- -
She thought of how he would react when she brought his world crashing
down on him, as hers had done on herself. All because the stick turned
blue.
Blue as Ms. Patty's scarf that she kept rewrapping around herself,
perhaps in the hopes of swooping up some young man and trapping him
between the material and her body. Rory gave little thought to this as
she stared at her half-eaten burger and mound of fries going cold on the
table before her. Beyond her focus was Dean, carefully chewing his fries
that had gone cold as he waited for Rory to join him in the enjoyment of
their meal, eventually giving up and eating on his own, all the while
looking at her as she was lost somewhere in another universe.
"I'm tired," Rory finally announced. She glanced at the counter,
where Lorelai had brought a blush to Luke's face that he tried
frantically to hide. "I'm going home."
"I'll go with you," Dean said.
"Okay."
--
She lay in the hospital, her abdominal muscles host to some horrible,
unearthly-like pain.
She pushed and pushed, wanting to scream from the stabs in her gut.
But there was something holding her mouth closed, gagging her, like
cotton swabs shoved down her throat. Butterflies laying eggs in her
windpipe. It was as if her voice box had been torn out.
Something was wrong, and they cut into her with a special surgeon's
knife. The hurt of it was hellish, and her eyes burned till they turned
red.
She felt every stitch of pain, but still, she could not scream.
Something is wrong, where have I come to, where am I going, why am
I lost.
The abdominal pain squeezed her insides, inserting a pressure cooker
between her ribcage and pelvic bone. And suddenly, a baby was born. They
wrapped it in a blanket.
What isn't it crying?
She was sticky with sweat that looked like blood.
She tried to forget everything else, that she couldn't say hello, or
smile, as the baby was handed to her. She tried to forget that something
was wrong.
She pulled back the blanket to see its face, and found a large rock,
like the one in the pit of her stomach, beneath the cover. Try as she
did, she couldn't scream.
"Where is my baby?" she was dying to ask, to questioningly accuse,
over and over.
But then she was simply dying, slipping, slipping, and fading away.
--
Someone was pinning her limbs to the mattress, stilling her while her
body went wild! Frightened, furious, she opened her eyes.
"Rory! Stop it, stop. Wake up," Dean pleaded. His voice was strained,
as if he'd been saying similar things in this loud a pitch for some time
now.
She didn't know what else to do but to continue to fight his
restraints of her body, and let those horrific screams bubble up from
somewhere deep in her belly, where she hoped something still grew.
"Stop... stop..." His voice was breaking, splitting into pieces like
the insides of her brain. And she forced herself to stop the strangled
cries, the 'Exorcist' bodily impressions.
Things weren't so whole in this moment. They were more like an
unsolved Rubik cube, scattered and in need of greater help than was
being given.
--
Her eyes worked to focus on the unruly four year-old that stood
before her. "I hate you!" her child screamed.
She saw herself screaming, closing it all out, crouching in a ball in
the corner of a room filled with an old crib, a changing table, a mobile
singing its wordless song while she covered her ears and closed her
eyes.
The child kicked furniture, dented the walls with small sneakers.
Reinvented the term "out of control".
Dealing was not a thing in the cards as her maturity shrank until it
collided with the holes in the plaster decorating the room all around
her. She screamed along with the child, and it couldn't be determined
whose vocal chords were the winner.
But still, the mobile's tune played on.
--
Rory couldn't keep her eyes open, though she fought the droop of her
eyelids like crazy. She didn't want to keep visiting these worlds in
which she was alone with her terror and futures that she couldn't handle
or control.
Three days in bed, thrashing around on the sheets, hair tangling on
the pillow, cold sweats soaking her pajamas and the sheets. Miserable
days, in which she felt alone, even when her eyes were open, and Dean
was there, his expression clouded, his lips closed, now afraid of
everything he might say.
--
She saw a toddler, running before her on the expanse of a beach,
squealing with laughter as she laughed, too, running to catch up.
Everything was beautiful -- the ocean waves, the tiny footprints in the
wet sand.
Suddenly something grabbed her ankles from behind, and she fell, her
face smashing into dozens of seashells that cut into her skin so that
she would never look the same again. No one would recognize her with her
scarred features. Her throat muscles tightened up, restricting any sobs
as blood rose from the many cuts and pooled in puddles beneath her face,
her crushed, broken features.
And when she looked up, her baby was gone, gone.
--
Rory couldn't run her fingers through her hair, short though it was,
when finally after eighteen hours straight, she climbed out of her bed
and stepped outside of her room. Seeking comfort, company, something
other than the insane things painted on her dreamful brain.
It was past nine in the evening as she approached her mother in the
kitchen.
Lorelai looked up from her humongous stack of junk mail to notice the
circles under her daughter's eyes. "Wow, have you ever slept? Ever?" she
asked, straight to the point. "In your lifetime?"
Rory's voice was scratchy, still sleepy in her response. "Help me out
here: do you always flatter me so?"
"Only when you deserve it."
Nods were a difficult thing on the stiff neck that Rory nursed with a
rubbing hand as she took a seat next to Lorelai at the kitchen table.
"I was wondering when you were going to make your grand re-entrance
into life," Lorelai said, and then her voice gained the concern that had
been missing in the conversation. "Dean and I have been really worried.
But every time he wakes you up, he gets a severe slapping, and I haven't
been able to go into that room, hearing the tales he's been telling
me...
"What is it you're so upset about, hun?"
"Bad dreams," Rory offered simply, as if any of it was that simple.
"Where is Dean?"
"He's camped out on the couch. I've been leaving him alone for the
few short hours he'll sleep every day, when he can stop worrying about
you for enough seconds to let his subconscious close his eyes."
Rory sighed. "I miss him whether I'm asleep or awake."
"You miss him being the pincushion." Lorelai grinned.
"No." Rory was so serious, her sighs long and grating. "Did you ever
have bad dreams, when you were pregnant with me?"
"God, yes. I'd have ones where I was drunk when I signed the birth
certificate, naming my daughter 'Nathan'. I'd have ones where you came
out of me with a cone head. Easy to push out; harder to deal with in the
end. Those were the dreams when I had to name you 'Nathan' to take the
focus off of the obvious.
"And then there was this one dream. I went to the cupboard, and there
were no more jelly beans! You had eaten them! Which was so
freakishly incredible, because you had done it while inside of my belly
without my knowing about it."
Lorelai couldn't read the disgruntled expression on Rory's face, and
even if she could, she wouldn't have been able to understand the depth
of what it meant. Rory saw her mother's life as being full of roses,
while hers was currently spliced with thorns. She saw no point in
voicing this, and in defeat, she headed back to her room.
"Hun?" came the hesitant voice from behind her.
Rory stopped walking, as only a few more steps would take her out of
her mother's vicinity. "Yeah?" she asked without turning around.
"Maybe we should think of something to help you get some real rest.
Because, babe..." Lorelai's voice was so concerned that Rory didn't need
to be facing her to absorb the emotion. "I'm worried about you."
She sighed. "Like pills?"
"Your grandmother's suggestion. Of course, she was in the throes of a
major hangover ala those ingenious venom creations at the time,
so her sanity was even less visible than usual..."
"Find a time when I'm too tired to pelt you with the little pills in
your hand. I guess I have to go back to sleep eventually." Rory craned
her neck to squint at her mother out of the corner of her eye. "But
prepare for a wrestling match if I'm not ready yet."
And back to her room she trekked, leaving Lorelai with the idea of
following her own mother's hasty suggestions swirling to a whirlwind in
her stomach.
--
After three days of nothing but sleep, Rory refused to sleep for the
next three. Terrified of her dreams, of the fact that they were coming
from her subconscious and robbing her of all spirit, she forced her eyes
to stay open, only allowing them to close in short blinks.
On the third day at noon, the knock at her open bedroom door
reverberated, echoed, off the empty walls in her skull. "Rory?" came the
voice, so slowly into focus.
She turned around in the chair at her desk. "I am Jack's comatose
spirit." Her voice was raspy, her throat dry. She took another sip of
her water, eyeing Dean and his confusion.
He kept being careful around her in her waking hours, tip-toeing
around her skeletal structure as though it would soon burst into sand.
She couldn't say that his position was a wrong one to take, as she, in
her mental stupor, kept poking at her wrist bones, wondering how things
so skinny could support a hand's weight, let alone the appendage of a
filled coffee mug.
His steps weren't as careful this time as she stretched to raise a
brow, wanting to tell him... something. Surely there was... something,
she needed to say. He reached her, and lowered himself in a crouch,
looking up at her face as she sat in the chair, focusing on looking back
at him.
Wetting his lips, his adoring gaze turned sour with worry or perhaps
guilt of some kind, he asked, "How are you?"
"Tired." It was honesty, and mostly all that she could comprehend.
Dean nodded at this. He was aware of the hours she was clocking. "Why
don't you go to sleep?"
She tilted her head, her eyes meeting his as squarely as she could,
though it was much like being drunk and having to touch your nose with
your finger. And she just gave him that stare, the one that she hoped he
could read. He always was good at reading her. It made her feel special,
like one of those books she hadn't been able to focus on for a week now.
She missed her books. But though her mind wandered, she stilled her
gaze, making it a goal to continually focus on Dean's eyes. The wet eyes
that held a sheen, like the evenly separated screen of a sprinkler,
holding back the rest of the droplets. Was he trying not to cry for her?
"Rory?"
"Your eyes are like the ocean."
She couldn't tell if he guffawed, or coughed, or choked on a sob as
his head snapped down, taking his face away from her view.
"The color..." she tried to explain. "It's blue, and like... also
green."
"Rory," and his voice was a sob. He wouldn't look at her anymore. She
clicked her tongue in sympathetic fashion, and reached her hands out to
him. Unsatisfied when they wouldn't reach beyond the chair, she slid off
of the chair, and fell as gracefully as possible beside his bent knees.
She took his head in her hands, and hugged it to her chest. And she
thought. She groped for her intelligence.
She swallowed deeply. "Dean..." She kissed the top of his head, her
lips landing somewhere in the middle of that gorgeous mop of hair. Three
times quickly she pecked, and then the fourth time, she let her lips
linger, the smack sound coming off silent as she pulled away. "Look at
me, because... it's too hard to understand anything when you're not
looking at me and telling me why. Why any of this is happening."
He looked at her then, his head held captive in her confused grip,
grimy tears apparent on his face. "I'm going to tell Lorelai that we
shouldn't give you that sedative again."
"Was that the pretty pink pill that I took with chocolate milk?"
"Look what it's doing to you... And still you don't sleep."
"Is that why..." She frowned and thought. "Is that why I'm all Johnny
Depp on acid, and quoting 'Fight Club' randomly when nothing else makes
sense?
"Captain on acid... He was a Pirate." She giggled nonsensically. The
desperate way Dean looked at her made her stop with that noise.
"You know what's funny?" She didn't know why she kept talking, why
she couldn't stop. "That pill looked a lot like birth control." Now
there was no stifling of her giggles. There just was no hope of taking
that one away from her.
Dean sighed, and now suddenly she was tired again. He gently took
hold of each of her hands, pulling them away from the sides of his face.
He laced her fingers around his back side so that she leaned into him,
and she rested her cheek on his chest as he pulled her into his lap. And
held her there.
"You need to sleep again," he said in a soothing, calming voice that
rumbled just slightly from his chest cavity, no longer stirring the
echoes in her brain. She figured if she could stop things from stirring
in there, eventually her head would stop feeling like soup.
"Rory?"
She inhaled his scent. "I don't want to..."
His voice was a whisper now, and he rubbed gentle circles along her
lower back. Her clasped fingers felt heavy, and she fought to keep them
from separating and falling to the carpet.
"I'm afraid," she told him meekly, sorting through her thoughts,
trying to remember why she had the priorities that were set.
"I know," came his whisper. "But you can't stay awake forever."
The sedated part of her brain had arguments that were buried in
heavy, fuzzy snow. She didn't open her mouth to protest again, and after
eight more minutes of the slow circles Dean drew on her back, the last
thing she comprehended was the feeling of moisture as his lips touched
her neck in "Goodnight".
--
Three a.m. came, and after a dreamless sleep, Rory hurriedly
untangled herself from Dean's sleeping limbs to rush to the bathroom,
making it just in time. Up came her chocolate milk, some macaroni and
cheese, and something tinted pink. Up came a great deal of liquid from
some depths way down inside of her.
Dean, unafraid of seeing her sickly times, snuck into the bathroom to
quietly plop down beside her, as she retched and retched. They'd had the
conversation before, about how seeing or hearing someone puke equaled
the urge to puke, according to Rory. But things just weren't that way
with Dean. This was one time of many that he'd sat beside her, his
presence meant to soothe her in her pain.
Rory finished with her vomiting, tears of exertion trailing down her
face. She groaned, a long, lingering sound, then placed an arm over the
toilet seat on which she placed her head. Looking weakly to Dean, her
voice was winded and small as she said, "What?"
Dean couldn't seem to swallow, for God, she had never looked quite
like this. "We're gonna have a baby," he said.
Rory found a hint of a smile from somewhere deep within her. "Yeah...
I guess we are."
--
She was vomiting again, and Dean was nowhere to be found. There was
nothing but terror in the screams that tore out of her throat with every
retch that she endured.
And out came a baby, straight from her windpipe, up her throat. She
gagged out some final fluid, and then gasped, clutching at her neck,
seeking air to breathe, to calm.
The baby in the water, she encountered as she looked down, would
barely tip the scale to three pounds. It was like a baby doll, covered
in red slime, and stomach fluids. As it wailed and flailed its limbs in
the contaminated toilet water, she thought, "It's too small. It wouldn't
survive anyway."
It wouldn't survive anyway, and so she sat there, some force holding
back her savior limbs, and let it drown.
--
Dean sat in the dark of Rory's bedroom as she made whimpering sounds
in her sleep. The stars sent weak illumination in from the window, to
highlight his olive t-shirt and boxers. The gloom of the moment
threatened to overtake him until he was whimpering, himself, eyes open
only to a dreamscape of madness.
He leaned his head back in Rory's desk chair, reliving the moment
when he could see his baby on the ultrasound screen, until the doctor
pressed a button, and tore the picture away.
- -
to be continued...
