Love by the Numbers

by Karin Kallmaker

  “We won’t make it.”

  “The ticket counter is over here—no line. It can’t hurt to try.”

  Within a few minutes Nicole had explained the need to the sympathetic ticket agent, but Lily’s heart sank when the young woman shook her head.

  “It’s past the time when we can check your luggage.”

  “It can be on a flight later in the day,” Nicole said.

  “Due to security, it has to go on the flight with you. The flight is full, too—well, there’s one first-class seat left.”

  “We’ll take it,” Lily said. She plunked down Insignis’s credit card, knowing Uncle Damon wouldn’t hesitate.

  Nicole began to protest, then swallowed hard. “Thank you, Lily.”

  “You’ll be in Boston by noon. I’ll get there as soon as I can, bags and all.”

  The ticket agent quickly scanned the card and tapped at her keyboard. “No bags, here’s the boarding pass. Security is usually light at this hour. Good luck.” She handed a sheaf of papers to Nicole. “I hope your sister and the baby are doing well by the time you get there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now, let’s get you and the suitcases on the next possible arrival,” the agent said to Lily.

  Lily handed her ID to the agent, aware that Nicole was hesitating. She looked up long enough to say, “Go. You don’t have time to waste.”

  Nicole’s eyes were dark. For a moment Lily thought Nicole might kiss her, but she nodded instead. “Thank you.”

  She willed herself not to tear up. There was no time for it. “Don’t miss the flight—text when you’re in your seat, okay?”

  She watched Nicole half-run toward the security screening, her carry-on roller bouncing over ripples in the carpet. The agent asked for her credit card again and when Lily glanced one more time in the direction of security there was no sign of Nicole.

  She walked away from the counter with a ticket for a flight that didn’t leave for nearly four hours—she’d be in the air when Nicole landed. Her flight stopped in Charlotte before going on to Boston and it would be mid-evening before Lily reached Meredith.

  There was no sign of Nicole at security, which was a good thing, Lily told herself. Thankfully, everyone in line seemed to be too sleepy to take any notice of Lily and her increasingly red eyes. Maybe, too, her famous face was finally passing out of short-term memory.

  She was putting her shoes back on when her phone chirped.

  Nicole’s message read, “In my seat. Thank you. For everything.”

  You’re welcome would seem glib, so Lily texted back, “Will arrive Meredith 8 tonight. See you then.”

  She didn’t expect an answer. Nevertheless she got one more chirp. The message only said, “Please.”

  Puzzling over the meaning, Lily realized she was ravenous, and she finally had the time to blush over why. All that physical activity last night had her stomach growling over airport food. A Starbucks kiosk was the only thing open, but it would do for a start. She smiled into her latte, remembering the crazy drive through Moscow and their great relief at finding a Starbucks there. And blushed again remembering Nicole’s mouth on her.

  Fortified by caffeine, she found a comfortable electronics workstation and booted up her laptop and plugged in her phone to charge, blushing once more as she recalled why she’d forgotten to do so last night. Headset in place she called Uncle Damon’s home number, figuring he was up and partly caffeinated as well.

  “Lily? To what do I owe this early morning pleasure?”

  “We’ve got a major wrinkle,” Lily answered him. She explained about Kate and that Nicole was already in the air on her way home. “I thought it best to start canceling. We were supposed to be at Georgia State tonight. I thought I should at least cancel the next four days, and more tomorrow, after there’s some kind of news—hopefully good news.”

  “That’s probably prudent. It can’t be helped. Are you okay? You sound shaky.”

  “Do I? I guess I am.” Lily wanted to confess to all her confusions, but at the moment she felt she was talking to her boss, not her uncle. Though he and David had, of course, been the ones she’d first told about her crush on a female classmate, convincing him over the phone that she’d fallen for a woman he considered a pain in the ass didn’t seem like a good idea. “Everything is so uncertain. Nicole was frantic—for her, that is.”

  “That’s hard to picture, but under the circumstances understandable. Pumpkin, if she is going to be at home for an extended time my door is open—the guest room is yours and I can keep you on the payroll for a little while. I can think of one or two projects no one ever seems to find time to do to justify it to the other partners. You’ll figure out your next step.”

  “Thank you. That helps,” Lily said vaguely.

  “I am still hopeful that you’ll become a diplomat and live in exciting places and I’ll visit you twice a year.”

  “So am I, I guess. I could stay in New York. After all, New Yorkers will take you back after a scandal.” She knew she had to make a plan, and that plan couldn’t include Nicole. If the worst happened Nicole would probably cancel the rest of the trip to be with her mother and new niece…She knocked on the faux wood surface of the work desk. “I’m not going to think that far ahead. There’s time.”

  “The trip has been good so far? Other than getting lost in Russia? Did you see the blog we wrote up about that adventure?” Lily heard what sounded like the espresso maker sputtering and pictured her uncle’s cheerful, tidy kitchen.

  “I did. Nicole said it made the situation seem more dangerous than it was.”

  “Dr. Hathaway isn’t very imaginative.”

  Lily flushed as she relived the sensation of Nicole pulling her bra straps down. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Really? Well, you know her better than I do.”

  He had no idea. “Oh! Really—this proves my point. Guess who we ran into yesterday?”

  “Do tell.”

  Lily related the encounter with Merrill Boone. “So the very imaginative Dr. Hathaway asks Boone if she was eight or nine when her parents divorced—and apparently she was close enough that Boone went into a defensive tailspin.”

  “My opinion of her has gone up twenty points. I’m glad she was there for moral support.”

  She wasn’t about to tell him that Nicole had flipped off another woman for getting too friendly with Lily in a gay bar, even though he was likely to find that a positive character trait as well. “I don’t know if Boone is going to leave me alone. If she doesn’t then I know it’ll still be hard to find the kind of work I was hoping to get. But so what? I can be a hotel concierge in Spain and live on bread, olives and cheese if I have to. I do have choices.”

  “So when you get back we’ll talk about your choices. It’s not so bleak as it was, is it?”

  Lily agreed even as she was thinking she could also wait tables in Meredith. Get a teaching certificate for languages and find her way into the school system somehow, even though she’d never wanted to be a teacher. She could cobble together a living in the area, couldn’t she?

  Circumspect had no patience for Libido’s hopeful, wishful thinking. How does it feel, after a night like that, to still not know if the woman can even feel love? She clearly wanted you, but for what?

  Libido was happy with the answer of, “Great sex.”

  Focus on what matters right now, Lily thought.

  “Let’s just take it day-by-day,” she said to Uncle Damon. She had work to accomplish in the next several hours. Before she began she sent one more silent prayer winging heavenward for Kate and her little girl. Priorities.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Nicole was only a few steps inside the doors of Meredith General Hospital when she was reminded why she’d opted out of pursuing a career in medicine. The smell of antiseptic left her nauseated, and even though she knew it highly unlikely, she thought she smelled blood. She’d attempted to overcome the response with standard desensitization techn
iques, but after a course of volunteering in the hospital she’d been as queasy on the last day as the first. Her neural pathways were stubborn.

  Her stepfather had died in this particular hospital, and that association from her childhood only added to her anxiety for Kate. She’d spoken with her mother twice on the drive from Logan, and knew Kate was still in intensive care and listed as critical. The latest description of her vital signs from a doctor was, “Thready but steady.”

  She was glad Betty Creedy, who had met her at the airport, had insisted on some food during the drive. It had steadied her nerves. She was carrying a frothy chai tea for her mother, having asked Betty to stop at the Meredith Grinder. It was all she could think to do, and she thought that Lily would approve.

  She missed Lily. She missed Lily with every step. Every heartbeat. She told herself that she shouldn’t rely on someone else to make her a better woman and a more thoughtful daughter, but it seemed that she wanted more on the resume of her life than “excellent researcher” and “consistent professor.”

  Her mother broke down the moment she saw Nicole. She wanted to cry too, but her mother had been bottling up her fear all night. Nicole could wait. She rocked her mother while she wept, not certain that her fervent, “It’s going to be okay,” was heard.

  The storm abated after a few minutes and the eagerness with which her mother drank half of the tea without pausing proved that she’d not eaten much. Her color improved, and Nicole went with her to the restroom to wash her face and stood helpfully by while her mother repaired her makeup.

  “There,” she pronounced, looking at her mother in the mirror. “Kate will know you when she wakes up.”

  Her mother blew her nose. “Waiting is hard. I have been praying. One loses one’s parents, that is natural. Losing my husbands was not easy, but I had my daughters. But losing a daughter—”

  “Kate’s going to be okay,” Nicole said firmly. “And now you have a granddaughter.”

  The words brought a slight smile to her mother’s lips though her brow remained creased with worry. “Kate won’t have another baby. One of the things they had to do in the surgery was remove her uterus. I don’t understand what went wrong.”

  After five minutes with the ICU resident, Nicole understood. Kate’s blood pressure had set off a cascade of bad outcomes, including a massive loss of blood during the C-section. When the doctor said Kate had flatlined twice for sixty seconds before responding to electric shock the surgeon had deemed it more important to stop the bleeding and stabilize Kate’s heartbeat than to try to save the uterus. Nicole completely agreed.

  The ICU nurse let them both in to see Kate for only a minute. Nicole swallowed queasily and kept her arm around her mother. Kate’s face was waxy and pale and her skin seemed to hang off her chin and hands. The tape holding the breathing tube in place would leave marks for several days. She wanted Kate to wake up and complain about the tape, how boring it all was and to beg someone to turn on the TV.

  When they both touched her hand her vital signs didn’t change.

  “The baby is doing fine.” Nicole squeezed Kate’s fingers. “Her APGAR score was six. That’s good for a pre-term delivery, Kate, more than good. She’s going to be fine, but she needs you.”

  “You need to pick a name.” Her mother patted Kate’s arm. “I know you couldn’t decide between Aliyah or Juliet for a girl.”

  “We’ll be back. We’re going to go look at Aliyah-Juliet now.”

  It became the pattern of their afternoon. A few minutes with Kate, twenty minutes peering through the glass into the nursery, then back to the waiting room to decide nothing in the vending machine was edible. Betty Creedy dropped by, bringing some freshly baked pumpkin chocolate chip muffins for both of them and the nurses. Nicole did her best to express her gratitude and it wasn’t lost on her that Mrs. Creedy was a little surprised by her effusiveness.

  Through the thick plexiglass window Baby A-J looked healthy considering her rushed arrival into the world. Even though they could see only the tiniest bit of the little girl’s face, it was obviously pink and she knew how to cry. Her tiny mouth was already trying to suck even though feeding by mouth would wait while the intravenous feeding tried to load her up with nutrients she’d missed by arriving early. The signs were all good. The nurse had said the baby would be in the perinatal unit for at least three more weeks. What effect would it have, Nicole wondered, to start life separated from the world by barriers and the faces of those who loved you indistinct, and the sounds of affection muffled?

  With an inward wry laugh, she touched the glass. It wasn’t all that different from the way she’d been living. Separated from other kids by her skin color and “strange” mother, and a brain that understood math and science problems long before her peers did, she’d always been behind a wall of her own and other people’s making. Having learned that barriers could help the pursuits of a scholar she’d made good use of them to keep people out—and her emotions in.

  But for now her personal glass seemed to be gone. She was grateful to have her mother’s hand to hold. Whether her barriers had been melted by Lily or shattered by her fear for Kate didn’t matter. The muffins were delicious. Her mother was beautiful. The nurses were kind. All of these things she would have deflected before, but now they washed into her senses, leaving her a little dizzy.

  She knew she would go back to the university and back to dealing with frustrations of academia and students. But she didn’t want to go back to a state of perpetual annoyance that filtered out all the positives. She chuckled to herself again. She wouldn’t go so far as loving vindaloo, however.

  Her mother heard her little laugh. “What is funny? I need to smile.”

  “Just thinking about Kate coaxing Baby A-J to eat strained peas. You know how she hates gooey things.”

  Her mother did smile at that. “I have been warning her about diapers. When you were born I was sure I would be ill wiping up poo and spit-up. But motherhood changes everything, overnight. There is nothing that comes out of a baby’s body that bothers me now. I would rather not touch some of them, but…” She shrugged. “A baby needs. A mother gives.”

  Nicole was startled by the sudden chirping of her phone. She glanced at the display and felt herself flush with pleasure. She forgot her mother was there as she answered, “Where are you? When will you get here?”

  Lily’s voice was a little garbled. “I’m in Charlotte, waiting for the next flight. I talked to Uncle Damon—he said you’re not to worry about anything. The coordinator at Georgia State was very understanding, and I’ve e-mailed or called the contacts for every event for the next four days to cancel.”

  “You’ve been productive.”

  “I’ve had a lot of coffee.”

  Nicole laughed. “I’m up to my eyes in really bad tea.”

  “How about when I drive into town I stop at that café next to Beekman’s and get some real food?”

  “Mom’s friends are bringing some dinner in a while, but thank you.” She turned to look at her mother and found herself the subject of an intense maternal stare. “It’s Lily,” she explained. “She’s halfway here.”

  She watched her mother raise one eyebrow and for a moment she had a clear idea of what she would see in her own mirror in another twenty years. What had she said to deserve that look?

  “My flight is starting to board,” Lily was saying. “When I land I’ll get a rental and drive out. Don’t worry about anything, okay? Just Kate. How is she? How is the baby?”

  Nicole gave her a quick update and wished her a safe flight. “We’ll be here at the hospital unless I call. You’ll come directly here?”

  Lily’s voice grew soft. “Yes. Of course.”

  Nicole couldn’t help her equally quiet, shy response. “Thank you.”

  She disconnected the call and turned back to her mother. “She’ll be here tonight. It was good of her to keep my suitcase so I could make the earlier flight.”

  “Lily is—”
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  They were interrupted by the perinatal nurse, a solid, round-faced young woman. “I hate to be a pest, but state law requires we file a certificate of live birth within twenty-four hours. It’s better to have a name than putting ‘refused to state’ on the form.”

  Her mother was shaking her head. “Kate must decide. She will wake up and decide.”

  Nicole sighed. “So at about twenty-three hours you’re going to file one anyway?” The nurse nodded regretfully. “So regardless, Mom, Kate will have to file for an amended certificate to change the name. We could make a guess—if we get it right then she won’t have to go through the bother. If we don’t she’s no worse off.”

  “Let’s wait until tonight to do that,” her mother said. “But we’ll give you a name. ‘Refused to state’ is not acceptable, I agree.”

  The nurse smiled. “I’ll let the night nurse know to ask again. Your beautiful granddaughter could be president some day and you wouldn’t want anyone questioning her birth certificate.”

  They all laughed and Nicole was glad of the released tension as she walked with her mother back to the beige and gray waiting room. She decided, finally, that a vending machine bag of M&M’S looked good to her touchy stomach. Tearing the packet open she popped a couple into her mouth, recalling young Leonid’s ravenous consumption of the bag Lily had given him. From there her mind called up the image of Lily getting out of the pool at that spa in Spain. She’d held that lovely body against her last night, had found ways to make Lily quiver and cry out.

  Her pulse rate went up and Nicole didn’t mind. Right now it was just good to know Lily was on her way. She was smiling when she sat down next to her mother and offered some of the candy.

  “No. I will grow fat sitting in this room,” her mother said. “So. Tell me about Lily.”

  Nicole popped more candies into her mouth. “She’s been a great assistant.”

  “No,” her mother said.