Work Text:
September 27, 2019
It’s like watching a storm roll in, almost.
There’s a tension in the air, the harsh bold line of text in her email asking for a meeting before she leaves for the day, summoning her to the office. There’s no surprise in it, really. Anger, yes, but there’s no room for surprise. Resentment’s an old friend, distraction even older, stale coffee-smell accompanying the squished-down padding shifting of an office chair, condensation rings on a desk, the hum of the aircon above her head, it’s familiar. It’s predictable. She hates it. She needs it. She wants to be anywhere but here with it.
The ER had never been predictable even before Jace had died, so when she came back, she sought something with the illusion of control. Moved to pediatrics, then to ICU, then to oncology. The last stung in a way that she hadn’t expected, had smelled like her Momma’s clothes after a day of chemo. She hadn’t even realized she remembered the smell so clearly, not until it was bringing her to tears in a supply closet.
Now, clouds of anger, humiliation, a kind refusing to be dulled by a compassionate eye, a softened recital of, “Four absences this month, day-of or night before notice. You’ve been late to half your shifts. You’re distracted. You’re transferring through departments like you’re trying on jeans at the mall and I’m worried about you. Worried about your patients.”
“My patients are fine.” Baela can say, Baela can insist, but it doesn’t matter.
“And I believe that. You’re a good nurse. But what happens if you freeze during another code?”
Bitter taste in her mouth, picked skin around her nails. The phantom feeling in a memory of ribs breaking beneath her hands and the buzz, buzz, buzz of her phone in her scrub pocket.
“That was once, I’m fine now.” Says, insists, doesn’t matter-
“It was once. You’ve stayed back since then. Let the others get to the front, content to fetch meds and supplies for them. It’s not like you. You aren’t like you.”
Of course I’m not like me, she wants to say, my husband is dead. I have one child who can barely leave the house, another who seems to think its her God-given role in life to get her to leave the house, a third who nearly failed math and English, and a fourth who won’t talk about what she’s feeling to anyone.
“What can I do to help you?”
“Transfer me again. Let me try again somewhere fresh.”
She’ll run out of departments eventually. She’s not all that sure what she’ll do when she gets to that point.
“I’ll do that,” the nursing director shifts in that squeaky chair, a painful record scratch across Baela’s senses, “but before I do, I want you to go home and ask yourself if walking into this hospital for work is the right thing for you to keep doing.”
What do you think I’ll do if I leave? Feel better? Where am I meant to go if I’m not here-
“Are you asking me to resign?”
“I’m asking you to do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself and your family. We’ve worked together for a long time, Baela, you’ll always have a place here if you want one. But think about it, let me know how you’re doing when you get back in.”
. . .
In another life, she comes home to him.
In that life, it’s just after seven in the morning when she steps in through the garage. The washing machine is running to her left and her girls are at the table eating. Her Jace is standing at the counter, pouring electrolyte mix into his water bottle and wearing his glasses that match Daenaera’s black frames. He smiles at her, calls her Bee, kisses her, says goodbye to their girls as they leave for school. He laughs as the door lock clicks under her hand and she playfully pushes him back against the kitchen cabinets to kiss him again.
It’s her favorite kind of day. The kind where she gets to see her girls before they go to school and where Jace doesn’t have to go into the office, the kind where they can spend a morning together doing whatever they want before she goes to catch up on sleep.
They’ll invite Cregan and Rickon over for dinner, go out to the dock to catch the last few days of warm swimming weather and sun for the year. They’ll stop for ice cream after, tan and warm and sunscreen-smelling, and she’ll wrap her arms around Jace from behind and let her chin rest on his shoulder while he looks at the menu above the registers.
In that life, she’ll take it for granted.
In this one, it’s not an option for her.
In this life, she comes home to an empty house, stuck too late at the meeting to say goodbye to the girls on their way out. The washing machine is still, silent, full of damp clothes that smell after sitting overnight. Alyssa must have forgotten to switch them like Baela had asked her too before leaving for the night shift. The jar full of plastic electrolyte sachets sits untouched in the pantry. It’s a flavor she doesn’t like, the girls don’t either, they bought it for Jace alone. His glasses are in a box in his closet with her wedding ring, his things tucked away out of sight in an attempt to be able to walk into any room of her home without constant, painful reminders.
She knows she should eat something but as she strips out of her scrubs and drops them into the hamper, any appetite for food that remains fades away into nothingness. Other appetites remain, frustratingly, infuriatingly, no matter how much she ignores them. Even when she does attempt to address them, it’s never enough, never quite right, never quite what her body wishes for.
It keeps her from her own bed, now perpetually made up with the decorative pillows in place, a glorified dressing table used only for laying out her clothes or packing her suitcase when they go to see her grandmother in New York. They’d gone over the summer, at Rhaenys’ insistence, to celebrate Baela’s 39th birthday, though she hadn’t felt much like celebrating. But it’d been good for the girls to get them away from it all and let them be pampered and spoiled the same way that Baela and her sister had been after her mother’s death.
As good as it was for them though, Baela was all too aware that the trip felt like a blatant attempt by her grandmother at buttering up the girls to move there. It was nothing new, it didn’t surprise her all that much. She’s even considered it more than once, wondered if she could give them a better life in a new place, somewhere farther away from the landmines of painful reminders that seemed to haunt everywhere they went. Let her girls be spoiled and pampered with shopping trips and summers in Europe and glittering bracelets with their birthstones for as long as she could. They deserve it, don’r they? After all they’d been through?
And then she’d see Daenaera in the front seat of Rickon’s car, smiling for the first time in far too long, and all thoughts of leaving would fade away.
. . .
Later, she’d blame it on her hazy mind, on waking up over-warm and fuzzy, stumbling away from the couch with weak knees to get a glass of water and pull herself together.
The lawn mower hums outside, the sound blurred just enough by the insulation and the sound dampening windows that she’d slept through most of it. Cregan’s text blinks up at her from her phone screen, sent an hour earlier letting her know it’s him out there. As if anyone else mowed her lawn without her asking these days. She’d planned on hiring someone for the job, had mentioned it once, and suddenly Cregan cared more about lawn maintenance than he ever had in his life.
He likes feeling useful, Aly had said a few months before, ice cubes cracking between her teeth, and he’s real generous about it.
Something about Aly’s tone had told Baela that she wasn’t just talking about lawn care anymore. She’d shaken her head at the other woman, laughing and flushed in a way that she didn’t want to examine too much in that moment, and Aly had bumped her boot against Baela’s pretty blue heels with a grin.
Maybe she’ll have to blame it on Aly then, for putting such thoughts in her head.
She wakes in time, brewing a pot of coffee and eating a peanut butter sandwich to the soundtrack of the lawn mower through the windows and the cooking channel still playing in the living room. The trouble comes when she went to the washing machine to restart it, adding fresh detergent to the drum and closing it as the lawn mower quiets and the back door opens behind her. The late-summer heat seeps in through the doorway as Cregan steps inside, followed by the smell of cut grass and sweat.
“Hey, work go alright?”
She shrugs, adjusting the settings on the washer, “Could have been better, yours?”
The word trails off as she turns towards him, his hand pulling the hem of his shirt up to wipe the sweat off of his face. She should be able to ignore the prolonged flash of bare skin and belly, how many times had she seen him without a shirt on at the lake? The pool? While absentmindedly changing in those exhausting newborn days when Rickon had puked down the back of his shirt? It should be easy to ignore, she knows that Cregan has no seductive plans with it, in his mind it’s nothing but innocent, routine, nothing out of the ordinary.
Unfortunately for her, it is not innocent, and any and all thoughts in her head disappear off the face of the earth at the sight.
“It was good.”
Yes, it very much is, Baela’s traitouous mind whispers, the rest of her just struggling to catch up. What had she asked him about? Work?
“You mind if I use the shower? The kids’ll be home soon and I was thinking maybe we all go out for dinner tonight.”
The shower. Her thoughts rapidly begin to spiral in ways that they really shouldn’t be-
She manages to make some kind of affirmative sound, turning back to the dryer and opening it up as if that will cover up her complete inability to form words. Unfortunately for her, it’s empty, with nothing but a lint tray to busy her hands with as Cregan walks towards the kitchen and out of sight.
The shower, the shower, the shower, swirls around her brain like water going down a drain. She drops the lint tray back into the slot and covers her face with her hands. Faintly, she hears the bathroom door shut. The bathroom where the shower is. The shower Cregan is in. The shower where Cregan is naked-
Everything is fine, she wants to scream, but instead settles for whispering it into her hands over and over again, this will pass, I just need to be normal about it.
I just need to be normal about it.
. . .
Baela’s not good at just being normal about it.
How can she be when she’s sitting across from Cregan at a Mexican restuarant and his hair’s still wet? It’s scrambling her thoughts, which on top of the day she’s already had is not what she needs. He’s real generous about it, Aly taunts in her mind, rudely. This is not okay. This is anything but okay. Cregan’s off limits in so many ways and this is clearly just her body seeking out a familiar source of comfort as a substitute for the comfort she can’t obtain. Hasn’t obtained for months. She is simply not built for having dry spells. Aside from recovering from the births of her daughters, the last dry spell she’d had was when she was still a sixteen year old virgin.
She occupies her restless hands with tearing a straw wrapper into tiny, tiny pieces, littering the table with them until a broad hand covers both of hers.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
So much. I want to climb you like a tree.
She barely holds back a cringe. Too much. Way too much.
Your best friend, my husband, is dead. They want me to resign at work. I honestly should but I’m not about to admit that to anyone but myself. I can’t tell you I want to climb you like a tree because that could implode our entire lives and I’ve barely even processed it myself. I don’t want to be someone who uses you.
His hand’s on hers and it feels like fire, which is not helping.
What saves her is Daella accidentally knocking over a water glass. Ice and water and sweetener packets float towards the table edge as Cregan’s hand rips away from her own to reach over Alyssa and Daella to grab the cup. Daenaera drops a handful of napkins into the mess as Jocelyn pulls more from the dispenser, the waitress already headed their way with the carafe for a refill and more towels.
It gives her time to compose herself, to sip at her own water while holding out more napkins with the other hand, to look anywhere but the broad expanse of Cregan’s back. To focus on her children, who don’t need any more complications in their lives. They’ve suffered enough without her being reckless in any way with the most involved and stable adult in their lives.
“I’m fine,” She tells him eventually, when he finally turns back to her with that look on his face because of course even distracted he wouldn’t forget that he’d asked her a question, “I’m just missing him today, you know?”
Cregan’s eyes soften, “Yeah, I know.”
He reaches out and squeezes her hand then, more her wrist than anything, so quick that she thinks for a moment that she’d imagined it.
. . .
They send the kids off to get ice cream down the street, Cregan stopping her outside the restuarant while the rest go ahead.
All she can focus on is her daughters’ purses hanging from one of his hands, the straps hooked around his fingers, baby pink and silver and stuffed animal keychains against the dark wash of his jeans. Useful, Aly’s voice says, dutiful.
“You know,” Baela says, “You don’t have to mow my lawn.”
Or take my car to put gas in it, or change the oil, or get up on the ladder to change out the batteries in the smoke detectors-
Cregan just shrugs, like he always does, “Why wouldn’t I?”
Because it’s not your lawn to mow? I’m not your wife, they aren’t your children-
She should take it off his hands, should tell him to stop, but she’s weak when it comes to this, so she doesn’t. She’s selfish, when it comes to him, because he always stays. Sometimes it feels like he can read her mind, though she’s not sure if she wants him to be able to now.
“The hospital wants me to resign.” It stumbles out of her, her arms crossed over her chest, clinging to comfort, “For a little while, at least. Or maybe they’re just saying that to make me think I have more of a choice. I don’t know.”
“Do you want to resign?”
Did she want to keep walking through the same doors that let her out into a world where Jace was dead? Did she want to keep walking down the halls where she stood as he breathed his last? Forever trapped with the phantom feeling of that little girl’s ribs breaking beneath compressions and the suffocating feeling of disbelief that followed?
But Jace had been so proud of her becoming a nurse. He’d put his own career aside to take care of the girls and Rickon while she was in nursing school, had been the most dedicated stay at home husband and father to give her the career opportunities she’d fought for since her mother had died. If she left nursing, would it make his sacrifices mean less?
“I don’t know what I want.”
He doesn’t tell her what he’d do. He doesn’t tell her what Jace would want her to do. Instead he just reaches out and squeezes her shoulder, lingering like they have any right to touch. Like he knows how horrible she is on the inside and understands it all too well. Her hand comes up to hold it in place, warm through the fabric of her shirt.
She doesn’t want to let go, wants this tether to the earth and to living and to feeling something after all these months of numb and pain.
She does anyways, to keep Jocelyn from seeing it when she turns around to wave them closer.
Cregan carries the purses in both hands, after that, keychains jangling, the sound echoing in her head with every step.
. . .
She stands in Jace’s closet that night once the girls have gone to bed and presses her face into the rows of hanging shirts.
The smell is fading, but tonight he’s still there. A ghost of him in the fabric, she’ll cling to it for as long as she can. She digs through his coat pockets for signs, because that’s what he would do, isn’t it? Always watching for lucky numbers and looking up the odds. Knocking on wood and cracking open the fortune cookies to read what wisdom they held.
Today is a good day for change, she finds in the pocket of one of his dress pants, paper wrinkled, and laughs until she cries.