Chapter Text
Boston
January, 1953
The soft tick...tick... tick…. seemed to fill every darkened corner of the living room. Two hours past midnight.
The roll-top desk was covered with the usual books, papers, and tea-things of a night’s hard study. The only novelties, to his eye, were the bottle at her elbow—a good sight emptier than last he’d observed it—and the tears on her cheeks in the lamplight.
“May I ask what it is we drink to this night?” he attempted, reaching cheekily for her tumbler and taking a draught.
She laughed, a huff of air that finished in an unmistakable, heartbreaking sob.
He kissed her hair, pulling a chair alongside. “Wi’ the bairns and your studies, Claire—Ye ken that it’s is alright if ye need to step back a wee bit and—“
“I don't. I’m fine,” she said with forced good cheer, eyes swollen. “Just a little tired tonight.”
“I dinna doubt it. Your wee book is open to the same page as when ye first sat down at half-past nine.”
Her eyes welled afresh with tears, though she tried to hide them.
"Come to bed, love," he crooned reaching for her. "Ye need rest."
She shook her head silently, scrubbed hands over her eyes and pulling her stockinged feet up onto the chair.
When she next spoke, legs tucked tight into her chest, her words were scarcely to be heard.
“I just can’t bear it, Jamie”
He minded the newspaper, then, and didn’t need to reread the headline, the words bleeding from the ring of the whisky glass.
Virus infected 60,000 US children, killed 3,000 in 1952
“They’re just kids,” came the whisper across her knees, “babies. Sixty-thousand of them, and in the blink of an eye, they’re either crippled or—“ Her voice broke, teeth clenching. “And we can’t do a bloody thing to prevent it.”
“Surely—“ He hesitated. “Surely they’ll find the Vaccine for it soon?”
He said this tentatively, not only thinking of his fundamental lack of knowledge of Vaccination but also of his wife, what that tight jaw tended to forbode. He expected her to snap back, to let her rage at the world find him as easy scapegoat; but she only shook her head, eyes bright, defeated. “I really don’t know.”
Nor did anyone. The papers brought news of treatments, of developments in the means of sustaining the wee ones afflicted—but not of healing them. Not of giving back their ruined limbs, nor preventing the silent spread of the menace across the world.
“It used to be only a moment here and there,” she was saying, not looking at him. “It's always on the mind of anyone you encounter—at work—with friends—everyone with children. It used to be something I could grit through with rational thinking, or optimism, or whatever you want to call it. With each week that passes now, though, it’s as if every day I wake up expecting the worst. Every time Ian gets a headache or Bree feels warm to the touch. I’ve faced war and unthinkable loss more times than most and I’ve come through—I’ve learned to be strong my entire life. I thought... Call me arrogant, but I thought...Damn it, am I not better than this? Am I no better than this pathetic despair?
He brushed the hair softly back from her face. “Ye canna be better or worse than a feeling. Ye canna control such a thing. It doesna change who ye are, to feel so.”
“And I know—I KNOW that of course it will be alright, someday.” She was staring at her two hands, as though they held the key. “By some bloody miracle, it will be alright, but I can’t shake the feeling—for months, I haven't been able to shake the fear that it’s never going to change. However could it? The virus has been studied for decades! It’s already killed and maimed so many and yet even the best minds in the world can’t give us any sort of hope!” A glaring passion poured out from her like heat from a forge. “I want it to be like a raider in the night—you shine light upon him and gut the bastard with your dirk, there, then, and he’s done! It’s OVER!”
“...She’s still a highland lass at heart, aye?”
“She is.” Her laugh was like drops of cool water, calming the fire within her, leaving the raw ache bared beneath. “I want it to be something that can be slain. I just can’t bear this feeling that the world is trying to fight a monster made of smoke, and that the more we claw at it, the further it spreads.”
“I feel the same, my Sassenach. The anger. Back then, we hadna such medicines, nor true knowledge of that which made us ill. We’d no notion that control could exist over such things as disease and death. Only that the Lord giveth and He taketh away.”
Her eyes were upon the headline again, unseeing, or perhaps piercing each word with all her might for revelation.
“I’ve grown accustomed to knowing Bree doesna risk losing a limb from an infected scratch, or that Ian has medicines that keep the pain of the ear infections at bay. So much so that the notion that this curse might not be defeated this year, or the next, or even ten years from now is— it seems preposterous. The rage that it brings up in me is—”
“Then how do you accept this?” she croaked, pleading. “How do you keep the—“ she clutched at the newspaper, “—the dread and the grief from—?“
“The same way you do, mo chridhe.” He moved closer and laid a hand on her arm. “By doing what ye can to protect them.”
A dark, cold laugh. “We can’t do a damn thing to protect them.”
“Ye do it already. You do, Claire,” he said firmly, staving off her protest. “Ye keep them apart from crowded places when ye can, in the summertime, when the spread seems to be worst. Ye dinna let talk of it reach their wee ears, if it can be helped. Trite I may seem, aye, I ken it’s in your thoughts, but it doesna make me wrong. Ye talk so gently and carefully to Bree when she hears mention of it from her playmates. Ye tell her the facts about the Polio, yet keep her spirits high, taking her mind to happier thoughts such that the worry is soon forgotten. Remember how it was in the summer? When she would come to us weeping night after night thinking she wouldna be able to run anymore, like wee Janie Foster? It’s been months, now, since the last time.” He cupped her cheek. “You’ve been keeping her nightmares at bay.”
“But all the nightmares kept from her—from them—” She put her hand atop his, pressing it hard as the aching words tumbled out, “they’re just cramming tighter and tighter inside my own head and I’m terrified it’ll never stop.”
“It will.” He stood and raised her to her feet, cradling her close as she let herself weep in earnest at last. “This willna last forever, mo ghraidh. It will not.”
And later, pressed against her bare back, he whispered. “Tomorrow is the only day that matters. And we’ll have the living of it together.”