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]

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.