able to release the day and just relax in the safety of their home with his favourite person. It’s like the moment when the tide pulls out from crashing against the cliffs and everything resettles into quiet.
“What you got, baby?” Alex asks, package digging into his ribs.
“It was left on the doorstep,” Henry replies, pulling back and shrugging off his coat and shoes.
Alex hums and heads off towards the kitchen. Henry follows, wanting to open the package and then get his husband cuddling on the sofa with him as fast as possible.
“Do you know what it is?” Alex asks as he comes up behind where Henry has stopped at the kitchen counter, wrapping an arm round his waist and resting his chin on Henry’s shoulder.
“No,” Henry murmurs, as he rifles through the tissue paper and bubblewrap in the box, “I haven’t ordered anything.”
There’s a note on top. Henry tenses as he registers the handwriting, a choked sound spinning out of him before he can stop it.
Henry, I found these in the attic of Adelaide Cottage. Thought you would want them more than me. Phillip.
“Phillip?” Alex asks, as shocked as Henry.
Henry’s relationship with his brother has improved slightly since Henry moved to New York. Henry knows it will never be a perfect relationship but he’s tired of letting his family ruin the life he’s building for himself. He started putting his foot down with Phillip, and Phillip had learned that he either had to accept that or lose Henry completely. It’s still strained and tense, and Henry certainly never expects packages from his brother to run up on his doorstep.
Henry hums, thumbing the edge of the paper and making no move to find out what Phillip has sent. Alex tightens his grip on Henry’s waist, anchoring him, breathing in time with the rise and fall of Henry’s chest.
“I can’t imagine Phillip being the one to clear his own attic,” Henry whispers eventually, and Alex stifles his laugh into Henry’s shoulder.
“Adelaide Cottage?” Alex asks. “That’s the one Phillip is moving into now, right?”
“Yeah. Mum lived there with Dad until he died when she moved to Balmoral. Nobody lived there after that but Gran said Phillip and Martha should live there now that Martha's pregnant.”
Henry says it so easily to Alex, explains it in broad strokes as if it’s a simple story, as if it doesn’t probe at Henry’s open wounds. Catherine moved to Balmoral and with it, moved completely out of her children’s lives. He’d been dating Alex for seven years now, and Alex had only met Catherine once, and by accident when they ran into her leaving a royal event. She was polite, kind to the man her son introduced as his boyfriend, but disengaged. It had torn something open in Henry that has never healed. He sent her an invite to the wedding and she had simply sent back a bouquet of flowers. Henry loved his wedding day, considered it the best day of his life, but he’d be lying if he didn't admit he’d spent a great portion of the day scanning the crowd for his mother until he’d truly accepted that, when his father died, he’d lost two parents.
Henry stands frozen for a moment more, hands trembling slightly. Whatever Phillip found in that house– in his mother’s house– is now sitting on their table like a ticking time bomb. In some ways, Henry wants to throw it out, wants to believe that whatever it is can’t be worth the way it dredges back up all the memories he has tried so hard to move on from. But the other part of him– the young child in him, who loves his mother, who misses his mother– needs to know what is in the box.
And so, eventually, Henry does drop the note on the table and reaches further down into the box. Slowly, like it might actually explode in his hands, he pulls out another, smaller box. It’s dusty, obviously old and worn from the years it had spent sitting in the attic. There’s blocky writing across the top, reading ‘FILMS’, that Henry runs his thumb along slowly.
“That’s Dad’s writing,” Henry whispers and something deep aches inside him.
Alex pulls away from Henry then, passing him some scissors so Henry can slice through the tape holding the box shut, and sidles up to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. It’s quiet in the kitchen, as if the room itself is holding its breath.
There’s four VHS tapes sitting in the box. They’re carefully titled Performance One through to Performance Four.
“Oh,” Henry murmurs, reaching out to run his fingers lightly over the top of the tapes. “I’m not sure what I was expecting but–”
“We have a VHS player in the garage,” Alex offers, and Henry can tell he’s desperate to be helpful, to reach out and steady Henry when the world is a little unsteady. “I’ll grab it.”
Alex is quick to find it; he’s back with it by the time Henry has moved all the tapes into the living room. He’s thankful it was easy to find, glad that he’s barely been left alone to dwell on what is on the tapes. They’re so inconspicuous, sitting in the box in the living room as if that’s where they belong. As if that
“Got it,” Alex says, “and it should be pretty easy to plug in.”
Luckily, it is. Henry isn’t sure he could cope with technical issues right now, not with the way he’s already vibrating with nervous anticipation. Henry hands one of the tapes to Alex, the one labelled ‘Performance One’, and Alex slides it in and presses play.
The screen is dark for a moment. Then, static slowly forms a picture, a little blurry, a little shaky, but comprehensible nonetheless.
Henry’s first thought, however preposterous, is that it’s him on screen.
His second thought sends him reeling, steals the air out of the room: his father is on the screen.
It definitely is Arthur Fox. He’s standing on a stage in an auditorium, casual clothing and smiling broadly. There’s no set dressing and no-one else on stage. It’s darkly lit as if a performance was about to begin. It looks like the person filming is sitting a few rows back from the stage, but all the other seats are empty.
Henry gasps, a little wetly, and freezes where he’s standing.
“Oh baby,” Alex murmurs softly, sliding his hand into Henry’s, and Henry holds back, tight.
The sound is muffled, cutting in and out, but Arthur’s laugh rings loud and clear in their front room. Henry flinches like he’s been shot.
But then, there’s movement on screen and the camera pans out slightly to focus in on someone else walking on to the stage. It takes Henry a few moments to recognise them and he’s almost ashamed by his own hesitance. It’s his mother. She’s younger, hair a little longer, but it’s definitely Catherine.
A small sound startled out of Henry. His hand spasms around Alex’s and Henry jerks forward instinctively, as if to shut off the TV, before he catches himself. He needs to see this, even when it hurts.
On the screen, Catherine steps up next to Arthur, smiling almost as broadly as Arthur is. Henry wants to hate her for it, but he really just hates how unfamiliar the expression is to him.
“Nothing to be done,” Arthur says, voice loud and clear, ringing around their living room.
“I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.” Catherine pauses dramatically, spinning face to face with Arthur. “So there you are again.”
“They’re–” Henry mutters, awed and terrified all at once. “They’re doing Waiting for Godot.”
In the play, Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, who never arrives. It’s a good play. One of Henry’s favourites. He has a copy sitting on the shelf of his office which was once his father’s. A little deliriously, he now wonders whether it was really his mother’s.
“I didn’t know your mom used to act,” Alex says.
Henry shakes his head. “Neither did I.”
Henry has always known that his mother had a life before she was his mother, before she was a widow, just as his father had a life before he had children, before he had cancer, before he was just gone. When she disappeared into her grief, he lost all versions of her at once. And when Catherine disappeared from Henry’s life, so did his easiest source of information about his father. Henry’s memories of him are spotted, erased through grief or overlaid with the knowledge of what comes next. He lost his father and then he lost his mother, and then he lost them all over again when he had nobody to talk to about their lives before it was broken apart in grief.
And now, suddenly, Henry has a direct glimpse into a whole life he’s been shut out of– a whole relationship and a whole world of happiness that he never knew existed like this. It’s a little strange to be learning something new about these versions of his parents that existed before him. Henry wants to know them better, wants to know about their life before they became his parents, but it burns that Catherine is not the one sharing it with him.
“No audience,” Alex adds, “so it must have been a private performance.”
“Just for them,” Henry murmurs, sinking down on the couch, eyes unwavering from the screen. “Just because they can.”
Alex sinks down next to him, placing a hand on Henry’s thigh, reassuring, weighty. “I wonder who is filming.”
Henry doesn’t answer, doesn’t know how to. What is there to say?
On screen, Catherine smiles. “I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.”
“Me too!” Arthur says.
“Together again at last!”
Henry’s heart breaks in his chest. It hurts. Henry doesn’t even know what to do with all this hurt.
“It’s– um– it’s ironic, I guess,” Henry whispers, as if speaking louder would shatter the hush descended in their room, “that they’re doing this play. It’s just people sitting, waiting, frozen. Never knowing if what they’re waiting for is coming. Never knowing when to give up and just move on.” Henry chuckles darkly. “Sounds a little familiar.”
Henry imagines his mother alone in the dark at her cottage, letting her phone ring off the hook, letting a wedding invitation go unanswered. He imagines her in her black mourning clothes, straightening Henry’s collar at the funeral and telling him that he looks so much like Arthur. He imagines her waiting, waiting, waiting as everything else falls away around her.
“Where are the leaves?”
“It must be dead,” Catherine says, definitely.
Arthur nods. “No more weeping.”
Alex lets out a wobbly exhale next to him. “They look so happy.”
“I– um– I knew they had to have loved each other, you know,” Henry chokes out, throat thick. “I remember it a bit– the way they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, the amount of flowers that would always be in the kitchen, the smiles.”
Looking back, Henry knows his childhood was happy. There was laughter, and smiles, and Sunday morning brunches where Arthur would hustle all the staff out the kitchen and make them all pancakes and Catherine would choose a vinyl to play and Henry knew nothing but the slope of sunlight through the blinds. Even now, coloured in with grief, there’s happiness there.
“And,” Henry continues, “I knew it must have been real for Mum to have been just so broken when he died. But– seeing it like this– it’s different. They, um, they really did love each other.”
“Yeah,” Alex agrees softly, and Henry thinks of Alex’s childhood where there were raised voices and slammed doors and never knowing who would be there when you got home. Henry is lucky, he knows, to have held onto his family for so long. “They did.”
“I get it.” Henry whispers. It’s a long held confession of his, extending an understanding to his mother that he’s been scared of at times. “Why she’s so distant. I think I would be the same if I lost you.”
“Baby–”
Henry doesn’t want to hear what Alex has to say about that particular thought. He knows Alex will rally against it, will tell Henry that nothing would hurt him more than Henry losing his life to grief. But it’s the truth Henry knows is bone deep. Without Alex, there wouldn’t be anything for him beyond his own overwhelming loss, the darkness that swoops in and takes him out at the knees. Without Alex, there is no Henry.
“They look so happy,” Henry interrupts, echoing Alex’s earlier words.
Henry hopes that people look at videos of him and Alex and say the same thing. He hopes he’ll always hold out his hand and Alex will hold it back. He hopes they both die in their sleep at the same time and he never has to live a life where he’s not in love with Alex Claremont-Diaz.
Arthur exclaims, “I dreamt that—”
Catherine interrupts: “Don’t tell me!”
“It's not nice of you. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can't tell them to you?”
“Let them remain private,” Catherine exhales. “You know I can't bear that.”
“There are times when I wonder if it wouldn't be better for us to part.”
Catherine reaches for Arthur’s hand, holds on. “You wouldn't go far.”
Alex reaches for Henry’s hand, holds on.
Henry tips forward slightly more, as close as he can get to the screen. “She always said I look so much like him and I never realised how that was meant to be an apology. A reason why she left, why she just– couldn’t be around me anymore.”
Henry holds compassion for his mother, holds a sense of sick understanding about how he would react in her place, holds a well of grief in his chest that could never match hers. He knows what it is like to look at someone and see a ghost. He feels it– the ache, the sickness, the way your heart drops in hope for a split second– every time he looks in the mirror.
“It doesn’t make it okay,” Alex blurts, and Henry loves him so much for the way he never fails to have his back.
Henry smiles, wryly, at Alex. “I know. I do feel angry at her, Alex.” It’s another truth that Henry tries not to look directly at. He has understanding for his mother, but he’s also angry. It’s a double edge sword– both hurt Henry in some way, both cut him to the bone. “I do feel angry.”
They were all grieving his father, he thinks, but she’s the only one who let it take her away. He hates her a little for it. He envies her a little too.
“Why did she get to disappear?” Henry blurts. “I was grieving too and I was wheeled out to public events and– and–” Henry cuts himself off and takes a deep breath. It’s an old anger here, one that won’t help him to dwell on. “It doesn’t matter.”
Alex works his lip between his teeth, looks worried that Henry’s holding things in and is liable to explode. “Hen–”
“Looking at her here,” Henry says instead, watching the joy on his mother as she moves across the stage on screen. “I just think, why couldn’t we get that version of her?”
That’s a newer anger, something unfamiliar rising up inside him. It’s rooted in him deep, a stubborn weed, growing up high until it chokes him. The woman on screen is not a woman he recognises and Henry hates how he hates her for it. Why wasn’t he enough for her? Why wasn’t him, or Bea, or Phillip enough to draw her out of darkness and be there for them? He never wanted a perfect, not-grieving mother; he just wanted a mother. He just wanted his mother.
“I don’t know, baby,” Alex murmurs, drawing Henry into his arms. “I don’t think there’s any reason really. Just-”
“Bad luck,” Henry finishes, bitter taste in his mouth. “Bad luck my Dad got cancer and died.”
Alex presses a soft kiss to the top of his head. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
Henry’s eyes burn with tears and he hates it– hates that he can’t leave all these messy feelings behind. “It doesn’t feel fair.”
“It’s not.”
“They were so happy,” Henry repeats again and the room falls silent as his parents keep moving on the screen in front of them. Henry wants to reach out and touch them. Henry wants to press pause on the TV and freeze the two of them in that moment so nothing else can touch them. Henry wants, for the first time in years, to call his mother.
Catherine holds Arthur’s face between her palms. “We can still part, if you think it would be better.”
Arthur turns his head, kisses her palm. “It's not worthwhile now.”
“No, it's not worthwhile now.”