Chapter Text
When Vivian was born she weighed five pounds, eight ounces. A tiny thing Jennifer could cradle in one arm.
By the time it all unravels, Vivian weighs a hundred and five pounds and is five-feet, five inches tall. These are details that become important when Jen flies from her office in Montclair to Bellevue. She’s a doctor, but she has no idea why this information matters.
There’s a tube in her daughter’s throat and lines leading into her arms.
"I don’t understand what’s happening,” she tells them, but her voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere very far away. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
She hadn’t been watching the press conference her daughter the hotshot new federal prosecutor gave in a public corruption case; if she had she would have seen and heard what happened. But her daughter was giving press conferences in the case once or twice a week, and Jennifer so rarely understood what it was her daughter was saying.
She thinks: Why won’t anyone tell me what’s happening?
She looks at her daughter. Picks up the hand unencumbered by monitors. And weeps like the world is ending.
Jason comes in the afternoon; she tells him not to bring the kids, who aren’t such little kids anymore. “I know they’re thirteen, but it would be a lot for anyone, and she’s unconscious.”
He puts his hand on Jen’s shoulder, and stares at his little sister. “When she was a baby I used to like watching her sleep. She always looked so peaceful.” He doesn’t say that this is exactly like that, but it’s obvious: Here she is, so still and so quiet, sedated in a hospital bed.
“What happened?” Jen’s voice is a croak. But she knows Jason would know.
“The FBI already got the guy, and the US. Attorney’s Office is already moving to indict.” The fact that he opens with that tells Jennifer a lot. “Someone shot her on the courthouse steps over the case. They’re saying that within thirty seconds she was being attended to by the marshals.”
He doesn’t mention what the shooter had shouted, insinuating that his baby sister had sucked off the judge in chambers to get a favorable ruling. Between that and the blood on the granite steps, it’s been a long day of Vivian at her lowest.
Jen sighs, leans on Jason’s shoulder. “Jesus Christ.” Her voice is a whisper. “She looks so small.”
Jason wraps his arm around his mother’s shoulder.
He was so angry, when she told him she was pregnant. She’d taken him to a nice restaurant to let him know, to sweeten the deal and try to stem any outburst. The way he looks at her place setting—that she’d only ordered Diet Coke—seemed to set him off. “If you wanted to find a reason to quit drinking, I’m sure there was an easier one,” Jason said, looking at her with something between contempt and pity. Like he’s mad that he wasn’t a good enough reason for her to want to be well.
Jen’s lower lip wobbled and her eyes filled with tears. There was so much she could take. There was so much she could bear. But her son’s naked disdain for her makes her ill. “Jason—“ Her voice wavers pitifully, and she can’t get the words out. It feels like her throat is closing, to know how disappointed he is in her, how little he thinks of her, her choices, her behavior, how much resentment he must have been carrying only to have the balloon popped when she became a figure worthy of pity and vengeance.
(Vengeance is mine; I will repay)
“Is it his?” Her son’s voice is now equally small, like the sight of his mother about to fall apart at dinner had sobered him, made him a boy again.
Jen wipes beneath her eyes with her thumb, her lips with the back of her wrist. “Whose?”
“His.”
She understands instantly, as if someone had splashed ice water all over her, the deep silencing thud of recognition.
Jason never saw her rapist, because it never got to the point where he would have gone with her for moral support into a police station or a courtroom. So he has built up this person in his head, the man who hurt his mommy, into some sort of monster. And maybe he is—he is so much larger in Jen’s nightmares, after all—but he is also still just a person in the same fucked-up world Jen inhabits.
The word comes out an exhale. “No. No, Jason, no.”
“Is it Dad’s?” She shakes her head.
They sit in silence. Jason drains his pinot noir and when the waiter comes by and offers him a refill, he accepts. Jen stares at her soda and her plate of gnocchi that has rapidly turned to a brick in her stomach.
“So who’s the dad?”
“I don’t know, Jason.” Her voice is wretched. She keeps having to say it, and it’s the lie she picked, and it guts her every single time, this sharp fluty blade slicing her open again and again. But then she pauses. “It’s a girl, Jase.”
The waiter comes by with Jason’s refill. He stares at his mother in silence. She stares at her hands, studying her knuckles. (When she was a young mom and Jason was a young boy, she’d sing him “The Boxer” all the time. “And he carries the reminder of every glove that laid him down or cut him, til he cried out, in his anger and his shame I am leaving, I am leaving, yet the fighter still remains.”).
There’s something in his face she can hardly bear to look at. She is seeing her son as a man and a boy, someone who adores her and resents her, all in one expression. “Holy shit. A baby sister.”
And now he sits with his eyes shut in the chair next to the hospital bed, holding his baby sister’s hand.
When Richard comes, he brings Jennifer take-out, and she notes that he looks so much like a grandfather, like an old man (which, of course, he is, even if she still doesn’t think of him that way). “Thanks, Richard,” she says softly, popping the lid off a container of sweet and sour chicken. “Smells good.”
“She’s still out? Is it medically-induced?”
Jen nods. “She hit her head when she fell; there was a lot of swelling on the brain. A bleed.” It’s so easy for her to sip back into thinking like a doctor, even though it’s her daughter laying there in the bed. Sometimes when it’s very quiet she thinks she can hear the thunk and crack and thwack of her daughter’s head hitting the stair in broad daylight surrounded by crowds and noise and voices (her mind thinks bullets puncturing flesh would be mostly silent; she doesn’t know how to hear that). The way something so awful could not possibly happen in sunlight.
(It always comes back to stairs; she will not, she cannot, let herself interrogate this).
Richard puts his hand on Jen’s shoulder. “If you want to go home and get some sleep, I’ll stay with her.” Jen shakes her head. He puts his hand on her shoulder, still standing over her. “You smell like a hospital. You haven’t slept since she got here. She’s not going anywhere, Jenny. Get some sleep.” It’s the fact that he calls her Jenny—the name of beds and births, a quiet name he calls her only in the dark—that makes the fight drain out of her.
“Okay. If anything happens—“
“I’ll call you. But I think she can wait for you to come back. She could use the rest, anyway.”
And Vivian, who so rarely misses her cues, opens her eyes and begins choking on her tracheal tube. Jennifer is at once at her daughter’s bedside, bag still slung over her shoulder and only one arm in the sleeve of her jacket, while Richard calmly asks for a nurse. “Honey, it’s okay. Shh. Don’t panic. There’s a tube in your throat; I know it’s uncomfortable. Just hold my hand. I missed you so much, Viv.” Her voice his hazy with tears.
Richard watches this like he’s watching the answer to Jen’s prayer, this second chance, this miracle.
Vivian had had emergency surgery to repair a punctured lung and a liver laceration. Later, surgery to stop a bleed in her brain and put a small plate in the back of her skull, which ended up being worse off than triage had suggested. When she wakes, she is diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. Owing to this, she spends a lot of time nauseous and vomiting with her eyes closed while Jen holds her hand, during the parts of the day she isn’t sedated. “‘M off the case, aren’t I?”
Jen can’t tell if her daughter sounds regretful or relieved about that. So she hums.
“D’they keep the bullets? Can I see ‘em?” Vivian’s words keeping coming out slurred; the doctors tell them both it will pass. It would be funny, if Jennifer wasn’t so very terrified that her daughter would be permanently disabled.
“The bullets are with the FBI as evidence, honey.”
“But they got ‘em out?” Jen nods. “Neat.” Vivian then pulls the top of her hospital gown down, giving Jen an eyeful. But she traces the line of stitches on her ribs, covered with bandages. “Gonna be a cool scar.” And Jen tries to realize what’s going on in her daughter’s mind. Her now-topless daughter, brain scrambled by injury, trying to understand what has been done to her body.
Jen helps readjust the top of the gown. “Battle wounds.”
(The scar on her knee was never surgical; it faded in time. Vivian will always bear these scars, these reminders).
Vivian closes her eyes. “When's my brain gonna be better?”
“I don’t know, honey.” Sweeps her daughter’s hair out of her face. “I’m just glad you’re awake.”
Jen kisses her daughter’s head dozens of times a day, as if she could kiss it better, make it it so.
The look on Vivian’s face makes Jennifer think of her as a little toddler, and the fear and confusion breaks Jen’s heart. “What if my brain doesn’t work?”
There’s this moment no one on earth lived but her: Walking from her car to the emergency room at University Hospital in Newark, knowing that there’s still blood dripping down the inside of her thighs, knowing that her knee is still bleeding and has swollen. She wonders if it would be easier to take off her shoes in the parking lot or if that would be one more indignity than she could possibly handle.
The ripped underwear are balled up in her purse.
There is something so jarring about the fact that it’s a really beautiful day, with the sun only just gone down (why do sunsets always look best from parking lots, she wonders), and she was raped in the stairwell at work half an hour earlier. It feels like it’s too much to comprehend.
When she finally makes it through the double doors the blood announces her, and then everything is medical, sterile white, nurses instructing her to strip on a big brown sheet of paper so the evidence remains, and then tenderly buttoning up her hospital gown.
But when she was in the parking lot, when she had to walk into the hospital, the world felt so beautiful for all the horror it had just done her.
Jennifer thinks of this moment, when she thinks of what her daughter must have felt for thirty seconds bleeding on the stairs in front of the federal courthouse all alone. She would have been looking up. What did the sky look like for Vivian, in that moment that nobody but her has ever lived?
When Vivian is unconscious, Jennifer wonders what Anthony would say. What he would do. How big his feelings would be; how they’d absorb everything, eclipse everything. She imagines it, wonders it, and then finds herself letting it go. He doesn’t know their daughter; he doesn’t know this world. She looks down at her daughter in a hospital bed, gently smoothing Aquaphor on her dry lips cracked from the hospital air, and she thinks he could never understand. Their daughter did justice for a living.
(And yet sometimes she thinks of the way he held her shoulders, her hand, in her office while she sobbed, the way he wanted to understand her).
She dreams that she and Vivian are in her office; Vivian is her patient, and is bleeding out of bullet holes in her chest and stomach. “I need help,” Vivian says, and Jennifer in her dream doesn’t remember that this is her child. She watches Vivian slice a clean line all the way around her torso and hand her a needle and a length of cord to stitch her up. “I think you can help me?” The wound doesn’t bleed as Jen criss-crosses nylon rope to keep her patient together.
"This therapy shit is all a racket. You know it, and I know it," Anthony's voice says, but she can't see his face.
"Oh, shut the fuck up," Vivian replies ethereally, her body somehow covered and uncovered all at once while Jennifer pulls on the threads like she's lacing up a corset. "What could you know that I don't already know?"
Then Vivian is in a white negligee, something nearly angelic, covered in a sheen of blood splatter that hasn’t quite soaked in. Jennifer can't tell where all the blood is coming from. “I think you are very hurt,” she whispers, and Vivian nods and smiles. She has such a beautiful smile.
“Why else would I be here?”
The morning after Vivian’s birth, Jennifer calls Anthony at the strip club, and someone takes a message. “Anthony, it’s me. It happened. I just wanted you to know.”
It feels seedy and debasing to call a strip club to inform her daughter's father that she's been born. It degrades her; it feels like a filthy thing to do while she's holding her newborn child. This thing she has to be cool and indirect about because nobody can know. She could be calling about a drug deal or a hit or an abortion, for all anyone listening would know. Except he would know. She gazes down at her daughter, their daughter, this thing that happened.
Vivian’s days are spent laying in a dark room listening to audiobooks and podcasts with her eyes closed. (“I am trying to stay up-to-date on my profession,” she explains one night, carefully enunciating her words like a drunk person, before Jen checks and realizes she’s listening to a mass-market mystery novel. Jen can’t tell if her daughter was just lying, or making a joke, or really has no idea what she’s listening to).
Luna keeps vigil in the corner of Vivian’s room, staring up at her with perfectly mournful puppy-dog eyes from her dog bed, occasionally rising to press her wet nose to Vivian’s hand or offer licks.
The first weekend she’s home, Carmela brings food. Vivian can hear them talking downstairs, but doesn’t bother straining her hearing to make anything out. Everything is effort now; everything is work.
She's halfway nodding off when she hears a quiet "hey there" from the doorway.
“I brought pastina. Meadow and AJ always liked it when they were sick.” Carmela watches Vivian struggle to lift herself into a sitting position.
“If you close the blinds I can prob’ly take the mask off. Don’t wanna spill all over myself. Waste a good home-cooked Italian mom meal.” Vivian’s crooked grin makes her look a lot like Jen, Carmela thinks. It’s still so hard to see Tony in his daughter, even when she knows it’s true, has accepted it and made her peace with it. Vivian just doesn’t look like Tony all that much.
(Meadow always looked more like Carmela, she thinks; AJ was his dad’s spitting image from the moment he was born).
Sometimes, Carmela thinks that if she was a worse woman, she’d wonder if Jen had lied. But no woman would articulate a lie that would put her through that much pain, for that long, not when there are so many easier stories, not when DNA can cut through them all.
There are dark circles under Vivian’s eyes, livid purplish-blue like she’d been hit square in the face, and her lips are chapped. Limp post-hospital hair remains in a braid. “Madone. You poor thing.” Carmela helps Vivian sit up, mindful of her many wounds. She keeps a hand on Vivian’s forearm like she's afraid to let go.
A little laugh. “You should see the other guy.”
They sit in the dark.
“You could turn on music if you want. Or talk. I’m okay with sounds. It’s the light, looking at stuff, that’s really hard.” Vivian’s eyes are closed. She’s finished throwing up and apologizing about it (“I’m so sorry, I have pretty much only been drinking nutritional supplements, I don’t know why I thought I could handle real food, I’m so sorry”) while Carmela held a deep tray under her mouth and rubbed her back in soothing circles.
It reminds Carmela of taking care of Meadow when she was sick, the bristle of independence bumping up against the realization of helplessness. Meadow has a family and a life, doesn’t need Carmela the way she used to. It’s so nice to feel needed again.
“You know, Tony got shot. A couple of times, actually. One hit his pancreas and he was out for about a week.”
Vivian tries to sit up a little taller. “I’m glad to know I am upholding a Soprano family tradition.”
“Well, Tony did usually do something to deserve it.” No matter how many years pass, her bones will always remember the perennial nervousness of what could happen. “Can’t say the same about you.”
(Vivian was never supposed to get hurt).
What Carmela also can’t say is that unlike Jennifer, she’s seen the footage over and over, like she’s trying to make sense of it. Vivian’s a good kid, she keeps thinking, she doesn’t deserve this. She’s doing something good with her life. How could this happen to someone like this? Meadow had called her, a little bit frantic, after seeing it on the news. “Mom, holy fuck, is she even still alive? Holy shit. I feel like, when Dad got shot—“
And Carmela has to cut that train of thought off. She can’t entertain it.
But she’s watched the video. She knows the thunk and thwack of skull hitting granite federal stairs; she knows what Vivian looks like when her baby-blue button-down is covered in blood. She knows what it’s like to feel her blood run cold and not even know if she can help. How she could help. If they would even want her to help. (I know, she wants to tell Jennifer, what you're going through. I do. The way your stomach won't stop hurting, the way it hurts to breathe).
And that, she supposes, is when she realizes she loves Vivian, loves Jen, thinks of them like family, the same fierce need to keep them safe coming up to make her ache.
She waited about a day before calling Jennifer’s cell, which goes unsurprisingly to voicemail. “Jen, I’m so sorry—I didn’t want to call earlier because I figured you’d be frantic and busy, and I guess you still are. Jesus, I’m so sorry. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do. Just call. I’ll do whatever you need.” Carmela wonders if she could close out with “Love you,” but the words are out in a mumble before she gets a chance to think.
But, she doesn’t regret it. It must be true or else she wouldn’t have felt compelled.
She wonders what Tony would do, if he knew that his daughter was laying in a hospital bed on sedation, with tubes and wires and catheters, because she was trying to go some good in the world. Forget the feds; he'd murder the man without a second thought.
(Sometimes, since Jen told her, she wonders if Tony ever knew about the rape, if that’s another dismembered body somewhere in the Meadowlands waiting to be found).
Sometimes she thinks of how the way he loved was violence.
Since the shooting, Jen has seemed surprised that Carmela doesn’t know more about how to cope; and then backtracked, apologizing, “I’m sorry, I just assumed—“
But Jen wasn’t necessarily wrong to assume. There were rules to that thing of theirs, you leave the kids alone, and you definitely leave the boss’ kids alone. And they tried to keep their kids on some semblance of straight-and-narrow, made hard because they of course had no idea what that would look like.
And then, she looks at Vivian in her bed with pill bottles upon pill bottles next her, apparently fed by nutritional paste, in a dark room recovering from gunshots and a head wound, and all Carmela can think is a set of twin thoughts that make her nauseous. “We were so lucky,” she thinks, but feels guilty that they didn’t earn their good fortune. “She never did anything wrong.”
In the dark, when she can’t sleep, when it’s bright noon outside but she still can’t look toward the light, Vivian conjures up her shooter. Some asshole in a baseball hat, she imagines when she’s being sincere. Some slick KGB or MI-5 agent, when she’s seeking to fluff herself up, make herself bigger and more important in her imagination.
What she doesn't even know how to imagine is what she looked like on the steps. There was obviously blood—you don’t take a couple of bullets without blood—but she can’t picture what it was like. It happened to her, but it’s hearsay; it could have happened to someone else. Her head was somewhere else, and now she wonders what she would have thought, tried to say, if she had known.
Vivian sleeps, thanks to the regular schedule of medication she’s on (Carmela had to give her a trazodone pill, while Vivian did her best not to show that she was in pain). It’s a relief when Jennifer comes home, brandishing margarita mix, of all things. “I usually do ‘em myself, but…fuck it.” She dumps half a bottle of Jose Cuervo into a pitcher, tops it with the mix, and holds it out to Carmela. “Let me know what it needs more of, booze or sugar.”
Carmela dutifully takes a sip. Pulls a face. “That tastes fucking horrible.”
“Everything’s kind of fucking horrible right now.” They take the pitcher into the backyard. “I don’t really have any food in the house. Pizza sound good?”
When Tony was shot, people kept bringing food. It was relentless, this stream of rigatoni and lasagna and ziti in aluminum casserole trays. It’s foreign to Carmela, the idea that this wouldn’t be the case for Jen. “I wish you’d said something—I would’ve brought over whatever you wanted.” Now she feels silly, only bringing enough food for two or three people.
But Jen just waves her hand. “Thanks so much. Really. But she’s still not really eating, and my nerves are just—no one here is up to big meals yet.”
Within half an hour they’re both on their way to tipsy off shitty margaritas, digging into a pizza, while music plays and the sun sets. “Thanks for watching her earlier. It’s so hard…She keeps asking me why. Why did it happen? Why is my brain like this? And I can’t honestly tell if she’s just righteously upset, or if she really…doesn’t remember.” Jen takes a deep breath, shuts her eyes. “I just needed air.”
(Jen had been halfway to her office, to sit and stare at a wall in perfect silence, when she decided to go to the library and curl up with a shitty beach read in the biggest chair she could find near the children’s section; she liked the sound of kids sounding out words and laughing).
Carmela offers a soft, closed-lip smile. “She’s pretty funny. Seemed with it, when I was with her. But she was very apologetic about the darkness and the throwing up.”
“It’s like having a baby again, only the baby weighs a hundred pounds and can swear at me. Except I think I love her even more now." Jen pauses to think while she sips. “Wow, this is a really fucking horrible margarita.”
“Where d’you keep your booze? I think I can do better.”
Jen ends up sitting on the counter while she watches Carmela tear through her fridge and cupboards and bar cart to find what she’s looking for, listening to her mumble ingredients. “Is this what it’s like when you cook? You seem very focused. On a mission.”
Carmela finds lime juice, half a bottle of Fresca, and is pretty sure the fridge has a built-in ice maker. She presents her improvement to Jen in a coffee mug. “Not exactly a margarita, but it can’t possibly taste worse than that shit. And if the tequila is the problem, you’ve got vodka.”
(Still Belvedere, even after all this time; Jennifer can’t help what she likes).
A hum, while Jen takes a sip. “Much better.” And then she looks at Carmela. “I never asked you, what it was like after AJ. And what I’m going through is fucking horrible. But it’s still not close. I’m so sorry I never asked.”
Carmela moves to a kitchen table to sit, thinking. “Meadow has her family, y’know? And Tony was dead. So I was just alone in this house that was never going to be loud again. I’d go running.” She laughs a little. “I’m not a runner—I did spin classes and pilates, not running—but I found a pair of Mead’s old sneakers and ran like I was—I don’t know.”
Jen’s smile is heartbreakingly sympathetic, a little bit sad like she was expressing what Carmela was feeling. “Like you were running away?” A nod.
It occurs to Jennifer that she, herself, still has people. Carmela's son died and she was alone. Who offered to bring her meals she didn’t want? Jen still has Jason and Dani to help, still has Richard making sure little details of things get handled (insurance, finances, all just in case…).
Carmela had nobody. It breaks Jennifer’s heart. “You okay?”
She realizes she’s crying a little bit (and also realizes she’s probably a little drunker than she thought). “I’m okay. It just made me…I hadn’t thought… You were just alone. It just made me sad. No one should be alone for something like this. Like that.”
There’s the beginning of a defensive bristle. Carmela still had Meadow and Mike, she thinks, and her grandkids—but they weren’t there, in that house, with her. So her shoulders slump. “Yeah. It was really hard.”
It was so hard to get up every day in the home her son died in. It was so hard to keep living. It was so hard to find the motivation to cook or wash the dishes or shower, to remember that there was a life beyond those walls. She hated that home because it held all the hurt, and yet she couldn’t bear to leave it. The world outside kept going. It kept going. Carmela was terrified of being left behind by the world, but more than that, more than anything, terrified of the world leaving her son behind. Forgetting him.
“So you ran.” Carmela nods. “Do you think you’re still running?”
If they realize they’re slipping into doctor and patient mode, that Carmela is getting to see Dr. Jennifer Melfi who knew her husband’s sins and secrets, the person in charge of fixing him, neither of them notices.
“I mean, I still go running.” But she tries to think through the tequila and the painful memories: Her son in a bed not unlike Vivian, but unlike her, not awake, no hope to wake up. “Maybe I am. I don’t know. I used to belong somewhere. Now I don’t.”
And wants to say—when I was spoon-feeding pastina to your adult daughter and put Italian opera on and listened to her explain it to me while she moved her hand the way ballerinas move their hands, I felt, like maybe, maybe I could belong here? She wants to say it, wants to be understood. But she’s so afraid that Jennifer will look at her, will look at her past and her dead husband, and then look at her daughter and say, No, I made this choice a long time ago.
Jennifer looks at her with a sympathetic face. “What if you didn’t have to keep running? What would that look like for you?”
Carmela glances down at her bare feet against the soft amber tile of Jen’s kitchen. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to figure it out tonight.” And then Jen stops. Smiles tentatively. “Y’know, after that sleepover we had, Vivian was really happy I’d made a real friend. She also thought your pancakes and scrambled eggs were outrageous.” Puts her mug of margarita on the counter and goes to hug Carmela properly.
And Carmela hugs back tight. There are so many things she wants to say. So many things she wants someone else to hear. To understand.
Jennifer strokes a hand up and down Carmela’s back. Plants a kiss on her cheek that she hopes Carmela will understand. “Vivian runs a lot. Since she was at Columbia. When she’s better, you should go out with her. And then you have a place to come back to, when you’re done.”
Nobody is ever missing.