Chapter 13: Guilt Trip
Winter faded into Spring and Porter thrived, the once fragile newborn strengthening as he grew; his round, pink cheeks giving him a healthy glow as he developed an energy that would surely have Emma longing for the days of sleepless nights just as soon as her son became sufficiently mobile. But for now he reveled in his new ability to prop himself up on his elbows during tummy time and would eagerly grasp at anything that he could get his tiny hands around (particularly Puppy and poor Mama's hair). He sat up all on his own now, though always under careful supervision, and Neal, who had already deemed him a prodigy, swore that Porter had said his name the other day.
"Well, it was something between Po and Port anyway," said Neal sheepishly after attempting to get Porter to repeat the sound for a skeptical Emma.
(She had no doubts that Porter was intelligent, she just knew that anything resembling words from their son's mouth were purely coincidental at this point.)
"Babies babble," she told him, rescuing Porter from his father only to steal him away to the sink for bath time. "Besides, obviously his first word is gonna be Mama."
Porter clapped happily (because he actually liked the water) and Neal scowled in mock disbelief.
"It could be Dada," Neal insisted as he laid out a towel in the effort to save the floor from Porter's enthusiastic splashing.
Emma raised a brow. "Twenty bucks?"
"You're on."
(Nothing came of it for a while.)
But, just as Emma had predicted, Porter's love of noise grew with him. He found endless entertainment in banging things together. Almost as much as he enjoyed dropping them. Sometimes, Emma thought, because he knew she would quickly retrieve it for him as he babbled away happily at her.
Watching all of this, knowing that her son hadn't become obviously stunted in her feeble care, slowly allowed Emma's worried tension to fade away. Just like Neal had said: It had gotten easier. Porter even slept through the night now.
(Well, most of the time.)
They discovered too that, like his parents, Porter seemed to love the car. But like his mother, he tended to hate the destination. And people. Porter had grown increasingly wary of anything new and, really, the only person he tolerated regularly (other than his parents, of course) was Maya. Even Joy got an earful until Emma rushed to his aid.
"Maya went through it too," said Joy when Emma worriedly admitted that Porter was obviously picking up on her trust issues. "It's just his way of saying I know you're not my Ma and I'm not gonna trust you until she gives the okay. Huh, little guy?"
Joy then offered him a wide smile but Porter merely stared stonily back at her.
All this made things like taking Porter with her while shopping even more of a chore. She would talk to him, a long boring list of what she had to get, and then shake boxes at him when she ran out of things to say. This distracted him nicely until the noise stopped, replaced by his unhappy whine. So Emma would wave the next item at him until his eyes turned wide with his budding curiosity, chubby arms stretching toward her, wanting the chance to hold the thing himself. If he got insistent enough, she would hand it off to him before they could disturb the other shoppers. And, just when it seemed like Porter was content to hold the box of whatever she would turn to get the next thing and splat, off she went to retrieve the last one, apologizing profusely when he actually managed to throw something far enough to hit someone like that man in the leather jacket thumbing through packages of steak like a walking cliche.
This routine of sorts worked well. Well enough, anyway, until they reached the cash register and she actually had to divide her attention.
(And these days it got worse if someone on line tried to help her out by talking to him.)
Today, as per usual, the cashier announced the final price in a dull monotone and Emma straightened, pocketing a dropped pacifier to blink at the register announcing the grand total. Porter cried in earnest from the cart next to her while customers behind her grumbled unhappily.
"I had a coupon for the diapers," Emma murmured distractedly as she rummaged through her purse, pulling out an overused credit card, handing it over as the cashier hummed an acknowledgment, her expression bored. "Already scanned it."
As they waited, Emma did her best to distract Porter with Puppy (who had not had the best day out) only to be met with the cashier's growing agitation.
"Um," said the woman, shoving the card back at her, looking the opposite of sympathetic. "Rejected."
Emma swallowed thickly and, tuning out the gossipy murmurs behind her, tried looking through her purse in the effort to rummage up the necessary cash. But she didn't have enough.
She looked at what she did have and then the items waiting to be taken home.
"Okay," she said, ignoring the growing warmth on her cheeks, absently running a hand over Porter's unruly locks in the effort to calm him. "Can you put back the, uh cookies and the cereal."
"I've got it."
Emma jumped, startled as a few bills, unsolicited, dropped down on the conveyor belt. And not just enough for the things she couldn't afford, but the whole lot of it. Immediately, she tried to gather them up and shove them back at the unshaven man (who might have been assaulted by Porter earlier).
"I can't -" she stuttered, but he had already stepped out of her reach.
"Take it," he said and then, with an added dose of cryptic, "Let's say it's the least I can do."
He walked away. The cashier had already started to re-scan the items with an annoyed frown, the line of customers behind her growing longer and more unhappy by the minute. Emma waffled, wanting to tell her to stop because she didn't take charity, before, in spite of herself, she yelled after the man, "At least give me an address so I can pay you back."
He didn't even turn, merely waved behind him as he walked on and Emma couldn't exactly leave Porter to catch up to him.
She received an absurdly large amount in change, which just made her feel worse and she hurried out of the store, eyes scanning the parking lot because she could at least give that back, but before she could even make it off the curb the sound of a motorcycle roaring past them startled Porter, distracting Emma from her search as she soothed her son and privately cursed reckless drivers.
She knew, of course, what this meant. Both she and Neal had avoided the topic, but as she packed their groceries into the back seat, the contents getting tossed around more than they usually would, Emma knew that she had to return to work. Meaning they would have to put Porter in child care.
Her stomach twisted with bitterness at the thought, but next time snacks might turn into meals and then meals would become diapers and formula.
She had known it would happen eventually, of course. Obviously, she did. She had just, maybe, hoped for more time.
Neal must have sensed this.
"We'll figure something else out," he promised her, "this was just a fluke."
And it was. Mostly. Joy had taken a look at their accounts and bills and Neal's not-so feeble paychecks and told them it wasn't so much lack of funds that had left her short on cash (though they weren't actually storing away any extra either), but more the whole still learning money management thing (for example, Neal tended to come home with gifts for Port more often than not). Maybe with an added case of bad math skills. She chided them for not keeping careful records, warned them to cut back on the splurging and non-essentials ("Yes," Joy told them, "even if it's for the baby."), and then helped them set up a more practical budget. But even then, guilt still lingered in Neal's expression, as if he had somehow failed them, and Emma shook her head because no. Fluke or not, it was time. Neal shouldn't have to feel the weight of supporting all three of them forever.
Not that this stopped him from suggesting that he take that stupid job he had rightly turned down.
"You used your strike, remember," said Emma practically, suddenly appreciative of the baseball metaphor because, "You don't get those back."
So Emma would return to work. As soon as they found someone to watch Porter during the day. Daycare didn't have many options. None that they could afford anyway, but Neal produced a solution before she could make her way down the list.
"The Youth Center?" repeated Emma. "They have daycare?"
"Free daycare," Neal stressed.
Not that Emma and Neal necessarily met the requirements (they weren't quite poor enough, apparently, and wasn't that a weird line they constantly straddled), but considering the fact that both of them, Neal especially, had become somewhat of a regular fixture there, Leo agreed that he would see if they could make an exception.
(Naturally Emma took this as a polite no, but he insisted that he simply needed to see if they actually had space for another kid.)
They lucked out, though Emma couldn't bring herself to feel particularly pleased at the prospect.
For one, the children at the daycare seemed abnormally sticky.
"Y'know, someday Port is gonna get sticky too," Neal pointed out, giving their son a playful poke and producing a joyous giggle. "In fact, I think he already is."
(Yes, somehow, Porter had managed to get purple something all over his chin, cheeks, and hands, baffling Emma as to what Neal could have possibly done with him as she tried to throw their dinner together.)
She scoffed at the notion, producing a damp cloth to wipe Porter clean as he desperately tried to squirm out of her reach.
X-x-x-x-X
Daycare itself came with all sorts of trials and tribulations. Emma fretted over all the milestones she'd miss, for one, and whether it could be considered a form of neglect to leave their baby with complete strangers for hours. And then they had to deal with the matter of the other kids too. Stickiness aside, kids got sick and germs spread like wildfire.
It made certain things inevitable.
Like Emma forcing Neal awake with an uncharacteristically violent shake.
"He feels warm," she insisted fiercely at Neal's first signs of wakefulness and the genuine fear present in her voice took Neal from groggy to ready and alert in mere moments.
He felt his son's forehead and then promptly pushed himself out of bed. "I'll call the doctor."
Emma bounced Porter on her hip, trying to soothe him as she followed Neal out of the bedroom. "He's congested too. And that looks like a rash." She nodded to the side of the fridge, "The number should be under the take-out menus."
When the doctor answered on the third ring, sleep evident in his voice, Neal began to rattle off the symptoms, doing his best not to sound too panicked lest it get Emma even more worked up.
"Tell him his eyes look kind of glassy too," she said, somewhat distractedly as she tried to figure out how she might successfully clear Port's nose.
Neal repeated her words.
The doctor, however, failed to show the appropriate concern.
"Should we get the car ready?" Emma asked anxiously, a hand smoothing over Porter's unruly hair. Neal merely shook his head, listened for a few moments, offered a distracted thanks (which might have also been mildly sarcastic), and hung up the phone.
"Infant's Tylenol, fluids, monitor his temperature. If we want we can rinse him down with a cool wash cloth."
"But shouldn't he see a doctor?" Emma insisted and again, the now went unspoken.
"He said we could take him first thing in the morning," said Neal, somewhat displeased but he searched for the medicine, reading the label carefully. "Should if the fever hasn't gone down."
Porter fussed when Neal tried to take him from Emma, hoping to give her a break, and she whispered more soothing noises before looking up. "What about the Emergency Room?"
Neal found the offer half-tempting, but refused to reach full-blown panic. Not yet. "Let's try the medicine first."
Eventually, after much encouragement and spilled teaspoons, they got Porter to swallow it. Though this didn't actually help him breath any better and Neal moved them into the bathroom, blasting the hot water until the mirrors turned foggy and they had, quite effectively, created a steam room.
"Clever," murmured Emma as he tried pressing a cool compress to his son's forehead, a task made needlessly difficult as, sniffing pitifully, Porter burrowed further and further against his mother's chest. He'd hoped, maybe, this meant he might be hungry and they'd get some fluids in him, but Emma's attempts to nurse him were met with a turned head and so eventually she took over the task of cooling him herself as Neal leaned back against the tub, his brow creased in worry.
Not long after Porter fell asleep, temperature already inching back toward normal, Emma stripped their bed, setting him in between them, refusing to leave him alone. Not that they slept.
(Emma worried that he might get worse and Neal couldn't with the baby in the bed because what if he accidentally rolled on top of him.)
But by morning, Porter's nose had cleared and his temperature, thankfully, had returned completely back to normal. They took him to the doctor's anyway who, despite seeing nothing visibly wrong with Porter, offered the same advice as the night before.
Neal, though, had to talk Emma out of yelling at the daycare administrators.
"They clearly weren't watching him closely enough," she insisted.
"Kids get sick, Emma," said Neal, feeling far more level-headed now that the threat had passed. "And it might not have been the daycare. He could have picked it up anywhere. Didn't you say that you had double duty because Gretchen was out with the flu?"
Emma huffed, turned on her heel, and then refused to talk to him the rest of the day despite his insistence that he really hadn't meant that he blamed her, just that it could have been from anything. But when she picked at her food, not at all enjoying her favorite side dish of mashed potatoes, Neal, who had started to get a headache, realized that maybe it wasn't him she was mad at.
(They had a bad habit, he realized, of never talking about the things that really bothered them until after the fighting had already started.)
"It's not your fault he got sick, Emma, and it won't be your fault when it happens again," he told her later, when they settled into bed.
"I know," she mumbled.
"Do you?" he asked because he couldn't fathom why exactly her mood hadn't passed with Porter's fever.
He thought, maybe, she'd gone right back to ignoring him but then, just as he was ready to turn over and get some fucking sleep (his head was killing him), Emma asked, in nothing more than a whisper, "If you could do anything ... anything in the world ... what would you do?"
He thought about it a moment as he knew that's what she expected him to do (they had had variations of this conversation before) and then replied with a simple, "This."
He could practically hear the eye roll, "Yeah, but -"
Neal, however, had already figured out exactly how to distract her from this particular line of thought.
"What would you do?"
She gaped like a fish and then deflated, letting out a huff of frustration and finishing it all off with a disgruntled, "This."
Because it was the truth. But Neal also got that if she had asked the real question she had wanted him to answer ("Yeah. But anything but this?") her own answer would fall in the same vein as his. I don't know.
That bothered her. The uncertainty.
She thought it should bother him too, he supposed, but it didn't. That's what worried her.
Before he could think of something to reassure her, however, he let out a sudden, violent sneeze.
(And then another.) (And another.)
Emma scrambled out of the bed, swearing as she tripped over the blankets.
"You're sick," she accused, untangling herself from the blanket before gathering Porter into her arms.
Immediately, he protested only to be betrayed by yet another sneeze as Emma hurriedly took Porter into the other, hopefully germ-free, room.
X-x-x-x-x-x-X
He was. Sick.
And not only had Neal gotten sick, but whatever he had, had apparently turned him into a horrible grump too. He was snappy and whiny and had rudely complained about her chicken noodle soup (possibly because he had childishly requested ice cream or, maybe, because it really did suck). Emma changed the sheets and got softer tissues and better soup (she did not give into the request for ice cream), and rubbed vapor rub on his chest. She did this and mentally calculated how she might hold this over him later because honestly, the way he went on and on, it was like he had never even had a cold before.
Thankfully, for all involved, he was better within the day and, after thoroughly decontaminating the bedroom and anything else Neal might have touched or breathed on, they moved the baby back into the bedroom and went on as normal. Emma had even forgotten what had been bothering her before the whole debacle had started.
Well. Almost.
She hated her job. Like a lot.
"Well, naturally," agreed Joy one afternoon, over coffee, "but it's deciding what you do like that's the problem."
True. Emma didn't like things. And the things she did like, well, they didn't exactly translate into anything that paid. They could. Possibly. But when she had, briefly, toyed with the idea of finding the job in the youth counseling spectrum, she realized that almost anything in that vein involved things like a high school diploma and higher education and experience. To which she had exactly none. A thought that had sparked an idea that she had battled with long before she even considered bringing it up with Neal because it meant more work. Too much.
(With, maybe, a small chance of long term benefits.)
She wanted to try.
And then a particularly disastrous afternoon that had bought her dangerously close to snapping at a customer about how some people had real problems compared to his no pickle complaint gave her the push to actually voice as much.
"Neal," she began tentatively, turning to him during a commercial break for one of those old Westerns he liked. Porter was on his mat, positioned on his stomach, babbling as he grabbed at Puppy and the rest of his toys, expertly pulling them towards him. "What would you think if I went for my G.E.D.?"
Neal turned the volume down and gave her a slightly confused look. "What?"
"My G.E.D.?" she repeated, and then, at his continued blank look, "my high school diploma."
(Honestly. Sometimes he could be a bit thick. Not stupid, she didn't mean that, but the things he didn't know and the things that he did downright baffled her sometimes.)
His eyes crinkled as he gave her a bright smile. "I think that'd be great."
Immediately, as if she had brought it up just so Neal could talk her out of it, she began to doubt the logistics of the idea.
"But do you think I'd have time for it. You know, with everything." The baby and their jobs kept them ridiculously busy. They barely had time for themselves and Emma had been forced to drastically cut back on the hours she spent at the center since starting back at the restaurant.
"We'd make time," he said as if it were really that simple. "You should put it on Hope."
Emma groaned.
Operation Hope made things horribly daunting. But real. Even if it remained kinda (ridiculously) sparse. After their depressing assessment of it leading up to their makeshift holiday, Neal had attempted to fill it out by sticking all sorts of ridiculous things on the door. Things like grocery lists and pictures of clothes that he wanted to buy and even newspaper clippings of garage sales he wanted to hit over the upcoming weekend. And so they would go back and forth, debating what should actually classify something as board material.
Emma, for one, hadn't wanted anything materialistic.
"A house is material, baby, don't you think. And it might be nice to have one day." She blinked. "Maybe even better furniture."
A house sounded like this impossible thing to Emma and putting it on the board, letting themselves hope for it seemed like it would inevitably lead to disappointment.
"That's the point of it though, isn't it?" Neal questioned. "A place to put our hopes and dreams until we can."
She hesitated, waffling, knowing that if she agreed then Neal would take that as a yes and run with it. But she also knew, at the very least, they would eventually have to move into a bigger apartment. Someplace where Porter would have his own room (and they wouldn't have to sneak off to the living room whenever they wanted to have sex). Maybe even a yard where he could play.
(Thinking that far into the future though? It always led to disappointment.)
"Yeah, maybe," she agreed, somewhat reluctantly, "a house might be nice. Someday."
Neal grinned and searched old magazines, cutting out the first decent picture of a house he could find. Emma immediately protested when she saw it on the refrigerator door.
"Not that house," she said, ripping it down. "I don't want that house. We can't just use a picture of a house that isn't ours."
She would continue to insist on that.
Neal, after rolling his eyes, wrote out house on a flashcard before Emma shook her head and replaced it with home and finally, it had gone up on the fridge. Then they followed it up with better furniture almost immediately because both agreed that they didn't want to eat off patio furniture or sit in an itchy orange recliner (that had started to squeak) forever.
It forced Emma's hand and she agreed that, maybe, certain material things did belong on Hope. "But nothing we can buy right now," she finished firmly. "This isn't for grocery lists."
They could afford food (most days) and even new pants. Just, maybe, not really expensive pants. And Neal had no reason to wear really expensive pants anyway. In fact, he hated getting dressed up.
(Though Emma had discovered that he looked absolutely delicious in a suit.)
But under Neal's watchful eye, going for her G.E.D. went up on Hope, though she didn't actually do anything toward accomplishing the goal. Not at first. She wasn't avoiding it, but there was the matter of her other, far more pressing priorities. She had work and the center and, naturally, she couldn't sacrifice any more time with Porter than her busy schedule already forced her to.
And then she got sick.
This awful thing. It was like whatever Port and Neal and Gretchen had somehow aligned, teaming up and creating some sort of super virus, leaving Emma miserable and confined to bed for the better part of a week. And even then, after she began to feel better, Neal forced her to take the weekend.
"To recover," he explained, bringing an unhappy Porter back into the room and immediately they reached for each other after a week apart.
"And," he continued, exiting the room and returning with a ratty old backpack that looked suspiciously weighed down. "You can get a start on your studies."
Emma pouted, cuddling Porter nice and tight against her, "But I'm sick."
Neal raised a brow. "Well then, if you're still sick, Porter should probably head back to the living room."
Emma tightened her grip and Porter, she swore, gave his father a suspicious look.
(It had been a long seven days for the both of them.)
Reluctantly, she pulled a book towards her. "If I study," she started carefully, "can Porter stay."
Neal pulled out a picture book with lots of bright colors and textured pictures. "Only if he studies too."
She reached for him then, tugging him onto the bed with them. After all, if Emma and Porter were really going to knuckle down and hit the books, they'd need their favorite teacher there to help them.
