you have a lifetime before you, I'll adore you, come what may

[intheruins]

The child is a boy, just as Serena told George from the start, small but stubborn as his mother and determined to live.

She names him for his father – the father he's unlikely to ever meet – and gives him her maiden name as his middle. She figures it's the last chance she has for her family's name to live on, long after the rest of them were lost to her.

A week or so after she delivers him she's told she can leave the hospital but he's not ready, yet, and that's a reality she doesn't easily accept. If she were back in North Carolina instead of this strange, forward place, she might have more sway in bringing him back to the apartment that she's been assigned, but neither the doctors nor nurses will hear any of it.

So she leaves the hospital without her son – a day after Mother's Day, of all days – watching him through glass before she heads on. She'll be back in the evening, she tells them, although once she's outside she's not sure where she'll find the strength. She has two scars, now. The one burned in her back and one on her belly, each telling a story of survival against all odds.

Nothing to her name except a few clothes the nurses had given her and an envelope that has cash, a key and the strangest phone she's ever seen, she lingers outside the hospital for a few minutes before asking for help hailing a cab. Someone tells her it's 2017 (a fact she's still struggling to believe) and to use something called an app.

For the first time since she was a young girl, covered in ash, Serena feels totally at a loss.

[Dated Monday, May 15. Find Serena either outside the hospital or arriving at Chelsea Cloisters.]

Comments

[intheruins]

"Thank you," Serena says. She almost goes to go on to say that he looks just like his father, the same dark hair and blue eyes, but holds back. She hasn't been able to look at the photos, even once she figured out how to on the device.

It feels strange and wrong to be heading in the opposite direction of her son. Almost like she's failed him, even if she has no other choice. Even if she plans to return the first opportunity she can.

Sliding into the cab first, she puts her bags at her feet. "I can't wait to bring him home. I have so much I need to buy."

[a_littlefaith]

"Jeez, yeah," Beth says as she gets into the cab as well, then leans over the back of the seat to tell the driver where to take them. "I mean, that's true of any new baby, but back home you got all that time to prepare and here it's like you gotta start from scratch all over again."

They have some stuff from Judith, stuff she's sure Carl won't mind parting with if someone else might get some use out of it.

"We might have some stuff you can use," she says. "Judith is pretty big now, so she's grown out of a lot of her clothes and she doesn't need all her baby stuff anymore."

[intheruins]

"Oh, that's very kind of you," Serena says. She's not usually one to accept charity – she'd spent so many years on her own – but here she doesn't have much of a choice. "I have some money that they've given me to buy the essentials, at least."

That she can't simply nurse has complicated things in a way that she wasn't prepared for. Not that she was prepared for any of this. Even back in the camp, she was supposed to have weeks before the baby was born. "I wish I had his bassinet from back home. I can't imagine finding anything like it here."

[a_littlefaith]

There must be something special about the bassinet for her to wish for it here, something personal, and Beth has to resist the urge to tell Serena that sometimes things can arrive from home. Sometimes those things aren't so nice and they don't have any control over what arrives and what doesn't, so she doesn't want to give false hope and make her think there's a good chance the bassinet might end up here.

It might. But Beth figures, at least in this case, it's better to be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.

"Was it passed down through your family?" she asks. "We had some stuff like that when we were little. Stuff my grandparents had kept and then gave my mom when my older brother Shawn was born."

[intheruins]

"Not my family, no," Serena says, shaking her head. Everything they'd had was reduced to ashes in the fire that took their lives. She doesn't even have a picture of her parents.

She can't say whether George looks like her when she was an infant, because there's nothing left from when she was born at all. If not for her memories of her family, they might as well have never lived. "My husband's. He had it imported. It was very... special. He was very excited to have a son."

She says nothing about the fact it would be his second. The law didn't acknowledge a child born out of wedlock and nor will she.

[a_littlefaith]

"I'm sorry," Beth says, wishing there was some way she could make that easier, but she knows there's nothing. She can't bring Serena's husband here, she can't even bring some of her familiar things from home, and she wants to help, but she knows that isn't the way go about doing it. Darrow may be her second chance at having a real life, but she knows it isn't perfect and it takes just as much as it gives.

"I know it's not the same, but I'm happy to help you look for some things," she offers as the cab pulls up to the apartment building. Beth doesn't always have a lot of money to spare, but she pays the driver without question, then opens the door to help Serena out. "There's a lot of stuff here, too, that you'll be able to buy that might not make sense. I can help you figure it out. I mean, some of it anyway."

She has no idea how to work a breast pump.

[intheruins]

Serena doesn't even have a chance to pay for the cab before she's being helped out of it, and it makes her feel strange. Back in North Carolina, at the timber camp, there weren't any richer than Serena and her husband. If anyone were capable of offering charity, it was them.

Reluctant as they might have been. Nobody got rich by giving away their riches, after all.

"They gave me some things," she says. "Enough for a few days. Some... they called it formula. My milk never came in."

It shouldn't bother her but it does, another thing she has to deny her son.

[a_littlefaith]

For all she loves babies and wants children of her own at some point, that's something Beth has never even thought of and it gives her pause as she considers it. That's why formula exists, or at least one of the reasons, but she's just never thought about the reasons for it before now.

"The formula will be good for him," she says. "The stuff they make now is full of all kinds of nutrients, he'll be gettin' everything he needs. I can show you where to get more and we can look up baby stores so I can help you find the closest one."

The internet isn't going to be familiar to her, after all, but Beth is happy to help wherever she can.