bubbles
There was a moment that Jack thought about all the time these days, especially with Matty’s birthday coming up.
He tried to get Matt to tell him what he wanted for said birthday, fully anticipating the answer to be a dead serious ‘Legos and Scotch’ but instead Matt threw his whole weight on top of Jack and knocked the wind out of him.
He said he wanted to sleep in. Gave Jack a big smile to underline it.
His ribs were left undefended and he shrieked before he fell off the couch with Jack’s fingers digging into them.
A rookie mistake.
Jack resolved to get him something to remember him by for the following years. He asked Grace about his Mam’s claddagh and she said that Matty already had it and kept it. She’d given it to him a few months back.
Jack considered this, and then considered the mental image of his son and decided that nah, it wouldn’t do anyways.
He ended up in an aisle in a store he never before would have entered, blocked in by huge round blobs of faux-fur on either side.
Matt was tactile. An octopus in human skin.
When he was born, Grace’s mother had arrived and pushed past Jack with her usual disgust for his presence. She’d laid eyes upon her grandson for the first time and had appraised him like a piece of silver.
She had complaints.
He was too small. Too ginger and ruddy. He was fussy, she’d decided, because his pop’s rough hands were holdin’ him and scraping away at his skin.
She was insistent about that bit and the small thing. Jack hadn’t known what to say to her because the docs all said that 6 pounds and 8 oz was pretty normal for a first baby, and anyways, it hadn’t been Matty’s fault that he was red all over. He’d been busy being slapped and held upside down and squinted at and rinsed—the little guy had deserved some slack.
Not that Cara O’Breen would ever care what Jack thought about anything.
Her greatest complaint—besides Jack being the father of her daughter’s child—was that Grace had only had the one baby.
Their family had a history of twins, and for a moment there, the slightest moment--two-week window of time--the docs had thought that Matty had been a set of two.
Grace had been horrified. Jack had laid in bed with her after the doctor’s appointment, reassuring her—promising her that it was a mistake.
She’d been so scared. She didn’t think she was a big enough person to carry twins. She didn’t want to give birth twice. She wasn’t ready to cope with two babies at the same time; her eyes had gone glossy around the edges just thinking about it.
The doc in the appointment that day had gone all quiet when Grace hadn’t fallen over herself in joy at the news. She’d said that it was still early yet. They’d keep an eye on things to see if they developed.
And they did.
And the maybe-baby didn’t happen. Jack and Grace left the hospital with one little boy, who was smaller than the soft teddy bear that his disapproving grandmother had given him.
For what it was worth, Bill had taken one look at Matty and started weeping. He’d just about cooed over Matty’s pinkness and his scrawny little limbs. He thought he was perfect.
So say what you want about the Murdocks, but Jack knew that at least one of them had an appreciative sort of devil in them.
Matt already had the dog, who was a friendly enough household addition, but Jack thought that the bunny was poetic.
Cara O’Breen had gotten her grandson a teddy bear nearly twice his size for the day of his birth. He’d fit in its arms. He hated it. Even Grace had laughed through her haze of despair at how much her child despised that bear.
Jack had had to take it out of the bassinette and hide it in the living room where it couldn’t be witnessed, held, or touched by accident. And with it removed from his space, Matty had settled in more comfortably—certainly more comfortably than his mama. Jack wasn’t angry. He knew Grace had hated that bear, too.
He gave her the bunny after he rescued it from that aisle of faux-fur terror and asked her if she remembered the bear. She looked up at him in disgust.
“Mom truly went out of her way to ruin our boy’s first few hours, didn’t she?” she asked.
“Maybe she was thinkin’ the red would make him look less purple in comparison?” Jack offered in fake defense.
They both knew that Cara O’Breen would have preferred to choke than for Jack to defend her honor.
Grace thought the bunny was good. She said that she wasn’t sure where the old one had gone. Might have gone into the trunk. Matt tended to squirrel little bits and bobs away like that.
The new bunny was all stretched out and blue and unbearably soft. Jack hadn’t been sure if it was a baby toy or not. It was more navy than sky and its nose was fairly long. But in the end, he’d decided that Matt wouldn’t really care. It wasn’t for other people to see or feel.
It was a memory, clarified.
Matt hated that teddy bear from when he was born, but a week later, Jack, in a fit of sleeplessness on the way home from the gym and in full awareness that he was going to walk into a home with a silent wife and a wailing wain, had stopped in front of a rack of toys that a store owner was taking in.
They were half-off the price. Had little things wrong with them, apparently.
He must have been a sight to see because it was a long ass time before the store owner peeked their head back out and asked how old his baby was.
A whole week, sir.
A whole goddamn week.
The guy had laughed his ass off and slapped Jack on the shoulder and told him that he was going to make it.
He asked if baby was a boy or a girl, then Jack muddled through a confusing, half-drunken explanation about the situation with the bear, and the guy had shoved his hand to the bottom of the display basket and produced that which would thereafter only be known in the household as ‘Bubbles.’
She needed an eye fixed.
She was pretty big, still, for a week-old baby, but Jack took her home all the same and then got no peace from Bubbles’s many and varied needs for the next ten years.
Matt was obsessed with that goddamn rabbit.
He brought it with him everywhere he went; he freaked out when Jack tried to convince him to leave her home during kindergarten. Freaked out when Jack tired to convince him to leave her home during first grade. Freaked out when—you get the idea.
The removal of Bubbles for washing was an exercise in stealth and distraction.
The application of Bubbles to any distress was the fastest way to attain household harmony.
Bubbles was a very devout bunny, it turned out; she went to Sunday School and church on the regular.
She was also a very brave and sturdy bunny, having endured many surgeries and terrain.
When Matt went blind, Jack had to reintroduce him to his best friend. At first, she was rejected. Matty hadn’t wanted anyone or anything to touch him but Jack. But over time, he remembered his commitment to dying a horrible death if he didn’t know where his rabbit was, and by the time he’d figured out how to play with Legos again, he’d figured out what Bubbles felt like and how to know her location at all times of the day.
He did this by shoving her into Jack’s gymbag to make sure that she would be waiting for him after school.
Jack couldn’t remember now if she’d been in there the day that he’d ended up on the pavement.
She probably had, given his and Matt’s luck in life.
Waiting for Matt to get home from a case that had put him on tv for a brief moment was an ironic twist of events that made Jack’s lip start cracking and curling and he never wanted it to stop.
He’d put Bubbles the Second under Matt’s pillow already. Had secretly ordered him sticky rice with that syrupy sweet and sour sauce that he was obsessed with from the restaurant at the end of the block. He’d set up the rainbow-rimmed plates around the table andhad tossed a handful of confetti in the center of it, and in the fridge was a cake made of whipped cream and strawberries that Matt didn’t need to know about for another hour at least.
Foggy and Karen were in on it.
They were worthy accomplices.
But they weren’t here yet, none of them were, and so Jack had time to have a moment—just a little thing—for the baby that once was and then wasn’t.
He had no doubts that he couldn’t have coped with two babies in arms while Grace was so miserable and silent. He had no doubt that Matty’s blindness would have been twice the disaster it was if he’d had a brother to witness it all happen.
The guilt of reaching out and catching nothing. That darling feeling of being ignored for a more needy sibling.
Jack had been there.
Being the baby of five hadn’t gotten him any special attention, but he could pretend.
He could pretend that he’d somehow managed it all and had stepped out of the hospital with two boys, two babies, each with a bear that they hated and a slightly less intense dusting of their grandma’s ire.
He could pretend that they’d both grown up healthy—that there was a Mr. Pig in addition to Miss Bubbles, who had run rampant in their household.
He could pretend that this other baby had been the complete opposite of Matt—shouting and joyous where he was shy and reserved. Flagrantly optimistic where Matt struggled to find the light in his unacknowledged darkness.
Jack could imagine two boys, being absolute little shits together. Literally hellions. Tiny devils, each egging the other on, playing tricks on Jack and making him just about see red before he caught himself and gave into the game alongside them.
Maybe if there had been two boys, one holding each of his hands, Jack wouldn’t have been so stupid that night.
The pressure would have been greater. His senses would have been sharper. He would have known better.
With two babies at home who needed him, maybe he wouldn’t have put so much stock in the way that only the one remembered him.
‘Mike,’ he thought a little ruefully.
He’d have named the baby Mike. Matt and Mike. They would have been inseparable until six, and then they would have decided that they hated each other until ten, and then they would have clung to each other and made a pact that nothing would ever come between them, ever, ever, ever.
Mike would have made Jack laugh just as much as Matty had. His humor would have been completely off the wall. A silly boy, always poking holes in his brother’s walls before they could finish going up.
Jack poured a shot out for Mike—the son he’d almost had, the brother Matty needed, and the unending headache for Grace that he would have been.
Happy Birthday, Mike. You almost made it, kid. And Jack, if no one else, would never forget that.