A/N: Been a while! I have graduated-onto the next program! :-)
I am excited to get back into writing some FanFiction as well as get back to writing my book.
Hope you enjoy!
"If you go to Baghdad…" Henry paused, pulling his eyes upwards to meet hers from where they'd drooped down, "I don't know what it's going to look like when you come back."
She'd been left speechless this morning, and the celery had been left unchopped on the counter after she'd slammed it down for him to cut away from her. That was before the words were said, that was before she'd had to reconsider everything she'd ever worked for. It wasn't like this was something she did lightly—she knew leaving her family behind in the States for a year would be terrible. But this is what she'd signed up for when she started with the CIA, and it was only pure chance that she ended up winning the desk-job argument in the first place. They'd needed someone to fill a position, and when she begged, she was very convincing.
So why was the convincing not working on Henry this time around?
She walks to the bedroom window and wraps her arms around her, tightening them underneath her chest as she watches Henry shovel snow outside. Stevie is helping while Allison pushes Jason on the swing set nearby, and she feels her heart throb in her throat. This world—the world they live in right now with all this turmoil and lives being lost senselessly every day—is not the world she wants them to grow up in. She has to go to Baghdad. She has no other choice.
I don't know what it's going to look like when you come back. The words are reverberating in her head over and over, like a sharp pinging off glass. The consequential sensation equals her ears ringing and her head aching, so she brings her fingers to her jaw and rubs the muscle there from where she'd had it clenched so tightly.
What would it look like when she came back? Their life had been difficult to adjust to when Henry came back from Iraq. Though his combat stint was brief this time, she knows what deployments have done to them in the past. Their first deployment after Stevie was born almost wrecked their marriage, and had it not been for the fact that Allison had been conceived on the very night he'd gotten home, it might not have lasted. But they made it work for the sake of a new baby, and they'd been fine since then aside from marital spats here and there. This was no spat, though. This was bigger than that. Henry was threatening a divorce, even though he was saying it in the most passive aggressive and convoluted way. She knew that much.
She turns away from the window and takes a shaky breath, looking at the phone on her bedside table. Conrad had given her until the end of the week to decide whether she was going to Baghdad or quitting, and they'd now arrived at the end of the week. Saturdays were typically for family time, but she's not sure she is even welcome out there right now—not with the cold glare Henry gave her this morning on his way outside.
Instead, she spends much of the day inside and cleaning—something she's been known to do when stressed—while the kids and Henry spent the day outside with him working on Jason's bed he was building and the kids playing in the snow. She took notice that the baseboards needed a good scrubbing, so she's been inching around the outer edges of the house all day now with her bucket and rag, only getting up when the water needed changed in her bucket. She's finished the kitchen, the living room, their bedroom and bathroom, the downstairs bathroom, the kids' bathroom, and all three of the kids' rooms. She'd been working on the laundry room when Allison came in and announced they were getting hungry and ready for dinner, which left her with only the pantry and office to finish. She'd get to those later when she wanted to procrastinate sleeping next to her husband.
Crawling to her knees, she gets up on all fours and uses the wall to help her stand while listening to her knees pop. She takes a moment to stretch before leaning down and grabbing her mop bucket and rag, sighing when she notices her reflection in the murky water. She knows this is a problem—the obsessive cleaning when upset—but she doesn't know how to fix it and assumes that it's not harming anyone anyway. In a way, it's productive.
She walks to the kitchen and notices the celery on the counter there, staring at it for a moment. I don't know what it's going to look like when you come back. There's that sharp pinging in her head again, and it makes her headache come back immediately. She grabs the celery forcefully and tosses it toward the trash, ringing the top of the can and knocking the whole thing over. She growls at herself and ignores it altogether, ripping the fridge door open and storming through it to find the ingredients for Saturday spaghetti.
When the kids start piling in, she glances at them, but doesn't say anything more than, "Go upstairs and clean up a little before dinner," then goes back to chopping the onion to put in the spaghetti sauce. She knows that Henry isn't far behind them—he always sends them in first in the winter so that they don't get too cold with the sun going down. Something that she always has appreciated about him.
She hears the back door but doesn't move to look, just slides the onions into the saucepan as it's boiling on the stovetop. Footsteps walk toward her, then stop, and she still doesn't look. The floor creaks once, and she assumes he's shifting his weight behind her, but she still doesn't take her eyes off the sauce, mixing it slowly now with her wooden spoon. She hears footsteps moving away this time, and her back feels warmer now that his icy gaze isn't fixed upon it.
"Dinner's ready," she announces about three minutes later, calling upstairs so that everyone could hear. Allison was already down, but Stevie and Jason and Henry were all missing. She glances over at Ali playing with a babydoll on the floor, and her heart aches a little, wondering if even she will remember much about her, or if Henry was wrong and Jason nor Allison would remember her when she came back. But she had to do it. For the good of her children's lives. Not just for this year of their life that she'd be gone. For the rest of their lives.
She hears the stairs creaking and sees Stevie coming down them with Henry trailing. "Where's Jason?" She asks either of them.
Stevie shrugs—somethings she's been doing more in her sassy-eleven-year-old way. Henry looks around, "I thought he'd come downstairs already?"
"No," she replies coldly, setting the saucepan on the hot pad, a barrier between the hot metal and the wood.
Nothing else is said, but Henry turns and calls upstairs, "Jason!" He says, "Come down—dinner's ready, buddy."
No answer, but Elizabeth wasn't overly concerned. Almost-four-year-olds don't have the best listening skills, and soon, Henry would go up and find him and drag him down before she could even finish getting the bread on the table. But when she pulls the garlic bread from the oven door and looks over to see everyone at the table except herself and Jason, she furrows her brow. She brings the bread over, laying it down near the sauce, "Did you check on Jason?" She asks Henry pointedly, twiddling her fingers and trying to keep them loose from the achiness she's experiencing now that she's scrubbed the entire house's baseboards.
"No," Henry says, and Stevie looks at the two of them.
"Are you fighting?" She asks.
Ah, the joys of an eleven-year-old.
And then, the joys of being married: "Yes" and "No" were said at the same time, Elizabeth taking the lie route while Mr. Ethics across the table from her took the truthful road.
Stevie eyes them again and leans forward, squinting at her father. "You never lie." She says, then eyes her mother. "Why are you fighting?"
"We're not fighting," Elizabeth answers, setting down the pasta that she'd just gotten before making her way up the stairs to find Jason. "Jason! Come on, dinner is ready." She calls about halfway up.
When she hears no answer, her heart sinks a little. She tries to not immediately think of the worst, but when she's already on edge, sometimes her mind goes to the darkest corners first. "Jason?" She calls again at the top step, turning the corner and peeking into his room.
She rounds the corner and holds much of her weight against the doorframe, "Buddy?" She calls out, not wanting to scare him awake. He was laying on his bed, his face turned away from her, all snuggled up underneath his blankets. She tilts her head a little, wondering why he came in and went to bed—it's unlike him, even when he's tired, to skip dinner. "Jason?" She calls out again, a little louder this time. No response. "Jason," she says more sternly, walking in and pushing the door open further. She goes to his bed and lays her hands on his shoulder and head, realizing he's burning up.
She gently rolls him to his back and his eyes flutter open just barely before shutting again. She feels his forehead again and realizes just how hot he is, wondering what his temperature is right now. She'd never felt him be so hot before. Turning quickly, she rushes out of the room and down the stairs, "He's burning up," she mumbles as she makes a beeline for the medicine cabinet in the kitchen, grabbing the children's Motrin and measuring out the proper dosage.
"What?" Henry asks, standing up from the table. Stevie and Allison were unbothered, mostly, because they were still chattering and sort of bickering about who can eat more pasta. "He's got a fever?" He asks, now at her side as she pops the syringe in her mouth in order to screw the lid back on.
"Yes," she mumbles through gritted teeth and a syringe, putting it back up in the cabinet and rushing back up the stairs. She hears, again, footsteps following her, followed by the stairs creaking, and then the upstairs floor creaking into his bedroom. "Jason honey?" She calls out quietly, trying to get him to look at her. "Mommy needs to give you some medicine, okay?" He's barely awake, just looking at her like she possibly has three heads. She bends at her hips and sits down on his bed, one hip lazily resting there, and scoops her hand behind his head to lift it up. When the syringe touches his lips, he sleepily opens them just barely, and she squeezes the medicine in. She watches him swallow it and blink at her, then look at Henry and blink.
She swallows thick as she notices the redness in his cheeks—partially from being outside and partially from the fever. The thought crosses her mind that she should go get the thermometer, but right now she just wants to make sure he's okay since he's barely aware of his surroundings. He laid still, and she wondered just how long he'd been feeling bad.
Henry is standing beside her, and he reaches down gently to touch their son's head with the backs of his fingers. When his skin meets Jason's, he looks at Elizabeth, "He's on fire, babe," he whispers.
"I know," she whispers back, the coldness out of both of their voices gone and instead thick with worry.
Henry's hand moves upward to push Jason's sweaty hair off his forehead, and they both startle for a moment when Jason shivers. They make eye contact with each other immediately, and as Elizabeth is noticing the worry etched in her husband's face, Jason's body stiffens beside her. Her hand had been resting on his knee, and it's stick straight, his muscles tight. "Jason!" She cries, mostly in alarm at the way her son's body had gone so stiff. She tightens her grip at his knee, trying to offer some sort of security in the grip of his body seizing, When her mind finally catches up with what's happening, she looks at Henry with tears in her eyes, "We need to get him to the hospital now." She cries, not even able to finish her sentence before Henry is already scooping him into his arms.
They run together down the stairs, and she glances at Stevie and Allison, swallowing thick. "Your brother is sick, girls." She announces, "Stevie," she says, then takes a sharp breath, "You're in charge. Be careful. Lock the doors. Call me if you need something and do not go outside or leave this house." She warns.
Almost all she can see of Stevie's eyes are the whites in them, and she feels bad for scaring her, but she also is scared out of her mind right now. Something mothers don't always have the ability to turn off.
Elizabeth sat in the back seat with Jason in her lap, his little body convulsing as she cradles his head, trying to keep it safe from hitting anything as he moves uncontrollably. "Hurry, Henry," she begs. In her right mind, she'd know that Henry was already going almost 100 in a residential area, but she has no idea where her right mind even is in this moment. She just knows she has her baby boy in her lap and that he's severely ill, something is really wrong with him.
Somehow, over the roar of the engine that was being put to the test, she could focus in on his shallow breaths, trying to count the seconds between each inhale and exhale to make sure they continued at a somewhat steady pace. When three seconds passed after his last exhale, she shakes him a little, an instinct that maybe was right or maybe was wrong, and she yells, "Jason!"
"What's going on?!" Henry yells back, looking at her in the rearview mirror.
"He's not breathing." She cries out, leaning down and putting her ear to his mouth, her hands already readying themselves to do CPR on him. Two more seconds passed by when he finally took an inhale, and she glances up to see they're pulling under the ER awning.
Henry's out of the car before she can even realize it, and there's three nurses rushing to the car when she looks up from Jason again, keeping an even closer eye on his breathing. "Three years old, Jason McCord," a nurse is saying as the others work to get him out of Elizabeth's lap.
When Jason's off her lap, a part of her briefly feels empty like she did almost four years ago when she'd given birth to him. Knowing he was the last baby hurt extra worse, and she cried more than she had with the other two because of the emptiness inside her. And that feeling was replicated now.
"He stopped breathing a second ago." Elizabeth warns them as she follows them into the hospital. They were already wheeling him back, though, and she's not even sure they heard her.
When they get to the room, they close the curtain abruptly and immediately start attaching things to Jason, and she feels so unbelievably helpless that all she can do is stand with her feet glued together, her palms covering her mouth, and tears running out of her eyes.
Her feet feel like they are melting out from underneath her as she watches them put an IV in Jason's tiny arm, but just as she feels she's going to fall (which way, she's unsure), she feels arms wrap around her and a chin rest on her head. Henry has her from her side, one leg on each side of thigh, literally engulfing her. "I'm sorry," he whispers, "Right now, nothing else matters but him."
She closes her eyes and feels the tears stream down her face, rolling off her chin and presumably onto his arm. Though she tried to hold it in all this time, she lets out a sob, and he moves in front of her so that she can bury her face into his shoulder and cry there. And she does exactly that.
She tucks her arms up underneath his, and she feels him squeeze her tightly once more.
What felt like an hour later, but was actually only minutes, the doctor comes through the curtain and introduces himself. "I'm Dr. Petersen," he says, shaking their hands as they had finally sat down in the hard, plastic chairs. "Looks like Jason had a series of febrile seizures due to his high fever." He explains, rolling the stool up behind him and sitting down as Jason's heartbeat sounds through the machine. "He's stable now, but we'll keep him overnight just for observation."
She feels herself be able to breathe for the first time since dinner—maybe since before dinner, even, since before all this nonsense about Baghdad. Her body falls over into Henry's, and he wraps his arm around her shoulder and tucks her into his body. The space between his shoulder and hips was like a nook for her, perfectly etched just for Elizabeth. Her eyes stung from all the crying, now suddenly aware of how terrified she'd been. When she becomes aware of that, another feeling washes over her: guilt. How could she leave her family now? The thought gnaws on her as the doctor leaves the room.
"We need to get someone at the house," she remembers, thinking of Stevie and Allison and how they may or may not have burnt the house down by now.
Henry swallows thick, reaching up quickly to swipe at what she imagines was a tear. He pulls his Nokia from his front pocket and clears his throat, "I'll ask Isabelle to go over there," he says.
She nods, keeping her face tucked into his side. "I'm sorry," she whispers, her turn to do so this time. "For Baghdad."
"I'm sorry for making it more difficult than it already has to be." Henry answers, pulling the phone up to his ear and answering when Isabelle's voice greets him.
After Isabelle agrees to go babysit for the night, Henry gets up slowly and doesn't tell her where he's going, but she doesn't even think about it. Instead, she has her gaze fixed on Jason, seeing his body convulse in front of her over and over. She shuts her eyes and squeezes them for a moment, trying to get the image to stop playing in her head, but it won't go away.
"Good morning," she hears, half-awake. When she opens, she sees Dr. Petersen again, but this time with a little sunshine seeping through the window in the room they'd moved Jason to last night. "I have the results from Jason's tests last night." She announces.
Elizabeth sits up and looks over at Henry. Both of them had been in the chairs, and she was slumped over on his shoulder. He looked as though he hadn't slept a wink, though, and she wondered how she had the gull to fall asleep in the first place.
"The good news is that Jason's seizures were caused by fever, not by any sort of neurological issue." Dr. Petersen explains, and Elizabeth looks over at her son sleeping peacefully on the bed. This time his chest is rising and falling quietly, calmly, instead of erratically and then not at all.
"What caused the fever?" Henry asks, pulling Elizabeth from her cycle of repeating that image in her head.
Dr. Petersen lays the chart back on Jason's bed and clears his throat, "Looks like the culprit is a bacterial infection—specifically streptococcal pharyngitis. Better known as strep throat." He says, "Quite common—"
"Oh, we've dealt with strep in our house once this winter already." Elizabeth assures, "Our youngest daughter had strep but only gave it to me." She states.
Dr. Petersen nods, "Well, the rest of you got lucky then." He says, "Sometimes, in kids this young, the fever can escalate quickly and cause the seizure. Febrile seizures are typically harmless, but of course just keep an eye out on him and make sure his fever is going down. He'll likely develop more symptoms over the coming days—fever is usually the first." He says. "We'll send you home with some antibiotics—the same antibiotics we've been giving him through IV—and like I said, just keep an eye on him."
"Thank you," Elizabeth breathes, and she feels Henry's fingers wrap around the back of hers. She closes her fingers, too, and they squeeze each other's hands for a moment as the doctor signs some papers, attaches them to the clipboard, and then leaves.
Her gaze moves back to Jason, watching his breathing, listening to his heart beating at a normal rate now. She squeezes Henry's hand again, feeling a lump rise up in her throat. Her head feels like a whirlwind—no, like a tornado. The sight of her son convulsing in her arms the whole car ride here keeps playing on a nonstop loop, and as badly as she wants to see him in her head like he is now, she can't get the image out.
With being in Iraq so recently to interrogate her suspect, she'd seen some gruesome things. She's seen other gruesome things throughout her career. But none of them, not even the torture, could compare to watching her little boy—the baby she carried for nine months in her body and then carried outside her body until he refused to be held—go unconscious. The sudden fragility of what was typically a healthy little boy shook her, and she still feels faint over the whole situation.
This was a vivid, looping reminder of what she stood to lose, and what might happen in her absence.
She stands shakily, walking to the edge of Jason's bed and leaning her hands against it, not wanting to disturb him but wanting so badly to hold him against her chest. She feels as though she can't breathe now, as though the weight of her decision that she was technically supposed to make yesterday is crushing her lungs, her throat, and maybe even her entire body. Could she board a plane knowing what she might come back to—or knowing she even has a chance of not coming back at all?
She hears Henry behind her in the chair, stirring and walking over to her. When she turns to look at him, she breaks again, and she blinks quickly. Annoyed with herself, she rubs the tears from her eyes, "I can't do it, Henry," she breathes, "I can't leave now."
"Babe," he whispers, wrapping his arm around the small of her back, pulling her into him. "It's not a decision you have to make right now."
"I was supposed to tell Conrad last night." She reminds him, her voice cracking when she said her boss's name. "I need to be where I'm most needed—and right now, that's not Baghdad. Being in the CIA has always meant making sacrifices, but motherhood is about sacrifices too. What's it say about my priorities if I choose one sacrifice over another?"
"It says you're dedicated to your career that you worked hard to build, and that you're dedicated to bettering our country we live in for our kids to be able to live peacefully throughout their lives." Henry answers, and she wants to break again.
But she stays strong this time, only her lip quivering as she looks into his eyes, "But if something happened to him—or to the girls or to you—and I wasn't here…" her voice trails off as she shake creeps back into her voice, "I don't think I could ever forgive myself, Henry," she strangles out, looking into his eyes through blurry vision.
He takes a deep breath, and she watches as she notices the relief washing over his face. This man loves her. She's always known that. But it's clear to her right now that he deeply loves her and that he was scared—scared of losing her, scared of her going to Baghdad, scared of being alone, scared of what may come after she came back. How could she not have seen that before?
"I need to call Conrad," she whispers, "Not keep him hanging."
Henry nods, "Let's make the call together," he whispers, moving his hand to her head and pushing a strand of hair from near her eye. "Are you sure about this?" He asks one more time.
She swallows thick, looking over at Jason for a moment before nodding, "I'm sure." She whispers back, grabbing her phone from her pocket and dialing Conrad's number. "Mr. Dalton," she answers, looking up at Henry and swallowing the lump in her throat, "After a lot of thinking, I believe Juliet would be a great station chief in Baghdad, sir." She says, her voice just barely shaking. She lifts her head up a little, taking a deep breath, "My family needs me here."
There's a pause on the line, and then she hears Conrad shuffle something on the other line, "I can't pretend this isn't a terrible disappointment, Elizabeth." He answers.
"I know, sir." She replies, and Henry presses a kiss to her forehead upon hearing that, "I know."
"I will give you until Tuesday to resign," he replies, then sighs, "The CIA is losing a good one, Bess. They really are."
She swallows thick, "Thank you, sir." She replies, "I'll have my resignation finished by tomorrow night." As she hangs up, she looks up at Henry and sees that same relieved look in his eye, and she knows she did the right thing. But then she knows, too, that the next time she sees the newest soldier death toll on the television or hears it on the radio, her heart will be downed with guilt again. Guilt from her family or guilt from her country—either way, she's guilty.
"You did the right thing," Henry whispers. She knows. He doesn't have to say it. But it feels good to hear it from someone because she knows she won't hear it from Conrad, that's for sure. She leans forward and rests her ear on Henry's chest, looking over at Jason and his sleeping body.
"This is where I need to be." She whispers, her arms tucked between their bodies. "This is where I need to be."