Prompt: Mother's Day one year comes shortly after Elizabeth has a miscarriage.
Content Warning: pregnancy loss
The sun was shining.
It was a beautiful, bright, warm day in the middle of May, and Elizabeth was sitting at the kitchen table in the little house she shared with her husband, and it was silent. It was so utterly silent that she wanted to scream just to take up some of that empty space. The kind of silent that was hard and oppressive, too much and too loud, somehow. She hated it.
Today, more than ever.
There was a mug of stone cold tea on the table in front of her, filled almost to the brim. Next to it, a sopping wet teabag, crumpled in on itself with tea spreading out in a messy circle around it in the fabric of the napkin it rested on. There was a spoon, too, unused save for when Elizabeth had pressed the back of it against the hot tea bag to squeeze out the excess liquid. It had all been untouched now for over an hour. The napkin, where it had been wet, had already dried out and shriveled under the tea bag.
Elizabeth was not a tea drinker. She loved coffee. Extra hot and with steamed milk and a little sugar, especially. That was her favorite, but she could handle a black coffee, too, no problem. Some days, when it was especially wintry or when she was particularly stressed, it was the black coffee she actually preferred, the way her mother had taken it.
She didn't like tea. But she hadn't had coffee since March.
It was Mother's Day.
She had insisted Henry go to work. She loved her husband, and took great solace in having him nearby most of the time. He had been her saving grace for the past three weeks. But not today.
Today, all Elizabeth wanted was to be alone.
Actually, all Elizabeth wanted was her baby in her arms. Or better yet, still growing inside her body, safe where they should have been. As she sat there at the table in the painful silence of her house, Elizabeth remembered learning she was pregnant.
Henry looked at the test.
Elizabeth had insisted. She wanted him to be the one to hear the good news first, and in her heart she knew she wanted to look back and remember the way his eyes lit up, the way he would look at her when he was the one to tell her that she was pregnant, that they were going to be parents.
It had been just like Elizabeth wanted it. The two of them alone in their little bathroom one evening, Henry looking up at her with such joy in the lines of his features, looking at her like she hung the moon, like he'd never been so happy in his life.
"Elizabeth, we're having a baby!"
But they were not having a baby. Not anymore.
She remembered that part, too, the torment along with that once-happy memory, each vivid recollection vying for space in her mind.
She remembered the pain, the panic, as she'd stood in that same bathroom just weeks later and spotted the blood. The sharp twisting in her stomach, the physical pain and the way alarm rushed through her veins and seemed to gather right there where her body had been growing a child.
She remembered the hospital, the sterility, the steady hum of noise, of life, and the silence. She remembered the silence most. Not silence like her kitchen on Mother's Day, but silence against the backdrop of a noisy, bustling emergency room. Silence where her baby's heartbeat was supposed to be.
The technician, young like Elizabeth, and bright-eyed with dark hair, looked like she was afraid to speak.
"I'm so very sorry."
"Check again," Elizabeth said. Henry's hand was tight in hers. She could feel his pulse thrumming alongside hers in the fabric of her fingers. His heartbeat, her heartbeat, both of them alive and healthy and well- and surely, so was their baby. How could two alive, healthy, well people have an unborn baby?
But she checked again. And again when Elizabeth demanded it.
"Again."
"Elizabeth."
Henry's voice was far too soft. Too knowing.
Elizabeth did not want to know.
When she looked over at her husband, there were tears in his eyes. And silence.
Elizabeth looked down at her tea. It was Mother's Day, and it occurred to her for the very first time that she didn't have to drink that anymore. She wasn't pregnant. There was no baby growing inside her, no need to abstain from caffeine.
She felt barely herself as she rose from the table, carrying the cold mug, and dumped the tea into the sink. It swirled against the drain and disappeared, and Elizabeth tried not to think about how much she felt like that tea right then.
What would Henry say?
That was what Elizabeth found herself thinking about as she turned away from the sink and began making coffee.
If Henry were here, instead of at work where she had insisted he go, what would he say?
She hadn't let him say much of anything so far. Some part of her wanted to suffer in this. She wanted, a little, to blame herself, and maybe for Henry to blame her a tiny bit. Her body, after all, had failed to keep their child safe and growing. But on that Mother's Day morning, as the scent of coffee filtered into the kitchen and steam rose from the back of the machine where it sat in its place on the countertop, Elizabeth craved to hear what Henry would say.
Did that mean she was healing?
She wondered if Henry would have done something nice for Mother's Day. She'd have been still only a few months pregnant, not far along at all, but it was Henry. He would have wanted it to be special for her.
He would want to be here with her.
So Elizabeth picked up the phone.
By the time that she was sitting at the table again, hot coffee in front of her- black, like her mother had taken it- Henry was already walking in the door.
Her phone call concerned him, but he was glad she was calling him home. He had hated so much having to leave her alone on a day like this. Henry was grieving, too. He had planned something special for Mother's Day. He didn't want to be away from Elizabeth today, either.
He walked into the kitchen and found her there with a cup of coffee.
He tried not to think about the implications.
She looked up when he came to stand right next to her, and he looked down into her ocean blue eyes and gently smoothed his hand over her head, from her hairline over her crown and came to rest on the back of her skull, fingers lost in her blonde hair.
He didn't ask if she was okay. He didn't ask if she was going to drink the coffee. He didn't ask why she'd wanted him to come home.
It was one of the things Elizabeth loved most about Henry.
He kissed her forehead and she leaned her head against him where he stood beside her chair.
"I'm ready to hear what you want to say to me today," Elizabeth told him quietly.
Henry couldn't help the tiny ghost of a smile on his face. Elizabeth- strong and brave and smart and kind Elizabeth, with all the heart in the world, all the love he'd ever known. She knew him like no one else ever could.
There was so much that Henry had wanted to say to Elizabeth since the miscarriage happened. There had been so many times that he wanted to speak, and he knew that his wife knew him well enough to know that. But she had needed this silence, and he felt he owed it to her. He felt that she deserved it. She had carried the body of the child they hoped to bring into the world, she had been the one to feel the physical loss, to suffer the pain. She deserved this time.
She would come to him when she was ready.
Henry had told himself that so many times that he had long since lost count. It had been three weeks, and a lifetime.
But he'd been right. She would come to him when she was ready, and now she had.
He knelt down on the kitchen floor in front of her, looking up at her face, still so young and so lost and so familiar and in such agony still.
"Elizabeth," he began softly. His hand rested on her leg, comfortable and familiar and intimate. His hazel eyes burned with truth.
"You are a mother," he said.
Elizabeth wasn't sure what she had really anticipated that Henry might say, but she knew that it wasn't this. She stared at him for a moment.
"You're still a mother," he told her. She wasn't sure she had ever seen him so serious.
"What do you mean?" she asked, though she thought she knew. She wanted him to say it to her, out loud, the way that Henry did.
"This baby isn't here," Henry began carefully, knowing that the lines of grief, faith, and parenthood were blurred before them now like watercolors. Dark, sad, streaming watercolors on this canvas of life, a part of it that they were too close now to see. A part of the bigger picture, but for now a blurry, messy, uncertain part.
"But you are," he continued. "You are here, and it's Mother's Day, and that's for you, too. Not just for the mothers who have loud houses."
Elizabeth didn't even have to wonder how he'd known she would focus on the silence.
Henry knew her.
Better than anyone ever could.
"You're a mother, Elizabeth. Right now, it's painful in ways that no one can imagine. But it won't always be exactly this painful, and exactly this quiet. The only thing about this experience that is...truly permanent, is that you will always be this baby's mother."
He looked earnestly into her eyes.
"Neither life nor death nor any experience can take that away from you," he told her.
Elizabeth swallowed hard. She reached out, not saying a word, and for a moment she rested her hand on Henry's cheek, his skin warm against her palm.
Then, a sparrow sang outside, and when Elizabeth tore her gaze away from her husband, she looked out the window to find the bird on a branch, singing to a blue May sky.
She took a drink of coffee, and found that it was not yet cold.
Henry sat next to her then, with the soft scrape of the chair legs on the floor, and when the silence settled over them again, Elizabeth found it somehow a little bit more bearable.
