Cedar Chest: Puck & Rachel
Life, it seemed, was a system built on checks and balances. One side could never have too much power, so when one person entered the world, another had to leave it. It was a repeating pattern in Puck's life. His own father had taken off when his baby sister had been born, ensuring that their family never had more than three people at any one time. And now, as he stood on the brink of adding another, he found himself saying goodbye all over again.
It had been a cold January day seven months ago when he had come home to his Manhattan loft to find his wife sitting on the edge of their bed, hunched over with a little plastic applicator in her hand. He knew what it was immediately, recognizing it from that one scare he had with Santana freshman year that no one knew about and then everything with Quinn and Beth. But it was different this time, happier, everything he and Rachel had been wanting since they got married the year before. Everything was confirmed four days later, and the first person the had called had been his mother.
Vivian Puckerman had sobbed into the phone when she found out that she was going to be a grandmother again. She had always loved Beth and hated that they missed out on all the big moments of her growing up. Even if she had known it to be best at the time and had always supported the difficult decision Quinn had made, Puck knew that his mother had been waiting years for a second chance to do the grandma thing the right way. But as he listened to her cry, he knew that there was something more. He carefully pried the phone away from Rachel and let himself out onto the fire escape as his mother told him that she was dying.
They had left New York two weeks later so that he could be there with Vivian for every appointment. Becca was still so young, and Puck couldn't let his baby sister do everything herself. Rachel had agreed, even insisted, and the three of them became a little unit working to make everything as best as they could for Vivian. It had been like that right up until the end, in those long and waning days when she started to fade fast and neither Puck nor Becca could find the strength to leave her side. Their family had become four with Rachel and he had stupidly thought they might make it to five.
Vivian died on a Thursday night just before the eleven o'clock news.
And now, with just a few weeks to go before she gave birth, Puck and Rachel were in his mother's room going through things that he knew none of them would ever want. They had already separated out the clothes in her closet and taken the most expensive of her jewelry to a safety deposit box so that Becca could have them once she was settled in her new apartment near campus. A real estate agent would come to look at the little run-down house that had always been Puck's home on Monday, and Burt said he'd give them a good deal on her used car down at the dealership. It was just stuff, things they didn't need, but it still hurt to let it go.
"Your mother told me that there were some things she wanted us to have in there," Rachel told him, nodding toward the cedar chest that had always been at the end of his mom's bed. He remembered hiding in there once when he had played hide and seek with Finn. That smell had always comforted him. He scrounged around in her top dresser drawer and handed the key over to Rachel before sitting on the floor next to her feet. The scent washed over him as she lifted the lid slowly. "Oh, look, Noah, it's your baby things."
They spent the next hour going through each item stored in the cedar chest. There were perfectly preserved sleeper sets and tiny little shoes and stuffed animals he vaguely remembered from when he was really young. Becca wandered in eventually, sitting next to her brother as they looked over their baby books and fingered blankets that been hand-knitted by Nana Connie and laughed at photos of them together when Becca had been born. And when his sister started crying, Puck held up a photo of the three of them together and pressed her close to his side.
"I really miss our mom," she whispered. Rachel came down to sit on her other side, tucking the girl maternally against her chest just as Vivian had done to her so many times.
"We miss her too," his wife said for him. "But I've been thinking, your brother and I haven't really decided on a name. If you guys don't mind, I'd like to name her after Vivian."
Puck smiled at his wife and then down at Becca. "What do you think, sis?"
She grinned and nodded. "Mom would have liked that."
What Becca didn't know, what Puck and Rachel had already decided but didn't tell her, was that they also had anther name in mind. Rebecca Vivian Puckerman was born on a Thursday night just before the eleven o'clock news with her mother screaming in stunted yiddish, her father wincing in pain from his crushed fingers and her aunt filming the entire thing with a delighted grin. She was perfect and healthy and later, when the nurses asked if they had an outfit for her, Becca handed Rachel one of her light pink chenille sleepers from the cedar chest and told her that she wanted her niece to have it.
And just like that, order was restored and three went back to four.