Author's Note – Hello, discerning readers! Sorry to be such a downer on this one, but that one line really stuck with me in "Great Barrier" and it's been following me ever since. (This thing basically wrote itself in a couple of hours, which means no beta - all mistakes are mine.) Besides, it's not like I own these characters or anything – Dick Wolf and Rene Balcer do. Review early and review often!
He catches himself mesmerized by children now, pulled in by the innocent and carefree ways they throw themselves into games played with their friends around a jungle gym and entranced by the straightforward attitude they all seem to possess when it comes to life. Rarely is anything gray in the eyes of a child – there is black and there is white. Hot and cold. Good and bad. The differences are clear and unmistakable, easy to see and define.
How he wishes that were actually true.
He finds himself watching children wherever he goes, his gaze drawn by them when he's sitting at a coffee shop or lounging in a park, whereas before they were merely part of the scenery. Their screams of delight used to be background noise but now they fill his ears and make his throat catch. Children at play, children walking down the street with their parents – they're everywhere and every time he catches himself staring or chuckling at their antics, he fights the urge to slam the palm of his hand onto a nearby table or wall or tree to vent his frustration. She has cursed him in this way; she brought the truth to the surface and threw it in his face like scalding water and now he can't escape it. It surrounds him like a fog and each child who smiles up at him in line at the grocery store or waves absently from a restaurant booth only increases the intensity of the burn.
Bobby Goren will never be a father. Nicole Wallace will never be a mother – not again, anyway (every indication is that she has died), but the fact that she'd had the opportunity in her life - had it and squandered it – feels like a punch to his gut. She murdered her own child in cold blood and then took away his unborn children in a few uttered words.
They sat in the interrogation room two days ago, squared off like the true rivals they were from the beginning, and just when he thought he'd finally broken her once and for all, she'd said it. In a voice sliding and serpent-like in its ability to crawl into his head and cling there, she'd told him that neither of them were cut out to be parents, that neither would have children. She'd cursed him in the space of a breathless sentence.
"Don't count me out just yet," he'd retorted flippantly but with no bluster or bravado. It was a dismissive sentence meant to change the subject.
She had said nothing in return and both knew her words had struck home because they were the truth. Bobby Goren would never – could never – be a father, not with the weight of a set of bad genes hanging over his head. The chance of fathering a child with schizophrenia was too strong to take such a risk, for even if he never developed the disorder that had consumed his mother so completely, he still carried it in him like a cancer that could be spread to any progeny he might father.
And to curse a child before he or she was even born seemed to be the cruelest act of all. To offer a chance at only a half-life, a life plagued by the imaginary and terrible and without the simple pleasures of true living, would be unforgivable. It is the job of a parent - of a father - to give his children every available opportunity to experience joy and to avoid suffering and Bobby Goren knows that he can't guarantee a fair chance at such a life, so he's choosing to yield to the odds. After all, the house usually always wins at games of chance.
Yet what pains him even more than the curse that Nicole placed upon him is the sheer hypocrisy of her act – how dare she, a woman who killed her own child out of jealousy, speak to him of such things? How dare she speak the truth that he preferred to hide deeply within himself?
How dare she place the two of them on the same level?
There is no denying, after all, that Nicole Wallace was also a cursed being. Abused by her father as a young child, she never stood a chance at being a successful parent herself – and yet she had been blessed with the opportunity to try. She had been a mother once. She had a beautiful child of her own, a glowing and loving being created from parts of her own body and yet she'd had the heartless cruelty to put out that delicate light with the air of someone grinding a cigarette butt out beneath the heel of a boot. She had murdered her own child and seemed to feel only the barest twinge of remorse for doing so.
And that knowledge is what makes the back of Bobby Goren's throat catch as he sips coffee on a bench in Central Park and tries to read the newspaper, the shrill chatter of nearby children at play filling his ears with a brilliant cacophony of sound. Nicole had an opportunity that Bobby would give anything for and she treated it like nothing. She threw away her daughter like a piece of trash and then had the audacity to remind him that he'll never even have a daughter - or a son, for that matter. He'll never look into the face of a newborn baby and try to find his own features there or learn to change a diaper while talking on the phone (the true definition of multi-tasking). He'll never sit on this very bench and watch his own children play or hear their delighted laughter waft over on the late autumn breeze.
He's destined to live out his entire life without the clichéd patter of little feet – little Goren feet. And while it's a decision he's long since come to terms with, lately it has come to feel more like a curse than the heroic sacrifice he once thought it to be.
And he owes it all to Nicole.
He cringes inwardly when he realizes that, in a way, this means that she has won a small victory in their battle. She's gone from his life now – hopefully permanently – yet he will never be able to look at another child without thinking of her words and the grisly choice she made in her own life. He will also think of the one that he has forced himself to make. She'll always be with him now. Bobby Goren is a cursed man.
The irony, of course, is that he was cursed all along; he just didn't realize it until Nicole said so.
With a sigh, he flips to another section of the newspaper and tries unsuccessfully to ignore the children as they play tag nearby.