Chapter 57

Author's note: Trigger warnings for death, grief, miscarriage, blood, medical descriptions.

...

There's something about waiting that's rather like dying.

Waiting, you see, is the kind of pain that burns slowly, stripping away skin and nerve endings, magnesium on sandpaper, white hot and spreading. Jack can feel matches striking inside of his throat. He tries to swallow them down, tilting his head back to look at the ceiling. This ceiling was the first one he plastered when they renovated the house. He hadn't quite mastered it at that point. There are scars in the ceiling like the ones on his back where the spindles of the banister railing at the top of the stairs are digging into him. Dr. Graceton told him to leave him alone to work, that he will fetch him when he's needed. Katherine hadn't begged him to stay, not verbally at least, though her eyes told a different story. So he waits at the bottom of the stairs that lead to their room, as close as possible, and it feels like dying. It feels like dying rather more when he remembers that Katherine might actually be.

If she does, it'll be his fault. He knows this. It'll be his fault just the same as it was his fault when his mother died. The same way, too. He doesn't want to see Katherine turn grey. He can't imagine her as anything other than bursting with colour. Jack stares up at the ceiling and wonders what kind of sick and twisted god would take her away from him. Wonders why his prayer wasn't answered, despite Katherine's conviction. Wonders if that kick that Katherine thought she felt was sent to torture them both. If this is what her god does, he wants no part of it.

He's told Edith to wait downstairs. He's under no illusions about the likelihood of good news here. When the doctor comes down the stairs, though, grim and grey-faced, it's still somehow a shock. Jack jolts to his feet.

"Your wife is sleeping." Jack almost collapses to the floor. Alive. Katherine's alive. "She had significant blood loss, but she will make a full recovery." Full recovery. Full fucking recovery. "However –" shit shit fuck he can't do a however, "- I'm afraid your wife has miscarried a baby girl."

It takes those words for Jack to realise that there's a bundle of bloodied towels in the doctor's arms. No. No no no no no no. It can't – he can't –

"I'll have the body taken to this funeral home." Dr. Graceton tells him, handing him a business card. William Houghton, Undertaker. Jack drops it, stoops to pick it up with shaking fingers. The doctor gives him a look, a look of what he isn't quite sure of, and makes to move past him.

"Wait." Jack calls out in a voice that sounds as if it hasn't been used in ten years, turning around. "Can – can I hold her?"

The look on the doctor's face is distinctly one of disgust, then, but he comes forward anyway and transfers the bundle into Jacks trembling arms. It's warm, still, the bundle of towels, it's still fucking warm. It takes Jack two tries to pull back the edge of the towel, fingers shaking as they are.

She's smaller than he expected. He could fit her in the palm of his hand. Those baby booties Katherine is knitting? He could wrap her in one like a blanket. He gets stuck, on that, a little, stuck in the knowledge that she'll never wear them. A little girl. His little girl. Lucy. And the worst of it is that she doesn't look like she's gone. She doesn't look like any dead body Jack's ever seen, not grey and chipped away at like other corpses. She looks warm. She's pink, like fresh scrubbed skin. She has tiny little fingers with tiny little fingernails. She's perfect. She's perfect and theirs and gone.

Jack doesn't know how long he stands there, staring down Lucy, but when the doctor takes her back and covers her back up with the towel, he doesn't resist. He doesn't think he has the strength to. The doctor makes to leave again. Jack stops him.

"Katherine – she'll be okay?"

Dr. Graceton turns around. "Your wife should make a full recovery, as I said. I've put her under mild sedation, but she should wake in about half an hour."

Jack nods. Swallows. "Could… could this happen again?" He can't do this again. Katherine can't do this again. They'll never survive it.

"Mr. Kelly, I can tell you right now that your wife will never get pregnant again. There is absolutely no danger of that."

He chokes. "What?"

The doctor looks at him as if he's some mentally incapacitated child. He speaks slowly, really slowly, patronising. Jack can't bring himself to care, feels as though he needs these pauses in between words, needs the time. Why couldn't they have had more time? "The scar tissue created by a trauma like this won't allow for a pregnancy. Once she's healed you can go on with your…" he wrinkles his nose, looking at Jack like he's some sort of monster, "…activities without concern for that."

"I don' care about fuckin' her," Jack is shouting now though he doesn't know quite how, his voice breaking, "I care that she wanted kids in the future, an' now she can't have 'em!"

The doctor takes a step back, lowers his tone. "Mr. Kelly, there was an underlying condition that caused this. Your wife would never have been able to have children. I really am sorry for your situation, but at some point she would have lost a baby and this would have occurred, preventing any future pregnancy. You should be glad she's even alive."

"What, an' that's what I's s'posed to tell her?" Jack snarls, biting back tears. "To jus' be glad she's alive?"

"Yes." The doctor tightens his jaw. "I'll be back to check on her tomorrow morning."

He walks down the stairs. Jack stumbles back, running from something, some shadow, until his back hits the wall, knocking the wind out of him. He can't breathe. He can't even stand up. He slides to the floor and screams into his hands, too far gone to remember any words that aren't prayers or curses, and really aren't they both the same thing?

"Jack?"

He doesn't know when Edith climbed the stairs, or when she found herself in front of him, or what she's even seen. All he knows is that she's looking down at him, still dressed in her nightgown and his jacket, and she looks more scared than he's ever seen her.

"I don't understand. Is Katherine – is she going to die?"

Edith's lip trembles. Jack's hand does too, when he reaches out and pulls her down beside him. She comes, pliant as the day he did the same in the Hotel Netherland, even though she's taller now. She tucks herself into his side just the same.

"No, no, the doctor says she's goin' to be jus' fine."

"Then why are you crying?"

Jack brings his free hand up to his face, swipes at his eyes. His fist comes away damp. He hadn't even realised. He hadn't even realised.

"She lost the baby."

The words don't belong to him. They can't belong to him. They belong to somebody else, somebody who is supposed to be the strong one, the leader, Captain Jack. Santa Fe has never felt further away.

"Oh."

"An' she ain't ever goin' to be able to have another."

"Oh."

"An' now I's got to tell her."

"Can- can I do anything?"

"Nah, Edie, you's fine. You did a real good job, there, though."

Jack doesn't know where he finds the strength from, but he hauls them both to their feet and tells Edith to go to bed. Edith looks like she wants to say no, to force her way up the stairs to see her sister, but she doesn't. Maybe she can see it behind Jack's eyes, that he doesn't have the energy to fight her, that he's numb now, and distant, and doesn't know how to do any of this. She squeezes his arm, tight enough to hurt, and then goes back into her bedroom.

It takes every ounce of Jack to walk back into that bedroom, every ounce of self-control, of willpower, of energy. When he enters, Katherine is still asleep, mercifully. Jack's never been more grateful to see the rise and fall of her chest, but he wonders if it would be better if she just stayed asleep. Because she will wake, the doctor said she would, and with wakefulness will come the pain.

The bed is still stained red, a reminder of all that's happened. He should change the sheets, but he doesn't know how to do it with a person on the bed, especially a person who's just lost too much blood, and they're probably going to need a new mattress anyway. When he lies down beside her, though, it's still wet, still sticky. Jack knows that he could scrub himself raw three times a day for a year and he'd still see this blood on his skin.

He lies there and he watches. This was his job, wasn't it? Watcher, protector. And he'd failed. Had there been signs? Something he could have done? Something he could have seen earlier? He doesn't suppose it matters now.

"Jack?" Katherine blinks awake, stirring, then groaning in pain. Her eyes are glassy and unfocused, though he doesn't know whether it's the blood loss or the sedation.

"Hey, Ace." He whispers, trying not to start crying again. One of them needs to be strong here. One of them has to be, or everything will crumble. He reaches out and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "How're you feelin'?"

"Awful." She whimpers, catching hold of his hand and keeping it there, pressed to her cheek, searching for some sort of comfort. "What did the doctor say? Is the baby okay?"

"What kinda awful? Sick? In pain?"

"Pain. Cramping, like time of the month." She sighs, winces, shifts. Fists her hands in his undershirt, pulls him a little closer to her. Jack tries his best to comply, shifting closer, trying not to jostle her on the mattress. Katherine doesn't seem to care, tucking herself in closer to him. Jack doesn't want this, doesn't want to be touched, any brush of fingertips might set him off, but Katherine needs this, needs this closeness, and he needs to do this for her. "What did the doctor say, Jack?"

Jack fixes his eyes on the far wall, swallows. "He's comin' back to check on you in the mornin', but he says you should make a full recovery."

"And the baby?" He needs to tell her. He needs to. But the words are stuck in his throat. He can't get them out. He's choking on them. "Jack. The baby?" He remembers how Snyder had held his head under the water in the boathouse once, the way that he'd thrashed and screamed in silent streams of bubbles. The way, when the water flowed into his mouth, that he'd gone very still and quiet. The way that blackness started to creep in around the edges of his vision. "Oh my god."

Jack thinks that it might be the first time he's ever heard her take the lord's name in vain. He pulls her in tight to him, hears her sharp intake of breath at the hurt it causes, but feels the way that she grips him tighter for it.

"Was it my fault?" She sounds numb, her voice barely even there, as if it has been stolen away.

"No, sweetheart, no, no, no," he plants kisses in her hair, her head tucked against his chest, prays that she won't look up and see him crying, "it ain't you, never you."

Katherine had a felt elephant, when she was little, one that matched with Lucy's, a gift from Uncle Worthington one Christmas when stuffed toys first came out and were all the rage. She had loved that elephant. It had taken quite a pounding, glued to her hands through childhood illnesses and tantrums. One day, when she was six, she picked it up and the seam ripped open, completely out of nowhere, stuffing spilling out everywhere. She screamed and screamed and screamed, until the whole household came running. The housekeeper had tutted and taken her elephant away to mend him, sending him back with a bandage and a cake for being a good patient that Katherine had to help him eat, seeing as his tummy had been upset by the operation and all.

Katherine feels rather like her felt elephant. Like she's been ripped open at the seams and her insides pulled out of her. Except now there's no cake, and no bandages, and no housekeeper. There's just her and Jack. Hollowed out. Empty. The stuffing ripped out of them. There's nobody around to stitch them back together.

"Did you see them?" She whispers. "The baby, did you see them before the doctor took them away?"

"Yeah."

She doesn't want to know. But she has to. "What were they like?"

"She was perfect." Jack's hands are on her, comforting and warm. She doesn't know how he can bear to touch her. "She was jus' perfect."

"A little girl." Lucy.

"Yeah." Jack nods. She can feel him trembling. "Jus' like- like she was sleepin'. These little fingers, you wouldn't believe how small, I-"

He breaks off. He can't. Her head feels damp. It takes her a moment to realise that it's Jack, that it's him sobbing into her hair, not just yet more of her being covered in blood.

"I'm sorry."

"No, Kath," Jack chokes, "don' you be sorry, never be sorry, it ain't your fault, it ain't-"

"Who else's?"

Is there something wrong with her, Katherine wonders, that she isn't crying? She unfists one of her hands from Jack's shirt and slides it down between them. Her stomach is still swollen. It's still firm. She hasn't deflated. Surely she ought to have done, if Lucy were truly gone? Surely that's why she isn't crying. Surely it's because none of this is real. Just a bad dream. She's inside one of Jack's nightmares, surely.

"Nobody's, nobody's, it jus'… happened."

It hits her all at once, and she fists her hands in his shirt again and screams into his chest, the tears coming now, a dam breaking. "That's not good enough, Jack, it's not fair-"

"It ain't fair." Jack holds her through it, stable, a shelter of his arms. "Nobody woulda ever loved that kid more than us. But it happened."

"How do we live with this?" She sobs. She hears him sob too, feels it in the way his chest hollows out. She's hollow, now.

"I dunno." Jack replies, hollow too. "We jus' keeps livin', I guess."

...

Author's note: One in every eight pregnancies result in miscarriage. So many women deal with this, and nobody talks about it because our society is fucking awful and doesn't believe that miscarriage has the same emotional impact as losing a child who has already been born. So, if for some reason you're the person that needs to hear this: you aren't on your own and the pain doesn't ever go away, but it does ease with time.