Chapter Text
I. October 9, 2010
New York, New York
The last time Shauna stepped through these doors, she left with a sleeping baby in her arms. A blue and white striped cap—hospital-issue, ridiculously tiny, destined to be carefully preserved by Jackie for the rest of their lives—had brushed the underside of her nose every few seconds, the product of some innate, consumptive human urge to breathe babies in. Her arms had been placed carefully, the mark of a woman who had never outgrown the fear of dropping, never adjusted to maternal instinct, never settled in. A woman who was always, always afraid.
That fear had been nothing, as it turned out.
Things had a way of shifting, of stretching to make room, of taking on more and more, until what had once seemed insurmountable was small and forgotten, eclipsed by new terrors or amended softer by memory. Trying to dig through the fear she felt now to isolate which particular fractions of it she’d felt then was no more possible than making out the trappings of New Jersey from 31,000 feet above. She’d tried, on her way to JFK. She’d looked down and she’d squinted and she’d willed herself to pick out all the things that she’d wished so desperately to see.
She’d, of course, had no such luck. Fields were fields, forest was forest, city sprawl was city sprawl.
And NewYork-Presbyterian was NewYork-Presbyterian.
The hospital hadn’t changed since Shauna had last seen it, no matter how different she felt. The mass of concrete and brick that built the exterior didn’t care that Shauna’s world was narrowing to a fine point this time, rather than expanding to add another life. Neither did the tile floors that looked as though they’d been sealed in epoxy, artificially shiny, or the bold-faced signs that advised foot-traffic with only moderate success, or the dozens of staff walking quickly, their heads down to avoid having to give directions on their break, not wanting to be stuck in a conversation with someone lost, someone broken, someone who couldn’t imagine how their world wasn’t caving in, too.
Someone like Shauna.
Nat had given her the directions she needed on the phone. Then she’d texted them to her after they’d hung up, because Shauna could only assume she’d sounded something like she’d felt—utterly and irreparably fucking useless. Through the main doors, straight to the elevators, fifth floor, hang one left, then another, a right at the dead end, through the metal doors labeled Intensive Care Unit, and on to room 502. Shauna repeated her instructions in place of prayer, because she couldn’t shake the nagging fear that anything she’d find herself directing God’s way might be volatile enough to make the situation worse.
She walked so fast the paintings that adorned the white walls, uncomfortably conspicuous in their beauty, blurred in her peripheral. Jackie had always been far more taken by the building than Shauna’d ever been. Shauna mostly found it odd to have health insurance so fancy it was a better financial decision to cross state lines and receive care in one of the most prestigious hospitals in the nation than to go to humble, simple (woefully outdated, if you asked her mother) Wiskayok Medical Center. But beggars couldn’t be choosers—though she and Jackie were no longer either of those things, and that fact alone was partially responsible for the pit of uneasiness that formed in Shauna’s stomach every time she walked these halls—so New York Pres it was.
Shauna felt herself break into a run as she turned the corner on that second left. A sprint, really, and maybe what she’d thought was a brisk walk through the rest of the hospital had actually been a jog. Shauna was fast, even now, even more than a decade out from soccer practice and running the track and booking it from cops at keggers gone wrong. She’d never lost the bulk of her speed, so it took her no time at all to make it to room 502.
She’d had a plan. She’d had time, on the cross-country flight, to give herself a pep talk about staying calm. To remind herself that she needed to be strong, that she needed to control herself. But when Shauna saw Jackie, placed on the bed, staged like one of the dolls they’d played with as little girls, pillows used to prop up her arms and align her hips and support her knees, a tube down her throat, machines surrounding her, blinking and beeping and displaying jagged moving lines, Shauna’s plan stood no chance.
II. August 9, 1996
Shrewsbury, New Jersey
“You know, if you hadn’t waited until the last possible moment, you wouldn’t need such an extensive procedure.”
The woman shook her head, her blonde bob swaying against her chin, and made three angry check marks on the paperwork she clutched. All Shauna could see of it was the back of her clipboard, pink and embedded with glitter, adorned with stickers of watercolor kittens tangled in bright bundles of yarn.
“It would’ve been much simpler for everyone.”
Shauna blinked hard, shifting her gaze to the safety of the same worn converse she’d had since she was fourteen. She focused on the traces of black smudged around the white rubber rims—the ghosts of doodles that Jackie had drawn there years ago, Shauna’s feet propped in her lap and her lip pulled between her teeth in concentration. The exam table was set at an awkward height. Shauna’s legs hung over the side, the tips of her toes just barely skimming the shiny beige floor. Her thighs were pressed against each other uncomfortably. The pale flesh of them, expanded with her appetite over the past month, worked in tandem with her over-sized ringer tee and the small bump of her belly to swallow her denim shorts whole.
A little kid.
That’s what she felt like. A child, receiving chastisement for something much more innocent than being the slut who couldn’t figure out a condom.
“Yeah, well, she didn’t. So unless you have a fucking time machine you want to lend us, save your opinions for the next time somebody’s reaching up your vagina.”
For most of their friendship, a stretch of time which amounted to most of their lives, Shauna couldn’t have imagined Jackie speaking to an authority figure with even a twinge with overt contempt. Jackie had always chosen to shrink herself. Jackie smiled and nodded and made herself as small as she could, a pretty thing backed into a corner, until see wasn’t seen as a threat.
But that was the thing. While Shauna hadn’t felt this young since her parents divorce, long painful nights that inevitably ended with Shauna crawling into her mother’s bed, Jackie seemed to be hurtling in the opposite direction. It was as though she’d become a real adult in the span of weeks, and Shauna couldn’t help but startle every time Jackie made it apparent.
Jackie crossed her arms and raised a brow at the woman—an open dare. Her hair was perfectly styled, subtle waves framing her face and skimming her collarbones. Shauna knew that purple and blue half-moons of exhaustion hid beneath Jackie’s concealer, because Shauna was the one who’d made them appear there, but Jackie’s eyes were magicked to appear naturally bright and alert. The pink of her cheeks matched the pink of her lips matched the pink of her nails. She wore a simple black dress that Shauna had never seen before, something strikingly boring and modest compared to her usual, but as flattering on her as everything else was.
She was beautiful and she was terrifying, and each of those seemed to fuel the other like gasoline on an open flame.
The woman said nothing in response to Jackie. She huffed and pursed her lips in a distinctly condescending way that might’ve made someone else even angrier—probably would’ve made Shauna angrier, if she’d felt at all capable of anything approaching anger—but Jackie could handle silent condemnation. She could shrug it off and cast it aside, as long as she got what she wanted in the end. And Jackie had gotten what she wanted, because the woman stood, her stool rolling back with the sudden absence of her weight.
“The doctor will be in momentarily,” the woman said curtly, her icy blue eyes locked on Shauna’s. Shauna wrapped her arms around her middle instinctively, her shoulders slumping forward. “Undress from the waist down and lay flat on the table, Ms. Shipman. There’s a sheet to cover up with on top of the pillow.”
The woman slammed the door behind her.
Shauna didn’t move.
“Shauna?” Jackie asked, her tone so unbearably cautious it bordered on formal. Shauna’s stomach turned. “Do you, um, want me to…y’know, step out?”
Shauna felt a frown take hold without her permission, her face pinched so tight it sent an ache rippling through her forehead. She looked directly at Jackie for the first time since they’d walked through the pitiful show of protesters outside the Red Bank Planned Parenthood. (Only two Christ-loving dissenters, neither committed enough to their cause to try and speak to Shauna. Not after Jackie kicked their trifold sign out of the way, at least.)
Every time Shauna looked at Jackie’s face now she saw her then—sitting on the curb in front of Lottie’s house, mascara streaming down her cheeks with tears so swift they carried the black streaks as far as her neck and her chest, sobbing Shauna’s name, as Shauna got into her car and left her there—and Shauna couldn’t handle that, not today, not when Jackie was doing this for her.
“Shauna?”
Shauna jumped, shifting out of blurred senses and back into clinic-white, clorox-scented reality. Jackie had moved closer, vacating her chair in the corner of the room to stand directly in front of Shauna.
“Huh?” Shauna asked dumbly.
Her lips burned when she parted them, chapped and raw. She was a mess. She felt inhuman—bloated huge with a parasite gripping her insides, so sweaty in the summer heat that she never felt clean, her hair knotted and matted from lack of care.
“No,” Shauna answered, processing on delay what Jackie had said before Jackie could repeat it. “No. Stay, please.”
Jackie nodded, briskness creeping back into her movements, and the distance that Shauna had forged between them settled into the room once more.
“That nurse was a real bitch,” Jackie said, her arms crossed against her chest.
The absence of her necklace—the gold heart she’d once clasped around Shauna’s neck for luck—made bile rise in Shauna’s throat. Jackie had sold it three days ago, less than twelve hours after Shauna had shown up on her doorstep sobbing, begging for entry when she knew that the Taylors were out of town for their yearly anniversary trip.
Planned Parenthood was cheap, but nothing was free. Five hundred dollars, they’d told Jackie when she’d called, the phone on speaker and Shauna crying uselessly in her bed, while she paced so aggressively she left imprints in her bedroom carpet—foot-shaped smudges in a slightly differently shade of taupe that Shauna watched her vacuum away the next morning.
“Don’t let her get to you, Shipman.”
Jackie offered a kindness in the use of Shauna’s surname—one she’d only bestowed upon Shauna one other time since Shauna had forced their reunion, in the form of the sweetest words Shauna had ever heard: we’ll get through this together, Shipman.
Jackie had been making good on it ever since.
“She’s not a nurse,” Shauna said softly, her gaze ticking lower, searching for comfort. “She’s a medical assistant.”
“Okay, whatever.” Jackie knelt in front of Shauna, and for a brief confounding moment, Shauna thought it was just so that she would have to see the exaggerated roll of Jackie’s eyes. But Jackie set to work, unlacing Shauna’s shoes gingerly. “It doesn’t matter what she is. She’s a cunt, so just…ignore her.”
“It matters.” Shauna let Jackie slide her shoes off and stood on sock feet. Her knees wobbled. Jackie rose quickly to hold her elbows. “If she was a nurse, I’d be scared she was gonna do something to me in, like, retaliation for you snapping.”
“What?” Jackie scoffed, a sound just shy of a laugh and God, Shauna wanted to hear her laugh, hadn’t heard it in months, hadn’t known that it was the most important sound in the world until it went missing. “Like a waitress spitting in your food? Pretty sure medical professionals have higher standards than that.”
Shauna unbuttoned her shorts and slid them down her legs. Jackie stared at the wall over Shauna’s shoulder pointedly.
“You’d be surprised,” Shauna said. “My mom has met some truly crazy people.”
“Well, then I’m glad she’s not a nurse.” Jackie took Shauna’s shorts from her, shaking them out before folding them neatly.
“Me too.”
Shauna thought she saw Jackie’s cheeks shift from pink to red as she pulled her underwear off. She took her shorts back from Jackie and tucked the black cotton between the fold.
Jackie stared at an age-faded diagram of the female reproductive system with feigned interest, until Shauna was laying on the table with the sheet draped over her.
The doctor was much nicer than the medical assistant, but her kindness made Shauna more uncomfortable than disdain could ever hope to.
A quick exam, during which Jackie hovered by Shauna’s head, and then Dr. Rosen was instructing Shauna to sit however made her comfortable. Jackie didn’t leave her side to return to her chair in the corner of the room. She stood vigil, clinging to Shauna’s hand, even though their palms were sweaty and sticky.
“Because of the delay in your care,” Dr. Rosen explained calmly (code for ‘because you pretended that you didn’t notice all the symptoms of your obvious fucking pregnancy, in hopes that it would just go away’), “we have to do what’s called a dilation and evacuation. Did they go over all of this with you when you made your appointment?”
“Yes,” Shauna said, hoping to spare herself the details.
Jackie contradicted her at the same time, “No, they didn’t tell us anything.”
Us. Us us us. That was how Jackie talked about this thing and Shauna still couldn’t tell whether she loved it or hated it. Whether she felt relief or love or anger for it.
She ran her free hand over her eyes.
“Okay. That’s alright, we have to get the consent signed for the procedure, which means going over the details again, regardless. I just like to know where we’re starting. Your cervix is soft, so those medications did their job. That’s great.”
Dr. Rosen talked about a lot of things.
Epidural, which Shauna had always assumed was a shot. She went so pale when informed that it was actually a tube that stayed lodged in your spine that both Dr. Rosen and Jackie fussed over her, demanding she sit back, offering her juice, blotting at the sweat on her brow.
Dilator devices that sized up, like the gauges that Shauna had once considered using to stretch her ears, before Jackie had wrinkled her nose in disgust at the idea.
Forceps that grabbed. Vacuums that sucked. Curettes that scraped.
But, scariest of all, was the mask that would cover her nose and her mouth and fill her airway with the same laughing gas that had made her confess things to Jackie when she’d gotten her wisdom teeth out two years before. Things that they’d both pretended she hadn’t said. Things that she couldn’t risk saying now, when everything between them was shattered beyond repair. When Shauna had spent two months away from Jackie and realized that almost everything she’d thought she hated about Jackie was something she actually hated about herself, and everything else, everything real, was so minor it seemed like a joke compared to the deep, gnawing ache she’d felt for Jackie in her absence. The bottomless pit that even the invader, stretching out Shauna’s stomach to the best of its ability, hadn’t been able to make a dent in.
The doctor stepped out to give Shauna time to think and Shauna knew that she was meant to be thinking about the fetus sticking to her insides.
About whether she really wanted to rip it out. About whether she wanted to let it keep growing instead, let it turn into an actual fucking baby, which would become an actual fucking child, and then an actual fucking teenager who ruined friendships and hurt people and smashed its life into pieces. And if not that, if she was certain about that, Shauna was meant to be thinking about risks. About the small chance of side effects. About the smaller, struck-by-lightening sized chance of death that had forced Jackie’s eyes impossibly wide when Dr. Rosen had mentioned it, because they both knew that if anyone could grip the tiniest risk of disaster between her fingers and twist it into a certain reality, it was Shauna.
There were a lot of things that Shauna should’ve been thinking about. But, as it had gone her entire life, the only thing that came to her mind was Jackie Taylor.
“Shauna?”
Jackie was pawing at Shauna, as though summoned by her thoughts. Her hands passed over Shauna’s hair, landed on her wet cheeks, rested on her shoulders. She’d always had a way of touching Shauna that felt like she was trying to fix something broken—scooping up shards of glass and frantically aligning them, pressing them together to try and force the glue to catch, paying no mind to the cuts the pieces made when they slid across her own skin.
“Yeah,” Shauna said quietly. An answer with no substance, one that Jackie wouldn’t accept, but Shauna had nothing solid to offer her.
“Do you—Shauna, look at me,” Jackie’s voice was soft. Her lips curved around gentle words that bore no reflection on what they had actually become since Shauna had ruined them. Jackie pinched Shauna’s jaw between her thumb and her finger, urging her face upward. When Shauna met Jackie’s eyes, Jackie rotated her hand, twisting her fingers softly to hold Shauna’s chin between them. Jackie ran her thumb back and forth absently, the tip of it brushing the underside of Shauna’s bottom lip with each pass. “Do you want to keep it?”
“I can’t have a baby,” Shauna blubbered, her lips threatening to swallow Jackie’s thumb whole as they parted suddenly.
Jackie drew her hand away and pulled Shauna tight against her, the sheet bunching awkwardly between Shauna’s legs.
“You can if you want to.”
Jackie rubbed Shauna’s back, her hand as firm as her words. Shauna pressed her face into Jackie’s chest and inhaled her—strawberry shampoo and sweet perfume and fresh, crisp deodorant.
“I can’t do it alone,” Shauna whispered.
She couldn’t do anything alone, it turned out. All that time spent wishing for her freedom from Jackie, come to find out she was fucking useless without her. It’d been Jackie who’d fixed this for her. Jackie who’d made the calls and set up the appointments. Jackie who’d picked up the pills that Shauna’d had to shove inside herself until they’d hit her cervix, gagging as she crouched in Jackie’s ocean blue bathroom, choking on the memory of sinking down on Jeff so hard it hurt.
“Shauna,” Jackie choked out, failing miserably to hide the cries wracking through her. Shauna fisted her hands into the waist of Jackie’s dress and Jackie squeezed her tighter. “Do you feel alone right now? I told you we’d get through this together and we will. If you want to keep it, we’ll make it work, okay? You’re not alone. I’m right here.”
“Do—do you think I should keep it?”
Shauna wouldn’t have considered keeping it at all, but there was something so intoxicating in the way Jackie had spoken with such definitive authority. If you want to keep it, we’ll make it work. We. We as in JackieAndShauna, as in the two of them forming a single unit again, as in merging into one. Well, one plus another.
JackieAndShaunaAndBaby.
“I can’t decide for you.” Jackie tried to pass her fingers through Shauna’s hair, but they caught resistance on tangles. She settled for scratching at Shauna’s scalp gently. “Do you want a baby, Shipman?”
“I want parts of it,” Shauna mumbled.
Jackie pulled away and Shauna scrambled for her, lurching forward with embarrassing speed to try and drag Jackie back toward her, but Jackie was just shifting to sit beside Shauna. She wound her arms around Shauna and drew her into a hug. Shauna’s face found the crook of her neck.
“Which parts?” Jackie asked.
Shauna shook her head stubbornly, choking on the snot building in her throat and nose. Disgusting. She felt so fucking disgusting, inside and out.
“Shauna,” Jackie soothed. “We have to talk about it. We’ve sort of run out of time not to. Which parts do you want?”
“The part where you have a reason not to hate me,” Shauna muttered under her breath.
Like a guilty daven, like her zeyde’s kaddish, when she managed to convince herself that her book of Catholic saints had pissed HaShem off enough to make him strike down her grandfather. Jackie had been there, too. She’d sat in the front row, mere feet from where Shauna stood with her mom and her bubbe and her brothers, just long enough to recite the words and scramble back to Jackie’s side.
Jackie had always been there.
“The—the part where you don’t leave me.”
“Shauna Miriam Shipman. I do not hate you. I’ve never hated you.” Shauna felt Jackie’s chin twist against the top of her head in a rough shake of her head. “And I’m not leaving you. You…you seemed like you wanted to leave me pretty fucking bad. But…if you don’t then…then we’re going to fix us, okay? No matter what.”
Jackie broke their embrace in a way that told Shauna she couldn’t prolong it any further. There was no more delaying it—Shauna had to look at Jackie, had to see the hurt she’d caused, had to watch her cry.
Mascara formed thin trails of black that stopped at Jackie’s cheekbones, like the sharpness of them was enough to form an impenetrable border. It wasn’t as bad as that night, when makeup had bled down, down, down—cheeks to chin to neck to chest—and left Jackie fully painted by Shauna’s betrayal.
“I need you to decide whether you want a baby. Don’t base it on anything else. Just that. Because—” Jackie scrunched her nose the way she always did when she was feeling something too strongly. It was the same motion, no matter the mood that provoked it, a barometer of overwhelm, more than an indicator of her emotion. “I know what it’s like to—to have a mom who didn’t want you.”
Shauna choked on her breath in her rush to confess, “I don’t want a baby. Maybe at all. Maybe ever.”
“Okay.” Jackie wiped the mascara from beneath her own eyes, leaving no trace of upset on her perfect face. She stood. Straightened her dress, ran a hand through Shauna’s hair, righted the sheet that covered Shauna’s lower half. “Let’s do this then.”
Conscious sedation and a fuck-ton of pain killers.
Turns out that was what it took for Shauna to say the words that Jackie hadn’t even known she’d been waiting to hear.
The procedure was over, but Shauna still needed to be monitored for another hour before Jackie could take her home. She laid on a sort of stretcher, closer to a hospital bed than the stiff, uncomfortable exam table she’d been on earlier. Jackie smoothed her blanket across her carefully, untucking the messy ends where it was curled under itself and coving her from her clavicle to her toes.
“Jackie!” Shauna’s arm shot out, mussing the freshly-righted covers. She grabbed at Jackie’s forearm and tugged her closer.
Shauna’s head lolled on her neck like a lead weight. Her tongue smacked against the roof of her mouth with every swallow of her saliva. Her eyes had fought to stay open, even when Jackie had told her that she could rest them. (Shauna, ever-stubborn, had just opened them comically wide in response, before letting them relax into something more neutral.)
Jackie sighed and sat on the plastic chair beside her, sticky with heat. “Hey, sleeping beauty.”
The words fell out of her mouth before she could stop them. She paused, swallowed, cursed herself mentally. She was fucking embarrassing herself, doting on Shauna like this, and she knew it. Shauna probably hated it. Probably found it funny, probably laughed about it as she scribbled in her journal.
Jackie had once been foolish enough to hope that Shauna was writing good things about her in there. That Shauna truly loved her, that she found Jackie even half as sweet and smart and funny and beautiful as Jackie found her. That the feeling was mutual. But after Randy had let Shauna’s big secret slip at Lottie’s graduation party, after Shauna had told Jackie exactly what she thought of her, Jackie had begun to wonder if Shauna had been taking the opportunities to jot down everything she hated about Jackie, right in front of her fucking face.
Shauna took Jackie’s face between shaky hands, as if reading her mind. She fumbled the grip on the first attempt, smacking Jackie gently on the cheek, and pulled her closer roughly.
“I wasn’t meant to be a mom,” Shauna whispered, as though it was brand new information, rather than the topic of Jackie’s every waking hour for the past three days.
“Not yet,” Jackie corrected gently. “Not until you want to be.”
“No, I—” Shauna gave her most frustrated whine, the one she let out before she revealed secrets, and Jackie held her breath, waiting for the blow, “I think that all I’m meant to be is yours. I don’t care about anything else. I just need to be your Shauna again.”
Jackie’s heart pounded in her chest. The whiplash hurt. Not knowing what to expect was the scariest thing in the fucking world to her, and Jackie had quickly learned that she could never know what to expect with Shauna. But Shauna looked so genuine just then, with her lower lip trembling and her eyes huge and glossy and her entire body shivering just a little, that Jackie decided to let herself believe it.
This was her Shauna. This was the Shauna she knew. And she was coming back to her.
“We’re each others,” Jackie whispered, squeezing Shauna’s wrists, “we always have been and we always will be.”
Shauna was still what the nurse—a kind brunette, not the fucking cunt of a blonde who had done the intake, Shauna was right about that—had referred to as a little loopy. Shauna had strong reactions to substances of all sorts. She’d been a lightweight from the jump, spewing bottom shelf tequila down the front of Jackie’s jeans and onto her white Keds the first time they’d gotten drunk. Weed made her anxious, paranoid about the mundane horrors of everyday life, rather than aliens or the FBI. Pills made her loose-limbed and loose-lipped, but she usually fell asleep in Jackie’s arms before she could say any of the things that Jackie wanted to hear.
But this was a strange combo. She was jumpy with stress, hyper-vigilant but slow. She seemed to be convinced that Jackie was going to leave her, to which Jackie wished she could say you’re the one who does the leaving. Jackie wished she’d been able to land a single retaliatory blow.
But it was Shauna. Her Shauna. And she was scared and she was broken and she was, according to her own words, words Jackie had to hope weren’t lies, Jackie’s.
So Jackie did the opposite of hurt her back. She soothed. She coddled. She reassured. She told Shauna what she was going to do before she did it—Shaun, I’m getting out of the car to go around and open your side, okay? And then we’ll go inside together and I’ll stay with you all night.
Jackie had guided Shauna to the car, buoyed her through the drive, wrangled her up the stairs to her front door. She’d shepherded her into her own kitchen and settled her on her own dining chair. And now she was filling her favorite glass under the tap.
“I feel fucking disgusting,” Shauna sniffled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand.
“When’s the last time you washed your hair?” Jackie asked. Ice clinked in the cup as she set it in front of Shana pointedly.
Shauna shrugged, teetering on the precipice of tears. “A while.”
Jackie sat beside her at the kitchen table, her favorite place in the Shipman household, aside from Shauna’s attic bedroom. It was where she’d once felt the safest, the most at home, the most loved. The worn wood had served as the foundation for countless stacks of pancakes in their lives. The ritual of it had changed with age but, unlike all of the change that had come with this horrible fucking summer, it’d been a welcome progression. Blueberries mixed into the batter, rather than chocolate chips. Coffee in simple mugs, rather than orange juice in Snoopy and Woodstock glasses. Heat simmering in Jackie’s belly, at the sight of Shauna in a flannel and her underwear, smirking and rolling her eyes each time Jackie applauded a showy flip of her spatula, rather than the warmth that Jackie had felt in her chest when Deb had been the one cooking.
Jackie waited until Shauna finished chugging her water, tracking the drips that slid down her neck from the corners of her mouth.
“Will you let me wash it for you?”
Wash meant more than that, of course.
A simple wash wouldn’t do it. Jackie would need to let the conditioner sit. She’d need to work a fine toothed comb through the tangles for an hour, before she could even give it the first scrub. It didn’t take very long for Shauna’s hair to get like this—knots came easily when she tossed in her sleep. But Jackie had only had to do this twice before.
The first when they were far too young—Shauna’s dad nowhere to be found, Deborah stuck in bed, Shauna’s brothers with her aunt, but Shauna left behind with the idea that it would prevent Deb from slipping too deep. The second when they were older, when Shauna kept more secrets from Jackie and wouldn’t tell her the whys, during a time where Jackie now knew that Shauna had been letting Jeff kiss her and touch her and—
No. Jackie couldn’t think about that.
She settled Shauna in a chair in front of the kitchen sink. She tested the temperature on the back of her wrist and used Deb’s favorite vase to collect water and pour it over Shauna’s hair.
Shauna had refused to tell Deb about any of this, panicking when Jackie suggested it, but Jackie couldn’t figure out why. Deb had always been a good mom—the best mom. She was nothing like Jackie’s mother. She was all warmth and understanding. There was no roughness with her, no fear of being taught a lesson in her presence. Deborah Shipman was the embodiment of I’m not mad, I’m disappointed, and even her disappointment was thin at best.
But Shauna had insisted, so Jackie had scheduled the appointment for a day when Deb was working a sixteen hour shift—3:00 pm to 7:30 am, with a commute home and a guarantee that she’d sleep until at least 4 in the afternoon the next day—and Jackie had sent Noah and Daniel to friends’ houses, a crisp twenty in each of their pockets to stop them from asking questions about Shauna’s sort of hysterical state.
Conditioner slipped through Jackie’s fingers and caught in stubborn clumps on the tangled nest of Shauna’s hair. The comb skidded and tugged, but Jackie was careful to hold tight at the root, so that it didn’t sting Shauna’s scalp.
“Just cut it off,” Shauna said eventually, her voice garbled and slow.
“No,” Jackie insisted. “I’ll be done soon. Just hold still.”
Shauna scrunched her face tight, every muscle tense with effort. “It isn’t fucking worth it, Jackie, just—”
“Stop!” Jackie sobbed. Shauna flinched. “Fuck, just…” Jackie smoothed her thumb across Shauna’s temple until Shauna relaxed, sinking into defeat. “I’m not cutting your hair, Shipman. Let me do this. Please.”
Shauna let her.
“They said you could shower if you want. But no baths for ten days.”
Jackie was determined not to let her work go to waste. She’d woven Shauna’s hair carefully, each strand coaxed into twin French braids. The style could last Shauna days until another wash if it needed to, without a single knot wriggling its way in. Jackie tugged the end of one braid twice, their forever-signal that they were finished with each other’s hair.
Shauna sat up straighter but she kept her eyes shut, hiding herself from Jackie.
“Just…you’re a little unsteady, still. I could…could sit in with you like I used to?” Jackie offered.
Shauna scrunched her nose in something—disgust, maybe. Regret dried Jackie’s mouth and pulled at her chest.
“Just in case you get, like, lightheaded or whatever,” Jackie added quickly.
“Sure,” Shauna whispered. She stood, a wobble in her legs that knocked her knees together and proved Jackie’s point. “Like you used to.”
“Are you okay?” Jackie called, from her perch on the counter.
There’d been a shift in the sound that echoed off of the bathroom walls, a full patter against the tub instead of the soft, dulled noise of water hitting Shauna’s body and sliding down it. Jackie found herself gripped by the admittedly irrational, but no less tangible, fear that Shauna might’ve fallen without her noticing. Maybe Jackie—exhausted from three nights in a row of sleep being an aspiration rather than a reality—had nodded off, instead of just rested her eyes like she’d thought, and missed the thud of Shauna’s body as she’d gone down. Maybe Shauna was having complications, maybe she was bleeding too much, maybe she was unconscious, drowning in the spray of the shower head mere feet from—
“Yeah,” Shauna answered, just as Jackie dropped to her feet to check. “I’m done.”
Jackie’s heart slowed, but the stress didn’t ease—it was simply hummingbird beats to aching thuds.
“Okay.” Jackie tugged at her dress, straightening it out. “Okay, um, want me to get you a towel?”
“Yes, please.” Shauna’s words were slurred.
Jackie couldn’t place blame in a percentage. She couldn’t isolate what came from the drugs, what came from physical pain, what from emotional, but she wanted to wipe it all away, until Shauna sounded like herself again. Jackie hadn’t heard the Shauna she remembered since May. She was beginning to wonder if her memories—Shauna’s high-pitched giggle, her sweetly sarcastic tone, the soft and shy shift to her words when she was being serious—were a forgery. Maybe Shauna had been right. She’d certainly seemed confident when she’d said it, one hand on her car door and the other planted on the back of her hip: Maybe you never really knew me at all.
Jackie shook it off, shrugging her shoulders back forcefully and clenching her fists on the way to the towels. She took one off of the stack and unfolded it, holding it open for Shauna as she approached the shower.
“Here you go,” Jackie said.
Shauna pulled back the curtain. Jackie expected her to pluck the towel out of her hands and retreat behind its cover once more.
That is not what Shauna did.
Maybe Jackie had more to do with it than she wanted to admit. Maybe there had been some hope behind the way Jackie had held the towel up, her hands a few feet apart to pull it taut, a beacon for Shauna, calling her to step toward it, rather than encouraging her to take it away.
Whatever the catalyst, Jackie was as grateful as she was terrified when Shauna ambled over the edge of the tub to step into the towel and, by extension, Jackie’s arms.
Jackie’s heart stuttered, but her body didn’t fail her. She wrapped the fabric around Shauna instinctively. Shauna’s arms were pinned awkwardly to her sides beneath the towel, as she planted her face in the crook of Jackie’s neck. Jackie closed the towel behind Shauna’s back the best she could, overlapping it so that she could press it against Shauna’s skin with arms wrapped tight around her body instead of hands fumbling for purchase.
“I’m sorry,” Shauna blubbered into Jackie’s skin. Jackie felt a wet spot forming above her collar-bone—water and tears and saliva, if she was right about how hard Shauna was crying. “I’m so sorry. I—I—I…Jackie,” Shauna whined, wounded and desperate, as though Jackie’s name was a full sentence.
A fresh round of pain meds was probably settling in. Narcotics took about an hour to hit, Jackie knew from timing her mothers moods with the pills she popped, and Jackie had forced Shauna to take her first at-home dose with the water she’d plied her with earlier. Shauna never took narcs for fun, so the already low tolerance embedded in her by nature was heightened by her body’s unfamiliarity with the drugs.
Jackie had always thought of Shauna as solid. She was strong, someone Jackie could drop all her weight onto without worry. Shauna, in a body much tinier, was sturdier than Jeff had ever been. Yes, Jackie’s nose met the soft skin just beneath Shauna’s jaw when she hugged her close, rather than the hard wall of sternum she was faced with during Jeff’s suffocating embraces, but it wasn’t about actual size.
It was physical, to a degree. The entire team was stronger than they looked, and Jackie had spent plenty of time watching the tendons in Shauna’s hands flex, admiring the muscles of her thighs when they tensed. (And God, another time, one not that long ago, Jackie would’ve been trying desperately to staunch very different emotions right now, with the muscles of Shauna’s back moving under her hands.)
There was an emotional soundness that Jackie had always been able to find in Shauna, too. One that Jackie had spent the past two months trying to convince herself she’d manufactured completely, though three days back in Shauna’s presence had been enough for Jackie to push back against everything Shauna had said to her during their fight, to unearth and dust-off and polish and prove her point that Shauna wasn’t the person she’d claimed to be, with angry tears in her eyes and angrier words in her mouth.
But Shauna had never seemed smaller to Jackie than she did in that moment, tucked against Jackie’s body and convulsing with tears.
“It’s okay, you’re okay,” Jackie soothed. She took a deep breath and held it, starving her body of oxygen to deter the sobs she felt coming on. “It’s—oh, Shauna, it’s okay.”
“No it isn’t!” Shauna shook her head wildly. Jackie cupped the back of it to force her still. “I fucked it up! I did, I fucked it, I—I—”
Shauna swayed on her feet. Jackie clutched her tighter but, try as she might, she had never been as strong as Shauna. Tears finally forced their way out of her eyes, stinging at the corners.
“Sit, Shauna. Come on, that’s it.”
It wasn’t graceful. Jackie squirmed awkwardly to support Shauna’s hips as she crashed down next to her, the towel slid sideways on Shauna’s body, both of them grabbing at it to right it, water that had leaked down the side of the tub dampened their backs when they finally settled. But they managed. Shauna landed half in Jackie’s lap, the towel secured beneath her armpits instead of cocooning her completely, her head against Jackie’s chest and her hands gripping the front of Jackie’s dress so tight the material pulled away from Jackie’s body.
“You’re the only good thing,” Shauna mumbled, so groggy that it was a warning to Jackie—she had approximately five minutes to get Shauna to bed before she crashed in a drug-induced, immobilized sleep. “You’re—you’re amazing. So good to me and just—just funny and smart and good at shit and so so pretty.”
Jackie felt herself flush. She really ought to move Shauna, could feel Shauna’s lips parting against the top of her breast as she inhaled so heavy it was almost a waking snore, but Shauna was saying things that Jackie would have made a deal with the devil to hear, so Jackie sat still and silent and waited for Shauna to finish her thought.
“And I ruined it. I lost you,” Shauna sobbed. “I don’t know what to do without you.”
Jackie squeezed her tight, trying to encompass as much of her torso as she could. “You never needed to be without me. I tried. You—you fucking ignored me.”
“Because you deserve better,” Shauna answered, as simply as she might’ve explained a math problem to Jackie just months ago, like it was some undeniable truth. Jackie kissed the crown of her head, rubbed a hand across the bare skin between her shoulder blades, tried to telepathically communicate just how wrong Shauna was. “I—I fucked up so bad, why wouldn’t you be done with me?”
Jackie tipped Shauna’s face up to her own, cradling her jaw with fingers as gentle as she could make them. Jackie took Shauna in for just a moment, wide eyes and trembling lip and wet cheeks, before pressing their foreheads together.
“Because that’s not how love works.”