The next day, Carol helps Hershel to organize and inventory the medicines in the safe on the houseboat he shares with Beth. She discusses Lori's depression with Michonne, who herself suffered from postpartum depression when Andre was born. Michonne comes over to look at the available medicines and lets Carol know which antidepressant helped her. "It's a gamble, though, isn't it?" she asks. "None of us are psychiatrists. Then again…it always seemed my psychiatrist was playing a game of trial and error. If it works, it works. If it doesn't… we stop."
"And when we run out?" asks Rick, who has joined them.
"Lori will just have to figure out how to push through," Michonne tells him. "Like the rest of us. After all, she still has both her children." She glances at Carol, who understands the faint tinge of resentment in her voice.
Over the next month, little Judith begins to thrive. She gains twenty ounces and grows an inch. Lori finally gets out of bed for something other than the bathroom, even if it's only to come up on deck with Judith in a Snugli against her chest and take a short walk on shore to find out what all the muffled gunfire is about. When she learns it's just Rick teaching the less experienced shooters (Beth, Addison, Michonne, and Carl), she mutters, "You could have given me a heads up."
[*]
Daryl is a gift-giver. Carol didn't see that coming, though she supposes she should have, from the moment he brought her that solitary Cherokee rose nestled in a brown beer bottle. "A flower?" she asked then, not imagining Daryl the kind of man to bring anyone such a thing. It surprised her so much, she stopped crying, which might well have been his goal. At the time, she thought it out of character for him, but she knows now it wasn't, that it's very much in character…he just never had anyone to happily receive his gifts before.
And Carol makes sure to happily receive them all, even if they're not something she particularly wants or needs, even if they take up space in the drawers and on the nightstand in her tiny bedroom. He's like a cat who brings its owner a mauled mouse and lays it on the doorstep, and then looks up as though to say—aren't you proud of me? He's still not entirely comfortable showing physical affection in ordinary, everyday moments, and cuddling for more than ten minutes at a time is a challenge, but gift-giving comes more naturally to him, and it makes her heart smile every time he comes home from the hunt or a supply run, always with a little something to bestow upon her.
Today he doesn't get home until she's cooking dinner, and she can hear him stomping the snow off his boots above deck. She's lit the little wood stove to heat the boat, because they don't have an electric heater. He comes down the ladder, flips off his poncho, and leaves it in a pool on the floor. "Would you mind hanging that up on the coat rack, please?" she asks.
He grunts, and after taking off his boots – he leaves them either up top or at the foot of the ladder now – he scoops up the poncho and hangs it on the silver rack. It's flecked with snow. He squats before the wood stove and warms his hands before it, rubbing them together before standing again.
"You should really wear gloves, Pookie," she tells him.
"Hard to shoot and load. Ain't that cold anyhow." He wanders over to the electric stove top and sniffs her cooking. Then he makes an awkward lunge to kiss her on the cheek. She smiles as he pulls back after quick and sloppy smack. He's never had a girlfriend in his life, not a real one, and he's trying.
She wonders what he's brought her today. She shouldn't make assumptions, of course, but by now she does. He's given her every reason to, and when he slides his hands into the front cargo pocket on his pants, she's reminded of her childhood, when her mother used to sneak little treats in the Christmas stockings during Advent and then tell Carol that the "elves had visited early" and she should "take a peek."
Daryl lays on the counter by the stovetop some kind of red, rectangular-prism-shaped object with a key chain. "Got you something."
She picks it up and sees where one can blow into it. "A whistle?" she asks.
"Think it's a rape whistle. Got it off a woman walker."
Carol can't help it this time. She bursts out laughing, and he frowns. "Sorry, sorry…" she apologizes. She kisses him on the chin, and then the nose, and then his frowning lips. What on earth does he imagine she needs a rape whistle for? If someone tries to rape her in the woods, she'll drive a knife into his stomach, and rip it up through his chest, not blow a whistle that might draw a pack of walkers.
"Guess it was dumb. Just…it's red, and red's your second favorite color."
He always remembers little details like that. He doesn't do it to be seductive, she doesn't think—it's just that he's observant and he has a steel trap mind. "I love it," Carol insists, and then she blows on it, and he winces at the high-pitched squeal. She lowers the whistle. "I can use it when I need you to bring me my wine."
"Stahp."
"Can you watch the pot? I'm going to run put it in my room." Once in her room, she pulls open her drawer and drops the red rape whistle atop her many other assorted gifts before returning to the kitchenette.
[*]
Carol's a nurturer. Someone who ran into her on the road these days and saw how well she could shoot and stab, how quickly she's willing to kill to defend her own, might not guess it. But Daryl knows, by the way she gets up early in the morning to fix him breakfast, clears his plate, always puts dinner on the table when he gets back discouraged and empty-handed from the winter hunt and reassures him, "You'll catch something tomorrow."
She does his laundry, too, and folds it in neat corners and stacks it on his bed in the room next to hers, the room he sleeps in less and less these days, because when she falls asleep in his arms after sex, she wants him to stay with her in her bed, however narrow it may be. He's learned to fall asleep with another human's flesh pressed to his, though it takes him awhile, still.
He's a little surprised by the way she serves him. He thought after all Ed put her through, she'd be done with catering to men. But she tells him it's different with him, because he appreciates her tender acts of service, because he drinks them up like a thirsty man. And he probably does. He was never nurtured as a child. His mother neglected him, and his father did worse. Merle was the closet thing to a parent he had, and Merle was Merle. A twelve-year-old should not be father to a two-year-old, and Merle couldn't be, not for long. Daryl half thinks he got himself caught dealing drugs, that at sixteen, juvie was a temporary escape for him. He came back when Daryl was seven, and left again for the Army when Daryl turned eight. After that, Daryl raised himself, until Merle swooped in again in his teenage years, plucked him from his father's cabin, and took him roaming, leaving behind a woman he didn't even know was pregnant.
So today, when he comes home from the hunt, and she shows him the ghillie suit she's spent hours making him, weaving little sticks and dead debris into the nets, along with her own sewing materials, he doesn't tell her that some of the colors she's chosen won't mesh well with the still barren forest. He just kisses her, thanks her, and tells her he can't wait to wear it.