That was what she had been.
The most beloved of sisters.
Loved even by someone as hard-hearted as me.
And on the sides of those words?
Yeah, that was what finally broke through the dam I had tried to put up in my eyes leading up to this day, knowing how hard it was going to be, and how much I didn't want to lose it in front of everyone again.
A teapot on one side.
And a teacup on the other.
And not just any teapot and cup.
The exact ones that had been tattooed on us.
The exact ones we used to have tea parties with as kids.
The flowers dropped onto the soft grass of her grave as Edison turned and pulled me to his chest at the sound of my sob.
Then, well, he did what he had done a year before. He held me. He let me purge it all. Then he took me home to an apartment he had insisted on eight months before, not wanting to live on Third Street turf. I had no arguments aside from I would continue to pay toward that rent what I paid to my old rent. There was an argument because Edison was the kind of man who liked to take care of you, and I was not the kind of woman who needed to be taken care of. In the end, he made me take a hundred off the top, and we called it a deal.
He pulled off my clothes, dragged me into bed, and just let me grieve.
I turned to him later that night, eyes cried dry, soul wrung of most of the pain.
And it finally happened.
The last guard fell.
The words that scared me more than anything came out of my lips when he turned to me. "You okay?" he asked, fingers stroking down my jaw.
"I love you." They rushed out, practically tripping over one another to finally be expressed. They felt weird, clumsy, foreign as the Russian Edison had been teaching me, on my tongue.
But right.
They were so right.
And so incredibly overdue.
The look of wonder on his face at hearing them was all the proof I needed that I had finally found something I had never been sure existed before - a man I could trust with that last bit of me.
But he had it.
And I knew he would take care of it.
Always.Lenny - 9 yearsIt was never planned.
Actually, it was never a discussion we had had.
Children.
I guessed when your lives had been as fucked up as ours had, you didn't give much thought to them, even as they popped out all around you. The goddamn Henchmen bred like rabbits, it seemed.
But not us.
Me and Edison, we were happy. Just the two of us.
It wasn't planned.
What was planned was the procedure to remove my IUD when, out of nowhere, I was getting piercing, excruciating pains in my lower belly with no clear reason why it was happening. Until, lo and behold, the gyno told me that it was common, that women got copper toxicity, or their bodies simply couldn't take the foreign invasion anymore.
So they ripped that bitch out.
And it hurt every bit as much as I thought it would.
I was thrown on the Pill instead, on which I stayed for four months.
Before I missed my period.
And then I got sick.
So incredibly freaking sick.
As the reality dawned on me, I can't claim I was elated, over-the-moon, or excited.
Dread was more the sensation that filled me.
I had changed a bit in my time with Edison.
I had opened up, become somewhat less guarded.
But I was still me.
Crass, blunt, sarcastic, jaded.
Those weren't exactly words people would use to describe the ideal mother.
Speaking of mothers, mine was pretty shitty.
I didn't have a good role model.
I didn't feel secure in my ability to raise a human, and have it come out even remotely well-adjusted.
So I hadn't been one of the glowing, 'I am carrying a miracle inside me' pregnant women.
I had been sick, literally.
Then I had been sick figuratively.
Every single waking moment of my day.
And then at night when I was plagued by dreams of screaming babies that I couldn't get over a wall in my way to find. Like my mental wall I had up against the idea of having children.
Edison, well, he did have a mother who had loved him dearly. He had been around the Henchmen kids longer than I had, had taken to their games easily, had allowed the girls to put flowers in his hair and beard after braiding it with clumsy fingers, had fallen to the ground, groaning as he held the invisible sword wounds on his chest that one of the boys had inflicted on him.
He was happy.
And he was patient with my uncharacteristically insecure ramblings.
He didn't try to tell me everything would be fine, to belittle my worries. He just let me speak. Then held me, telling me all the reasons he thought I was going to make a good mother, often coming back to the fact that, even a child myself, I had been a mother to Letha.