Work Text:
Final Goodbye
by TLR
Plot: Starsky falls for a woman who is keeping something painful from him.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
In the spring of 1976, Starsky met Rebecca Nolan in a used bookstore on Melrose because he reached for a Raymond Chandler book at the same time she did.
“Beat you to it,” she said, not taking the book, just smiling at his hand over hers.
Starsky looked over and saw dark hair, gray eyes, and a face that was quietly arresting, the kind he wanted to keep looking at because it seemed like there was something beneath the surface.
“Yeah?” he said. “You look more like a Jane Austen girl.”
“And you look more like comic books and auto magazines.”
“Ouch that hurts.”
That got a laugh out of her.
He let her have Chandler. She let him buy her coffee next door.
“You can call me Becca.”
“And you can call me Dave.”
She worked part-time at the bookstore and part-time doing copyediting for a small publisher downtown. She was into old records, flavored coffee, and men who didn’t talk too much about themselves.
“That leaves me out,” Starsky said.
“Not necessarily.” She stirred her hazelnut coffee without looking at him. “You haven’t tried yet.”
It started easy.
Dinner once. A drive to the beach. A late movie where she fell asleep for ten minutes with her head against his shoulder and woke embarrassed, but Starsky liked her better for it. She had a quirky sense of humor and was a good listener. She asked about his work and seemed interested without being too nosy.
::
Hutch noticed first, and was happy to for once.
“You’re smiling at your coffee now.”
Starsky looked up from Huggy’s counter. “Am not.”
“Are too.”
Polishing a glass, Huggy said, “Hutch, he's the face of a man in trouble.”
Starsky grinned. “Maybe the reason for it is female in nature.”
Hutch sat back in the booth. “Maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“What’s her name?”
“Becca. I like that name. Short for Rebecca. She loves different flavors of coffee.”
Hutch watched his face a second, then smiled the small genuine kind. “Okay. You got it bad.”
“Maybe a little.”
Starsky was intrigued just enough to start daydreaming and thinking ahead without meaning to.
Becca didn’t make promises. That was one of the things he liked about her. She didn’t act like every good evening needed a Hallmark verse attached to it.
She’d come over to his place for takeout and a record, then leave before midnight with a kiss and a soft “Good night, Dave.” She didn’t ask for more than he offered, she just made him want to offer more.
But there were things.
Little things at first.
She dropped a wineglass one night and stood staring at her hand afterward as if it had betrayed her.
“You okay?” Starsky asked.
“Yeah. Just tired.”
Another time they were crossing the street and she stumbled for no reason he could see. He caught her elbow and she laughed it off with, “Guess I forgot how sidewalks work.”
Then there was the afternoon at Griffith Park when she turned pale all at once and asked to sit down.
“You sure you’re all right, Bec?”
“Just dizzy. Probably too much sun.”
It was April and the day was mild.
Starsky studied her. “You’ve said that before.”
“Said what?”
“That you’re tired, or dizzy, or off.”
She smiled. “You’re a detective. Everything looks suspicious to you.”
::
A week later, he and Hutch were assisting with a burglary report in Hollywood when Starsky saw her across the street stepping from a building.
He almost called out, then didn’t.
She wasn’t alone. An older man in a suit stood talking with her on the sidewalk, then she got in her car and drove away.
“Wonder who that is?” Hutch asked.
“No idea.”
::
That evening Starsky called her apartment, but there was no answer.
The next day, he went over to her house.
“Hey um... can we talk?”
“Of course. About what?”
He scratched at his forehead, suddenly nervous and uncharacteristically unsure of himself. “Um... I saw you with... with that guy yesterday and...”
She was silent, and then, “Dave... it isn't what you think.”
He stood and waited, as if hoping against hope that it was anything but what he suspected.
“Then what is it, Becca?”
She let out a slow breath.
“I'd rather not talk about it.”
“What? How can we not talk about--”
“He's my doctor! Okay?! Now leave!”
“But--what? Bec--”
She pushed and shoved him back toward the door.
“Go! Just go!”
She managed to muscle him back out the door, slammed it shut, and locked it. She could hear him through the wood... “Becca? Please talk to me.”
She leaned her forehead against the door, her voice now lower and defeated. “Just go, Dave. I'm going to bed.”
“We'll talk tomorrow, okay? I'll come back. We'll talk here, or my place, or go for coffee, or...”
But no words came back at him through the door, so he turned and left.
::
Hutch answered the knock at his door, seeing his downhearted expression.
“Hey buddy,” Hutch said taking his arm and pulling him inside. “What gives? You look terrible.”
“Somethin's goin' on with Becca. I think she's sick, and she won't talk about it. Her doctor was the guy we saw her with yesterday.”
Hutch thought for a moment. “Want me to talk to her?”
“No, we're talkin' at her place tomorrow. Thanks, though.”
“You wanna crash here tonight?”
“Nah, think I'll just head home. Catch you later.”
Hutch nodded and opened the door for him to leave. “Call if you need me for anything.”
“Will do.”
::
The next day when Starsky knocked on Becca's door, there was no answer and her car was gone. A woman presumed to be her landlady came from the backyard rolling up a garden hose.
“You see Becca around?” he asked.
She gave a mild shrug. “She left with her stuff about an hour ago. Didn’t say where to and I didn't ask. Paid up what she owed and took boxes and suitcases. She left a key and an envelope for David Starsky.”
Starsky held out his hand, which she eyed with skepticism. “You David Starsky?”
He showed her his police ID, then the manager handed him the envelope.
It was cream-colored stationery with his name in neat handwriting. He knew before he opened it that whatever was inside would hurt.
“Thanks,” he said quietly to the landlady, then went to sit in the Torino to read it under a tree shedding purple blossoms.
~Dave, if you’re reading this, then I did the cowardly thing and left before you could come talk me out of it.
I know you would have tried.
That’s one of the reasons I’m going.
I should have told you sooner, before we started caring for each other and, before I said yes to everything.
A year ago, I started having numbness in my hands, trouble with balance, blurred vision that came and went. I thought it was stress or overwork or not enough sleep, but it wasn’t. After months of doctors and tests and one very honest neurologist, I was told I have multiple sclerosis.
He says no one knows exactly how quickly it will progress. Maybe slowly, maybe not. Good health and bad health will come and go. There is no cure, Dave. Only uncertainty, and a long hallway full of doors I don't want to open with someone beside me who can still walk away whole.
Please don’t think this means I didn’t care. It means I cared too much.
I know enough about life to know what illness does, not just to the body but to everyone orbiting it. I don't want you standing in some future room watching me lose one piece after another and telling yourself it doesn’t matter. I don't want to have to be brave in front of you, because I'm not sure I can be. I don't want your kindness to become duty, even if you swear it wouldn’t. I want to remember us the way we are. What we had was the start of something special, I just know it.
Maybe that’s unfair to you and I’m making the choice for both of us because I’m frightened.
But I'm also trying, in the only way I know how, to leave you with something better than the end of me.
What we had was good. It mattered to me. You mattered to me. Please believe that.
And please don’t come looking for me.
Goodbye, Dave~
::
Starsky sat for a long time with the letter in his hand, as if the words might change into something better if he held it long enough.
::
When he finally got to Hutch's, his perceptive friend pulled him in again, this time into a hug, then walked him over to the sofa to sit him down.
Starsky held out the letter and Hutch read it, then folded it and gave it back.
Neither said anything for a moment.
Then Hutch asked, “You know where she went?”
Starsky shook his head no.
“You gonna try to find her anyway?”
Starsky looked down at the envelope. “She asked me not to. I have to respect her.”
::
Huggy's was near closing as Starsky and Hutch sat in a quiet booth.
“I coulda handled it,” the brunet said at last. “That’s the part killin’ me. She didn’t even let me say it.”
“Maybe she knew you'd mean it. It scared her.”
“I did mean it.”
Hutch nodded once. “I know.”
Starsky looked up, eyes red-rimmed with anger more than tears.
“I'd have stayed. I wanted to tell her we’d figure it out.”
Hutch placed a hand over Starsky's wrist. “I know that.”
Starsky looked toward the front windows of Huggy's, through glass and into the dark city.
“I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
Hutch let that linger between them a little while, then he leaned his forearms on the table and said, “When Helen died, there were things you didn’t get to say to her either.”
Starsky’s face changed. He was uncomfortable with people stepping that close to old wounds unless they’d earned it. Hutch had.
“Yeah,” Starsky said gently. “You were there with me. You know what I mean.”
Starsky looked back down at the letter.
“This isn’t the same. She’s alive, which kinda makes it worse. Because there's no grave to visit, and no ending I can point to and say it's finished. She's just gone.”
“Yeah. It's loss just the same.”
Starsky let out a breath, then rubbed his face as if to wipe away emotions. “Let's get another drink, shall we? Stronger this time.”
“Sure. On me.”
The jukebox across the room clicked into a melancholy instrumental, while Hutch raised his fingers to Huggy and signaled a drink.
They sat there another half hour, not talking much. That was all right too. Hutch knew when talk helped and when it only scratched at the wound.
At closing time, Starsky stood and tucked the letter back into its envelope.
Hutch rose with him.
“You gonna be okay tonight?”
Starsky shrugged. “Maybe.”
“That’s not a very good answer.”
“It’s the only one I got.”
Hutch studied him a second. “Then I’m staying at your place.”
Starsky shook his head. “Suit yourself.”
::
They drove back to Starsky’s place with the windows down and the night air warm on their arms. At a red light, Starsky reached into his jacket pocket, touched the envelope once to make sure it was still there, then let his hand rest over it.
Not healed. Not even close.
But not alone either. He had Hutch to help him.
::
Later, long after Hutch had stretched out on the couch and gone quiet, Starsky stood in the kitchen with the light over the sink on and read the letter one last time.
When he was done, he folded it with care and put it in the drawer of his bedside table, then slipped under the sheets, the ache still inside, and the memory of her, and the knowledge that somewhere out there Becca Nolan was settled in her decision.
It wasn’t the same for him, but for now, until he could work through it if that were even possible, it's what he had.
The end