Do You Want To Try?..
He was late.
Ash was always late - it was a quality his mother bemoaned when he was a young boy - no matter the importance of the day. This time wasn't his fault - accident on Pontiac, twelve-car pile up. He had to drive a mile out of his way to get there.
Sheila's attending intercepted Ash in the hallway, pulled him aside and steered him to the couch. His stomach contracted into a hard ball as the kindly-looking old doctor's face took on a countenance of pity.
"I'm afraid the baby didn't make it."
Ash sat perfectly still, his eyes boring holes through the doctor's face.
"He became tangled in his umbilical chord. It happens, occasionally, through no fault of the mother." The world seemed to stop for Ash at the word 'he'; his son was dead. Why couldn't he feel anything at all?
"...release the child for embalmment or cremation," he continued.
That finally got Ash's attention. "The kid's already out?"
"Your wife consented to the delivery," he explained. "The fetus had begun to decompose. To avoid blood poisoning..." Ash couldn't hear the rest of it. Decompose. "....cremation. Gave her consent...sign here?"
Ash forced himself to sign the certificate thrust beneath his hands; the birth and death certificates, the request for cremation. He couldn't make himself look at the tiny footprints decorating the birth certificate.
The doctor squeezed Ash's shoulder, and he winced beneath the offered contact. "You'll be able to have other children," he began gently. "With effort and careful monitoring..." he told Ash, in exacting detail, that the lining of his wife's uterus had thickened with scar tissue due to an improperly healed internal injury ("did she suffer some sort of blunt force trauma?" "Car accident when she was a teenager.") and therefore it did not stretch properly with this pregnancy. The infant, constricted in its movements, had tangled itself up and strangled itself. Had she taken proper precaution...
"The doctor said she was fine. Look, she was six months along. This is our first, and we didn't..."
"I'm not blaming her," the doctor informed Ash. There were drugs, apparently, that would have properly relaxed her uterus to allow the baby full development. It hadn't expanded properly - had she been in pain? (she had refused to speak to him for weeks) She should look over her insurance; find an ob-gyn under the plan who would monitor her progress...there would be other children. Careful should be their watchword...
Ash couldn't stand to hear more. He grabbed the man by his collar. "Take me to my wife."
His look was no less firm than Ash's own. "She's resting. A nurse will take you to her - now, Mister Williams, you must be gentle with her. The shock was great, you understand..."
Ash didn't understand anything - he could barely seem to walk.
Somehow he found her - the third bed in a crowded ward, curled into a ball, staring blindly out the window.
He reached for her, pressing gently against her shoulder.
She looked back at him over her shoulder. "I didnae think ye'd come."
Her words bit into his heart. "You're my wife," he said.
"Aye," she said. A long silence filled the room, and Ash tried to leap across the emotional gap between them but couldn't procure the words he needed. "Did ye see him?"
Ash shook his head. "You must see him." Sheila turned around. "They could not shrive him. Can you not do him some small honor, made of a father's love?"
Something inside of Ash shrunk at those words. They didn't shrive him. You can't baptize the dead. His features twisted, his head hanging low.
"Can you not offer him love? Even if it would be a lie?" Sheila wondered.
"It wouldn't be a lie," Ash responded quickly.
"I would not know. He was a mistake."
Ash felt something inside of himself crumble as he poured over the words he'd spoken to her over the past couple of months; how he'd been confused and angry about her pregnancy, wholly unplanned and, in his case, a major source of concern. "I can't even protect you! How can I keep a baby safe?" Sheila had been defiant. "I want a baby because I love thee." For her, it was that simple.
A mistake. The baby had been misconceived, unintentionally brought to life; so had Ash, the result of too much Southern Comfort during a Jefferson Airplane concert. His father had never missed an opportunity to bring that up. You were a mistake, boy.
He knew right away that a child between them was no mistake at all.
Before she could stop him, Ash crawled into bed beside Sheila and pulled her into his arms. "We'll have another baby."
She lashed out, her fists colliding with his chest. "Damn ye, ye filthy lying bastard! Ye never wanted this one!" She didn't want his comfort, but Ash felt the need to give it to her; she battled until her energy deserted her; at last she lay passively in his embrace.
"Baby, I'm sorry," he said, looking into her eyes, holding her fiercely. "I'm sorry."
The words broke something inside of his wife, and Sheila buried her face against Ash's neck and sobbed ardently into his flesh.
That was what undid him. He'd only seen Sheila cry once in all of the time he'd known her, and that when he had left her; her tears moved him more eloquently than anything. Not knowing what else to do, he held her until she sobbed herself into an exhausted sleep.
They named him Paul, after Sheila's lost brother. Ash held him once, before he was cremated; a perfectly-formed little boy with dark hair, sleeping somewhere beyond the grip of life, of even Kandarian magic.
Months later, Ash turned to Sheila and wrapped an arm around her shoulder, leading her out into the living room. That he actually made the effort to create this night for her means more than she can explain. That there are candles and glasses and the closeness of him, and that he actually considered what she might want.
He asks her then, over the dinner, in the silence of the room. It comes up and takes her by surprise, nibbling her heart.
"Do you want to try?"