“Hey, bad day?” Carter asked, voice low as he observed the more pronounced limp. He walked around the couch where he’d been sitting and helped her remove her coat, then her crutch, before they proceeded to the kitchen where they sat adjacent each other.
She sighed and leaned forward in the chair, placing her chin on a clenched first, weariness etching lines into her face as the sun sank beyond the horizon and Carter’s eyes filled with concern.
“Yeah,” she finally whispered, offering nothing further until his hand came to rest over hers.
“The baby okay?”
“She’s fine,” Kerry smiled slightly at him, then leaned her head closer to his. “It’s been a long day, John.”
“You shouldn’t keep working these long shifts, Kerry, you’re gonna work yourself into the ground.” He returned to this only because he was unsure what else to say. Something hurt her, something bothered her, but he knew not to press.
She’d taken to calling him John at home, when they were just Kerry and John and she wasn’t afraid of emotions or reality. She’d tell him what was bothering her, because she knew he would listen and would empathize.
She grunted, quiet again for a few moments. “Hardly,” she finally verbalized, “Could you pour me some juice or something?”
He nodded, realizing that this was the prelude to a conversation that would no doubt be emotional. That’s how she always began those sort of things, offering a drink. It was when she asked that he really worried, as it usually meant she couldn’t stand to pour it on her own. “It must’ve been horrible,” he wanted to say, but wisely chose to wait as he returned with a glass of apple juice for her and water for himself.
She gulped the drink, then closed her eyes, taking a deep and almost shaky breath, “I had to do a sex crimes kit on a nine year old today.” The words were whispered, tense, anguished almost, and his hand came to rest upon hers as he was afraid to do more. “Her father… beat her, raped her, locked her out of the house. Told her she ran her mother off so she had to be just like her… had to be her mommy. Jesus, John!” Her eyes opened then, squinted in the dim light and glazed with tears and anger.
He reached forward and slipped an arm around her shoulder as she slammed the glass onto the tabletop. Pulling her upward, he kissed her forehead then replied, “I know, I know. Why some people are blessed with children…” he began, then shook his head. “I used to think that my childhood was so horrible because of my brother, because I was ignored and always left behind. But now, you know, seeing all these kids being brought into the ER, traipsing in bruised and battered,” he let his train of thought trail off, and she sighed, her breath warming his neck.
“Let’s go to bed, huh? I know you’re tired… I’m going to walk you upstairs then head back downstairs and turn myself in for the night,” he added, hoping he didn’t sound overeager. The last thing he wanted to do was frighten her off so soon.
He led her up the stairs and helped her to sit on the edge of the bed, observing as she fought a yawn and a few tears finally streaked down her face. “I know you’re tired, and I know…” Carter began, but she interrupted.
“How is that fair? How is it fair that men like Hailey’s father and men like Ellis father children then do the things they do? Why?!” She felt torn, angry, hurt, scared like the little girl in Curtain Four must’ve been.
“I don’t know, Kerry,” he whispered, sitting beside her, moving his thumbs upward to wipe the hot tears from her face. Shaking his head, Carter repeated, “I don’t know.”
After a moment, she pushed herself backward onto the bed, leaning into the pillows, tears falling quickly and acidly down her face. Kerry seemed to ignore them, as she always ignored what she considered to be signs of weakness, her faulty emotions. And she would not let them win, thus opting to focus on the face of her best friend, laying a hand on his upper arm as he seemed poised to move. “Stay with me, now,” at first her words were spoken in her typical once-was-the-ER-Chief-voice, but as she continued, the words were spoken with an uncommon vulnerability, “please. We can pop some popcorn or eat those cookies or something, maybe watch a movie? I’m not very tired yet, but if you are, I understand. I just…” her words were rushed, low, but even in the dark lighting she could see Carter’s lips lift in a grin, and soon felt his mouth pressed softly against hers.
“Movie’s in the VCR already,” he chuckled, “and are you sure you want crumbs in your bed?”
“I don’t mind,” she mumbled, squirming to settle herself in a position that didn’t cause her back to ache or her stomach to roll.
Carter eased back onto the bed beside her, sliding one arm beneath her shoulders and the other over her waist as he pulled her closer, into his arms. “What are you scared of, Kerry?” he whispered, nuzzling his head into her neck.
At first, he thought she hadn’t heard him or maybe she just refused to answer, but when she spoke, he realized that she hadn’t answered because she couldn’t. “Nothing, Carter, nothing that can hurt us now.” He didn’t miss the usage of the ‘us’, and his lips fought from quirking into a grin again as he realized the ‘us’ didn’t just include her and the child. Reaching around her, he grabbed the remote, scooted toward the center of the bed with her still firmly positioned halfway on his chest, and flipped on the television.
“I thought you might like a good drama,” Carter offered, smiling into her hair just before she propped herself up on her elbow.
“This is not drama, this is comedy,” she replied with a smirk as the opening credits for Thelma & Louise began to roll. “But it’s excellent either way. Thanks,” Kerry nodded, then let her elbow fall beneath her as she settled her cheek above his heart, relishing the sound of his heartbeat as it echoed beneath her ear.
---
Kerry Weaver’s Home
March 30th, 1999
Early Morning Hours
I am Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last.
He quoted the Bible frequently throughout the gatherings as they feasted on barely cooked meals at wobbly wooden tables. The building would never have passed building code had the area a modernized government that could establish such regulations. The children were packed into three bedrooms, girls, boys, babies. The disabled were to fend for themselves, the crippled, the blind, the deaf. Most never made it past age six, for the epidemics were rampant in the tiny compound. Muddy stream, leaked sewage, uncooked food, pestilence, plague, famine. The country was dry, the crops destroyed by insects that could not be controlled, the children riddled with diseases that left many dead, others immune to a multitude of frightening things.
She’d been left there at birth, left to fend for herself, one of two white children in a five room orphanage – kitchen, three bedrooms, gathering/reception room – that housed 47 children. They slept on straw mats, sometimes two to one, coughing and crying, never loud enough for the head mistress or the master to hear for they feared their punishments. When he didn’t like one, he was beaten or strangled or cast out from the compound, left to flounder where no one else dare abode.
The land was barren.
When the headmaster liked one, she was his personal favorite for the remainder of her time, whether a family took her, which wasn’t often, or death stole her away to a better place. Several girls were killed during their time there, some with knives, one with the Colonel’s hidden gun. The words ‘suicide’ and ‘she’s better off’ were sometimes murmured by the nurses, but the children never understood the language, instead they watched bodies lowered into dusty ground beyond the muddy water, crops crumbling beneath the breeze.
The desert was barren, but they were far from the it. Droughts consumed the land as the anger and the hatred consumed many of their souls.
Suffer the little children and forbid them not to come unto me.
The two girls were kindred spirits by the time the youngest was three, sharing their mat and giggling late into the night when the headmaster was asleep, fumes of scotch rising into the air around him, though the children knew not what it was. Kerry and Jessie were their names, and they were as close to sisters as they could become without sharing blood. The older girl had known her parents, had seen them die in a futile accident, had shared her memories of beautiful times and kind family with the smaller, lame redhead. She was bubbly and beautiful, and by age eleven she had become one of his girls, and she was the first and the last to reach into his locked dresser drawer and end her own life with a gun she only dared to hope was loaded. She never told her little Kerry goodbye, and thus, the child was left alone and afraid, knowing that should he take another child, she would be the next.
And at the tender age of seven, she became his favorite, and she was taken into his arms and his life and his bed, knowing only that survival had become first instinct and that she could not run because her leg could not carry her far enough away. When they took her away, the ones she came to know as her parents, thirteen months later, she was bruised and battered and terrified of her father, and it was long before she did not fear the act of bathing.
And in her dreams, she felt him, hands callused and rough, angry and searching, always pinching and prodding and touching and grabbing, and she feared his angry eyes, white surrounding brown the only light color that was a part of his body. When he had first ‘inducted’ her, he’d told her that it was safe, that she would not be harmed as long as she understood the process, understood the secrets. And so, she built herself a hidden place, a garden that was an ocean away and far from where they black man stood towering over her, pushing up her dress and pulling away her stockings.
Honor thy father.
Somewhere deep within her, she’d been lost then, hiding beneath the foliage of a secret garden none knew how to wind their way through the maze too. She did not trust, she did not love, she did not risk.
And 27 years later, she finally began to dream, let herself remember.
---
She woke then, a thin sheen of sweat covering her face, bladder full, his tenderly smiling, sleeping, face inches from her own. It was in moments like those, when she dreamed and she feared and she wondered exactly why she was still alive and so many were not, that she was thankful, because she’d finally given someone a chance, and things seemed to be turning out in her favor.
Kerry hoisted herself from the bed to head toward the bathroom, never noticing that Carter’s eyes had opened, squinting in the low light. He’d felt the wetness of her skin, heard the sharp intake of breath when she’d woken, seen the rapid heaving of her chest and the way the past shadowed her eyes, clouding them.
But he would not push, because he wasn’t sure how.
Soon she returned to the room, skin dry and face shining, one hand grasping the wall as she worked her way back to the bed, the other resting lightly over her slightly swollen belly. Lowering herself into the bed, she smiled meekly at him, eyes caressing his face before her hand followed, and soon he drifted back to sleep as she watched him, not quite afraid and not quite secure.
And when she finally gave into her instincts, Doctor Weaver fell into a restless sleep facing her younger love, one hand at his jawline, the other cradling her child, their child, and she dreamt of Hailey and children like her, garden swings and clear water, the ways in which things could be better, the times they had been worse, and the blessings her child would be given. The gift of security, the gift of freedom, the gift of love, and the gift of family.
They would do what they could, and she hoped that it could be enough.
