Alone

by Jennifer Reynolds

  “Maybe by the time you have your first child I’ll have learned to use it.”

  Eve stopped, looked at her mother in shock, laughed, and started walking again. Children weren’t even a thought in her head. Sure, she liked them, but having one of her own—she thought not. “Sat. phones will be a thing of the past by then,” Eve teased.

  “She is asking for you, Sadie.” Jayna’s husband, Gene, was waiting for them in the hall in front of Jayna’s room when they arrived. He didn’t say anything to anyone else as he rushed back into the hospital room, practically dragging his mother-in-law behind him.

  “That was odd,” Eve commented, looking questioningly at her father as she took a seat beside him in the waiting area.

  When Jayna and Gene’s first child, Gwen, was born, he had looked happy, albeit a little tired and scared. Her first pregnancy had gone fine, and so had this one. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the past nine months to warrant such a look on his face. Jayna had craved her normal hot sauce and ranch dressing combo sauce that went on everything. She had gained nearly thirty pounds, which was five more than her last pregnancy—a fact she had constantly reminded her family of, to their annoyance. Her feet had swelled. Her back had hurt. Her navel even popped out like a turkey timer during her last month. When it did, Eve had poked it every time she saw her sister, which had pissed Jayna off thoroughly. Everything had gone as it should have, so she wondered what could possibly be happening.

  “I hope nothing is wrong,” Eve mumbled more to herself than to her father, who was facing the door Gene and Sadie had hurried into and wasn’t listening to her. Jayna’s door was the only one directly across the hall from the first entrance to the waiting room.

  “Who has Gwen?” Eve asked, deciding she would force a little small talk out of her father. Talking, she told herself, would help take the edge off the tension mounting in the room. Talking would also force her father’s attention off the door to Jayna’s room.

  “She’s with Gene’s folks for the week. Since she is starting school in the fall they decided she should spend a lot of time with them this year,” Ross answered, though the dismissive tone of his voice told her he wasn’t really interested in their conversation.

  “School is eight months away. They just want an excuse to have her over,” Eve snapped, sounding a little petty. Eve liked Gene’s parents. She just hated the way they told Jayna and Gene how to do things when it came to Gwen. They told them what kind of clothes to buy, what kind of toys to buy, what time of day they should give her a bath, how long she should be allowed to play outside, and what time and for how long her naps should be. They had behaved more like Gwen’s parents than her grandparents. Gene and Jayna seemed to take it all in stride, rolling their eyes behind his parent’s back, and doing things the way they wanted to anyway. Eve didn’t know how they could stand it. Jayna told her once that when you had your first kid, people were all the time telling you how you should and shouldn’t do things and that you learn how to take in what you want and ignore the rest.

  “Probably, but they do live two hours away and with the new baby on the way and Gwen about to start school, it is going to be hard for Jayna and Gene to make the trip to see them as often as they do now,” her father said.

  “Speaking of Gene’s family, do we need to call the Forbs or his sister?”

  “No. Your mom asked Gene when he called if he needed us to. He told her he had called them right when Jayna’s contractions started. They should be here in less than an hour. Do me a favor when they get here, help them watch Gwen.”

  “I can do that.” She nodded. Ross did not tell her why he thought the Forbs needed help watching their granddaughter. They seemed perfectly capable of attending to her, but if her dad thought they might need help then she would help. Eve wasn’t completely sure if she could, though. Her stomach was beginning to tighten itself in a knot so tight she thought her insides might burst from her abdomen, spilling her stomach and intestines all over the waiting room floor. The last thing she thought she would possibly be able to do was babysit a five-year-old.

  Eve had been there for every one of her niece and nephew’s births, because even though she personally didn’t want children, she did love her siblings and their children. She loved the fact that she could play with them, buy them things, spoil them, and when they started doing the pooping thing or the crying-for-no-reason thing, she could hand them over to the people in charge of them.

  Beside her Ross tensed as a bedraggled looking nurse rushed from Jayna’s room. For just a second, they caught a glimpse of Jayna’s legs up in the stirrups and a doctor bending down between them. In that second, they also heard an earsplitting scream. Ross leapt to his feet, but the door shut too quickly and the nurse passed them by as if she hadn’t seen them there. That scream confirmed their fear that something was wrong with Jayna’s delivery.

  As time slowly passed, Eve could distinctly hear the sounds of other patients in distress. Women in other rooms up and down the hall were having problems as well. Looking around the waiting room, she had seen more than a few panic-stricken faces staring blankly into nothing. She had to force herself to focus all of her attention on the things going on in Jayna’s room. Doctors and nurses rushed in and out, all looking worried. Some were even cutting slight, sympathetic glances their way. They hadn’t heard Jayna scream again, but the silence was just as deafening.

  “Has the baby come?” Beverly, Gene’s mother, asked, waking Eve from her thoughts. Eve had been so lost in worry that she hadn’t noticed them approach. “Eve, is everything all right?” This time Gene’s mother grabbed her by the arm and lightly shook her.

  “Huh.” Eve turned her face up to the woman in confusion.

  “I asked if the baby had come yet. Is everything all right?” she asked, the question coming out slightly annoyed considering the number of times she had to ask it. She looked frantically from Jayna’s door to Eve, confused by Eve’s lack of response.

  “No, Mrs. Beverly, the baby hasn’t come. At least, I don’t think so. Mom and Gene have been in there for a while now. The only people that have come out are doctors and nurses. I don’t know where dad has gone.” She was too numb for any kind of emotion in her voice to show. Eve looked around worriedly for her father.

  “I think I saw your father on our way up. Are your brothers here yet?” Gene’s dad asked as he fed Gwen a pack of cheese and peanut butter crackers.

  “Chad and Seth have been called, but they haven’t gotten here yet. Maybe dad went down to the gift shop,” she told them. He had mumbled something about Jayna not having one of those big It’s a boy or It’s a Girl wreaths on her door. She hadn’t thought to remind him that Jayna was only in the delivery room and the wreath didn’t matter.

  “Here, Eve, will you watch Gwen while I go and check on your father?” Mr. Forbs asked, getting up, sitting the child in her lap, and looking over at his wife who had taken up Eve’s job of intensely watching Jayna’s door for any movement. Gwen immediately began playing with Eve’s diamond heart necklace and asking a multitude of questions in the highly annoying way kids who aren’t your own do.

  “Aunt Eve, what are you doing here?” Gwen asked when she finally got bored with Eve’s heart necklace and had begun twirling her St. Christopher’s medal.

  “We are waiting for your new brother or sister to get here,” Eve answered.

  “Oh.”

  Jayna loved surprises. She had refused to let the doctors tell her what she was having. Gene had spent the last four months bursting at the seams with anticipation. He had begged Eve’s sister to let him find out, but she had denied him. Eve and her mother had a sneaking suspicion that he actually liked the idea of the baby being a surprise and was only putting up a fight to annoy Jayna.

  “Where is mama?” Gwen asked still twirling her necklace.

  “Your Mama is in that room right over there, number three, waiting for the baby to come.”

  Gwen knew that Jayna was
carrying the baby in her belly, but they hadn’t gone into detail as to how the baby got in there or how it would get out. Luckily, Gwen just gave Eve a look that said she wasn’t quite sure what Eve was talking about and didn’t really care, then went back to amusing herself with Eve’s necklace.

  “Let’s sing some songs while we wait,” Eve suggested, trying to keep herself from feeling completely helpless while sitting around doing nothing. They started out with the “ABC” song, which they did in both English and Spanish.

  They were halfway through their fifth song when both of Gwen’s grandfathers came back into the waiting room.

  “Any news yet?” Ross asked as he squatted down to catch a running Gwen. Eve noticed that he didn’t have anything with him, but she didn’t bother to ask why. The disturbed looks on both of the men’s faces silenced any words that might have left her mouth.

  “No. Lots of doctors and nurses rushing in and out at random times, but no one has come to tell us anything,” Beverly said, not looking in their direction. Her husband came over and sat down next to her. She paid him no attention.

  Eve’s brother, Chad, had always lived with his foot shoved firmly into his mouth, so it wasn’t surprising to hear him talking as loudly as possible down the hall. “What is going on in this hospital? People running around like crazy. People whispering and…”

  Ross turned to him, shaking his head and mouthing for his son to shut his mouth, which the other man did abruptly when he saw the distraught look on everyone’s face.

  “Eve, will you take Gwen back?” her father asked, handing the child over to her. Eve just nodded. “Walk with me,” she heard Ross say softly as he passed by his son. She watched them walk out into the hall and out of earshot.

  Patience wasn’t one of Eve’s virtues. Deciding she had sat for as long as she could, over twenty minutes to be exact, she passed Gwen over to Alexia, Chad’s wife, got up, and went to pace back and forth in front of Jayna’s room, occasionally pausing to place her ear to the door and listen to what was going on inside. Of course, she couldn’t hear anything but muffled sounds because the door was so thick.

  The thought that she might possibly get to hear the new baby’s little cry popped into her head. That thought made her remember the camera she had stowed away in her bag by her seat. Remembering these things brought on another round of sadness. She realized that she hadn’t taken any pictures or filmed any of the family as she had done with the births of her other nieces and nephews. Doing so now seemed to be inappropriate.

  “Gwen, honey, go over and sit with your nana and pop for a minute. Mrs. Forbs, I’m going to the nurse’s station to see if I can get someone to tell us what is going on.” Eve heard Alexia say.

  She stopped pacing and watched as Mrs. Forbs took Gwen, nodding at Alexia. Nodding seemed to be the only thing any of them could do.

  We must be too afraid to open our mouths, Eve thought to herself. Words would make the severity of the situation worse.

  There had been no need for Alexia to go to the nurse’s station because the second she stepped out into the hall Sadie came out of Jayna’s room. She carried a look of horrified shock on her face. Eve watched her mother pull the door closed behind her with shaky hands. The sight of her mother’s horror scared her.

  “Mom,” she whispered, moving to stand too close to her mother.

  “Get your father?” was her mother’s reply.

  “What is going on? Is the baby all right?” Beverly asked as Sadie entered the waiting room. As soon as the words left her mouth, everyone in the room began bombarding her with questions. Sadie held up her hands to stop the overwhelming noise. They stopped, watched her scan their faces with cold, emotionally stunned eyes, then walk to one of the seats and sit down.

  “The baby is fine. He took his sweet time coming out, but he is here and he is beautiful.” She sighed, focusing on the last question, the one thing she could answer. The other was so surreal she didn’t think she could say it.

  “Did you say he?” Mrs. Forbs asked, turning to smile at her husband. They now had one of each, which was what, according to Jayna, they had been praying for since they found out Jayna was pregnant.

  “Yes, Jayna had a boy. They named him Caleb Braden.”

  About that time, a nurse came out of the room pushing a hospital carrier with a screaming baby inside. They all leapt up to go look at him, but the nurse shooed them away.

  “They are taking him for his shots and a bath,” Sadie answered in response to their confused and disappointed faces.

  “When can we go in to see Jayna?” Eve asked excited about the baby, but desperately wanting to see her sister.

  “I…there were complications…” Bringing her shaking hands to her face, she wiped them across her forehead, clearing off the sudden perspiration that had accumulated there. She really didn’t want to tell them what had happened.

  “Complications? What kind of complications? Is she all right?” This time Ross asked the questions. Her mom hadn’t had time to answer him. As soon as the words left his mouth, Gene exited Jayna’s room with a stone white complexion and silent tears flooding out of his eyes.

  Eve’s mother reached over and grabbed her hand. The grip Sadie had on her was so painful and stiff that it frightened her, causing her to look down at their intertwined fingers. Her mother’s knuckles had gone white under the strain of squeezing Eve so hard. The pain, slowly coursing through her hand and up her arm, told her exactly what was about to come out of Gene’s mouth.

  Eve’s body froze.

  Time stopped.

  The color drained from her face.

  Vomit burned its way up her throat.

  The world went silent.

  Turning her head slowly, she took in her surroundings. She could see that there were other people in the waiting room, some cried and some stared off in stunned silence. She had half-expected to see that the world had stopped moving. Her vision and perception were so distorted that it was as if she was watching the world from outside of it.

  Very carefully, she turned back to her family. She could see her brother-in-law’s lips moving. In the second the words left his lips, sound came back to the world, and when the words that she knew were coming, came, she vomited into the seat next to her. Bile fried the back of her throat as she emptied her stomach.

  ----------

  Eve and her mother stayed at the hospital with Gene for the next three days, so that someone would always be with the baby. They took turns feeding him, holding him, singing to him. Doyle arrived shortly after Jayna died and stayed with Eve as much as possible. The Forbs stayed at the home of Eve’s parents with her father, who stayed busy making funeral arrangements.

  After the funeral—which Eve could never remember the details of—Gene agreed to let Gwen go back with his parents for a few weeks and to let Caleb stay with Eve and her parents so that he could grieve.

  If Eve had been in the right frame of mind to pay any attention, she would have noticed that in those same moments that they were grieving for Jayna the world was starting to grieve for itself. A virus was spreading, killing. The death rate rose quickly, not as quick as the sudden burst of deaths hospitals across the nation had experienced that first day, but it wasn’t a slow process.

  II – Saying Goodbye

  Just weeks after Jayna’s death, Eve’s parents’ home was once again full of crying people. Gene’s funeral had been over for nearly an hour, but people were still milling about. Eve selfishly wished that his parents had lived closer to town so that all of the people crowding her parents’ home could have gone to their house instead. That was a horrible thing to wish for, she knew, but that hadn’t stopped her from wishing it.

  Eve had been walking up the stairs to go lie down in her old bedroom when she overheard the soft whispers of her brothers. They were in her parents’ bedroom talking quietly to each other. They were exchanging stories about the things they had seen over the weeks following Jayna’s funeral.

&
nbsp; A lot of things had happened, so many things in fact, that her mind couldn’t settle on one, not that she wanted to, it was all too horrible to think about.

  “Gavin said…plane…blood pouring from...” Only every few words reached her between the extremely quiet voices and her rambling brain, and she couldn’t tell who was speaking.

  “I know…five cars…bodies…”

  Eve took a few more steps up the stairs, but stopped when she heard her father’s voice. She wondered if he had been with them the entire time or if he had also overheard their conversation and joined them. The further up she went, the clearer the voices floated down to her. Her father began retelling them what he and Mr. Forbs had overseen at the hospital the day Jayna passed away.

  “Dad, do you think that white powder has anything to do with what is happening? Do you think the rumors are true? That it’s some kind of a mutating virus destroying the human immune system and killing us?” Chad bombarded his father with questions, not giving him time to answer any of them.

  “That sounds like as good a theory as any. Your grandfather would have had some interesting theories about this. I don’t know anything for sure, but whatever is going on, it may have come out of that vial. I’ve been reading the latest statistics coming out of the Weekly World News. They are showing a major increase in deaths overseas as well as here in the states.”

  “I can believe it after seeing all of those funerals today, and all of those fresh graves,” Seth agreed. “People are dying over nothing. Over things that haven’t killed a human in over a hundred years.”

  “Allen, um Mr. Forbs, said that when Gene came up three days ago he was complaining about a bad case of diarrhea, and Jayna…well the doctor said that what happened when Caleb was born was quite common and not at all life threatening. Maybe a hundred years ago it would have been lethal, but not with today’s medicine. She should have survived, not bled out the way she did,” Chad added.