This is the result of a very bad day and having the urge to listen to Reba McEntire. I wanted to write something to let my emotions out and I remembered this song, "He Gets That From Me," by Reba and it inspired this.
BTW: This is me letting out emotion, so it may be a bit scatter brained.
Calleigh sat on the bed, her side of the bed. She looked at the clock, one-fifty a.m. She couldn't believe it had only been two weeks, twelve hours and seventeen minutes since that gun had rung out. The gun that shot Eric in the neck, those damn bullets always hit him were Kevlar didn't protect.
The bleeding had been too much and the doctors weren't able to do anything except make sure Eric left this world without pain.
Tim Pavel Delko, their thirteen-year-old son, insisted on being in the room when the time came to say goodbye. Calleigh couldn't deny Tim of the opportunity to say goodbye to his father and Eric to his son. Calleigh watched as the two exchanged their final goodbyes, both of them trying to hold back the tears in their eyes. However, neither Tim nor Calleigh could control the tears when they felt the life go out of Eric, each of them holding one of his hands as the line on the heart monitor went flat.
She sat here in their room now, thinking of that very moment, like she had many nights in a row. Once she looked passed the sadness and shock she had felt, Calleigh felt something else…she felt proud, proud of her son, Eric's son, their son. Calleigh didn't know many kids his age that could have been in that room to see their father die. Calleigh wouldn't have been able to if something had happened at the age of thirteen and she knew Eric wouldn't have been able to, either.
Tim had inherited traits from both sides of the gene pool, but the one that had somehow mixed was the strength both Eric and Calleigh possessed. Tim had gotten every drop of their strength and courage, and they both knew it. That's how Calleigh knew Tim would have been able to handle seeing Eric cross over.
Calleigh bit her lip as the memory flooded back to her, she didn't dare let herself go back twice in one night. She couldn't let herself fall apart; she had to be strong for Tim. She was all he had left…and he was all she had left. This whole thing had bonded them together in a way they didn't think possible.
Calleigh and Tim had always been close, she wasn't sure if it was because he was in ways like Eric, who she had always found connections with, or because he was in ways like her and they found things in common to talk about. Calleigh was surprised, as Tim grew up, how he had seemed to inherit a few of her traits. She had guessed, since he got Eric's looks that she had been overruled in his DNA structure, but Tim had gotten one or two things from Calleigh. Her fear of ants, her unmorning like-person attitude and an uncanny capability to shoot were just a few.
Calleigh couldn't stand staying in the room that Eric and her had spent so many nights together in another second. She slid on her slippers and walked out, hurriedly but quietly. The whole house was cold, but Calleigh knew turning up the thermostat or sliding on some heavier clothing wasn't going to make the slightest difference, so she paid the chill no mind.
She sat herself down on the couch and hugged one of the pillows to her chest, wishing that her body would give out and let her sleep. She hadn't had a decent night sleep in a fortnight and she probably wasn't going to for a long time. She knew time would heal this ache, for her and Tim, but she wished time would hurry up. She wanted herself and Tim, more so, to escape this agony.
Tim was coping with Eric's death, better than Calleigh in some ways, but she saw every time Eric was brought up in conversation how a flash of pain would cross his features. The pain she saw made her wish more desperately that there were a way to bring Eric back, just so her son wouldn't have to hurt so badly. She would give anything to have her husband back and have Tim's pain vanish.
Calleigh knew that both of these wishes were impossible to come true. Eric was gone, for good, and Tim would never fully recover from Eric's death, the emotional scars would haunt him forever. Calleigh knew they would haunt her, too, but she would have volunteered to have Tim's scars as well if there was a chance to do that…another wish that would never come true.
Calleigh should have known it was too good to last, to have an incredible husband who she had been madly in love with and a wonderful son who she would die for, amazing things like that never happened to her. So when Eric asked her to marry him and when Tim was born, Calleigh had never felt more blessed.
But Calleigh knew she was never to have the two of them physically next to her again, only in picture and old videos.
Calleigh conceded to that fact by picking her phone off the coffee table and flipping through her pictures to find one of Tim and Eric she had saved from a vacation they had taken a few months back...little did they know it would be Eric's last. She had taken it when the two were standing outside the hotel they were staying. They were both smiling, that was Calleigh's favorite part. Eric was just as handsome, a huge understatement, as her memory served and the sun had hit Tim just right to reveal the light freckles along his nose and she couldn't resist snapping the picture.
In spite of herself, a slight grin tugged on the corners of Calleigh's lips. She remembered how she had had the same freckles growing up, only coming out when the sun touched her a certain way. But as time went on they faded away, as she was sure they would do for Tim.
Calleigh sighed and closed the phone. Calleigh had thought that the photo would have hurt to look at and it did, but it also gave her a ray of hope.
Tears of sadness poured out of Calleigh's eyes as she was hit with the familiar reality that Eric was gone. She had had him for a limited amount of time and she could never get it back. She could never kiss his lips again and he could never hold her in his arms again.
But as the tears fell, a little voice inside her head told her that she was going to be okay and Calleigh believed it with every fiber of her being. She knew that somehow she and Tim would get through this, one day.
"Mom?" a voice said from behind her, the voice she needed to hear the most, Tim's.
Calleigh wiped the way the tears before he could see them.
"Hey, baby," she said, turning towards him.
It amazed her how much Tim looked like Eric, same brown eyes, facial structure, skin tone and he was even approaching Eric's height. But it wasn't just in appearance Tim resembled Eric. Tim also had Eric's love of the water and his over-protectiveness. He also acted like Eric in some ways and if that fact made it feel, almost that Eric was back, somehow reincarnated in the son they had created.
"Can't sleep?" she asked.
He shook his head, sadly; she knew that look…he had been thinking about Eric. She patted the spot on the couch next to her and he came over to take it.
"Are you okay?" Calleigh asked, gently, as she moved her hand up and down his spine in a loving motion.
He looked up at her and smiled his usual smile. The one Eric always used to give her since 1997 and the one Tim had always smiled since the day he was born.
Tim was defiantly Eric's son; anyone with half a brain could see it. They may have named Tim after Tim Speedle, but it was defiantly Eric living on through him. Calleigh knew that Tim wasn't Eric one hundred percent and she was actually happy about that. Tim Delko was Tim Delko and he had just got some of his father's best qualities, and Calleigh took comfort in knowing Eric's memory would always be held within Tim. She would in some ways have her husband in some small way, but she would always have her son.
"Yeah," he nodded in response to her question. "You?"
There he went again, resembling his father by caring more about her feelings than his own. A sad smile made itself noticeable on her face. She had no idea what she would do without this child, well, Calleigh guessed he really wasn't a child anymore, but Calleigh knew that Tim was the only thing making her get out of bed these days…just like Eric did on her bad days.
"I'm fine," she promised.
Calleigh put her cheek atop Tim's dark hair and held him tight, the same way she had whenever Tim had been sick when he was younger or if they ever shared one of their mother-son moments, like they were doing now.
Calleigh stared ahead at the door to see the backpack next to it.
"You know you don't have to go back to school right now if you don't want to," Calleigh whispered to him. He hadn't gone to school and she didn't go to work the last couple of weeks. With the funeral, visiting relatives and the pure pain of the situation, work and school were furthest from their minds.
But she had made the decision days ago she would try to go back to work and Tim had decided, independently, that he would go back to school.
"I'll be fine," he said, certainty in his voice.
"You sure?" Calleigh asked, lifting her head to look at him.
He nodded.
"Dad would want us to give it a shot," Tim said, voice growing a bit sad at the phrase he tried to speak.
"He would," Calleigh agreed. "But if you feel that you want to come home, call me and I'll come pick you up. Okay?"
"Okay," he nodded.
They sat in silence for a few moments before the clock chimed two in the morning.
"We should get some sleep," Calleigh said, getting off the couch the same time Tim did.
"Or try to," he mumbled.
Calleigh shrugged in agreement as they made their way down the hall. Tim's bedroom came first. Calleigh looked through the open door and was surprised to see the room was clean. The clothes weren't strewn across the room, there weren't any pieces of paper on the floor, the desk was straight and his bed was made. Calleigh had never seen his room so clean; the only thing that was proof that this was Tim's room was the guitar in the corner. It was the guitar Eric had given him for Christmas last year. Apparently, it had been Eric's great-grandfather's and it had been handed down through the generations. Tim loved the guitar and Eric was going to teach him how to play over the summer, unfortunately, fate had other ideas.
More than once, lately, Calleigh had heard him strumming the metallic strings as he attempted a chord or the chord's progression. Calleigh would sometimes hear him practicing into the early hours of the morning and she didn't have the heart to tell him to stop playing because it was keeping her awake. In truth, Calleigh loved hearing him play, even if he was only learning and she had to hear the same note over and over. She was proud he was trying so hard to learn and she had the feeling he was trying to make Eric proud by learning, little did Tim know that Eric had always been proud of him.
"'Night," he said, the two of them wrapping their arms around each other. "I love you."
"I love you, too," she whispered, tears threatening to make themselves present.
"So, your room actually has a floor," Calleigh smiled, trying to lighten the depressing atmosphere.
"Well, actually, at first it didn't," Tim said, leaning out of their embrace to smile at her.
Calleigh raised an eyebrow.
"Turns out the floor had actually decomposed into the junk I had had on it and I had to call someone to get it replaced," he shrugged with a grin.
A huge smile broke across Calleigh's face and she chuckled, relinquishing the tears that had almost made themselves visible.
"Well, that's one bill I'm not paying," she smiled. "Get some sleep."
He nodded and with that she left, closing the door behind her.
The second the wooden door came between mother and son, Calleigh's heart almost ruptured, despite the slight laugh they had just had. She thought about Tim's room, his obsession with suddenly needing to learn guitar and him wanting to go back to school. She thought she might have known what he was doing…bargaining. Thinking if he tried hard enough to achieve something, maybe it would get his father back.
Calleigh stood outside the door and looked at its coat of white paint, thinking about how on the other side a teenage boy was hurting and trying to win God's approval to bring Eric back to them. She prayed that Tim wasn't trying to do that, she knew it would just hurt him even more when Eric didn't return in the end.
Calleigh fought back the urge to scream, she couldn't heal her son and she couldn't get her husband back. The world was so cruel and life was so unfair. Eric and Tim were her whole world and she would have done anything to keep them with her until the day she died. But now her husband, the only man she had ever loved, had been ripped away from her and Tim.
Calleigh had the feeling she was probably going to be the most overprotective parent for the rest of the time Tim was home and probably after, too. She couldn't lose Tim; she had to keep her son safe, her and Eric's son safe.
Calleigh rolled her lips and was about to make her way to bed, but a voice from inside the room she had been staring at made her freeze.
"Dear God," Tim prayed. "Help Mom and I get through this, we miss Dad so much. Mom always has this look in her eye, like she is barely hanging on by a thread."
Calleigh choked on a sob as he spoke these words, he could see her pain. She automatically felt as though she had let Tim and Eric down. Tim for not being a strong mom and Eric for not holding her chin up high enough for her son.
Calleigh knew she shouldn't have continued to stay there and listen to this, but she was frozen.
"Tell Dad that Mom and I are going to be okay, once we get used to him being gone. Tell him that we love him and that we miss him very much…and please tell him that I think about him everyday, I wake up every morning forgetting that he isn't home."
At these words, Calleigh found herself with both hands over her mouth and tears racing out of her eyes and down her face before collecting on her fingers. All these nights she had felt pain because of Eric's death, this had added up to be the worst.
"And let Mom know it's going to be okay, I don't think she believes it," Tim whispered.
Calleigh wasn't sure if the prayer was finished or if Tim had more to say, but she couldn't stick around to find out. She began to walk numbly to her room and closed the door and buried her face in her pillow before even daring to uncover her mouth.
Her pillow muffled the sobs that escaped her and the pillowcase soon became soaked with saltwater like it never had been before. She cried for Eric, Tim, herself and the broken family they had become. Tim's prayer echoing all the while.
He sure misses you
Calleigh had had it wrong before, she realized now. Tim wasn't bargaining for his father's return, just some peace of mind and the need for the two of them to move on. But Calleigh also saw that moving on was going to be easier said than done. Calleigh could never see herself moving on from this. She would always see the dying Eric, the pain in Tim's eyes and the empty sheets on the other side of the bed, never to be filled again. But she hoped Tim would be able to move on, he had the rest of his life to live, he didn't need this to keep him tied down forever.
Calleigh tried to calm herself, not wanting to risk Tim hearing this.
Calleigh knew the final thing Tim inherited from her and it was something she hoped he wouldn't get. Calleigh had known the scars of a troubled childhood, from her fathers drinking problem, and she had made it her mission that Tim would never have to know what those kinds of scars felt like. But Tim now had wounds deeper than Calleigh's from her childhood and that every time he thought about growing up, there would be bittersweet memories.
Maybe genetics weren't the cause of that one, but it still seemed too ironic in Calleigh's eyes.
Calleigh knew she would never be able to say the words aloud, so she just thought the words.
Eric, we need you.
Calleigh knew that Eric heard her and that he had heard Tim as well.