FIC: Lullaby
So I wrote a thing. It's not the next chapter of Walk Tall, or the sequel to Harry Potter & the High School Show Choir, but it is Glee. I hope you like it.
Title: Lullaby
Pairing: Quinn/Puck, Beth, ensemble
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~5,000
Disclaimer: Glee belongs to Ryan Murphy and Fox. I own nothing.
Summary: They're a dozen teenagers with no business being left alone with a small child, let alone raising one between them, but 'family', to Beth, will forever mean warm arms and the sound of voices.
Beth Puckerman's first language is music.
She won't remember when she's older, those six months where she eschews all words and only speaks by humming. She plunks out little melodies on her primary-colored Playskool keyboard and picks at the strings of her daddy's guitar when he leaves it too close to her chubby hands' reach, and doesn't need words, not for happy or sad or tired or want, not when she can play hungry and almost sing no, if it's singing before there are lyrics, before there's anything at all but notes and sounds. Her momma will remember how secretly worried she was, but it makes sense, too, in the life of a child surrounded by people who don't know how to talk to her with anything but song.
Her first clear memories, when she's older, won't be from Lima at all but the ramshackle apartment in Columbus, Momma's books spread out across the table and Daddy kissing her forehead before he heads off to work at night, but some things linger. She'll hum along to her little piano one day, after the first apartment, when they're back home in Lima and Beth has a room all her own, and her mother will pause in the doorway with her about to laugh-about to yell face on, and say,
"Beth? Did Daddy teach you that song?"
"No," she will say unconcernedly, picking out the high notes carefully because her hands still aren't big enough to hit so many keys at once easily, and later she will overhear Momma scolding Daddy in the hallway,
"Where did she even learn any Nine Inch Nails?" she will say, and Daddy will have his about to laugh-about to tell Beth she's awesome face on.
"That time Miss Holiday subbed in senior year?" he'll suggest, and Momma will hit him on the shoulder, and say,
"How could she remember--she was only a year old!" And Daddy will laugh, and notice her watching around the door, like Daddies always do, and scoop her up around the middle, and say,
"Hey, munchkin, d'you know a song that goes like this?" And he'll start singing something that she doesn't know any of the words to but the song sounds right anyway, and she'll sing la la la along with him even in the fast parts, while Momma laughs and laughs and scolds him for, "oh my god, Noah, don't you dare teach our daughter the words to Rocky Horror" until she finally gives up and joins in and they sing together, the tiniest heart of family.
There are things that Quinn will never really tell her about that first, hot summer, even when she's old enough to understand them. It's a part of Beth's life remembered only in snapshots, carefully taped down to brightly-colored construction paper on the first few pages of her baby book, labeled in gold gel pen with Auntie Rache's precise and curly handwriting.
In the pictures, the room looks less tiny and beige, the pile of fabric scraps and sewing things shoved up against the far wall mostly out of frame. There's a cradle in the corner under the window that's later replaced by a crib, an old desk chair covered in a soft quilt for nursing, and a ten-year-old boom box in the corner. Quinn hopes that Beth sees the good things when she looks through those pictures someday, the huge fluffy white duck that still takes up half the crib every night, the mobile of handmade felt musical notes dangling from the wires of unbent coat hangers.
Someday Beth will look at the picture of herself swaddled on her Uncle Artie's lap, watching Uncle Finn and Uncle Mike put on some kind of ridiculous song and dance routine, and ask what her parents were doing leaving a three-month-old infant in the care of three teenage boys without a clue between them. Quinn doesn't know how to explain that nobody else knew any better. Grandma Judy, newly sober, spent more hours at work than at home not for the money but because she had no idea how to raise a child without two Valium and a nanny. And Momma Quinn knew even less back then than she does now, and that so much less than Beth must ever guess, not from anyone.
There's picture of Uncle Kurt staring at Beth like a mystery wrapped in an enigma swaddled in a brand new designer onesie, probably the last few moments before he decided both of their time would be better spent teaching her the harmonies to every Andrew Lloyd Webber song ever written before she could walk. There's Auntie 'Tana looking like she's only refraining from dropping a sleeping Beth because Quinn was watching through the viewfinder while Aunt Brittany did some kind of interpretive song-and-hand-gesture performance that was either about unicorns or zombies. Someday all Beth is going to see there is love, but Quinn sees a bunch of teenagers who no sane parent would trust near their infant child.
Kurt has always shown up with bags of baby clothes and pretended he was saving them all from bad baby fashion and not from having to make the choice between extra formula or diapers. And whether Brittany knows all the songs and games and stories from Elmo and Dora because she has a seven-year-old sister or just because she's Brittany, it's more than any of the rest of them had.
There's no evidence to ever let Beth know about all the questions, all the doubt and fear, and it's going to stay that way. There's no proof of all the nights Quinn stayed awake until dawn out of worry even though Puck was sleeping on the couch downstairs with a baby monitor cradled right next to his head. Nobody ever caught a picture of her crying herself to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, because once her baby was born it was supposed to get easier, but two delivery room arguments and one split decision made in a haze of painkillers and all she's left with are more questions, more doubts, and the realization that nothing in life will ever be easy again.
There's a picture of Aunt 'Cedes with a stroller inherited from Tina's older brother's first kid, taking Beth out for a walk like she did every Monday and Wednesday afternoon it was sunny all summer. When it rained she sat in the hard quilt-covered desk chair facing the window instead of the corner of the old sewing table they used to change diapers on, and sang every old soul song and church spiritual she could think of so Beth wouldn't cry and wake Momma up. There's a picture of Auntie Rache looking halfway between panicked and gleeful the day Quinn had a doctor's appointment and Mercedes had the flu, and everybody else they knew in the world was either out of town or had to work. They came home that day to find Beth bouncing in time to the soundtrack to Wicked and Rachel stenciling a whole constellation of stars onto the plain beige walls in a dozen colors of child-safe permanent marker.
She doesn't talk much and she doesn't cry much. The first time she burst into tears in a New Directions rehearsal she was six months old, and she started sobbing in the middle of thunderous applause just after her Aunt 'Cedes and soon-to-be-Uncle Sam got done with their Breadstix-winning duet. Her diaper was definitely wet, and, judging by the mess of it, had been for some time. Her daddy looked down at her wriggling on Mr. Schuester's desk, diaper-free and suddenly happy as a clam, with his my little girl is even more awesome than I realized face on.
"Did you wait 'til their song was over on purpose?" he asked. Beth cooed. "Shoulda started crying earlier, Mommy and Daddy could use that night out." Nobody believed him for months, and Auntie Rache started saying things much more loudly than Beth ever did about needing a respectfully child-free space to practice for Sectionals, but besides the time Auntie Tina started sobbing in the middle of her own song on Valentine's day and Beth joined in at the top of her lungs, she never makes a peep during a performance at all.
Beth doesn't make much noise even when she's upset, which makes it even easier for her dozen teenage aunts and uncles to confide in her about all their selfish loving teenage agony. She doesn't play peekaboo or dollies or blocks with her babysitters when Daddy needs to work or Momma needs to study or Miss Margie next door begs off, more often than she comes through these days. Beth sits on the ground in front of her toys and stares up with wide eyes while Auntie 'Tana paces and frets and practices secret love songs and angry accusations instead of sitting through first and second period.
Too many words make Beth fuss. She does it quietly, like she doesn't dare draw too much attention to her own problems in the face of so much overwhelming angst, but when she was younger she'd squirm and make little sad noises whenever the people around her talked too long. Now she slinks back into a corner with her duckie and her little piano until Uncle Finn stops ranting or Auntie 'Cedes stops monologuing or Uncle Kurt remembers she's still in the room. Her parents suspect she might like Auntie Rache best just because Rachel almost never talks to Beth at all, just sets her up in her crib as a captive audience and runs through heartfelt ballads for an hour straight without pausing to take a breath.
Her Aunt Sarah cried all the time when she was a baby, when her daddy was still just Little Noah and her daddy's daddy still spent almost a full month home between every seven-week tour. She cried and screamed, and Grandma Ruth has all sorts of advice for that, but none for a baby who sits and frets and whimpers quietly like the weight of the world is too much to bear. When it's too cold for the stroller and gas is too expensive to take her riding in the car, and she doesn't care about the television and she's bored of the three or four baby toys she's really outgrown anyway, there's the music.
There aren't many nights when Noah Puckerman goes home to sleep under his mother's roof any more, although he's almost always out the front door before Grandma Judy wakes up. He knows that eventually a whole day will have to go by without Beth seeing him at all, but if he has his way it won't be until she's gone off and started college at the most super-special smartass university they can find, somewhere far away from Lima. And he sort of plans to move right along with her when that happens, too.
Beth isn't going to grow up like him. Her mother is going to have a college education, and her daddy is going to tuck her into bed every single night for as long as she'll possibly let him. She's going to have so many adults she loves and trusts who aren't afraid to say it back that she's never going to need to throw a slushie in anyone's face to feel important, and she's never going to end up letting a loser like him get her drunk just to feel wanted.
Columbus is going to throw a wrench in so many of his plans that it won't be until years on, when Quinn's ready to graduate, that he'll start to realize how much this constant being jerked around by fate is just life, and how well they've done regardless. He's going to get that mostly-night job as a busboy that turns into a waiter that turns into a bartender that keeps him from putting Beth to bed five or six nights a week, and he's going to run every time his boss says 'jump' or moves him to a lunch shift without notice because it lets him get her up in the morning and feed her breakfast while Quinn tears out of that shithole of an apartment to catch her bus to class on time. He's going to shave his mohawk and go by Noah instead of Puck and he's not even going to miss it.
He and Quinn are going to drop Beth off at Aunt Tina's dorm room or Uncle Finn's fraternity every other week so they can shout at each other in peace. Half the time they'll be rehashing the same old money issues and long-held insecurities just to let off steam, and they'll fall into bed with the fervor of twenty-year-olds who don't have daughters in preschool. The other half, they'll end up with Quinn weeping against his chest, because,
"She's four years old, Noah, and she barely talks. What if there's something wrong with her? Is it something we did, is it because we didn't drop out of school to spend time with her?"
"Hey, hey," he'll soothe. "Trust me, that girl's plenty smart whether she's yakking like a baby Berry or not, and she's never had a problem making us understand her. Worst comes to worse, she'll just end up like Brittany--"
"Oh god she's going to turn out like Brittany," Quinn will moan, and Noah will shake her shoulder and say,
"Yeah, and Brittany's dancing with all her clothes on in Chicago, living in a nicer place than we're gonna see for the next ten years." He'll turn it into the money argument on purpose, because Quinn crying will never not make his heart clench up in ways he doesn't quite know how to handle, but Quinn shouting and angry is enough of a bitch that he doesn't mind shouting right back.
He's going to spend three whole afternoons going though picture books at the library on Quinn's orders before he and Beth both get so miserably bored that they call it off and go to the park. He's going to swallow his pride and call Rachel about tracking down every single dance and music class appropriate for insanely talented five-year-olds, and then swallow his terror and call Finn's mom for advice on not raising another Rachel.
He's going to hold Beth on his lap and teach her to wrap her tiny fingers around the tiny bridge of her guitar himself, and when she cries because the strings cut into her fingers, he's not going to make her stop until she wants to herself. He's going to sing with her every single day of her life until he sends her off to college. And he's probably going to run up one hell of a phone bill then, too.
Even once Beth gets into the habit of calling everybody she knows by name and communicating almost entirely in sentences when she has to, she'll remember some people better by melody. There are certain songs that go with certain people, she knows that, and it means more than any old name anyway.
Finn's freshman year college roommate is going to meet her on a day in September when "Here Comes The Sun" floats down the hall, sung acoustic, loud enough to hear almost from the elevators. He will open his dorm room door saying,
"Hey, dude, I didn't know you could sing so--" and stop as the shock of Finn's fairly practiced voice is replaced by the much greater shock of the visiting two-year-old held so familiarly on his lap while some guy in a mohawk strums a guitar on the other bed.
"Here Comes The Sun" is Uncle Finn's song, from the very first time Momma and Daddy left her alone with him with only the warning, "Sing to her if she starts crying and doesn't need her diaper changed". He spent five minutes staring at her in terror and wracking his brain for any single song that was okay around children, never mind that she was only about four months old, and then the next three hours singing the same one over and over again.
There's an entire month in their senior year when Beth's daddy and her Uncle Finn can hardly stand to look at each other. Whenever they have to sit in the same room with Beth they never say a single word; her daddy just plays his guitar and Uncle Finn sings that song, over and over until it's as locked into their memories as it is in hers.
Uncle Kurt is the Beatles too, though she'll never remember why, and he'll look first startled and then sad when she's old enough to ask him. It's sad, she'll remember that, even though the songs that make her think of him aren't supposed to be sad at all. She hums the chorus of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" every time she wants to demand his attention, and he always crumples and bends down to meet her no matter what else is going on. Uncle Kurt is a good hand-holder, she'll learn someday, when she's old enough to cross roads on her own two feet but not quite old enough to do it by herself, though he'll always get his trying to keep from crying/trying to keep from hugging Beth so tight she can't breathe face on when she says that, too.
Mr. Shoes, who she will always call Mr. Shoes when she has to call him by words and not Uncle or notes, even when she's sixteen and failing Spanish, is ella, ella, ella, eh eh eh. Her momma eventually laughs and tells her he never even sang that part of the song. She tells Beth that it's supposed to be 'Singing In The Rain', but that's not how it should work. Guitars shouldn't get wet and neither should Mr. Shoes. She likes it better her way.
Daddy's song is the one with her name in it, the one he always sings all the time always. It's supposed to be a sad song. Beth knows that, because she's very good at telling which songs are sad and which ones are supposed to be happy, but it took her a long time to figure it out anyway because Daddy doesn't sing it that way. He sings it like a promise in a lullaby.
Beth is going to be the flower girl at her own parents' wedding, the year her momma is finally old enough to have champagne her daddy didn't charm out of the liquor store clerk with a smile and a fake ID. Everything in the back yard will be covered in flowers, especially the girls. Quinn will braid them into Bethie's hair herself, taking care to hold her own head quite still for Santana to do the same.
Beth's parents are never, ever going to leave each other, because if they lose each other they'll either lose Beth or be left with her alone and neither of those things bears thinking about. Beth's momma is never, ever going to leave her daddy for more than the couple of hours of 'mental health break girl time' she takes every month or two with Aunt Britt and Auntie 'Tana. She's not going to Columbus for college alone. She will never even try to plan to go to Columbus alone, to send Beth to preschool alone, to somehow piece together the rent on that first piece of shit apartment alone with only whatever scholarships and financial aid she wins by the claws of her fingers and whatever work she can find time for between babysitters and midterms.
Quinn goes to junior prom with Puck because he asks her when she doesn't expect to go at all, and to senior prom with Noah because who else would go with either of them? She gets ready in the same bedroom she will later dress for her wedding in, all the Glee girls gathered together for one last session of primping and curling before Nationals and graduation and the so-called rest of their life. She wears ice blue for prom, and for her wedding, a whole field of tiny red flowers in her hair.
They're going to win Nationals senior year and it's going to get her a full ride when she makes her case to the scholarship committee. A girl who can make a 3.7 GPA and win Nationals for show choir while caring for a baby is a girl with the drive and the sheer grit to take their money and conquer the world. She could have. L. Quinn Fabray could have stormed out of Lima with all of Rachel's fire and Santana's ruthlessness combined, and nothing on earth could ever have stopped her.
Beth's momma is going to go to Columbus because it's close to home and Uncle Finn and Auntie 'Tana and Aunt Tina will all be just down the road when she needs them. When she's done there, she's going right back to Lima. Beth's daddy's going with her. Beth's daddy has never doubted that for a second.
Beth's daddy is going to look L. Quinn Fabray in the eyes in her mother's backyard that her father paid for, and swear always to be there for every rusty bursting pipe and overdue gas bill, to cook dinner on the nights she's too tired to think and to drive out to meet her with jumper cables every winter as soon as they can afford a second car. He's going to swear to love forever and never leave, and when she swears it back again she's not going to be looking over his shoulder at Uncle Finn or Uncle Sam or anyone at all. Quinn's going to make Noah soup when he's whining like a baby about having a fever, and yell at all the creditors on the phone until they stop calling, and find his keys for him every single evening because he somehow always loses them in the same three places every time.
He's not going to swear to sweep her off her feet and make her a princess, like Finn would have, like Sam almost dared to want, once. He's never going to swear to that. L. Quinn Fabray was supposed to find a husband who would treat her as his most delicate, precious thing, but Beth's daddy already has one of those and eventually her momma won't be able to find it left in herself to blame him.
Beth will never meet either of her Grandpapas, and Nana Ruth and Grandma Judy will barely know how to act with her any better than her hot mess of teenage aunts and uncles. Her parents know how to learn from a bad example when it's set before them, though. Beth's mother's mother has a cabinet, in the same room as all her put-away crowns, where she keeps all the evidence of the last time she wore royal white. There's a pair of crystal candlesticks, a lace veil in snow white, and a layer of dust over all of it. Her father's mother just has a small box in a locked drawer where she keeps a pair of rings.
Quinn will only have one ring, plain and thin and all they can afford. Beth will never see her take it off.
Beth never spends much time around other kids her age. By the time she gets into preschool in Columbus, they'll have learned things and she'll never understand where they came from. She won't know the right toys or the right TV shows, she won't like story time the right way, and she'll remember her melodies before her words too much to make anything easy or instinctual. She doesn't have friends as a toddler in Lima. She has a family instead.
It's not until her second year that Beth starts to notice how much work it is, having a family, especially one so big. They're always moving. First Momma gives her breakfast, then Auntie Tana or Uncle Finn or both of them take her to the park, then they go see Daddy for a snack and a nap in his car, and by the time she wakes up, Auntie Rache is there instead. Then Uncle Sam or Aunt 'Cedes or Uncle Kurt come sing to her, or all three of them together, and sometimes Momma visits and sometimes Daddy comes back and it's always someone else after that. Aunt Tina always sings her to sleep for her new nap, though, at least until it's cold and snow and everything changes again and Uncle Mike picks her up from Momma and she starts to take her nap in Uncle Artie's lap.
After that there's Momma and Daddy and everybody at once in the room with the singing and Uncle Mr. Shoes. It's too much to remember for an eighteen-month-old baby, time and schedules and order and names, but she finds her way from arms to arms again and again and always clings just as tightly.
Someday, flipping through the faded construction paper pages of her baby book, she'll find one of Auntie Rache's schedules, neatly folded to fit snugly into the crease between pages. She'll know it for Auntie Rache's work right away: everybody's class list is copied down with a stalker's precision, study halls and lunch periods and skippable classes all highlighted and color-coded and coordinated with cell phone references to find a replacement if something went wrong. Nobody else in Beth's family is so exacting or fond of highlighters. Her momma made the schedule, though, she'll know that just on instinct. It'll take until high school for her to wonder if her momma set limits on what classes her aunts and uncles were even allowed to take.
She won't remember all the times it doesn't quite work. Mr. Shoes hides a baby seat discretely behind his desk for a period or two more times than even Coach knows about. Daddy takes three different classes the summer before they move to Columbus to make up for the days he's missed. She only goes to work with Grandma Judy twice, when there's nothing else for it, but she won't remember that part at all.
Family, to Beth, is all arms and voices. Phones will come as a huge shock to her someday, when Uncle Kurt and Auntie Rache go to New York to find dreams and Uncle Sam goes to Tennessee to find home. Uncle Artie will run east to Pennsylvania and six months later Aunt Britt will run away west, and the fall after that Auntie 'Tana will finally run after her. Chicago is closer than New York, and Uncle Mike is closer than Auntie 'Cedes, but Auntie Rache's voice doesn't sound the same through wires at all, not even New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made, ooh when Bethie tries to sing her name back to her.
They call all the same because family does. Family doesn't just stay in Ohio instead of going off to Michigan or Maryland or California. Family transfers from Kent State to OSU to go to bed every night with a lover and babysit every Friday afternoon. Family learns it can conquer New York, and then comes back to a city that's three hours closer because maybe it doesn't have to. Family calls before every performance, and visits for Christmas from Tennessee with a sheepish look on its face, because family means coming back home.
Beth never starts crying while somebody's performing, but a song won't always make her stop if she's already begun. The baby monitor's no good for that. Most nights it's easier for her daddy to just slump down against one star-spattered wall in her nursery, guitar balanced across his knees, and hum and strum until they both fall asleep.
There are pictures in Beth's baby book that Noah--he'll be 'Noah' now, keep his two girls safe and dry instead of running around provoking mischief every which way he can--has no memory of Quinn taking. From the angle she was standing just out in the hallway looking in while he cradled their daughter against his chest and slept.
He's run into her out in the hall when he ducked out for a bottle or a bathroom break, once or twice, but she always pretended to be on her way to the bathroom and he never pushed. It won't be until he sees the pictures that he wonders how many nights she waited out there, listening alone instead of taking the few hours of uninterrupted sleep he could try to give her.
It's midnight when Beth quiets completely and Noah slides her gently into her crib without a stir. He nearly jumps out of his skin and wakes her all over again when he feels the hand land on his shoulder.
"Come on," Quinn whispers near-silently. "She'll sleep the rest of the night."
Out in the hall, he turns to her in the dark, still shadows falling across both of their faces, and says, "I don't mind staying in there with her."
"Think, Noah," Quinn sighs. "If you ruin your back sleeping like that now, how are you going to pick her up when she's ten? Come to bed."
She takes his hand, and his eyes widen unseen, as she leads him down the hall to her own room. It's all pale, cream-colored boudoir lit by the glow of the streetlights, and Quinn a ghost in a white nightgown in the middle of it all. She makes him take off his jeans before she lets him under the sheets.
They don't have sex. They don't kiss, barely even touch, but when they climb into bed he retakes her hand. They hold on until dawn.
Beth is the only member of the New Directions whose seat in the choir room never changes for all the drama and breakups and friendships in this place, because she's too young to pick any chair but the one Quinn locks her baby carrier onto every day. Usually they bracket her, Quinn and Puck, but the others all take their turn to sit beside her, to hand her a pacifier if she cries or run her out for a change of diaper.
The room itself never changes much. The walls will go from dirty, institutional cream to dirty, institutional light blue, but the cracks in the tile will all still be in the same places, just a little more wear and tear, the day she finally gets up from that very same chair and steps up to the front.
"My name is Beth," she'll say, adjusting the strap of the guitar her momma's going to give her for her fourteenth birthday. "And this is the first song I ever heard."
She won't remember that day, fresh out of the hospital and bundled up so warm and tight to her momma's chest, the first time she came into this very room. It wasn't the last time she'd hear the song, though: it's in Aunt Tina's movie marathons and Uncle Kurt's Judy Garland retrospectives, Uncle Mr. Shoes when he's trying to be parental and near the end of her daddy's repertoire when he's very very tired. Momma will sing it sometimes, looking at Beth or out the window, with tears in the corner of her eyes, but she always swears they're happy tears and never explains.
Mr. Shoes stands next to the piano smiling, grayer and rounder and much more lined than the last time a Puckerman played this song in this classroom, but the children on the red plastic chairs look terribly like the people smiling out of the gold frame mounted next to the door, if you squint. There's a place for a girl who talks with the keys of a piano better than the ones on a laptop and can't ever go a day without singing. There's a place for home, no matter how far away the pieces are. She's always known it.
"There's a land that I dreamed of, once in a lullaby."
Title: Lullaby
Pairing: Quinn/Puck, Beth, ensemble
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~5,000
Disclaimer: Glee belongs to Ryan Murphy and Fox. I own nothing.
Summary: They're a dozen teenagers with no business being left alone with a small child, let alone raising one between them, but 'family', to Beth, will forever mean warm arms and the sound of voices.
Beth Puckerman's first language is music.
She won't remember when she's older, those six months where she eschews all words and only speaks by humming. She plunks out little melodies on her primary-colored Playskool keyboard and picks at the strings of her daddy's guitar when he leaves it too close to her chubby hands' reach, and doesn't need words, not for happy or sad or tired or want, not when she can play hungry and almost sing no, if it's singing before there are lyrics, before there's anything at all but notes and sounds. Her momma will remember how secretly worried she was, but it makes sense, too, in the life of a child surrounded by people who don't know how to talk to her with anything but song.
Her first clear memories, when she's older, won't be from Lima at all but the ramshackle apartment in Columbus, Momma's books spread out across the table and Daddy kissing her forehead before he heads off to work at night, but some things linger. She'll hum along to her little piano one day, after the first apartment, when they're back home in Lima and Beth has a room all her own, and her mother will pause in the doorway with her about to laugh-about to yell face on, and say,
"Beth? Did Daddy teach you that song?"
"No," she will say unconcernedly, picking out the high notes carefully because her hands still aren't big enough to hit so many keys at once easily, and later she will overhear Momma scolding Daddy in the hallway,
"Where did she even learn any Nine Inch Nails?" she will say, and Daddy will have his about to laugh-about to tell Beth she's awesome face on.
"That time Miss Holiday subbed in senior year?" he'll suggest, and Momma will hit him on the shoulder, and say,
"How could she remember--she was only a year old!" And Daddy will laugh, and notice her watching around the door, like Daddies always do, and scoop her up around the middle, and say,
"Hey, munchkin, d'you know a song that goes like this?" And he'll start singing something that she doesn't know any of the words to but the song sounds right anyway, and she'll sing la la la along with him even in the fast parts, while Momma laughs and laughs and scolds him for, "oh my god, Noah, don't you dare teach our daughter the words to Rocky Horror" until she finally gives up and joins in and they sing together, the tiniest heart of family.
There are things that Quinn will never really tell her about that first, hot summer, even when she's old enough to understand them. It's a part of Beth's life remembered only in snapshots, carefully taped down to brightly-colored construction paper on the first few pages of her baby book, labeled in gold gel pen with Auntie Rache's precise and curly handwriting.
In the pictures, the room looks less tiny and beige, the pile of fabric scraps and sewing things shoved up against the far wall mostly out of frame. There's a cradle in the corner under the window that's later replaced by a crib, an old desk chair covered in a soft quilt for nursing, and a ten-year-old boom box in the corner. Quinn hopes that Beth sees the good things when she looks through those pictures someday, the huge fluffy white duck that still takes up half the crib every night, the mobile of handmade felt musical notes dangling from the wires of unbent coat hangers.
Someday Beth will look at the picture of herself swaddled on her Uncle Artie's lap, watching Uncle Finn and Uncle Mike put on some kind of ridiculous song and dance routine, and ask what her parents were doing leaving a three-month-old infant in the care of three teenage boys without a clue between them. Quinn doesn't know how to explain that nobody else knew any better. Grandma Judy, newly sober, spent more hours at work than at home not for the money but because she had no idea how to raise a child without two Valium and a nanny. And Momma Quinn knew even less back then than she does now, and that so much less than Beth must ever guess, not from anyone.
There's picture of Uncle Kurt staring at Beth like a mystery wrapped in an enigma swaddled in a brand new designer onesie, probably the last few moments before he decided both of their time would be better spent teaching her the harmonies to every Andrew Lloyd Webber song ever written before she could walk. There's Auntie 'Tana looking like she's only refraining from dropping a sleeping Beth because Quinn was watching through the viewfinder while Aunt Brittany did some kind of interpretive song-and-hand-gesture performance that was either about unicorns or zombies. Someday all Beth is going to see there is love, but Quinn sees a bunch of teenagers who no sane parent would trust near their infant child.
Kurt has always shown up with bags of baby clothes and pretended he was saving them all from bad baby fashion and not from having to make the choice between extra formula or diapers. And whether Brittany knows all the songs and games and stories from Elmo and Dora because she has a seven-year-old sister or just because she's Brittany, it's more than any of the rest of them had.
There's no evidence to ever let Beth know about all the questions, all the doubt and fear, and it's going to stay that way. There's no proof of all the nights Quinn stayed awake until dawn out of worry even though Puck was sleeping on the couch downstairs with a baby monitor cradled right next to his head. Nobody ever caught a picture of her crying herself to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, because once her baby was born it was supposed to get easier, but two delivery room arguments and one split decision made in a haze of painkillers and all she's left with are more questions, more doubts, and the realization that nothing in life will ever be easy again.
There's a picture of Aunt 'Cedes with a stroller inherited from Tina's older brother's first kid, taking Beth out for a walk like she did every Monday and Wednesday afternoon it was sunny all summer. When it rained she sat in the hard quilt-covered desk chair facing the window instead of the corner of the old sewing table they used to change diapers on, and sang every old soul song and church spiritual she could think of so Beth wouldn't cry and wake Momma up. There's a picture of Auntie Rache looking halfway between panicked and gleeful the day Quinn had a doctor's appointment and Mercedes had the flu, and everybody else they knew in the world was either out of town or had to work. They came home that day to find Beth bouncing in time to the soundtrack to Wicked and Rachel stenciling a whole constellation of stars onto the plain beige walls in a dozen colors of child-safe permanent marker.
She doesn't talk much and she doesn't cry much. The first time she burst into tears in a New Directions rehearsal she was six months old, and she started sobbing in the middle of thunderous applause just after her Aunt 'Cedes and soon-to-be-Uncle Sam got done with their Breadstix-winning duet. Her diaper was definitely wet, and, judging by the mess of it, had been for some time. Her daddy looked down at her wriggling on Mr. Schuester's desk, diaper-free and suddenly happy as a clam, with his my little girl is even more awesome than I realized face on.
"Did you wait 'til their song was over on purpose?" he asked. Beth cooed. "Shoulda started crying earlier, Mommy and Daddy could use that night out." Nobody believed him for months, and Auntie Rache started saying things much more loudly than Beth ever did about needing a respectfully child-free space to practice for Sectionals, but besides the time Auntie Tina started sobbing in the middle of her own song on Valentine's day and Beth joined in at the top of her lungs, she never makes a peep during a performance at all.
Beth doesn't make much noise even when she's upset, which makes it even easier for her dozen teenage aunts and uncles to confide in her about all their selfish loving teenage agony. She doesn't play peekaboo or dollies or blocks with her babysitters when Daddy needs to work or Momma needs to study or Miss Margie next door begs off, more often than she comes through these days. Beth sits on the ground in front of her toys and stares up with wide eyes while Auntie 'Tana paces and frets and practices secret love songs and angry accusations instead of sitting through first and second period.
Too many words make Beth fuss. She does it quietly, like she doesn't dare draw too much attention to her own problems in the face of so much overwhelming angst, but when she was younger she'd squirm and make little sad noises whenever the people around her talked too long. Now she slinks back into a corner with her duckie and her little piano until Uncle Finn stops ranting or Auntie 'Cedes stops monologuing or Uncle Kurt remembers she's still in the room. Her parents suspect she might like Auntie Rache best just because Rachel almost never talks to Beth at all, just sets her up in her crib as a captive audience and runs through heartfelt ballads for an hour straight without pausing to take a breath.
Her Aunt Sarah cried all the time when she was a baby, when her daddy was still just Little Noah and her daddy's daddy still spent almost a full month home between every seven-week tour. She cried and screamed, and Grandma Ruth has all sorts of advice for that, but none for a baby who sits and frets and whimpers quietly like the weight of the world is too much to bear. When it's too cold for the stroller and gas is too expensive to take her riding in the car, and she doesn't care about the television and she's bored of the three or four baby toys she's really outgrown anyway, there's the music.
There aren't many nights when Noah Puckerman goes home to sleep under his mother's roof any more, although he's almost always out the front door before Grandma Judy wakes up. He knows that eventually a whole day will have to go by without Beth seeing him at all, but if he has his way it won't be until she's gone off and started college at the most super-special smartass university they can find, somewhere far away from Lima. And he sort of plans to move right along with her when that happens, too.
Beth isn't going to grow up like him. Her mother is going to have a college education, and her daddy is going to tuck her into bed every single night for as long as she'll possibly let him. She's going to have so many adults she loves and trusts who aren't afraid to say it back that she's never going to need to throw a slushie in anyone's face to feel important, and she's never going to end up letting a loser like him get her drunk just to feel wanted.
Columbus is going to throw a wrench in so many of his plans that it won't be until years on, when Quinn's ready to graduate, that he'll start to realize how much this constant being jerked around by fate is just life, and how well they've done regardless. He's going to get that mostly-night job as a busboy that turns into a waiter that turns into a bartender that keeps him from putting Beth to bed five or six nights a week, and he's going to run every time his boss says 'jump' or moves him to a lunch shift without notice because it lets him get her up in the morning and feed her breakfast while Quinn tears out of that shithole of an apartment to catch her bus to class on time. He's going to shave his mohawk and go by Noah instead of Puck and he's not even going to miss it.
He and Quinn are going to drop Beth off at Aunt Tina's dorm room or Uncle Finn's fraternity every other week so they can shout at each other in peace. Half the time they'll be rehashing the same old money issues and long-held insecurities just to let off steam, and they'll fall into bed with the fervor of twenty-year-olds who don't have daughters in preschool. The other half, they'll end up with Quinn weeping against his chest, because,
"She's four years old, Noah, and she barely talks. What if there's something wrong with her? Is it something we did, is it because we didn't drop out of school to spend time with her?"
"Hey, hey," he'll soothe. "Trust me, that girl's plenty smart whether she's yakking like a baby Berry or not, and she's never had a problem making us understand her. Worst comes to worse, she'll just end up like Brittany--"
"Oh god she's going to turn out like Brittany," Quinn will moan, and Noah will shake her shoulder and say,
"Yeah, and Brittany's dancing with all her clothes on in Chicago, living in a nicer place than we're gonna see for the next ten years." He'll turn it into the money argument on purpose, because Quinn crying will never not make his heart clench up in ways he doesn't quite know how to handle, but Quinn shouting and angry is enough of a bitch that he doesn't mind shouting right back.
He's going to spend three whole afternoons going though picture books at the library on Quinn's orders before he and Beth both get so miserably bored that they call it off and go to the park. He's going to swallow his pride and call Rachel about tracking down every single dance and music class appropriate for insanely talented five-year-olds, and then swallow his terror and call Finn's mom for advice on not raising another Rachel.
He's going to hold Beth on his lap and teach her to wrap her tiny fingers around the tiny bridge of her guitar himself, and when she cries because the strings cut into her fingers, he's not going to make her stop until she wants to herself. He's going to sing with her every single day of her life until he sends her off to college. And he's probably going to run up one hell of a phone bill then, too.
Even once Beth gets into the habit of calling everybody she knows by name and communicating almost entirely in sentences when she has to, she'll remember some people better by melody. There are certain songs that go with certain people, she knows that, and it means more than any old name anyway.
Finn's freshman year college roommate is going to meet her on a day in September when "Here Comes The Sun" floats down the hall, sung acoustic, loud enough to hear almost from the elevators. He will open his dorm room door saying,
"Hey, dude, I didn't know you could sing so--" and stop as the shock of Finn's fairly practiced voice is replaced by the much greater shock of the visiting two-year-old held so familiarly on his lap while some guy in a mohawk strums a guitar on the other bed.
"Here Comes The Sun" is Uncle Finn's song, from the very first time Momma and Daddy left her alone with him with only the warning, "Sing to her if she starts crying and doesn't need her diaper changed". He spent five minutes staring at her in terror and wracking his brain for any single song that was okay around children, never mind that she was only about four months old, and then the next three hours singing the same one over and over again.
There's an entire month in their senior year when Beth's daddy and her Uncle Finn can hardly stand to look at each other. Whenever they have to sit in the same room with Beth they never say a single word; her daddy just plays his guitar and Uncle Finn sings that song, over and over until it's as locked into their memories as it is in hers.
Uncle Kurt is the Beatles too, though she'll never remember why, and he'll look first startled and then sad when she's old enough to ask him. It's sad, she'll remember that, even though the songs that make her think of him aren't supposed to be sad at all. She hums the chorus of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" every time she wants to demand his attention, and he always crumples and bends down to meet her no matter what else is going on. Uncle Kurt is a good hand-holder, she'll learn someday, when she's old enough to cross roads on her own two feet but not quite old enough to do it by herself, though he'll always get his trying to keep from crying/trying to keep from hugging Beth so tight she can't breathe face on when she says that, too.
Mr. Shoes, who she will always call Mr. Shoes when she has to call him by words and not Uncle or notes, even when she's sixteen and failing Spanish, is ella, ella, ella, eh eh eh. Her momma eventually laughs and tells her he never even sang that part of the song. She tells Beth that it's supposed to be 'Singing In The Rain', but that's not how it should work. Guitars shouldn't get wet and neither should Mr. Shoes. She likes it better her way.
Daddy's song is the one with her name in it, the one he always sings all the time always. It's supposed to be a sad song. Beth knows that, because she's very good at telling which songs are sad and which ones are supposed to be happy, but it took her a long time to figure it out anyway because Daddy doesn't sing it that way. He sings it like a promise in a lullaby.
Beth is going to be the flower girl at her own parents' wedding, the year her momma is finally old enough to have champagne her daddy didn't charm out of the liquor store clerk with a smile and a fake ID. Everything in the back yard will be covered in flowers, especially the girls. Quinn will braid them into Bethie's hair herself, taking care to hold her own head quite still for Santana to do the same.
Beth's parents are never, ever going to leave each other, because if they lose each other they'll either lose Beth or be left with her alone and neither of those things bears thinking about. Beth's momma is never, ever going to leave her daddy for more than the couple of hours of 'mental health break girl time' she takes every month or two with Aunt Britt and Auntie 'Tana. She's not going to Columbus for college alone. She will never even try to plan to go to Columbus alone, to send Beth to preschool alone, to somehow piece together the rent on that first piece of shit apartment alone with only whatever scholarships and financial aid she wins by the claws of her fingers and whatever work she can find time for between babysitters and midterms.
Quinn goes to junior prom with Puck because he asks her when she doesn't expect to go at all, and to senior prom with Noah because who else would go with either of them? She gets ready in the same bedroom she will later dress for her wedding in, all the Glee girls gathered together for one last session of primping and curling before Nationals and graduation and the so-called rest of their life. She wears ice blue for prom, and for her wedding, a whole field of tiny red flowers in her hair.
They're going to win Nationals senior year and it's going to get her a full ride when she makes her case to the scholarship committee. A girl who can make a 3.7 GPA and win Nationals for show choir while caring for a baby is a girl with the drive and the sheer grit to take their money and conquer the world. She could have. L. Quinn Fabray could have stormed out of Lima with all of Rachel's fire and Santana's ruthlessness combined, and nothing on earth could ever have stopped her.
Beth's momma is going to go to Columbus because it's close to home and Uncle Finn and Auntie 'Tana and Aunt Tina will all be just down the road when she needs them. When she's done there, she's going right back to Lima. Beth's daddy's going with her. Beth's daddy has never doubted that for a second.
Beth's daddy is going to look L. Quinn Fabray in the eyes in her mother's backyard that her father paid for, and swear always to be there for every rusty bursting pipe and overdue gas bill, to cook dinner on the nights she's too tired to think and to drive out to meet her with jumper cables every winter as soon as they can afford a second car. He's going to swear to love forever and never leave, and when she swears it back again she's not going to be looking over his shoulder at Uncle Finn or Uncle Sam or anyone at all. Quinn's going to make Noah soup when he's whining like a baby about having a fever, and yell at all the creditors on the phone until they stop calling, and find his keys for him every single evening because he somehow always loses them in the same three places every time.
He's not going to swear to sweep her off her feet and make her a princess, like Finn would have, like Sam almost dared to want, once. He's never going to swear to that. L. Quinn Fabray was supposed to find a husband who would treat her as his most delicate, precious thing, but Beth's daddy already has one of those and eventually her momma won't be able to find it left in herself to blame him.
Beth will never meet either of her Grandpapas, and Nana Ruth and Grandma Judy will barely know how to act with her any better than her hot mess of teenage aunts and uncles. Her parents know how to learn from a bad example when it's set before them, though. Beth's mother's mother has a cabinet, in the same room as all her put-away crowns, where she keeps all the evidence of the last time she wore royal white. There's a pair of crystal candlesticks, a lace veil in snow white, and a layer of dust over all of it. Her father's mother just has a small box in a locked drawer where she keeps a pair of rings.
Quinn will only have one ring, plain and thin and all they can afford. Beth will never see her take it off.
Beth never spends much time around other kids her age. By the time she gets into preschool in Columbus, they'll have learned things and she'll never understand where they came from. She won't know the right toys or the right TV shows, she won't like story time the right way, and she'll remember her melodies before her words too much to make anything easy or instinctual. She doesn't have friends as a toddler in Lima. She has a family instead.
It's not until her second year that Beth starts to notice how much work it is, having a family, especially one so big. They're always moving. First Momma gives her breakfast, then Auntie Tana or Uncle Finn or both of them take her to the park, then they go see Daddy for a snack and a nap in his car, and by the time she wakes up, Auntie Rache is there instead. Then Uncle Sam or Aunt 'Cedes or Uncle Kurt come sing to her, or all three of them together, and sometimes Momma visits and sometimes Daddy comes back and it's always someone else after that. Aunt Tina always sings her to sleep for her new nap, though, at least until it's cold and snow and everything changes again and Uncle Mike picks her up from Momma and she starts to take her nap in Uncle Artie's lap.
After that there's Momma and Daddy and everybody at once in the room with the singing and Uncle Mr. Shoes. It's too much to remember for an eighteen-month-old baby, time and schedules and order and names, but she finds her way from arms to arms again and again and always clings just as tightly.
Someday, flipping through the faded construction paper pages of her baby book, she'll find one of Auntie Rache's schedules, neatly folded to fit snugly into the crease between pages. She'll know it for Auntie Rache's work right away: everybody's class list is copied down with a stalker's precision, study halls and lunch periods and skippable classes all highlighted and color-coded and coordinated with cell phone references to find a replacement if something went wrong. Nobody else in Beth's family is so exacting or fond of highlighters. Her momma made the schedule, though, she'll know that just on instinct. It'll take until high school for her to wonder if her momma set limits on what classes her aunts and uncles were even allowed to take.
She won't remember all the times it doesn't quite work. Mr. Shoes hides a baby seat discretely behind his desk for a period or two more times than even Coach knows about. Daddy takes three different classes the summer before they move to Columbus to make up for the days he's missed. She only goes to work with Grandma Judy twice, when there's nothing else for it, but she won't remember that part at all.
Family, to Beth, is all arms and voices. Phones will come as a huge shock to her someday, when Uncle Kurt and Auntie Rache go to New York to find dreams and Uncle Sam goes to Tennessee to find home. Uncle Artie will run east to Pennsylvania and six months later Aunt Britt will run away west, and the fall after that Auntie 'Tana will finally run after her. Chicago is closer than New York, and Uncle Mike is closer than Auntie 'Cedes, but Auntie Rache's voice doesn't sound the same through wires at all, not even New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made, ooh when Bethie tries to sing her name back to her.
They call all the same because family does. Family doesn't just stay in Ohio instead of going off to Michigan or Maryland or California. Family transfers from Kent State to OSU to go to bed every night with a lover and babysit every Friday afternoon. Family learns it can conquer New York, and then comes back to a city that's three hours closer because maybe it doesn't have to. Family calls before every performance, and visits for Christmas from Tennessee with a sheepish look on its face, because family means coming back home.
Beth never starts crying while somebody's performing, but a song won't always make her stop if she's already begun. The baby monitor's no good for that. Most nights it's easier for her daddy to just slump down against one star-spattered wall in her nursery, guitar balanced across his knees, and hum and strum until they both fall asleep.
There are pictures in Beth's baby book that Noah--he'll be 'Noah' now, keep his two girls safe and dry instead of running around provoking mischief every which way he can--has no memory of Quinn taking. From the angle she was standing just out in the hallway looking in while he cradled their daughter against his chest and slept.
He's run into her out in the hall when he ducked out for a bottle or a bathroom break, once or twice, but she always pretended to be on her way to the bathroom and he never pushed. It won't be until he sees the pictures that he wonders how many nights she waited out there, listening alone instead of taking the few hours of uninterrupted sleep he could try to give her.
It's midnight when Beth quiets completely and Noah slides her gently into her crib without a stir. He nearly jumps out of his skin and wakes her all over again when he feels the hand land on his shoulder.
"Come on," Quinn whispers near-silently. "She'll sleep the rest of the night."
Out in the hall, he turns to her in the dark, still shadows falling across both of their faces, and says, "I don't mind staying in there with her."
"Think, Noah," Quinn sighs. "If you ruin your back sleeping like that now, how are you going to pick her up when she's ten? Come to bed."
She takes his hand, and his eyes widen unseen, as she leads him down the hall to her own room. It's all pale, cream-colored boudoir lit by the glow of the streetlights, and Quinn a ghost in a white nightgown in the middle of it all. She makes him take off his jeans before she lets him under the sheets.
They don't have sex. They don't kiss, barely even touch, but when they climb into bed he retakes her hand. They hold on until dawn.
Beth is the only member of the New Directions whose seat in the choir room never changes for all the drama and breakups and friendships in this place, because she's too young to pick any chair but the one Quinn locks her baby carrier onto every day. Usually they bracket her, Quinn and Puck, but the others all take their turn to sit beside her, to hand her a pacifier if she cries or run her out for a change of diaper.
The room itself never changes much. The walls will go from dirty, institutional cream to dirty, institutional light blue, but the cracks in the tile will all still be in the same places, just a little more wear and tear, the day she finally gets up from that very same chair and steps up to the front.
"My name is Beth," she'll say, adjusting the strap of the guitar her momma's going to give her for her fourteenth birthday. "And this is the first song I ever heard."
She won't remember that day, fresh out of the hospital and bundled up so warm and tight to her momma's chest, the first time she came into this very room. It wasn't the last time she'd hear the song, though: it's in Aunt Tina's movie marathons and Uncle Kurt's Judy Garland retrospectives, Uncle Mr. Shoes when he's trying to be parental and near the end of her daddy's repertoire when he's very very tired. Momma will sing it sometimes, looking at Beth or out the window, with tears in the corner of her eyes, but she always swears they're happy tears and never explains.
Mr. Shoes stands next to the piano smiling, grayer and rounder and much more lined than the last time a Puckerman played this song in this classroom, but the children on the red plastic chairs look terribly like the people smiling out of the gold frame mounted next to the door, if you squint. There's a place for a girl who talks with the keys of a piano better than the ones on a laptop and can't ever go a day without singing. There's a place for home, no matter how far away the pieces are. She's always known it.
"There's a land that I dreamed of, once in a lullaby."