Chapter Text
What can you say to a child to make up for lost time?
It almost feels like a dream, fifteen years asleep at the wheel, and suddenly that angel-faced baby had become a young woman, who had then become a too young mother herself while she wasn't looking. And even if that baby never reached her daughter's arms, her girl shaking, tears spilling from eyes that darkened to a twilight blue, she would never forget that heartbreak. That one moment where her daughter's world shifted and then forced itself back on its own axis, neck taut as she turned her face away from the squalling bundle in the nurse's arms.
She allows herself to think it only once; her granddaughter has her mother's hair, that pale golden shade left only by the sun tumbling through an open window.
Part of her rages, who could look at her daughter and take that innocence away? But then, the rational part of her thinks that innocence was whittled away long before that rat faced man, Dean, came sniffing around. It's a failure to add to her cross, and if she were Catholic, a sin for confession.
*
Stephanie behind the bluster, behind the exaggerated cats-eye, cooks and cleans. She knows to separate the laundry by color and fabric, knows how to pay the bills-numbers in neon green on a ripped piece of paper pinned to the metal of the fridge with a magnet shaped like a star. It's a unique pain, realizing that she doesn't remember teaching her daughter any of it.
Being close to her daughter is an alien thing and she doesn't know how to talk to her, not at first, but her daughter is far sweeter, kinder, than someone who came from her and Arthur has any right to be. In those long weeks after her daughter gives the baby up, she never sees that smile drop once. And per her own selfish nature, desperate to absolve her own guilt, she begins to think she had misunderstood the nature of those tears. That for Stephanie, once the baby was given to St. Swithin's, she was free to be a teenager again.
That lie lasts only until she hears telltale sobbing through the walls. She'd been up later than normal for her schedule, and, too afraid to see the look on Stephanie's face, she fails as a mother again.
Her sea legs are only found when she discovers that damn suit when Stephanie is seventeen. For the first time in her life, she fights with her daughter (She fights for her daughter.)
The screaming match is titanic, it is easily the most charged interaction they've had in years. She says cruel and untrue things and watches them land like physical blows. Life as a hero is just a sacrifice to her.
Her daughter asks her "Why don't you believe in me?" For once open about her tears. The question pulls her back in time and suddenly she can only see a little girl again.
Stephanie had been about five or six, still in pigtails and denim overalls speckled with stars, and in a moment of lucidity, she'd taken her to the Unemployment Office. Too poor for a sitter, they had ridden the 72 with change they'd found between couch cushions and in the pocket of an old jacket.
Hands shaky from withdrawal made the struggle to get her paperwork in order worse. The caseworker, hair shot through with gray, Marsha, or Martha, she can't remember which, averted her eyes and pulled out a small coloring book and crayons.
"What would you like to do when you grow up?" The woman asked Stephanie.
That tiny hand, nails painted messily in an eggplant purple, because back then everything of hers that her daughter had to choose from leaned towards darkness, paused. She drummed her fingers along the edge of the poster board to a brightly colored circus flyer. A carnival had come into town just for that weekend.
She remembered hating that she couldn't afford a $5 entrance fee. With Arthur in jail again, it would be Kraft Mac and Cheese and crackers for the foreseeable future, that measly $5 would have been a splurge. But her daughter knew nothing about her thoughts, bright eyes glued to the trio of highwire performers.
The young boy in yellow, green, and red caught her attention the most "because grown-ups doing something cool is way less cool than a kid doing the same thing."
Mouth sounding out the words as she read, fingertips wandering across the gloss of the poster, her daughter had exclaimed "I want to fly like him!"
The caseworker humored her and said "Maybe you will." and Stephanie lit up before boasting that of course she would, finally settling down.
And while she applied for food stamps and rent assistance, tabs and initials blurring together, she asked herself why she said nothing when her daughter said she wanted to fly. She could only tell herself that that was a silly dream and encouraging it would be a lie. At the very least she never lied to her daughter.
She never asked herself why she didn't believe in her.
The memory makes her wonder if she is failing her daughter again by not accepting her choices, but by some miracle, she wins their argument. Maybe because she is more ruthless, more willing to chip and chisel away at that brittle confidence. Stephanie promises to not be a hero anymore and the relief and shame coursing through her at that moment almost makes her sick.
But isn't the rest of her daughter's life more important than her comfort?
Months pass by and her daughter smiles less and less but at least Stephanie can focus on school and making other friends. She isn't covered in bruises or explaining away breaks. It will fade, she tells herself over and over, amantra she parrots when she lies in the darkness of her room.
*
One day at work, the broadcast pans to a figure in a black suit. She can't tear her eyes away even as the doors to the emergency room burst open, the sound of sirens filtering through the air.
Somewhere else, she knows light comes blaring back into her daughter's eyes.
It's only a matter of time.