Little feet clad in a donut-printed footie pajama shuffled across the hallway in the dark of the night. The hall was lit by nothing but a singular small light by the stairs and the pale moon reflecting on the shiny wooden floor. The house was dead silent; everyone having just retreated to their rooms for the night.
The tiny fingers stretched up to try and wrap itself around the circular door knob, tippy-toes trying to balance itself so the little girl could muster just enough strength to twist the knob to crack the door ajar.
"Mama?" a shy voice whispered into a partially lit room, a bedroom lamp the only thing exposing the little intruder.
Meredith was leaning comfortably between her fluffy pillows. Her back was resting up against the headboard with a book resting on her lap when the small voice interrupted her reverie. She looked up to see her little baby girl close the door and slowly walk up to her, her eyes dazed and her blonde hair sticking out in all directions as a result of tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep.
"Ellie? What's wrong, baby?" Meredith concerned, putting her book away as the little girl used all four of her limbs to slowly climb her mother's enormous bed.
"Mama. Can't sleep," she muttered as she crawled from the foot of the bed and climbed onto her mother's warm body, burying her face on her chest and arms stretching out to envelop her frame.
"Is that so?" Her mother said lovingly as she caressed her daughter's hair, trying to comb through her bird's nest of a head with her fingers. "Did you have a bad dream?"
"No, I don't think so," she looked up thinking for a second, resting her soft chin on her mother's sternum. Her big sparkly eyes gazing up innocently at her mother's; a carbon copy of her father's baby blue ones.
Meredith couldn't help but smile at her beautiful child. Everyday, she reminded her more and more of Derek. She had his out-of-this-world intelligence and his sunny disposition. When she'd smile, she had this boyish grin that seemed to daze you into saying yes to whatever she wanted. And in the extremely rare occasions that it didn't work, she'd throw the biggest temper tantrum; her father's broodiness apparent in the crease between her eyebrows and the way she'd cross her arms. And just like Derek, she'd then hold a grudge lasting forever that only Meredith knew how to pacify.
She'd bet the world and more that the little person laying on her right now would've had Derek wrapped around her tiny little finger the same way he was completely wrapped around Zola's.
At one point, her youngest was the light at the end of her dark dark tunnel, her guiding star, her grace under pressure. When she was pregnant with Ellis, her baby was her source of life; not the other way around despite what medical school taught her. Hope overcame her grief in San Diego in the form of the little bundle of joy wrapped in a pink blanket. And when she first opened her eyes to look at her mother's, she swore it was Derek looking at her.
"I think it was your snoring, Mama," she accused honestly.
Meredith looked at her shocked with an offended smile. "Me? I wasn't even sleeping yet! How could I be snoring?" she defended herself, laughing. She remembered the times Zola would come into her room to sleep with her too, and she'd wake up in a panic because Zola would pinch her nose close to try and silence the snores that would escape her open mouth. Zola's wild giggle overcoming her sleep-deprived face when Meredith's eyes bulged awake from her breathing being interrupted.
"Maybe it was Bailey," Meredith tried to mischievously switch the blame on her son who was unfortunate enough to inherit her snoring genes, knowing Ellis would confront her brother about it tomorrow at breakfast.
"You're right, Mama! I needa talk to him bout it," her stern voice determined to end the problem once and for all over their cereal and milk in the morning.
Meredith chuckled once more at her baby's tenacity. She had Derek's breathtaking eyes and charming personality. She had Meredith's courageousness and infectious giggle. But she most definitely had her namesake's bossiness. Baby Ellis was, in every way, Dr. Ellis Grey when she wanted something done.
Ellis huffed and once again laid her head down, pressing her soft cheek against Meredith's chest, listening to her mother's heartbeat. She smiled softly to herself at the way her mom's chest went thump-thump, a personal lullaby lulling her to relax.
Pressing a soft kiss on Ellis' strawberry scented hair, and enveloping her arms around her baby's small body, Meredith lightly suggested, "How about you stay with mama tonight?"
Lately, she'd been trying to break their habits of sleeping with her in her bed. As much as she loved when her babies cuddled up with her, Amelia and Maggie had a hard time putting them down when Meredith was on call for nights; the kids would end up insisting they'd wait till Mama was back so they could sleep with her or Ellis would burst into tears when she'd find Meredith's room empty when she'd wander there in the middle of the night.
"Yeah," Ellis softly whispered with excitement as Meredith pulled the comforter over both their bodies, creating a soft and warm cocoon for them.
As Meredith hummed a soft lullaby of Incy Wincy Spider while soothing her daughter's hair, Ellis stuck her thumb into her mouth while her sleepy eyes wandered around the room and slowly started to flutter close. It wasn't until she caught sight of the framed picture on Meredith's bedside table did she lose her sleepiness again.
"Hi Daddy!" her eyes lit up as she smiled against Meredith's bosom when she spotted the picture of Meredith and Derek's smiling faces beside the alarm clock. He had his arm tightly around her shoulder as she leaned into him. His McDreamy hair was a little messier than usual and her wispy blonde bangs were playing at her brows. Both their faces showed toothy smiles, their eyes filled with unbridled joy in that captured moment.
"Mama, look. It's you and my Daddy," Ellis exclaimed, taking her thumb out her mouth to point at the picture frame.
Meredith smiled sadly at Ellis' excitement. Moments like this, she cursed how cruel and sweet life could be. "Yeah, baby. That's your Daddy." She reached out to take the frame herself after Ellis stretched her short arm and failed to grab it, not wanting to move from her comfortable position.
Ellis twisted her little body to sit on her mother's lap, eyes now alert looking with wonder at the frame that was now in Meredith's hands in front of them.
Guilt wracked her soul. It takes an enormous sense of honesty to admit that she tries not to talk about their father when unwarranted. But when she did, she tried to do his memory justice. And she'd never shy away from their questions, but she just never brought him up all that often. She answered their questions and told stories about him with a tone full of love and assurances that their father loved them as much as she did from beyond the grave- that if love were enough, he'd still be here.
Maybe it was a bit selfish of her as a mother not to try harder, but the reality of speaking about him in past tense still pierced her heart after all these years.
She had to give her eldest daughter a lot of credit. Zola was the one who most proactively kept Derek alive in Bailey and Ellis' heart. She'd dig up old photos of their father to show her siblings and tell them all that she could remember about their father. About how Daddy's watching over them, how Derek used to take her and her brother to play on the ferry boat, and how the princess crown that was now adorning Bailey's head during their tea parties used to be Derek's to wear.
Ellis' eyes would light up listening to Zola's stories, but at the end, her eyebrows would pinch in quiet confusion as to why Daddy didn't stay around to do all those things with her. Nevertheless, she could always feel an invisible force of faith that just led her to love that man that she's never met. She looked at all his pictures and listened to the stories and could just feel it in her heart: he was her daddy and he loved her.
"Mama, did you marry my Daddy?" the little voice asked passingly.
"Yes, Daddy and I were married, Ellie," she smiled at her question, not knowing where Ellis even learned about weddings or the concept of marriage. Kids would just catch you off guard, asking you the most random things.
"When my friend Cody's mommies got married, Mama, he said they both wore super pretty white dresses and he was holding their rings on a pillow. And when Uncle Alex and Auntie Jo got married, he looked all fancy and Auntie Jo looked like a princess," she recounted to her mother, "And remember when Zozo was throwing the flowers on the floor? And there was a big party?"
"I certainly do," Meredith replied. "That was a fun day, huh?"
"Yeah. Did you wear a pretty dress too when you married Daddy? And was Daddy all fancy like Uncle Alex?" the little girl inquired, wanting to imagine what her mommy would've looked like in a wedding dress.
Meredith laughed. Partly because she married Derek twice and none of those times involved a white taffeta, rings, or flowers, and partly because she thought if only her daughter knew how much Meredith hated weddings, and that their dream wedding was to just get married alone, naked in a field of flowers with a bouquet of scalpels as Derek once suggested.
"Nope. I actually didn't, El. Daddy and I just wrote our vows on a Post-It note in the hospital," Meredith explained, recalling that one moment that seemed like everything was perfect; her calm before the implosion.
"Vows? What's that?" she asked, confused. Her hopes of trying to imagine her parents looking like a prince and princess crushed.
"Well, when you have a wedding, you're supposed to make your promises to each other in front of everyone. Those promises are called your vows," she went on to explain as she leaned her head against her daughter's little one, "Daddy and I did it when we were alone. We just sat down and he wrote down on a Post-It what we wanted to promise each other. So we vowed to love each other and take care of each other forever. Just the two of us," Meredith smiled with a bittersweet expression looking down at the framed picture.
"What about Zo and Bailey?" she looked up at her mother's eyes unsatisfied.
"Well, this was way before you guys were born."
Ellis' face scrunched up in an adorable little scowl, discontented at her mother's story. Great, she couldn't ask Zola cause she wasn't there either. Instead of the image of a dolled-up couple, all she had was the mundane picture of her father writing on a small piece of paper.
"Do you have any pictures?" she requested, thinking that the least Meredith could do was show her any memories of that day.
"No, babe. I'm sorry. We were so busy at the hospital that day, we didn't have a chance to take any." Meredith said with a laugh when Ellis' scowl deepened further. "I do have the Post-It that Daddy wrote on that day. Wanna see?"
Ellis' blue eyes lit up and removed herself from her mother's embrace to face her.
"Yes! Yes! Yes! Wanna see, please! Wanna see!" Her hair jumped as she bounced on her knees up and down on the soft mattress in excitement.
"Okay, okay. Let me go get it," Meredith said laughing at her daughter's elation, putting the frame back in place and getting up from the bed to open the top drawer of her dresser where she keeps the frame safe underneath some thick socks. She grabbed the framed note and walked back to the bed, letting Ellis settle back into their old position of her sitting on her lap and laying against her chest.
"Alright. Here it is," she holds it out in front of them, Ellis' little fingers touching the glass. They never got the beach wedding he promised after Izzie was in the clear, but she looked at their Post-It and their daughter in her arms and thought, this was more than enough.
Ellis stares at it silently and wide-eyed for a moment until, "What's this?" The disappointed note in her voice evident as she stared at the blue square paper.
"This is Daddy and Mama's Post-It Note. These were our promises that Daddy wrote out," Meredith laughed, amused at how unimpressed her daughter was at it.
Meredith and Derek did have the tendency to be stuck in their own little world; their grandest moments and gestures holding weight just the two of them exclusively shared, like they were inside jokes. From her house of candles to his proposal, from their "wedding/s" to her birth announcement, they lived for each other, not caring that the rest of their friends and family and the whole world were rather impervious to their antics.
"Mama! I can't even read," she sighed exasperatedly at the scribbles on the paper, turning it backward to see if there was anything more to it. "That's it?" she looked unamused at her mother's giggles.
"That's it, sweetie," she shook her head, doubling up in laughter when Ellis' face could only be described as one thousand level of unsatisfied. Meredith got up and put the Post-It away as Ellis groaned and rolled around the bed, trying to at least get comfortable in the midst of the biggest letdown of her world.
She let out a laugh as sat back on the bed and watched Ellis muffle her complaints onto a pillow, repeatedly asking why she didn't have a real wedding. "Okay, c'mon. Let's try and get some sleep. It's way past your bedtime, Ellie-Belle, and Mama's got work tomorrow," she playfully patted her baby's butt, trying to get her to stop rolling around.
Ellis silenced and shot her head up. She got comfortable against her mother's left side, her warmth making the child sigh contentedly. As Meredith laid down and put her arm around the little girl that used her as a body pillow, she dimmed her bedside lamp to the lowest level to turn it into a makeshift night light.
The little girl once more stuck her thumb into her mouth and started to flutter her eyes, falling asleep. Her leg bent trying to tangle itself onto her mother's. As Meredith ran her hand soothingly up and down her little back to soothe her to sleep, Ellis' whispered into the dimness.
"Mama?"
"Mhmm?" she whispered back with her eyes now closed.
"Take pictures next time. So I can see Daddy, okay?"
"Okay, baby," she smiled at Ellis' request, both of them drifting to a peaceful slumber thinking about Derek.
The next morning, Ellis woke up with her head on the foot of the bed and body diagonally positioned, her mother already having left the room but not waking her so she could sleep in. She shuffled down the stairs when Amelia called her for breakfast.
It was Saturday and her mother promised that she'd be back before dinner tonight. After lecturing Bailey about his snoring, leaving him wide-eyed and silently baffled at his sister's long rant without context about him sounding like an elephant at night, she left the kitchen so Meredith could give her a bath upstairs before leaving for the hospital.
"So what are you gonna do today, Ellie?" Meredith asked as she wrapped her in a fluffy towel.
"I'm gonna draw a picture today."
"That's great, baby. Why don't you draw one for me when I get back?"
"It was gonna be for you anyway, Mama!" she giggled, finding it silly when Meredith pinched her little nose in delight after dressing her up.
That night, Meredith came home just before the sun set. And as she bid Maggie goodbye, who was quickly heading to the hospital for her night shift, the kids called out for her to come into the kitchen.
"Hey, my babies! What's going on here?"
She looked at the colorful mess on the dining room table. Crayons and markers scattered everywhere. Splotches of glue here and there. Beads, jewels, and stickers all over the place.
"We had arts and crafts day, Mommy," Zola beamed at her, showing her an advanced piece of artwork, A gorgeous, almost realistic, picture of a butterfly adorned with sticks of jewels glued in the right places. "I'm gonna give this to Mrs. Carson for Teacher's Appreciation Week."
"That's so beautiful, Zozo! She's gonna love it. Good job." She definitely did not get her artistic skills from Meredith.
She pressed a kiss onto Bailey's hair as he continued to draw nonsensical lines all over his paper, switching from red markers to green crayons, then squeezing a bottle of blue glitter without stopping to create piles and piles of mismatched messy colorful scribbles against each other. And he definitely did get his artistic skills from Meredith.
"Mama, look! For you!" Ellis reached out to hand her a piece of paper from the other end of the table.
She smiled and picked Ellis up by the armpits and secured her against her waist with one hand, and took the paper in the other, holding it out in front of the both of them.
Meredith looked at the drawing and breathed out a gasp, using all her strength not to just break out in tears in front of her kids. A circle sun sat on the upper right hand corner of the paper with blue cloud-shapes hovering the top. The bottom of the page was colored tan with a starfish on the right and blue waves surrounded the two figures in the middle. A yellow-haired woman was dressed in a long white wedding dress with what looked like flowers clutched in her hand, and a dark haired man was clad in a blue suit with a red bow tie. They were engaged in a loving and innocent kiss by the beach.
Wedding in the Bahamas. Just like he promised.
"It's the beach. That's you and that's my Daddy. And that's your pretty dress and that's his pretty suit and this is your wedding!" she giggled with delight, pointing at the elements of her artwork.
"Ellis," she whispered breathlessly, so awed and speechless at the beauty of it all. "It's amazing. So so so amazing," she couldn't take her eyes off of it until she had to because tears felt like they were forming at bay. She looked at her daughter's face etched with pride at her work and attacked her with little kisses all over causing her to erupt in giggles.
"Thank you, baby. I absolutely love it. And I love you. We love you," she said, smacking one more giant wet kiss on her little chubby cheek.
That night, as the house quieted down again, Meredith went to check on her kids' rooms. She placed a kiss on Zola's forehead after tucking her in and thanking her for helping Aunt Maggie watch her siblings. Everyday, she thanked whatever God above and all her lucky stars her beautiful first child found her way into her and Derek's life.
She next went to Bailey, who echoed genuine concerns about his little sister's stern rant about his snoring this morning, knowing Ellis was tough and scary and would actually do something about anything that displeased her. She laughed and assured him Ellis was nothing to be afraid of. She then read Bailey a story until he fell asleep on her, his snores starting out quiet enough so his sister couldn't wake up from across the hall.
She then went into Ellis' room, her eyes already closed and mouth agape. Meredith brushed the hair from her face and smiled at her gorgeous daughter's slumbering figure. She gently placed a soft kiss on her forehead and whispered, "Thank you for the picture, baby. Daddy and I love you so so much, Ellie-Belle." Her baby's face broke out into a soft, unconscious smile at her mother's presence before repositioning her body to get more comfortable. Meredith quietly shut her door and retreated back to her own room.
She pulled out the drawing Ellis gave her once more, unable to keep away from the image. She'd probably looked at it a hundred times tonight, memorizing every single detail of the beach wedding that never happened.
Love each other even when we hate each other.
No running.
Take care when old, smelly, senile.
She rested the picture against a frame on her dresser, looking at it one last time for the night before telling Derek, "I miss you," with tears starting to coat her glassy eyes. She let them roll down her cheek for just a little while before sighing and retreating to her bathroom to get cleaned up to go to sleep. She then headed for her bed, drifting into another night where she knew she'd wake with the right side empty, and not having her back against his chest or his arm on top of her waist. She shut her eyes, letting her slumber overcome her.
And it's forever.