DISCLAIMER: Guiding Light and its characters are the property of Proctor & Gamble. No infringement intended.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
SERIES: Seventh part of The Script Series.
None The Wiser
By gilligankane
Olivia wants me to marry Frank.
Olivia wants me to marry Frank.
Olivia wants me to marry Frank.
No matter how many time she says in her mind, Natalia still doesn't want to believe it.
It would happen to her: find the one person she truly wants to spend the rest of her life with, and that person – Olivia – wants her to spend forever with someone else.
It just doesn't make any sense to her.
Apparently, she muses, it makes sense to Olivia.
It's then that she realizes that she's standing in the middle of the "Olivia Spencer Memorial Park," in the middle of the grass and it's starting to snow again.
I hate you, she remembers telling Olivia a year ago, standing in the doorway of the woman's hospital room.
"A year ago," she breathes out, her mind racing at the idea.
A year ago, she hated Olivia Spencer; hated her for what the greedy, heartless woman had taken from her; hated her for what she'd cost her: Gus – Nicky.
And now, she can't remember anything but Olivia; anything but their Friday night movies and banana pancakes and; anything but that first hectic morning where Emma barely got to the bus; anything but the side of the doorway from Chicago on Christmas; anything but folding laundry.
"I can't do laundry by myself," Olivia yelled. "When I do it takes me forever and I never do it right. But with you, it takes a half hour and BAM! It's perfect!"
She can't remember a time when waking up to Emma's smiling face and Olivia's sleepy voice didn't make her smile.
She wonders how she could have been so stupid, so oblivious, to this all before.
"I had a family, I had everything I thought Rafe needed," she tells the open field, speaking more to God than anything.
She tilts her head upward, closing her eyes at the feel of the snow crystals touching her face and catching in her eyelashes.
"I thought I needed to give Rafe everything he missed out on, everything he deserved. But, I had it already, didn't I? I had a family and a home and, and I had ducks. What else does he need? I mean, Olivia and Emma were enough for me, why wouldn't they be enough for him?"
God says nothing to her; her soul doesn't ring or hum inside her to let her know that he's saying anything.
This is what she was afraid of.
But as the next snowflake lands on her, brought down by a gust of sharp air, she gets it.
She's more afraid of losing Olivia than she is of losing God.
Her knees feel weak and she drops heavily to the bench behind her, vaguely aware that a name plate is digging through her thin coat into her shoulders. She's more afraid of losing Olivia than God, and that should have been her first clue.
When she slept with Frank, she was ashamed of herself, nervous that God would hate her for what she'd done. But when she finally told Olivia – when the other woman had finally pried it out of her – she trembled in her arms, because she was afraid Olivia would hate her, and God's opinion fell to the wayside.
"No one could hate you," Olivia whispered in her ear. And she felt forgiven.
God had always been her rock, her fortress in the storm of her life. He was there for her when she had no family; he was there when she was scraping by to support Rafe; he was there for her when she lost Gus and when she needed the strength to keep Olivia alive.
And then it was Olivia – it was Olivia who was there when she lost the money for Rafe's lawyer; who was there when she needed the push to buy the house; who was there when she felt like she had no potential to be anyone other than a waitress and maid; who was there when she needed a smile or a hug or just a presence.
God used to be that presence, the calming nature that tempered the fire and despair in her soul, and somewhere along the way, that nature had been replaced with jade eyes and a mischievous smile.
God used to be her salvation, and without her even realizing, it had morphed into a stubborn, passionate, determined woman who put Natalia and her daughter before anything else.
God used to be the one she turned to, and somehow, the shoulder she turned to ended up being attached to Olivia.
"Forgive me Father, for I have sinned," she began, taking a deep breath. "It has been three days since my last confession. And I'm guilty of depending on someone other than you."
"I'm guilty of loving another with as much fire as I love you."
"I'm guilty of not caring about the consequences of it either."
Because, she decides, she doesn't care. Father Ray can glare at her through his bushy eyebrows and curl his lips up at her in disgust; Frank can swear he'll never speak to her again; Buzz can stop serving her food; Alan can run her out of town; Doris can talk into as many camera as she wants to.
She actually doesn't give a shit.
About any of it.
Because, she decides, she cares about Emma. She cares about that precious little girl whose heart is almost made of gold. She cares about funny-shaped pancakes and super secret Wednesday lunches. She cares about days playing hooky and Halloween costumes and school supplies.
And more importantly, but just a little more importantly, she cares about Olivia.
She cares about the fact that it's become a repetitive circle: she started out fighting for Olivia's heart and her she is, fighting again.
Except she almost gave up before; almost let Olivia sink into the oblivion on her own.
Not now; not this time.
"Please God," she begs out loud. "Please believe in this love and this family. Please don't make me choose. Please don't make me choose," she repeats.
Because underneath all of her crosses and all her crucifixes and all her statues of Mary and underneath under all her doubt, she knows she would choose Olivia Spencer over her God.
It would be a hard decision to give him up, but she desperately wants there to be a middle ground: a place where she can have both of them, her God and her Love.
She believes in God's message, in the idea of a Savior descending upon the world, in the Ten Commandments and The Golden Rule. But she also believes the God is Love; that he wouldn't give her something so real after so long, something that could give her happiness and room to stop and breath, just to take it away because his Bible didn't give her to room to love Olivia.
It would be one cruel God, just like Olivia said in the graveyard, talking to Gus.
And she just doesn't believe that God would do that.
Her God would let her love, no matter the circumstances of that love.
You can't pick and choose from the Bible, she could read in Father Ray's eyes when she told him about Olivia.
But you can, she knows, as long as it's done right. Because these days the Bible can't be taken too literally, otherwise there'd more bloodshed than the world would know what to do with.
Leviticus 20:13 says "If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives."
But she knows that 1 John 4:8 says "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."
"I know God," she prays. "It's unconventional and there are those who find it wrong, but you are love, and so is Olivia and this is a gift that comes to people less often than everyone would like to believe. Please give me the strength to believe; to believe that this is a gift, that this is something you have blessed me with. Please give me the strength to accept this gift and embrace it. Please give me the strength to love."
"Amen," she finishes.
Snow has blanketed the ground by the time she looks up, but she can still see the path out of the park and she'll probably still be able to see the road and the tire tracks leading past the park back towards the Beacon, where she knows that Olivia is probably setting up a war camp: bunkered down in her room for hours with nothing to sustain her. She knows Olivia will stay there until Natalia comes to get her, pulls her back together and demands to spend the rest of her life loving her.
She loves Olivia Spencer.
Olivia wants her to marry Frank.
Well, she considers. It wouldn't be the first time she completely ignored Olivia Spencer.
And it won't be the last.
The End