SERIES: Nyssa

AUTHOR: Missy

EMAIL: lasfic@yahoo.com

PART: 1 of  1

RATING:  PG-13 (thematic material)

PAIRING(s): L/L

DISTRIBUTION: To Myself  so far; any other archives are welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine.  Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!

CATEGORY: Drama/Romance

FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!

SETTING IN TIMELINE: AU Milwaukee

SPOILLER/SUMMARY: One year, birth to death to birth again - Composed of four drabbles: "Blue", "Saint Anne's", "Stagger Onward, Rejoicing", and "Starting Point"

NOTES: Lyric breaks between drabbles are from "Playboy Mommie", "All That We Let In" and "Dance Without Sleeping", by Tori Amos, Emily Saliers and Melissa Etheridge Respectively.   C and TM to their prospective owners.

Genius Jones is a character from the LAS trade paperback series.  I used him because he's the only close-to-canon character I can imagine knowing the meaning of the word "Nyssa".

***

"I'll say it now, here by your grave 'those angels can't ever take my place'"

***

The scene greeting Lenny Kosnowski as he crossed the threshold of the maternity ward of Saint Jude's  was one of controlled, coordinated chaos.  How convenient - his entire life had devolved into the same in the past few months.  How could it not be so, now that his apartment had been besieged by Laverne Kosnowski: homemaker?

He tried to desperately to comfort himself with old memories as he headed to the admissions desk.  Another charming scene rose up in his mind - breakfast.  Overdone eggs and toast.  She didn't have anything but tea, watching him anxiously over the plate. 

She wanted him to like it, and he had gobbled it down.

Why didn't I make her eat? he whipped himself.  Nothing Laverne consumed nowadays seemed to stay down, months into her pregnancy, but he kept begging her to eat more, pressing cups of broth to her lips whenever they were together.  She had felt hot in embrace through the night, and he begged her to see a doctor, to stay home from work, but she had dressed in her smock and walked with him out the door, saying they couldn't afford anymore sick days.  They couldn't afford it - he knew they couldn't.  He felt a hole in the pocket of his worn jeans and felt a sickening flush of anxiety.

He'd been thinking a lot about money lately, no matter how it made his temples throb.  Their combined salleries kept food in their mouths, made them warm in the winter, kept the water on, the necessities in the cabinet - but they couldn't expand beyond that.  When the rabbit had died six months ago he had been panicked and tried not to show it, but she had known.  He secretly hoped the doctor had been a mistake.  They were always a paycheck from living in the gutter, something he would never allow himself to put her through. 

It was his fault - they had gotten careless, giddy in their new marriage.  The idea of a baby so early seemed to please Laverne, and he accepted it through her willingness.

At first, it had been hard to get attached to the 'thing' growing inside of his wife.  He felt weak and helpless watching her grow drawn and ill in the first months of her pregnancy and found himself becoming angry at the baby for hurting her.  Laverne had a majestic serenity that comforted him out of these brief moods.  A few weeks ago, they had been shopping at Matanapolous' Fish market and she had stopped moving suddenly.  She reached out, grabbed his hand and plastered it to her belly.  There was a thrumming beneath the palm.

In a moment, he was in love.

Love had a way of leaving him, Lenny thought, biting down the pain ripping him apart.  God had a way of listening to his wishes months too late.    He returned from his route to the grave face of his supervisor.  "Your wife collapsed on the line," he said bluntly.  "She was bleeding.  They took her to Saint Jude's."

Fuck, not Saint Jude's.  Her mother had died here.  His mother had been taken there after her last suicide attempt, the last one before she'd left him alone on his fifth birthday. 

He tried to shove down his emotions and peeled his ears for the familiar whine, the familiar scream.

"Gimmie the baby!"

Relief filled him as he stalked over to a curtained-in cubical on the charity ward.  The woman in the bed was Laverne, all right, though she looked like hell - her hair mussed up, face red.  There was a doctor between her legs, suturing her closed, and another older one holding a still blue bundle away from her.

"Missus Kosnowski," the older doctor said, his voice irritatingly rational, "if you don't calm down, we're going to have to give you a sedative."

She saw Lenny standing uselessly at the foot of the bed.  "Lenny, they won't give me the baby," she said, a strange desperation in her voice. He remembered the scene in Matanapolous ' again - a light had turned on within her - as if her she  had realized out of nowhere that this was a real child inside of her, the future rolling around beneath her skin.  The fluttering thumps had made him feel love for the baby, for the very first time.  He walked to the doctor, feeling himself shake within, his stomach turning and turning.

The doctor pulled him away from Laverne's prying eyes, turning their backs on her.  "I'm sorry, Mister Kosnowski."    His eyes snapped from the doctor's face to the still bundle in his arms.   "There's no saying what went wrong." he continued, speaking loftily as if on Aristotle and Socrates.  "If I had to hazard a guess, I would say it was strangulation.  The chord was wrapped around her neck." 

Lenny stared blankly at the motionless blankets, remembering his sister Linda's baby boy, Al - he had wriggled and called, chirpy and happy from the second he had been born.  The papoose in his arms made no motion, no sound. 

"There will be other children."

The words made Lenny's head snap up, as if under a corrective blow - the truth puncturing him like a needle.  "How can you say that to me?" he snapped, his voice guttural.  Why did it hurt so much, the sight of that still body?

The doctor shrunk back.  "The best way to counteract your wife's hysteria," the doctor past him, "is to start right away on a new baby.  The less time she has to think about this one, the less it will hurt her."  With that he strode out of the cubical, leaving Lenny and Laverne all but alone.

Her voice came through to him, thin and reedy.  "Why won't she cry, Lenny?" she asked in a helpless sort of voice - he realized Laverne had been talking ceaselessly, trying to get his attention but too weak to throw anything at him.

He stared blankly at the bundle thrust to the crook of his arm.  Cautiously, he peeled back the blanket, wanting to see, knowing he would never forget. 

The child in his arms was breathtaking.  He recognized the line of Laverne's jaw, the shape of her eyes - his own cheeks, the tuft of blond hair.   Then he saw the blue-purple cast of the skin, felt the stillness of the body.

He sank down on the edge of her bed, staring blankly at the little face that would never smile for him, never cry.  He felt her weak hand on his shoulder, trying to turn him.  "Lenny, let me see her...."

He dipped his arms, watched horror dawn on her face.  "No," she whispered.  "No."

He lay the baby against her side, climbed into the bed with her, keeping her warm between their prone bodies.  "I'm so sorry," he said, and meant it.

Silently, she curled up into a ball and away from him, kicking away the doctor working between her legs and segregating them to their own miseries.

***

"The baby came before i found the magic how to keep her happy."

***

"There'll be other babies."

Lenny grew to hate that phrase, one that was repeated to him over and over again over the past week.  There will be other babies.  They'd get over this.  Then why did he want the one they were burying?

He glanced around himself , the near-empty interior of Saint Anne's.  They had been married here almost a year ago, and he couldn't reconcile memories of the festive ceremony with the sterile gloom of the rectory today.  He stared at the huge wooden crucifix hung over the altar, straight ahead, like he had as a soldier in the chore during drills.  Then there was the sound of an organ, a funerary march - his best friend and her father easily bearing a box down to the front of the church and book ending them in the pew.  Father Delvecchio began to talk and Squiggy began to sob, but Lenny didn't understand the words.  He only saw the crate and a small spray of white carnations no longer than his arm crowning it.  Then he stared at the flowers to avoid staring at the casket.

Other thing happened, but Lenny had no real memory of them when he talked about that day with Laverne later.  Frank had read the twenty-third psalm, and Shirley sang "Nearer My God To Thee" at Laverne's request.  In all, ten people came to the funeral, and Lenny was furious about that.  The logical part of his mind reminded him that their friends were not funeral people, but at the very least his father should have come instead of going to Oxnard to check on his recently-divorced and apparently suicidal Uncle Ogden.

Lenny's anger was weaker, as always, than his sense of pain.  What was going on under his skin was worse than anything he had imagined.  Worse than the worst beating he had ever gotten - at the age of three, at the hands of his mother and a rolling pin.  The pain shredding open Lenny Kosnowski shocked his usually ebullient voice into silence. 

He felt cold, too.  So damn cold.  He couldn't feel any warmth, even from Laverne's body propped beside his side – and her presence was usually quite radiant.  Her head rested against his shoulder – when he glanced her way during communion, her own features were glazed, shell-shocked.  When they returned to say their rosaries she burrowed her face against his neck and kept it there until the ceremony was over.

Frank drove them to Heaven's Gate Cemetery - to the small plot that had been dug up beside Josephine DeFazio's body, where their little girl would lie.  The child was an unconsecrated being – she had been baptized after death, and under Laverne’s hysterical questioning Father Delvecchio had been unable to tell her the baby would wait for her in heaven.  Laverne would know no peace until the baby lay with her mother, and when she refused to eat for an entire week Frank had worked his magic at the church, and the baby would be allowed part of what would one day be Frank’s plot.  There were more words of sorrow spoken - Lenny mouthed an Our Father but was emotionless.  Eventually he was alone with Laverne.  Eventually, he got up and walked to the side of the grave.

There were small blood red carnations filling the hole - dotting the pure white of the small casket.  Where once he couldn't bare to look Lenny now stared endlessly into the ground.  He wished it would swallow him up.  He wished God had taken him instead.

He returned, mentally, to the funeral of his maternal Grandfather, a communist refugee from Russia.   His mother had bawled by that grave, but Lenny couldn't conjure a single tear for the baby he'd barely known.  It wasn't a malicious feeling - he was too wasted by self-pity to think of mourning another.  In truth, frighteningly, Lenny felt nothing at all, not even the rain on his skin.

"Goodnight, Pappa." his mother had said to her father.

"Goodnight, Josie," he said to the grave.

Then he turned to his sobbing wife and left the cemetery.

***

"Alarming desperation leads me to believe with all my shields and protections it's only me I deceive"

***

"Are you okay?"

"Huh?  Yeah, Len - I'm just reading."

"Whatt're you...oh."

"Don’t say it like that.  Shirl said she'd come by and take these to the missionary tomorrow."

"You sure you wanna get rid of the baby's stuff?"

"Why not?  Who's gonna use it?"

"Vernie."

It's okay."

"No it’s not."

"It will be when everything’s gone.”

“No it won’t.  You cry all night.  You try to sleep all weekend. ..”

“Yeah, well, I can't live with all of this stuff - the baby's stuff - when I wake up, it's all over the place.  It's all I see when I got to sleep."

"I know.  It's hard..."

"No it's not, not for you!  You barely cried over Josie..."

"I..."

"You act like it don't hurt when all it's doing is killing me..."

"Vernie..."

"And now you won't touch me - you won't even look at me!"

"You?  I don’t want you to look at me!  It’s all my fault, Laverne."

"How -"

"When you first told me you were gonna have a baby, I wished it was a mistake!  Then I was angry at it for making you sick.  I didn't start loving Josie 'til you let me feel her move around."

"You didn’t mean for her to die.”

“No, Vernie, you gotta believe me…”

“Len, wishing don't make things happen.  The doctor told me babies sometimes die that way - for no real special reason.  He said I was lucky I went into labor when I did.  I was starting to get an infection…"

"I coulda taken better care of you."

"No.  You're a great husband, Len.  I ain't been a great wife."

"You are.  I guess we've both been trying too hard not to feel nothing."

"Do you ever look at the pictures they took at the hospital?"

"When I'm alone.  I didn't think you wanted to see them."

"I look at them sometimes, too.  Josie was beautiful - she looks like you."

"She had your eyes – the shape, I mean."

"I bet she would have had your smile."

"We'll never know."

"No - but we don't have to forget her.  Maybe we should go down to the cemetery tomorrow, see her and Mamma."

"I'd like to do that.  I ain't been there since we buried her."

"Len?  Do you mind if I keep some of this stuff?"

"We had a little girl.  I don’t wanna forget that."

***

"And the greatest gift of life is to know love..."

***

"What are you calling her?"

Laverne looked down at the infant in her arms.  Tiny arms waved away over the blanket over a red, wrinkled face.  She looked nothing like a storybook child and everything like her husband, but she was alive, here, breathing, real. 

This pregnancy had been a dream, compared to the last - little sickness to contend with - and planned faultlessly to coincide with Lenny's promotion.  All of the hysteria this time out had been Lenny’s – every sneeze and cough was instantly attended to as Lenny doted on her every sound.   Still, stubbornly, she had worked up to her ninth month, while Lenny fretted and overfed her.  She lamented her lost size-ten frame, then saw again the bright blue eyes of her baby girl and ceased to care.  She would pray a novena, soon, in thanks – and a rosary for her baby’s big sister. 

Briefly, she shared a look with Lenny, and once again their unspoken connection seemed to say it all.  He rubbed her big toe through the sheets and she turned to her guest.  "I dunno, Genius.  We were thinking Mary or Agathea."

"How about Squiggy?" Lenny asked, but one look from his wife negated that.

Genius Jones placed his index finger beside his chin, a gesture Laverne had always hated.  He was an old friend from high school - her favorite tutor, a hundred pounds ago.  "Hmm - an interesting conundrum.  Have you considered the name Nyssa?"

"What the heck is a Nyssa?" Lenny asked.

"Don't either of you speak Greek?" Genius seemed to live in a world where such an event was clearly impossible.  "Nyssa...Nyssa..." he pushed a hand into his breast pocket and pulled out a leather-bound miniature dictionary.

"You carry a Greek dictionary?" Laverne wondered.

"Of course - one never knows when one needs to communicate with the Matanapolouses....Aha!  Nyssa."  He held out the dictionary to Laverne and pointed out the name.

She scanned the definition once and smiled.  "It's perfect."

"I don't get a say?"  she sighed and handed the dictionary to Lenny, the baby in her arms and her finger under the word.

He read and absorbed, slowly but just as efficiently, and a huge smile spread across his face.  "It's perfect," he replied.  "Nyessa."

"Nyssa," she replied - they both knew the meaning and savored it.

Nyssa.  Starting point.