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A/N
I don't remember the pacing of when Robin found out/the maple leaf onsie/the park bench and no longer have the episode on my DVR, so bare with me as I make some inconsequential things like time up. This story is kind of an unintentional prequel to "Silent night in central park."
I
After leaving Dr. Sonya's office, in order to reach the elevator, Robin had to walk down a corridor filled with pictures she hadn't noticed on her way in: of pregnant women whose round stomachs were swollen and taut and whose navels protruded like radio knobs; of smiling babies, soft-skinned, some with downy hair and little hands that reached toward the camera or held onto their impossibly tiny toes.
To her credit, she did not cry. She had always said she never wanted to have kids. She clung to that fact with the same force with which she clutched in her hand the tiny folded square that used to be the printout of her test results, so tightly that her nails dug into the flesh of her palm around it and made crescent moons.
She was not cut out to push a stroller full of wailing infants or carry around a diaper bag filled with plastic toys and Gerber baby food instead of a purse. She wasn't one of those women who could come home after work and with all the patience in the world, teach a kid to use the bathroom or blow its nose or color in the lines.
In the elevator, she took out her cell phone and typed the following message:
Turns out we had nothing to worry about. Apparently I can't have kids. Lol.
She stared at the words on the screen and sighed. Then she closed her phone without sending them.
II
For a reason she couldn't quite fathom, Robin had thought going with Lily to update her baby registry would be good for her. She had thought seeing all of the disheveled parents tote their toddlers along on those backpack leashes or shush their embarrassingly loud and screaming infants would remind her why she had never wanted that kind of life. In fact, she had thought it would allow her to inwardly point a finger at the rushed and overtired, and be glad she would never be one of them.
But the news was still raw and unexamined: she hadn't considered how little the socks were or how plush pastel-colored sweaters could be, or how some babies' cheeks mushed forward like squirrel cheeks when they smiled.
Robin stood in a safe aisle: books, away from her friends. She leafed through a few titles that calmed her: Breastfeeding for Dummies, Awake all Night Baby. The idea of the mouth and tongue and possibly teeth of a baby on her nipple freaked her out.
In the middle of the aisle, a little girl with black curls who wore a ballerina tutu with white tights and a fluffy winter jacket stood holding a stuffed bear. Her hair was messy and disheveled, as if she had been doing somersaults or crawling out from underneath a blanket, and the bear she held up wore green pants. Robin had no idea how old she might be.
"Mommy," she said in a voice that was both delicate and raspy. "Can I get a friend for the baby?"
The mother was obviously pregnant and waddled as she stepped toward to the little girl.
"You want to buy a special friend for your baby brother?" the mother asked, crouching down what little she could.
"Like Corduroy." The little girl nodded animatedly.
"That's very nice of you. Why don't you hold on to him until we check out?"
The girl nodded with a broad smile full of tiny teeth.
"How many more days?" the girl asked.
The mother exchanged a glance and smile with Robin that she knew was meant to be knowing, as if Robin, too, were a member of this club, as if her eyes, like the woman's, were capable of the kind of compassion and patience that was bottomless, as if bottomless were more than just some imprecise word.
"I don't know. He will come when he is ready," the mother said.
"Did I take long to be ready, too?"
The mother hugged the girl to her pregnant belly. "You took just the right amount of time."
The little girl followed behind her mother into another area of the store and Robin moved off in the opposite direction.
She absentmindedly ran her hands along a rack of clothes that turned out to be miniature sports jerseys. She picked one up off the rack and examined it. She tried hard to think of Lily and the things Lily would want for her baby, but all of her thoughts just kept coming back to her and the things she could never be.
If she had been pregnant, she would have bought this, she thought. She would be here with Lily shopping for herself. They would be making this journey together.
When she thought she was pregnant, she had thought things like that. Not at first, but after a couple days, when she had forced herself into believing it was true.
If she had a girl, she would let her paint her room pink or purple if she wanted to, or green or brown or a rainbow or a space-scape, whatever she wanted. Robin's room had been painted when her parents first bought the house she grew up in and it hadn't been repainted to accommodate a little girl. All hard lines and dark wood molding like a lodge or a room you looked at instead of lived in.
She would quit smoking.
She wouldn't be one of those parents who responded with "Because I said so."
She wouldn't have loud sex in the room next door.
She wouldn't talk to her kid the way her father talked to her.
When Doctor Sonia gave her the rest results, it had just been words, a piece of paper.
But now in the store, holding the jersey in her hands, touching the mesh between her fingers before putting it back on the rack, it became real. It became loss. It became an imagined future she would never have, a happiness some failure in her anatomy had denied her.
Though it was never something she had wanted, she hadn't written it off yet as something she would never want.
She had sometimes imagined a future where she could change her mind, where she could tow her kids by the hands down a crowded street or sit by their bedside and read The Story of Canada like she did with Katie until they had it by heart, where she could feel secure enough to want to be responsible for someone else's life, to look into a pair of eyes that would carry something of her own in them, to have someone who would never stop loving her, who she would never stop loving.
But Ted held up that white and red onsie with that big unknowing smile on his face.
"Canadorable."
She couldn't even laugh.
She stood still and listened to the sound of her own breath in her ears and tried not to think of all the things that would never be.
Though she was sure her friends would ask questions that she didn't want to answer later, she left the store. She almost met Barney's eyes on the way out. God, what must he have thought? That she was sad because she didn't turn out to be pregnant? She was glad, in a way, when he didn't leave the store after her and steer her into the nearest stool in the nearest bar and make her drink until she could spill the real reason she was upset, the way she would have done to him, the way she had done to him when he was upset about his father.
But after a few blocks that she walked without destination, she wanted to sink down somewhere and disappear, stop being Robin Scherbatsky for a while or forever. The tears clouded her eyes, but she didn't allow herself to stop moving forward. Instead, she hailed a cab and spit out the address of a shooting range she didn't normally go to.
When she arrived, the familiar smell of combusting gunpowder and men's musk settled her on some base level. With the ear protectors on, the sound of shooting was dull and far off, but gave her something rhythmic to focus on instead of thinking about what an idiot she was being over this.
After a few rounds, she felt better. She took out her cell phone to check the time and saw text messages from her friends:
Where did you go? From Lily
Are you okay? From Ted
You ok? McLarens at 7. From Barney
She looked at all three and sent her excuses to Lily and Ted. She told them she felt sick again, the way she had for the past few days. It wasn't too far from the truth. She felt like something was wrong inside her. She almost included Barney on the text too, but something in her wanted to tell him the truth. She typed into the screen: Sorry for leaving like that. I couldn't be there. But after looking at it for a few long seconds, decided against it. That would be like saying she wanted to open the conversation with him again.
They weren't together. She was still with Kevin. Barney was a mistake and he led, just as she had expected, to bad consequences. Or maybe it was the cheating. And her body rejected childbirth as a form of retribution. This conclusion made no any sense and wasn't logical, but she had a hard time dissuading herself from the belief, so much so that she finally gave up and just tried not to think about it.
She hit cancel and the message went into her discarded drafts. She just wrote, Yeah, I'll be there and sent it before she could change her mind.
III
On Christmas Eve, as all of her friends went off to spend the holiday with their families, Robin spent a lot of time walking around outside in the cold. Not only was she not invited to Christmas at home (which, if she really considered it, it was probably her fault because she hadn't gone back for the past few Christmases), but she also had no desire to spend any holidays at her parents' house. She did miss her hometown, the way it all looked at wintertime. But New York was an easy substitute. All the lights and window displays in green, red, and white, the oversized Christmas trees covered in ornaments and snow. She enjoyed walking passed them. She enjoyed the cold press of snow under her feet in her snow boots. The quiet pleasure of it all. On the coldest days, even New Yorkers stayed inside and she could walk certain side streets at night and hardly see anyone else on the sidewalk. She liked the feeling this gave her, of owning the city in a way, being strong and cold when the rest of the city waited in heated buildings for taxi cabs.
When she got back to the apartment, Ted was still there, holding an extra ticket to Cleveland out to her. While she could admire the gesture, she just wanted to be left alone. In fact, she was looking forward to it, to sitting by herself in the apartment and getting so drunk on egg nog and brandy that she wouldn't care at all about the whole no kids ever thing.
That's why she ended up on that park bench. She wanted a place where she could sit by herself and think. In the numbing cold, too. She hoped it could numb some of the feelings that still twirled around conflicted inside her.
Sitting on that dark bench, where if she was honest with herself, she knew was a terrible place to spend Christmas Eve, not just alone, but in the dark, among exposed trees whose branches looked an awful lot like spindled bones and in the dark, they were shadowed and black like phantom limbs.
She didn't know how she started narrating the story of the past few days to her invisible, non-existent future children, but she was at a low point. She had also probably mixed too much brandy into her egg nog, so much that she almost convinced herself she could see them there among the snow and dark.
They were beautiful. They were everything she wanted them to be.
And she couldn't even begin to understand the dysfunction that made her imagine them sitting on the couch in Barney's apartment. Or why instead of talking to her boyfriend about the fact that she was barren, infertile, something in her just wrong, in this point of weakness, she wanted to talk to Barney. She wanted to talk to him in a way she never talked to him: honestly, about the things she felt and the mistakes she had made, probably while crying into the lapel of one of his suits.
She took out her phone and typed a text. The letters stared back at her like eyes. Judging.
I'm kind of drunk and sitting in central park. I want…
She erased them.
I'm sitting in central park. I could use a friend right now.
It sounded like something Ted would write if he were a menstruating woman. She erased them.
Can we talk?
She stared at those three words for a long time. Her fingers began to lose feeling outside of her gloves. She imagined him calling her back and her not really knowing what to say, not being able to explain the temporary insanity that seemed to take her over in that moment, how everything inside her was messed up. She didn't feel for Kevin what she was supposed to. She couldn't allow herself what she really wanted. She was sure, deep down, that she didn't know how to love anybody the way she should, really love them, over time, the kind of love that stays and has to be worked at, like Lily said. And she couldn't explain why she wanted to share these tormenting thoughts of her own insufficiencies with Barney instead of with her boyfriend, who was probably better equipped to deal with them and give her the right answers.
So finally, with tears flooding her eyes, she erased each letter and retyped two words in their place: Merry Christmas.
IV
In November, Robin babysat Marvin alone for the first time.
It wasn't until after she had agreed that she realized she had never watched Marvin on her own and had absolutely no idea what to do with a baby for four hours. Lily had assured her he would sleep for most of it and that Robin could sit on the couch with the baby monitor and watch summer reruns.
He was asleep when she arrived until about ten minutes after Lily and Marshall left. Then he began to wail. Robin went in the room and picked him up from under the shoulders and just held him out in front of her, looking at him. He stopped crying momentarily when she lifted him but began again shortly after. He must have realized she was not his mother. She tried to feed him, but he didn't want the bottle. She laid him down and pulled back the diaper the way Lily always did. She gave a hesitant sniff but smelled only baby powder.
"What do you want?" she asked him.
At her words, he stopped crying and looked at her as if he recognized her. He reached out tiny fingers and grabbed onto a strand of her hair and pulled, hard.
"Ow," she said and extricated her hair from his chubby little hand. She sat down on the rug with him in her lap and took out a little circular toy that jingled when she shook it. She shook it for Marvin and he reached for it. Though Lily would probably be mad at the comparison, Marvin reminded her of her dogs. Anything that made a noise was the most interesting thing in the world to both babies and dogs. And both had the same prerogative: they had to put anything they could reach into their mouths and chew it.
"Good boy," she found herself saying.
Babies and dogs weren't that different. At least, babies and puppies.
After about ten minutes, Marvin had gone through (meaning: chewed on and threw) all of the toys that were within Robin's reach. He seemed to slow down and slowly sunk down in her arms and promptly fell asleep.
Afraid to move and wake him, Robin sat on the floor and watched him until her legs were numb. She repositioned herself so that she could stretch her legs out and lean her back against the wall.
To her, he was still a sort of personality-less blob of a person, but in the silence of the room, as she listened to him breathe, it still struck her that one day, he would be someone. His own someone, because of and regardless of whatever Lily and Marshall wanted for him.
He was still new. Nothing had gone wrong for him yet. No one had tried to make him someone he wasn't. No one had hurt him. Robin knew she would do anything to keep him that way. It was a primal feeling, as close to maternal as she would ever get, and she allowed herself to imagine what it would be like if he was hers. Sitting there on the rug in the nursery that used to be her bedroom, she cradled Marvin in her arms, she touched the skin of his forehead with her fingertips, and she held him so close that she could feel his pulse against her ribs.
And in that moment, she was so full with feeling that her heart began to pound, heavy and warm and wet. Tears formed in her eyes, and though she tried to blink them away, ashamed, they obeyed gravity, wetting the edge of Marvin's blanket. She took in a breath that was more of a gasp, a clap of thunder, a sound she couldn't control. Marvin stirred and woke. He watched her with sleepy, wide eyes. He did not cry.
Between the spontaneous sobs that escaped from a place low in her throat, she tried to whisper comforting words to Marvin. He made small noises back at her that somehow made it harder for her to stop. She put him back into the crib and turned on the baby monitor as Lily instructed. Then she left the room, closed the door behind her, and sat with her back pressed against it.
She wanted to call Barney then, not necessarily to talk about it, but to talk. With one hand, she took out her phone but couldn't think of what to say.
V
It is almost Christmas again and Robin has very nearly come an entire year from that night alone in Central Park. She has realized that she can go weeks without thinking of it, or a month where the news seems so far away that it doesn't make the space between her ribs constrict. But, with the dark and the cold of winter approaching, it has become fresh and new again, like a scab pried off to reveal raw, unhealed skin.
It will probably just be one of those things she will always associate with winter, with her friends leaving to spend the holidays with their families, with egg nog and the kind of dark you can't see into, no matter how much time you give your eyes to adjust, and coming each year full circle will make her remember it, relive it almost.
Since that time last year, she has dreamed of those children from time to time, has made them real and soft and warm in the confines of her mind. At least, she reasons, her subconscious mind hasn't seen fit to torture her by giving them names.
She dreamed of them again last night, tossed and turned and woke up sporadically to try and get them out of her mind with late night television and ice cream out of the carton.
Last night, Barney kissed her. She supposes that had something to do with it, with not sleeping, with their faces appearing to her like phantoms in the night, like ghosts of people who never lived.
She drinks full a glass of scotch.
Tonight, they sat together in the bar before everyone else arrived and he told her he was done. What had she said? That he wasn't making a fool of himself? She meant to say more, to offer her side of things, but something about the way he told her to stop paralyzed her.
This is what she wanted to say: you just don't know the whole story. Or, maybe: you don't know all the ways it would be a mistake.
She didn't realize that a part of her needed to say it until after everyone had come and gone, until she and Ted and Barney piled into a shared taxi to ride back to their apartments, until she opened the door to her apartment which was dark and too cold, and sat down on the couch still wearing her coat and shoes.
You weren't the one who made a fool of yourself, she types into her phone and erases immediately after.
There's something I should have told you a year ago, she types.
It's not exactly that she only wants things she can't have – it is more that she doesn't realize what she wants until it is wrenched away from her, irrevocably, violently, in a flash. She is realizing now this hard truth about herself. She doesn't let herself want things, not in the way she should when they are attainable. She squashes down her want until it is small and easily folded away into some corner of herself. But when it becomes impossible, that's when it escapes the small place she confined it to.
But it isn't fair to him. It wouldn't be fair of her to drag him into this whirlwind, this bog that is slowly sucking her down into its mire. She cannot ask him for help, not now, not when she owes him so much already.
From where she sits now in her living room, she can see very clearly that she has been wrong. She can see how deeply she has hurt him, over and over again, in order to spare herself the hurt.
She tries a third message: I'm sorry for everything, but just as she finishes, she erases it and closes her phone. Even that, even forgiveness, she doesn't deserve. She slides the phone across the floor away from her so she won't be tempted. She fills her glass again and wobbles back to the couch.
She stays up until she is too tired to dream. Especially after tonight, she knows she can't handle seeing ghosts. She can't handle living a life that isn't hers and will never be, even in a dream, because it only means waking again into a reality where she is alone.