A Time To Lose
She lay motionless on Kid's bunk, worrying about Warner, his next move, and what she was getting herself, and Jimmy-since he was hellbent on staying, into.
"Maybe I should sell, take the money...start over somewhere new," she said aloud, tears stinging her eyes at the thought of it. "I know what we talked about, but I don't think I have another war in me, Kid."
She curled herself around her belly, holding onto the small roundness there, miserable and unsure of herself and her new world.
It was so subtle at first she thought she imagined it, but her breath caught in her throat and she froze, waiting to see if it came again, desperately wishing for it.
It did. Far beneath her hands, there was a butterfly doing flips in her belly, softer than a whisper but sure as sunrise. It was the first time she had felt the baby within her move...the first time she had felt either of their two babies move.
Tears of gratitude sprang up, spilled over, and a delighted laugh escaped her lips. And before she knew it she was both laughing and crying with joy like a madwoman. Her laugh sounded alien, like something she had never heard before.
"He's really there, Kid!" She exclaimed. "He's real!"
She looked around the quiet bunkhouse, half-hoping to catch a glimpse of Kid, some sign he was with her. This is where her life had truly started, where she felt Kid more than anywhere else. This place was the only legacy they had, and their baby would know Kid only through his connection to this place.
She lay there, gratitude washing through her, her heart lighter than it had been. Resolve came next. "All right," she murmured, but she was talking to the baby this time. "We'll fight."
February 27 1861, Rock Creek Nebraska Territory
She paced the floor across the length of their small rented rooms, turned around and did it again, as she had been for the last half-hour.
Kid was due home from his run, and she had news.
She was admittedly nervous. She had no idea how he would feel about the fact the doctor had confirmed to her that she was going to have a baby.
They had talked about having children, but in distantly abstract terms. Now, with the impending war holding their future, and the future of the whole nation, hostage, it hardly seemed an ideal time to start their family.
To add to her concerns, it was becoming clear that the days of the express were numbered.
It was terrible timing.
Still, her heart leapt with excitement at the thought of being a mother, which surprised her because she had been so hesitant to take on the role of wife. She just wasn't sure how Kid, who was already brooding with worry over the uncertain times, might feel about this added responsibility.
He came in with a blast of cold air, covered in mud. She could tell from one look at him that it had been a bad ride and that he was ready to drop.
There was a rush of jealousy that swept through her, even given that he looked miserable. She still missed the bone-weariness that followed the hard rides, the physical exhaustion. She was often restless these days, found herself at a loss of how to exercise her anxiousness away from the 75-mile trail that used to challenge her body and quiet her mind.
"Hey Lou," he smiled, and she knew he was glad to see her, but the smile didn't reach all the way into his eyes.
"What's wrong?" she asked him immediately, as he wrestled his mud-caked boots off just inside the door and then started peeling the top layers of damp clothes off.
He gave her the mystified look he always did when she read his mind. He sighed and told her, "Texas approved the referendum for secession too. And the Southern States have inaugurated Jefferson Davis as President. Lincoln will be inaugurated in a couple of weeks."
Lou bit her lip. It seemed whenever any of the boys came back from a run to the East, they brought the war closer and closer. New states were leaving the union, arsenals and federal property were being seized. Secession was like a contagion that had started slowly but was now raging across the Southern States.
"Virginia?" she asked quietly.
He simply shook his head, indicating no news, lips tightly pressed.
Lou sighed, decided her own news could wait until the shadow of the war moved off them. The bubble of excitement in her belly burst, was replaced by the dread that seemed to have taken up residence there since Noah died some months back.
However, Kid spotted the little package she had tied up in a yellow ribbon and placed on the middle of their small table along with their dinner. "What's this?" he asked with a sweet, but tired, smile.
"It's noth-" she started to say, but stopped abruptly because she was superstitious enough not to dismiss the baby so easily. "It's a surprise, but maybe it can wait a bit until you rest?"
Kid, relieved of the dirtiest layers of his clothes, came to her, putting his arms around her and kissing her thoroughly. She could feel the cold on his skin.
"l could use a nice surprise," he grinned and moved cool lips up her neck until he found her earlobe, making her scrunch her neck and squeak as chills broke out all along her body. She heard the widening smile in his voice at her reaction, "Could use some warming up too, once I clean up. I'll rest when I'm dead."
She squirmed and giggled under his touch, but he held her tightly.
"Can I?" he whispered against her neck, tasting her skin there and bringing on a whole different kind of chills.
"Mmm?" she asked, very distracted but inclined to grant him permission to do whatever he liked at the moment.
"Open it?"
Lou took a deep breath, nervousness eclipsing the desire she felt. "All right. Open it."
He looked like a boy himself when he took the package, testing its weight mischievously, a smile pulling at the corner of his lips.
Lou watched his face, anxiously, as he tugged the ribbon and opened the lid of the little box.
When he saw what was inside, his face registered bemusement, then outright confusion. Slowly he reached in the box and withdrew the silver rattle she had bought at Tompkins store. It looked ridiculously small pinched in his big fingers.
He looked at her, brow lowered with lack of comprehension, and Lou arched her own brows expectantly, waiting for him to get it.
When he did get it, the truth seemed to run all over him like stampeding horses, flattening him. His eyes went wide, his face a shade paler, and his lips parted for words that would not come as he looked incredulously at her.
"Lou?" he finally managed to inquire, voice pitched high.
Despite her worry at how he would take the news, a laugh escaped her at his panicked expression.
"Yes?"
"You're...we're….I'm…?" he stammered wildly and then dropped his gaze to her midsection incredulously, mouth hanging open.
"Yeah," she said, felt tears touch her eyes as she said for the first time, "you're gonna be a Daddy."
"But...how?"
She giggled again, reminded herself she'd had a full day and a half to wrap her mind around what Kid was grappling with now. "I was under the impression you knew exactly how, Kid. But you see when a man and a woman-"
She stopped talking abruptly when he glared at her with fire in his eyes, incredulous that she might make a joke at this moment.
He stood there dumbstruck, alternately looking at the rattle and at her still-flat stomach, as if the baby might pop out any second.
"If it's alright, I'm gonna start eatin' while you sort this out," Lou finally muttered, sitting down at the table without waiting for his response. What had been amusing at first to her was quickly turning aggravating. It was as if the thought that this might happen had never crossed his thoughts.
She could get no read on his stunned expression, could not tell if in addition to the shock he was pleased, but he did not look it. For sure, he was not leaping in joy.
It hurt her feelings, and inexplicably there were tears burning her eyes, which frustrated and dismayed her, though the doctor had warned her that moodiness was common in the early weeks. Watching him try to process the information, she felt like she had done something wrong, even though he was exactly as responsible as she was.
"Kid?" she finally whispered.
His wide eyes turned to meet hers.
"Say somethin'," she pleaded, voice catching.
The distress in her voice snapped him out of his trance. He looked at her a long moment with great tenderness overtaking his expression. He dropped to one knee at her side, putting one arm around her back, and the other hesitantly, gently, over her stomach.
He poked around lightly, tickling her and she yelped with laughter and stilled his hand, demanding, "Kid, what in the world are you doing?"
"Trying to feel it!"
"Kid...there ain't much to feel yet. It'll be several months before you'll be able to feel the baby move. You can't even tell yet by looking at me. I'm barely six weeks along."
"Can you feel it yet?" he asked, amazed.
"No...not yet. I just been tired, and a little sick off and on these last few weeks."
"But you're sure?" he asked meeting her eyes.
She nodded and his face finally broke into a brilliant smile as the tears spilled down his cheeks. She tasted the salt of them as he put his icy hands on her cheeks and held her there while he kissed her ever so gently.
"You're...happy?" she finally guessed tearfully. "Truly?"
He leaned his forehead against hers, his voice thick. "Yeah, Lou. Happier than I ever thought I would be. Happier than I got any right to be."
"I know the timing ain't perfect," Lou ventured, giving him permission to express his concerns.
He surprised her. "I can't think of a better time for happiness, for something to look forward to, Lou. This is a blessing."
Lou smiled through her own tears, comforted, relieved. "You're going to be a wonderful father, Kid."
She saw fear and doubt flash in his expression, knew as well as she knew him that he was thinking of his own abusive father. He squared his shoulders with resolve and met her gaze squarely. "I can tell you one thing, Lou. I'm sure gonna try. The most important thing I'm ever gonna do in this life is try to be a good father and a husband worthy of you. I love you."
And he drew her from the chair, into his lap, and held her as tightly as he dared there on the floor, his cold lips pressed to her forehead.
She awoke so much in the grip of the memory that she could still feel the icy brand of his kiss on her brow and taste the salt of his tears on her lips.
She clenched her teeth against the pain, knowing Kid and her first baby were gone, just memories. It was the highest form of cruelty, the waking after seeing him so vividly, and having the sharp edge of reality sever the false happiness it brought her.
She always wished she could go back to Kid when she woke from these dreams and find him in sleep, but he was elusive, coming and going from her subconscious as he pleased. In the first weeks after he had left her, she had scarcely left the bed, preferring the escape the occasional dreams of him offered.
She tried to roll over and go back to sleep, praying to pick up exactly where the dream had left off, with her in his arms, but the thing that had awakened her in the first place broke through her grogginess at last.
Smoke. A lot of it in the air. And the horses were neighing loudly in distress from the corral. She heard retreating hoofbeats, feared the horses had gotten loose.
She glanced toward the window. It was late, it should have been full dark, but she could see the flickering of what had to be large flames throwing shadows against the curtains from outside.
In instant panic, she bolted from the bunk and tore across the room, throwing open the door and gasping when she saw the first floor of the main house engulfed in flames that were quickly moving up the structure toward the second floor. She glanced over to see the horses still in the corral, pacing and neighing nervously.
"Fire!" she screamed as she started running toward the barn for a bucket, and to wake Jimmy.
She stumbled mid-stride as a horrifying thought hit her like a blow. Jimmy. He had, at her insistence, moved to the main house a few days back.
She turned frantically back toward the house, eyes searching for signs of him, signs he had made it out. She didn't see him anywhere. Her eyes drifted up the burning structure where the bedrooms were located. She saw nothing but deadly smoke and leaping flames.
"No, no, no, no, no," she gasped over and over as she changed directions mid-stride and turned back across the yard toward the house.
She rushed through the white picket fence and toward the front porch, kept going until she hit the heat that felt like a solid wall just before the stairs. The intensity and pain of it on her skin forced her back. She squared her shoulders and tried to surge forward again, but again the scorching of her skin was too much and she couldn't push past.
"Jimmy!" She screamed, over and over, coughing as the smoke invaded her mouth and nose. It was no use...she couldn't get close to the front door.
She ran back out of the fence and around the back of the house, praying to find him there. Her tears nearly blinded her when she didn't. She cast a glance upwards again at the second story, now engulfed in flames, and couldn't imagine how anyone in it could be alive.
She couldn't give up though; she could not lose anyone else.
The flames were not as intense at the back of the house, and she ran up to the back door, grabbing the knob and howling in pain as the metal burned her badly, blistering her palm. Cradling the hand, she bent at the waist and felt near to madness as the fire forced her back into the dirt again.
She needed help. She bellowed for it at the top of her lungs, over and over at intervals, in between coughing and hollering Jimmy's name, even realizing there was no one near enough to hear.
The sound of the fire consuming the old wood of the house was deafening, it roared and crackled and hissed like a wild and terrible beast making a kill.
She ran back to the barn, grabbed a single bucket, and went to the water trough to scoop some up. She sloshed most of it onto her nightgown on the first trip across the dust.
Somewhere, in her right mind, it occurred to her how utterly useless a half-full bucket at a time was going to be in fighting the raging inferno that lit the whole station like day. The flames reached toward the sky, the smoke blocked out the moon and stars.
She had no idea what else to do, doing nothing was not an option. Trip after trip she ran the path from the trough to the house, until her arms trembled with exhaustion, and each time she tossed the water, the water fell further and further from the flames and just sloshed over her feet.
She might have been at it minutes, hours, or days. She wasn't sure, but she was halfway across the yard, still sobbing with the effort and with grief, when her legs finally gave out. She crashed down on her knees in the dust, utterly defeated as she recognized she had reached the outer limits of her strength, and that it had not been enough to save Jimmy. Just as it hadn't been enough to save Kid.
Tears blurred her vision. She didn't sob anymore; she was just too spent for that. Instead silent tears washed down her face as she sat there watching the house lose the battle with the fire. The flames for a moment outlined the structure of the old house perfectly as it had always been. It looked eerily beautiful, an enormous glowing skeleton sketched on the dark navy sky.
And then with a last splintering groan, the house simply folded in on itself, the supports collapsing like broken bones.
Lou closed her eyes as a wave of dust, smoke, and grief washed over her, bowing her head against it, wrapping her arms around herself, and feeling as if the heat had petrified her, turned her to stone.
A/N: Thank you for reading and reviewing. That little notification makes my day, and I love hearing your thoughts on the characters and the history and the speculations of what comes next. I do have explanations for everything going on-all will be revealed. In time.
I have to say writing Lou dealing with Kid's death is actually pretty painful. I heard a Charlie Puth song called See You Again the other day, and sat and cried in my car thinking about it in the context of this story and in losing a loved one in general...the chorus of that song inspired this chapter a bit:
It's been a long day without you my friend,
And I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
We've come a long way from where we began,
Oh I'll tell you all about it when I see you again, when I see you again.
