Everything in Transit

Death in a warped sense can bring out the best in people.

Through loss, suffering and mourning people get their act together. They sort out their priorities and focus on them, placing all their dedication, patience and love into one single entity, which would be grateful for the attention it received.

For Kay everything was about Corrine and John. She unashamedly admitted to herself that these two people were the only ones who really mattered now that Elaine had gone. They deserved every ounce of love and dedication that Kay had to offer. Nothing else mattered. LA didn't matter, her TV characters didn't matter, and her absentee parents didn't matter anymore. Kay knew what she had to do now and she was going to see it through.

However even though her love and commitment to John and Corrine was unwavering, she seemed unable to tell the boy whom she had loved since the very first day, just exactly how she felt. There never seemed a right moment for this sort of confession. Either he was somewhere with his friends working on new songs or tentatively planning new tours, which he was extremely weary of doing considering the current circumstances, or he was with Kay and Corrine. Granted this would have been the best time for Kay's confession, but when she saw how John looked at his little daughter who was the perfect mix of him and Elaine, the words caught in Kay's throat and stayed stuck there.

Instead she listened to the confessions that John had to make, they were never directly about her, but some part of her brain liked to wish that he had one about her too, and that he couldn't quite put into words.

"You know what Kay?" John asked her one day as he was heating up the milk to feed Corrine with. "I didn't want Elaine to have her." John said ashamedly, avoiding all eye contact with Kay.

However to her this was no secret.

It had been her whom Elaine had run to that night in tears saying that John didn't want the baby and that they were too young. It had been Kay who had to sort her sister out; it had been Kay who said to do whatever Elaine thought was best.

It had been Kay who thought that she had ultimately killed her own sister.

It had been a complicated story.

Elaine loved John, John liked Elaine but didn't quite share the same dedication. But he went along with it because Elaine was fun and beautiful and for some time she made him forget about what he truly wanted, and that was the other Corlett girl.

But this was a secret that never passed his lips.

It had always been John and Elaine, always. People smiled at them and exclaimed how they truly were the perfect couple. But to John it never felt perfect, far from it. He had tried to explain this to Elaine on that fateful night when they broke up. Elaine had been hysterical saying that he couldn't do this to her and that was when she dropped the bombshell that she was in fact pregnant.

For Elaine it had been a warped idea that if she was pregnant, John would feel obliged to stay with her and care for her. She thought that this baby would bring them closer together, when in fact it just drove him away, because John was scared. He knew he couldn't be a father and yet six months later he was stood in Elaine's kitchen heating up milk for his daughter.

"I know John, she told me," Kay said sadly, heaving herself up to sit on the kitchen counter and swinging her legs. "She came running to me that night…"

For Elaine there had been no other option; she was going to have the baby.

But she couldn't cope with Corrine. After the birth of Corrine, which only Kay had been present for, Elaine succumbed to post natal depression. John refused to see her and the baby, having been in the firm mindset that Elaine had planned this all along and that it was some wild scheme to keep him tied to her.

Kay had tried to help her sister out as much as possible, splitting up her time between LA and Tempe, but in the end even that wasn't enough.

On Corrine's four-month anniversary of existence, Kay had flown back home to Tempe to celebrate Elaine, but when Kay had knocked on her sister's door there was no answer. In complete hysterical panic Kay called the Landlord and the police, who broke down the shaky wooden door without a problem.

The first thing that Kay heard when she ran into the apartment was the screaming of a tiny baby who was left alone in her cot and was a frightening shade of blue, having not been fed for god knows how long. Kay had picked her up and held her close, before shouting for Elaine. The landlord and the policemen checked the apartment, but it was Kay who had the misfortune of being the one who checked the bathroom first.

Kay would later on recount this story to her therapist, about how she had run into the bathroom still clutching baby Corrine to her chest and how her desperately searching eyes had fallen onto the body of her older sister lying in a filled bath, her left arm hanging over the side of the white vintage bath tub which had gold clawed feet. It had been a bath that Elaine had been searching for, for months so that it could fit in with the vintage feel of the apartment.

With difficulty Kay had tried to explain to her therapist what emotions had seared through her when she saw her dead sister's body in that vintage bath, two empty bottle of anti depressants and painkillers rolling on the floor, but it was impossible because the chief emotion that flooded through Kay was relief. Relief that it was all over: all the blues and the tears, relief that Corrine wouldn't have a mother who would hate her for existing and driving her father away.

Kay felt ashamed at feeling relieved. She knew that it was not the right emotion to be feeling. Partly because of her guilty and partly because it was her duty, Kay then took Corrine in. To everyone who asked her why she did it, her answer was because she owed it to her sister, but the truth was that it was to ease her own guilt and because she knew that she could be a better mother to Corrine than Elaine could have ever been.

As Kay sat on the kitchen counter, all these thoughts just poured out of her mouth, the weight of the words depositing themselves on John's shoulders as he realised just how much Kay had gone through.

"Why didn’t you tell me all this?" John asked almost disbelieving, unable to comprehend that she had kept all of this hidden from him.

"Because I wanted to give you a choice of being involved in Corrine's life or not, but then I realised I couldn't go through with this anymore on my own," Kay tried to explain but her voice gave way and cracked. "I need you John."

It was a sentence that he had been longing to hear for god knows how long, and the warmth that swept through him almost compared to the feelings that John had felt when he first saw Corrine: unconditional love.