A/N: Back to back stories? Wow, who am I?
Thank you to the guest who left the insanely sweet review on my last chapter. I so appreciate you and your words (and all of you and your words, of course). Updating is never a burden to me, this is my free time, the thing I get to do and love while taking a break from the other things I don't necessarily love in my life.
I wanted to write something without real dialogue. Hope you enjoy.
The dim, purple light of the early morning floods into her eyes as she picks her head up from her arm. Her skin makes a sticky noise when she peels it off from itself, a red mark left behind on her forearm where her head had been. A pang shoots through her neck, the side that was crunched up against her shoulder as she slept with only her arm for a pillow against the armrest of the couch, and she tugs her head in the other direction in a sad attempt to stretch it out.
When she looks in the direction she'd last left Stevie last night, her breath catches. Only an empty cushion on the loveseat stares back at her, and she sits up quickly and swipes the hair from out of her face that had fallen out of her ponytail sometime during the night. After only a moment of panic, she spots her daughter curled up on the rug against the "comfy chair," as they called it in this house. This is the chair that Henry and Elizabeth would playfully fight over whenever one of them wanted to sit in it. Usually, Henry would be sitting there first with his feet kicked up on the cloth footstool, and Elizabeth would lay across the arms of the chair and annoy him until he got up. Sometimes, though, it was the other way around. He would stand behind her and pester her ears until she would give in, telling him she needed to go do some work in her office anyway. Occasionally, and more often than not, really, she would lay across his lap and pretend to bother him, but neither one moved to get the other one out of the chair. They just let each other be there, wrapped up in the other one's space.
Stevie's blanket is pulled up underneath her chin, and Elizabeth knows she should go and see if she still has a fever. She's sleeping so good. She lays her head back down on her arm and watches the blanket over Stevie rise and fall with her little breaths. Elizabeth's eyes slowly move to clock the pillow underneath her daughter's head, and then she notices the sleeping bag between Stevie and the rug, and then If You Give a Mouse a Cookie laying next to her head.
Narrowing her eyes and trying to squint the headache away, she tries to remember how she'd left Stevie last night.
Alison's screams radiated through the baby monitor, as well as through the rest of their house, and Elizabeth heard Stevie throwing up again in the living room. She shut her eyes and put down the medicine she'd been measuring out, dumping it all over the counter with clumsiness. Huffing, she made her way into the living room to see the pan she'd provided for Stevie over on the coffee table, and Stevie was nowhere near it.
Tears heated her eyes as she ran a hand across her forehead, swiping her hair away and noting how hot she was, too. The dizziness made her feel like her eyes were swirling as she pushed her body to walk forward and assess the damages to the loveseat Stevie was on. This was the second time in the past twenty-four hours that Stevie had gotten the furniture—Elizabeth and Henry's bed was first at about one this morning when she crawled in with them complaining that she still didn't feel good.
When she heard Henry walking in, she shooed him away hastily, told him to go check on Alison and something about "obviously go check on the crying baby." He mumbled something about her tone, and that they're both trying to do their best, and she snapped back as she pulled Stevie's hair away from the pile of vomit. Henry said something, but Elizabeth's ears were ringing, and her jaw was clenched so tight, and Stevie was crying that Mommy was mad at her. She couldn't find it in her to tell her daughter that she wasn't mad. She wasn't actually mad, but she knew if she talked more, she would just cry; if she opened her mouth again, she maybe would even vomit like she's done much of the day. So cruelty just hung in the air while Elizabeth was all out of motherly comfort for the evening.
She heard Alison still crying in her room down the hall, and she shut her eyes as she started cleaning the loveseat. Stevie was pressed against the arm of the seat, the blanket kicked off in the floor during her complaints of how hot it was. Elizabeth had managed to keep her own tears at bay until she heard Stevie crying again, and one dripped down onto the same material she'd been working to clean. Her arm suddenly felt so tired that she couldn't keep scrubbing, and her body felt so sore from retching that she couldn't bend like this anymore.
Snapping her body to stand up straight, she grabbed onto the arm and steadied herself from the way the room spun, and she marched into Alison's room. She mumbled something to Henry and took the baby without even asking or giving a heads up, just ripped her from his arms as Alison was screaming in his ear, and then her ear. She gave orders to go help Stevie and clean up and that she's so sick, and that she's so sore, and that she's so tired of doing it all around this house.
He stood and looked at her, not watching her soothe Alison, but watching and studying how she could hurt him so badly. She didn't acknowledge him, she just sat down in the rocker and fed Alison and thought about the soreness of her throat, and the little six-month-old was silent once again and already almost falling asleep against Elizabeth's breast.
She shut her eyes as Henry finally walked out through the door. Silently, she said a little prayer that Alison is the only one to not get this flu, though there was virtually no other way of preventing it. She was sick, Henry was sick, and Stevie was patient zero from school. First grade had not been favorable to them this year.
Rocking back and forth in the rocker, watching Alison's eyes droop, she held her head up with her other hand that wasn't holding the baby. She'd washed so many sheets, it felt like, and wiped Stevie's mouth so many times and wet a washrag numerous times to lay over her forehead. She watched Alison breathing turning from the short and huffy "wide awake and upset" breaths to the smooth and slower "about to fall asleep" breathing, appreciating the way her uncongested nose felt sacred to her in that moment.
She felt her eyes growing heavier, but she fought off the sleep. She still had to take care of Stevie who she could hear sniffling and upset in the living room. Elizabeth had almost drifted off by the time she heard Alison's little suction release, and she carefully laid her down in the crib before tiptoeing out and shutting the door quietly behind her. She had to slowly pull it through that squeaky spot that Henry said he'd fix last week. She cringed, but the door latched, and she didn't hear Alison stirring.
When she walked back out, she first saw Stevie exactly where she'd left her, but this time passed out. Henry was pulling the blanket back on top of her and had sprayed cleaner to soak on the couch. Elizabeth went back to her original post in the kitchen. She measured more medicine out, cleaned up the other she had spilled all over the countertop, and quietly came back into the living room to stick the syringe in Stevie's mouth carefully, trying her very best not to wake her up.
No one had prepared her that she would need surgeon-like, hand-eye precision as a mother.
Henry lingered behind her, and she could feel her own coldness radiating off her feverishly hot body. When she had administered all the medicine and Stevie only stirred, she said nothing to her daughter, nothing to Henry—she was mothered and wifed out for the day. She laid the syringe on the table next to Stevie and made her way to the couch across from her daughter, plopping down and pulling her feet up under her, watching Stevie breathe slow and, on occasion, wheezy breaths.
She'd only gotten a short nap and a lot of missing her own mother in before two hours had passed and Alison, once again, demanded attention. When she got up, she heard Henry throwing up in their bathroom, and then it made her nauseous, too. By the time she had gotten back to her spot on the couch, Henry was there on the other end, clutching another pan, and Elizabeth was wiping the vomit from around her own mouth as she sat down.
The last time she'd looked, the hands of the clock were somewhere around midnight. She vaguely remembers noting in her head that it was maybe 10:30 or close to it whenever she'd gotten the syringe of Motrin into Stevie, and maybe around 12:30 when she'd come to sit back down after feeding Alison, and now the purplish light is shining through the living room window behind the loveseat.
Under her arm, she feels a tug of material, and she looks down to see a blanket. The fuzziness almost tickles the spot underneath her elbow. I don't remember getting a blanket last night. She follows where the tugging is coming from and sees Henry at the other end of the couch still. He's leaned on his left side, up against the arm. His pan is within reaching distance on the floor, and his blanket is pulled up underneath his chin, balled up in his fist. She looks over at Stevie again, the blanket under her chin and balled up in her fist, and then back to Henry.
Sitting up more, her wedding ring gets caught on the fuzz of the blanket. Immediately, she grits her teeth together and huffs through her stuffy nose—a bold and dangerous move. Her grip tightens around the blanket as she tries to free the prong from its wooly prison in the almost-darkness. She's caught between two impulses, suddenly: freeing it or wrenching it off altogether. As if the ring knows how smothered and caught she's felt since Stevie got so sick and Alison needed her so badly and Henry was sometimes such a helpless patient, it feels like an attempt at mockery from her diamonds.
The ring finally slips free of the threads, but her breaths are quick and heated as she breathes through her mouth. She starts to pull it off her finger because of all the annoyance it has caused her (has it really, though? Or is she tired and unable to breathe using her nose?), and she stops with her middle finger and thumb clutching the ring. She looks at the metal and clenches her teeth together, feeling like the ring itself was weighing down on her chest. The mom. The wife. The anchor. The one who's expected to keep everything moving even when I'm sick. It wasn't ever supposed to feel like a weight.
A shuffling noise startles her, and she realizes it's coming from the baby monitor—that garbled sound gives it away. Letting go of her ring and leaving it on her finger, she pats the blanket quietly, reaching underneath and between her legs, searching the crack between the cushions, and her fingers find nothing but crumbs. Panicked, hoping Alison wasn't going to start crying and wake Stevie up, she looks underneath the blanket, checks the table beside her, and instead finds a full bottle of Gatorade. She pauses her search, staring. The lid had been opened, but it was placed back on it. She blinks, unable to remember getting it. But she reaches for it anyway and takes a careful swig, and then she hears that same shuffling noise again.
Her head whips over in the direction that she heard it from this time, and she sees the white plastic item in the crook of Henry's arm—or what she suspects is his arm since it's underneath the blanket. She thinks about reaching for it, but she knows it'll wake him up, too, if she does.
She gets that feeling in the pit of her stomach, and she burps carefully, using her best caution to ensure that nothing else comes up with it. Stevie stirs to Elizabeth's right, and she watches her daughter as she just rolls over onto her other side and tucks the blanket up under her chin again. Then Henry stirs to her left, and she feels something against her foot—his foot.
She rests her hands in her lap, looking down at the ring. It's not heavy because it's bad. It's heavy because it's an entire life we've built…a promise to each other. The thing that got us to this point in our lives. Well, no. Sex got us to this very point in our lives with two kids who just need their mother too much sometimes. But I guess our love led to that. She takes a shaky breath before letting it out quietly, turning into a sigh.
No one is awake. Just go back to sleep. Alison's fine, and Stevie is finally sound asleep after the worst of the vomiting and crying yesterday. Just go back to sleep. She lays her head back down on the arm of the couch and pulls the blanket up over her shoulder, shutting her eyes for only a moment before the fly back open.
Her head whips around to Henry who is suddenly coughing, and it sounds violent. She waits to see if he's going to wake up, but he doesn't—or at least he doesn't look over here if he does waken—and then she checks to see if Stevie is still asleep. She didn't even move.
She watches Henry again, her eyes flitting from the sweat on his brow to his chest region, making sure the blanket is still moving with his breaths. "I feel like I'm doing everything around here," the memory came back to her from last night, cold and sharp, and she clenched her eyes shut and gritted her teeth. He's sick, too, Elizabeth. He's very sick.
She keeps her eyes shut and listens for his breaths, and occasionally, a wheeze comes out of him and her eyes shoot back open. But each time, he's been okay, so she tries to relax into the arm of the couch and will herself to go back to sleep. Now, though, the sun is starting to rise, and there's a bright, golden stream shining right into her eyes between the slits in the blinds. No one shut them last night, apparently, and she couldn't imagine why it didn't cross anyone's mind.
She shifts on the couch to where her back is leaning against the arm of the couch, trying to avoid the sunshine flooding in at the bottom slat. The bottoms of her feet find his toes, and she scoots her feet on top of his, trying to warm his cold feet with all her body heat. She knows they both have fevers—it's obvious. Yet she's hot, and he's shivering and cold to touch, it seems. She watches him a while longer before her eyelids start to droop in front of her view, and she blinks heavy a couple times before seeing him stir.
The baby monitor falls out of the crook of his arm, and it wakes him up when the plastic rattles against the rug below. Startled, he moves to grab it, but she moves her feet up his ankles to get his attention. He looks over at her, half bent over, his face all scrunched up, his hair sticking up in all the wrong ways, and she shakes her head just slightly. She says nothing more, and he leans back against the couch, tucking the blanket back up over himself once more.
She watches as he blinks his eyes a few times in Stevie's direction. She notes that he immediately knew where to look for her unlike Elizabeth did this morning, and he settles deeper into the cushion. With no shuffling noises coming from the sleeping bag, she knows Stevie stayed asleep even through the loudness of the baby monitor falling, and she doesn't bother to look. She just keeps her gaze on Henry, whose eyes are now trying to adjust to the sudden burst of sunlight now coming through the blinds and what seemed like directly into their eyes.
His mouth contorts and he squints again, trying to move away from the light. Looking over at Elizabeth, he seems to take note of her posture. Moving one leg first, then the other joining, he rotates so that he's facing her instead of the bright sunshine. Her feet settle back on top of his.
You're so cold.
For a moment, they lock eyes. They'd seemingly both been avoiding looking at each other when they thought the other one was looking. Once they're there, though, their gazes never move away from each other and they barely even take the time away to blink. She hears his breaths become more even, and in turn, she notices that hers do too. The sunshine is shifting enough that it's illuminating the side of his face, and he's so pale, maybe the palest she's ever seen him. The nausea comes back, and she swallows desperately in attempt to keep from throwing up again. She's had enough of it already, and frankly, she's tired of hearing the retching noises from everyone in this household other than Alison. Her stomach quivers as if to say, please, no more, we're so sore.
His feet move underneath hers, his legs straightening out slightly, and he rests his cheek tiredly against the back of the couch. He looks at her again, and she takes a deep breath, topping it off with a cough at the end. She takes a tissue from the box beside the couch, rubbing it along her sore and dry nose as she assesses Henry some more.
When did you get the sleeping bag for Stevie?
When did you get her pillow from her room? When did you put the pillowcase back on it?
When did you get this blanket and cover me up?
When did you put the Gatorade here?
Did Alison wake up again? Did you take a bottle from the fridge?
Did you read to Stevie?
Did I sleep through it all?
Why didn't you wake me?
She decides not to ask anything—mostly out of pure exhaustion. Instead she finally moves to take her eyes off him for a moment and look out the window, squinting. The sun shines through closer to the middle of the slats now, and she is thankful time is flying by in this instance.
She feels his feet under hers again, and it brings her gaze back to him momentarily. He's taken the blanket off his chest, and his hands are resting in his lap as he yawns, and she hears his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth when he makes the movement. She reaches behind her head and grabs for the Gatorade, sticking it out over their legs for him to reach. The sunlight glimmers off his wedding band when he grabs the drink, and it catches her eye enough that she watches it as he tips the bottle back and swigs carefully. Mindlessly, her thumb is spinning her own wedding band around her finger as he puts the lid back on, handing the bottle back to her. She takes it, setting it down between their legs and the back of the couch in reach for both of them.
When he moves his gaze away from her, toward the sunrise again, she follows suit. His breaths, Stevie's snores, and the soft, swirling noises from Alison's baby monitor lull her into a lucid state, though she doesn't fall back asleep.
Her toes curl gently downward, pressing into the tops of his feet, and she sighs.
How lucky am I to be sick with him on this couch across from me?