A/N: Hello!
Nothing much to say other than I hope you're having a great week and that I hope you enjoy this chapter.
August 31, 1991
"August 22, 1991
My dear Elibet,
I am so sorry I can't be there right now. As I'm writing this, I just got off the phone with you at the hospital, and you sounded so terrified. It broke my heart. I hate that our calls are so spotty…I know you want to talk and I do too. I'm counting down the days until we're together again.
For now, because I can't seem to get you on the phone long enough to be able to hear you and tell you what's on my heart, this will have to do.
I don't know how someone can be so sad and yet so happy at the same time. One minute I'm ecstatic because I'm a DAD! I'm actually going to be a father.
But then, I remember I'm a half a world away from you and our baby. I'm not going to see the milestones and help you through it all. I want to be there for you. I want to help you decorate the nursery and pick out clothes. I want to take you to the doctor and fix meals for you when you don't want to do it yourself (which who am I kidding…you never want to do them yourself. And I love cooking for you, so it's a win either way) I just want to hold you and watch our baby grow in your incredible body, Elizabeth, and I'm so so so sorry that I can't be there.
Please take care of yourself babe. I'm scared for you…the hospital trip sounded like it ended up alright, but please just try to take care of yourself until I can come and do it for you, my love.
I hope you write back to me soon. I also hope wherever we are next has better reception because I want to hear your voice…I'm desperate to hear your voice. I want to hear everything about the baby and everything you want to tell me.
I love you so much, and I love our baby, too. Make sure it knows Daddy loves him…or her.
Love,
Hank"
Elizabeth has read over these words five times now, still standing in their doorway. She hasn't even set her keys down—the keyring is resting on her middle finger as she skims back over the letter again, looking at every little water mark on the paper. Perfectly round circles, and one blotched the ink over "Love" at the end.
She finally takes a deep breath through her nose and finds reality again, picking her head up and holding the letter to her chest. She stumbles through the hallway and into the living room, kicking her shoes off as she walks, and plopping down onto the couch. The letter is still pressed into her shirt as she melts backward into the couch cushion, curling her knees up to her stomach and laying her head backwards.
"Elizabeth," she hears, and it sounds like an echo from far, far away. "Elizabeth? Are you alright?"
She opens her eyes and looks at the ceiling to hear better (how does opening your eyes help?). "Elizabeth," she hears again, and she finally looks over to the kitchen. "Are you okay?"
"Sorry," she mumbles to Isabelle who is now standing beside the couch's arm and looking down at Elizabeth very concerned. She thinks for a moment that this might be how a big sister would look at her if she had one, even though Isabelle is the same age as she is. "Henry sent me a letter." She says.
"Oh," Isabelle says, swallowing thick and shifting a little. "All good?"
"All good." Elizabeth confirms, sniffling and looking at the paper again, but making it brief this time. She folds it back up the way it came to her in the envelope and sets it between her stomach and her thighs that were still inches away from her abdomen.
"Good," Isabelle replies, then looks back in the kitchen, "I got the spaghetti on the stove, but I'm not sure where the sauce is."
"Oh, sauce." Elizabeth says, realizing she'd forgotten to get sauce on the way home. "I was going to stop and get some." She admits.
"Well," Isabelle says and laughs pathetically, rubbing her temple, "I could've gotten some on my way here had I known you didn't have any." She says.
"I'm sorry," Elizabeth answers, mostly so absentminded these days after her shocking news that she wasn't even sure always what her own name was. She'd told the nurse Elizabeth Adams in the hospital that day, and then when the electric company asked for her name over the phone while she was paying her bill, she had to think what her first name was. Her mind was foggy, to say the least, and she wanted—no, needed it to go back to normal. "You really don't have to keep cooking for me, Isabelle." Elizabeth states.
She shakes her head, "I don't trust you to come home and eat, Elizabeth." She says matter-of-factly, turning back to the kitchen and raising her voice so she can be heard, "I can't monitor your breakfasts, but I know when you eat lunch at work and when you don't, and I can make sure you're getting a second meal in this way."
Elizabeth hears things banging in the kitchen, so she stands up and walks over to peek around the corner. She watches as Isabelle is cutting up tomatoes, "What are you doing?" She asks.
Isabelle looks at her but doesn't stop chopping, "What's it look like?" She asks, "I'm making sauce."
"You're making sauce?" Elizabeth asks. "Like…homemade?"
"I'm Italian." Isabelle answers, huffing her hair from her face, "You think I don't know how to make pasta sauce? It's my birthright, even if I'm only part Italiano." She adds, drawing out the Italian accent that really just made her sound very old-money New York, Elizabeth realizes, when she says the last word.
Elizabeth just watches as she continues to cut up the tomatoes, adding everything to another pan. Her legs begin to get shaky feeling so she walks over and sits down at the table, keeping a close eye on her friend and that saucepan. In moments, it looked like actual pasta sauce. "I've never had sauce that didn't come from a jar." She admits.
Isabelle looks at her over her shoulder and raises a disapproving brow, "Never?" She asks. When Elizabeth shakes her head, she continues on and tends to her pasta sauce at the same time, "Well, I don't think mine is as good as my mother's, but it's pretty damn good." She boasts, "Have you ever considered learning to cook, Elizabeth?"
"Yes," she says immediately, "I consider it frequently, and then I burn things and stop considering it." She continues, "That's why Henry does all the cooking. In our first apartment after we were married, I burnt a package of ramen noodles."
"You—" Isabelle stops herself, her hand frozen from stirring the sauce as she stares at Elizabeth as if she were trying to figure out if she was serious or not. Elizabeth figures she must have decided that she was indeed serious because she turns and resumes stirring, "Maybe it's for the best that Henry do the cooking." She concludes.
"Exactly." Elizabeth says, leaning her head tiredly on her hand as her elbow rests on the tabletop.
"Until he's back, you've got me for dinners." Isabelle states, "And I won't take no for an answer."
"You don't need to be cooking for me every day." Elizabeth replies, "You have a life of your own, you didn't take me in to raise."
"I haven't taken you in," Isabelle says, "I cook dinner for myself every night, and your house is just right down the street from mine, so why shouldn't I just cook it at your place instead of mine?" She asks rhetorically, "I'm not doing extra work. I'm just doing what I normally do but in someone else's house."
"But—"
"No buts." Isabelle interrupts, throwing her free hand up before placing it back on her hip like any good Italian mother would.
Elizabeth watches as this woman is cooking, wondering how they got here. Last week, Elizabeth barely knew her. She knew her as Isabelle Barnes, but that was it. Why did she care? Why did she happen to be the one to see Elizabeth pass out? Did this mean they were friends now, or did Isabelle feel some weird sense of duty since she was the one who was there during the whole fiasco that sent her to the hospital? Her mind wanders off to the hospital visit last week and the two days she spent there, mostly with Isabelle beside her.
"Is the ultrasound needed today?"
"Well, Dr. Reynolds ordered one, but I can go doublecheck with him before I do it just to be sure."
"That'd be great."
"You gotta do it, Bess. Why don't you want to?"
"Because right now I can believe it's not real. I can just…I can think of it as a stomach flu and not come to terms with the fact that I'm all alone, thousands of miles away from my husband while carrying a child I am not sure I'm even ready for. There's a lot of complicated emotions going on."
"Well, I didn't really take you for someone that would just lie down and give up, Elizabeth. Not after everything you told me. I thought you were a really strong woman, but here you are proving me wrong about it. You're scared, and I get that, I would be too. But not tackling this fear head on…that surprises me. I guess I was wrong about you."
When Isabelle left the room after stating that, Elizabeth bristled in her hospital bed and looked at the ceiling, staring so hard that one might expect lasers to come out soon. When the ultrasound woman came back in, Elizabeth cleared her throat, "Just go ahead." She told the young woman.
"Okay," she had answered, "Dr. Reynolds said it was required anyway for today to make sure everything was good with the baby."
The baby. The thought still seemed so foreign, so unreal. So lifechanging and life-threatening. She closed her eyes and gripped the sheets under her, a pain starting to form in her jaw from clenching it so tightly. But once everything was prepped on the tech's end, it was her turn to experience the rest.
"You're going to feel some pressure." Katie, the tech, told her.
Elizabeth waited to feel that pressure, but she was met with a painful sensation instead. Unfortunately, the only time she remembered feeling that way was her first time having sex, and Henry was much, much warmer than this…thing…they had just put in her body.
"Try to relax," the tech said, and Elizabeth just wanted to snap and ask how she could possibly relax, but she tried her best.
For a moment, time stood still. She and Katie just got very intimate very quick, and she was still gripping the sheets underneath her as this woman, whose last name she doesn't even know, was moving a wand around inside Elizabeth's body.
But then she heard something that made her eyes open again, and she searched quickly for the monitor that was attached to this wand, and gray images were on the screen. "Is that it?" Elizabeth asked, not sure what she was looking at.
Katie was searching, Elizabeth could tell by the way the wand was moving, and she was also squinting at the screen. "Here we go," she said, and Elizabeth felt a little embarrassed for a moment that she had blindly asked if that was it before. It clearly was not, now that she saw the real "it."
The echoing heartbeat surrounded the room and seemed, somehow, to lull Elizabeth a bit. She didn't feel near as scared, but instead just felt a weird sense of calm come over her as though she'd just had good drugs inserted into this IV in her arm. And then she saw it—the "it" that Katie saw when she said "here we go" just moments ago. "That's your baby." She said, pointing at this little blip on the screen just in case Elizabeth wasn't able to tell. There was no other way to put it other than that this "baby" looked like a lima bean, or some other kind of bean—Elizabeth didn't eat any of them, so she wasn't really sure which to classify it as.
Somehow, it's as if the room let out a breath of relief when Katie pointed to that bean, though. Elizabeth wasn't sure how it happened, but the pressure that had built in the room from before had somehow released and escaped. The tension wasn't so thick now, she didn't feel like throwing up from fear. Instead, she felt like she could burst into tears—that's an actual baby inside of her.
"Right there," Katie pointed to a little spot on the bean, "That's the heartbeat. A strong, healthy rhythm." She concluded.
Elizabeth just watched and stayed still, not moving one inch and barely breathing. The tension of the room was now replaced with a buzzing.
There's an actual heartbeat. This was real. This wasn't some joke.
"It looks like everything's developing well," Katie said.
It was no longer just a concept. It was no longer something that was maybe or maybe not happening. It was real. And it was developing well, apparently.
After a few moments longer, Katie announced that she was finished and removed the wand, and Elizabeth felt naked and bare and vulnerable again, even under the sheets that kept her body mostly covered. She wanted to melt into the bed and never see this Katie again, and hopefully she never would anyway.
Katie finished everything she had to do, apparently, and gave Elizabeth an assuring smile, "Everything looks good, Mrs. McCord." She said, "Dr. Reynolds will go over the results with you in a little." She concluded, waving and exiting as though she and Elizabeth did not actually just share a highly intimate experience.
She let her head fall over on the pillow to look at the screen that Katie left in here, presumably for Dr. Reynolds, and saw the frozen image of the little bean on the screen. This odd feeling came over her—not happiness, not sadness, not fear or anxiety. She couldn't explain it, but it felt close to an emptiness. But how, when she should be full of life?
Isabelle walked back into the room a few moments later, "Did you get it?" She asked, asking her as though she were talking about a lipstick color or something that Elizabeth had wanted.
Elizabeth just nodded, "I did." She said, then gestured over to the screen and swallowed thick.
"Wow," Isabelle whispered, looking at the screen from the other side of Elizabeth's bed, "It's…it's a bean." She said.
Elizabeth just barely snorted, still experiencing that empty feeling, "Yeah," she whispered, "But she said everything looked good."
"Aren't you glad you got it done?" Isabelle asked, going over to sit down.
Elizabeth shrugged, "I don't know." She said, and that was honesty. She didn't know how to feel. In a way, she was relieved that everything was okay, but on the other hand, she felt this overwhelming sense of responsibility come crashing down on her that she hadn't asked for. Was she glad? Not really, she thought. But also, maybe she was because she didn't have to wonder anymore. This was tangible now, it was her reality that she would have to come to terms with whether she wanted to or not.
But for now, her head was throbbing again, so she just shut her eyes and hoped to fall asleep.
She doesn't know the answers to any of those questions rolling through her head, and she hasn't gotten the courage to ask. For now, she's just happy she does have someone here, and isn't having to try to cook freezer meals that she just throws back up. She's found she can eat spaghetti and keep it down, as well as Isabelle's breaded chicken tenders, and that's about it. For lunch, she forces herself to eat cheese and crackers, but she can't manage to eat anything other than that unless there are leftovers that Isabelle has made. And Isabelle was right—she couldn't monitor her breakfast. It's not like Elizabeth was trying to starve herself, not that at all. But she couldn't fathom trying to eat anything before ten in the morning, her body simply would not allow it. Everything before then, and sometimes even after then, would immediately come back up.
And maybe, if she's honest with herself, she's happy to have someone here at all. The loneliness when Isabelle isn't here is unbearable, and she's had to just take herself to bed and cry herself to sleep a few nights before Isabelle did daily dinners. After the daily dinner, Isabelle usually had kept her spirits up enough that she was able to not focus on the loneliness she felt whenever she was alone again, and instead feel the slight boost of serotonin coursing through her body.
"Buon appetite!" Isabelle exclaims, laying the plate of spaghetti down in front of Elizabeth.
It snaps her out of her stupor, thinking about Isabelle being here and how Henry is gone and how much she misses him and the sweet letter he sent and how terrified she is of being a mom and how…wait, he's not terrified to be a dad? The thought just crosses her mind swiftly, and she looks at Isabelle determined, "Henry said he's excited to be a dad." She realizes again out loud, frowning and looking down absently at Isabelle's plate, "He…no. He said he was actually ecstatic because he's a dad." She murmurs, remembering every inch of that letter already. She borderline slams her palms on the table, "Why does he get to be ecstatic when I get to be terrified?"
Isabelle shovels a pile of spaghetti in her mouth like nothing was happening, and the move makes Elizabeth feel annoyed.
"Honey," Isabelle says cooly, "Because your hormones are literally a churning sea right now."
"Don't say churning." Elizabeth says, feeling like her stomach might flip just at the word.
Isabelle laughs, "Exactly my point." She says, wiping her mouth with the napkin and setting it back in her lap before looking at Elizabeth, "You're scared because you're alone and you're the one with the baby growing inside of you and draining your body." She explains, "You just had a pretty gnarly health scare on top of it, so of course you're scared while he's ecstatic."
She looks down into her plate of spaghetti, steaming and smelling delicious. "He said he's terrified too." Elizabeth realizes, taking a shaky breath, "For me, of course, because I'm alone."
"Well," Isabelle says, her mouth full as she's chewing on another fork full of spaghetti, "You're not entirely alone anymore. You have me." She says, swallowing the bite, "You're stuck with me now, whether you like it or not."
Elizabeth looks at her, studying to see if this was an act or not. She can't tell—something infuriating about Isabelle is that she's CIA and is a trained operative, just like Elizabeth, and neither of them give away their thoughts too easily. So instead of trying to continue to decipher this woman beside her, she digs into her plate of spaghetti.
"August 31, 1991
Henry,
Oh, my love, Henry. I miss you.
I wish you were here too. It sounds ridiculous for a grown woman to say this, but I just want to be held. I want to be held by you, though, or my mom (which obviously is impossible either way). And I'm just tired all the time and scared of being a mom. I don't think I know how yet, and I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready at all, Henry. I wanted a career. How do I handle this and a career at the same time? I doubt you have an answer to that, but it's something I'm dealing with. I'm just scared.
Isabelle, the CIA coworker who watched me pass out last week, she has been cooking for me every night. So don't worry, I'm at least getting dinners. I've only been able to keep spaghetti down, breaded chicken tenders, and cheese and crackers too. It's really hard to be sick all the time, and nothing seems to help right now.
The doctor said I'm about six weeks, but that was last week so I guess it's more like seven now. If all the calculations are right, you should be home two weeks before I'm due. So hopefully everything goes good and that's how it works because I don't want to do it all alone…I don't even want to do this part alone, but I know I have to."
She pauses from writing for a moment and leans over, adjusting the book and notepaper on her lap and grabbing a picture from the bedside drawer. It was a printout of the ultrasound the doctor gave her on her way out of the hospital, and she had cut this one off the strip to send to Henry, but hadn't worked up the courage to do it yet. Now feels like the ultimate opportunity, though, since she's sending him a letter anyway.
She stares at the picture for a moment, her words scribbled over the page behind it, out of focus in her eyes. That bean that has a heartbeat felt like it was staring at her, but she knows that can't be the case. However, she gets this weird feeling, knowing she's not alone suddenly. She notes that the picture is quivering, realizing soon after that it's because her hands are shaking. She lets the picture down on the paper, then looks at the blanket bunched up around her belly as she leans against the headboard.
Her hand slides to the blanket and pulls it down just slightly, then shakily grabs for her shirt and pulls it up to just show a little skin. She feels like her heart is in her throat, and she keeps trying to swallow in hopes of getting it to go back down. There's throbbing everywhere, including her head that still wasn't back to 100% after her concussion, and her fingers are shaking so much that she's not sure she recognizes them as her own—it seems someone else is controlling her body. And technically, someone else is controlling her body.
Her fingers finally land on her skin and she shivers, moving the tips just to the side of her naval. She opens her mouth and hears her tongue stick to the roof of it. Licking her lips, she tries to will more saliva to come back into her mouth, but she can't. She shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath, trying to avoid the way her fingers feel foreign against her own skin. When she opens her eyes again, she looks at the picture that is settled down on the paper, then they dart over to the side where she'd laid his letter by her leg. She scratches her cheek with her other hand before dropping her eyes back down to where her other hand rested on the skin she didn't recognize. "I don't know what to say to you," she whispers, feeling crazy as she starts talking, "But Henry told me to make sure you know he loves you, and…I guess that's what I'm doing now." She says nervously, that heart coming right back into her throat as soon as she stops talking. It feels like it's choking her, but she continues anyway. "I…" She stops again, unsure what to say once more, and just shuts her eyes and sees a vision of Henry's face.
"I love you," he says in her head, and she takes a deep breath again, able to breathe once more.
"I love you too." She whispers out loud, knowing that it was all in her head anyway, but saying it for good measure.
She picks up the pen again and begins writing once more:
"I told the baby you love it, and I'll make sure it knows every day.
I hope you can call me soon because I desperately miss hearing your voice, Henry. I hope you're safe, and I love you so much. Please write as often as you can…I'll hang on to every word.
Love,
Elibet."