A/N: I actually started this story considerably before "Wild Things," even before my previous one shot, but it took a while to get off the ground. "Wild Things" was just nice in that it confirmed some of my ideas about Lana and Grams.
When Lana finds out, on a mid-August day hot enough to melt the red paint off of the fire hydrants of Santa Martina, that she is going to have a baby, she screams. Then she cries. Then she calls her mother and does both of those things again.
"What am I going to do?" she asks. "I can't do this!"
"Honey," her mother says, "it's all right. Come over, we'll talk about this."
So Lana walks to her mother's apartment (she doesn't own a car, and Santa Martina is hardly large enough to warrant buying one) and sits at her table, and eats ginger snaps from a box, and decides to have an abortion.
"Maybe it's best for everyone this way," says Lana's mother. Lana knows her mother doesn't believe that, and she is absurdly grateful that she's pretending to. So she doesn't understand why she asks what she does. Maybe she just needs context.
"Mom," she says, "How did you feel when you found out you were going to have me?"
Her mother reaches across the table and smooths Lana's hair, a motion that takes her right back to her days of being twelve and telling her mom about her crushes and heartbreaks. Her tiny, practice heartbreaks.
"The happiest I'd ever felt," says her mom. "The absolute happiest. But that was a very different situation, Lana."
It must have been, because Lana thinks this must be the absolute unhappiest moment of her life.
"And what about…" Lana swallows. "What about Dad? How did he feel?"
Her mother pulls her hand away. "He was happy, too. Just as happy as I was, if not moreso."
Lana wonders if this baby's father would be happy, if he knew.
She supposes she'll never find out. She never did find out his name, or his face, or anything. She'd rather not know.
That alley off Broadway, the hands holding her down, muffled screams…
They're knowledge enough. She doesn't need a name.
"Mom, maybe I should keep it."
It's an act of resistance, she knows, a stupid one, a reckless one, but she can't bear the thought of letting her hatred of him control her decision.
Maybe one day she'll love her child the way her mother loves her.
Samantha finds the mitt when she's four. She runs into the kitchen, waving the mitt in the air.
"Mommy!" she shouts. "Mommy, is this yours?"
Lana will never be sure why she decides to lie, but she does. The mitt is hers, from the days when her father made her play softball. But she thinks of Samantha, yesterday, asking about her dad, and how she couldn't tell her. How she thinks she never will.
Samantha deserves something.
"No," she says. "It was your father's."