On Impermanence

If we lived forever, if the dews of Adashino never vanished, if the
crematory smoke on Toribeyama never faded, men would hardly feel the pity of
things. The beauty of life is in its impermanence. Man lives the longest of
all living things... and even one year lived peacefully seems very long. Yet
for such as love the world, a thousand years would fade like the dream of
one night.

Kenko Yoshida, Essays in Idleness (1330-1332)

VII
---

"Buffy, just calling to let you know my test results came back clear. Dr.
Kriegel's switching me to a lighter dose of meds, so that's good. I'll be
home late, make sure Dawn gets dinner, okay? Love you."

She snaps the cellphone shut. Closes her eyes and rubs the bridge of her
nose. The medication leaves her nauseous, dizzy and tired. The doctor claims
it'll pass. She wishes she could throw up on him.

Hallway's clear. A bench with no-one on it and Joyce sits down, closes her
eyes and catches her breath. She's always tired and it's been nothing but
errands all day. To the gallery, the supermarket for everything Buffy
forgot, bookstore, florist and now the five-minute consult.

Support group next.

Room 24A, faded blue carpet and fold-up chairs pulled into a circle. Vending
machine coffee and everyone there carries a bottle of water for the pills
they're all taking. More hats than bare heads, and someone always starts
crying mid-way. Usually it's Emma, who's got two little boys and had to quit
her job. She's lost so much weight she's like a little bird, translucent
skin stretched over thin easily-snapped bones. She cries a lot and Joyce
tries not to be impatient, tries not to think less of her.

Dawn cries a lot. Always did, from colic and long fussy nights to
kindergarten tantrums. Buffy was an easy child, an easy pregnancy, easy
birth and perfectly golden. Dawn was sallow and wrinkled and when Joyce saw
her for the first time, struggling and screaming in the neo-natal unit, she
remembers the shock of not loving her instantly.

"She'll be a fighter," the nurses told her. "It's a good sign that she can
scream like that, she's strong." Three weeks early, and she remembers
looking at Dawn and wondering if it'd be better if this ugly, crabby baby
died.

Which is strange. She wonders why the monks gave her the memories of eight
months of back aches and constant bleeding. Bed rest and Buffy bouncing on
the mattress, trying to play and Hank hovering, endlessly hovering because
this was his idea, another baby. He didn't want Buffy an only child like
they'd both been. A big family, four or five kids maybe, and he hadn't been
the one getting hormone injections, prodded at by doctors and peeing into
endless cups.

A twenty-hour labor, mastitis so she couldn't nurse, and the way Hank's face
had closed up when the doctor said she wouldn't have any more children. The
times she had wanted to shake Dawn, shake her quiet.

Fourteen years of Dawn, good and bad. She wonders when exactly the monks
changed her memories. Whether she was ever happy with Hank, if in the real
world, the world-without-Dawn, they didn't fall apart so quickly. If maybe
they lasted longer, if Buffy had been happier.

She remembers very clearly the summer Buffy ran away. Sitting at home with
Dawn and thinking, well, at least this child will live.

But Dawn won't. There's a god out to kill her. Vampires and demons after the
other.

And even if Joyce wanted to, even if she could have, the cancer's destroyed
any chance she has of another child. Any day now, she expects to get a call
from Hank that his new wife is pregnant. Twins, she bets.

There are support groups for everything in California. Sunnydale has seven
for parents who've lost children. One of them meets across the hall from
24A, and she recognises some of them. Buffy doesn't want to hear about
them, doesn't want to attend the funerals that Giles keeps track of. Joyce
goes instead. She's read up on the appropriate patter. Learnt to give hugs
to strangers whose children are dust under her own child's hands.

There's another group for infertility. She has the flyer listing all the
groups folded up neatly in her bag. Infertility, Tuesdays at 8 p.m.
Sometimes she thinks about going, but she doesn't do more than smooth out
the paper, re-read the date and time.

She hasn't thought of this in years - or at least, she doesn't remember
thinking about it. She remembers sometimes looking at her girls, her
beautiful girls, and thinking fiercely that it had been worth it. Hank, the
treatment, the miscarriages, all of that had been worth it for these two
incredible girls.

Yet when the doctor said in passing - because she's old, old with wrinkles
foundation can't cover completely, and men don't look at her like that when
she's with her girls - "The chemotherapy will leave you infertile, Joyce." -
something in her had split open, jagged and pain bright.

"But I already am," she wanted to answer to his unspoken "But you already
are."

She takes her pills, and when she washes them down with the tea Dawn makes,
she thinks about the pills she took all that time ago. LSD and acid back in
the days, the pack a day habit she used to have, the lousy food she ate,
that she never exercised enough, forgot her vitamins, forget to stay calm
and healthy. Forgot not to get cancer.

There's a computer at home, one at the shop and she goes to the library to
research instead. Makes the browser screen small and worries about the
people walking by, looking over her shoulder, reading. She goes early in the
mornings, when she's the only one at the terminals and the librarian is a
volunteer, not Susan from her book group.

Fertility drugs and cancer. Ovarian, and she reads the medical papers, tries
to remember the names of the drugs she took back then. It's probably not a
link, probably something random, and she wishes she could ask the doctor,
ask someone and get an answer.

Have some great big voice boom down out of the clouds: "It's not your fault,
Joyce. It was..."

Dawn? Hank? The doctors? Glory trying to destroy her family? Buffy and all
the stress? Someone, just someone, a demon, a vampire, something she can
see, someone she can fight.

If the monks could change everything, change the world so Dawn had always
been here, did they do this? She asks the doctors, but they talk in vague
numbers, avoid her gaze and she realizes she's shrill. An middle-aged woman,
shrill and weak. She lowers her voice and calmly pushes for a date. When.
When did this start. Estimate for me, please.

Months ago, they tell her. A tiny malfunction here, and they tap the side of
her head, the place that feels bruised and hollow already, and the cells
can't control themselves. You didn't notice until the headaches started, but
it was there already.

Months ago. Maybe three months? she asks. Four? Six?

They shrug. Perhaps.

Giles tells her that events before Dawn were probably the same. She
remembers the weeks, the waiting. Walking around the house with Buffy on her
hip, a sunny smiling toddler and thinking through the nausea, how happy she
was. Blissfully pregnant in her house with her husband and her darling
daughter. The way her breasts would swell and her bras would be too tight,
wonderfully tight. Nausea and the doctors said it was a good sign. This one
would last.

She called her mother the first time. The second time, she waited until the
end of the first trimester. She started bleeding the next day. She didn't
call again until they heard Dawn's heartbeat. She remembers that, the racing
thump-a-thump, and Hank had taken the day off, was outside in the waiting
room with Buffy, and they called him in to listen, and he'd kissed her and
she'd put her head back on the table and wept with relief.

A son, maybe. A son or a daughter, she didn't care. A baby, another baby.
All the little clothes that Buffy had worn, packed up and stored out of
sight, and she let herself dream. Prams and cribs, nursing the baby with
Buffy reading a book, the big sister. Old and grey, with Hank next to her.
Christmases with grandchildren and maybe after Dawn, she could have another
baby, a third one.

These days, she has plenty of time to think. She's in bed a lot, and her
mind tends to wander. Hospitals remind her of too much. Buffy comes to visit
with Dawn, laughing and sweetly, lovingly worried. She wants to soothe the
fear from their faces, hug them and say that everything will be okay. She'd
die for them, she loves them so much.

She wishes she'd never had them. Lying in the hospital bed, looking out of
the windows at Sunnydale, at all the stories she knows about this place -
she wishes she'd never come here. Married someone else, stayed single. Moved
to Europe, written a book. Stayed in university, become a professor instead
of a mom. Done all the thousand things she wishes she had time to do.

Because her daughters won't have that time. She wants to keep Dawn home,
take her out of school and have her nearby all the time, safe. She takes
more photographs and she wonders if Glory will be kind, if Glory will be
merciful and not kill Dawn until Joyce is dead.

She thinks about praying, to Glory, to the other gods that Giles talks
about. To the universe.

Let me die before my children.

She asks Giles about vampires with souls, about Angel and his curse, and he
stops her, crushes her in a hug and strokes her hair while she tries not to
cry, not to break down. He tells her about Billy Fordham, and she remembers
him, a sweet kid who called her "Ma'am". She shared a school carpool with
his father, both of them single parents, and she thinks she should call him,
and she can't bear to.

She remembers drinking an entire bottle of vodka over one long, horrible
pain-hazy day back in '85. Dropping Buffy off at a neighbour's, because she
wasn't a bad mom, she wasn't going to get drunk in front of her kid. Going
home and Hank was away on business, the house was quiet. No children sounds.
She'd still been bleeding from the D&C. The pad chafing between her thighs,
bright, bright red blood like watered down paint. Putting on music and
getting drunk enough to cry.

No-one else was there that day. No-one else remembers those babies except
her. Hanks has forgotten, she knows that. She wonders if when Dawn dies,
when Dawn becomes whatever it is she's destined for, will Joyce remember
her? Will her memories - first steps, first words, fourteen years of
motherhood - will they vanish too?

She mails photographs of Dawn to distant relatives. She thinks about getting
a tattoo with her daughter's name, her birth date. Waking up to smooth clear
skin and never getting a phone call from a second cousin wondering who the
little girl in the green dress is.

She wants to ask Giles what happened to the other Slayers, wants to look at
the histories she knows he has for the answers there. What happened to their
parents, their siblings. Did any of them marry? Did they have children,
grandchildren? She already knows the answer from the way Buffy flinches at
conversations about the future. There are no answers for Dawn.

And she wants to slap them, all these brave kids, to shout at them "What
about your parents?" She doesn't like the Harrises, the Rosenburg woman is
unbearable, but she can hear the sobbing in the room across from 24A.

Please, she prays. Let me die before my children.