Por si éramos pocos by Belenuski - Chapter 8 (Part 4)
Title: Por si éramos pocos by Belenuski
Rating: PG-13
NB: My apologies if I've gotten some of the medical info incorrect. It's kinda hard to translate when I don't really know anything about it in the first place...Oh well. Enjoy (or whatever)!
Silvia, sitting on the bed, cried silently, wiping away the tears that just wouldn’t stop coming. Her hands were shaking and her heart, broken more than she was used to, indicated that there would need to be a lot of magic and a lot of bandages to cure the horrible damage that had been done.
All the patches she had slapped on her heart after every fight had come undone and the pain was bleeding out again. Maybe that’s why she felt like she couldn’t breathe and that she could drown in her own tears.
“Get out,” she stuttered.
“No, Silvia, listen…”
“Leave me in peace!” She yelled without looking at Pepa, bringing her hands up to her face and starting to cry even harder.
She wasn’t sure why she was doing it. It was just so many things that had finally exploded in her with this discovery. She felt stupid, lied to, and more than anything, exhausted. Exhausted of having to put up with more and more arguments, of lying and knowing she’s being lied to, of being just to be, of loving…without knowing why.
Pepa also didn’t want to be like this. She wanted to fix things with Silvia and let her know that she never wanted to cause her pain, that she loved her and that she stopped what happened with Aitor, but she knew not to expect a pardon from her wife, in fact, she didn’t even want one. She was sure if Silvia forgave her, they would both just end up suffering again sooner or later, and if this time it was she who fucked things up, next time it could be Silvia. The marriage just wasn’t working, and they both knew it.
“Silvia, I swear…”
“You and Aitor!” She yelled, looking at Pepa with her face still damp. “Not only do you fuck things up every time we argue! Not only do you hurt me more and more with every fight, but now you’ve also proven to me that I can’t trust you!”
Silence. Pepa clenched her fists, that last bit hurt. Silvia wasn’t the only one who was hurt when they fought, but right now was not the time to throw that in her face.
“I only asked one thing of you…” Silvia whispered. “I only asked for you to give me a reason to trust in you…”
“Let me explain,” the brunette begged.
“No, I’m tired of listening to the explanations.”
“But…”
“I’ve made a million attempts, Pepa, a million attempts to…to understand you, to understand your position. I’ve done the impossible by ridding my head of any thought that might be against yours, and more than that, ridding my head of everybody except you. And then you go and fuck it up again, dammit.”
“Please listen to me,” Pepa asked again. “Please.”
Silvia dried new tears from her eyes and took a few, slow breaths, trying to calm down. This conversation was going to last a while and if she didn’t calm down, she was going to hyperventilate.
“I only wanted to talk to him to get him away from me. We went into the locker room and…and he kissed me. And, okay, I kissed him back but I swear it didn’t get any further than that. When he tried to go further, I pushed him away and…”
“I don’t care, Pepa. It’s just that I don’t care anymore.”
Pepa also wanted to cry. She bit her bottom lip and Silvia, head hanging, crumpled the blanket beneath her.
The seconds passed by slowly and Pepa ended up sitting at the foot of the bed, she couldn’t even look at Silvia in the face. The redhead also wasn’t up to the task.
“I’m sorry,” Pepa said decidedly.
“I don’t want your apologies.”
“Then what should I do?”
“Nothing.” This was also said very seriously, very cruelly. A sudden stab of letters that left Pepa unable to catch her breath for several seconds.
It was just like that one time four years ago. Like that day when the redhead also asked Pepa not to do anything. But this time it was different…that “nothing” said everything, and deep down, it made sense. What could she do now? Give her the moon? Take her to the stars? For what? In the end, it wouldn’t solve anything. For some time now they were together just to be together and when they attempted to fix this, they just made things worse and worse.
“Nothing works,” Pepa murmured, wiping her face with her hands. Nothing worked. The tears gathered in her eyes and, finally, they dropped. “Not the trips, not the candlelit nights…nothing. I don’t know what we can do to…”
“I said ‘nothing’,” Silvia repeated. Pepa turned this time to look at her. They’re humid eyes met each other and Pepa tried to wipe away her tears, but she was unsuccessful. The cry that she hadn’t let out in a long time was coming out and there was nothing to do but let it all out. “I can’t do it anymore. I’m so tired. I can’t…I can’t with everything, truthfully I can’t,” Silvia said.
“We’ve gotten to the point where anything we say to each other causes the sparks to start flying and…” Pepa sighed inbetween sobs, “and there’s just no way, fuck…We can’t be…we can’t…” It was so hard for her to say it.
“We can’t be together,” Silvia helped her. “Not like this.”
Sara was leaning against the countertop, staring at the floor preoccupied. Don Lorenzo hadn’t gone back into the living room and was ignoring the laughs from the guests who weren’t aware of what was going on.
“Do you think that...?” Sara started, but she wasn’t brave enough to finish the phrase.
“No,” her grandfather said. “They are…they’re my daughter and my daughter-in-law. They wouldn’t throw everything away for one fight.”
“But, it’s just that it hasn’t been one, abuelo, there’ve been many. They haven’t been doing well for a while now,” the blonde clarified.
Don Lorenzo sighed and frowned. He tapped on the table top with his knuckles, worried, but a small boy with brown hair and green eyes distracted him when he came into the kitchen. He sat down on the floor with his arms crossed. It was Dani.
“You’re not playing with Noah?” Don Lorenzo asked with a smile.
“She doesn’t want to play and she made me angry! She’s stupid!”
Sara looked at her grandfather and he nodded. He walked over to the boy to talk to him while Sara went to look for Noah. It was understandable that she wouldn’t want to play, she had to be worried about her mothers. Noah was a smart girl, and very brave, but when things had to do with her loved ones, she was also afraid of thinking of the worst.
Sara turned down the hallway, thinking that she would find Noah in her room, sitting on the bed pensively, but instead, she was surprised to find her crying in the hallway, her head up against her mothers’ bedroom door. She was listening to everything, and though she could only understand half of what they were saying, she did know that things weren’t going well. The last sentence made her break out into a sob. She fully understood what it meant.
“Noah, no.” Her cousin said, walking up to her. “It’s rude to eavesdrop. Let’s go play, come on.”
When Sara took her by the arm, Noah slapped her hand away. She was breathing agitatedly and she shook her head.
“I think the break that you asked me for three years ago is necessary now,” Pepa said.
“Now you don’t think it’s selfish?”
“I’m not pregnant now.” The tears had finally stopped, but the anguish and pain certainly hadn’t.
“That’s exactly why it’s more difficult now. Noah’s three years old and she’s not going to take it well, dammit. You never think, Pepa.”
“Noah’s going to have a rough time whether we’re separated or not, she’s not an idiot, she knows when we fight.”
“I can’t believe you want to upset her like that.”
“Fuck, Silvia! Make up your mind! You can’t tell me that you can’t stand this situation anymore and then sit there with your arms crossed just for the sake of the girl.”
“That girl is my daughter! It’s normal for me to be worried about her!”
“Oh, I see. Now it’s normal for you to be worried, right? It was you who said we couldn’t put her in the middle. But you only ever do what’s convenient for you. In the hotel in Barcelona you were wanting to take a break, while I was pregnant! Now that I’m giving you the chance because Noah is older and she can better understand the situation, you come back with ‘I don’t want to upset her’. Maybe it’s you who doesn’t think!”
“Fuck, don’t you understand? It’s precisely because she’s older that it’ll affect her more. You have no idea what you’re fucking talking about, like always.”
“Well then what the hell do you suggest, Silvia!? Because I don’t see what option you’re giving me. You’re just complaining about our shit of a marriage without doing anything about it. I’m always the one who goes after you asking for forgiveness! It should be me who’s exhausted with this!”
“You!? Oh, now it turns out your Ms. Perfect, who goes around hooking up with anyone without having the balls to tell me about it to my face.”
“Are we going to play that game? Throwing shit in each others’ faces? Okay, because I know very well that you’ve been keeping things from me, too. But, clearly, I’m the bad one here, like always.”
“Go to fucking hell, Pepa! You have no fucking idea what you want, I don’t even know why you came in here. You walk in looking for a solution to fix this ‘shit of a marriage’, as you called it, and all of a sudden you’re talking about taking a break. Fucking grow up for once!”
“Grow up!? Because you just know everything, do you even know how to fix this?”
“I don’t want to fix it!”
“Well, then, why are we arguing?! The easiest thing to do would be to just sign fucking divorce papers and then everything will be fixed!”
“NOAH!” They heard Sara scream from outside the door.
Pepa and Silvia stopped yelling at each other and looked at the door, trying to hear what was happening outside. They heard the little one coughing, breathing with difficulty, and Sara yelling her name.
They looked at each other in reflex and ran to throw open the door. They saw their daughter sitting on the floor, clutching at her chest and coughing, her eyes filled with tears. She was starting to turn very red.
“Noah!” Both mothers exclaimed.
Everybody came rushing, but Paco asked for space for the little one. Smothering her wouldn’t be a good idea, she needed air.
“Noah, look at us,” Silvia ordered, caressing her daughter’s face. “Look at us, my love.”
Noah squeezed her eyes in pain and continued to cough. Pepa shut her eyes, too.
“Cariño, calm down, okay? Breath, baby.”
“Ma…”Noah forced out, opening her eyes and grabbing onto her mothers' sleeves.
“Shhh,” Pepa said. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Calm down.”
“Breathe calmly, okay? Come on, it’s over.”
Her cough stopped bit by bit and, still having some trouble breathing, she let go of her mothers and wiped her tears away. Pepa and Silvia sighed and Pepa took the little one in her arms.
“Take her to her room, I’ll say goodbye to everybody. We’re going to take her to the doctor, okay?”
“Yes.”
Those were the first words they’d spoken calmly to each other since they had both walked into the bedroom earlier. They had to accept that Noah was even a bigger influencing factor than they had thought.
Pepa, with her daughter’s head leaning on her shoulder, took her to her bedroom whispering calming words since she could still feel Noah’s little heart racing.
“What happened?” Silvia asked, composing herself from the scare.
“She heard you two fighting,” Sara responded. “I tried to pull her away, but she wouldn’t let me and…I don’t know what happened. She started to have trouble breathing and started coughing more and more and…She was choking, tita.” Her niece’s face twisted at the thought. She felt completely helpless at that moment, almost as much as Silvia felt responsible. All she was doing was messing up her daughter’s life is what she thought.
“Come on, help me explain to everyone and get them out of the house. The party’s over.”
____________________________________
Noah had finally stopped crying and was breathing normally again. She had remained silent through the whole car ride, just like her mothers who wouldn’t even look at each other. The tense atmosphere dissipated, though, when they entered the consultation. Finally, with the doctor, Noah spoke out of simple necessity and a little out of fear, thinking that she was going to get a shot. But that wasn’t the case. There was just a few tests and x-rays and Noah didn’t cause any problems.
It was like nothing had happened, and the little one was playing in a corner of the waiting room. There was a nurse in the room who was keeping an eye on her and two other children who were also playing with other toys.
Inside the consultation room, the mothers were listening attentively to the pediatrician.
“It’s just as we thought, her pulmonary condition has gotten worse,” the doctor announced.
“But…” Pepa began.
“No, it’s not extremely serious,” he responded, knowing what the question was going to be. “But it’s bad enough that we’ll have to double the dosage of the medication that she takes in the mornings.”
“Again?” Silvia asked in concern. “We doubled the dosage just a year ago. Now she’ll be taking four times as much medicine than last year, it’s a lot for such a young girl.”
“Look, Noah’s showing the start of asthma, and though it’s not a grave illness, it could be dangerous if it worsens. Even though she’s not suffering from it now, we’re going to try doubling the dosage again. It’s to stop the asthma from appearing.”
“And if it does?” Pepa asked.
“She’ll have to do what other asthmatics do - use an inhaler. That’s why I want to try more medicine, so that this doesn’t occur.”
Both women looked at each other and Silvia finally nodded. Pepa sighed exhaustedly and Silvia ran her right hand through her hair, troubled.
“Well, okay then, we’ll double the dosage,” the redhead said in resignation.
She was just about to stand up when the doctor spoke again.
“One more thing.” Pepa, who was already on her feet, sat down again. “Noah has to be in a very anxious state to have an attack without actually being asthmatic yet. Did something happen?”
Pepa and Silvia looked at each other. They felt responsible for everything that was happening, and if that wasn’t enough, even the doctor could tell how badly things were going.
“An argument,” Pepa responded. “Between us.”
“I don’t want to interfere in your private life, but it’s not recommendable for the girl to be aware of the tense moments between her mothers. If she has another anxiety attack, it could be much worse. She’s almost at the point of suffering from asthma and other respiratory attack could really bring on the infirmity.
They both nodded pensively and, after saying goodbye to the pediatrician who explained to them when they were to give the medication to Noah, they exited the room. They walked slowly into the waiting room, and before walking in, they looked at each other again. Pepa leaned against the wall with her hands in her pockets and Silvia sighed with her eyes closed.
“And now what?” Silvia asked. “Still thinking about getting a divorce?”
She didn’t say it with any bitterness or resentment, she was simply asking. She wasn’t sure herself if it was a good idea or not.
“If we tell her now, her condition will worsen.”
“So then?”
Pepa, unsmiling, pulled her hand out of her pocket and held it out to her wife. But this wasn’t a romantic or comforting gesture. She was doing it for her daughter and that’s just what she specified: “For Noah.”
Silvia looked at Pepa’s outstretched hand and thought about what she would have to deal with if she took it. But Pepa would have to deal with it, too, and if her wife could, she could as well. And, what’s more, she thought about the little one, about her smile and what she needed. She didn’t hesitate much longer and finally grabbed Pepa’s hand.
“For Noah,” she accepted with a nod, knowing deep down that this was a mistake.
Links to the original story written in Spanish:
http://pepaysilvia.mforos.com/1469855/8481210-por-si-eramos-pocos-01-11-09-23-40/
http://pepaysilvia.mforos.com/1469855/8680673-por-si-eramos-pocos-ii-28-11-09-21-35/
Rating: PG-13
NB: My apologies if I've gotten some of the medical info incorrect. It's kinda hard to translate when I don't really know anything about it in the first place...Oh well. Enjoy (or whatever)!
Silvia, sitting on the bed, cried silently, wiping away the tears that just wouldn’t stop coming. Her hands were shaking and her heart, broken more than she was used to, indicated that there would need to be a lot of magic and a lot of bandages to cure the horrible damage that had been done.
All the patches she had slapped on her heart after every fight had come undone and the pain was bleeding out again. Maybe that’s why she felt like she couldn’t breathe and that she could drown in her own tears.
“Get out,” she stuttered.
“No, Silvia, listen…”
“Leave me in peace!” She yelled without looking at Pepa, bringing her hands up to her face and starting to cry even harder.
She wasn’t sure why she was doing it. It was just so many things that had finally exploded in her with this discovery. She felt stupid, lied to, and more than anything, exhausted. Exhausted of having to put up with more and more arguments, of lying and knowing she’s being lied to, of being just to be, of loving…without knowing why.
Pepa also didn’t want to be like this. She wanted to fix things with Silvia and let her know that she never wanted to cause her pain, that she loved her and that she stopped what happened with Aitor, but she knew not to expect a pardon from her wife, in fact, she didn’t even want one. She was sure if Silvia forgave her, they would both just end up suffering again sooner or later, and if this time it was she who fucked things up, next time it could be Silvia. The marriage just wasn’t working, and they both knew it.
“Silvia, I swear…”
“You and Aitor!” She yelled, looking at Pepa with her face still damp. “Not only do you fuck things up every time we argue! Not only do you hurt me more and more with every fight, but now you’ve also proven to me that I can’t trust you!”
Silence. Pepa clenched her fists, that last bit hurt. Silvia wasn’t the only one who was hurt when they fought, but right now was not the time to throw that in her face.
“I only asked one thing of you…” Silvia whispered. “I only asked for you to give me a reason to trust in you…”
“Let me explain,” the brunette begged.
“No, I’m tired of listening to the explanations.”
“But…”
“I’ve made a million attempts, Pepa, a million attempts to…to understand you, to understand your position. I’ve done the impossible by ridding my head of any thought that might be against yours, and more than that, ridding my head of everybody except you. And then you go and fuck it up again, dammit.”
“Please listen to me,” Pepa asked again. “Please.”
Silvia dried new tears from her eyes and took a few, slow breaths, trying to calm down. This conversation was going to last a while and if she didn’t calm down, she was going to hyperventilate.
“I only wanted to talk to him to get him away from me. We went into the locker room and…and he kissed me. And, okay, I kissed him back but I swear it didn’t get any further than that. When he tried to go further, I pushed him away and…”
“I don’t care, Pepa. It’s just that I don’t care anymore.”
Pepa also wanted to cry. She bit her bottom lip and Silvia, head hanging, crumpled the blanket beneath her.
The seconds passed by slowly and Pepa ended up sitting at the foot of the bed, she couldn’t even look at Silvia in the face. The redhead also wasn’t up to the task.
“I’m sorry,” Pepa said decidedly.
“I don’t want your apologies.”
“Then what should I do?”
“Nothing.” This was also said very seriously, very cruelly. A sudden stab of letters that left Pepa unable to catch her breath for several seconds.
It was just like that one time four years ago. Like that day when the redhead also asked Pepa not to do anything. But this time it was different…that “nothing” said everything, and deep down, it made sense. What could she do now? Give her the moon? Take her to the stars? For what? In the end, it wouldn’t solve anything. For some time now they were together just to be together and when they attempted to fix this, they just made things worse and worse.
“Nothing works,” Pepa murmured, wiping her face with her hands. Nothing worked. The tears gathered in her eyes and, finally, they dropped. “Not the trips, not the candlelit nights…nothing. I don’t know what we can do to…”
“I said ‘nothing’,” Silvia repeated. Pepa turned this time to look at her. They’re humid eyes met each other and Pepa tried to wipe away her tears, but she was unsuccessful. The cry that she hadn’t let out in a long time was coming out and there was nothing to do but let it all out. “I can’t do it anymore. I’m so tired. I can’t…I can’t with everything, truthfully I can’t,” Silvia said.
“We’ve gotten to the point where anything we say to each other causes the sparks to start flying and…” Pepa sighed inbetween sobs, “and there’s just no way, fuck…We can’t be…we can’t…” It was so hard for her to say it.
“We can’t be together,” Silvia helped her. “Not like this.”
Sara was leaning against the countertop, staring at the floor preoccupied. Don Lorenzo hadn’t gone back into the living room and was ignoring the laughs from the guests who weren’t aware of what was going on.
“Do you think that...?” Sara started, but she wasn’t brave enough to finish the phrase.
“No,” her grandfather said. “They are…they’re my daughter and my daughter-in-law. They wouldn’t throw everything away for one fight.”
“But, it’s just that it hasn’t been one, abuelo, there’ve been many. They haven’t been doing well for a while now,” the blonde clarified.
Don Lorenzo sighed and frowned. He tapped on the table top with his knuckles, worried, but a small boy with brown hair and green eyes distracted him when he came into the kitchen. He sat down on the floor with his arms crossed. It was Dani.
“You’re not playing with Noah?” Don Lorenzo asked with a smile.
“She doesn’t want to play and she made me angry! She’s stupid!”
Sara looked at her grandfather and he nodded. He walked over to the boy to talk to him while Sara went to look for Noah. It was understandable that she wouldn’t want to play, she had to be worried about her mothers. Noah was a smart girl, and very brave, but when things had to do with her loved ones, she was also afraid of thinking of the worst.
Sara turned down the hallway, thinking that she would find Noah in her room, sitting on the bed pensively, but instead, she was surprised to find her crying in the hallway, her head up against her mothers’ bedroom door. She was listening to everything, and though she could only understand half of what they were saying, she did know that things weren’t going well. The last sentence made her break out into a sob. She fully understood what it meant.
“Noah, no.” Her cousin said, walking up to her. “It’s rude to eavesdrop. Let’s go play, come on.”
When Sara took her by the arm, Noah slapped her hand away. She was breathing agitatedly and she shook her head.
“I think the break that you asked me for three years ago is necessary now,” Pepa said.
“Now you don’t think it’s selfish?”
“I’m not pregnant now.” The tears had finally stopped, but the anguish and pain certainly hadn’t.
“That’s exactly why it’s more difficult now. Noah’s three years old and she’s not going to take it well, dammit. You never think, Pepa.”
“Noah’s going to have a rough time whether we’re separated or not, she’s not an idiot, she knows when we fight.”
“I can’t believe you want to upset her like that.”
“Fuck, Silvia! Make up your mind! You can’t tell me that you can’t stand this situation anymore and then sit there with your arms crossed just for the sake of the girl.”
“That girl is my daughter! It’s normal for me to be worried about her!”
“Oh, I see. Now it’s normal for you to be worried, right? It was you who said we couldn’t put her in the middle. But you only ever do what’s convenient for you. In the hotel in Barcelona you were wanting to take a break, while I was pregnant! Now that I’m giving you the chance because Noah is older and she can better understand the situation, you come back with ‘I don’t want to upset her’. Maybe it’s you who doesn’t think!”
“Fuck, don’t you understand? It’s precisely because she’s older that it’ll affect her more. You have no idea what you’re fucking talking about, like always.”
“Well then what the hell do you suggest, Silvia!? Because I don’t see what option you’re giving me. You’re just complaining about our shit of a marriage without doing anything about it. I’m always the one who goes after you asking for forgiveness! It should be me who’s exhausted with this!”
“You!? Oh, now it turns out your Ms. Perfect, who goes around hooking up with anyone without having the balls to tell me about it to my face.”
“Are we going to play that game? Throwing shit in each others’ faces? Okay, because I know very well that you’ve been keeping things from me, too. But, clearly, I’m the bad one here, like always.”
“Go to fucking hell, Pepa! You have no fucking idea what you want, I don’t even know why you came in here. You walk in looking for a solution to fix this ‘shit of a marriage’, as you called it, and all of a sudden you’re talking about taking a break. Fucking grow up for once!”
“Grow up!? Because you just know everything, do you even know how to fix this?”
“I don’t want to fix it!”
“Well, then, why are we arguing?! The easiest thing to do would be to just sign fucking divorce papers and then everything will be fixed!”
“NOAH!” They heard Sara scream from outside the door.
Pepa and Silvia stopped yelling at each other and looked at the door, trying to hear what was happening outside. They heard the little one coughing, breathing with difficulty, and Sara yelling her name.
They looked at each other in reflex and ran to throw open the door. They saw their daughter sitting on the floor, clutching at her chest and coughing, her eyes filled with tears. She was starting to turn very red.
“Noah!” Both mothers exclaimed.
Everybody came rushing, but Paco asked for space for the little one. Smothering her wouldn’t be a good idea, she needed air.
“Noah, look at us,” Silvia ordered, caressing her daughter’s face. “Look at us, my love.”
Noah squeezed her eyes in pain and continued to cough. Pepa shut her eyes, too.
“Cariño, calm down, okay? Breath, baby.”
“Ma…”Noah forced out, opening her eyes and grabbing onto her mothers' sleeves.
“Shhh,” Pepa said. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Calm down.”
“Breathe calmly, okay? Come on, it’s over.”
Her cough stopped bit by bit and, still having some trouble breathing, she let go of her mothers and wiped her tears away. Pepa and Silvia sighed and Pepa took the little one in her arms.
“Take her to her room, I’ll say goodbye to everybody. We’re going to take her to the doctor, okay?”
“Yes.”
Those were the first words they’d spoken calmly to each other since they had both walked into the bedroom earlier. They had to accept that Noah was even a bigger influencing factor than they had thought.
Pepa, with her daughter’s head leaning on her shoulder, took her to her bedroom whispering calming words since she could still feel Noah’s little heart racing.
“What happened?” Silvia asked, composing herself from the scare.
“She heard you two fighting,” Sara responded. “I tried to pull her away, but she wouldn’t let me and…I don’t know what happened. She started to have trouble breathing and started coughing more and more and…She was choking, tita.” Her niece’s face twisted at the thought. She felt completely helpless at that moment, almost as much as Silvia felt responsible. All she was doing was messing up her daughter’s life is what she thought.
“Come on, help me explain to everyone and get them out of the house. The party’s over.”
____________________________________
Noah had finally stopped crying and was breathing normally again. She had remained silent through the whole car ride, just like her mothers who wouldn’t even look at each other. The tense atmosphere dissipated, though, when they entered the consultation. Finally, with the doctor, Noah spoke out of simple necessity and a little out of fear, thinking that she was going to get a shot. But that wasn’t the case. There was just a few tests and x-rays and Noah didn’t cause any problems.
It was like nothing had happened, and the little one was playing in a corner of the waiting room. There was a nurse in the room who was keeping an eye on her and two other children who were also playing with other toys.
Inside the consultation room, the mothers were listening attentively to the pediatrician.
“It’s just as we thought, her pulmonary condition has gotten worse,” the doctor announced.
“But…” Pepa began.
“No, it’s not extremely serious,” he responded, knowing what the question was going to be. “But it’s bad enough that we’ll have to double the dosage of the medication that she takes in the mornings.”
“Again?” Silvia asked in concern. “We doubled the dosage just a year ago. Now she’ll be taking four times as much medicine than last year, it’s a lot for such a young girl.”
“Look, Noah’s showing the start of asthma, and though it’s not a grave illness, it could be dangerous if it worsens. Even though she’s not suffering from it now, we’re going to try doubling the dosage again. It’s to stop the asthma from appearing.”
“And if it does?” Pepa asked.
“She’ll have to do what other asthmatics do - use an inhaler. That’s why I want to try more medicine, so that this doesn’t occur.”
Both women looked at each other and Silvia finally nodded. Pepa sighed exhaustedly and Silvia ran her right hand through her hair, troubled.
“Well, okay then, we’ll double the dosage,” the redhead said in resignation.
She was just about to stand up when the doctor spoke again.
“One more thing.” Pepa, who was already on her feet, sat down again. “Noah has to be in a very anxious state to have an attack without actually being asthmatic yet. Did something happen?”
Pepa and Silvia looked at each other. They felt responsible for everything that was happening, and if that wasn’t enough, even the doctor could tell how badly things were going.
“An argument,” Pepa responded. “Between us.”
“I don’t want to interfere in your private life, but it’s not recommendable for the girl to be aware of the tense moments between her mothers. If she has another anxiety attack, it could be much worse. She’s almost at the point of suffering from asthma and other respiratory attack could really bring on the infirmity.
They both nodded pensively and, after saying goodbye to the pediatrician who explained to them when they were to give the medication to Noah, they exited the room. They walked slowly into the waiting room, and before walking in, they looked at each other again. Pepa leaned against the wall with her hands in her pockets and Silvia sighed with her eyes closed.
“And now what?” Silvia asked. “Still thinking about getting a divorce?”
She didn’t say it with any bitterness or resentment, she was simply asking. She wasn’t sure herself if it was a good idea or not.
“If we tell her now, her condition will worsen.”
“So then?”
Pepa, unsmiling, pulled her hand out of her pocket and held it out to her wife. But this wasn’t a romantic or comforting gesture. She was doing it for her daughter and that’s just what she specified: “For Noah.”
Silvia looked at Pepa’s outstretched hand and thought about what she would have to deal with if she took it. But Pepa would have to deal with it, too, and if her wife could, she could as well. And, what’s more, she thought about the little one, about her smile and what she needed. She didn’t hesitate much longer and finally grabbed Pepa’s hand.
“For Noah,” she accepted with a nod, knowing deep down that this was a mistake.
Links to the original story written in Spanish:
http://pepaysilvia.mforos.com/1469855/8481210-por-si-eramos-pocos-01-11-09-23-40/
http://pepaysilvia.mforos.com/1469855/8680673-por-si-eramos-pocos-ii-28-11-09-21-35/