Heart & Soul

by Nicole Williams

The nurse looked close to being about to beg me or threaten me when someone rushed inside the room. It wasn’t the someone I’d hoped for, but Josie brought with her a tender smile and a warm hand to hold. Sweat was pouring from my face, mixing with my tears, and my body felt as if it were about to explode, but when she brought a cold washcloth to my forehead and gave me a nod, it brought me back to a place of reason.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get your baby taken care of, and then we’ll deal with the rest.” She squeezed the washcloth, and icy cold droplets dripped onto my forehead, seeming to clear the crazed fever I’d been overtaken with. “Your baby needs you right now. Jesse’s in good hands, and Garth’s in there to make sure of it too. It’s time to do your thing.”

  “But Jesse . . .” I bit my lip as another contraction ripped through my body. “I wanted him to be here. He wanted to be here.”

  Josie tipped her head, thinking for a moment, before pulling out her phone. “Do you want me to, you know, film it? So he can watch it later if—”

  Her voice cut off abruptly, but I didn’t miss her meaning. If he woke up. If he survived. If our baby would have its father. I shook my head, though it was for a different reason than the one Josie assumed.

  “Yeah, good idea. It looks like a massacre down there. I’m not sure I could hold the camera steady.” She smiled at me and gave my hand a hard squeeze. “Now listen to the ‘pushy’ nurse and push that baby out already.”

  I knew she was right. I knew I didn’t have a choice. Or I did, maybe, but it was my job to take care of our baby. I had to trust that the doctors were doing theirs and taking care of Jesse. Once the baby was delivered and safe, then I could worry about Jesse, but worrying about him right now wouldn’t do anything but hinder the whole situation.

  “I’m ready,” I panted at the nurse. “My baby? It’s early. Will it be okay?”

  The cross nurse’s face relaxed, and she gave my knee a gentle squeeze. “Your baby’s going to be okay. Let’s get it out so you can see for yourself though. Okay?”

  I couldn’t answer her because that was when another contraction assaulted me, and this time when she and the doctor yelled, “Push,” I listened. It actually felt pretty good, or at least like I could control something instead of just lying there and taking the contractions. Pushing, in a way, felt like I was fighting back.

  On my third or fourth push, things got uncomfortable again, and I could guess why. More from the look on Josie’s face—which made it seem like she was watching an autopsy—than from what the doctor was saying about the baby’s head crowning.

  “Oh my God,” Josie said, looking away one second only to look back the next. “It’s the most amazing and grotesque thing I’ve ever witnessed.” She shook her head. “How in the hell is that possible? The next time a guy says he’s tough, I’m going to make him watch a video of this.”

  The pain was unreal at that point. So searing white-hot it blinded me and brought me to a place where I felt like I was about to pass out and actually hoped I would. I’d never really given natural delivery much thought because I’d known from the very beginning that I’d be having a scheduled Caesarean. I’d never spent any time researching or thinking about what this would feel like or what the pain would do to me. I knew there were things like epidurals or spinal blocks or something for women who went with the traditional way of delivering a baby, and damn, I wished that was an option for me. But my baby was minutes, if not seconds, from being brought into the world. I think they’d told me when I’d been rushed in that I was too far along for the Caesarean to be safely performed, but I hadn’t realized what that meant until right now, when my body felt as if it were simultaneously on fire and about to implode. If I ever did this again, I was going Caesarean all the way, even if my heart wasn’t a factor in the equation. No question.

  When the doctor ordered me to push again, I was already bearing down, desperate to make pain end. Then, all at once, it did. A relieved exhale rushed out of my mouth as my head crashed back into the pillow. And that was when I heard it—the cry. Our baby’s first precious, gut-wrenching cry. I held on to the sound of it, memorizing every note and nuance so I could describe it in perfect detail to Jesse.

  The doctor stood and smiled at me. “Congratulations. You’ve got a daughter.”

  JESSE HAD BEEN right. Our baby was a girl. I should have known.

  I’d been so convinced that we were going to have a boy that when the doctor told me it was a girl, it didn’t register at first. Only after Lily, then Josie, had repeated it, then I’d cycled it through my head a few times, did I realize the little boy I’d been dreaming about had been, in fact, a girl all along.

  It brought on a fresh rush of tears, but these tears weren’t spawned from pain but from joy. We had a daughter. She was here and healthy, and I’d made it through the delivery healthy as well, my heart staying strong.

  I didn’t get to hold her—with her being premature, they had to rush her off to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit—but the nurse made sure I got a good look at her before they whisked her away. She was, by a large margin, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. All pink and new and strong-lunged. She didn’t stop wailing from the time she’d been born to the time they rolled her out of the room, and I loved that. I adored that in her first moments on this planet, she was already raising a riot and making sure she was heard. I cherished the thought that maybe, just maybe, wherever Jesse was and whatever condition he was in, he might be able to hear the first cries of our daughter.

  After I’d been stitched up and cleaned up, they moved me to a different room in the main part of the hospital. I still had to be hooked up to that dreaded heart rate monitor, but I was so tired after the delivery, I was dozing off before they even dialed down the volume on the monitor.

  Josie and Lily moved with me to the new room, and it wasn’t long after that before Hyacinth and Clementine found us. The girls came in with smiles, but their eyes were puffy and rimmed with red. It was that kind of day for us all. A day of celebration and tragedy. I didn’t want to ask either of them if they knew what was happening with Jesse, so I whispered to Josie, pleading with her to go find out something. Now that the baby was safe, I needed to know what was happening to the rest of my family.

  She agreed, but I didn’t miss how she dragged her feet as she left my room. I guessed she felt the same way we all must have—that she was as terrified of finding out how Jesse was as she was anxious.

  Lily and her sisters stayed with me, but I hadn’t seen either Neil or Rose, which meant they were with Jesse. Eventually Lily shuffled over to the window, staring out of it like she was trying to make sense of the day. I waited.

  I waited some more. When it felt like the waiting would kill me and I was tempted to holler at whatever nurse walked by the door, I waited some more. I checked the clock on the wall so many times that when Josie finally made her reappearance, I could confidently say I never wanted to see another wall clock.

  When she came into the room, all of us girls sucked in a deep breath. She was staring at the floor, her hands wringing in front of her. I stopped breathing. My heart stopped too.

  Then a sharp sob fell from her lips before she lifted her head. Her eyes found mine and in them was all the answer I needed. “He’s alive.”

  IT HAD NEVER felt so good to be alive.

  Holding my little girl, swinging on the porch swing hanging from the roof of our finished home, hearing the rest of my family’s voices and laughter coming from inside. Life had been good for a long time, but now? Now it was great.

  I’d spent months crippled by fear that I’d lose one or both of them, and they’d both made it. Rowen and our baby had survived the whole terrifying process and were just as healthy as could be. I should have put a little more faith in Rowen’s reassurances rather than letting fear take center stage for so long, but that was behind me. I was looking to the future.

  My daughter caught sight of a deer bounding past the house, and she
bounced in my lap, making excited coos and pumping her fists. She could sit on this swing, content to watch life and nature roll by, almost as long as I could. I’d been doing a lot more of that lately—sitting and finding solace in quiet moments and unhurried schedules. Coming face to face with one’s maker and surviving to live another day—or decades hopefully—had a way of changing a person’s perspective. Facing death had a way of making life richer, a way of squeezing even more purpose into one’s life, a way of bringing more meaning and significance to simple moments and everyday details. At least for me it had.

  After two weeks in the hospital—our premature daughter had been discharged a week before I was—I finally got to go home. I needed to be sent home with a wheelchair and had graduated to crutches a couple of weeks after that, but I didn’t have to have it confirmed by the doctors and nurses that I was lucky to be alive. A crash like that . . . the odds were more stacked against a person surviving it than they were stacked in their favor.

  I didn’t remember the crash. I didn’t remember anything except for getting in Old Bessie and starting back to check on Rowen, then waking up in a hospital bed feeling like my body was one giant bruise. I had no memory of the two days that passed in between. Garth told me that was probably a good thing.

  Of course the reason I didn’t remember the crash was because I’d fallen asleep at the wheel. Exhaustion had chosen that moment to stifle me into submission. If nothing else, it had gotten my attention and respect. I’d never let myself get worn so thin again. I had a family to take care of, a family who depended on me. I had too much at stake to ever risk letting myself get that way again.

  So the house had taken a lot longer to finish than I’d planned. Part of that was due to it being complicated, if not downright risky, moving around a construction site while using crutches. The other part of the relaxed build schedule had to do with my new life lesson of not wearing myself down to an exhausted nub again. Plus, I had a brand-new daughter to enjoy and get to know and a healthy wife I owed a serious debt. In more ways than one.

  Living out of my parents’ living room for the past ten months had been a bit . . . complicated and had taken more than one creative solution, but I’d never heard a single complaint from anyone. Everyone seemed relieved that we were all still there, a family that had grown one instead of shrunk one or more. But when the day came to finally move into Rowen’s and my place, we were both ready to haul boxes over before the sun had risen.

  It had been awesome of my parents to let us stay for so long, but we were ready for our own place. Some of the rooms were still being finished—our room still needed to be painted, the kitchen floor had just gone in last weekend, we were short a dining room table, and the garage still wasn’t insulated—but there was a roof over our heads and all appliances of a necessary nature had been installed.

  The picture Rowen had been working on for months at our old condo had been one of the first things to find its permanent home above the fireplace in the family room. She’d painted a portrait of the two of us, saving a spot in the lower center of the giant canvas for our baby to be painted in once it was born. I didn’t know how she could make a painting more real than an actual photo, but I supposed that was part of Rowen’s gift: turning art into reality, making it attainable even for some hick who’d grown up on a ranch in Montana. There wasn’t one time I’d looked at that painting without feeling something—something that went deep enough it penetrated my soul every time.

  We’d been in the house for just two weeks, but it already felt like home. It already felt lived in and like we’d lived years’ worth of memories inside it instead of mere days. It was a good house. The kind that wasn’t so large a person couldn’t hear their child’s laughter from across the house, nor was it so small it felt like there wasn’t enough room to grow into it. It was just right. The place where I started and ended the day with my family.

  Another couple of deer scrambled by the house, weaving through the maze of trucks and cars parked out front, and the little bundle in my lap exploded with motion and sound again. Just when I’d thought she was almost asleep. This was her typical naptime, but there’d been too much excitement inside for her to go down in her crib, so I’d slipped her out to the front porch. It was much quieter out here, even with the rushing creek in the background and the noisy birds yelling at each from across the valley.

  Today was a special day—a day that had been months in the making and had finally come to fruition.

  The front door opened, and out stepped someone who knew exactly who she was looking for and where to find them. The stern expression she tried to hold vanished the moment our daughter bounced in my lap again, flapping her arms like she was trying her hardest to fly to her mama.

  “You know, this might not be a typical baby shower, but since the baby in question is out of my tummy, she should be present at this lavish party one of her godmothers threw for her.”

  Our daughter stopped bouncing for a moment, twisting her head back to look at me with big blue eyes that were as expressive as her mama’s.

  “Busted,” I whispered to her.

  She grinned a toothy smile and flapped her arms, all right in the world once again.

  “Come on then, scoot over and make room.” Rowen was already squeezing in beside us. “I need a break from the games and balloons and pastel-wrapped presents and napkins.”

  I gave her a little more room so she wouldn’t be smashed into the arm of the swing, but not so much she wasn’t still smashed against me. “I thought this was supposed to be a baby shower, not a royal coronation and wedding combined.”

  She leaned her head against my chest to get eye level with the eight-month-old who simply couldn’t contain herself now that she had both Mom and Dad’s attention. Rowen brushed her nose back and forth across our little girl’s nose, making her erupt in laughter.

  “Whenever Josie is at the helm of the party-planning ship, to expect anything less than over-the-top is to fool oneself,” Rowen said, waving at the giant balloon arch leading up the porch before flashing her wrist in front of me to show off her ornate pink rose corsage.

  “Not that I’ve been to a baby shower before, but I think this one hits upon a lot of firsts.” I draped an arm around Rowen and rocked my family back and forth in the swing my dad had made for us as a home-warming gift. “Putting aside the fact that the baby is eight months old, there are guys here, a five-course barbeque dinner is planned, the mayor is a guest, and there’s a bubble machine on our front walkway.” I lifted my chin at the machine blowing an endless stream of bubbles.

  “Plus, the mom-to-be-slash-already-has-been-for-eight-months is drinking a beer.” Rowen lifted her bottle and winked. It was the same kind I’d been drinking that night her attempts to get me drunk and take advantage of me failed. She’d been taking advantage of me plenty lately to make up for lost time, no beer required. “And I made a special request for the bubble machine, so that’s the one thing Josie isn’t to blame for. The rest you can pin on her all you want though.”

  My brows came together as I studied the machine sending bubbles out across the field. My wife didn’t strike me as the bubble-machine type. “You wanted a bubble machine?”

  “She loves bubbles. Since she’s kind of the star of the party, she should have a say in it.” Rowen grinned at her daughter, who was going a little cross-eyed trying to focus on a bubble coming at her. It popped right between her eyeballs, and she giggled like it was the grandest thing in the entire world.

  “Nice she finally has a name, right?” I said.

  Rowen’s eyes lifted to the sky. “Well, it wasn’t like I was just going to name our child when you were unconscious. What if you had woken up to find out you had a child named Winnipeg or Desdemona?”

  “I would have loved her every bit as much as I do now.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to take a chance, and besides, it wasn’t like she needed a name during her first week of life. It’s not like we’ve scar
red her permanently because we didn’t give her a name the moment she ejected out of my—”

  My grimace must have stopped her. Either that or her memory of the whole birth. From what Garth had told me from what Josie had told him, war documentaries portrayed less carnage.

  I nudged her. “I’m glad you waited. I’m glad we figured it out together.”

  “You and I might be the only ones. The rest of our friends and family were about to mutiny if we didn’t give her a name, I think.” Rowen held out her hands, and almost immediately, our daughter went into them. “But in plenty of cultures, a baby doesn’t get named for days, even years. We were just being multicultural.”

  “Sure, we were,” I said.

  “What? You think I could have come up with a name like Elodie on my own? That brilliance took the two of our heads coming together.”

  At the sound of her name, Elodie looked between us, like she was answering with a yeah, what is it? Her name hadn’t come from flipping through a list of old family names or even because of its meaning or origin—it had been far more simple than that. It was the one name both of us had had on our list of names we’d drawn up at the hospital. For others, that might have seemed an impetuous way to name one’s child. For us, it was just the right way.

  “Besides, you were the one who was convinced I was wrong about having a son, so I figured you’d have a list of girl names to bring to the baby-naming table.” Rowen’s gaze moved from Elodie to me.

  The look in her eyes stopped my breath. Ever since the accident, some of the looks she’d given me could bowl me over if I wasn’t bracing for them. It was almost as if she was looking at someone she’d buried and later seen risen from the grave.

  “I was also just a little preoccupied, looming at your bedside in between visiting the NICU, worried my husband, who had just become a father, was going to ditch us.”

  I tightened my arm around her shoulders. “I wasn’t going anywhere. Someone upstairs just figured I’d better learn a tough lesson before I became a dad and exhaustion took on a whole new meaning.” I kissed her temple when I noticed Rowen’s eyes glazing over. They’d done a lot of that ever since the accident. “There was and is no way I’m ever leaving my girls. Ever.”