by A. S. Teague
Happy tears fill my eyes, and I sink to the floor in front of him.
He threads his fingers through my hair and, looking in to my eyes, whispers, “Our baby.”
CHAPTER Eight
six months later
october
“COME ON, COME on, come on.”
No, no, no.
“Grand Slam, baby! Grand fucking Slam!”
Dammit. Damn it all!
“The Braves are going to the World Series! The Braves!”
Stupid Braves!
“The Atlanta Braves and the Tampa Bay Rays! You know what this means, Sid? We’re going to the World Series!”
Noooooo…
Sitting on the edge of the couch, I chew on what’s left of my fingernails, unable to stop despite the fact they are ragged and painful.
The Atlanta Braves have just won the final game in the series in spectacular fashion. Down by three in the bottom of the ninth, I held my breath as the homerun king had come up to bat, praying that he was tired, or distracted, or anything that would prevent him from hitting a grand slam.
But my prayers went unanswered, and he had in fact knocked the ball out of the park, propelling the men on each of the three bases toward home plate. The king himself had slowly jogged around each base, his arms stretched high in victory as the announcers and crowd went wild.
I wanted to give him the finger.
I wasn’t able to join in the excitement of my husband and friends. Dread filled my swollen belly, a feeling that made me nauseous.
Breccan swore that the meeting of the Braves and Rays would be fate. Both stadiums were within driving distance, and since flying back and forth to each of the games wouldn’t be good for me, this was the best possible solution. Fate. I didn’t agree with him, but I kept my thoughts to myself and instead spent the last week hoping they would fall.
But they didn’t fall.
They won.
In grand fashion.
And they were going to the World Series.
“Just got the tickets, baby!” Breccan shouts excitedly across the crowd, holding his phone in the air.
And apparently, so were we.
I pull my hand away from my mouth and give him a thumb’s up, forcing a weak smile to my face. He grins back and then turns his attention to one of the party goers.
I sigh in relief and settle back in to the couch, resuming the massacre of what’s left of my nails. Closing my eyes, I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, grimacing at the inability to fully take a deep breath.
I rub my belly and grumble, “Taking up a lot of room in there, you know.”
“Better get used to it,” Rebecca sings, flopping on the couch beside me.
I crack an eye open to look at her and frown at her large glass of wine in one hand. “I hate you.”
She takes a sip from the offending glass and then sets it down. “Oh, you do not. Why are you sitting over here by yourself?”
I give up on the breathing techniques and open both eyes. Looking around, I see the room full of people are still celebrating. “Just not in the mood to party, I guess.”
Her forehead creases and she pats my knee. “Wanna talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
She purses her lips, “Don’t play dumb. Something’s up.”
I wave her off. “I’m just tired is all. Growing a human is freaking exhausting. Just you wait.”
Laughing, she shakes her head. “No thank you. I’m not having kids. No offense, but after watching you…” I shoot daggers at her with my eyes and wisely, she doesn’t finish her sentence. “Anyway, if you’re sure you don’t need to talk?”
I nod. “I’m fine. Get back to your guests. I’m gonna grab Breccan and head home, I think.”
She gives my knee another pat and then pushes to her feet. “Alright. Love you, Sid.”
I squeeze her fingers and return the sentiment. “Love you too, Reb.”
Rocking back and forth, I finally manage to stand, giving myself a minute to catch my balance and then wade through the crowd, intent on finding my husband.
It’s been a long night, and I’m ready to get home and come to terms with the fact that we’re almost finished with the bucket list.
“YOU FEELING OKAY?” Breccan asks over breakfast. “You’ve been acting strange the last few days.”
I nod, not bothering to look at him, and continue to push the eggs around on my plate.
His hand covers mine, stilling the movement and he says, “Sid, you sure?”
I finally lift my eyes to his. A pang of guilt hits me as I lie, “I don’t think I can swing missing work for the World Series. Maybe we should wait until next year.”
He shakes his head emphatically. “We may never get another shot like this one. Both teams close by, one of them our team. Why would we skip it?”
“Well, I know, but with me being out so much early in the pregnancy, I don’t have much time off,” I tell him lamely.
He shrugs. “Then quit. You’re not going back after Olivia is born anyway. Just quit now.”
Horrified at the thought, I pull my hand from his. “Absolutely not. I can’t just leave them in the lurch like that!”
I push away from the table, suddenly needing to escape. A quick getaway is no longer possible though and I don’t even make it around the table before Breccan is standing in front of me.
Damn this basketball-sized belly!
“You told me yourself that the company had already hired your replacement. It would probably be doing them a favor to not have to pay your salary.”
Damn him for always being right.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I mumble. “I don’t think it’s healthy to spend so much time sitting in the car when you’re pregnant. It’s a seven-hour drive, you know.”
“We’ll take frequent breaks. We’re going to have to with your tiny bladder these days,” he chuckles.
Damn tiny bladder!
“Hey, you try having something sitting on your bladder all the time and see if you don’t have to pee every ten minutes!”.
Breccan holds his hands up in surrender, “Fair enough.”
He places a hand on my belly and squats, his lips directly in front of my stomach. “You’re giving Mama a hard time, you know. You gotta be a good girl in there.”
As if she understands what her daddy is saying to her, she moves under his hand and his face splits in to a wide smile.
“That’s right, sweet girl. Daddy’s talking to you.”
He talks to his daughter through my stomach often, and no matter how many times he does it, my heart skips a beat. There’s just something about hearing him call himself ‘Daddy’ that melts me.
She rolls again under his hand. He keeps his fingers where they are another minute, but she’s done moving, so he stands and tugs at the end of my long locks.
Once I got over the debilitating morning sickness, I started noticing some of the perks of being with child. My skin is glowing and smooth, my hair shiny and longer than it has ever been. The positive changes have balanced the scales against all the cons, and I found myself really enjoying being pregnant.
“You don’t want to cross off the last item on Connor’s list, do you?” Breccan interrupts my thoughts.
Startled at his accurate guess, and his uncanny ability to read me so easily, I take a step back and scramble to come up with something to say.
My mind blank, I sigh and nod.
“That’s what I thought. Tell me why,” he says gently, leading me to our love seat.
Reluctantly, I settle in to the plush cushions. “I just…” I don’t finish my thought and sit silently, staring in to space while Breccan patiently waits for me to explain to him why I don’t want to go to the World Series games.
But I can’t find the words to explain to him that once we do this, once we finish this list of crazy adventures that Connor started, that he’ll be gone forever.
My eyes begin to
fill with tears, the hollow feeling in my chest that I haven’t experienced in so long returning, and I break.
“I just can’t let him go!” I cry.
Breccan wraps an arm around my shoulders, but I shrug it off.
“Please don’t touch me,” I beg, my voice cracking.
“Who says you have to let him go?”
“Argh!” a strangled cry of frustration escapes my throat. “You don’t understand.”
His cheeks flush, but his voice remains calm as he tells me, “Then help me understand.”
I scoot to the edge of the couch and awkwardly stand, my legs restless and needing to stretch. I waddle back and forth, doing my best caged hippo impersonation as I try to gather my thoughts.
“Once we finish the list, he’ll be gone. It’ll be over, and Connor will be gone. I’m just not ready to lose him all over again,” I choke out, my hand flying to my mouth desperate to keep the sobs inside.
Breccan jumps to his feet, but I hold an arm out to him, halting his progress. His eyes plead with me, begging me without words to let him hold me, but I shake my head.
I need space to think, to breathe, to cry.
“Okay baby,” he whispers, sitting back down, and I resume pacing.
“I thought it would take longer,” I confess. “I thought we would be working on this list forever. I never imagined that we’d do everything in less than three years!” I laugh bitterly. “And isn’t that the fucking shit irony of it all. It only took three years to complete everything that Connor wanted to do in his whole god damn life!” I shout, my hand clenched in fists at my side.
Whirling away from him, I shout, “It’s not fucking fair, Breccan! A twelve-year-old boy had a whole lifetime of things he wanted to do, and it took us three years to finish it.” Waving my arms wildly, a sob escapes my lips. “All of these crazy things on his list, things that he thought would make his life great, and yet, none of them were real.”
Breccan doesn’t speak when I pause for air, so I keep going, ranting and raving while he quietly sits on the couch, his face full of pain but respecting my need for space.
“He wasn’t old enough to know that sky diving, or seeing all seven games of the World Series, wasn’t what made for a happy, full life! He couldn’t have known at his age that what mattered most was love. And having someone love you, and loving someone back. And it kills me to know that he will never experience that! It. Kills. Me.”
My chest burns, my face wet with tears. Through my blurred vision, I see Breccan’s face change as he pushes to his feet, ignoring my pleas to leave me alone.
Pulling me in to his arms, he holds me tenderly while I struggle against him.
“It’s not fair, dammit!” I wail. “He’ll never fall in love. He’ll never get married, never have kids, never have what I have. And it’s not fucking fair. Why am I here and he isn’t? Why do I deserve to be happy when he never will?”
His arms flexed around my swollen body, his lips move in my hair. “Let it out, baby.”
My face pressed in to his chest, my scream is muffled, but it serves its purpose, and as my screams turn to sobs, a weight lifts from my own chest.
For several long minutes, he holds me close, letting my tears soak his shirt. When my eyes are finally dry, the tears that I’ve been holding in for so long gone, Breccan sets me away from him and stares in to my face.
“Connor is here, and he always will be. It doesn’t matter when we finish that list, he will never be gone.” Letting me go with one hand, he gestures. “Look around the room. He’s everywhere.”
He points to the mantle that’s covered in frames. “He’s in every picture.”
He waves a hand at the bookshelf behind me that holds Connors prized football and baseball. “He’s in every memory.”
He places his palm between my breasts. “He’s in our hearts.”
He slides that hand down and rests it on my abdomen. “And he’s here, his spirit is here with this baby.”
Right on cue, Olivia kicks at Breccan’s hand, and I laugh through the tears.
“Look at me,” he demands. Slowly, I look away from the picture of Connor in the middle of the mantel and into Breccan’s intense eyes.
“We are living for Connor. Being happy, loving each other, completing this bucket list. Everything we are doing is for him. And I will spend the rest of my life working my ass off to make sure that we live a life Connor would be proud of. A life of adventure. A life filled with happiness. A life that only knows love. I swear to you, Sidney, we will never fucking forget him. Once we finish his list, we’ll make our own and we’ll keep checking things off, for him.”
His words are everything I need to hear and my chest swells at the sincerity in his eyes. He means every bit of what he’s just told me, and in that moment, I realize how very wrong I’ve been.
I’ve spent the last few years agonizing over what it would mean once we finished the list. I’ve been terrified that he’d just wanted to check off the items and be done with it, so we could move on with our lives. I imagined that we would cross off that last item, and Breccan would shove the notebook in a drawer to be forgotten about, along with the memory of my precious nephew.
“I should have known better,” I tell him, too ashamed to look him in the eyes.
“Known what?” he prods, grasping my chin with his thumb and forefinger tenderly.
My eyes still averted, I tell him. “I was so afraid that you were in a hurry to get the list finished so that we could move forward in our lives. That you wanted to get it behind us, so we could start living for ourselves.”
“Not a chance in hell,” he growls, the intensity of his words causing my gaze to jump to his. He crushes his lips to mine. I readily accept his tongue when he pushes in to my mouth, his kiss hard.
Tearing his lips from mine, I pant as he tells me, “Crossing that last item off the list isn’t the end, baby. It’s just the beginning.”
EPILOGUE
breccan
two months later
december
“BRECCAN!”
Her shrill scream wakes me from a sound sleep, and I spring to my feet, instantly alert.
“Breccan!” she screams again, the sound of her voice causing my blood to turn cold.
The room’s pitch black, my eyes taking too long to adjust to the darkness. Finally, I’m able to read the clock on my bedside table, the red numbers telling me that it’s the middle of the night.
“Sidney?” I shout back. “Where are you?”
“In here.” Her voice comes from behind the closed bathroom door, a sliver of light guiding me to where my wife is crying.
“What’s the matter, baby?” I ask panicked, as I throw the door open.
Sidney’s sitting on the floor, a puddle of water at her feet, her face pale and streaked with tears. Fear grips my gut and I rush in to the room, slipping on the liquid and landing hard beside her with an “oomph.”
“Oh God, Breccan, are you okay?” she asks a split second before she clutches her enormous belly and lets out a low moan.
Scrambling to my feet, I search the room for a towel and pull one off the wall-mounted rack. Mopping up the floor, I ask again, “What’s wrong?”
Her eyes wide with fear, she tells me, “I’m in labor. My water broke.” The pain leaves her face and she giggles. “You just slipped in it.”
“Fuck. I’m gonna call 9-1-1,” I tell her, rushing from the room to get my cellphone.
Laughter follows me out of the bathroom. I locate my phone and in my rush to get back to her, I nearly run her over.
“Don’t call an ambulance, dummy. Just take me to the hospital!” she scolds, a smile playing at her lips.
“How can you be smiling at a time like this?” I ask, incredulously, but don’t argue.
I grab the bag that’s been packed and sitting by the door for two weeks and run from the room.
“Breccan!” she yells again, and I skid to a stop.
�
�Shit, sorry, I’m coming.” I tell her once I realize that I’ve almost left without her.
I rush back to her and, holding her elbow for support, begin to guide her from the room. We make it almost to the doorway when she doubles over, an agonized moan escaping her lips.
“Okay, baby, just breathe. Remember the classes. Hoo-hoo-hee-hee.”
She nods and begins breathing through the contraction with me.
“That’s it, baby. You’re doing great,” I encourage, and in just a moment, the pain has eased off again and she stands upright.
“They’re getting closer together. And stronger,” she tells me, and I again spring in to action.
“Okay, let’s get you in the car before the next one.”
She giggles again as I try to pull her through the door. “Honey. You gonna put any clothes on, or are you wanting to give the nurses a show?”
I glance down and realize that I’ve been trying to rush her through the door while wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, wet from the fluid I’d slipped in earlier.
“Fuck!” I bark and drop her arm to throw on a pair of pants and tee shirt.
“Relax, honey,” she soothes, and I try to calm down. She rubs my arm with her soft hand, and I realize the irony of her trying to calm me while she’s the one in immense pain.
“Okay, I’m calm. And dressed. Let’s go.”
five hours later
“ONE LAST PUSH. You can do it, Sidney. Give me one last push.”
I run my hand over Sidney’s sweaty head and squeeze her fingers. “You can do it, baby. You can do it,” I whisper in her ear.
A tear slides down her cheek. “I can’t!” she cries. “I’m tired. I can’t do it.”
I kiss the moisture away from her face. “You can. One more push and our beautiful baby girl will be here,” I promise.
She shakes her head, defeat written all over her face. “I’m not strong enough, Breccan.” She moans, the beginning of a contraction causing her voice to break.
“Sidney Carlisle, you are the strongest fucking person I’ve ever met. There’s nothing you can’t do,” I tell her fiercely, my eyes locked on hers.
