Chapter 40: a blessing written older than the rest

At some point on the edge of town he forces himself to pull over, get out of the truck, crouch and drop his head over his knees until he can breathe again.

It takes everything in him. Every cell is screaming for him to drive, drive for fuck's sake, push that fucking chunk of scrap metal on wheels as hard as he can until he gets to her. But part of him is awake and aware enough to know that he has to be able to get to her in the first place, and if he can't think, he can't follow the directions he dragged out of the confused elderly man on the sidewalk about five blocks away from where he managed to turn the truck around.

Got the name on his own, excavated it from the mound of panicky debris that was his higher brain function. But that was only half the equation. In isolation the name meant nothing, and his phone is not smart and GPS in that fucking truck is a hilariously bad joke.

He has a name and directions, both pieces he needs, but it won't mean anything if he can't think straight.

How the fuck is he supposed to think straight.

How is he supposed to think straight with her blood on his hands.

And no, that's not even a question. It isn't worthy of the punctuation.

He breathes. The sun is warm on his back and head, perversely cheerful; it's a gorgeous early fall day. The kind of day, before yesterday, that he would have been looking for a way to spend with her. Well, he supposes he did and might still, and that's horrifying and he has to squeeze his eyes shut and make himself breathe all over again.

She was breathing when they took her away from him. He remembers. It's all a broken series of smeared fragments, but he does remember that. She was breathing. She was alive and she was breathing.

So he'll do like her.

He opens his eyes and looks down at his hands. They're streaked with mud, with blood - his and hers, because he forgot about his scraped-open palms but there they are. More dirt and blood packed under his fingernails. His hands are an indicator of the state of the rest of him. He probably looks terrible.

That couldn't possibly matter any less.

She was breathing when they took her, and he has a name and directions. Those three things. He grabs for them like handholds, like hands, threads his fingers through them. They're enough.

Focus.

He lurches to his feet, shoves himself back into the truck and kicks it into drive, stomps on the gas.

He turns onto a bigger road, passing cars at unsafe speeds. The sun hits his eyes to the right, makes him blink hard, makes his eyes sting, and at some point he realizes it's not just the sun, and the wet on his face isn't just sweat or water dripping out of his hair. He scrubs at his cheeks, suddenly angry. At the tears, at himself, at the fucking road, at the truck which refuses to go as fast as he deems appropriate to the situation, at the gorgeous fucking day, and most of all at the little reasonable persuasive bits of himself that made all those very rational arguments, told him all those twisted comforting lies, and angry at how much he wanted to hear them then. At what a coward he was. Is. Telling himself that she wasn't all that important in the long run. That she had nothing really to give him. That he didn't need her.

He's sure as fuck been set straight as far as that goes. Ph-fucking-D in lying to himself. He could teach college courses on it. He could write books.

Used to think it would be enough just to be with her. Around her. Having her not allow him that... He would have hung his head, gone away, never dreamed of resisting her, but except for a few broken and half-imagined seconds when Maggie told him she was missing, her telling him to go was the worst thing he could think of.

Such an idiot, and he's fucked.

He's on autopilot but he gets there, and by the time he does he's forgotten the name again, but of course at this point it doesn't matter. He parks, destroys the distance between the truck and the ER entrance, and the possibility that he's going about this all wrong doesn't occur to him, and if it did it wouldn't matter. The double doors hiss open - too slow, everything today is too fucking slow - and someone in scrubs is coming toward him, a woman with her hair pulled tightly back and deep frown lines on her brown face, looking tired and a little harried though as far as his dim awareness goes the smallish room isn't all that full.

The sharp white light hurts his eyes, his head.

"Sir, you're-" The woman looks him over and her frown deepens even as her eyes widen just a touch. His lip, he thinks vaguely, except the blood there dried up hours ago, and it can't possibly matter, or maybe it's just that he probably looks like he's been rolling around in a mud puddle, which he basically has.

The nurse touches his arm. "You need to come over to the desk, we can take care-"

Impatience mixed with desperation mixed with residual terror: under his skin is a thunderstorm, inside of his skull churning dark. He grips the woman's upper arm. "A blond girl come in here? You see a blond girl?"

"Sir, you need to calm down." To her credit, she's extremely calm; also becoming slightly annoyed, and that's contagious and adds annoyance to his own cocktail. "You're lookin' for someone - do you have a name? Do you know how long ago she would've come in?"

"Beth." He's trying to focus on the nurse and scan the room at the same time - the few people waiting in seats, a couple of them nursing relatively minor cuts on hands, legs, and no sign of her, not anywhere. Like she's just gone. "Beth, she's Beth Gree-"

"Daryl?"

Familiar voice. Quiet, also level, calm, and not a trace of annoyance. He feels a hand on his shoulder and whirls, and it's Annette, her face pale and a little drawn but not stricken.

She doesn't look like something absolutely terrible has happened.

That's weird, very, because it has.

"It's all right." She's saying it to the nurse. He thinks. He just stares at her, everything clenched. "I know him, he's looking for my daughter."

Her hand hasn't left his shoulder. Normally he might be stiffening, uncertain, but now he doesn't care, and in fact he feels grounded, feet solidifying against the floor. It's a little easier to breathe.

She's here. So they know. The rest of the family knows. Good, because he probably would have forgotten to call them. At least for a while.

The nurse looks a bit doubtful, but she turns away and heads over to the woman with the cut hand, bending over to peer at it. It doesn't matter. The rest of the room is of no consequence at all. All he can see is Annette.

"She's," he murmurs - can't get find any more volume than that, and the back of his throat feels like it's been raked with a goddamn rake, but Annette gives him a small nod and tugs gently at him.

"She's gonna be all right. Why don't you come sit down with me?"

For what seems like a long, long moment all he can do is stare at her some more. Because she's going to be all right.

She's all right.

Okay. He'll sit down. That seems reasonable.

He does - sits beside Annette in a chair at the far end of the room facing the doors - and he leans his elbows on his knees and gazes down at the ugly, sickly-pale tile floor and goes back to trying to breathe. Because he thought Beth Greene and oxygen didn't really mix but that wasn't right. There was nothing right about that. She's air. She actually is the air. And she would want him to hold it the fuck together right now. Keep breathing.

Especially if she's all right.

Annette doesn't try to get him to talk. Doesn't say anything to him. Just sits with him. He's ridiculously grateful to her.

After a bit he leans back and blinks in all that hard light, finally beginning to be aware of what's around him - not just the light and the plain hard chairs with inadequate padding but also the sterility, the low hum of activity that manages to be unsettling rather than soothing. Not that he's ever heard anyone say they like them, but he hates emergency rooms. He hasn't spent a lot of time in them but there were a few times when he was a kid. A few.

Once he recalls better than the others, because it was worse, and because there was something he had to remember so he could say it and get it right and not mix things up.

He was climbing a tree and he fell and he broke his arm and that was also where the bruises came from. He broke his arm because he fell. That was why. That was how it happened.

He lowers his head again and doesn't raise it. He's back to hurting all over. He's also so thirsty. But he can talk.

"The others here?"

"Yeah." Hint of a smile in her voice, though he doesn't look up to see. "They're parking. Longer term. We might be here awhile."

"Thought you said she was alright."

"She is. Or that's what the doctor told us. She said they're runnin' some tests, gettin' her a room."

He does look up then, stabbed by fresh alarm. Very little of this is making any sense. Then again, none of it has been for over a month. "They're keepin' her?"

"For now. They said they'll have more to tell us soon. When Hershel and Shawn get here we'll move into the actual waiting room." She pauses, her eyes searching his face, and there's something in her expression he doesn't quite know what to make of. Not sharp, but keen. Probing. She's thinking something and she's looking for confirmation.

Finally she seems to make a decision. "They said someone pulled her out of the water. Carried her to the paramedics when they couldn't get through the traffic." Another pause, a few beats, and he feels like cracking under that gaze. He's too exhausted to do much more in the way of concealment. "That was you, wasn't it?"

Whatever she asks him, he's not sure he'll be able to deny any of it. Not to her. Maybe not to anyone. I'm in love with your daughter. I know it's fucked up and I'm sorry but I love her and it's torture and I don't know how to make it stop and I don't even want to. I was wrong. I was so fucking wrong.

"That was you," she says again. "Or at least you were there. Otherwise I have no idea how you'd have found out. Far as I know no one called you."

He ducks his head. Nods. Very slight, hardly at all, but he can't keep from doing it and anyway he's not sure there's any good reason to resist the urge. Why would he even want to lie about something like this? Even make the attempt? It was him.

He had her.

Annette lays her hand over his and it's warm and soft, and everything in him tenses, twists up inside, but he doesn't pull away. He can't pull away. It wouldn't be one of the worst things he could do right now, but God, it wouldn't be good.

"Thank you," she says, very softly. "You saved her."

Everything in him rears up in protest and he shakes his head, emphatic, though he keeps his gaze locked down on his hands, his boots, the ugly floor. "She did. Grabbed a car door. Held on. Kept her head up." He swallows and his throat burns. "She saved herself."

Annette says nothing else. She does squeeze his hand, once, and he can sort of deal with it. He almost can. He thinks about this woman, this woman who was kind to him from the beginning, even when she had no reason to be, even when she wasn't sure about him, this woman who has always been kind to him since, has invited him into her home and fed him and let him - for a while - share in what it is to be with her family, how she's with him now, and he thinks about lifting his head and meeting her eyes and just saying it. Just saying it. Just telling her the fucking truth and letting her do what she wants with it. Taking the consequences. He's so tired.

Part of him - a tiny part, like a seed settling into soft earth - doesn't want to lie anymore.

I love your daughter so much. I do. I don't expect anything from her and I don't have anything to give her, but I would give her everything. There's nothing in the entire fucking world I wouldn't give her if I could.

And I just wanted you to know.

He doesn't say anything.

At some point she brings him some water.

He didn't know just how exhausted he was. Didn't have any idea. But now, having received those six talismanic words - she's going to be all right - everything in him has collapsed and is still collapsing. Lead fishing line sinkers are dangling from his eyelids, the same lead that made them flowing into his marrow - his bones are dense, too dense for his muscles. He feels ragged at all his edges. All the pain in him has subsided into a mercifully dull ache. Annette has been good enough to refrain from commenting on the general walking natural disaster he is at the moment, and when Hershel and Shawn show up no one says much of anything to him. Annette talks to them in low tones. He suspects she might be telling them what happened, with him. Why he's here.

He doesn't have the energy to care. He just wants to sit. Or no: what he really wants to do is curl up on a couple of these fabulously uncomfortable chairs and go to sleep for a few days.

After a while - or maybe it's only a few minutes - he becomes aware that they're all moving and he shuffles after them.

The waiting room proper is marginally more comfortable, to the extent that he's even paying attention. He only has to do so long enough to perceive that it's standard in every possible way. More uncomfortable chairs. Magazines years old. TV on one wall, droning. Plant that may or may not be real. He closes his eyes again and drifts.

And somewhere in that semi-darkness it occurs to him that he might actually get to see her again.

He really can't start crying in here. He'll have to explain why.

Later, someone comes in. He glances up; petite woman with dark skin sharp contrast against her white coat, looks like the doctor. Saying something - Annette mentioned tests and here they get mentioned again. Something about a concussion. Something about it not being all that bad, considering. General exclamations of relief. Something else about stitches. Yet something else about keeping her overnight, maybe a night after.

Something about how they can see her now.

Something about how he can come with them.

He doesn't go in. At least not at first. He stands there just inside the doorway and he watches the rest of them, watches Annette take a seat on the side of her bed, watches Hershel lean down and kiss her forehead, Shawn kiss her cheek, saying something about the stitches, about how she looks pretty gross, and that's funny, because he's about to just drop to the floor looking at her like this. Just about to give up and let all his lead-filled bones take him down.

She's clean, her hair's washed, her head's bandaged, and the gash over her cheek, and she's pale and she looks just about as tired as he feels, but she's smiling. She's smiling.

And she sees him and her smile changes.

He doesn't know how to describe how it changes. He doesn't know how to understand it. It just does. The sun pours in through the half-drawn blinds and catches her hair, her skin, and she smiles, and she's so bright he has to look away. She's on fire. She's a flame. No amount of flood could put her out.

Before anyone has time to invite him in he's turning away, heading for the doors back to the waiting room with his head down and his hands thrust into his pockets.

When he looks up he's outside the main entrance, bathed in sun.

There are a series of concrete planters in rows on either side, full of juniper and slowly dying annuals, and he half falls onto the edge of one of these, breathing - which is difficult again, so he's doing it a little hard. The air is so fresh it's like new pain in his lungs, and he's fumbling for his cigarettes when he remembers that he spent most of the previous night absolutely soaked so it's extraordinarily unlikely that they or his lighter will be in any condition to be used.

He checks anyway. Nope.

Sigh. Okay.

He tilts his head back and faces the light and the warmth and just... just soaks in it for a while. Lets it be that for a change. He's tired of water. Wishes he didn't even need to drink it. Wishes he didn't need to go home and use it to rinse off all this mud and this blood and whatever else he's gotten himself covered with.

Go home and face Merle. Which actually feels like the least unpleasant of the tasks before him. Merle will probably take one look at him and leave him alone. At least for a few hours.

He can go home and he can do these things and he can sleep, because she's going to be all right. And whatever her smile was doing, she gave him one.

Her mercy is boundless.

He jumps when he hears his name, feels the touch on his shoulder; he must have been at least halfway into a doze. Feels like it, anyway; he feels disoriented. Though he wouldn't really need to doze to get to that place.

A shape is blocking the sun. He blinks. It's Shawn.

"Not gonna come back in?"

Daryl shakes his head. No. He's not. He can't. It's just not on the table. His bones are already full of lead but the rest of him is brittle and run through with cracks, and if he stays in that room with her, if he goes nearer to her right now, she's just going to shatter him, and everyone in there is going to see. And he can't exactly ask for some time alone with her.

He doesn't need to go back in. She's going to be all right.

Shawn shrugs. "Suit yourself. You should go home, then. You look really bad."

Daryl gives him a very small, very thin smile. He knows.

"She wanted me to give you this." Shawn is holding something out. Daryl stares at it, struggles to focus. It looks like a folded piece of paper. It is a folded piece of paper. He takes it with a slightly shaking hand and stares at it some more.

"Thank-you note," Shawn says, by way of explanation. "Kinda weird, you're gonna see her next week anyway. Whatever, she got knocked on the head. She might be kinda weird for a while." He glances back at the doors. "I'm gonna head back in." But then he takes a second and looks back at Daryl, seems to study him. "Hey, listen... You okay?"

Not ever. "Yeah."

"You don't need a ride home or anythin'?"

Probably. "No."

"Alright." Shawn turns, heads back toward the entrance, tosses a final glance over his shoulder. "See you."

Somehow Daryl makes it back to the truck.

But he just sits there for a minute or two, staring into space, wondering if he actually for a fact is capable of driving home without hitting someone or something or rolling into a ditch. Just passing out right here doesn't seem advisable. Going ahead and driving seems questionable. A decision in the next little bit is probably necessary.

He realizes he's still holding the folded piece of paper. He unfolds it.

The handwriting is shaky. It wobbles. He wonders how she even got someone to give her paper and pen, why she wasn't just told to cut it out and concentrate on being concussed. But she has a way of convincing people, of gently and kindly and persistently getting what she wants, and she got this.

She wrote him a note.

He's not sure it qualifies as a thank-you note, but it's a note.

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

He doesn't completely understand. He doesn't need to. It's the last thing, the last weight and stab and flood that washes over him and fills him and empties him out. She's going to be all right and she smiled at him and she was coming to see him and she wrote him this.

This.

He leans over the steering wheel and cries until he can't breathe at all.

Note: poem is "The Uses of Sorrow" by Mary Oliver.