Chapter 115
Bellamy felt like he was still mentally unpacking everything he'd discussed today when he got home, but when Clarke greeted him with a huge smile and an excited, "Bellamy, look at this," his attention diverted. She was playing with Avery on the floor, and Avery looked completely interested in some blocks rather than anything else that was going on. But when Clarke exclaimed, "Avery!" their little girl glanced up at her. "Did you see that?" Clarke said. "She knows her name!"
Holy shit, he thought, wanting to give it a try himself. He sat down on the other side of his daughter and said her name a little more quietly than Clarke had. "Avery?"
She looked over at him, too.
"Wow," he said, in awe. "That's incredible."
"I know," Clarke said. "How do they learn so much so quickly?"
He shrugged. "It just happens, I guess." He messed up the wispy hairs on top Avery's head, getting a little coo out of her. "We were babies once," he pointed out. "Our brains did it."
"It's just crazy, though," Clarke said. "God, she's almost half a year old now. Time really flies, huh?"
It really did. Seemed like just yesterday he was holding a little baby in his arms for the first time.
"You know," Clarke said, clearing her throat a bit, "I was reading some articles, as I'm known to do, and now I'm thinking, maybe we should try to introduce some solid foods into her diet."
"Like what?" he asked.
"Fruits, veggies. Mushy veggies."
Mushy veggies? He made a face of disgust. "Tasty."
"Or rice cereal," she added. "That's kind of like the standard. You mix that with breastmilk or formula, and it's this whole soupy thing."
Again, it sounded gross. "Sorry, kiddo," he said to Avery, "I tried to get you cotton candy at the carnival."
"Yeah, yeah, I know, you're the fun parent and I'm the strict one." Clarke rolled her eyes in mock annoyance. "We're gonna do what's recommended, though."
"Yeah, that's fine." She was really good at staying on top of things when it came to raising a child. To be honest, he kind of just followed her lead most of the time. "What else is recommended for six month olds?" he asked, figuring she'd know.
"Well, we should probably start transitioning her to the actual bathtub," she replied.
"Ours is huge, though." They could fit fifty Averys in there.
"I know. So if she doesn't like that, then we can wash her in the sink," Clarke said. "Without her little baby tub."
He couldn't help but frown as he pictured her getting too big for that.
"What?" Clarke said.
"I'm just not ready for her to grow up," he admitted. Thank God he'd come back from rehab when he did, otherwise he definitely would have missed more than her first time crawling.
"It is kinda bittersweet," Clarke agreed. "We'll have another baby someday, though, and then we'll get to do this all over again."
He liked the sound of that. A lot. There was that 'someday,' though, the word that always got tacked on. "Dr. Wallace and I talked about kids a lot today," he told her, transitioning into . . . the thing he needed to talk to her about.
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah. He's got three."
Clarke picked Avery up when she started to crawl onto her lap. "Maybe we'll have three," she said.
Three kids? He relished the thought of it. Hell, he could handle four, too. Five was probably pushing it, but maybe they'd luck out and have twins or something.
Before he could wander too far off into dreamland, he refocused himself and attempted a segue. "He said you're welcome to come to our next session, if you want," he said. "It'd cost a little bit more, but . . . he says he thinks it might be good for the two of us to sit down together and talk about some things."
Clarke's expression shifted into one of surprise, and she sat there just sort of distracted rubbing Avery's back for a moment before she asked, "What things, exactly?"
He didn't want to answer that question, because he was worried it'd freak her out too much, that she wouldn't want to do it, that she'd feel like she wasn't able to.
It didn't take any words for her to understand what he was getting at, though. "You don't have to answer. I think I know," she said quietly, looking away from him and down at the floor instead. "That would be intense," she predicted.
It definitely would be. Even just talking about it on his own today had left him feeling like he needed to do a little deep breathing before bed. "I think it might be good for us," he said, trying not to pressure her, even though he really did want her to come along.
She inhaled shakily, seemed to hold the breath there as she shut her eyes, and then exhaled just as shakily. When she opened her eyes again, though, she nodded slowly and said, "Okay. We can do that."
He wouldn't have been upset with her if she'd said no, or told him that she wasn't ready to do that yet. But she was gonna do this for him. Even after she'd already done so much for him. "Thank you," he said, well aware that he was asking her to willingly revisit the hardest decision she'd ever made in her entire life. It was what they needed to do, though. It was what they'd needed to do for a long time.
...
Even though Clarke had already done her fair share of waiting in Dr. Wallace's office, waiting to actually go in there and speak with him felt different. The nature books on the table did nothing to distract her, and the relaxing music playing through overhead speakers did little to calm her. She wondered now if this was what it had felt like for Bellamy during his first therapy session. The ones up in Baltimore must have been the scariest for him, because he'd been there by himself, and he'd just decided to kick the drinking habit.
"You nervous?" he asked her.
"Yeah," she admitted. "I've never been to therapy before." Although considering how moody of a teenager she'd once been, she was actually surprised her parents hadn't insisted on it.
"It's weird at first," he told her. "Gets easier with practice."
Did that mean she would be coming back again then? She wasn't opposed to it if it ended up helping them out in some way. Lots of couples went to therapy. And it wasn't like she'd have to come every single time. Sometimes his solo sessions were going to be what he needed.
"So Dr. Wallace is a nice guy?" she asked for about the twelfth time that day.
"He's really nice," Bellamy assured her again, reaching over to hold her hand. His touch was so . . . comforting. It was nice to feel like she could lean on him again when she was feeling nervous or unsure, because she'd gotten quite used to him leaning on her. They were a team, though, so it was all about supporting each other.
Of course, all the support in the world wasn't going to quell her nerves completely. That just wasn't possible. She just didn't want to screw this up. It was obviously really important to him, and he was probably going to be very open and honest about things. She hoped she wouldn't just shut down, because Bellamy needed her to be open and honest in return.
...
Clarke would have rather been sitting in calculus than waiting in the office for this stupid mandatory meeting with her guidance counselor. Sure, some seniors needed guidance—some of them needed lots of it—but she didn't. She was doing everything seniors were supposed to do if they planned on continuing their education after high school, and usually, she was doing it early.
She was starting to get annoyed with whoever was in front of her, because that person had been sitting in that office for over half an hour. She was going to miss all of her math class because that one person was taking so long. Honestly, it had to be someone who was clueless about how to register for the ACT, or how to fill out applications and write scholarship essays. Because that was the only way she could envision being in there for thirty minutes.
When the door to Ms. Franco's office opened and Wells came out, she felt kind of bad for getting all antsy and annoyed. Wells was the opposite end of the spectrum from the clueless kids. Whenever he had any free-time, he was working on college stuff. Some days he didn't even eat lunch because he was so involved in it.
"How'd yours go?" she asked him.
"Great," he said. "I feel motivated to fill out some scholarship applications now."
How were there even any left for him to fill out? She wasn't sure, but more power to him. Wells was probably going to end up in the Ivy League. He hadn't heard back from Yale or Harvard yet, but it seemed like it was just a matter of time.
"Clarke, you're next," Ms. Franco said, ushering Clarke into her office.
Here we go, Clarke thought unenthusiastically. She grabbed her backpack and sulked inside the very office she'd been avoiding for the year and a half. Mrs. Monn, bless her heart, had kept trying to convince her to go sit down with Ms. Franco, just for a visit, just to open up and express her feelings. But she'd ignored the suggestion every single time. Ms. Franco just didn't know anything about her. She wasn't a bad guidance counselor by any means. In fact, she was the favorite staff member of most of the male students at Arkadia High School, mostly on account of her being a former model and all-around beautiful. Clarke just didn't feel a connection to her at all, so if she ever did decide to open up to someone, it'd be someone else.
"How's your senior year going so far?" Ms. Franco asked, sitting down in her chair again.
"It's going," Clarke answered simply.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." She was probably going to graduate salutatorian, which wasn't a shabby accomplishment by any means, and Stu-Co and Quiz Bowl still gave her things to do. It was actually a pretty boring year overall. Wells was pretty much her only friend, although Jasper did sometimes eat lunch with them. He had his own groups of friends now, though, which was good for him. Of course, now that Octavia was a freshman, she sometimes encountered her in the halls. Luckily, their lockers were on opposite sides of the school, though, and they had separate lunch shifts, so they hardly ever crossed paths. There had been a couple of awkward run-ins, though, like on the first day of school, when Octavia had introduced Clarke to her friends as 'my brother's ex.' She'd probably just been trying to make the other girls in her grade think she was cool because she knew a senior. But once they'd realized Clarke wasn't actually part of the cool crowd anymore, none of them had paid her much attention.
"Have you taken the ACT?" Ms. Franco asked her.
"Yep." She'd taken it twice her junior year and once over the summer. She had a score of 31 now, which was good enough for her.
"And what about applications?" the counselor asked.
"Already applied. And I've been accepted everywhere I applied." It wasn't meant to sound like a brag, but . . . it just was what it was. "I'm working on scholarships, too, so I really don't need this whole consultation."
"Well, I like to visit with every senior, every year," Ms. Franco said, undeterred by her resistance. "So where are you thinking about going? Have you decided yet?"
Clarke shrugged. "Probably just stay here in Arkadia. My best friend goes there. She says she likes it."
"Oh, Raven Reyes, right?" Ms. Franco recalled.
"Yeah. She's literally getting paid to go to college with all the scholarships she's got."
"I'm sure," Ms. Franco said. "I always thought she'd go somewhere bigger."
"Well, she would've, but everything's so expensive, and her dad's just got a blue collar job," Clarke said. When it came to colleges, size didn't really matter.
"What about your dad? Your mom?" Ms. Franco prompted. "What kind of opportunities do you think their financial situations might provide you?"
Clarke mulled over the very specific wording of that question and narrowed her eyes a bit. "Is that the roundabout way of saying, 'Your family's rich, Clarke. Go to a more well-known school.'"
"No, not at all."
"Because I know I could," she acknowledged. With the combination of scholarships and her parents' money, she could pretty much afford to go anywhere. "I could go to some huge school and be just another face in the crowd. Trust me, it's tempting."
Ms. Franco tilted her head to the side curiously. "And why do you say that?"
"Because it's exhausting when lots of people know your business." Sure, the spotlight on her had dulled significantly this year, especially since guys like Dax were no longer around harassing her. But Josephine was still around and was flouting her sophomore vibes all over the place. She liked to get her digs in, seemingly for no other reason that not liking her.
"It sounds like you're looking for a larger student body than what we have here," Ms. Franco remarked. "Why settle for Arkadia then?"
"I'm not settling," she denied. "I'm fine with going here. I can get my biology degree and then go onto med school. Then I'll move to a bigger city." That was her plan. What was so bad about that plan? She didn't understand why this counselor kept prodding.
"Your dad moved to Baltimore, didn't he?"
"Yeah, a couple months ago." She wondered how she'd found out about that, because they'd never even conversed prior to this. Either she'd heard some juicy gossip around town, or it was something all staff members had been informed of in some kind of meeting. They had meetings every other week where they addressed student concerns. Maybe she was a concern of theirs now that her family had fallen apart.
"I guess I'm just trying to figure out . . . what's keeping you here," Ms. Franco said. "Is it your mom?"
"No. I mean, I love her, but . . . we get on each other's nerves sometimes." Maybe things would be better now that she'd ended things with boring old Ronald, but Clarke wasn't holding her breath on that. "I just wanna go to college with Raven. Is that so bad?"
"No, of course not," Ms. Franco said. "But I can't help but feel like there's a bigger reason."
Clarke forced her facial expression to not change, to not give anything away, but dammit, her mind started running wild with possibilities that would never happen. She pictured Bellamy returning after all this time away, surprising everyone, and she pictured herself being there for it. There would be some big welcome home party, maybe at his house or at Eligius. They would catch up, and he'd want to see her dorm room. She'd give him a tour around campus, and they . . .
Stop it, she told herself, so frustrated that she'd even let herself imagine all of that. It was stupid. It was just so stupid at this point. He was living across the country, last she'd heard. There was no reason for him to come back to Arkadia.
And yet still, she felt reluctant to move away.
"You look upset, Clarke," Ms. Franco noted. "Am I doing something to upset you?"
"Yeah, you know what? You are," Clarke snarled angrily. "This is supposed to be a college talk, not some therapy session." She stood up, grabbed her backpack, and muttered, "I'm done here," on her way out the door.
...
"What if I screw this up?" she whispered more to herself than to Bellamy.
He heard her, though, because he said, "You can't. It doesn't work that way. You just say whatever you feel, and there's no judgment."
He made it sound so simple, probably because he'd gotten used to it.
The door swung open, and there stood Dr. Wallace with a big, welcoming smile on his face. "Bellamy," he said.
"Hey, doc," Bellamy said, standing. Clarke kind of tried to stand behind him. "Good to see you."
"You, too." Dr. Wallace looked around Bellamy, and Bellamy stepped aside, leaving her with nowhere to hide. "And this must be Clarke," the doctor said.
"Hi." She gave his hand a shake.
Dr. Wallace gave Bellamy an impressed look and said, "My goodness."
"I know, she's really pretty," Bellamy said. "I'm a lucky man."
Clarke laughed a little and followed Bellamy back into Dr. Wallace's office. Her first thought was, Where's the couch? In all the movies and TV shows, whenever anyone went to therapy, they lay down on the couch and sometimes even got hypnotized. But instead of a couch, Dr. Wallace had two big chairs for them to sit in. She'd also imagined that the walls of his office would just be lined with bookshelves, all fully stocked with medical textbooks and DSM manuals. But he had lots of paintings on display that sort of reminded her of the paintings she'd seen at the abortion clinic. It was all about calming people's emotions. They were probably more effective at doing that here.
It started out easy enough, with Dr. Wallace just asking a few questions to get to know her. She told him that her mom worked at the hospital, and she told him that she had a bachelor's degree in biology but never intended to use it. He asked her about her hobbies, and she mentioned art and music, of course, and Bellamy jumped in to brag her up and make her sound like she was a much better artist and musician than she actually was.
It got more serious after all of that, though. It had to. Dr. Wallace began by explaining to her, "Bellamy's told me about what happened in the past. We worked through a bit of it on his own, but what I want is for the two of you to have a conversation about it together. I'm not here to interject my opinion, just to facilitate."
She wrung her fingers together, her heart pounding almost as hard as Bellamy's did when he woke up from one of his nightmares. "Okay," she said, waiting for him to say something else. But he just looked at the two of them expectantly, and she realized he hadn't been kidding when he'd said he wasn't going to interject his opinion. He was going to very much just be a listener, and this conversation was going to be their own.
"So how do we start?" Clarke asked neither one of them in particular.
"I can start," Bellamy volunteered. He turned towards her a little bit, not facing her directly, but just opening himself up to her before . . . opening himself up to her. "One of the things Dr. Wallace and I have been trying to figure out is why all this adoption stuff . . . triggered me?" he said. "I don't know if that's the right word, but obviously when things started to get harder with that and when Finn got in the way of what we wanted . . . obviously that kick-started my drinking."
She nodded silently in agreement.
"I mean, yeah, I drank before that," he acknowledged, "but I didn't have a drinking problem yet. So we work a lot on identifying the underlying factors, you know?"
"Yeah." That made sense. She was glad they were approaching his sessions that way.
"We've talked a lot about my dad and how I never knew him," he went on. "And maybe that's part of the reason why I've always wanted to be there for Avery and why I'm so protective. Because I want her to have what I didn't."
That made sense, too. She and Aurora had done a little speculating of their own, but to hear Bellamy actually vocalize that insight about himself out loud seemed like a really positive step.
"So when Finn started coming around . . ." He trailed off.
"You felt threatened," she filled in.
"No, that's the thing. I didn't. Not really," he said. "Every time you've told me, 'You're her real dad, Bellamy. That's what matters,' I've known that's true. I know he can't take my place in her life. I know that. Sure, I still get pissed off whenever I think of him holding her or calling himself her father, but . . . he's not the root of this. It's not about him."
Looking down at her lap, she tried to work up the courage to ask a question she was very afraid to. "Is it about me?" she practically whimpered.
He waited a moment, then softly answered, "Kind of."
She sniffed back tears, just nodding, taking that in.
"The only other time in my life where I felt like I started relying on alcohol too much was after . . . after you told me about the abortion," he murmured quietly. "If Avery hadn't been born and we hadn't gotten back together, I probably would've just kept spiraling back then."
She sniffled again, unable to hold back tears this time, and Dr. Wallace slid a box of tissues towards her. "I'm sorry," she said, taking one.
"You're fine," the doctor assured her.
"I don't mean to make you cry," Bellamy said, looking at her sympathetically.
"No, it's . . . part of the process, right?" she said, wiping at her eyes. "So, um, what you're saying is this all stems back to . . . that?"
"It might," he said.
Her mouth shook uncontrollably as she tried to keep from just hunching over and sobbing.
"Finding out you had an abortion . . . it was traumatic," Bellamy said. "And I don't wanna sound insensitive, 'cause I know it was traumatic for you to have one. And I don't wanna sound like I'm blaming you for my problems, because you had the right to make that choice, and I should've made better choices after I found out. But . . .I don't know if I ever really dealt with it, Clarke."
He probably hadn't. He'd just said it himself, after all: Avery had been born, and they'd gotten back together. As much as she'd liked to pretend they were over it, they probably never had been.
"Finding out I had a kid, but that I'm never gonna know that kid . . ." His jaw clenched as he swallowed hard. "That made it worse when I felt like I might lose Avery. It just brought all that trauma back. And I wasn't able to deal with it."
She tossed one tissue into the wastebasket next to the doctor's desk, immediately grabbing for another one. "I'm really sorry," she apologized, her voice cracking.
"No, it's not your fault," he assured her.
"It pretty much is, though." She'd owned up to that a while ago, so she didn't have a problem admitting it now. "I was the one who had the abortion. I was the one who didn't tell you about it for years."
"But I . . . listen, Clarke, something you gotta understand is-"
Dr. Wallace cleared his throat, and that seemed to signal something to Bellamy, because he stopped and rephrased himself.
"Something I would like for you to try to understand," he corrected himself, "is that I really did forgive you for not telling me. And I still forgive you. I do. I'm not holding that against you anymore. Even sitting here right now, I'm not mad at you for what you did."
He'd definitely been mad once, understandably so. So if he'd wanted to feel that way again, she would have let him. "So you forgave," she said, "but you didn't forget?"
"Something like that."
"Well, I'll never forget, either," she mumbled. So in that way, they could relate.
After they'd fallen silent for almost a full minute, Dr. Wallace asked her a question to keep them talking. "Do you ever just let yourself think about and reflect on your past, Clarke?"
"Sometimes," she answered. "But I try not to think about this, because . . . it makes me feel horrible." The tears started to pour out on their own accord, and she knew all the Kleenex in the world were powerless to stop them. "I mean, I feel like every woman's gonna struggle with guilt after having something like that done. That's just normal. It's not a decision most people make lightly. And nowadays . . ." She wiped at her nose, hating the feeling that she was becoming all goopy and drippy. "I don't know, sometimes I look back on that and think I made the wrong decision, and sometimes I feel like I made the right one. It changes all the time. But at the end of the day, it's never fun knowing that something you did hurt the person you love so much."
"I've hurt you, too," Bellamy pointed out. "With my drinking."
"Yeah, but that's an addiction; it's a disease."
"It still hurt, though, still caused you pain. And I've said some things . . ." His eyes shone with tears, but he kept them on her. And not as many of his tears fell over. He was definitely more used to all of this than she was. "We basically have these two huge tragedies in our relationship, right?" he said. "Or maybe tragedies isn't the right word. Just . . . darker times? The abortion, and my drinking. I don't know about you, but I've never gone through anything worse."
"Me, neither," she said.
"We forgave each other, but we can't ever make that stuff just go away."
"Nope." It would've been nice if they could, but life didn't work that way. There were some choices that were going to linger with both of them forever. Those choices wouldn't always be so loud and at the forefront of their minds like they were right now, but they'd always be there somewhere. Constantly.
"So looking back now, Bellamy, after everything you've been through . . ." Dr. Wallace said, "when you think about the child you never knew, what do you feel?"
"Just . . ." He held his hands out, palms facing up as if he were looking for the right word to drop into them. "Sadness," he finally answered. "I think I'll always feel that."
"Me, too," Clarke said. Even on those days when she did feel like she'd made the right decision, she'd still be sad about it.
"And Clarke, think back to two months ago when Bellamy's drinking was really drawing your concern," Dr. Wallace told her. "How do you feel when you think about that?"
There was probably a more descriptive word choice she could have conjured up, but she figured the basic one would do. "Still sad."
"Same," Bellamy said.
"Sadness, sorrow, regret, guilt . . . these are normal things to feel in life. We can't avoid them," Dr. Wallace said. "It's how we respond to them that determines the paths our lives take."
That made Clarke feel a little bit better, because . . . she felt like both she and Bellamy had responded pretty well. He could have abandoned her after he'd found out about the abortion, left her to raise Avery on her own. But he hadn't. And she could have withdrawn from him completely, making him deal with his addiction on his own. Because even on the days when she felt badass, it wasn't an easy thing to help someone deal with. But she hadn't done that. They'd stayed together and stayed married, and in some ways . . . she felt like their relationship was evolving more than it ever had before. Two months ago, could they have come here and had this conversation? Would either of them really have been willing to be so honest?
"Can I say something?" Bellamy blurted suddenly.
"It's your therapy session," Dr. Wallace responded with a chuckle.
"Right." Bellamy angled his body completely towards Clarke's, took both her hands in his, and stroked his thumbs over her knuckles, a simple but loving touch that made her heartrate pick up again. But not in a nervous way this time. "Clarke, I love you so much," he told her. "And even though you're crying, and I might start crying any second . . ."
She laughed a little, and a few more tears slipped out.
". . . and even though this stuff's really hard for us to talk about, we are talking," he reminded her. "We're here, and we're working through it, and we're getting stronger because of it."
So he sensed it, too, then, that their relationship was just growing from all of this?
"And that doesn't make me feel sad at all," he said, smiling at her. "It makes me feel happy."
She choked out a sob, the definitely not sad kind, and nodded in agreement, smiling back at him. "I feel happy, too," she said. She didn't know how it was possible to feel so good about things when she was sitting there in a therapist's office with tears streaming down her face, but she did. And he did, too. And because they were both feeling the same way in that same moment dealing with the same issues, she just knew in her gut, without a doubt . . . they were gonna make it.