Chapter 50

Jack has been kneeling in front of his wife, one of her hands in his, for a full ten minutes, and he's still none the wiser. She'd shot out into the hallway just as he'd got home, mouth open, ready to tell him. Until, that is, she realised that she has absolutely no idea what to say. Which is how they've ended up here, with her sat on the sofa and Jack kneeling in front of her. He looks how she feels, like his world is ending, like it's crumbling around him into dust.

This whole thing would be less distressing, Jack thinks, if she would just look at him. He's sure that if she will just make eye contact with him then he will be able to coax out of her whatever it is that's sent her sideways. But no, she won't even look at him, instead staring down into her lap where one of his hands is intertwined with hers.

"Kath, love, whatever it is, it can't be as bad as you's makin' out." He squeezes her hand. "Jus' spit it out."

He isn't sure if he wants her to. What if today is the day she realises how useless he is? What if today is the day she leaves?

Just spit it out, Katherine. Two words, really simple. I'm pregnant. Just say it. I'm pregnant. "I – I think I'm pregnant."

She says the words to the hands intertwined on her lap, unable to meet his eyes. She can't look at him, she just can't. But then he doesn't answer, his hand gone limp in hers, and the silence stretches on for seconds, minutes, hours. So she has to look, she has to. She dares, glances up, Jack's face unreadable, unreadable to the point where she has to beg him because she has to know, she has to.

"Jack, say something." It's as if the words wake him from a dream. His eyes, unfocused, blown wide, snap back to her, seeing her for the first time.

"Okay." Jack settles back on his heels, his free hand stuffing itself into his hair, scratching at his scalp. He swallows, heavy, laboured. "Okay."

"Something other than okay?"

He blinks. "Are y'sure?"

"Pretty sure." Katherine nods slowly, not quite sure what Jack wants the answer to be. Really, she supposes, it doesn't matter what either of them wants. "I've been being sick every morning and I haven't bled since September."

"Okay." Jack nods, tight and jerky, then catches her irritated gaze. "Sorry, I – I thought we was bein' careful?"

"Not careful enough, apparently."

"We's goin' to have a baby, Ace." Jack's voice is quiet, prayerful, a voice that burns incense in a church. "A baby."

They're having a baby. He's going to be a dad. A child. The family he's always wanted, craved, hankered after. The eight-year-old boy who sat, cold and miserable, on the bench in the park, watching the families wander past, little children in colourful woollen coats, adoring parents clasping their little reddened fingers in large hands adorned with wedding rings. Happy. That's going to be him. That's going to be him and Katherine.

That's going to be him and Katherine. What the hell. He has no idea how to be a dad. What if he ends up like his old man? What if Katherine… what if Katherine ends up like his mother?

"I can't do this!" His thoughts shatter at her tone. Katherine's crying, now. "We're nineteen, Jack, we can't be parents!"

Jack sucks in a breath. Katherine. He can do this, he has Katherine. He has to do this for Katherine. Strong, sensible. Be the husband and father he doesn't have a clue how to be. Jack tenses the muscles of his legs underneath him, forcing himself further down against the floorboards. He will not run. Even though it's all he wants to do, he will not run. Katherine. Katherine is more important.

"Speak for yoursel', I's twenty." He forces a smile onto his face, but that just seems to distress Katherine more, so he quickly wipes it off, bringing his free hand up to clasp hold of her other one, ducking his head to chase her gaze until she's looking at him again. "Hey, hey. We'll figure it out. We's done crazier things, you an' me, huh?"

"But everything I've worked for." Katherine tells him, squeezing his hands to the point of pain. "The second that Mr. Ross realises I'm pregnant he'll lay me off. I'll never write again."

"So, we don' tell him." Jack shrugs, then grins up at her. "It'll take him at least six months to work up the courage to ask you 'f you is, for fear o' implyin' you's gettin' fat."

"Jack." She sounds desperate in a way that makes his chest tighten.

"Kath, we'll figure it out." He breaks one hand out of her grip, gesturing wildly. "You can still write, jus' maybe not for the Sun. You's got those fiction stories you's always workin' on, an' the stuff for the suffrage magazine. You don' hafta give that stuff up. I know it's scary, but we'll get through."

Can't she see it? Yes, it's terrifying, but they have the whole world spread out in front of them, theirs for the taking. They have a house, he has a job steady enough to support the both of them, they're going to have a child. They've got everything, everything they could ever possibly want.

"But what about when it's here? I can't – I don't want to just stay at home, Jack. I want children, of course, I do, but not yet! I want to do something first!"

"It ain't ideal timin', but 's okay. You could go back to work part-time, you won't have no trouble gettin' another job. Or we hires a nanny."

"You… you want to keep it?"

Jack thinks he might throw up. He's heard stories, you don't grow up alongside the dockyard girls or socialise with the girls at Medda's without hearing them. Hot baths, they used to say, real hot, scald your skin lobster-red, some sort of purification in the steam. Whisky, mixed with ipecac. Or, worst of all, the stories of the housewives in their dirty tenement blocks, whispers of their trade, the tools they sterilise in the grease-stained ovens, pools of blood cleaned up before the younger children troop in from the street, the older ones from the factories.

"Well, I ain't lettin' some old lady have at you wi' a wire coat hanger on her kitchen table, Kath."

Katherine blanches, that wasn't what she'd meant, not what she'd meant at all, she couldn't do that if she wanted to. Which she doesn't. The thought shocks her. She wants this baby. Yes, the timing is terrible, but Jack's right. They can make this work. Things never do seem to quite go their way, but they make them work. They've made this work, this thing between them that hums, electric, this marriage, this family that they've built, that they've brought together.

She wants this. She wants a child with Jack's hair and her eyes, wants a little person that's theirs, who they made, with tiny fingers and toes, full of hope, who'll know a family the likes of which neither of them had. A family that's unconditional, and loves them accordingly. But Jack – she knows, through his whispers in the dark, through his past behaviour, that he must be scared out of his wits. She can see it in his eyes, dark and darting, that he wants to run, knows that he's holding back for her sake. So she has to ask, because this can't be just what she wants. Jack has to want this too.

"No, I mean…" she squeezes her eyes shut, hoping that it isn't what he wants, "you don't want to give it up?"

Jack snatches his hand away, as if he can't bear to touch her. "What? How – how couldja even say somethin' like that?"

Katherine blinks her eyes open, filling with tears once more as Jack jolts to his feet, stumbling backwards away from her, bracing a white-knuckled hand on the mantelpiece. "I thought you weren't ready," she protests, "I –"

"No kid o' mine is goin' into some damn orphanage to grow up under the thumb o' some Synder." Jack spits, head down, not looking at her, but pointing at her, yes, one finger of his free hand, accusatory. "'F you want your career, Kath, then you fuck off an' get it, but I ain't givin' my kid up. No way."

Jack's never sworn in front of her, not like that, never mind at her. Well, at least they're on the same page. She should have known that that would be what sets him off, that it'd be the thought of a child in pain that would do it, after everything. Something warm blossoms inside of her chest.

"I love you, Jack."

He closes his eyes, pained, trying to gather himself. She waits. She'll wait a lifetime for him to come back to her, if she has to.

"I love you too."

"And I love this baby, because it's ours."

Jack nods, finally meeting her eyes. "Me too."

Later, much later, lying in their bed, Jack thinks back to this time a year ago, a year that feels like a lifetime, months that have been hard as hell but blissful in it. He thinks of the time that they lay together, much like this, in the darkness of Medda's theatre, the way that the worn velvet felt beneath his fingers and how much softer Katherine had seemed than that fabric. He thinks of the secrets that he told her then, words spoken into darkness, words full of meaning dissolving in empty air, rejected scripts for half-finished plays, things that neither of them could understand, not then.

"Y'know how you said I has to tell you things?"

He's half hoping she's asleep already, that he won't have to say it, but he has to try. He's got to be better, to show up for her, because it's Katherine, because they're a family, and this life that they've built together has to be stable, has to be ready for another person to come into it. They have to get it all out, spread out on the table in front of them in black and white newsprint. For their sake. For the baby's.

"Mm?" Damnit.

"I's real scared, Ace."

"Why?"

Why, indeed. There are many answers that he could give to such a question. For all of his blustering, Jack knows that he's just a blowhard, faking confidence in the hopes that it'll all turn out alright. He's fucking terrified, always has been.

The first time Jack saw a dead body, he was eight. His father had been grey for as long as Jack could remember, grey hair, turned so before its time; grey skin, washed out like a half-developed photograph; grey eyes, hard and steely and sparking when the mood took him to dole out a beating. It had taken Jack a full minute to realise that the man on the sofa - no, the body – that he'd been trying to shake awake was grey because it was dead. He was told, later, by the landlord that kicked him out onto the street, that his father had choked on his own vomit, unable to breathe, too drunk to turn himself onto his side and spit it out. It was the first time that Jack understood why his father hadn't been fully grey, why the tips of his father's fingers, just shy of brushing against the floor as his arm dangled, lifeless, over the side of the sofa, had been blue, a bluish-purple that stained the fingernails like that strange, foul-smelling polish that the working girls down by the docks used.

Jack has seen a lot of dead bodies since. The boys at the Refuge and the lodgehouse; croup, scarlet fever, polio, if you can name it, Jack's seen a kid dead with it, like some sick sort of bucket list, and of course it always fell to him to shoo away the other boys and deal with it, their innocence still intact. He's seen more than his fair share of grey faces and blue fingers. And he's fucking terrified of seeing another.

He doesn't want to be a grey-faced father, not dead on the sofa, but rotting from the inside out, gangrenous. He doesn't want to be his old man, tossed to the curb and bitter with it, beating on his wife, beating on his kid. He'd rather be dead completely, choke on his own vomit. But what is he supposed to do instead? He doesn't know anything except the grey, doesn't know how to be anything apart from it. Katherine is the colour in his life and he paints her as such, but how long will she be able to stay so if his grey keeps on encroaching, sneaking, like mould stretching out its grasping, groping fingers across a ceiling?

"I dunno how to be a dad." He chokes out, as if the mould has got into his throat. "My old man… I don' wanta be like him, Kath. What 'f I turn out like him?"

Katherine, previously nuzzling into his shoulder, stills. Jack wonders whether this is it, whether this is what breaks them. Then, abrupt, she sits up in their bed, yanking him up beside her, and takes his face between her hands.

"Jack Kelly, you are nothing like your father." She is fierce, strong, every bit the woman he married, the woman that he fell in love with, that he falls in love with over again each day. Jack knows, no doubt in his mind, that she'll be a fantastic mother. "You are strong and kind and wonderful and you're going to make a fantastic father. Look at all the newsies! You raised all of them and they've turned out brilliantly."

"'S different." Jack mumbles, swiping at his nose with the back of his hand.

"No, it's not." Her hands tighten on his face, forcing him to look at her, forcing him to allow himself to be convinced. "We'll muddle through, you and me. You'll be a great dad."

Hell. When Katherine says it, her and her words, he can just about believe it. He can just about believe it. "Okay."

Katherine searches his eyes for a moment, catches a new sort of conviction there, then, satisfied, settles the two of them back against the pillows. Jack allows her to, just for a moment, in the quiet of their bedroom, look after him. Tomorrow he will get up and he will be strong for her, like he was today, tensing his muscles and not running out the door, not wanting to run out the door, because he loves her. But just for now, it's okay. This thing they've got going on, it goes both ways. And it's the most wonderful thing he's ever known.

"Do you remember him?" Katherine asks him, her breath brushing against the shell of his ear. "Your father?"

"Bits an' pieces." Jack admits. Barely visible in the darkness of their bedroom, he waves a hand vaguely. "Not real clear, like. I remember the beatin's he handed out better than him. He was kinda… angular, like. All hard edges. Y'know?"

And she sort of does. Katherine has realised that Jack sees the world very differently to her. Her brain craves pattern and order and logic, where Jack is more fluid. Jack sees the ways in which objects flow into one another, their lines and shades and textures. She wishes, sometimes, that she could see the world through his eyes, just for a while, just to see what it's like. But there's a reason they work so well together. She needs his creativity; he needs her structure. They need each other.

"Why?" Jack asks. Katherine bites her lip.

"I don't remember what Lucy looked like. I mean, I do, but her face… it's sort of…gone."

It's strange, to say it out loud. To admit it. When it's echoing around her own head, it feels like a failing, like if she'd only loved Lucy better then she might be able to remember properly. She feels Jack tug her a little bit closer. She doesn't feel like so much of a failure anymore.

"We should call our kid Lucy. 'F it's a girl, o' course."

"Really?"

"Mm. Whaddaya want for a boy?"

Katherine thinks for a moment. When she and Lucy were little, they used to draw pictures of imaginary weddings and plan their children's names. Growing up, coming into herself, she'd never thought that she'd be married at nineteen, that she'd be pregnant. She'd wanted independence. But now? She likes having Jack, having him to rely on, having him rely on her. She never thought that this would be her life, but she'd hate to be living any other.

"I like Thomas."

"Thomas 's nice." Jack turns his head, presses a kiss to her forehead. He presses words into her skin, words so quiet that she almost doesn't hear them, almost quieter than the flutter of her eyes closing. Almost. "Don' leave me, alright?"

"What do you mean?"

"My mother –"

Oh. Jack, her darling Jack. "Jack. Your mother gave birth twenty years ago in a filthy slum. I will have our baby here. In this bedroom, with a midwife or a doctor, in a clean, warm house with good food and medicine. You can't get rid of me that easily, okay?"

"Okay."

Jack tries not to let the words filthy slum hurt as much as they do. There's some truth to them, of course, but it's strange to think of that one room apartment that he spent the first eight years of his life in, on and off, when they could scrape together the rent, as a filthy slum. Katherine's words do offer some modicum of comfort, though. It's her, after all, and she's never been one too shy away from something just because it's dangerous. He wouldn't have her any other way.

"Why ain't you afraid? O' dyin?"

"Because I believe in a God who promises unconditional salvation to those who believe in him. I have nothing to fear." And of course, that's her answer. Jack doesn't think he'll ever understand this faith that she has, this incredible trust she has in something that she's never seen. But then she puts trust in him, and she knows him, knows every part of him, the places where he's stitched together, and still she loves him, and anything's possible if that is. "Are you? Afraid of dying, I mean."

"No. I's jus' afraid o' you leavin' me alone."

"I didn't say I wasn't afraid of your death, Jack, only that I'm not afraid of mine." She reaches over his bare chest and takes hold of his left hand with hers, the rings on their fingers clinking together. "I promise not to leave you, so long as you promise not to leave me."

"For sure?"

"For sure."