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“Joel,” Ellie whimpers from her place on the hospital bed. “It hurts.”
The sound of her voice, so plaintive and pleading, cuts something deep down inside of him that he’d thought was already long-shredded.
“I know, babygirl,” he says softly. “I know.”
Her room is gloomy, both blinds and curtains drawn against the sunshine outside. It’s also quiet. Joel has threatened the medical staff within an inch of their lives if they dare try to come to her for anything today, as he has done for the last three days. Their latest procedure first left her vomiting, then feverish, and now achy in a way she can’t bear. It makes him murderous.
But more than that, it makes him sad.
He has his hand on her forehead, gently swiping his thumb between the pained knit of her eyebrows. He’s been sat in the chair beside her bed for hours, leaving to go to the bathroom only when he knows she won’t wake up to find him gone. The one time she did… Her screams broke his heart. So now he knows that when she falls asleep, he has to wait fifteen minutes and then can only be gone for a maximum of twenty.
He’s never away longer than ten.
“D’you want me to find someone?” He asks, hesitating, as always, to call them nurses because as far as he can tell most of them have never seen a real patient in their lives and would’ve been little more than glorified first-aiders twenty years ago, never mind now. “Get them to give you some more of those meds?”
“No,” she moans immediately, head shaking beneath his hand. “Make my head fuzzy.”
“No sense you being in pain, though.” She’s refused every hour that he’s asked, but he still feels like he has to try. Seeing her writhing like this is like a fist underneath his heart, shoving both up and down until none of his organs are where they should be. “You can sleep. I’ll make sure nothin’ happens to you.”
“No,” she says again, but it’s like a whimper and she sounds so young and so scared that it makes him want to bite his teeth together and scream. He resists the temptation to tell her, yet again, that they could leave right now and have this over and done with. He’d have her on the road to Jackson within twenty minutes. But she’s in no fit state to leave and besides, she would never say yes.
Why do his kids always have to be so selfless?
“Okay, babygirl,” he sighs, his thumb still moving up and down. “Whatever you want.”
Ellie looks up at him, cheeks flushed. She looks like a sick little girl, and it takes him a long moment to realise that’s exactly what she is. The world now, the world he’s somehow survived for the past twenty years, doesn’t allow for sick little girls anymore. The fact that Ellie, now, going through things that so many people wouldn’t dare to, gets to be more of a kid here than she ever has before makes him sick in a way that makes him angry and mournful.
“Joel?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you in pain, too?”
His own eyebrows knit together but the thumb on her forehead continues its slow, smooth strokes. “What are you on about, huh?”
“Your face.” She reaches out as if to touch it. “Looks like you are.”
When Sarah was six she had appendicitis. He hadn’t known it at first, of course, had just thought it was a sore stomach mostly brought about by her averse reaction to Friday spelling tests. He’d kept her off school anyway - her little face so mournful that only a professional sadist would’ve been able to resist it - but he’d been pissy and irritable after tucking her back in bed. He was missing work, missing pay that they so desperately fucking needed. Tommy still lived with them then, and his contributions did not match up to his expense. The roof needed fixed, Sarah needed new shoes, new soccer uniform, and there was an outstanding balance on a field trip that Joel kept getting increasingly angry letters about. He’d stood in their kitchen, looking at the broken cupboard door he didn’t have the parts to fix, and felt like the whole world was personally against him.
Then the screaming started.
Bounding up to Sarah’s room he’d found her writhing on her bed, feverish and flushed. “Daddy!” She had been screaming, fat tears rolling down her face. Her voice had broken his heart. “Daddy! It hurts!” And he’d tried to soothe her - “It’s okay, babygirl. I’m here. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Can you tell me where it hurts?” – but when the screaming hadn’t abated and had only increased and when he couldn’t get a straight answer, fear had made his heart race and he had to resist the urge to shake her and say, Sarah, tell me where it hurts! Tell me what’s wrong so I can fix it. Babygirl, I need you to help me fix it!
Eventually he got something about her stomach but when he tried to look she squealed and pushed him away and eight years later, in a field, the smallest part of him would remember. Tommy came home and thank fuck because he drove them to the hospital while Joel held a still-screaming Sarah in the back of the truck, utterly and deathly afraid and aware of nothing else but that. She was rushed to surgery almost as soon as they got there, Joel left holding her stuffed rabbit and Tommy left holding Joel when his knees finally gave out.
“She’ll be fine,” Tommy had said, attempting to hand him a coffee during the first hour of surgery. “Not like you even need one anyway.”
Joel barely heard and didn’t appreciate his brother’s attempt at levity. He hadn’t taken the coffee either, awake enough as it was. “That screamin’,” he’d mumbled, holding the rabbit in his hands. “I’m never gonna stop hearing that sound.” He’d looked up at his brother, face like a confused child. “I couldn’t make it stop.”
“Unless you could magically take out an appendix then no, ‘course you couldn’t.” But Tommy was pale, had been shaken by it, too. Sounds like that belonged in nightmares and nowhere else.
“I just felt so helpless… so just… like what am I even there for, you know? Basic thing you should be able to do is protect your kid from hurtin’ and I just – I just couldn’t do it.”
Tommy had put a hand on his shoulder and left it there. “It was appendicitis. Ain’t nothing you could’ve done. You’re not God, Joel.”
“No.” Joel had nodded, then looked down at the rabbit in his hands. He didn’t even know its name, only that it had one. Sarah always named her animals. The feeling of failure was thick and fast and threatened to drown him. He was twenty-eight but felt a hundred. “But it ain’t God’s job. It’s mine. I’m her father.”
Looking at Ellie, now, he’s reminded of how he felt back then in another hospital room, looking down at another sick little girl. The basic tenets of fatherhood and he keeps breaking them, keeps failing all he daughters he’s responsible for. The God he doesn’t believe in should learn not to trust him with them anymore.
In the end, however, he needs them. Joel Miller is defined by his daughters. In their absence, he ceases to be.
“I’m just fine,” he says to Ellie. It isn’t a lie, not exactly, but he would if he had to. “Don’t you worry yourself about me.” He spies her cup of water on the table next to him, untouched for hours. “You want a drink?”
“Nuh-uh.” She shifts uncomfortably underneath his hand. “I’ll just throw up again.”
“You don’t know that,” he chides gently. “And you gotta soon, otherwise they’ll want to put your IV in again.”
“No.” The reaction is immediate and visceral. “No, I don’t want it. Joel, you can’t fucking let them, okay? I don’t want another one.” Tears gather at the corner of her eyes, losing battle with gravity immediately. “I don’t want it. Don’t let them do it.”
“Hey,” he soothes softly. “Hey, I’m not lettin’ them do anything you don’t want, alright? But if you don’t drink then they’ll have a point and it’ll be a pretty hard one to argue against.”
She looks up at him so trustingly it takes his breath away. Every time they have come to her with some new drug, some new procedure, some new fucking idea, she has always turned first to him. Marlene gets so irritated about it but it’s been weeks now and every time Ellie will still look to him before anyone else, trusting him to make it safe. He has no idea half of what they say, can’t make head nor tail of the science, but he’d know, on some instinctive level he’d just know if they wanted to harm her. The fact that she knows he would, too, makes him feel as though he’s been given a gift that he does not deserve. But here, now, they only have each other and deserve matters little in the face of this. It is what it is – Ellie and Joel. If either of them has anything to do with it then that’s the way it’ll stay.
“Will you try have just a sip? For me?”
She eyes the cup. “Only if you fill it up fresh. Don’t want gross room-temperature water.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” His knees creak as he stands up, disguising what he is sure is the audible thump of his heart as it beats in sheer relief of hearing some of Ellie peeking through the clouds. “You want ice in there, too?”
“Now what would you do if I actually said yes?”
The answer is obvious. “I’d get you some ice.”
She looks at him for a long moment before closing her eyes again. “Fuck off, dude.” But then she looks at him, once again small and unsure of herself. “But like don’t actually fuck off, you know? Come back?”
The fact that it’s even a question… “I’ll be less than five minutes. I promise.”
She nods, but he knows her eyes will watch the door until he makes good on it. And sure enough, when he returns to the darkened room, blinking from the lights of the corridor, it’s her little face he makes out first, eyes trained on the spot he vacated three and a half minutes before.
“Here you go,” he says, pretending the way he always does that he hasn’t noticed. “Fresh water. No ice. You ready to try it?”
Ellie looks at it dubiously but still allows Joel to help her gently into a sitting position. “Cheers,” she says bravely and takes a drink before she can convince herself not to. It’s a painful five minutes to drink even a quarter of the cup, but when she’s done she looks up at him hopefully, reminding him of a puppy that once followed Tommy home as a kid.
“That’s good,” he croons. “That’s real good, babygirl.”
Ellie rolls her eyes but flushes in pleasure and remains sitting up rather than immediately slumping back down. Her eyebrows, however, knit together once again and Joel doesn’t think about it before reaching over to smooth them out.
“What’s wrong, huh? I might be able to fix it.”
Please please let it be something I can fix, he thinks on an almost hourly basis. Room temperature water he can fix. Fireflies bothering them he can fix. Even residual pain from procedures he can fix as far as procuring medication and encouraging Ellie to take it. But the deeper hurts, the ones about not being good enough, about ending up alone, about who even is she if this cure doesn’t work… well all he can do is hold her, and promise her that, come what may, she’ll always be someone to him, and that will still mean something in the end.
“I’m just…” she wriggles around under the blankets. “So just not comfy. It’s like this ache everywhere and I wanna move and get rid of it but I just feel w- uh, tired. I feel so tired.”
Weak. That was the word she went to use and stopped herself. He doesn’t call her out on it. There are some things between them that are better left untouched and he won’t begrudge her this, not when she has so few things left untouched as is.
“Yeah, I know.” For a kid like her, this confinement must be a nightmare. Hell, it’s a nightmare for him, and he’s the fifty-six-year-old with the shitty knees. Sometimes at night when the stars are peeking through gaps in the curtains, they sit and talk about their time on the road, longing for it in a way they can neither rationalise nor explain. Soon, he tells her when she drifts off. We’ll be back on the outside soon.
Soon is all he has, but it’s a damn sight better than the we just can’t work within a timescale at this precise moment these quacks are giving her. Still, the failure is thick and whilst not as fast as it was, it’s there hovering at the bottom of his lungs, threatening to drown him all the time. There hasn’t been a day of peace since he was twenty-one years old.
Ellie wriggles again and his heart pinches. If she was a littler kid he’d rock her in a chair to alleviate the stiffness in her bones. He’d cradle her against his chest the way he did with his firstborn, bouncing gently around the living room in those mournful hours when the teething was too painful or the nightmare was too real. It didn’t take it away, it didn’t erase what came before, but the non-stop motion and the reassuring contact let them both be sad for a little while. They weren’t hours for silly faces or upbeat music; it was always slow and sad and that was okay. They just needed to be sad for a little while.
But this isn’t then and Sarah is dead. The slow dances around the living room belong to the foreign land of the past.
The past though…. It’s still painful, but it isn’t dead. Joel is still here. Even if sometimes it takes him by surprise, he is still here.
“Hey,” he murmurs. “I got an idea.”
Ellie cracks open one eye. There’s an inkling of friendly suspicion in them that makes him glad, reminds him of the time he handed her a can of twenty-year-old butter beans. “What?”
He holds her gaze very carefully. “Do you trust me?”
Ellie holds it back just the same. “Always.”
Joel nods. “Good. Alright, I’m gonna need you to get up.”
“Joel-”
“I know, I know, but trust, remember?” Ellie sticks up her middle finger and he just laughs. “Come on, you lazy ass. Up you get.”
“I’ve just had fucking needles stuck in my hips, man,” she grumbles, but gingerly peels back one of her blankets. “You’re the one who got a little tired at some fucking stairs.”
“I’m fifty-six. You’re fourteen. You got no excuse.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“You’re a little shit.”
They grin at each other now, instead of whatever unnamed thing it was before. Joel drapes one of the blankets around her shoulders as she swings her legs over the side of the bed. He wraps it tightly around her, bunching it up under her chin like he once did with a towel and a toddler after bath time. The bony points of her shoulders stick out, tenting the fabric in a way they shouldn’t, and he has to pretend he doesn’t see.
“Okay.” He holds out his hands. “You ready to try?”
Ellie nods, mustering up her bravest face. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
It takes them a minute, but only a minute, and eventually she’s standing, holding onto his arms with a white-knuckled grip.
Joel gives her a few seconds to adjust. “How you doin’?” He murmurs. Her eyes are scrunched up but eventually she nods, the tiniest hint of colour returning to her cheeks.
“I’m okay,” she says, exhaling slowly the way one of the only good nurses taught her. “Now, what’s your big plan?”
He looks down at his feet. “Gonna need you to step on my toes.” Ellie’s picture-perfect confusion makes him laugh. He’s been doing a lot more of that lately, despite the situation they find themselves in. “I mean literally. Stand on the top of my boots.”
“What the fuck for?” But she does it anyway, gingerly stepping on top of his heavy work boots in her new rainbow-striped socks that he found in one of the cupboards here. She’s so light that she barely makes a dent in the leather. He swallows a lump in his throat.
“You know, you should really take these off sometime, Joel.” She shuffles a little bit, adjusting her stance. “You’ve always got them on.”
“Always ready to go,” he murmurs, adjusting his own stance and sliding his hands to under her elbows, taking more of her weight, ensuring she’s steady. “How’s that?”
“Better. Now what?”
“Now,” he says, swaying softly from side to side. “We dance.”
It’s awkward at first. A little clumsy. Ellie weighs barely anything now, and in fact he doesn’t feel her on his feet as much as he knows he should. No, it’s this, the act of doing it at all. It might have been months, - probably closer to a year at this point – but he’s still learning how to be a father again, at how to pick up at the point he left off twenty years ago with another girl. He’s resisted feeling anything for so long that embracing it so completely now leaves him with a tingling sensation all over, like blood is returning to his limbs. Love returning to his life. He can hold back her hair, and he can get her meds, but this is the part he’s always struggled with, the part where failure rises most.
(What he doesn’t know, or yet understand, is that his daughters have never minded. All they’ve ever really wanted from him is for him to be here)
It’s silent for a while, the only sound Joel’s boots scuffing against the floor as he slowly shuffles around. It’s so slow it’s almost painful, but Ellie’s knuckles return to their usual colour and her fingernails stop biting into his shirt. He feels her whole body relax, more weight on the top of his boots. The feeling is overwhelming for them both; it is perhaps the most domestic they have ever been. Ellie shuts her eyes and Joel, unable to do that, begins to hum.
He's hummed to her for a while now, when talking was either too much or not enough. It started somewhere after Silver Lake, when the silence was dead between them and he found he couldn’t bare it anymore. She’d looked at him with surprise and, suddenly embarrassed, he’d stopped. She’d reached over and tapped his arm, said keep going. Her little voice was dead, too, but it was the most she’d spoken in days and he was so fucking relieved he could have wept. But he didn’t. He’d just started again.
He doesn’t know what possesses him now, much like he didn’t know all those months ago, but he clears his throat, just a little, and begins to sing.
“Catch a boat to England baby, maybe to Spain-”
Ellie’s eyes fly open. Joel, as is often of late, has to pretend he doesn’t see.
“Wherever I have gone, wherever I’ve been and gone, wherever I have gone, the blues are all the same.”
His voice is a little rough around the edges but still smooth underneath, still true. It’s been so long.
“Dude…” Ellie begins, but then she catches herself. There just… there aren’t the words. Instead, she buries her face in his chest and wraps her arms around him, holding on tight.
“When I’m not drinkin’ baby you are on my mind. When I’m not sleepin’ honey, when I ain’t sleepin' mama, when I’m not sleepin’, you know you’ll find me crying.”
Perhaps he should sing something else, something more cheerful, but this is their slow dance around the living room in the middle of the night. It’s all he can give. No matter how much he tries, the blues are running their game.
He’s sung through the third verse when Ellie mumbles his name into his shirt. He stops, thinking she’s tired, feels sick, needs to stop. Instead, he feels her take a deep breath and says, “I’m not Sarah.”
He keeps turning them around and around, her name no longer a punch to the gut. “I know.”
“No, I mean I’m nothing like her, not even a bit. And I – I can’t be.”
“I know.” He sways gently from side to side. “Don’t want you to be.”
Ellie peels back her head, looking up at him with that expression that just takes his breath away. The furrow appears between her eyes. “But then… why…”
Joel makes himself hold her eyes but his voice is thick and his tongue stumbles over words he’s never really been able to say. “Can love more than one person, kiddo.”
It takes her a second, one of the longest seconds of his life, but then her bottom lip trembles and she’s pressing her face into his shirt again, squeezing her arms together around his back like she’s trying to make them one.
“Yeah,” she mumbles into it, because this is a lot, it just is, but it’s real and it needs to be said, even if can’t be said exactly. They know what they mean to each other. The rest is semantics. “You really can.”
Joel squeezes his eyes shut to keep the tears at bay but he loses the battle and they fall all the same. He wraps his arms back around Ellie, both hands pressing her to him, keeping her safe. This funny, impossible little girl. His, if she ever could be. If she, with her wild spirit, could ever belong to anyone.
He wishes he held Sarah like this more. Mostly he used to hold her on his hip and she’d cling onto his arm, resting her head on his shoulder whilst he did other things, too busy as he was to stop and hold her completely. Always one hand on something else, always doing something else. But one hand always on her. He hopes that means something. There was always one hand on her.
He wishes he had that time again. Every day he wishes he could go back. He’d give almost anything to see Sarah again, to hold her, to tell her how much he loved her whilst looking her in the eye the way she deserved. Almost. That world is gone and he can never go back. He is here now, with Ellie, and there is nowhere else in this world that he’d rather be.
“Try another city baby another town, wherever I have gone, wherever I've been and gone, wherever I have gone the blues come followin' down.”
“This song’s kinda sad.”
“Yeah, it’s meant to be.”
“I like it.”
“Livin' is a gamble baby, lovin's much the same. Wherever I have played, whenever I've thrown them dice, wherever I have played the blues have run the game.”
“I like your voice, too,” Ellie admits, somewhat shyly. “Not bad for an old man.”
“I’ll take it,” Joel says, somewhat shy, too. “Is this, uh, helping any?”
“A bit. It feels, uh, nice. But like in general I still feel like shit.”
Oh, babygirl. If he could take her pain and put it in himself he would. “We can leave,” he tries again, for what must be the hundredth time since they arrived. “Anytime you want. Just say the word.”
“Joel,” she sighs affectionately. “We can’t.”
“You don’t owe anyone anything.”
“Yeah, I do.” He feels her sigh into him. “We gotta stay.”
Joel sighs, too. Brings his hand up to cradle the back of her head through her hair. She’s been wearing it down more and more because even the slightest tension on her scalp has become unbearable. “You’re breakin’ my damn heart,” he murmurs, more to himself than to her. He takes a deep breath. “But okay. Whatever you want.”
Ellie hums. Joel keeps singing. They’re almost at the end but it feels like just the beginning.
“You’re singing for me.”
He doesn’t quite make it all out, her voice muffled by his shirt. “What’s that?”
She doesn’t pull back, only repeats. “You’re singing for me, and I haven’t saved the world yet.”
He wants to hold her so tightly that her bones become fused to his. He wants to tuck her up next to his heart where she’d be safe. There will never ever be the words to express what she means to him, and even if there were, he wouldn’t be able to say them anyway.
“Oh, babygirl.” His voice is thick and he closes his eyes once again. Without her, there is nothing to save. He presses the softest kiss on the top of her hair. “Yeah, you have.”
Ellie doesn’t contradict him, doesn’t say anything at all. The last verse is over. He expects her to move away and relaxes in anticipation of her doing so. When she doesn’t, when she stays stuck to him as tightly as she ever has been, he says nothing, only wraps his arms around her once more and begins the song again.