Madeline Virginia Conrad always shrugs compliments about her name off and asserts, with more conviction than a five-year-old should be allowed to possess, that it is, "really nothing special". Her mother, Rayna Queen-of-Country Jaymes, has heard her say those three words many times, sometimes followed by a more articulated explanation, "I was named after my grandmothers."
Madeline was Teddy mother's name, she died of breast cancer just a couple months before Rayna's due date, and Virginia was of course Rayna mother's name. It is all true, what Maddie replies to the innumerous "yours is such a pretty name" compliments she gets from strangers she's introduced to. Only it isn't.
Well, part of it isn't.
Teddy's mother was indeed a Madelynn but with a "y" and a "n" that somehow never rose questions about the obvious misspelling in Maddie's name. It wasn't a misspelling at all to be fair. It was just another secret added to the long list of lies that Rayna used to update almost on a daily basis since pretty much the day Maddie had been conceived. It was probably the whitest lies of them all, but a lie nonetheless. Teddy never questioned Rayna's choice to spell his mother's name differently, Teddy never questioned any of Rayna's choices, in part because he still couldn't believe his luck in being married to such a wonderful woman, and in part because he knew Rayna was always one undesired question away from slipping through his fingers like sand through an hourglass. She was never his, deep down inside he'd known it all along, but that didn't mean he didn't get to pretend she was. Teddy Conrad has lied about the paternity of their daughter to the whole world for five years now, Rayna Jaymes, on the other hand, has lied about it for five years nine months and eight very uncomfortable days.
They had taken the paternity test when Maddie was fresh out of the womb, quite literally. Teddy didn't want to wait and Rayna didn't see how postponing the inevitable would be of any use. So they asked the doctors to do the test right away, while Rayna was still in the delivery room getting stitched up after giving birth to what she honestly thought was a buffalo while she was pushing it out. Even though her precious baby girl didn't resemble a buffalo in the slightest, still there she was, forty-five minutes after her daughter had made her grand entrance into the world, lying on a reclining operating table getting stitched up like a turkey on Thanksgiving day's eve. The paternity test results, to no one's great surprise other than Teddy's, said what Rayna had known since the day those double pink vertical lines appeared on the white stick she had peed on five minutes earlier. Madeline Virginia Conrad was a seven pounds and thirteen ounces Claybourne-Wyatt DNA agglomerate and there was little anyone could do or say about it.
In all fairness, no one will do or say anything about it for a long time, but that's a story for another time.
Teddy stood his ground when, only two hours after Maddie's birth, the doctor came in to communicate them there was no need to wait for the paternity test results, neither his nor Rayna's blood types matched the baby's. Tandy muttered a "fuck" under her breath and Lamar Wyatt didn't even bother to make a facial expression, he just excused himself and walked out of the room as if karma had just served him right. Teddy wiped away a single tear that had escaped his eye and took Rayna's hand in his, "She will always be my Madelynn," he said bringing her hand to his lip and kissing it tenderly.
Rayna smiled up at him, the same smile one could offer when called out as a runner up at a beauty pageant competition. That brown haired precious little girl she was holding in her arms was never going to be his Madelynn. Maddie was Deacon's Madeline, Deacon-the-love-of-her-life's Madeline and although he would probably never find out about it, she was hell-bent on keeping this teeny tiny secret to herself too. Teddy didn't need to know that an "i" and an "e" had tied that beautiful child to her biological father long before she even saw the light of day, he didn't need to know that Rayna had specifically asked to fill out the birth certificate herself, he didn't need to know then and he still doesn't to this day.
"It's nothing special," Maddie says now about her name and maybe it's for the best she doesn't know how extra special her name is, because if she did Rayna wouldn't know how to explain, to make her understand, that that unbelievably treacherous act of selfishness was, most of all, made out of love.
Rayna had never been an apprehensive, overprotective or even an anxious person, until she fell pregnant for the first time. There had been pregnancy scares in her life before, sure, she did date a living semen factory for almost eleven years on and off, after all; and he did deliver with the punctuality of a Swiss watch. Rayna never travelled without a pregnancy test in her suitcase; after the fourth pregnancy scare in a year she reckoned it would be just more sensible to buy them at the drugstore along with tampons, leaving whichever she'd get to use that month in the hands of the Guy Upstairs. It's not like they didn't use precautions, because they did, it's just that tour life is a bitch. You wake up one day and you're on the other side of the Country and it's hard to keep tabs on how many pills are left in that pill case when you can't even keep track of the time zone you're in. More times than not Rayna would find herself with a Monday pill or a Thursday pill too many and knew she had screwed up once again that month. They even tried condoms for a while but having sex on tour busses was no walk in the park, neither was spending fifteen minutes in the bus claustrophobic toilet rummaging into her vagina, praying to God she won't have to go to the emergency room to extract that damn piece of - clearly useless - latex out of there. And then there were the many drunk nights and the quickies in between sets and…yes, it was a wonder Rayna and Deacon hadn't recreated a Southern version of the Bradford family by the beginning of their third tour. All in all, Rayna had grown accustomed to that three minutes long I'm-gonna-shit-my-pants fear that threatened to choke her every time she'd take yet another pregnancy test. Or so she thought, until she indeed got pregnant and spent the better half of those three trimesters wondering when that fear would finally choke her to death.
At first it was the spotting that scared the living shit out of her in the first trimester. Turns out it was, as the three doctors she consulted said, "implantation bleeding". Which she had no idea what it was, but was more than fine with the knowledge that it was nothing serious.
Then came the food fear, which basically consisted in Rayna calling up her ob-gyn before and after every meal - weekends included. Too much caffeine, unpasteurized cheese, even eggs, anything would cause her to worry and wonder if it was suitable for a pregnant woman.
The greatest of them all was what Tandy mockingly called the "I killed my baby" fear. That one went on for quite some time and while it lasted Rayna had been a pain in the ass to absolutely everyone who was unlucky enough to cross her path. "I can't feel her", "I think I lost the baby", "Something is not right", were the sentences Rayna would repeat about five or six times a day to her next of kin and her not-so-next-of-kin as well. She never knew she could ever get so paranoid, and yet there she was shushing a room full dudes dressed in suits, because she thought she might have heard a teeny tiny movement in there, only to later profusely apologize to the eleven people in the room for the "false alarm".
Rayna had many false alarms, not that anyone was counting, but yes, a lot of false alarms. She had read hundreds of books about pregnancy to the point that Bucky had to beg the owner of an east Nashville bookstore to find another book Rayna could read, even in another language, he would have hired someone to translate it if that's what it took to make Rayna stop acting like the utterly crazy hormonal bitch she was. Every single book said pretty much the same damn thing, which Rayna didn't refrain from quoting to anyone who would argue she was fussing over nothing, "The first fetal movements should be felt by the mother between the sixteenth and twenty-second week of pregnancy."
Of course Rayna was well into her twenty-fourth week and still nothing: no popcorn popping, no goldfish swimming around, no butterfly wings fluttering, nada de nada. She had convinced herself she was the worst mother walking the Earth and would make an even more terrible one once mother nature left her taking care of that baby all on her own. She'd found a brand new item to add to the already long list of reasons to cry herself to sleep at night (along with the fact that the man lying next to her in bed wasn't Deacon, and that the ring on her left hand wasn't Deacon's and that there was the smallest chance the baby growing inside of her wasn't Deacon's). She now was also an awful mother who couldn't even distinguish a baby movement from an internal fart, as it turned out.
Rayna was growing more and more insufferable with each passing day, Teddy had given up on consoling his wife when she threw her two thousand dollars Valentino stilettos at him across the room, missing his left eye only by a few inches. Tandy had stopped visiting her sister when she realized she had become allergic to her sister's incessant whaling, not even making it an hour without starting to feel a weird itchiness all over her body whenever they were in a room alone. So she settled for brief daily phone calls. Bucky held the fort for all of them with stamina: first of all because, unlike everyone else, he got paid for it, and second of all because he knew that behind that tickling hormones bomb stood a broken woman. A broken woman who'd ask him to make a call every Sunday at ten in the morning sharp to the Riverside Center, to check on the progress of a certain inmate who'd stolen her heart and was not going to give it back, probably ever.
It was a rainy fall afternoon when it finally happened, when all Rayna's fears about her adequacy to motherhood dissolved.
She was driving in Teddy's car back home from the studio, it had been yet another fruitless four hours long recording session. Paul and Dave, the new producers she was working with, were getting tired of her diva attitude and made it clear to Rayna that this album was going to get done whether people could recognize the guitar riff on This Love Ain't Big Enough as Deacon's or not. Rayna had burst into tears the moment the elephant in the room was addressed and the session had been instantly cut short.
It's not that she didn't know she had to do this without Deacon backing her up while they were lying every track, it's just that she didn't know how to do that, she never had to before.
Watty afternoon show was on the radio, but Rayna was having a hard time focusing on anything but how uncomfortable driving had become with this growing bump taking up all the room between the steering wheel and herself. She could barely strap the seatbelt over it these days. Watty announced his guest for the day, or rather guests, a band named Yo La Tengo who was in Nashville recording their new album, as many bands had started doing in the late nineties when Nashville went from capital of country music to simply music city. Rayna had already heard of them, their cover of My Little Corner Of The World had been her absolute favorite song back in 1997. She'd forced Deacon to learn it on his guitar and play it whenever it suited her, which would usually occur in the dim light of some dirty motel room where the air smelled like sex and cheap tequila.
Rayna would sing to him to, "Come along with me to my little corner of the world." Deacon would shake his head at her and smile that gorgeous smile of his, strumming his heart out on that guitar until the song was over and their little corner of the world would become a tangle of sheets and sweaty limbs. Those were happier times, long gone happier times, and Rayna didn't need to remember them in the broad light of the day too, that was something she used to save for the sleepless nights.
Watty was interviewing the guys while Rayna's mind wandered to places it shouldn't have gotten close to, let alone explore, whilst driving. Then a new song, which would be featured on their still-in-the-making album, was announced and Rayna sighed while she got ready to listen to it, thinking they were surely one song ahead of her as far as album recording went. Music filled Teddy's SUV car and Rayna unconsciously started bopping her head up and down to the music.
Madeline, hair in your eyes
With the voice as soft as satin
Madeline, you'll surely find
Smiles from inside a worried glance
It was probably still a rough cut, but she was definitely enjoying listening to that song. She was drawn to it like a magnet and she couldn't quite figure out why.
You always kept me waiting
Somehow I never seem to mind
When the wind has caught your sail
Come back and see me, Madeline
There was something about this song, the music or maybe the lyrics, that felt familiar to her. It was like walking into a room and getting the distinct feeling you've been there before, a sort of dejà-vu. It was an odd feeling, but Rayna was six months pregnant and she had had her fair share of weird feelings in the past few months.
Madeline, after a while
They found your photo in a drawer
Madeline, from another time
I caught you standing in a door
When you were asked if we were lovers,
You replied you weren't sure
Rayna gasped and slammed her feet on the brakes just a few feet short of the vehicle in front of her own that had just stopped at a red light. She knew this story, she heard it before, no actually she felt like she'd lived it herself. She couldn't quite understand what was going on and then something even more illogical and inexplicable happened.
She felt a sharp kick right in the lower left side of her belly. It wasn't a delicate, almost unperceivable movement, it was a kick. A not-so-pain-free kick. Rayna gasped again at the totally unexpected event and brought her right hand to the left side of her belly at once. That's when she felt it again, another not so tiny movement. And then another. If she didn't know better she'd say her baby girl was kicking to the beat of the drum in the song that was still playing in the background.
If the fog should ever lift,
Come back and see me, Madeline
The light turned green, much to Rayna's disregard. Cars behind started honking in vain, there was no way Rayna would have let a bunch of Nashvillians ruin the moment she had been waiting for for months. Se rubbed her belly as her baby girl kept moving inside of it, restless for the first time, like she was making up for the time she'd spent in meditation in there.
Will you always keep me waiting?
Somehow I'm running out of time
When the wind has caught your sails
Come back and see me Madeline
Tears were now descending Rayna's cheeks and she was still in complete oblivion, until one of the by goers rolled his car' window down to shout unthinkable profanities at her. That's when her little pink bubble was burst and she put her car back in motion and started driving again. She was feeling a different million emotions and yet she was nowhere ready for the blow that would follow.
"That was Madeline, by Yo La Tengo," Watty's voice came through the speakers again. "Guys I would like for you tell our listeners about the story behind this song, the one you were telling me about while it was playing."
"Yeah, sure," a male voice came through. "We were going through demos for this new album, just looking for new material and then one day we came across this acoustic version of Madeline and we must say we all fell in love with it. We heard the writer was a little short on cash after losing his job on this big tour and would have sold the song to pretty much anyone," the band leader went on to explain, "So we called him up."
"Him being?"
"Much to our surprise I must say, him was Deacon Claybourne."
"Amazing songwriter that kid, so talented."
"Yes, very much so. In the end we met with him and he agreed to let us use the song. We got along with him so great right from the start that we asked him to stop by the studio when we would record it because we really wanted to do the song justice and he did. After a few session, we knew the song was lacking something, so we asked Deacon to help us out and he lent us his guitar skills, so the guitar you can hear playing in this song is Deacon's. We had the most amazing time with him. He's such a pro that man, we loved working with him."
"Yeah, on that note I would like to send Deacon our well wishes. Deacon, son, if you by any chance have the radio on and are listening to us right now please know that we love you and are all wishing a speedy recovery for you. We miss you around here buddy."
Rayna was crying hysterically by then, she stopped the car by the side of the road and leaned her forehead against the steering wheel. Deacon had written that song. No worse, Deacon had written that song for her and about her. And that hurt like a motherfucker, it really did. There was no soothing that pain, no matter how many somersaults her daughter was all of a sudden practicing in her belly, like that song had just brought her back from some winter hibernation, the joy of the moment had totally just been ruined. And then it hit her: she first felt her baby moving while she was listening to a song written by Deacon, and by no means could that have been a simple coincidence. That was for sure one last laugh the Gods had saved for their tragic story. She didn't know if the stars aligned or some weird chemical reaction took place, all she knew was that, according to the many books she had read, babies could hear music even inside their mother's tummies and her baby had reacted like that to a song Deacon wrote.
She was beyond any reasonable doubt sure now, growing inside of her was Deacon's baby. Madeline.
Deacon used to use different female names to refer to her in songs, some would be names Rayna hated that he would use only to piss her off, and some were names that she loved. She'd never heard this song before, Deacon had probably written it during the time they'd spent apart Rayna thought, before Madeline was conceived and after his fourth trip to rehab. Word around town was that Deacon was practically broke with all the money he was spending on his lake house mortgage and the money he had to send back home to Mississippi so that his niece would never find out what an empty fridge looked like. Rayna's heart broke in two when realization sank in that he was penniless because of her, because she had fired him, because she was the one he had bought that house for. When it came to paying for his current fifth rehab stint she didn't think about it twice, she'd paid the bill before Deacon even set a foot in the building.
Rayna cried some more, for the unborn baby he would never give his last name to, for the unfading love for that troublesome man that was still burning right into her chest and for a million other things that were in a way or another linked to those deep blue eyes and scruffy face.
She missed him. She didn't just miss him, she really really missed him. She felt his absence in a guttural visceral all-consuming way. The days she hadn't dreamed about him making love to her could have been counted on one hand. It wasn't just the pregnancy hormones, this may be her first rodeo so to speak, but it certainly wasn't the first time she had woken up sweaty, wet and gasping in the middle of the night with an incessant need to have him inside of her.
Rayna also missed her best friend Deacon, her confidante, her writing partner. That man had been everything to Rayna for a long long time, far longer than she dared to remember and now, for some weird joke of intergalactic proportions, she was carrying his baby and was married to another man.
The pain came back again, fresh as new. The crying and sobbing resumed. She desperately wanted to be the girl of that song again, she wanted to be the girl in the picture found in his drawer by his roommate Vince something like a decade before, when they thought they were doing oh-so-good at keeping their relationship a secret from everyone, scared that that stark reality would haveruined what they'd created in between late night writing sessions and early morning make out sessions. She wanted to be that innocent girl that discovered what love was with a man whom she loved and who loved her back just as passionately and unconditionally. She wanted to blush at radio interviewers who asked if she and Deacon Claybourne were lovers, she wanted him to be the man she'd proudly thank from up that stage if she won the CMA award she was nominated for the following week. Oh, how she wanted to look straight at that puppy eyed-incredibly handsome-sexier-than-should-be-legal man and say those words of gratitude to him again, like she had done many years before when she won her first CMA.
"Deacon thank you, I would not be here without you tonight. You are my partner in each and every sense this word can be granted of. I share this with you with equal gratitude and love that I share my every living day with you. I love you babe."
She wanted to say those three words to him again and again and again until she had no air left in her lungs to utter another word. And she wanted to tell him their baby first moved when she heard her daddy playing guitar on a song he had written for her mommy. But she couldn't do any of those things anymore and not just because she was a married woman, no - not because she had made a commitment for life to another man, but because Deacon was such a fuck-up that he had taken it all away from her, even the possibility than in the future, far or near that it might be, she could get him back to herself and back to their daughter. He had left her without as much as the shadow of a choice.
He and his stupid wind could go and fuck themselves, because he had made sure that, when he fell off the wagon for the fifth time, that wind would never ever catch her sail again. Not his wind, not this wind.
If you asked her, Rayna couldn't quite tell for how long she stood there, in her loving husband's car, crying over her long lost love. Madeline didn't stop moving ever since that day, she was probably waiting for her daddy to be, in some capacity, there when she would make her big debut. Rayna never referred to her unborn child as "baby girl" anymore from that day forward. She was Madeline. Just Madeline.
Deacon's and hers Madeline.
Certainly naming the baby after a song Deacon himself had penned was a risky move, it could have ruined her in more ways than one, but she was up for the challenge because she owed both her daughter and her father that much. And also because she wanted nothing more but to pronounce that name for the rest of her life and think of him every single time she would do so.
That day, on the side of the road, Rayna promised herself she would never cut a song Deacon wrote ever again and she did awfully good for a number of years.
When Deacon, many years later, will ask her why she didn't cut any of his songs anymore, she'll simply shrug and give voice to what would have been her biggest fear in all those years, "I don't know. It felt weird…maybe they were all about me or something."
"They are, I guess," He'll say as candidly as only Deacon Claybourne could say.
"Sometimes I wish I could do it all over again."
"What would you change?"
Rayna will think about it for all of one second, "Nothing….everything."
And she'll mean it. She wouldn't have traded her daughters or her career or her newfound stability for anything in the world. Yet again she would have probably given it all up if that meant she got to spend the life she always dreamed of with the man that still haunted her dreams, the life they, she and Deacon, were supposed to live together.
She doesn't cut his songs anymore and her daughter thinks her name is somewhat of a tribute to her deceased grandmothers, unaware that that very not-so-special name is indeed a tribute. A tribute to the love through which she was generated.
She was composed just like a melody, the sweetest melody of them all, an eleven years in the making song, devotedly put together note by note, lyric by lyric. Rayna looks down at her unfazed by compliments five-year-old again and smiles proudly at her.
She has to give it to herself, their Madeline is and will always be the most beautiful song they've ever written together.
Song: Madeline by Yo La Tengo.