The Storm

by R. J. Prescott

  “When’s the baby due?” I asked.

  “What? Err…? What do you mean? What was the question again?” Em said nervously.

  “Three weeks after yours is due,” Con replied, wearing a huge grin.

  “Con!” Em protested, smacking him on the chest.

  “Sorry, Sunshine, but he guessed!” Con replied, not looking the least bit sorry.

  “Admit it, you couldn’t wait to tell him,” she accused playfully.

  “Baby, I’d broadcast it on national television if I could,” Con agreed.

  “Knowing that you’re on national television every time you fight, I wouldn’t put it past you to do just that,” Em replied, laughing.

  Con gazed at her adoringly before pulling her in for a kiss.

  “How’d you know anyway?” Con asked me when he finally pulled his lips away from his wife.

  “Are you kidding me? In case you weren’t aware, you’re a tad overprotective lately,” I pointed out.

  Con frowned, looking confused, which I thought was pretty fucking comical.

  “Con, my girl has a serious heart condition, so I got reason to worry, and if I acted half as crazy around Irish as you do around Em, she’d have punched me in the balls by now,” I told him truthfully, making him frown even harder.

  “Honestly, it’s fine, love,” Em told him with a smile. “I like that you want to take care of us.”

  As soon as she said the word “us” it was like he got a hit of testosterone. He nuzzled her neck, making a giggle, and rubbed her belly gently. I rolled my eyes at their antics and began to regret not bringing Irish with me. There wasn’t a morning that I didn’t wake up and wonder what a lucky son of a bitch I was that she chose me.

  She was already sporting a tiny little bump. Ma told me that plants grow strong when you feed and talk to ’em. I figured the same was probably true for babies, so I talked to little bean every morning before we got out of bed, and I fed my girl every chance I got. I was already planning what to cook her that night, now I knew Em was expecting. No way was Con’s boy gonna be bigger than mine.

  “I wish you could see your face right now,” Em said to me, smiling. “You laugh at Con, but your face gets all dreamy when you’re thinking about Marie.”

  Con laughed, and I gave him the finger. I was about to give him shit when Tommy’s door opened and three doctors came out. Taking that as our cue, we all rushed into the room. When I saw Mary sobbing into John’s shoulder, my heart sank.

  “What’s up, ladies?” came a croaky, fragile voice from across the room.

  “About time you woke up, ya lazy bastard,” I said, grinning. I walked over to hug him as best I could, considering all the machines and crap around his bed. Moving out of the way so each of the lads could get their turn, I made my way over to Mary. John let her go to pass her a handkerchief from his pocket. She blew her nose loudly, then threw her arms around me. It was only then that I could see from her smile that they’d been happy tears.

  “Oh, Kieran, the doctors say he’s going to be fine. He’s going to need intensive physiotherapy for his leg and plenty of rest, but now that the swelling has gone down, they said it doesn’t look as though there’s any lasting brain damage,” she explained, the words pouring out of her with relief.

  “At least, no more than there was before,” Con said, smiling.

  “I was so worried about you!” Em exclaimed, giving Tommy a big kiss.

  “Hey now, let’s not get carried away!” Con protested, frowning. I wrapped my big arms around Mary and smiled across at my friends. Everyone ribbing and taking the piss felt strangely normal, and we’d all missed normal so very much.

  “The fire service been in touch yet?” Con asked.

  “Yeah, the guys have been in, but I haven’t seen any pen-pushers yet. Not much point yet until they know whether I’m ever going to be fit for active duty again,” Tommy replied.

  “You will be,” I reassured him. “If it takes all of us in the gym with you every day for a month, we’ll get you back in the truck.”

  “Well, there’s something to look forward to,” he joked. “I might take you up on the offer though. My leg’s pretty fucked, so it’s gonna take a fucking miracle to get it back where it was. Anyway, enough worrying about this shit. What’s been happening while I’ve been gone?”

  “Well, Marie’s pregnant and due in the summer. And Con knocked Em up, and she’s due three weeks after Irish,” I told him.

  “Lovely way you have of announcing that I’m expecting,” Em chastised.

  “Fuck me! How long was I out!” Tommy joked in surprise.

  “Super sperm works fast,” I informed him, making Em giggle.

  “You’re pregnant!” Mary squealed. Letting go of me, she threw herself at a terrified looking Con, then enveloped Em in a big hug.

  “Well, I don’t blame you both for taking advantage of my incapacitated state. Impregnating them before I have a chance to lure them away from you sure is probably the smartest thing you fuckers have ever done,” Tommy commented, making everyone laugh.

  “Love you, Tom,” I said truthfully.

  “Still not fucking gay,” he said, giving me the finger. Then everything really was as it should be.

  ***

  As I found myself sitting on the shitty, plastic hospital chairs, once again staring at crappy artwork, I realised that for everything good that happened in the universe, there was an equal and opposite shitty reaction. Tommy got better, while Irish got sick. Despite giving up working in the shop and being confined to bed rest, her little body just couldn’t take the strain of handling my demanding offspring. By thirty-two weeks, the doctors insisted that they couldn’t wait anymore. They were certain, that if they let Marie go full term, she would die, and if they couldn’t deliver in time, the baby would too.

  I knew without a shadow of a doubt that Irish would have given her last breath to give the baby as many days safely inside the protection of her body as she could. But if there was a good chance of saving both of them, I was taking it. When she argued with me, I explained that the greatest gift I could give my child was a mother. She cried for hours and agonised endlessly over the decision, but in the end, I didn’t have to talk her around. She knew I was right.

  This time, it was Em’s turn to stay home. All of our family, Ma, Tommy, Albie, Heath, Danny, and Father Pat included, were all sat with me. Nobody offered stupid fucking platitudes about how everything was gonna be fine. No words could help when your girl and your child were lying on an operating table without you there, ready to go under the knife. This was no straightforward surgery either. They were delivering the baby by caesarean section and going straight in for a repair to her aortic valve.

  “Do me a favour?” I asked the nurse as they wheeled her away. “Don’t tell me what sex the baby is. Just tell me that they’re safe. I want us to find out together.”

  “Of course,” she replied.

  The same nurse returned an hour later.

  “You have a beautiful, healthy baby,” she told me, and the waiting room buzzed with congratulations. “We need to keep baby Doherty in the NICU for three or four weeks to ensure that the lungs are developing as they should, but the steroid injections appear to have helped and the baby is breathing on its own.”

  “And Marie?” I asked earnestly.

  “She’ll be in theatre for a long while yet, but there were no complications with the caesarean,” she reassured me.

  “That’s grand news, thank you,” I told her. She smiled and headed back towards the doors.

  “Wait!” I called after her. “Why did you call the baby Doherty, and not Kelly?”

  “Because those were Miss Kelly’s instructions before she went into theatre,” she replied and carried on walking.

  It was the nearest I’d come to losing it since we got there.

  ***

  Ten hours and eight coffees later, Marie’s surgeon came to find us. Luca, Matt, and Tristan stood behind their mot
her, braced for bad news, but she reached for my and squeezed as I held my breath.

  “Marie is out of surgery and looking good. As we discussed previously, there have been huge improvements in cardiac surgery since Marie’s last operation, so we’re confident that this repair will provide a long-term solution. There’s no doubt that having another baby is out of the question, but there’s no reason that Marie can’t continue to live a normal and relatively healthy life,” he said.

  Ma burst into tears with relief, but Stella was as stoic as ever.

  “Thank you, doctor,” she said. “That is wonderful news.”

  “When can we see her?” I asked, not daring to believe his words until I could see her for myself.

  “A nurse will come and get you in a couple of hours. When she wakes up and comes round a bit, we’ll transfer her back to the ward and you can see her then,” he replied.

  Time dragged by ridiculously slowly, but it wasn’t the purgatory I’d been chained to during the surgery. When the nurse finally arrived, I looked to Marie’s mother. She was her next of kin and had more right to see her first than I did.

  “It’s all right, Kieran. Go and meet your child. I’ll give you a twenty minute head start before I’m coming for a cuddle with my grandchild,” she told me. I didn’t need to be asked twice. I grabbed her shoulders, planted a huge kiss on her cheek, and went to find my future.

  “Hey, love. Did you miss me?” she asked sleepily.

  “Always,” I replied. Taking a chair next to her, I picked up her tiny, beautiful hand and kissed the back of it.

  “Is the baby all right?” she asked, her first concern always for our child.

  “Of course,” I replied. “Our baby has your heart.”

  The doors opened and a nurse rolled in a tiny incubator.

  “Would you like to meet your son?” she asked with a huge grin.

  “We have a son?” I asked in disbelief. Tears were streaming from Marie’s eyes as the nurse carefully handed her our boy.

  “You sure do, and premature or not, he still has a set of lungs on him,” she replied.

  “What are we going to call him?” I asked Irish.

  “How do you feel about naming him after your dad and mine?” she suggested.

  “You’d do that?” I asked, stunned that she would let me honour him like that.

  “I think Jack Michael Doherty would be a fine name,” she replied. “Are you ready to hold your boy?” She placed him in my arms, and after wrapping his blanket around him, I cuddled him into my chest.

  There were no words to describe how I felt looking down at his beautiful face. He was only a few hours old, and still, I couldn’t remember a time that I didn’t love him. So often in life, I’d questioned myself, wondered if I could make it as a fighter, if I could hold it together in the face of someone already coping with so much. But there was no self-doubt in that moment. Because I knew with absolutely certainty that I was born to be a father.

  For the longest time, I was positive that the pain of da’s parting had frozen my heart forever.

  I was wrong.

  My thawed heart was overflowing. Because if there was one thing more precious to me than my last hug with my father, it was my first hug with my son.

  Epilogue

  Kieran Doherty

  “Come on, Pete, keep that guard up,” I barked, bouncing a little from side to side as I called out instructions.

  It amused me that music blared out from the speakers all day and the guys were anything but quiet as they trained, but never once did the noise wake my boy. But if I stood still for more than thirty seconds, all hell broke loose. I looked down at my little man. Strapped to my chest in a baby carrier, he would happily sleep for hours as long as I kept moving. I brought him down to the gym for a few hours almost every day. Marie hated to be parted from him, but I reminded her frequently that recovering from major heart surgery meant resting.

  “Your dog’s about to crap on the floor again,” Pete pointed out.

  “Bad dog!” I shouted to him. He turned his head to the side and gazed at me innocently. I wasn’t fooled. It was the look he gave me every time he crapped on the floor.

  “Outside!” I ordered, pointing towards the entrance. We’d installed a flap in the downstairs door so he could come and go as he pleased, but the little fucker was lazy. Why walk all the way downstairs when you could crap where you’re sitting? The dog completely ignored me as usual. I had the father thing down, but the art of canine training was beyond me.

  “Driscoll, downstairs now!” Danny ordered. Immediately, the stupid dog got up and did as he was told.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked.

  “I use the same tone of voice I use with the rest of you,” he explained, looking at me as though it was obvious.

  Just then, a piercing cry erupted from my chest.

  “Shit. I stopped moving,” I said to myself.

  “It ain’t that. He’s hungry. Look, pass him here,” Danny told me. Taking him out of his carrier, he lifted him up over his shoulder and headed towards the office to put Jack’s bottle on. Danny complained endlessly about everything. Everything except Jack. He fed him, changed nappies, and had him over his shoulder as he barked orders at the guys more than I had him in his baby carrier. He was the same old grumpy fucker, but he showed Jack a side he usually only reserved for Em.

  We found out just how much Danny embraced having kids around when a brand new travel crib turned up in his office. There was no room to swing a cat in there as it was, but he’d made it fit. Jack loved it and Em cried. I’d learned that pregnant woman cry.

  A lot.

  If you leave your socks on the bedroom floor, they cry. If you buy them flowers on your way home from work, they cry. Danny dealt with her hugs and happy tears by groaning about what a pain in the arse hormonal women were. But the crib stayed.

  Despite her pregnancy, Em spent almost every day that she wasn’t working at the gym. It was the only way we could get Con to train. He had a world title defence in two weeks, and his baby was due in three, meaning his protective genes had gone into overdrive. Em had almost made it full term, but how she’d done it without killing Con, I’d never know.

  Between taking care of Jack, training Con, and Irish’s flourishing design business, my girl and I had little time to dwell on the past. And the past was exactly where Alastair had been relegated. The police informed us that a car reported stolen by Alastair had been found, burned out and dumped. Forensic testing matched paint left on the back of my bike after the impact, to the car He was currently in a psychiatric facility pending sentencing. Surprisingly, he had pleaded guilty to the charges, claiming diminished responsibility. I guess his father’s firm thought that it was easier to deal with matters quickly than risk all the bad publicity that came with a trial. In the end, I felt sorry for the guy. It was hard not to when he had everything, except the one thing his money couldn’t buy.

  As for me? I knew as soon as I held Jack that my decision to end my professional boxing career had been the right one. Nearly losing him and Irish had taught me to treasure each and every second I had with my family. Fighting had made my heart strong. They had made it full. I loved Irish more than I knew it was possible to love another person. Like da said, it was a freight train that hit me when I least expected it. And I wouldn’t change it for the world. The only thing I planned on changing was Irish’s surname.

  I jumped up to the side of the ring and leant on the ropes as I called out pointers to Pete, who was sparing with one of the older kids. Con was doing hanging sit ups, but when the office door opened and Em called out, “O’Connell, I think my water just broke,” I thought he was going to fall off the bar. He caught my amused gaze and looked absolutely fucking terrified. I didn’t know what the future held for any of us, but I did know that life in this crazy-arse family of ours was about to get a whole lot more interesting.

  If you enjoyed The Storm, then please keep an eye out for Tommy’
s story coming soon, The Fire.

  Other Books by R.J. Prescott

  The Hurricane

  The Aftermath

  The Storm

  Connect with R.J. Prescott

  Website: http://rjprescott.com/

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rjprescottauthor/

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/rjprescottauth

  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/r.j.prescott/

  Acknowledgements

  To my husband and my best friend, Lee. The reason I can write the stories I do, is because of you. No matter what, you never let me lose faith in myself. Even on my worst days, you carry me. There aren’t enough words to describe how much I love you. To my beloved boys, Jack and Gabriel. You were both so little when I first started writing, and with every book you make me more and more proud. I love that I get to call myself an author. I love it even more that I get to call myself your Mum. Thank you Mum and Dad for all that you do for me. Everything I’ve ever achieved is because I had your love and support.

  Lauren-Marie, you are a legend. I can’t tell you how much your support and friendship means to me. You pick me up when I’m down, and keep me writing when I’ve run out of words. I look forward to many more books, signings and memories together for years to come. Also you are in charge of my passport forever seeing as I clearly am not to be trusted with remembering anything. Ever.

  My beautiful friend Maria. You have mad ninja proof reading skills and could literally run the country with your mobile phone and calendar. My only regret about our friendship is that I didn’t meet you sooner. You are one of the kindest, most generous and caring people I’ve ever met. Vin is a very lucky man, and I promise to regularly remind him of your awesomeness.