My version of a possible Carla exit next year...
I once knew your father well, he fought tears as he spoke of your mother's health. I guess a part of him just couldn't return.
The door shuts behind them and silence engulfs the two of them. She isn't sure how to cope, she doesn't know how to move. But tenderly, she cradles the sleeping baby girl against her chest because she has to. Because what else can she do? Not even weeks ago she watched this little girl take her first breath. Then she watched her oldest, most dear friend take her last. Then, she watched a life fall apart. She watched as the nameless baby's father lost control of it all. The year 2016, he had said. How can this still happen? But it had and he knew better than anyone how pointless regrets are if you cannot change them. She always had listened to him better than he listened to himself.
He wouldn't look at her; he couldn't look at her. He hadn't even taken her home, leaving the helpless baby in the hopeless hospital where she had lost her mother and so, so much more. Michelle couldn't leave her there; she couldn't bare it. She remembers the aching torment Carla had gone through at the loss of her first daughter and she knows she'd never forgive them for giving up on this one.
She remembers a lot about her best friend, over the years. It's as though memories flash before her almost constantly and the green, green eyes of her daughter do little to help. She remembers the dirty, shoeless kid she had been back in the day and then the woman who was never without the most expensive pair of boots in the shop. People called her vain but Michelle knew what it meant to her. She knew those shoes symbolised where she'd come from, where she'd escaped, what she had never had. Over time, they came to symbolise everything she wanted to give her daughter and now, everything she would never be able to.
Eventually, they would come to symbolise everything Michelle would give the little girl she affectionately named Grace, everything Carla would want her to have. She remembers a conversation with her back when they were kids with a past far too old for their small age. Grace had been Carla's favourite choice for Ryan's name had he been a girl and it seemed fitting, something to keep her memory ever living, even if she wasn't.
As your guardian I was instructed well to make sense of God's love in these fires of hell. No I don't expect you to understand, just to live what little life your broken heart can.
Michelle sinks down onto the sofa of the flat that had once held so much hope for her best friend. It may have been the first place she ever felt truly loved, truly safe and with a chance of a normal life. It's eerily quiet, except the sound of Grace's gentle, unknowing breathing and Michelle think's she'd do anything to hear Carla's sharp tongue and biting comments cutting through the air. She knows she should put the baby down but she doesn't know how, as though letting her go is letting Carla go.
Nick.
He had told her the last thing he wanted was to be anywhere near the child he had conceived with his not incredibly long term partner. She knows it would have torn Carla apart, but she almost cannot blame him. Looking at the three-week old child was to look at Carla and she knew it was only going to get worse. She could imagine in years to come, hearing the little girl laugh and only hearing her mother. She felt an ache for the baby that would never know her mum, that would never truly understand the extent of her fight, of what she had come through only to have it taken away at the last hurdle. She had everything taken away when she was finally getting everything she hadn't even known she'd wanted. It was life's biggest tragedy. A sick joke. Cruel, but Michelle knew cruel all too well.
She doesn't even know she is crying but then again she rarely stops these days. Michelle understands loss better than most, she knows grief. Darkness. She knows it isn't poetic and beautiful how some might write it to be. It's angry and pain and a dark endless hole that engulfs you. And you miss them, every single day. That pain doesn't go away; Michelle knew as well as Carla had. You simply learn to live with it.
You'll always remember the moment God took her away, for the weight of the world was placed on your shoulders that day.
Michelle has her own home, and a husband waiting for her too. But she doesn't like to leave this place much. Sometimes, it still smells like Carla and for a minute it's all not true. She places the sleeping baby into a Moses basket beside her bed. Carla's bed. She has placed a top her mother used to wear frequently and spritzed some perfume in a vain attempt to make Grace feel close to her dead mum. She kids herself it's for that reason anyway.
She sleeps, but not peacefully. Deeply enough, though, to not hear the front door open and close and a ghost of a man make his way into the bedroom. He can barely breathe, seeing a dark haired, sleeping form in the bed he slept in with her so many times is too much to bare. He forces himself to look away, to look at the sleeping daughter that was made with a part of him and a part of her. The only part he had left.
"You should hold her." Her voice is soft and groggy from sleep and it sounds nothing like hers would have. Nothing will compare anymore.
"I can't-" He has never sounded so broken.
Nick's eyes don't leave the little girl who lays, awake now but silent, as though she knows not to disturb the moment despite having no idea of the fight she will one day face to ever feel okay, once she understood.
"When I were pregnant with Ry… Carla wanted me to call him Grace, if he were a girl."
"Is that what you've named her?"
Michelle nods, the duvet over her legs as she sits, watching the scene unfold. A broken father, a lost mother, an unknowing daughter. "Only for now, until you wanted to choose her proper name."
Nick shakes his head a fraction, "Carla would have liked that." He freezes, "That's the first time I've said her name, since…"
It doesn't take long for either of their tears to fall and before she knows what's happening, he is on the bed, sobbing against her shoulder and for a brief moment, Michelle feels like she is betraying her best friend. But then she realises, this is what she would have wanted. Pulling together like they had done for her so many times before, picking up the pieces of her mess, she would say. So she lets him cry, lets him whisper Carla's name over and over like he's praying she will somehow answer.
Maybe your light is the seed and the darkness the dirt. In spite of the uneven odds, beauty lifts from the earth
Eventually, Michelle rises and leaves the father with his child alone, for the first time. She pulls the door to, but not so much so that she can't hear if they need her. She makes herself a coffee in a cup she has no idea of the meaning behind, something only Nick and Carla would ever understand, then she settles onto the sofa, under a blanket that started the very beginning of what had blossomed into the little girl in the next room.
He wants to hold her so very much, but he is scared he will break her. Instead, he perches on the end of the bed and lets her tiny hand hold his thumb.
"Hello." He whispers, as though he doesn't have a million other things to say that she will never understand.
"Sorry I haven't been around. I guess you scare me a bit." He is close enough that she can study his face, as he does to her.
"We were going to have it all, us three. We really could have been good for each other." Pain. "Your mum was terrified of you, you know. She barely even got to meet you." His littlest finger of his spare hand strokes her cheek and he is surprised by how warm she feels against his skin when the last time he had seen her mother she had been so cold.
"She would have loved you a whole lot, I think. She already did. We both did." Silence, but warmth, something he hasn't felt in so long.
"I won't let you forget her. She wasn't a very forgettable person, Gracie." He's suddenly cradling her against his chest as he slumps against the wall and he doesn't know how either of them got there but he knows he feels like he has just come up for air again.
He knows Michelle isn't far, just the other side of the door and he doesn't know how, but he knows somehow, the three of them will get through it.
He doesn't think he'll ever get over her, but he doesn't think anyone ever should. But they'll get through it, because they have to.
Because she would want them to.
He doesn't know how to be a dad, he doesn't even know how to be okay anymore. But he knows he can still hear her sometimes, as though she is right beside him and sometimes he swears he can feel the warmth of her breath hot against his neck. He knows her, he knows she doesn't really like goodbyes.
That's how he knows they'll get through it. Because she will always be there, always just out of reach, but always within sight if they merely close their eyes.
You're much too young now, so I write these words down, "Darkness exists to make light truly count."