Chapter 64

If Katherine had thought that getting back to work would make her feel better, she was sorely mistaken. Don't get her wrong, she needs something to fill her days. At first, while she was still physically recovering, she'd needed the time off. But now, almost back to normal (physically at least, though not in any other sense of the word), she needs something to occupy her mind. It works too fast as it is, never mind when every neural path it decides to walk down takes her back to the night they lost Lucy.

At first, it's almost comforting, stepping back into the smoky ink smell of the newsroom, the hustle and bustle of it, shirtsleeves and double-page spreads and the clattering of typewriter keys. She has missed this, the industriousness of it all, the feeling that she is making a difference. Except, she isn't. She's not making a difference. She knows this all the better when Mr. Ross calls her into his office.

As an editor, Mr. Ross gets his own office, rather than cramming around overflowing rows of desks with the other reporters. His office isn't large, not by any means, barely more than a few square feet of floor cut off from the newsroom by a flimsy partition wall, but it's the principle of the thing. Mr. Ross takes great pride in his principle of an office.

"Mrs. Kelly," he looks up at her when she enters and Katherine winces at the name – she loves being married to Jack, but she is not his property, "I was starting to think that you'd died."

I didn't die. My baby did. "The letter was very clear that I would be off work for three weeks, Mr. Ross. And, please, my professional name is Plumber."

Curt, to the point, toeing the line of civility. Even since her marriage, Katherine is careful with her male colleagues. For some of them, Mr. Ross included, the gold band on her finger is little deterrent. Most of them, luckily, have been shallow enough to leave her be since she came into possession of her scar, but Mr. Ross is, alas, not among them. Rings, it seems, mean little to him, given the number that encase his fingers, which bulge around them like sausages stuffed too tight into their skins.

"Come, it's not like we stand on the formality of professional names here." Katherine bites down several retorts and waits. Mr. Ross looks her up and down, then raises an eyebrow. "I hope you are well again." If you want to know, Mr. Ross, you would do well to ask directly, Katherine thinks, else you're going to make a lousy reporter.

"Quite. My apologies for the sudden absence." The man's face falls at her failure to volunteer any further information. It would be impertinent of him to ask further, though that never seems to have stopped him before. When he doesn't, Katherine continues. "I am quite ready to take on another story, however."

"Well, Johnson," ugh, he's still here? good grief, "has been covering your usual material during your time off, so you'll be on the ladies' pages for the time being – nice things to ease you back in, flower shows, that sort of thing." Mr. Ross tells her, passing over a sheet of paper with a few leads on it and then returning his eyes to the typewritten sheets in front of him, a covert dismissal.

Katherine fights the urge to tell him that she doesn't need to be eased back in. Her stubbornness has never gone down terribly well with Mr. Ross' particular brand of angry editor-ism and she's angry, not stupid. Still, she can't help but agree with Crutchie and what he'd pointed out a few months ago: that Johnson deserves to die a slow and painful death at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. In fact, Katherine would like to amend that – and, if the thought that she would rather like to suffocate both Johnson and Mr. Ross with the very flowers they have predestined for her to review isn't a particularly Christian thought, then she's just going to have to pray for forgiveness after she commits those murders, isn't she?

"And I will get back to my usual material when, exactly?"

Mr. Ross looks up, raising a mildly irritated eyebrow. Quite frankly, he looks like he's unimpressed that she has the audacity to even exist, never mind be asking him such impertinent questions. "Mrs. Kelly, you've just had three weeks off. You're really in no position to be making demands."

"I'm not demanding anything, sir." Katherine purses her lips, desperately reminding the tiny devil sat on her right shoulder that no, hitting Mr. Ross with her handbag will definitively not improve any part of this situation. "I merely wish to know when I can expect to return to my usual fare."

"When I see fit." Mr. Ross snaps, shuffling his papers at a rather obnoxious volume. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm rather busy."

Katherine walks out of Mr. Ross' office, head held high, before she can start agreeing with the tiny devil who, at this point, seems to hold a permanent ticket to the front row seats at her hellscape of a workplace. She will not give him the satisfaction. She will not give any of them the satisfaction.

She plonks herself down at the end of one of the long desks currently scattered with a few of the older reporters, most of whom have long since abandoned their jackets and waistcoats and stretched themselves out to proofread in their suspenders and shirtsleeves. Katherine stoically refuses to remove her sweater – she gets enough comments about her appearance without actively inviting speculation, thank you very much – and sets to taking her frustrations out on the typewriter. They want flower shows? These are going to be the best damn flower shows they've ever seen.

Despite the fact that there really is only so much she can do to try and make flower shows interesting, Katherine refuses to let her determination dim. Her quick visit to see Jack at work under the pretence of delivering some lunch item he'd carelessly forgotten is enough to see her through until the evening.

And that evening, as Jack figures out exactly what it is that a businessman means when he tells him that he wants something for the lobby that looks fresh and modern but with an old-time classic look, preferably in oil paint, Katherine dives under their bed and pulls out a stack of paper to load into her typewriter. They're only going to give her flower shows? Well then, she's just going to have to take her talents elsewhere.

The half-phrases and pieces of dialogue scribbled in the back of her ever-present notebook come together under the typewriter keys. She feels rusty, not in her typing, but in her brain. But rust scrapes right off, so she keeps on writing. And slowly, slowly, the jigsaw piece paragraphs start to fit together into something – something, she's not quite sure what, but it's something, and it's something that she's proud of.

Such a routine continues for a few weeks. Katherine refuses to be downtrodden, fuelled the by past evening's sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and writes like a woman possessed. She reworks old pieces rejected by the suffrage magazine, tones them down, slides them across Mr. Ross' desk. When he slides them back covered in red ink, she slides over another two, three, ten, the next day. He'll have to give sometime.

But so does Katherine, and she gives on a Friday evening a few weeks into her return to work.

See, Katherine walks home through a park. She used to take a shortcut through some back alleys, but since becoming the wife of a union leader who might be less than well-liked in those particular parts, Jack has managed to persuade her to walk through the shady park where the nice ladies go to walk their tiny dogs and gossip about the latest scandal.

However, when she sees them - Dr. Graceton, Rose, a pram - Katherine is unashamed to admit that she seriously considers secreting herself behind a nearby tree. Honestly, in that exact moment, it seems like an entirely sane and even quite desirable idea. But she is not a coward, so she keeps her head high and carries on walking toward them, though simultaneously making a mental note to not walk back home from work through this nice part of town anymore, with its wide, tree-lined pavements and neat white houses and people that she knows. She'll take her chances with the Brooklyn boys over the Gracetons any day, no matter what Jack's protests are.

"Rose, Dr. Graceton." She nods, once she has come within a few feet of them.

Rose looks up in surprise, opens and closes her mouth a few times like a particularly stupid goldfish, before Dr. Graceton inclines his head, his face like stone. "Mrs. Kelly."

Katherine wonders when exactly he went from being pleased to see her to clearly despising her very presence. Still, she has to be polite.

"You've had your little one." She nods towards the pram.

The pram itself is a thing of beauty, very different to the second-hand one which Mrs. Baker from down the street had offered to her and Jack, one which had served every one of the Bakers' six children, bore the war wounds to prove it, and, Mrs. Baker assured them, would be able to handle at least three more babies. Rose has always had the best of everything; Katherine shouldn't have expected any less. Plush velvet interior, polished silver handles, sleek black exterior. It's nicer than half of the furniture in their house.

"Frances Sophia." Rose finally seems to gather herself, gesturing into the pram with no small amount of pride.

She has that smugness about her that new mothers often have, a certain feeling that they suddenly know depths of love inaccessible to others, that they are in possession of the most precious creature God ever crafted. Katherine used to bear that expression, that air, when she rested her hand on the swell of her now-flat belly.

With great effort, Katherine steps closer, peers into the pram at the sleeping baby, doing her due diligence, stepping up to pay homage. She should have known that Rose's child would be as pretty as her mother, the same pale skin and hair like gold thread. If she wasn't sleeping, Katherine is sure she would be able to see the same big blue eyes. Katherine wishes that Frances Sophia was uglier. It would make her easier to hate.

"She's beautiful." Katherine says, telling herself that she's saying it because she's supposed to, not because it's true.

Rose's face falls open in realisation. "Oh, Katherine, I –"

"No, do not apologise." Katherine waves a hand dismissively. She doesn't want hollow apologies. She's hollow enough already. "She is. She is beautiful."

"Rose, we should take Frances home. We do not want her getting sick." Dr. Graceton coughs. It's not catching, Katherine wants to snap at him, even though he's the one who diagnosed her, your baby isn't going to drop dead just from me looking at her.

"Of course." Rose nods hurriedly, gratitude flashing behind her eyes. "Goodbye, Katherine."

"Goodbye." It feels like an ending, but not like a resolution.

Katherine wants to stamp her feet and scream at the sky, but it won't do her any good. She walks home a little slower than usual. Her and Marge have talked about this, of course, at one of their many meetings over the past few weeks. The other woman has been both invaluable and welcoming. But it's different, doing it for real. Seeing another mother pushing her perfect child around in a pram and trying not to wonder why them? Why them and not me? It's certainly not for lack of love. At first she had been worried about that, that Lucy had somehow sensed that she wasn't wanted, wasn't planned, but that's nothing but superstition. Lucy wasn't planned, but she was wanted. Jack's regular conversations with the little one would have quickly convinced her of that. No, there's no discernible reason and somehow that's worse than knowing that it's her fault. Because at least if she knew it was her fault, she could repent. She can't repent for this. She's just got to keep living with it.

It's testament to how little she wants to just keep living with it that even the sound of Jack's voice as she closes their front door behind her can't improve her mood.

"Hello?" He calls, from the kitchen, by the sounds of things. One would think that seeing as only two of them live in the house that he wouldn't bother questioning the newcomer's identity, but the Kelly household has never claimed to be normal. Now that the grief is less raw, more of a burning ache than a stabbing pain, the endless stream of newsies and former newsies and Bowery staff and neighbours has resumed in full force. It's rare that their house will go a day without at least one or two visitors.

"Only me." She calls back, hearing the lightness in Jack's tone as he makes to respond.

"Me? Now, 's that the name o' the pretty reporter who-" he rounds the corner through the kitchen doorway and into the hall to greet her, then sees her face and stops in his tracks, "-hey, what's wrong?"

"I saw the Gracetons on my way home from work." Katherine sighs, not looking at him as she toes off her shoes and sets her bag down on the hallway table. "Rose has had her baby."

"Oh."

Katherine screws her eyes shut. She's been doing so well, the past week. Not breaking down. Being her usual indomitable self.

"They didn't want anything to do with me. And they've got a lovely little baby girl." And then she feels Jack's arms around her, pulling her into his chest, feels the soft grey wool of his waistcoat against her cheek, the one she bought for him so long ago, it seems, that smells of him now, his aftershave and ink and oil paint. "I talked it through with Marge, preparing for seeing a mother with a pram. I just – it's different when it's real, you know?"

"Yeah, I knows."

And he doesn't know, he doesn't know at all, he can't. Because he lost his child, sure, but he didn't have the insides of him ripped out in the losing, at least not literally. He got to hold their child, sure, but there wasn't a string that tied him to their baby, a string that got cut, leaving only the invisible strings that bound them together, bound to a little girl who lies cold in the ground. They both know it's different, different forms of pain entirely, though both just as painful.

"And, it was as if, I don't know, they thought I'd make their baby sick or something. Just by looking."

"They's stupid." Jack's response is immediate in the kind of way that makes her stomach hurt, trying to digest the faith that she worries is so very misplaced.

"Are they?" She asks, even though she knows the answer.

Katherine's never believed in curses. They're a load of hocus-pocus, jiggery-pokery so far as she's concerned. But sometimes she feels cursed. Not in the hook-nosed witch kind of way, but in the King Midas way, where things look nice at first, shining gold, but have the life sucked out of them completely when one looks closer.

"Yeah. You lookin' fixes people, it don' make 'em sick." His fingers, deft, artist's fingers, brush through the strands of her hair, separating them.

"My looking has never fixed anybody."

"Fixed me, didn't it? As much as possible."

"I didn't fix you, Jack. You were never broken."

He takes her face between his hands then, these hands that paint and fight and work, all for her, only ever for her and their family, and makes her look at him when he says:

"An' neither is you." They're awash with something, those words, clean water pouring over her face, washing her clean, a jug filled in the River Pactolus.

"C'mon." He presses a kiss to her forehead with chapped lips. "I ain't started dinner yet; let's go to the Bowery instead. They's got a new show on an' we can see Daisy an' Medda after."

Katherine tilts her chin up, raising an eyebrow, a challenge. She is not broken. She will not be broken. "You just want to look at the Bowery Beauties' legs."

Jack grins down at her, that hopeful look on his face that reminds her just how very young her husband is. Because her one little joke, for him, is a sign that things are looking up. He's mastered hoping, it's what's kept him alive, on the streets. This whole thing, it's a veritable Pandora's box. But there's a glimmer of hope there in the bottom, with a broken wing and ruffled feathers, but it's there and it's them.

"Hey, I ain't Les. Only pair o' legs I wanta be lookin' at is yours, sweetheart."

Katherine shoots him a sarcastic look. "I think that's the greatest compliment you've ever given me."

"Plenty more where that came from." Jack tells her, smiling wickedly as he presses his tongue into the hollow of his cheek. "I can talk 'bout your tits next 'f you wants-"

She swats at his head for that and he barks out a laugh, haring it into the kitchen with her chasing after him, calling out something about his cheek and how dare he. And it hasn't really made anything better, because there's no way to fix this kind of brokenness, whether she looks directly at it or not. They just keep living. They keep living, and it's good.