211. I'm keeping my baby

“I was in a repertory company in LA when I met him. The crowds loved me. It was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How ironic that is, now. I was Titania. It was my first really big role, and I was determined to make my name. We were applauded to the rafters. They gave us a standing ovation: the first time I’d ever experienced it. I was just twenty, and I suppose you could say that I was drunk on adulation and applause. I didn’t need alcohol. We went out anyway, for a first-night cast party, somewhere in downtown LA. Just another bar. I couldn’t have found it again if you’d paid me, but we’d moved on, touring.”

Martha looks at her water as if she wishes it were wine.

“We hit it off. You know that, darling. It was a fabulous night – but when I woke up, he was gone. Six weeks later, I realised that he wasn’t entirely gone.” She pauses. “You young women don’t know how lucky you are,” she says bitterly. “Reliable contraception isn’t the only point. There have always been condoms.” Castle winces. That sounds perilously close to his existence being a complete accident. “You have no idea what public morality was like then. Sanctimonious was only the start of it. Actresses were regarded as only a few steps better than streetwalkers, and pregnancy outside marriage was anathema. No easy legal abortions then.”

Castle makes a strangled noise.

“I can’t say what I would have done if there had been. I was barely twenty,” she cries. “I had no idea. But I didn’t even think about going to some backstreet crone. I couldn’t have gone through with that.”

Martha’s eyes are damp, but this isn’t some ploy, some triumph of her actor’s trade; it’s not stagecraft. Her emotion is real, not overstated or staged. For almost the first time ever, Beckett finds in herself a glimmer of pity and of admiration for the choice Martha had made. It couldn’t have been easy.

“So I managed to hide it for a while. But then I couldn’t, and the parts dried up, and all the success I was beginning to enjoy slipped away.”

Beckett hears the next words before they’re spoken. From the tight, angry set of his shoulders, so does Castle.

“So I went home.” She blinks, and her face twists. “They didn’t want to know. If I’d been properly humble and grovelling and pleading… but I would never have pretended that I’d been a failure and I certainly wasn’t going to agree to giving my baby away.” She sips again. “That was the condition. I wouldn’t agree. So they threw me out. Again.” She stops. “I never heard from them again. I never wanted to.”

“Are they alive?”

“No.”

Beckett wonders if that is true, or a polite way of saying that Martha doesn’t know or doesn’t care. Castle is quite clearly thinking the same thing. Though – she does some quick mental arithmetic: Castle is forty, Martha sixty one or sixty two – her parents would have been well into their eighties if they were still alive. It’s not wholly likely.

“They died about fourteen years ago.”

Castle blinks. He appears to have realised something. “That’s… I see. That’s when you bought that property in LA. You inherited.”

“They didn’t give me any security then. They’d be turning in their graves to know they did after they died.”

Martha sounds unpleasantly happy about that. The word schadenfreude slithers, hissing, into Beckett’s mind.

“I see. But…”

“You would have liked grandparents.”

“I would have liked to know about any other family,” Castle raps. “But since my father clearly wasn’t an option, grandparents might have been nice.”

“You think, kiddo? Their exact words as I left were if you’re going to keep your bastard child don’t come crying to us. You should give it up.”

Castle gasps. Beckett’s hand tightens over his.

“They didn’t care. They could have contacted me at any time. They didn’t. I said I never wanted to hear from them. I didn’t say why.”

Beckett has a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“After you were born” – her face softens, and becomes in some way much younger – “once I’d got over the shock, and when you were a few weeks old and so cute – I sent them a picture and a short letter. I thought that when they saw you they’d love you. Maybe not me… but their only grandchild.”

“You were an only child?”

“Yes. No siblings. Perhaps it’s just as well. They’d likely have been just as moralistic and judgemental as my parents.”

“Mother…”

“I got a typed note back. It said we have no grandchildren. Among other things. It wasn’t even signed, just typed. Mr and Mrs Rodgers. So I never tried again.”

Castle is now pale. His mother’s eyes are far away, until they snap back to him.

“That was the first time. You know about the creep in LA. Fortunately he disappeared.”

“He’s in jail,” Castle blurts out. Beckett is certain sure he hadn’t meant to say that.

Martha stares blankly at her son. “Jail? How do you know that?”

Castle doesn’t say anything at all, for a second, then, “I had him arrested. Fraud. The money was all gone, though.”

Martha simply stares, open-mouthed. “I never knew,” she whispers. “I never knew.”

There is a long, dead, silence, until, with a sharp gesture, Martha summons a server and orders herself white wine.

“So,” she says, which she’s been using as a punctuation mark for the whole of the conversation, “everyone I thought I might have leaned on turned out to be a washout.”

Castle’s hand twitches under Beckett’s. Martha must have noticed some tic in his face.

“You were a child, darling. And then you were independent and so was I.”

It doesn’t seem to make Castle’s biting tension any less. “Independent? Or just out of sight, out of mind? You sent me to boarding school.” Old pain and new anger mix.

“Let me tell it in order, in my own way,” Martha bites out. “You said you wanted me to tell the whole truth, so now listen to it.”

Castle is silenced, though his lips pinch in very much the same way as Martha’s had. Beckett’s hand closes over his, stroking.

“I just about managed when you were tiny. Once you went to school, it got harder. We had to keep moving to where the work was, and it just wasn’t stable. It… up till sixth grade I could make sure everything was covered, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to help you after that. So I entered you for the scholarship exam and when you won it I sent you to boarding school so you had the best chance.” She looks at her hands, her knuckles prominent and nailbeds white.

“It freed you up to carry on acting,” Castle says bitterly.

“I could send you to boarding school, and work – or you could have gone to a new school every week, dropped out, and we’d both have been living out of the soup kitchen. Think about that, Richard. Would you have preferred that?”

“I wanted my family. You. I hated boarding school.”

“I wanted you to have a better chance! If you had faced the same choice with Alexis – what would you have done? You never had to make that choice with her because I made damn sure you had the chances you deserved and you took them. What would you have done when it was your turn if you’d been on the breadline like I was?”

There is an extremely unpleasant silence. Castle’s eyes are hard in his pale face, but it’s he whose gaze falls first.

“I’d have done anything to give Alexis the best start,” he admits. Beckett’s hand drops to his knee, and squeezes gently.

Martha lets that hang in the air, for a full minute.

“But if she was that unhappy I’d have let her come home,” Castle adds, pointedly.

“How would you know, if she didn’t tell you?” Martha ripostes, equally pointedly. “I still have all your letters.” Castle startles. “Not one of them mentions unhappiness. Not one. I read them over and over. Do you think I didn’t miss you? I missed you every hour, every day. Your letters talked about the boy running the magazine – Damien” – Castle startles again. His mother’s recall clearly strikes at the foundations of his thinking – “and that your stories were a success. You wrote about the adulation your friends gave you for your writing and how popular you were.” She stops, and gulps at her wine. “So tell me, if that was what Alexis told you, even though you missed her – if she seemed to be perfectly happy and you knew it was the best education she could get – what would you do?”

Castle is, again, silenced; another edged pause extends. Beckett waits, and watches, and says nothing: the silence of the interrogation room with a not-quite hostile witness wrapped about her.

“Left her there,” he says heavily: clearly uncomfortable with the inescapable conclusion. “I would have believed her, and left her there.” His eyes are piteous, his whole posture defeated. “I would have done what you did.”

Strangely, to Beckett’s eyes, Martha doesn’t appear to gain any satisfaction from the admission.

“I missed you every day,” she repeats. “So when I got successful again, and the scholarship ran out – I couldn’t afford the fees even with the success: a Tony doesn’t help that like an Oscar does – I didn’t make you sit for another scholarship, I brought you back to Manhattan. As I recall it, by then you didn’t want that either, even if now you’re saying that you wanted to be a family. How could I know what you wanted then, when even now you don’t?”

Beckett notes and appreciates – it’s not her place to approve or disapprove – Martha’s iron control over her tear ducts. It would be so easy for her to weep, and Castle would melt – and later realise or believe that he’d been manipulated into forgiveness. He’d be wrong, but that wouldn’t make it any better.

Another edged, defensive pause.

“I tried to do what I thought best. Maybe I was wrong. It doesn’t change how much I love you.” She takes another quenching gulp of wine. No-one speaks, until she swallows, and starts again.

“Anyway.” She sounds, suddenly, very like her son. “That was my parents. Then there was that bastard in LA. You know about that.”

Beckett doesn’t. But it’s – he’s – not her problem.

“And then,” Martha says, and Beckett herself tenses to match Castle’s high-strung attention, “we’d been a family for thirteen years and when Katherine started coming to the loft I wanted her to be part of the family too.” Castle looks very directly at his mother, who is only looking at him, as if Beckett weren’t there at all. That suits Beckett very well.

“I thought if she was family I’d never need to worry...” Martha appears to remember that Beckett is actually present.

“I thought...” she says, turning to Beckett, “I thought” – and she stops, her face twisting. “It was quite clear Richard was enamoured. But then you quarrelled, and except that he was grouchy it didn’t affect anything. Then you seemed to have patched it up, and you came for dinner, and everything was fine. Except I was nervous. It didn’t matter with his second wife” –

“Her name was Gina, Mother.”

“I saw so little of her I never used it – because she barely spoke to me.”

Castle mutters something under his breath which might have been you started it, she merely reciprocated. Beckett regards Martha with an interrogative stare and a silence which invites her to justify herself but certainly does not promise forgiveness without question.

“I liked your father – he is certainly charming – and you seemed perfectly happy at dinner. But then you didn’t want to come back.   It was obvious Richard was spending a lot of time with you, but it didn’t have much to do with murder. That many murders would have made headlines. Anyway, it looked like he was besotted with someone who didn’t want to be part of the family.”

Martha looks at Beckett, who looks straight back at her without any embarrassment. “I don’t need to justify my actions to you,” Beckett says coolly. “It’s you who was trying to force the pace, when you were told to let it be.”

For a moment, it seems as if Martha might argue, but then she drops her eyes. “I guess I deserved that,” she admits. “But…,” she gulps, “that was what happened in LA.”

Beckett makes a whole series of connections in no time at all, and waits to see what will be said next.

“He said she was his daughter in law. So he said. But his daughter in law” – that’s laced with arsenic – “who’d fallen on hard times, well, she visited a bit, but she didn’t want to engage. Didn’t want to be a family. So he brought her round, but mostly he visited her in her apartment. When she did visit, I felt pushed out. Nothing obvious, nothing I could put a finger on. It was just a little uncomfortable, like I was out of place. She should have been the one out of place.” Martha looks down into the remains of her wine.

“He said she needed his support.” Under the table, Castle’s hand turns upward to fold round Beckett’s fingers, now chilled and unmoving. “I offered to help. I was told it was all okay, he had it covered, just to leave it to him.”

“I see,” Castle says slowly, unemotionally. Beckett is very sure that he does, but they can talk about that later.

“And then one day someone knocked on the door and said that the apartment had been repossessed. He’d put a mortgage on it, forged my signature and that, as they say, was that. My accounts were empty. He’d disappeared. A week later I got a Dear Jane letter. He’d gone off with the girl. No wonder she didn’t want to be family.”

“I see,” Beckett says, just as Castle had. “Oh, I do see. So you thought if you buddied up to me it wouldn’t happen again. Despite it being exactly the opposite situation, and Castle telling you in words of one syllable that if you backed off you’d be staying.”

She breathes in, out; repeats: slow and measured. Beneath the table, her nails are biting into Castle’s hand.  “I don’t need a new family. I’m happy with the family I have. Dad and I have fixed things.” She breathes in, and out again: the same, slow, measured cadence of her speech. “Even if Castle and I become a family, that doesn’t make you my mother. No-one on earth will ever be my mother.”

“But it’s not me you need to talk to, because it’s not me you have the problem with. It’s Castle.” Beckett brings their still linked hands up on to the table. “You didn’t trust your own son. It really had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with you not trusting him.” Beckett’s gaze is clear, cold, and only just the right side of contemptuous. “You didn’t think he’d look after you, even though he’s done just that for thirteen years.” She stops, before she loses the last shreds of her control. “You thought that he’d be the same as all the other people you thought loved you.” She stops again. “So first, you didn’t give him any credit; and second, you’re assuming you brought him up so badly that he would behave like that.”

She pushes her chair back. “I understand why you did what you did. God knows, I understand how the past shapes the present. I don’t blame you for what you were trying to do with me, because I get it. You don’t need to make up with me. But you’ve got a lot of making up to do with your son.”

Castle inhales sharply. Martha is stone still; marble white, striated wrinkles across her face. Beckett’s shield and gun are suddenly very prominent.

“I’m not going to get in the way of that. But if you upset him like you did the last time there’s going to be nowhere that you can hide from me. I won’t tolerate you hurting him.” The tidal bore of menace surging across the table drowns speech.

Not a single server has approached their table since Martha had ordered her wine. Not a single server approaches during the long pause that follows Beckett’s words.

“So you’ll block me from my family,” Martha says bleakly.

“No. You can manage that all by yourself. How you and Castle behave is your problem, not mine. Whether you talk or not is up to both of you.” She pauses. “You ought to give your son and yourself more credit than you do. He’s a good man. He didn’t get that way on his own.”

She stands up. Castle abruptly looks bereft.

“I’m going to the restroom. While I’m gone, you need to decide if you want me to stay for the rest of this discussion. Castle’s vote wins,” she adds, unnecessarily, from their expressions.

When she leaves, her purse remaining on her chair by way of reassurance that she will return shortly, she leaves behind a fragile, dangerous silence and two people who can’t meet each other’s eyes.

In Beckett’s words: you don’t trust your son; you didn’t give him or yourself any credit; he’s a good man; he didn’t get that way on his own: Castle hears the tolling of the truth.   His mother is hopelessly insecure about everything. He’d never realised that while he’d been deeply, cripplingly homesick (and hidden it) she’d missed him as much. But deep down, he’s the product of her care, and if he’s grown up a good man, then she’s had plenty to do with that. It doesn’t excuse this whole mess, but it helps.

And yet. The knowledge that she doesn’t trust him bites as deeply now as three weeks ago. He might understand it, but that doesn’t mean he has to excuse that, either. Watching Beckett walk away, he contrasts her: for all their hopelessly mismanaged, rocky, tortuous beginning, she’s made it clear for months that she trusts him absolutely; that he’s her rock – and she is his, however difficult it is for him to ask; that she stands with him, at every turn.

There, facing his mother, who might truly always have loved him, and might love him still (and he does think that she does, though proof is yet lacking), but who’s still trapped in the prison of her past experience – there, watching Beckett’s confident, swinging, returning stride and the way her gaze is only on him – there, he suddenly understands how far she’s come to overpower the demons from her past and trust him.

She could, so very easily, still be in the same place as his mother.

She so very nearly was.

He looks up towards Beckett, who’s looking only at him, and smiles at her with his whole heart behind it. Her answering, blazing smile brands his soul.