Chapter Text
June 2017
Jess opens his eyes and everything is fine. He’s in his bed in Philly– it’s not quite dawn, and his six year old daughter, Willa, is sleeping peacefully next to him. All is quiet, still. Then the memories of the previous day crash down on him all at once like a brick wall.
Coming home with Willa after a trip to the library to find Maggie unconscious on their kitchen floor, the ambulance, standing there with Maggie’s sister, the surgeon’s hand on his shoulder telling him she didn’t make it, she’s gone. A ruptured aneurysm, a subarachnoid hemorrhage. No way to know, no way to prevent it, one in fifty people is walking around with an unruptured aneurysm. It’s a shame, she was so young, so beautiful. It was the second worst moment of his life.
The worst moment happened twenty minutes later– when he had to sit down across from his daughter, take her little hands in his, and tell her that her mother was dead. He had to be the one to break his little girl’s heart forever just minutes after his own was obliterated.
He started yesterday as a happy, content man, with a beautiful wife and daughter, a life and family that he wouldn’t trade for all the gold in the Sierra Madre, and ended the day numb as a statue, his daughter sobbing in his arms, staring at a plastic bag with his wife’s clothes and her engagement ring while they waited for an Uber in a hospital parking lot.
He sits up, leaning his head on his knees, watching the rise and fall of Willa’s chest in the gray morning light, her dark blonde hair tangled on her pillow. He wants to go back and live in that moment of forgetting.
He gets up instead. Walks to the kitchen, puts on a pot of coffee like he does every morning.
There’s a Post-it on the top of the coffee pot in Maggie’s handwriting that says “remember to throw out the filter, you White Rabbit” because he always fucking forgets and– Jesus Christ, how is he supposed to do this without her ?
He picks up the phone and dials automatically.
“Jess? It’s five thirty, what’s going on?” Luke’s up, of course he is.
Jess swallows, hard, he’s not sure he can say it. “Luke…”
“What’s wrong, what’s going on? Are you okay, is everyone okay?” Luke says, his voice tinted dark with worry, intensifying with each question.
“Luke, it’s Maggie. She…she’s dead.” He croaks it out, choking on the words, barely able to comprehend them, much less say them aloud.
“Jess, what? What do you mean she’s dead? What happened? Are you and Willa okay?”
“She just…I came home yesterday and she…it was an aneurysm. I’m…Willa and I aren’t hurt. We’re just you know–” His voice breaks off. “We’re still here, and she’s not.”
“Oh God, Jess. I’m so sorry. I’m coming, I’m leaving right now, okay? I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll see you soon, son. I love you.”
Jess nods, not even trusting himself to respond and Luke hangs up, probably rushing out the door. Jess sits down hard in one of the chairs at the kitchen table and drops his head into his hands. He’s not sure how long he sits there, but eventually he hears soft footsteps coming down the stairs. “Daddy?”
“In here Willabean,” He meets her at the stairs, sweeping her up into his arms, feeling her warm against him as she lays her head on his shoulder.
“Daddy, is mommy still dead?”
He kisses her cheek. “Yes. Mommy’s still dead. Something in her brain broke and the doctors tried their best, but they couldn’t fix it. She won’t be coming back. She loved you so much, though. Daddy loves you too and I’ll be here to take care of you, is that okay?” Great, he’s really looking forward to repeating this conversation over and over again.
She nods weakly, burrowing closer into his neck. He pours himself a cup of coffee and walks out to the porch, sitting down on the swing. The sun is coming up and Willa is hanging around his neck, shaking with sobs. He thinks about that day seven years ago when he and Maggie sat on this swing and she handed him the little wrapped package with the positive pregnancy test inside. His face is wet before he even realizes that he’s crying, salty tears dripping into his hot coffee.
“Open it!” Maggie says, excited, beaming.
Jess sighs as he reluctantly unwraps the ribbon and opens the box to reveal a pair of tiny Chuck Taylor high tops. He chuckles, thinking ‘oh how cute and… small’, and then the realization and what it really meant hit him in the solar plexus like a freight train out of nowhere. He looks up at Maggie, his mouth agape, questioning.
“Are these–?”
“And you’re the insightful writer” She says with laughter in her voice.
Jess takes the little shoes out of the box and then he sees the test underneath - two big fat pink positive lines staring at him.
“We’re having a baby,” he whispers, his voice full of wonder.
There are tears in her eyes as she nods and Jess takes her face in his hands and kisses her deeply.
“I want mommy,” Willa says, wrenching him back to the present.
“I know baby, I know, I want mommy too.” He puts the coffee down on the porch rail and rubs circles on her back, humming softly.
When Luke gets there three hours later he’s greeted at the door by an exhausted looking Jess with the phone pressed between his ear and shoulder holding Willa in his arms. Luke reaches out immediately to take Willa into his own arms, “Hey Billiebear,” he says warmly.
“Uncle Luke!” She perks up instantly, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“Hey kiddo, I’m so glad to see you.” He kisses her cheek. “Have you had breakfast?”
“No, I think Daddy was too sad to eat.”
“Okay, well how about Uncle Cool Hand Luke making you some pancakes?”
“Chocolate chips?”
“You got it, Billiebear.” He sets her on the kitchen counter and gets to work making pancake batter. “How are you doing today, sweetheart?”
“I’m okay. I don’t know what we do now without mommy. What happens next?” Her big blue eyes are full of pain and innocence.
“Well, we have a viewing, which is a time for your mommy’s friends and family to say goodbye, and then there will be a funeral, which is where everyone gets together to talk about your mommy and how much they love her, and then you and your daddy come home.”
“And then what?”
“And then you have to go back to school, and Daddy goes to work, and you live together and you love and take care of one another. My mom died when I was around your age too, and my dad and your Grandma Liz and I all took care of one another.”
“Were you sad when your mommy died?”
He sighs as he pours the batter into rounds on the sizzling pan. “Yes, I was really sad. Sometimes I’m still sad about it. It’s okay to be sad.”
She nods seriously. “You’re really smart Uncle Luke.”
He laughs. “Thanks, kid, I do okay,” he says, ruffling her hair affectionately.
Jess joins them in the kitchen. “Sorry Luke, Lena and I have been tag teaming on arrangements with the funeral home all morning.”
“Don’t apologize,” Luke puts down the spatula and pulls him into a tight hug, cupping his hand around the back of Jess’ head. “Oh kid.” he whispers.
Jess pulls back first, scrubbing at his eyes. He can’t do this right now. He has to get through this day somehow and the temptation to break down in Luke’s arms is too strong. “Do I smell pancakes?” he says shakily when Luke releases him.
“Chocolate chip pancakes!” Willa says, with a big toothy grin which warms Jess up for the first time all day.
“Yum,” he says, forcing a half smile.
Jess makes it through the next three days somehow. He grinds his teeth and presses his fingernails into his palms until they bleed like stigmata to get through the endless ‘sorry for your losses’ and ‘everything happens for a reasons’ and ‘time heals all wounds’ and other toothless condolences. He holds hands with Lena, Maggie’s sister, and they choose a coffin (a nice oak one), and an outfit (her favorite blue floral dress, god it used to bring out her eyes), and the music (Tony Bennett, not Sinatra, and In My Life, her favorite Beatles song), and the flowers (champagne lilies), and he bites his bottom lip until it bleeds while Lena cries in his arms.
At the funeral as Jess greets the guests in the anteroom, he imagines Maggie standing over his shoulder, her arms wrapped around his torso like she used to do on lazy Sunday mornings while he cooked breakfast; her chin in the divot of his right shoulder, giving running commentary on everything possible– the guests, their outfits, that guy from work that she hates. When Liz comes in with her overly loud greetings and she and TJ interject themselves in every conversation he hears her whisper in his ear,“they’d fit right in with the cast of Bringing Up Baby.” When ten year old Doula never lets him leave her sight all day, he hears Maggie say “she always wants to protect you.” Maggie had said it once before, when Doula had come to visit during the summer holidays when Willa was about 6 months old. She whispers to him about the way Lena’s pockets overflow with tissues, about Lorelai’s overcompensation for how much she doesn’t like Jess by buying the biggest flower arrangements in the room, about how he shouldn’t have let the funeral home put so much makeup on her when she barely wore any, about how cute Willa looks in her little dress (a simple black dress with sewn dandelions around the waist- Maggie’s handiwork) and what a nice job he did fixing Willa’s hair (it was nothing elaborate- it had a single braid wrapped like a crown). Her voice is so real he can feel her breath in his ear, her lips lightly touching his earlobe, and he breathes out a painful laugh, thinking of all the little moments with her that he never got around to remembering, never got around to… to cherishing.
Chris reads Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning at the funeral, Matt sings a song with lyrics he had written about Maggie and Lena talks about growing up with Maggie as her big sister and mother figure. Jess stumbles through some wildly inadequate words about how the day he met Maggie his universe changed forever and how lucky he was to have her in his life. He quotes her favorite Neil Gaiman line, “It always ends, that’s what gives it value,” and he talks about watching her become a mother and how she gave him everything he never thought he could have in life, how she will always be his home.
He swallows down the words he wants to say about how unfair everything is, how it would have maybe been better to have never met Maggie if this is how it ends. He swallows those words down and he swallows the pain and panic down and he swallows his tears down and he swallows down everything until he’s heavy and almost sick with it. Until it feels dangerous to open his lips because he might accidentally heave it all up, unbidden. He says thank you to everyone who came and he shakes their hands and he makes eye contact because that’s what she would do and he holds Willa until his arms are trembling and he doesn’t think he can stand anymore. Truth be told, there was only one person who could help him get through this day- but she wasn't here. She was out, chasing her dreams, and Jess knew he had no right asking, instead holding onto the hope that she’ll come around to pay her eventual condolences. Or at least call.
Finally the funeral is over and the guests go home and Luke tells Lorelai he’ll see her back at the hotel and he drives them back to their empty house in his pickup truck and he carries his sleeping daughter inside and puts her down in her bed.
He comes down the stairs to the kitchen and Luke is waiting for him with a sandwich and a beer. “You gotta eat something, kid.”
Jess looks at the sandwich like it might bite him. “Luke, I can’t.”
“I can make you something else if you want.”
“No, I can’t do this, any of this,” he gestures vaguely around him. “I can’t do it without her, Luke.” His voice cracks like a little kid and he doesn’t care.
“Jess–” Luke starts, wrapping his arms around his nephew, but he doesn’t say anything else because Jess is already sobbing uncontrollably into his chest, his hands clutching at the back of Luke’s shirt. He’s crying in great, hiccupping sobs, and Luke’s the only thing keeping him on his feet. Luke puts a hand on the back of Jess’ head, stroking his hair. He wants to tell Jess it’s okay, but he knows it isn’t, so he just waits until Jess is too exhausted to cry anymore.