Chapter 5

Remy's?

Confusion reigns as I walk through the door, not in complete control of my body. Everything is familiar, the classic diner booths and small tables, the counter along the back wall. But it's also radically different. It's empty. Remy's is a twenty-four hour diner, and being New York City, there is always someone here. The edges of my perception are fuzzy and unformed. If I focus on something, it takes shape and form; as soon as I look away it disappears into ethereal mist. It's making me uneasy, but there isn't much I can do about it right now.

Nothing hurts anymore, a serene calm leaving the turmoil of the last few weeks a distant memory. No nausea anymore either, which I will take as a win. I am not in control, following the unconscious beeline to my favorite table when I halt in my tracks, mid step.

Mom is sitting at one of the booths, her features sharp and clear. She hasn't changed in fifteen years, a picture as clear as that January morning, the last time we enjoyed a meal together, just her and I.

"MOM!" I bound to her as she stood from the booth, bracing for a hug. A hug I've longed deeply for these past fifteen years. Over the years I've imagined what I would say to her, what I would ask, what we would discuss. None of that matters now. Now that she is in front of me, any conversations I would have imagined feel mundane and silly. I just want to be with her. I feel tears forming in the edges of my eyes, and I force myself to thrust them back, not wanting to ruin the moment. I notice that she does this too; we are so alike.

Wordlessly we part from the embrace, our fingers dancing playfully across shoulders, arms, and hands, trying to maintain contact as she motions me to sit across from her in the booth.

She breaks the silence with a soft smile, "Hi Katherine. I've been waiting for you." She pauses, tilting her head to assess my condition, "I hear you have news."

I can only answer with a confused look and a slight shrug. "About what? What do you want to know?" So much news in fifteen years, what could she possibly want to hear about? Where do I start? What has she already had a hand in?

"Oh Katherine," she pauses for a beat, her slight smile transitioning to a full playful chuckle, "Great choice in Richard, by the way." She reaches for a milkshake that has just appeared in front of her. There's a matching one in front of me. After a thoughtful sip she continues, "You could have spared a lot of hurt you know. If you would have just acknowledged your feelings right away. You don't always have to do things the hard way." Wow, even in my imagination - or is this a hallucination - she can take me down with a simple look over her milkshake. Embarrassed, I hide my blush behind a sip of my own milkshake. Strawberry, my favorite. I know she's right, she always is. We settle into the comfortable silence as all the moments I could have told Rick how I felt flash through my vision, Johanna's motherly gaze inflicting my deserved punishment.

Just as I think about it, a plate of fries appears before us. Whatever magic is happening, I don't question it, not able to imagine ruining the moment. We dive in as if I'm nineteen again, on a quiet Saturday morning, but instead of discussing boys, we focus more on life in general. Mom keeps eyeing me though, silently prodding me to answer her original query. She already knows, I can feel from the weight of the moment, but she wants me to tell her. Why am I nervous?

"Mom," I take a fortifying deep breath, something I haven't been able to do since being shot, "I'm pregnant."

Johanna's face lights up into such joy, radiating it out of every pore and movement. She reaches out her hand, and I grasp it, the pride pulsing through our held grip. She's crying happy tears through the blushing and beaming and I can't help myself either.

"I'm so happy for you, Katie!"

We revel in this moment, time irrelevant, milkshakes mysteriously not melting, munching on our bottomless tray of fries. I gently close my eyes, nodding at the love we are transmitting and providing a moment to sort through the never ending list of all I want to talk about while I have her here. The density of the ethereal mist surrounding us buzzes with an energy that makes me uncomfortable.

"It's almost like you already know everything. If that's so Mom…. then why are we here?" The reality around me, or what I think reality should be, doesn't make sense. The distinctly Remy's characteristics remain formless wispy shadows. How can any of this be real? I feel no pain, no nausea. I feel no actual sensations, the fries and milkshake are neither warm nor cold. None of the familiar textures.

One conclusion remains, one I finally voice in a panic heavy whisper, "Mom….am…am I dead?"

The tabloid pictures seem to follow him, taunting him from every newsstand as he walks aimlessly away from the hospital. They are not flattering snapshots. He hadn't bothered wrestling into a shirt that morning - at least until the medics arrived- the black stitches zippering uneven and coarse down his chest, his face frozen open in shock. He could deal with that unflattering mug if it was the only picture they had captured. In the millisecond it took him to slam the door in the face of the paparazzi rat, the worst pictures had been snapped.

Kate, curled grotesquely into herself, pale yellow coloration that was so obvious it had to be either an exaggeration or manipulation. She was barely dressed, her nearly skeletal form showing behind her comfortable clothes. To add insult to the injury, they had paired the shot next to one from early in his shadowing, her proud face holding her finest and most powerfully formidable stance. He didn't pay attention to the headline framing the terrible pictures; they just slung insults she didn't deserve. A consuming sadness about Kate overtook any roiling anger about the tabloids. His warm and fuzzy memories of her were battling these reminders of her greatest pain.

Rick's head was swimming as he wandered, not accountable for where his legs were taking him. He just needed to move. Away. Anywhere.

Going home meant facing the blood stains, her haunting form curled onto the floor in front of the couch, the pillow and blanket nest he had constructed for her in their bed. He couldn't bear any of that right now. Going to the precinct without Kate made him feel like an interloper, a visitor who by now had long overstayed his welcome. They would have so many questions. Questions he was most definitely not ready to answer in this current state. So he wandered, his head swimming as his legs carried him.

"Dad?" Alexis' voice pulled him from his incoherent thoughts as he trudged through the door of his P.I. office, an asthmatic sounding zombie bee-lining to anywhere familiar. The walk was the longest he had done since being shot and was stressing his system to the max.

He simply answered with a strange, uncomprehending look to Alexis and Hayley, both on their laptops sorting through actual work.

'What are you doing here?" Alexis' anxiety rose with her body as she made her way around the desk to Rick. He was standing still in the middle of the room, a dementia patient coming into a moment of coherence.

"Uhmmm?" A slight whistle rasped through his lungs as he tried to find words.

"Is Beckett alright? Dad, what's wrong?!" She shook his arm forcefully to pull him into reality.

"She's…...ugh…" The reality he had been attempting to escape slammed into him hard as he caught his breath. How was she? What kind of question was that?

She was okay. Or would be. That is what the nurse had said when she brought Rick to Kate's room the night before. Upon arrival at the hospital Kate had been whisked into emergency surgery. Back at the loft she had come to about a minute after Martha had managed to call 911, but continued to oscillate between unconsciousness and vomiting blood and bile in the ambulance. Surgery had revealed a raging infection, eating away at her wounded intestines and stomach, the organ responsible for fighting it missing, the tissue framing its absence also infected and inflamed. The surgeon had carefully debrided what they could, taking time to preserve as much functionality as possible.

"The baby?" He had remembered asking, the image of Kate's heavily sedated frame in another hospital bed searing into his memory.

"The bleeding was her body's response to the added stress of the infection. Glad you came in when you did, her liver was starting to shut down. The OBGYN says the baby is fine, but your wife will be under more continuous and close monitoring from now on." The nurse had been gentle with the news, he remembered that. And she had hummed quietly as she bustled around, the sound helping to keep Rick from falling too far into anxious melancholy as he waited.

He had spent the night at Kate's side, nightmares of life without her chasing his sleep. When morning came with little to no change in her level of consciousness, he had needed to move. He needed to run from dark thoughts brewing in his psyche. How close was she going to get to dying? And how many more times would it happen before her luck ran out?

Back at the P.I. office, Rick used the last of his energy to stutter out, "Just…. needed a walk. Needed a break."

"Kate's okay, right?" Hayley had formed an attachment of sorts to this family she worked for, and the man in front of her was utterly broken.

"Yeah. She will be. I guess. When she wakes up. If…." His sentences were short as his thoughts were interrupted. Lilies. Suddenly all he could think about were lilies.

Time doesn't count here. There is no clock, no sun casting shadows, the watch on my wrist isn't ticking any time. It all still feels completely natural. Just me and mom.

She was particularly coy about my question, so I repeated it. "Mom. Am I dead? I know you are. And this could only be possible if I was to." Thoughts of Rick and all the things we dreamed for our future press against the gates, pushing tears and panic to the surface. "Can you just tell me?"

She finally meets my gaze. "No Kate, you are not dead yet." She reaches for a fry, so nonchalant, as if this isn't the most confusing situation any of us could be in right now. "But, you will be if you keep fighting everything."

"But," I let out a frustrated sigh, anger flaring, "I'm fighting for my life. I want to stay alive."

I can tell this wasn't the right path to take.

"Think of it this way," Mom reaches out her hands, enveloping one of mine, just as warm and soft as I remember them being. "What you are going through, all of it: your marriage, the blow back from the case, being shot, your pregnancy. They are all just a river. Fast and furious and full of rapids." I nod in agreement. We always stopped to admire the brazen mountain streams on the way to the cabin, cascading harshly over the rocks rubbed smooth by the centuries of friction. This is a metaphor that makes sense to me.

"A stick falls into the water. It has some options." I want to roll my eyes. This is the start of one of her rambling lessons mixed into a story thing that I always hated. But I try to play along.

"It can stick itself into the mud and stay put." She gives me a half smile, "What happens to the stick if it does that?"

I can imagine it clearly, the stick caught between two rocks, wedged up at such an angle it juts out, taking the full force of the water streaming past it. Battered and stripped of bark, it shines white, stark, and skeletal.

Mom looks to me for an answer, so I provide one, "It's stripped away. Broken."

"Exactly. It decided to fight. And it gets stripped and beaten and torn asunder."

I feel like I know where this is going now. Part of me wants her to skip to the end, the other part just wants to linger in her presence. I miss just sitting with her.

"Now, what happens to the stick that allows itself to go with the flow? Sure, it might get beaten around a bit, but it eventually finds a place to rest." She pats my hand, a conclusion to her story, "In one piece."

I know she's right, and my wet eyes rise to meet hers, being rewarded with a warm smile. "Be the stick that chooses to float."

If this would have been fifteen years ago, I would have answered her with a whine and initially ignored the advice. The new Kate? All grown up, and unsure, and possibly dying. No, I can't afford to ignore her advice now.

She continues, pouring her advice quickly, knowing the mold is now set and ready to receive, "Now's the time for focus. Put everything into your recovery. Eat when you are supposed to, do your exercises, even if they hurt. If you are anything like me when I was pregnant with you, my advice is to force yourself to eat."

"It's so hard." I let out an unintentional whine.

"It'll be easier now. Your infection is under control. And just a few more weeks until the end of the first trimester. Trust me, you'll want food again soon."

I trust her, but I also reserve some judgment, unsure of everything at the moment. I hadn't even had the time nor energy to start reading the pregnancy books Rick had bought and hid in our room.

"Lily," Johanna finally ventures, pulling me from my jumbled thoughts with a slight shake of my held hand.

"What?"

"Lily. Call her Lily."

One word in the statement blows me away, "Her?"

"Yeah. You're having a little girl," she chuckles.

Recalling the one crazy case from years ago with the time traveler, I'm reminded that fate had kids lined up for Rick and I. Three if I remember correctly. A little butterfly flutter twinges my pelvis, finally warming my heart to the idea. I'm barely far along enough to have the first definitive ultrasound. But I hold back my questions.

She can sense my hesitation, responding with a shrug, "A mother's intuition Kate. We just know things."

This magical mother's intuition. I want to ask her how I get it. How to balance being a mom and a professional, especially with the job I have. Instead the only question that comes out is, "Why Lily?"

"That's what we were going to call you. But your dad convinced me to go with Katherine instead. After your grandmother. I'm glad he did. But I've always loved the name Lily."

We both sit quietly in the moment, sharing everything we want to say through smiles instead.

A sharp pain hits my torso, a deep stabbing reminding me of my loss and what led to it. Remy's begins to spin around me and I shut my eyes to prevent the vertigo from pulling me under.

"Kate, remember, be the stick that floats. Stop fighting everything. You'll be okay." I hear Mom's voice fading as she repeats the advice, the last words coming through a tunnel. Distorting and garbled.

"Kate, stop fighting everything", her mother's voice faded and was slowly replaced by a much more familiar, deeper, and more present voice. "Stop fighting. You're going to be okay."

The stabbing in her torso was very real, pushing through the grogginess. She wanted to press on it, but something was preventing her hand from moving. She could feel her body reacting to the short spasms, butterflies pounding against her pelvis, and her shoulder muscles protesting loudly at each movement.

"Kate, you need to stop fighting." This time the voice was tinged with a bit of frustration and she opened her eyes to confront it.

Rick stared down at her, a bit wide eyed, one hand gripping hers tightly while the other hand pressed down on her body to attempt to hold it still. Nurses flanked the hospital bed, and her breath caught in her throat as the perception of feeling trapped bubbled to the surface.

"Kate! Kate, stop! Take a breath. Focus." Rick was insistent, gripping her chin and turning her head to face him. She was ready to fight. "Stop flailing. It's only making it worse."

Confusion washed over her as she focused on the pressure of his strong hands into her jaw. Flailing? What was going on?

As her body softened, Rick provided some much needed context, "You're coming out of some heavy sedation. You're okay. It's going to be okay." Each stroke of her cheek by his warm fingers softened her fight until she was nearly butter in his hands.

"Leaf that floats…." she whispered, letting the phantom spectra that was her mother sitting at Remy's fade from her vision.

"What?"

Huh, she must have said that out loud. She shook her head, still held in Rick's grip. She didn't have the energy to tell him right now. Instead she used it to take stock of her surroundings. What had been a frantic bustling of nurses a minute ago was now calm and controlled. A well choreographed dance with Kate the patient, and Rick her support person, the central focal point.

"You had a pretty bad infection. Needed another surgery to get it all out." Rick plopped himself in one of the hard plastic chairs that suddenly appeared next to the bed. Kate's perception was coming back in waves, the stabbing pains slowly receding to dull throbs. "You've been out for a lot longer than usual this time, and coming back to reality….." he paused here to coax a tear back into its place around his eye lid, preventing it from falling. "...well apparently you chose violence, started thrashing and flailing and nearly yelling in pain."

As her panic settled, Kate realized she was blushing. Her perception had landed on what had to be the most obnoxious bouquet in the entire flower shop, sitting on the edge of the tray table a nurse had just wheeled up to the opposite side of the bed from Rick. Vibrant orange tiger lilies filled the foreground, matched with pink flight lilies trying but failing to be subtle. To cap off the entire ensemble, a massive peace lily, mid bloom, poked up the middle, competing for attention. Coordinated with some greens, everything was wrapped together with a soft pink ribbon decorated with the word "Love" emblazoned in endless curly cursive.

"Wow. You didn't have to…" she let it trail off, her voice gaining strength as she attempted to shuffle her body slightly for comfort.

""I… ugh… I heard you were opening a flower store. Figured I'd pitch in." He offered with a nervous chuckle, his eyes more sparkling with tears than they were before. She attempted a return laugh but the shaking hurt her abdominal muscles too much. "No, I'm kidding. For some reason, all day, I couldn't get the thought of lillies out of my head."

Kate let silence fall, tuning out all other noises except the melody of her heart beat playing gently from the overhead monitor. Another more subtle rhythm played off a smaller monitor, its cords leading to electrodes just along the top of her pelvis. Her mother had been right, in so many different ways. Kate had made the right choice in finally letting Rick into her life, simply having him there holding her hand was grounding enough to this reality to keep her sane; keep her feeling loved. A safe harbor for any kind of storm.

The lilies caught her attention again. He had no idea, and she wondered how much she should tell him.

He had kept talking, she realized, rambling on about her condition and what had happened. Next to the massive bouquet sat a photo strip. The eight week ultrasound. Blurry and a bit unformed, their baby was a blob existing at the bottom of a larger circle that was her newly existing womb. They had run an ultrasound on Kate as soon as she had been wheeled into surgery, to confirm the baby's status, and again when the surgery was complete. The OBGYN was worried, hours long soaking in anesthesia was never good for fetuses. The sonographer had printed the strip more for Rick, something to give him hope as he waited for Kate to recover. Kate shushed Rick's rambling gently with a look and a quick squeeze of his hand. She let go of him for only a minute, reaching for the strip. She couldn't quite reach without more movement, so he leaned over her to grab it off the table, placing it in her hand that he had just let go of. The fingers on her slinged arm brushed along the electrodes of the fetal monitor as they led along the edge of the bed. Eight weeks. Eight weeks old and already having lived through so much.

"The baby is okay." Rick choked back a sound, somewhere between a sob and a relieved laugh. That was all she needed to hear. She could hear it in his voice, anytime he talked about the baby, the quiet reverence that reminded her that he was and would be a great father. Recalling how she accepted all of his crazy theories through the years, and how some of them either turned out to be right or helpful, she took a leap of faith.

Kate summoned what strength she had, feeling the lure of the pain medication pulling her back to rest. "Rick?" she murmured, "I need to tell you something. Something about her."

"Her?" Of all the words she had spoken, this one caught him by surprise the most.