Patty sat at the table, coughing into her handkerchief. Her hand was on her stomach, rubbing the bulge that was beginning to form from her pregnancy. She wasn't doing anything besides sitting and rubbing her stomach. She was just sitting at the lace adorned table and staring at the center piece of the table in between her fits of coughing.
Ben watched from the doorway, taking in her frail beauty. Long, wavy, blonde hair fell around her slim shoulders, cascading over her back and chest. Her skin white was as white as mid-winter snow, her lips the palest pink known to man, accentuated by the heavy, light pink cotton nightie she took to wearing around the house, even in the middle of summer. Her cute, little feet were cover in cozy house shoes. And on her left hand, her ring finger was a beautiful diamond ring, glinting in the dusty sunlight filtering through the room.
That same hand, the one with the ring glinting with dream like brightness, raised the handkerchief once more. As she coughed and coughed and coughed, Ben saw again everything about that stupid handkerchief. It was light blue, and on every corner there was a lily flower surrounded by her name, 'Patricia.' Though, as she was coughing, that beautiful light blue was tinted with little patches of red.
When she pulled it away from her mouth, lips now a darker shade of pink, she looked at the cloth momentarily, lifting her hand from her stomach to tuck her silken hair behind her hair. He could see her profile clearly, the grief stricken features. Her long, spindly lashes wet with tears as her hand fell back to her stomach. Her lips were quivering, and she let tears fall freely down her pale face. She folded the hanky over covering the evidence of her illness, and she rubbed her belly slowly, seeming to force love through the skin of her stomach into the womb, to her unborn child.
She looked over to him, suddenly, and she forced a watery smile onto her face. "Ben," she began, but just as suddenly she was taken over with a fit of coughing. He went to her side, grabbing onto her hand, letting her know that he was there with her. Her coughing went on forever, and panic started taking over him, rapidly.
He reached up to hold her hair, petting her soothingly, and saying over and over and over, "Patty, come on. Calm down, Patty. Try to breath. Patty?...Patty?...Patty!"
Hawkeye woke with a start, not screaming, but gasping for breath as her name fell from his lips one final time. His heart was hammering harshly, painfully in his ribcage and he pressed his left hand to it, feeling the pain subside and increase all at once as a new ache filled him. Longing and grief, he classified as he took long, steadying, almost painful breaths.
He looked around the small room, an actual room in his personal hell. The psychiatric ward in Tokyo, he remembered. The pain seemed to worsen with that thought. And tripled as he pulled himself further up on the bed, coming to rest against the wall. He wasn't tired anymore. How could he be when he had seen her again? It had been almost five years, and where he would think of her briefly now and then, even more when BJ spoke of his perfect family, he hadn't dreamed of her in forever. He hadn't seen her
in forever, having taken her picture out of his wallet eons ago, having put her and everything attached to her in a box back in Boston eons ago.
But he had seen her again, and now she seemed to be taking over him again. She was filling his every thought again, the reason why he had never been serious with a woman again, the reason children hurt so much more to operate on, and why he had had a special taste for blondes', especially blondes' with hair so light it almost looked white. Why the U.S.O. girl had hurt so much to even think about attaching himself to. It was her purity…Patty's purity. It had been one in the same, right down to the way they had both smiled at him.
Why he couldn't properly propose to Carlye. Even though she had come first, Patty had come after her, and even though he wanted that back, Carlye wasn't good enough. He wanted Patty back. He wanted her perfection back. Carlye could never be Patty, and he had known it even proposing into the corner to her.
He wanted Patty back, whole and healthy, with the baby they should have had…
"What was it about the child's death the made you unsettled?" Sidney asked in his usual clinical tone, his eyes gazing into Hawkeye's. When Hawkeye only stared at him as if he were completely dimwitted, the psychiatrist amended, "Obviously, death is something you try to prevent, but it was to save an entire bus full of people. Was it because you think you were the cause of the baby's death that had you so undone?"
Hawkeye thought back to that day one the bus. He thought about that poor woman, and the baby, her baby that she had been forced to kill to save the lives of complete strangers. Yes, he had blamed himself. He would be heartless if he hadn't. He had practically told her to kill that poor child. But was that really all of it? The dream he had had this morning made him reconsider. That little baby, a little girl, hadn't been the first he had seen dead, head lying limply in sad, shaking arms. It wasn't even the first death that he had blamed on himself and afterwards, come perilously close to losing himself.
He looked down at his hands, which he had been wringing for the past few hours, as he thought of Patty and their almost family. The pretty, soft black hair of their daughter, as he held her in his arms for those brief, terrible, few minutes. The discolored skin of all new-born children. The stillness of her chest. He thought of the feeling as he had looked back and forth between two of the three most important women in his life.
He had never told anyone of that family. Come to think of it, he had never, ever been Ben again after that. He had officially started introducing himself as 'Hawkeye,' shortly after them. The only one allowed to call him by his given name was his father, and he still preferred him to call him 'Hawkeye.' No one in Korea knew about Patty. Most people in the States didn't know about her, and the few who did he had very carefully disconnected himself from.
He didn't know why he would want to tell Sidney about her, both hers, hell, all three hers, but the impulse was there none the less. Sidney was a psychiatrist, his favorite psychiatrist, to be exact. Sidney had told him several things that were personal, and he had shared with Sidney several things he had hidden even from himself. Perhaps if he reintroduced his mother, Patty, and his daughter into the world, he could move past them. He had been lonely for a long time now…more than was expected of a widower.
He met Sidney's eyes again, and forced his hands to stop wringing. He opened his mouth. He was going to tell him about them! He was going to… "Yeah, Sidney. It was the guilt."
He hung his head, sorry for the attempt failed. There was no way he could talk about them now, not with Sidney, no matter how much they had divulged to each other. Those three women were his secret. They had to stay with him, until he found the perfect person to tell their lives to. Sidney may be one of his very close friends, but it just didn't settle correctly with him…
Patty danced with him at the reception of their wedding, wearing the pretty long flowing dress. It made her look like and angel, that dress. The melody of the song they had danced to was floating in the dream—'It had to be you' by Frank Sinatra. He twirled her around on the dance floor, smiling just as broadly as she did, and then he pulled her close to him again. She looked up into his eyes, her own green orbs glittering like beautiful spring fields after a refreshing morning sprinkle.
There was no one else around them. It was only Benjamin and Patricia Pierce while he relived the best day of his life. She pressed her evening gloved palm against his cheek, which back in those days had always been fresh shaven, and she smiled even deeper, telling him in an awe-filled voice, "I want to remember this day forever, Ben."
Ben leaned down and captured her lips briefly, before saying to her in the exact same tone, "I'll never let you."
Then he wasn't dancing with her. There was no music filtering throughout the dream. It was only him and the sounds he was making in the completely empty room. A nurse came walking down the hallway in front of him, holding a pink bundle in her arms, and the sounds of his breathing grew excited. One look at her face, however, made all of his breathing stop altogether, but the sound of his heart beating grew louder in his ears.
He knew the part of this dream well. Patty had not made it. Neither of them had expected her to make it through the birth of the baby, but perhaps…The nurse set the bundle in his arms with a sad sigh. And he looked at her, his little girl. He pulled the blanket off of her little head, seeing the baby's soft, fine black hair. Ben ran his hand through it, feeling just a bit of pride well up in him as he looked at her.
But then again, being in residency, he knew something was wrong. His baby wasn't moving. He put his hand under her tiny little nose, over her mouth. His baby wasn't breathing. He pulled the blanket off of her shoulders, and pressed on finger to her pulse. His baby didn't have a heartbeat…
His baby was dead?
Small, delicate hands reached around his hands and pulled her away from him, pulled his daughter out of his arms. The moment she was completely out of his grasp, she sprung to life, instantly wiggling and cooing. Ben moved to grab her back, but she was yanked quickly out of his reach. He looked up and froze.
His mother and Patty were standing in front of him, Patty holding his wiggling daughter to her chest, and both women wearing pained smiles on their faces. Patty kissed her daughter's forehead, with tears trailing down her pale cheeks, while Isadora, his mother, said painfully, "I'm so sorry, Benny, but Lydia has to come with us."
His heart broke as he looked at his mother, so different from Patty with her mahogany hair and her baby blue eyes, tall and womanly, compared to Patty's fair height and frame. He felt tears rolling down his face too as he said, quietly, desperately, "No. No, please, leave her with me. Leave Lydia with me…Leave me something."
Patty started crying harder as she stepped away from him pulling Lydia closer to her chest. "I'm so sorry, Ben," she said over and over again while he pleaded with her over and over, "No, no, no!"
"No!" Hawkeye yelled as he woke himself again; sitting up in his bunk, now back in the 4077th. He looked around his tent, which wasn't the one he was used to, because the camp had to move due to a fire that was heading straight for them. That and BJ wasn't there anymore. He had gone home without so much as a 'See ya, Hawk.' He had gone back to his perfect family, Peg and Erin. He had left Hawkeye with Charles and Margaret and dreams of his own nearly perfect family with Patty and Lydia.
Charles was on duty, though, so Hawkeye was on his own in his tent, left with the memory of not only Patty, but also of his mother and his perfect daughter. The three women who had mattered most to him…the three women who had been ripped away from him before he could truly ever appreciate them, one before he could even hear her laughter.
Hawkeye raised his hands to his eyes as he felt tears threatening to spring forth from them. This was agony. He was almost past them. He was almost okay, but that Baby, she had brought this all back to him. The pain he had buried after the death of his wife and daughter, it was all rushing back so fast, forcing him to mourn for them like he had never truly mourned. Sobs wracked his thin form and he allowed them, doubling over and letting himself feel the unfairness of his life. First his mother, then Patricia and Lydia…it would only be a matter of time before his dear friend Margaret followed them, or perhaps fate would really begin to play with him and his father would go, perhaps Charles, perhaps…his heart skipped a beat at the very thought…perhaps BJ.
He wept harder into his palm while all of this circulated in his head. One by one death would pick him clean of everything he held dear. He would be left standing in an empty room, in an empty house, just like the day after Patty and Lydia's death. He would be left staring at photos again, reminiscing on just how much he had never said. He would be forced to wear that stupid suit for funeral after funeral as he watched them bury more and more of his family.
It was only a matter of time…
"Hawkeye, are you alright?" Margaret asked as she came into the Swamp several days later. BJ was back by then, but Hawkeye and he hadn't exactly been on speaking terms, since the man had left without a single note to him. She sat on his cot, seeing as he was in the only free chair in his tent, and she continued, worry lacing her voice, "You've been a little withdrawn from the world lately."
He looked up at her with his baby blue eyes, which he had inherited from his mother, which had matched Patty's hanky, which he would have passed on to Lydia, and gave her a grim smile, saying, "Going crazy isn't all it's cracked up to be, Margaret."
She seemed uncomfortable. Temporary insanity was a topic that not many knew how to deal with. The only one who seemed remotely comfortable talking about it was Klinger and well, funny as that was, it was a little inappropriate at times. Everyone else ignored it completely or walked on eggshells around him. Given his choice of the two he rather liked it when everyone ignored it completely. Unfortunately, Margaret wasn't one of those people and she had been walking on eggshells around him ever since he returned.
Hawkeye sighed. "I'm sorry, Margaret," he said repentantly. "It's just getting a little hard adjusting only to have to readjust again so I can get ready for the final alteration." He was speaking not only about BJ's leaving and reappearing, and the camp's moving and moving again, but also of his mother's death, which had been followed by Patricia's death that had been followed by Lydia's death, and would surely be followed with his dad's death, or BJ's death, or Colonel Potter's death, or Margaret's death, even. He just didn't think he could handle it. He didn't think he could bare that being with him, too.
Margaret smiled, lightly, and said slowly, "I've had to deal with that all my life, what with dad being in the Army."
She didn't get was he was getting at, but that was okay. Hawkeye hadn't expected her to. He just acted like she did and he went along with her conversation, "I imagine it must have been difficult for you."
Patty was sitting in the nursery they had done up when they first found out she was pregnant. She was rocking back and forth on the rocking chair, wearing that heavy, pink, cotton nightie, but, most important to Ben, she was singing to bundle in her arms, with a happy smile on her face. She lifted her hand to stroke something—Lydia—it had to be little Lydia's face. He saw a small hand wrestle its way out of the confines of the blanket to grab her finger. Throughout the house, he could hear giggling; both from Patty and Lydia, and his heart soared.
He moved across the hallway he had been standing in, intent on getting a better view of the two most beautiful girls in the world, but the door slowly began to swing shut. His heart jumped and he felt panic overtake him. Picking up his pace, he tried to get there before the door shut, but the small hallway had
multiplied its width and it was not as if he were trying to cross the Sea of Japan. He called out to Patty, telling her to keep the door open, but she didn't hear. She never heard, and when he finally stepped close enough to the door, it was shut. When he tried to turn the knob, it was locked.
He stepped closer to the door, his hand reaching up to bang on the door, though he stopped as soon as his foot contacted something that was not his hardwood flooring. Taking a step back, he looked down at when he had just pressed his foot into. Cloth, he realized, blue and pink cloth. His confusion caught the best of him, and he reached down picking up the materials. It was Patty's handkerchief and the blanket that he had held Lydia in. He looked back up at the white painted door, his confusion only doubling with the articles in his hands.
When Ben looked back down, Patty's handkerchief was mottled with little sprays of red and Lydia's blanket was covered in birthing fluid. He dropped them in shock and went back up to the door, pressing his ear to the wood anxiously. There wasn't a sound to be heard. None of the giggling that had been emitting from his family's lips was floating around the house anymore. It was deathly quiet, which made Ben's heart beat erratically. He jiggled the handle frantically calling out, "Patty? Lydia? Can you hear me?"
The silence was suddenly filled again, with the sound of Patty's coughing. Painful gasps, horrendous hacking, it was worse than Ben had ever heard her, and what was worse? He could hear her calling for him between her fits of coughing, "Ben? Ben? Help!"
He banged on the door harder, calling back to her, "Patty! Patty, I'm here! I'm just on the other side of this door! Patty!"
The door opened suddenly, and Ben fell into the room. He looked up, his breathing irregular, his heart going a mile a minute. His hopes sank. The room was empty, devoid of the life that had just been in here giggling, singing, and only seconds ago, coughing. "Patty?" he called breathlessly, pushing himself away from the floor. He looked around the room feeling hopelessness eating at him. "Lydia?" he yelled, running to the crib, to discover only some of the toys they had bought for her before her birth and consequential death.
"Patty? Lydia?" he called again, tears welling in his eyes, as they did in most of his dreams these days. "Patty? Lydia? Please! Stop hiding!" He looked around the room frantically. "Lydia?" he sobbed. "Patty?"
"Hawkeye!"
He grabbed the arms connected to the hands shaking him out of his fitful slumber. Wild eyed, and still disoriented from the dream he continued to yell for his dead family, until he was pulled abruptly to someone's chest.
"Hawkeye! They aren't here. They're not here," the voice he slowly recognized as BJ's told him softly, trying to calm him down, trying to bring him back to this plane of existence. Hawkeye, still holding onto his friend began to sob once again at the cruel dreams that kept playing over and over in his mind. He wished he could let them go again. He wished he could become detached from them. This was killing
him. Dreaming of them every night as if they were real, as if they were in front of him again, within reach…it was too much to take, too much to take.
He clutched to BJ like a lifeline, taking the comfort for all he was worth, because he just couldn't do this anymore. He couldn't pretend that they had never existed. He couldn't pretend that he had never loved them and therefore that he could never mourn the loss of them. They had been real. They had been his girls, and dammit! They should still be here with him! He should have to only be able to see them in his dreams.
He wanted them back. He wanted them all back. He wanted his mother, his wife, his daughter, his best friend, his entire family. He wanted it all. He wanted to have what BJ had and be able to share with everyone when they spoke of children or wives. He wanted what BJ and Trapper had, what with their wallets stuffed with pictures of their little girls. He wanted it.
He wanted it…
Some time later, well after Hawkeye had had his breakdown, but before the echoes of morning had crept upon them, BJ and he sat in the Swamp silently, the aftermath of his awkward fit and the remnants of the note-less goodbye still hanging between them. They had been like this for well over an hour, neither one speaking, neither one trying to fall back asleep. They just sat on their separate cots staring at the floor before them as if it were the most interesting thing since sliced bread.
Charles was on Post-Op. duty and the rest of the camp was either on duty or still fast asleep, so the silence was broken only by the sounds of crickets and rats scurrying around in the night. Occasionally one of them would take a deep breath, and the other would come close to starting a conversation, but neither of them would know how to get the ball rolling.
Finally, it was BJ who asked, quietly, "Who're Patty and Lydia?"
Hawkeye jerked his head up from the ground, considering a lie. BJ didn't really need to know. The tide was over and Hawkeye once again felt that he could live with this pain, this secret that only one other person in the world truly knew about. He could live with this until his return back to the States, where he could speak to his father about the losses.
But it didn't settle properly, and he found himself taking a deep breath against the shock he was about to heap on BJ. "Patty was my wife," he said slowly, gauging BJ's reaction, "and Lydia was my daughter."
It was out almost before Hawkeye even finished, "What?"
Hawkeye rubbed his face, feeling haggard, old, and most of all, so heartbroken, as he began to tell BJ the story of his wife and child. "I met Patricia Whitmore just before I entered residency, shortly after Carlye," he began wearily. "From the second I laid eyes on her, I knew. I mean, I just knew she was the one. I asked her out in front of God and everybody, the first time I saw her at the library." He smiled
momentarily as he thought of that day, the absolute dumbfounded look that had been on her face as she blushed, her pale skin going dark pink in seconds, as he thought about the way he had talked circles around her until she had stuttered out a quiet, 'okay.' He chuckled to himself at that, shaking his head remorsefully. "After that first date, we were practically inseparable. A few short months later, we were married.
"You should have seen her wedding dress. She looked stunning in it." He was lost again in his memory of twirling her around the dance floor again, only this time there were people around them. Her parents danced together. His father danced with one of the other lady guests. People all around them, some of them he knew, most of them he didn't, all dancing to the song 'It had to be you" by Frank Sinatra.
BJ broke into her reminiscence, saying just as quietly as he had been, "You've been saying you weren't married since the very first day I met you, though?"
His heart sank again. "I'm not. At least, I'm not married anymore."
"What happened to her?"
"Patty was always this thin little thing. She was prone to getting sick if someone mentioned the word 'flu' around her. About a year and a half after we were married, when she was two months pregnant, she came down with this…" he paused, taking a steadying breath. He would need strength to get through the rest of this. "She came down with this cold, which steadily grew worse. She started running a high temperature. She started coughing…eventually she was coughing up blood. She was…"
He stopped again, needing a break as the image of her in that chair came upon him. How weak she had grown, how tired she was, and how she was always coughing and wheezing. How in the worse stages of it, those last few months before she went into labor, she started to cough up bloody sputum.
"Pneumonia," BJ diagnosed.
Hawkeye nodded, grimly. "Yeah," he croaked out. "She held on for a long time. She really did. After those first couple of weeks in the hospital, the doctors finally said that there was nothing that could be done. She wasn't responding to the medicine at all. She probably shouldn't have lived as long as she did, but…she wanted to give life. She wanted to have that baby, to be a mother for, at least, a few moments before she died.
"When her water broke, she was so weak, so close," He left the 'to death' part off, figuring BJ could figure that out on his own, "I had to carry her to the car and then into the hospital before she was wheeled away in a wheelchair. I knew then. I knew she wouldn't make it," he felt tears coming back and her cursed himself internally, wishing the tears would go away. They didn't, though, and they coursed silently down his face as he continued, "I waited for hours for news from anyone about anything. It took forever, but finally a nurse came walking down the hall, looking as grim as ever." He stopped again, needing a break.
This was the hardest part. This was the worst hour of his entire life, and he had never talked about it to anyone save his father when it had happened nearly five years ago. He took a deep breath and finally looked at BJ, hoping to draw strength from the sight of his friend, and in a way he did.
"Patty had died, just like I thought she would," he said thickly. "And our child, our little girl, had been stillborn. She died in the womb, probably due to Patty's illness and fatigue. She never even took a breath in this world, and I held my dead baby as they filled out her birth certificate and not two seconds later, her death certificate! Lydia Isadora Pierce was born and died on November 16th, 1948, and my wife died on the exact same day."
He was sobbing again. BJ was moving across their tent to comfort him, and in the midst of it all, Hawkeye continued their story. "I buried Patty and our little girl, Lydia, on the same damn day, and since then…" he took a deep breath, "since then, it's been like they were never really there. They had been a dream to me; right up until the Baby one the bus. Beej, Lydia had black hair too," he said pulling away from his friend.
"It was like stepping back in time and watching the nurse as she took the baby away from me. How she held my girl with tears in her eyes and she looked at me as if she had something to do with the baby's death, it was the same way that Korean mother did. Or at least, by the time I registered what she had done, that's how I thought she was looking at me…" he trailed off suddenly as that poor, Korean mother, who had had to do what he would never have done if it had been him, what Patty wouldn't have even considered doing, who killed her own child for the safety of total strangers, looked at him again in his mind's eye.
The pain that had been in her eyes had been the same he had seen in his own blue eyes those days after his family's death when he looked in the mirror and realized exactly how alone he was. How much worse off he would be without his family, and he had had no hand in their deaths. What that Korean lady must be feeling now…
BJ took a deep breath, and said in a tight, constricted voice, "It must have been agony for you to listen to me go on and on about Peg and Erin, when I had exactly what you had lost."
Hawkeye didn't lie when he said, "After never having told anyone about it, never having mentioned it, and having to listen to everyone talk about their families, I got used to it. I could numb the pain after a while and like I said, soon it was like they had been nothing more than a dream."
BJ sniffed, tearfully, having been affected by Hawkeye's story. "You're a strong man, Hawkeye."
"Just don't call me 'Ben'."
A/N: Hmm…I was re-watching the GF&A, and this popped into my mind. I hope I did an fair job in covering all the bases, such as why they were never mentioned, what brought them up again, why he
tried to forget them in the first place…all of that. If you have any further questions about this story I would be all too happy to answer them for you.
I appreciate that you took the time to read this and I know it's time consuming to review but…for me? Please? I would really like to know how this went over because I've never seen another story like this and I would really like to know if there's a good reason why there are no stories like this, such as they totally suck.
InnocentGuilt