What a Kiss Can Do

by Kathy Johncox

  We sat down on the blanket, just short of the circle of crushed cornstalks. The stars were very bright, yet eerily, the full moon was behind a cloud just like in those scary movies when something horrific is about to happen. There was a cool breeze. We sat and looked at the sky.

  “So let me tell you what I know for sure....” I started, going back to my conversation in the car earlier that day.

  Derek touched my shoulder and said, “Shhh.”

  “Hear something?” I asked. All senses were on alert.

  “No, and I won’t unless you shut up,” he murmured.

  We sat for about half an hour. My bug spray was dissipating. I could hear the gnats or mosquitoes buzzing around us. There was the occasional hoot of an owl. I was getting a leg cramp.

  I started to get up, but Derek grabbed my wrist. “Just stay here, for God’s sake,” he said.

  When Derek laid back on the blanket, I did the same. It was really dark now and we only could see each other’s forms, sometimes only in shadows, if the moon slid temporarily out of the clouds.

  With no aliens to distract me, I started thinking about life. Or rather, what my life might be like. In a few weeks, I would have a baby who would depend on me. Only me. There was no one to alternate feedings with, no one to call at work to exult in her first step.

  So much for lust, I thought. See what it got me? But then I remembered how lust had felt, some nights and some mornings and some afternoons with Fergie in various locations in my house. He was adventurous that way. In the shower, soaping each other and washing each other’s hair. In the kitchen, draped over my sturdy butcher block table. On the couch in the living room during a movie, either a boring one or one that was more stimulating. An example of that might be in that baseball movie when Kevin Costner paints Susan Sarandon’s toenails as they are sitting in bed. Lust clearly had its moments

  But love, we all need it. The love of a father is important, whether he is with you or not. But possibly more important is the man who makes a woman, whether she’s a big girl or a tiny baby, feel loved and wanted and important, pretty much like the center of his universe.

  That man was Derek and what I was sure of was this, if I ever got to say it. I was sure that I wanted there to be an “us,” that we should work on that relationship and see where it took us, and I agreed that we should, in his words, eat together, sleep together, argue, make up, kiss, hug, have sex, go shopping and see where it took us.

  So here I was, a pregnant reporter flat on my back in a cornfield with a best friend and possibly future lover attorney, waiting for aliens who possibly were taking the night off. Waiting in the moonlight, I returned to mistletoe and candlelight and thought about my dad for the first time in 20 years with a soft feeling. Jen was right. Whatever had happened years ago, in this time, Rudy should know him, I thought simply. I should give all my resentment a rest. I felt calm and at peace under the stars with someone who cared for me.

  I looked over at Derek and could see his profile in the dark. His head, nose, a bit of hair curling, his arms folded behind his head. I think his eyes were closed. I thought about how many people I knew who would be lying here with me. Only one.

  Then I heard a voice. It said, “Hold me?” like a question. Then I realized the voice was mine.

  Derek rolled over to face me. “Hold you?” he asked.

  “Never mind. The moment has passed,” I whispered.

  “You’re not getting off that easy. You said, and I heard you clearly say, ‘Hold me’. Were I to do that, this would be taking our relationship to another level, would it not?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Forget it, counselor. This is not a courtroom. This is a cornfield and the jury of our crows has not yet been selected.”

  “Ah, ah, ah,” he said. “The question is hanging out there still.”

  “All right,” I said. “I just felt like cuddling. Are you even a cuddler? Some people just are not, you know.”

  He sighed. “I do enjoy it,” he said and moved closer to me. He put his arm around me and tried to hold me close. But between his shorter stature, his shorter arms and my stomach, it just felt awkward. We lay there for a moment, I think both wondering what to do. Then Derek whispered.

  “Spooning it is, then.”

  “Spooning?

  “Like this.” He gently pushed me onto my side and fit himself close to me. I could feel his breath on my neck and his hand on my hip. “How’s this”

  “It doesn’t feel cuddly yet.”

  “All right then. On to step two.” He moved closer and began to massage my stomach.

  I had wondered about what this moment would be like, when we might be intimate, but we weren’t moving toward intimacy, not tonight anyway, not right here. Just cuddling. As though we had already had great sex and now were basking in it. I liked that Derek was a voluntarily cuddler, not someone who needed to be cajoled, shamed or bribed into it. Like other people I used to know.

  “Better,” I said softly. “She likes it.”

  “What did you think of what I said before?” he asked.

  “Which thing?”

  “What people who care for each other do, in my opinion.”

  “I liked it.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “Mostly.”

  “A start, then,” he said.

  We lay on the blanket for a long time. There were no extraterrestrial events. The stars were out in force, and of course, Derek knew all the constellations and traced them for me with my own hand. We were looking at the sky when he spoke.

  “There are such stories out there,” he said softly.

  “You mean like ‘Return of the Jedi?’” I teased.

  “I’d jab you in the ribs for that if I could find them.”

  “I couldn’t resist,” I said. “I don’t know anyone else who gets all dreamy over the universe.”

  “That just makes me unique in yet another way, doesn’t it?”

  I snuggled in closer and said nothing.

  “Rudy does like this,” I said after a while. “She’s bumping softly against my ribs in a kind of rhythm. I think that’s what Rudy does when Rudy’s content.”

  Derek felt around for the bumping. “Did you know that a percentage of normal sized parents give birth to dwarfs?” he said.

  First my ears perked up because he seldom used that word, at least not in my presence. Second, they perked up because, my God, I had never thought about dwarfism as a birth complication, if I could call it that. Lots of other things had come to mind in the middle of the night while I was trying to get comfortable, but not dwarfism.

  “Why did you have to tell me that?”

  “Because it’s a possibility, although remote.” Derek said. He was rubbing my shoulder. “Mothers must be ready for all eventualities. What would you do if that happened?”

  “Do?”

  “Yes. Do.”

  “There is nothing to do or not do. I love Rudy in a way that makes there nothing to do. It’s hard to explain where that feeling comes from, but it came the minute the pregnancy test stick indicated I was pregnant and at that time, I actually feared that word. But the minute I saw that plus sign and knew I was pregnant, I saw a baby with all fingers and toes, a baby who looked like the photos my mother keeps on the mantel, the baby that Gerber uses, or used to use on the baby food jars. Whatever Rudy looks like, she will look like that to me. The perfect baby.”

  We were both quiet.

  “This is good,” I said softly. I put my hand on his as he rubbed gently. His breath on my neck turned to soft kisses. My mouth was dry and my eyes were wet. I licked my lips and he lifted himself up on one elbow, turned my face toward him and caressed my cheek.

  “Derek, let me tell you what I am sure of now, before I possibly never get a chance. I want us, you and me, to eat together, sleep together, argue, make up, kiss, hug, have sex, go shopping—all the things that people working at a relationship do.”

  “Fin
ally,” he said softly. “It’s taken all these months and now, in a cornfield in the dead of night, you finally get it. What’s this? You’re crying.” He kissed my damp cheek and wiped the tears with the back of his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be. It just feels so good.”

  He hesitated, then cautiously touched my lips with his fingers. I felt him hard against my back. I turned toward him and felt for his face, his mouth, his lips and through my sobs, kissed him. We lay there kissing for a long time. All kinds of kissing. Wet. Soft. Ferocious. Finally, we kissed so hard I thought I saw stars, but then I realized it was a flashlight making its way toward us.

  “Miss Jensen?” called Will, the couple’s son. “Are you still out there? See anything?” He was swirling the flashlight to and fro. We sat up and tried to look innocent, at least I did. But my mind was swirling, too. More lust? I was thinking. Is this more lust? Or love? Is it love?

  “Nothing yet,” Derek called.

  “My mom and dad are going to bed. They wanted me to tell you. Call them in the morning, they said.”

  “We will,” we both called back.

  We heard him crashing through the cornstalks.

  “I’ve got to stand up,” I said. “Leg cramp.”

  Derek stood, grabbed my hand and pulled me up, not all that easy. We turned our backs to the blanket and looked at each other. Derek’s back was to the cornstalks and suddenly he seemed to be backlit. At first, I thought Will was returning with the light and waited for him to burst through the cornstalks. But the backlighting was not the yellow shine of a flashlight. It was more as I had imagined the green mist surrounding a cigar-shaped craft might look. I shivered with a really cold chill.

  “What’s the matter?” Derek asked.

  I put my finger to my lips. “Behind you.”

  “The boy?”

  I shook my head.

  He turned around then, too and gasped way too loudly.

  “I knew it. I knew it,” he whispered.

  He grabbed my hand. I grabbed his arm. Together, connected by equal measures of curiosity, excitement and fear, we moved toward the light, parting the cornstalks as we went. The green mist seemed far away but close. It made the area seem warm but cold. I shivered again and then couldn’t stop shivering.

  There it was—the cigar-shaped craft, hovering only around five feet off the ground. There, too, was the baseball boy, the Little League boy, gleaming bright white, with his box of candy bars. He looked like he was arguing with someone, shaking his head. As he did that, he glowed brighter. The green was getting deeper.

  “What do you think is happening?” Derek asked softly. “It feels like the boy is talking to a parent. Do you think the green is the parent?”

  “Why?” I whispered back.

  “Looks like it. Feels like it, somehow.”

  “A family in green and white?”

  “Who’s to say?”

  “I need my pad and paper,” I whispered and let go of his arm. I turned toward the car.

  “Stay,” Derek commanded, grabbing my shirt. “If you make noise, they’ll notice us.”

  So, I stayed there and took in all I saw, trying to commit it to memory with Derek’s arm around me and my arms around him. Then we saw Suzanne walk slowly out of the sliding glass doors through which she and her family had first observed this craft. She walked toward the green with purpose, as though protecting something, or someone. She walked until she was very close, maybe twenty feet away from the boy and the green hovering craft.

  “Let him stay,” she said. “Please. With us.” She reached out toward the boy.

  A thousand reporter questions scrolled through my head, yet I knew I would write nothing about this moment. Had he been with them all the time? Had he recently made himself known to them? Is that what caused their anger at our last visit? My whole body began to tingle, in a good way, like I was energized. I felt a coming together of thoughts in my head, thoughts about love and family, and love and lust, and love and risk, thoughts jumbling around the way they do when a story is gelling, just before it’s ready to jump from my fingers onto the keys, onto the screen, onto paper, into my book—finally my book.

  The best fireworks are always unexpected. Like when you are out riding around, getting an ice cream cone maybe, and you come to the top of a hill and the valley is bathed in colorful sparkling light. When you are waiting in a cornfield for a close encounter, you generally expect nothing to happen, so it, too, is unexpected. When Derek’s face became bathed in green, it was scarily disconcerting, like we had been detected or something, and I felt we should run. I heard a whooshing noise, then a noise like a siren. The green craft rose quickly, straight up, and disappeared. I heard Suzanne crying quietly. I wanted to go to her. Oh, how I wanted to go to her. It was one of the strongest feelings I’ve ever had. But Derek was tugging my arm and leading me, no, dragging me, along toward the car.

  “We have to go,” he said. “I feel it.”

  Outside the Rover, we stood and stared at each other, then kissed again.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  It’s Time

  As I stepped up into the Rover, liquid gushed all over my feet and puddled in the dirt.

  “Oh,” I exclaimed.

  “What?

  “I think my water broke.”

  “Your water?”

  “Yeah.” I was stunned. It was four to six weeks early for Rudy’s arrival and the room wasn’t painted yet. Not to mention my sister was going to be the labor coach and she was in the Virgin Islands on a second honeymoon.

  “This is it,” I said.

  “This is it?” Derek repeated. “What is it?”

  “Pretty soon I’ll start having contractions. Actually maybe I was having them in the field. Maybe what I thought was bumping was actually... Owwww.”

  “Owwww?”

  “I felt a twinge. Could you please stop saying everything I say and get me to civilization? I’m starting to get scared.”

  He started the car, but couldn’t take his eyes off me. I looked at him, then past him where, in the field, I swear, stood the glowing boy in a baseball uniform, with the mother’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Look,” I yelled, pointing. “The baseball boy!”

  Derek swore, but took his eyes off the road and looked. Now the glowing boy was morphing into a bright white light. Now, he was gone, but Suzanne stood in the field and Will and Bernie were with her. Her hand was on Will’s shoulder and Bernie had his arms around them both. They were looking at the sky.

  “I saw nothing. Are you sure you saw something?”

  “No, but I think I did.”

  “Let’s just get you to the hospital and worry about the baseball boy another time, shall we?”

  Derek peeled out of the stone driveway and careened down the road as I said “Owwww” again only louder, and begged to call Suzanne and Bernie tomorrow. Derek said yes, yes, yes and drove faster.

  “Owwww” and other exclamations were my mantra for the next half hour until the ride was over and we saw the lights of town. Derek was trying to time contractions and drive, neither very successfully, and I called my doctor from Derek’s cell phone.

  “Go directly to the hospital,” she said, when I told her that two educated adults had no idea what the contraction intervals were.

  “First babies usually take longer but let’s not chance it. Plus, Rudy’s early.”

  “I want to get my things,” I told Derek.

  “What things could you possibly need?”

  “Hairbrush, make-up, underwear, my book club book.”

  “I’m not delivering this baby in this car or anywhere else.”

  “Damn straight you’re not. You keep the car running. Just let me run in the house, grab my stuff, and we’ll be on our wayyyyyyy.”

  “The pains, they’re getting closer.”

  “How would you know?”

  “An increasingly acute sense of time.”

>   I ran in and couldn’t remember where my overnight bag was. I had planned to do all the packing in a week or two.

  “Oh Rudy,” I said. I was rummaging through the closet. “Derek likes your mommy a lot.”

  I tossed everything in sight in the bag and tore off the bed sheets looking for my book. There were several Milky Ways on the front hall table. I stuffed them in my bag as well.

  On the short ride to the hospital, there were two major sounds: me doing a variation on the deep breathing they tried to teach me in birthing class, and Derek, beeping the horn at really no one since it was late and the streets were nearly empty.

  We pulled up to the emergency room, and Derek hopped out to open the car door. A security guard hurried over with a wheelchair and started to say something when he saw Derek.

  “Is he with you?” the guard asked me.

  “Yes,” Derek snapped.

  The security guard showed him where to park and wheeled me in to admitting. There the woman at the high counter wanted my medical insurance card, which I dropped on the floor just as Derek strode in. He picked it up and handed it to her.

  “She’s pregnant,” he said.

  If I hadn’t had a contraction just then, I might have laughed uncontrollably and commented on the inanity of that remark. In the fog of that pain, I admitted to myself I needed Derek. Both as a labor coach, which I wasn’t sure would work out to anyone’s advantage, and as someone to stick by me, someone I cared about.

  The woman smiled and handed him my card.

  “Third floor and make a right,” she said. “They are expecting you.”

  “Who’s they?” he muttered wheeling me, with difficulty into the elevator. “Can’t get the right leverage on this damn thing.” He pushed the chair over the bump and I yelped.

  “Sorry.” He touched my shoulder, then eased around and rubbed my stomach just as the door opened. There stood my doctor and two nurses, one a tiny blond woman, and the other a really large man.