It's kind of torture for her to know that her daughter —
Her daughter.
She likes the sound of that.
(Especially since she hasn't had the chance to have a daughter other than that one glance in a crowded hospital room so long ago. And even then, she didn't have much of a chance at being one anyways — there was a couple in the next room waiting to steal that opportunity away from her before she even got it.)
Jesse is like her son. He's like an odd kind of best friend who is a son who knows almost all of her secrets, but he's like a son all the same.
So he's really the only one that comes to mind when she realizes that she must get Rachel to contact her in some way because she can't contact Rachel because that would be in violation of the damn contract that she was forced to sign.
(She had a real, live, breathing daughter for those two men; they should groveling at her feet with everything she asks for, not forcing her to sign a contract where she promises to not to get in touch with her daughter until said daughter turns eighteen years of age.)
Jesse is the only one that she's confident enough in the fact that he won't hurt her daughter beyond repair.
She spends over three days looking at songs before deciding on I Dreamed a Dream. The song speaks to her, and it could tell her life story if it was modified a just little. She records it with a sweet sentiment before beginning to sing the song. She records it onto the tape and that should be that because it's done and what's done is now done.
Yes, that should be that because she says it should and she should get her way, but it isn't, because Jesse doesn't want to deliver the tape to Rachel when she first hands it to him.
"What? Jesse you said you'd do this for me. Jesse, this is my daughter. You can't just decide to quit on me now. I'm so close to getting to know her. That's all I want. I-"
"You're going to decide that you don't want her," he cuts in. "You're going to talk slightly with her for a few days or so before you realize you want a baby who needs you, not some teenager who just wants you to be there for her. You want to be fully depended on. Rachel just can't depend all the way on you because she has both of her fathers, and you're going to reject her only because of that."
In a sick sort of way, she knows that he's right.
"Everything will be fine. Just do it," she hisses instead of wrestling with her conscience.
She knows that she just rejected her daughter from being in her life in any way, shape, or form. In a way, that hurts a lot more than she thought it would.
What hurts just as much as she thought(knew) it would, is the fact that Jesse will never forgive her for doing it. She just doesn't want him disappointed in her. He doesn't need to be disappointed in her for doing this; he knew she'd do this all along.
"I can't believe you."
She doesn't have to turn her head away from Phantom of the Opera to know that Jesse is at her house, and he wants to talk about what happened between her and Rachel.
"It's not my fault, Jesse. You know that."
"I even told you what would happen, and you didn't listen to me! You told me that everything would be fine, and I even believed you! God, Shelby. This is bad, even for you," he says, and the note of disappointment in his voice makes her cringe just a little.
Knowing that Jesse, the one who always thought that she could do anything she wanted, is disappointed her hurts more than it should. Jesse has always been the one rooting for her, and she would like to think that the relationship is mutual. Jesse has been confident in whatever she's chosen since she met him. He's always been the one person she knows that has never questioned any of her major decisions, and that never ending faith in her has always meant something of large importance to her. His faith has ended though.
"Rachel will be fine. She has her fathers. She will survive on her own through this."
It's tough to make herself believe her own words.
"She doesn't want to survive on her own. Rachel wants a mother. She wants you."
And then, just like that, he gone as quickly as he came.
It doesn't take a person with a PhD to see Jesse still cares for Rachel when he hesitates when she tells him to "get your ass right back to Vocal Adrenaline where it belongs."
He pauses and sighs. "Yes, ma'am."
It's hesitant, dejected, and not at all like she'd hoped for, but it'll do.
For now, it has to do.
She purposely stays as far away from her seat as she can possibly get when it's announced that New Directions is taking the stage at performing at Regionals.
She doesn't want to see Rachel, and chances are that Rachel doesn't want to see her.
So when she watches her team (her team that hasn't lost a competition in over three full years, her team that's been the national show choir champions for three years in a row, her team that she's worked so much with, her team that she loves and believe in, her team that has the slightest chance of losing thanks to her petite brunette of a daughter and that oafish male lead) perform their winning performance, she really is incredibly shocked to see Rachel sitting in the back row, staring mournfully at Shelby's lead male vocalist.
Especially since she heard that Quinn just went into labor fifteen minutes ago, and the rest of New Directions went with her to the hospital.
Beth seems to be the perfect solution to all of Shelby's problems right now.
Quinn doesn't want Beth; Shelby does.
Beth has to depend solely on her for everything; Rachel can't.
Shelby can't shut Beth out of her life by sending her back to her two gay fathers.
She's stressed. Possibly even more stressed than she was when she thought that Jesse lost his voice and they had Nationals in less than two days. That was stressed.
This has got to be the closest to hell she's ever come.
Beth is crying, and half of her cloths are stained with baby barf that refuses to come out with any stain remover that she's tried so far. Her babysitter just canceled, and she has to pick up the dry cleaning in thirty minutes or she has to pay some kind of outrageous fee.
So when she opens up the door (hair a mess, car keys in her mouth, baby bassinet with Beth strapped into it in her right hand, house keys in the other) to see Jesse standing on the other side getting ready to knock, she really couldn't be happier.
"You look like shit."
And he wonders why people think he's a jackass.
He takes the car keys from her mouth and unlocks the car for her, obviously taking pity on the fact that she's in such disarray at the moment because the damn babysitter isn't coming because she had to come down with some stupid case of strep throat. What kind of babysitter comes down with strep throat the day she has a charge?
Anyways, yes, he's helped her. It's little, but she wouldn't have been able to do it without strenuous effort on her part.
So maybe he's not as big of a jackass as some people think he is.
"Can you baby sit her?" At his look of alarm, she continues, "I'm dying here, Jesse. My regular baby sitter has some sort of illness and can't come. Please, Jesse, if you ever do anything for me, this is it. Please, that's all I ask," she begs.
"That's what you said about Rachel."
He's right, she realizes. She did say that. She said that all she wanted was to meet her daughter. He did that. He helped her meet her daughter, which was all she asked of him.
"Please," she begs, a little more desperate, a little more ready to cry. "For a few hours."
He concedes, and she hands him Beth in the bassinet and sets off to run errands.
That boy deserves a gold medal some day for the things that she's put him through.
Rachel is at her door.
Beth needs to be picked up from day care right this instant, and Rachel is at her door.
This really has no possible ending that's even remotely pleasant.
"Yes?" she asks casually. Rachel raises her eyes from her cell phone.
"I wondered whether or not you would try to talk to me one day. I wondered if you thought that Beth was a replacement for not being able to have me as a baby. I know that's just what she is, because a week or two ago I was talking with Jesse and he-"
"You're talking with Jesse?" she interrupts, obviously surprised.
Rachel looks slightly indignant. "He apologized for something, and I forgave him; I apologized for something, and he forgave me. As far as I know, that's all that there really is to it. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by yourself, Jesse truly thinks that you only adopted Beth because you couldn't have me as someone who was going to rely totally on you. He says that you got Beth only because you found out that you couldn't have me for a daughter. You can't have me," she corrects herself quickly.
Shelby shakes her head quickly. "I'm sorry about this, Rachel, but maybe we could continue this some other time, because right now I need to pick Beth up from day care-"
"She'll always be more important, of course she will. I'm out of your life. Don't try to weave your way back into mine. That's all I came to say. I would like to thank you for seeing me. I just... I needed some closure from you. That's all, really," Rachel says before turning around, getting into her car, and leaving Shelby standing confused and alone.
Shelby wonders if she needs some closure too.
"Jesse, you need to start telling me when you talk with Rachel. She came to see me the other day to tell me about something that you told her about my relationship with Beth."
He freezes, glancing back, obviously wondering whether or not he has a chance at getaway. Deciding that the answer to that is probably a no, he talks. "I'm right. You're using Beth as a replacement for the baby-Rachel that you never got to know. Now that you've made your choice, you're never even going to get to know the teenage-Rachel or the adult-Rachel. You will only know the small child that you saw briefly, and you know the girl that you've seen a few times since then. I'll bet that you don't even have her cell phone number. You probably don't even remember the day you gave birth to her," he snaps, obviously upset with her. He pauses. "Do you remember her birthday?"
It strikes her that it's in winter, but she can't put her finger on the exact day of that date.
"She's still my daugh-"
"Rachel is merely the girl that came out of your womb. You've made it clear that she is nothing more to you then that. You've absolutely no right to call her your daughter."
Each word that he says feels like a slap to the face.
"Besides, she was born on December eighteenth in 1994."
"Rachel," she says slowly, testing out the syllables on her tongue, trying to see if they fit. They don't. The word slips and slides under her tongue, pulses along her gums, and dips around her teeth, trying to figure out exactly where the foreign sound should go to.
The girl turns around and hides her surprise at seeing Shelby in the McKinley parking lot.
"What do you need from me?" she asks directly, adjusting the straps of the shoulder bag that she bought while at the mall with Kurt one day, avoiding Shelby's eyes.
"I wish we hadn't ended on such a terrible note," Shelby confesses.
Rachel's face shows no signs of forgiveness. "I recall it being your choice to shove me out of your life, not mine. If you find that you're the one who made the mistake, you're going to have to live with it," Rachel says stiffly, turning around and starting to walk over to a truck where a handsome boy with a letterman's jacket in one hand and a slushie in his other hand in holding the beaten truck's door open for her daughter. He motions with his head to the open door, signaling for Rachel to hurry things along, running a hand down his shaven head. Shelby realizes that this is Puck, Beth's father. Rachel's next words distract her from that point of thought though. "Thank you for trying to let us have a relationship, but it won't work with me. You won't be my mother," Rachel whispers brokenly. She doesn't turn to face her.
Shelby swallows a lump in her throat she didn't know was there and leaves.
Jesse leaves for California after spending another month in the state of Ohio. She wishes him the best of luck even though the both of them know that he won't need it.
The night before he leaves (to leave her alone with thoughts of relationships gone wrong and a mythical daughter who won't acknowledge her presence), they talk while playing a few rounds of poker (and maybe taking a few rounds of shots).
"She's hurt. You shut her out of your life and didn't try to reach out until you knew that she had rejected you. You couldn't stand the rejection; you try to get her back. She rejects you even further. Personally, Shelby, I don't see where your confusion comes in."
She shoots him a glare, letting his words sink in. "Damn it, you're right."
"Damn straight," he curses, laying out a flush. "Read 'em and weep, Shell. That's the fifth round I've won. We've played five rounds. Ready to give up? Or would you like to switch to playing hearts?" he asks with a barking laugh, knocking back another shot and mentally cuts himself off of the burning liquid that hurts so good. He definitely needs to be at least sober enough to drive to the airport in more or less than three hours.
She glares at him, shuffling the cards. "I'll be the dealer for this round."
She goes through life in a daze.
Beth takes up most of her time, but Rachel is always in the back of her mind.
One night when it's far too late for anyone else to be awake, she's driving back from the grocery store when she catches sight of Rachel standing in the bed of a truck as it speeds down the highway. Shelby stops at a red light to get a better look, and, sure enough, there is Rachel, raising her hands to the skies while screaming as loud as her classically trained vocal chords will possibly let her.
"How're you feeling, babe?" the driver from the cab of the truck yells.
She tries to shake the image from her mind as her imagination, but something in her won't give up the fact that it was real.
From what she's been able to find out from the Brief but Imperative Incident (as she's taken to calling it), Rachel was at least buzzed on some alcohol. As much as Shelby would like to think the best of her child, she knows that it's true, because (from what Jesse told her one day) Rachel doesn't drink all that much on a regular basis, but it gives her more spontaneity than usual when she has some.
So, Rachel is buzzed, standing in the back of a truck as it speeds down the highway. She's either very good friends with or dating the driver of the truck from the affectionate nickname he called her. From what the driver of the truck said, Shelby has deduced that Rachel was only doing it to feel better. Maybe she was thinking about Shelby.
The fact that she was in Rachel's thoughts makes Shelby smile.
The fact that it was such a bad thing that she was in Rachel's thoughts that Rachel had to go and do something that Shelby's sure is highly illegal makes Shelby feel like curling up into a ball and crying for all of the things she did to her daughter.
After she's done crying for the things that she did for Rachel, she starts to cry for the things that she didn't do for Rachel (and that second list goes on forever, it seems).
It's the first time she's ever just felt this upset and broken over it.
While she's crying, she hears Beth start to cry from upstairs.
Just because she broke her first daughter doesn't mean she can't fix her second one.
So she stops crying because Beth is far too young to see her mother cry; she has to be strong for Beth. It strikes her that she was never strong for Rachel.
Jesse stops by to see her when he's on fall break. Well, actually, she stops by to see him.
It's just been getting so much harder to ignore the presence of Rachel that doesn't hang over her life. The absence speaks volumes more than she ever could, and it feels like the stereo is inside her head, blaring her eardrums out.
She knows he'll be in the music store, pawing through maybe something by John Lennon or Mozart (his music taste has always been off the wall, really). If he's coming back to Ohio for a weeklong fall break, chances are that he won't spend much of it in his house.
Instead, she finds the curly haired boy sitting on a bench near the Lionel Richie section, one of his arms wrapped around a girl's shoulders. Shelby can tell that the girl has long, dark hair, and she looks a few years younger than Jesse from the back.
She doesn't want to intrude on him and... on him and whoever that girl is, so she turns to leave and call him maybe tomorrow? Shelby's not going to break up a private moment.
That is, until she catches a link of the conversation.
"How've you been?"
"Good. This year's been good, I guess. We tied with the Warblers from Dalton Academy for the title in Sectionals a few months ago in Glee, so we're off to Regionals soon."
Shelby knows that voice.
Oh, God, how she wishes she didn't know that voice or the boy talking with it.
Jesse is in the music store with his arm wrapped around her daughter, and Shelby's thoughts are stuck between wanting to run away as fast as her legs can possibly take her or wanting to stay and make amends with Rachel.
"Sounds fun. What solos did you have for the Sectionals performance?"
Even Shelby (who can't see her face) can tell that Rachel is deflated by this comment.
"None. Mr. Schuester decided to screw around and give Quinn and Santana the solos. Quinn and Sam totally stole the entrance that Finn and I had for Faithfully, but I'll admit that Santana had a wonderful voice when paired with the song Valerie."
Jesse sneers. "You would have sounded better. Schuester's always trying to spread the love in your club. It's absolutely sickening, the things he calls 'talent.' My God, he merely called my rendition of Burning Up 'OK.' That was a great performance!" he snaps.
"It was," Rachel agrees a little sadly, resting her head even more heavily on his shoulder.
"We should perform together while I'm in town. Come on, Rachel, please," Jesse begs.
"I'd love to. What're you doing while you're in town?" Rachel asks.
He shrugs (and oh, she should leave, but can't she just hear the end of their conversation before she goes?), mumbling something. "Not entirely sure. Obviously, I'm going to spend a lot of time with you, Rach. I'm probably going to see your mom for a while."
Rachel's posture stiffens, and she is no longer leaning on Jesse. "You guys are close, huh?" she questions, and it's obvious to everyone that Rachel still hasn't forgiven her.
"Yeah. I've known her ever since I can remember, and she's like the mom I never had."
A dry laugh erupts from Rachel's lips (Shelby wants to leave this place because this can't be good but she's too torn to do so). "Funny, because, see, she was supposed to be that way with me. She's related to me, she should be my mom, not yours. She should be my mom, not the mother of a child from an ex-boyfriend of mine and the girl who regularly makes my life a living hell. She should be my mom. That's the only reason why I knew her; because she wanted to know me. She screwed it all up on her own."
Rachel leans back on him suddenly, obviously exhausted from pretending that she doesn't care. "Babe, she... She doesn't know what she gave up," Jesse whispers into her hair.
Shelby feels sick. This isn't her place to be (sheneedstogo), but she's here all the same. It's time for her to leave (butshedoesn'twantto), she knows.
Without giving herself time to think about it any longer, Shelby spins on her heel and walks out of the music store, her high heels sounding her exit to anyone who's listening. She barely even listens to the hurt gasp that she knows springs from Rachel's lips and the angered thoughts that she knows are running through Jesse's mind at breakneck speeds.
Jesse calls her three hours later with curse words to spare and phrases to scream.
She knew he'd be upset, but she never figured he'd be this upset at it.
Apparently Rachel is still freaking out, and Jesse is this close to coming over to her house and lecturing the shit out of her because Rachel is actually that upset at this.
"Shelby... Shell, you gave her up. You need to learn to live with your fucking decision. What's in the past is in the past. You can't change it, no matter how much you want to. I think that the only way Rachel would benefit from you is if you just gave her some space. Try to give her some time, at the very least. She's lived seventeen years without a mother in her life, let her try to get used to the fact that, at one point, you might enter it. Once she's emotionally ready for that, it'll be easier for you to get through. She got really upset over the fact you heard her say all of that at the music store. You should have left when you saw us, and you know this, don't you? Of course you know it, isn't that right? You should have left the store when you realized I was with your biological daughter, and I know you know that it was Rachel, Shelby. Even you're not stupid enough to not recognize your own daughter when you see her from behind."
With a slight jolt of horror, she realizes that she didn't know Rachel from a look at her back; she only knew the girl by the impeccable voice she passed on.
"Give Rachel space. Give her some time. Just really back off if you want to have the smallest of relationships with her. She needs a lot of time to think about this. Give her some time, some space, whatever you'd like in the situation."
She agrees, letting Jesse give advice for once, even if she is twenty years his senior.
He continues, "I have to go now. Rachel is really upset that you heard her at the music store. She just needs someone to talk to, to listen to her."
The words pop out before she can stop them: "I could be that person."
He laughs dryly. "But you aren't, now are you?"
Rachel calls an hour after she's off the phone with Jesse.
Shelby doesn't recognize the number, but answers it anyways because you never know who got your number that you might want to talk to.
She doesn't bother with an introduction, just plows right on with it. "You heard what I said to Jesse in the music store. It was a total violation of privacy, but you stood there and listened nonetheless. Obviously you know now what I've felt. I'm fine without a mother, alright? I'm fine without you coming in and screwing my life up. I was absolutely fine until you came along with this grand little idea that you'd meet your daughter. You screwed up that plan; go away. Get the hell out of my life; stop trying to force your way back into it when you were barely in it in the first place! I don't want you in my life, Shelby. It's hard with you trying to get back in after you shut me out. It's so hard for me. I want to let you back in, but I know you're going to hurt me. It's hard for me to have to remind myself of that as often as I have to do. It's just so hard on me sometimes, Shelby," Rachel says in this voice that's been through too much and been defeated too many times. "I get so tired of letting people in to only have them go out again."
Before Shelby can even think of a response to that, Rachel has disconnected the call.
She pauses, looking blankly at the phone before realizing Rachel didn't call her "Mom."
She doesn't try to get in touch with Rachel again, because this time she understands just how badly she hurt her daughter when she left her in McKinley that day so long ago.
Closing her eyes, though, she's sure that she can blur the lines a bit and say that her mistakes weren't that bad. No, in the dark her mistakes are even more defined, and she hates herself more than she's ever hated anyone before.