Givin' Out Wings
This would be just what she deserves, after the week she's had. Then again, it could just be the guilt swirling around in her stomach. Morning sickness doesn't happen this fast, does it? Nothing happens this fast, she's pretty sure. To be even more sure, she checks the internet, and then takes her temperature. Only she has no record of her previous temperatures to compare it to. So she wallows in self pity for a few days, and tries to act like everything is normal. She almost orders a glass of Johnny Walker at the bar, but the what ifs keep her from it.
The next morning, first thing, she buys a test. She's late, only a little late though, only a week, not late enough to really worry. In fact, she's read online that worrying could actually delay it further by lulling the body into a kind of fake pregnancy, fooling it. She's heard about it before. It happens to some people. So she tries to stop worrying. She doesn't take the test. She lets it sit in the back of her sock drawer, still in the plastic drug store bag with the crinkled receipt.
But two days later, still nothing and she has sort of worked herself into a sort of hysteria. She wonders if Ted suspects anything, but he probably doesn't. Why would he? the logical part of her brain asks. Still, when she feels like she has to vomit, she runs the shower so Ted doesn't hear. She even pretended to drink a beer for his sake, dumping it down the sink in quarters when he left the room. But he has been monitoring her lately, unless she's just imagining it, which is entirely possible too. She blames the guilt. It has to be the guilt.
It has to be Barney's, if it is an it at all. She swears that if that night would ever stop haunting her, she would donate an entire paycheck to charity, or volunteer for the needy, or give up alcohol and cigarettes. She prays to a god she isn't sure she believes in and pleads with him to make this all stop. What are the odds of this happening? One night. One big mistake. She's being punished for it with this scare. That's all it is, a scare. They used protection and she's on birth control. Isn't it 99.9% effective? How could that little .1% be something to worry about? But all of a sudden, she remembers something in the news about a recall, so she checks online again and no, not her prescription anyway, and the problem was with the labeling, not the pills.
Still, even though she can't possibly be pregnant, she retrieves the pregnancy test from her sock drawer and locks herself in the bathroom to pee on it. Then she waits the appropriate amount of time by setting a timer on her cell phone and clipping her toe nails. The front door gives a loud creak open just as the timer goes off and Robin hears Ted and Barney's voices. She turns the shower on and then holds her breath as she turns the test over in her hand.
She doesn't scream or start to sob. Instead, she wraps the plastic stick in toilet paper and shoves it into the bottom of the trashcan. Then she undresses and stares down at her stomach without noticing any difference (what difference would there even be yet? she wonders). She doesn't feel anything growing there, only the gentle sort of nausea that hangs around her in the morning.
She climbs into the shower stands under the hot water in a state of shock. She rubs her washcloth against her body with a sort of ferocity and disbelief. She washes her hair and stands there under the stream until her skin is pruney and she is sure that Ted and Barney have left again. Maybe she read the test wrong somehow. She can't picture it in her head. So she retrieves the stick from the trash, stares at it again, wraps it back up and replaces it. She looks at herself in the mirror a long time in silence before going back to her bedroom. The apartment is empty, and she takes long, slow breaths and tells herself, this isn't happening, this isn't happening over and over again until she starts to believe it.
A few more days and a few more tests later, she is no longer convinced.
She used to make fun of girls like her, pregnant from some one night stand. Some dirty cheating slut. That's all she is.
In the shock and in a desperate attempt to do the right thing, she meets Kevin at a Starbucks by his office. She doesn't tell him she's pregnant or that she cheated on him. She just can't handle the thought of him thinking so badly of her. So instead, she tells him she needs to be on her own right now, needs to get through some things, just needs some time alone to grow up. He doesn't understand, of course, and she doesn't help him to. She gathers her purse takes the subway back to the apartment.
Then she spends two days following Lily around like the stupid, scared girl she is.
"I'm pregnant."
Robin's words echo off the walls of Lily and Marshall's suburban-sized bathroom and Barney looks at her like there is something else to say. As if maybe her words promise some kind of future, and it occurs to her that maybe they do now, since she is saying them aloud.
She hadn't planned to say them out loud, not to Barney, not to anyone. She planned to take care of it on her own, a dirty little secret that would only ever be hers. But with each day, her resolve crumbled away like everything else around her. She couldn't go backwards and she couldn't snuff out her mistake. She saw it as some kind of first step on the long pathway to growing up and being responsible.
She barely makes eye contact with Barney before she realizes she can't do this to him, not after everything else, not after that midnight at the bar. She stares at the hard lines of the tile floor. Then she stands up, but has nowhere else to go except into the house, so she sits back down again.
"How sure?" Barney asks. His voice is quiet, barely above a whisper. She is glad because in her paranoid guilt, she imagines everyone listening at the door.
She whispers back, "I took like five of those tests, you know, where you have to pee on the stick, and they all came back positive."
"You didn't go to the doctor?"
"No!" she exclaims maybe too loudly, or too suddenly. She can't very well tell him that she put it off because it would make this all too real, the way even telling him was beginning to make it. "No, not yet," she amends.
"It isn't for sure until you go to the doctor, Scherbatsky."
"I know."
"Does Kevin know?"
"No! Why would I…" she trails off and then looks up at him. "Oh. Oh." Realization shows on her face. "We haven't… I mean, it can't be…"
He takes in a deep breath and his eyes go wide. "You haven't?"
"We were taking things slow," she says automatically, "So it wouldn't get… weird. And, well, I… I broke up with him. I couldn't tell him any of it."
She drums her nails on the underside of the tub rim and concentrates on breathing. Barney is looking at her, but she can't meet his eyes.
"God, I'm sorry, Barney. I screw up everything. I just wish all this would go away."
"I don't," he says quietly.
She looks at him now, for real, into those blue eyes. "You don't?"
They are pleading with her and his voice gives a shake when he asks, "Doesn't some part of you want this?"
"Want this? Right now? I'm not ready for this. I can't be anyone's mother. I'm just a mess."
In the few seconds of silence that follow, Lily pounds on the door with curled fist and shouts through it: "Robin, if you don't get out of the bathroom, I am going to break this door down and drag you out!"
Both Robin and Barney jolt. But he recovers first, then moves to the door and opens it a crack.
"Barney, when did you? Never mind, Marshall's cutting the turkey now, so get out here," Lily says then stalks off.
"You haven't told them?" he asks her as he looks her up and down.
Robin shakes her head. Then she smoothes her shirt and follows him out of the bathroom.
A week later and she still doesn't go to the doctor. She doesn't really go anywhere, except to work and back home. With Marshall and Lily living in Long Island, she doesn't see much of a reason to go down to the bar and pretend to drink (to not arouse Ted's curiosity.) At least on this point, she and Barney present a united front. He challenges Ted to Smash Brothers and Call of Duty tournaments to keep him upstairs. Robin pretends to be busy with work, bringing home newspapers and books and spreading them around in her room and on the coffee table.
During Ted's night classes, Barney sometimes comes to the apartment and sits with her on the couch, both of them drinking ice water. Some days, she feels sick and lies there while he scrolls through channels. Other days, they spend hours talking. Somehow, they never arrive at Robin's apology for breaking their pledge and he never asks for it. They also never arrive at what this potential baby means for them or any of the practical topics they should discuss: Will they raise it together? Where will Robin live? When will they tell everyone? Are they together?
"Have you been to the doctor?" he asks her again, one night a week after Thanksgiving.
"No." She intends to rebut his question with her answer, but it sounds weak, even to her own ears.
"Robin, you have to go."
She sighs. "I know."
"Do you want me to come with?"
She shrugs without looking at him, but means yes.
"Do you have a doctor?"
"Not an obstetrician. I was thinking about going to that one Lily goes to, but isn't that weird?"
"We can find somebody else."
"Don't tell me you have a guy for that."
He laughs, low and rich. "No, not for that."
The next day she wakes up spotting. The internet tells her it is normal, but it's the push she needs to make the appointment. Barney takes his afternoon off and they meet in the doctor office's lobby. He sits there quietly next to her while she flips through magazines. Not the parenting ones though. Any of the others. He doesn't read anything, just sits at her side, calming her with his familiar presence.
They call her name and usher the both of them into an examination room. The nurse and doctor immediately assume they're married and that this was a planned pregnancy.
"Actually, we aren't—" Robin starts to say, but her voice fades out.
Barney looks at her but doesn't say anything. He stands off in the corner, hands in his coat pockets.
The ultrasound image shows a tiny baby blob that Robin cannot immediately recognize, but she stares hard at it and after a few moments, Barney reaches for her hand. The little blob moves or breathes or something and in that moment, she realizes the enormity of this, a little person growing inside her. And for the first time, she pictures it in her head, some perfect life she could just grab and pluck down for herself. She squeezes Barney's hand and her worries slowly start to fade out.
Barney goes out to the waiting room when they perform the tests. The doctor assures Robin spotting and nausea are perfectly normal at this stage of the pregnancy and then gives her a list of foods to avoid. When she joins Barney outside, they walk a few blocks, his arm around her. It feels like everything might just be okay after all, like she might be able to handle this turn of events, just by taking one step after another and not thinking too hard about what happens next.
One more week rolls by with Robin sick at everything. Then it tapers off. She goes to work without having vomited for the first time in weeks. It is a sort of victory, the way she sees it. But while she sits at her desk, now 9am, low in her belly, something starts to ache in a new way. She feels faint and shaky and staggers to the bathroom where she tries to throw up, but nothing comes.
The bathroom door opens and a familiar voice penetrates through the pain and her groaning.
"Robin, are you alright?"
She means to answer, "I'm fine," but the ache gets worse and it comes out a sob. Her body is shaking now and Nora sits down on the other side of the door.
"I'll take you home," she offers. "We'll get a taxi. Something is going around. Patrice was out last week."
Robin wants to laugh, or cry, at the irony of this, but instead, she unlocks the door and all but collapses forward. Nora catches her. Robin lets Nora grab her purse and lead her out to the curb, then back to the apartment.
She lies in her bed for an hour and a half trying to work up the strength to get her phone and call the doctor. When she finally moves it is slowly, peeling back the sheets to climb out. The doctor is with a patient but the nurse says to come down to the office right away, so she dials Barney, but he doesn't answer, probably in a morning meeting. The cramps start up again, full force. She turns back to the bed to lie down for a second and that's when she sees the blood, a messy smear across the sheets. Slowly, as if the rules of time have bent for her, she slinks down into a pile next to the bed and takes deep gulping breaths, trying not to faint. Her eyes are blurry and full of tears and she might be screaming and somewhere a door opens and there is a voice. That's when the world fades out.
When she opens her eyes, there are paramedics strapping her to a gurney and Ted looking between her and the bed. She wants to throw the blanket over the blood to hide it. She wants to tell him to stop looking at it or that none of this is real. But instead she says, "Don't tell Lily and Marshall."
As they start to wheel her out, her phone starts to ring from its spot on the bedroom floor. Ted answers it, his voice floating somewhere behind her. She can't hear anything he says over the paramedics asking if she can tell them her name and birth date and what year it is. She answers their questions, but closes her eyes after a while. They all sound so far away.
When she wakes again, the room is off-white and sterile and antiseptic. Barney and Ted are sitting on chairs next to the bed she is propped up in and they are speaking in whispers that reach her ears in pieces like some sort of secret language. They stand when they see her move and both lean over her. Barney's eyes are red and that's how she knows. Not when the doctor comes in to tell her, to offer his condolences, but seeing Barney's eyes like that, like they have crossed over some bridge and there is no going back.
Ted leaves them be, says he needs a coffee and goes.
"How are you?" Barney finally manages, but she can tell it isn't what he meant to say.
"I've been better," she says after a while, but it isn't what she meant to say either.
He stands back, doesn't touch her. She must look like some kind of corpse.
After a pause, they both burst out with, "I'm sorry," at the same time, but the words don't feel right. They don't capture the scope of the tragedy. They sound stale and recycled. But neither of them has anything better to offer. Not here in this hospital room with Ted probably standing in the hallway outside the door. Or at least, that's what Robin tells herself.
"Did they say if I could leave?" she asks him.
"When your IV is done."
She looks to her left, to the gentle drip of the machine.
"Does Ted…?"
"He knows everything. He wants to call Lily. Do you want to see Lily?"
When she says, "Not today," her voice has a pained quality to it that makes her feel ashamed. But seeing Lily right now is too much for her to handle.
A few minutes later, Ted knocks at the door and then pokes his head in. He is holding a steaming Styrofoam cup. "I'm going to run back to the apartment and clean up. The nurse said the IV might take an hour more."
"Ted, no," Robin gasps, embarrassed again at the memory of blood and mess. "I'll just throw everything out."
"Scherbatsky?" he says and meets her eyes, "I got this."
After Ted leaves, she and Barney watch midday television until the IV drip is empty and the nurse hands Robin a change of clothes Ted must have brought for her and a wheeled chair to leave the hospital in.
Barney sleeps on the couch at Robin and Ted's apartment. Late at night, she hears him pace around the living room and stand just inside her open door. She closes her eyes and pretends to be asleep when he comes to look in on her because she doesn't want to talk about this. She doesn't want him to tell her it's okay or that it wasn't her fault.
Maybe they haven't had a chance to talk about this and what it means now. But Robin can't picture any future at all, with Barney or without Barney. There is only this ambiguous present and the two of them afraid to say what they really mean (or is it just, her afraid to hear it?). Then there's Ted, standing off in her mind's periphery, a witness.
Robin spends the night wondering what would have happened if she went straight to the hospital instead of going back to the apartment, or if she had found out sooner. She had a few cigarettes right after that night with Barney. She must have had a drink or two before realizing she was late. And caffeine, how much caffeine had she had? There were so many ways this was all her fault. And that stupid rambling prayer. Some part of her had wanted this to happen. Hadn't she wanted it all to go away?
But, she reasons, that was before she understood how empty a person could feel. Here, lying in her bed with the new sheets, with the nauseous feeling in her stomach gone, a different, but no less uneasy one creeps up on her. Even with Ted and Barney in the apartment with her, she has never felt so alone or so empty.
The next morning, everyone is at the apartment when she wakes up and stumbles out of her bedroom. Barney is sitting on the couch with his hands squeezed together in his lap. Lily and Marshall are talking to him in low voices. Ted, in his flannel pajamas, is moving around in the kitchen making breakfast.
They all see her at once and Lily wraps Robin up in her warm arms. The bump of Lily's stomach presses into her and she starts to cry. After a while Lily is crying too, and leading Robin back into her bedroom where they both sit down on the bed. Robin lets Lily do most of the talking, lets those comforting words float over her. The door is open, but the guys stay out, the doorway some kind of barrier.
"Sweetie, darling," Lily is saying, "It's going to be okay. You're going to be okay."
She rubs Robin's back while she cries and her body heaves and heaves.
Lily doesn't say anything about next time or about one day in the future trying again and Robin cannot think of a way to express how grateful she is. So she cries until the tears stop coming, until she is left with just that dull pain behind her temples, until Lily lies down beside her and she falls back into a tense, dreamless sleep.
Another week and it is Christmas Eve.
Robin still hasn't gone back to work and instead spends her days in the apartment, reading news stories or lying in bed on her stomach with the pillow pulled over her head.
At the tail end of the bar's Christmas party, after Marshall and Lily have gone back to their big house in the suburbs, Barney puts a hand on Robin's shoulder. He is sitting next to her in the booth, Ted sitting across from them.
"You guys want to head out soon? I have eggnog and gingerbread cookies upstairs," Ted says.
Barney laughs. "Are you going to read us The Night before Christmas, too?"
"I've had it memorized since I was eight years old," he says. "Who needs to read it?"
Upstairs, they sit around looking at the tree. It's a Wonderful Life is on the TV like it is every year. They're all half-watching, the tray of cookies a pile of crumbs, and through the speakers comes out Clarence's voice, "When he isn't around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"
And like that Robin is sobbing. She feels it, feels that hole sucking her up in with it. Her face feels warm and her saliva hard to swallow. Barney reaches for the remote and changes it to A Christmas Story. Then he pulls her in and gives her a hug. She stays in his arms both too long and not long enough. She can feel him restless against her, and the hollow still deep inside her when he lets her go.
She can feel Ted and Barney exchange some look. Ted pats her shoulder timidly and rises from the couch.
"I'm going to bed," he says.
When Ted's door closes behind him, Barney presses his cold lips to Robin's forehead. She looks up at him the way a child might for guidance but still can't blink away the watery feeling that fills her eyes. He looks at her in a way she interprets as tired.
She's taking advantage of him. She's not handling this on her own, but hanging around in Barney's shadow, watching the way he deals with it and copying him. But it isn't working. She can't be as cool and collected as he can and pretending doesn't make her feel any better.
He leads her up the fire escape onto the snowy roof. They stand far from the edge and watch the snow fall down around them in big white tufts. He fishes her hand out of her pocket and laces his fingers through hers.
After a while, she tells him, "It's hard to be around Lily." The words leave her mouth with a cloudy wisp of breath and their aftertaste is something bitter and metallic.
Barney, holding her to him, counters, "It'll get easier." But his words have a stale quality to them, as if he's spoken them to her before. A hundred times, even.
Robin doesn't say anything. She believes him, but still, easier seems a foreign concept to her; maybe in the future, maybe someday, but not now.
"I think it might help you to talk to someone," he says after a while. "You could join a support group or something."
Talk to someone else. His words sting cold like the snowflakes on her cheeks.
"Don't you feel it too?" she asks.
"I don't think I feel it the same way you do." It is a confession. The condensation in his breath reaches her forehead, where it warms her a second before leaving the spot colder than before.
She already knew. But somehow, hearing it aloud in his voice makes her feel more alone in this, makes her feel like she was the only one who lost something she can't ever get back. She knows then, with a new sadness that comes on unexpectedly, that she is in a place where he cannot follow her. She loosens her hand from his grasp and lets it hang down at her side.
"Robin," he says. His voice is hoarse from the cold and strained from something else.
She knows what he is trying to do even if he doesn't. He is holding on to her, still, even as he is letting her go.
"Time," Robin tells him and swallows hard. She sticks her hands into her pockets for warmth and then takes a step forward.
Barney gives a little half nod. Then he looks out at the buildings covered in snow. She looks out too. The snow is still falling. On the road, cars are sloshing through it, turning the snow brown-gray. But high up it sticks white and glittery like in a storybook.
And then, they're just two more New Yorkers standing on some rooftop past midnight, watching the sky for Christmas miracles.