by Lilian Darcy
“Does that mean…?” he asked her.
Reba nodded, voice expressionless and eyes too bright. “They’re not going to try to stop it, and if it stops on its own, they’ll give me something to keep it going. There’s no possibility of the amniotic sac repairing itself. The baby has to be born, if it’s to have any chance at life.”
“What do you want me to do, Reba? Do you actually want me here? I—I never asked.”
Her clammy hand locked around his forearm. “I want you here.”
“Then I’m here.”
Here. Stomach empty. Mind racing. Heart in his throat. Worst-case scenarios crowding his brain like gate-crashers at a party. A tenderness and terror for Reba and the baby that went beyond all logic or understanding. Yeah, he was here, and he wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
He felt the moment when Reba’s next contraction began, and he could tell instantly how much the pain had intensified since those moments in the manager’s office at the steakhouse.
“What are they doing for you?” he asked. “Have they given you anything for the pain?”
“I don’t want anything. I can handle it. I don’t want this baby born drugged, on top of everything else.”
She probably didn’t need to feel that way. The staff wouldn’t have offered her any medication that endangered the baby. But Lucas respected her attitude and didn’t argue. This was happening to her body, not his.
Her body, but both their hearts.
A nurse appeared, wheeling some kind of preemie crash cart. He didn’t know what to call it, but it looked scary, with its overhead lights, its instruments and equipment, and it brought home to him the reality of a baby who would need the most intensive level of care that a high-tech neonatal unit could provide. If he or she survived at all.
Time stretched and blurred.
The world narrowed to Reba’s hand clutching his arm, her nails digging into his skin, her damp hair and her dry-mouthed cries. Her palms weren’t callused the way they’d been last September, he vaguely noticed. Sometimes, she moved the same way she’d moved when they made love, but his memory of this snapped in and out of clarity so fast it felt like spots before his eyes.
When the time came for her to push the baby out, the room suddenly seemed to fill with people, all of them capped and gowned and masked in blue or green or white. They talked in a terse medical shorthand that seemed purposely designed to keep Lucas out of the loop, and he wanted to yell at them, “Tell me what’s happening. Tell me what you’re doing, and what that machine is for.”
He was used to control, not this terrifying helplessness.
“Lucas…” Reba flung her head to one side, grabbed his arm even harder, then squared her body again, ready for the contraction that charged at her. She gave a tremendous heave.
“Beautiful!” someone said. “You’re doing great, Rebecca. One more now. And… Yes!”
A flurry of action, more praise, as if from a coven of cheerleaders at some bizarre sporting event. A wet, wax-coated bundle, impossibly small, slipped into the hands of the waiting medical staff so fast Lucas didn’t even see its face.
“She’s a girl! You have a beautiful girl, Rebecca and Lucas.”
A beautiful girl who wasn’t breathing on her own.
After a pregnancy which had seemed to specialize in turning dramatic whenever Lucas was around, as if the universe was trying to send him a message he didn’t want to hear.
A baby he’d felt ambivalent about, at best.
A tiny baby who’d been taken away, at once, into some secret corner of the room where the crash cart had been parked earlier, and where the gowned backs of the staff made a barrier Lucas couldn’t see past. They muttered to each other, talked to the baby, too. Did that mean she was alive?
Lucas’s own heart and lungs felt as if they’d hardened to stone. Of course the baby wasn’t breathing! It hurt too damned much to breathe.
He felt no ambivalence now.
His eyes stung like acid burns, his jaw knotted and ached. Reba sobbed with exhaustion, still holding his arm, and gasped out, “Is she all right? Tell me she’s all right!”
“Yes!” one of the doctors suddenly said. “Good girl!” He pumped the air with his fist.
“She’s doing great!” said a nurse. She wasn’t one of the people who’d been working on the baby, so how did she know?
Lucas felt the lightening of the atmosphere in the room, but didn’t trust it. They were all still working frantically. What were they doing? He glimpsed IV lines and needles, heard a ripping sound. Tape?
Someone told Reba to “push gently with the contraction” and he vaguely realized that this must be the after-birth. He leaned close to her. “Okay?”
“If she is.” Her voice was shaky and squeaky and thin. “Can I see her? When can I see her?” she asked the nurse.
“Not yet, honey.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s doing great.”
Lucas still didn’t believe it. It was too generic, too kind. He wanted facts and details. The baby’s heart rate. Her blood pressure. Her weight. And he wanted to be told what it all meant.
Was she smaller or bigger than they’d expected? How bad was it that she hadn’t breathed on her own? How many babies born fourteen weeks early survived? How many had problems? Were girls stronger than boys? He had an idea that they were.
A girl.
He was the father of a girl.
It didn’t seem real, even though it felt so unexpectedly, earth-shatteringly important, and when the medical people wheeled the baby and that crash cart thing out of the room a little while later, he had a dizzying, terrifying sense that his daughter didn’t exist any more, that he’d never see her again when he hadn’t even really seen her in the first place.
Reba shared it, he could tell, and he didn’t think he’d ever felt so linked to another human being, when just a few hours ago he’d considered that he barely knew her at all.
“Where is she?” She sounded tearful and panicky. “Where are they taking her?”
“She’s gone up to the NICU, honey,” said the nurse, who was still calmly fiddling around. “You’ll be able to see her as soon as we’ve gotten you settled in your room. Do we have a name for her?”
“I had a few ideas. I wanted something strong, for a girl.”
“Yes,” Lucas heard himself say.
If the baby had a strong name, she’d be a strong person. She’d fight, and survive. The idea made a bizarre kind of sense, right now.
“Christie was one idea,” Reba said. “Tara. Maggie.”
“Maggie’s good,” Lucas said. “I like Maggie.”
Reba turned to him, watched his face for a moment. Reading him, it felt like. Reading his heart. “I like Maggie, too,” she said.
“So she’s Maggie?” the nurse asked. “Is she Margaret?”
“I think so, because that way she can shorten it to something different later on, if she wants.”
“But for now she’s Maggie.”
“She’s Maggie,” Lucas agreed. He slipped his hand into Reba’s and squeezed, and knew that for better or for worse, neither his life nor hers were ever going to be the same again.
“Is she going to be okay?”
The words just came out on their own. Reba knew they would only earn the same cautious reassurance she’d already heard more times than she could count, but there was only one thing in the world that mattered, right now, and that was Maggie being okay—her tiny daughter surviving and being okay—so she had to ask, and she had to endure the answer.
“She’s doing real well, Rebecca,” said the nurse, whose name was Shirley. She looked to be somewhere in her fifties, solidly built as if she’d given birth to several babies of her own. “She’s looking good.”
“Please call me Reba.”
Because I know you’re going to be in my life for weeks. And I want you to be in my life for weeks, because at best it’s going to take weeks for Maggie to grow enou
gh to go home. So we might as well get off to the right start with the name thing.
“Reba,” the nurse repeated, with a smile.
She worked efficiently over the baby, checking monitors and making notes, trying only to invade the warmed interior of the isolette when she really had to. Reba had only been here in the NICU for a few minutes—she’d arrived in a wheelchair, pushed by a nurse—but the place had been Maggie’s home for nearly two hours.
It still didn’t seem real.
And where was Lucas?
He’d stayed with Reba until she was settled in her room, and then her nurse had suggested helping her through a shower before she was taken up to the NICU.
“There’s paperwork I’m supposed to take care of, for you and the baby,” he’d said at that point, his voice clipped and calm. “Let me get that out of the way while you’re showering, and I’ll meet you up there.”
Sounded sensible in theory, but the paperwork seemed to be taking a long time.
What if he just didn’t come back?
Watching her tiny baby, so vulnerable and so lost amongst tubes and tape and wires, so utterly precious with her black hair and crumpled face and miraculously moving chest, Reba felt Lucas’s absence in a way that added hugely to her sense that none of this could actually, really, seriously be happening.
Finally, she heard a sound behind her, and felt his hand fall heavy and warm onto her shoulder. “She’s so tiny,” he said. “How can she be that small?”
“She’s beautiful.”
He looked at the baby for a moment, and Reba knew exactly what he was seeing. Thin, reddish limbs, a squashed face, hair like a black silk wig just fringing the edge of the pink knit hat that protected her fragile body heat. The hat was no bigger than a bone china teacup, but it looked like a sultan’s outsized turban on Maggie’s tiny head.
At first sight, you couldn’t call her beautiful.
Still, Reba knew exactly the instant Lucas discovered that she was. He drew in a hiss of breath, and a little sound caught in his throat and then escaped.
“She’s stunning,” he said. “She’s fabulous.” Then he turned to Shirley and said, “Is she going to be okay?”
Shirley gave the same reply she’d given Reba, then added, “Tell me, though, what can I smell? It’s good…”
“Oh, right.” He blinked, as if to clear his vision. “Are you hungry, Reba? I thought you might be, and that you should eat, but all I could find here at the hospital, at this hour, was a couple of vending machines. That’s why I was gone so long. Found some takeout Chinese food, if you want it.”
Hungry? Was she hungry?
Yes, Reba vaguely registered a gnawing, vinegary sort of sensation in her stomach that some people might label hunger, but it was so powerfully overlaid by, oh, about a hundred other, harder feelings, including the physical pain of recent childbirth, that it didn’t seem important—until she looked at Maggie, who needed her mother to be strong, who might only survive if her mother stayed strong.
“Please,” she said. “That was so— Thanks for thinking of it, Lucas.”
“No problem. There you go.”
And she plowed her way through countless mouthfuls of egg roll and fried rice that tasted like cardboard and salt but would help her to stay strong.
“I think I should try to sleep now,” she said, some time later. Had to be three in the morning. Four, even. “Lucas, are you going to check into a motel for the rest of the night, or something?”
He shook his head impatiently, as if the question was a waste of his time. “I’ll stay here.”
He’d already asked Shirley a hundred questions, narrowing his tired eyes and nodding at her answers as if filing every fact and detail and scrap of information away like vital documents filed in a locked safe.
He hadn’t sat down.
He’d asked if there were information booklets he could read, Internet sites he could look up, doctors he could talk to—as if Maggie’s health and survival depended on him knowing everything there was to know about state-of-the-art preemie treatment, the way his business success depended on him knowing everything about a particular company or market trend.
It grated on Reba’s red-raw nerves and she wanted to yell at him, “How is this going to help? Is this what our daughter really needs from you?”
But nobody yelled in the NICU, and she wouldn’t yell at the father of her baby, who was here, when she hadn’t had a clue, eight hours ago, just how much she would need him to be, and just how close to him she would feel.
“When are you heading back to New York?” she asked him, after he’d put the takeout containers in the garbage bin for her.
It was a little crazy, the way she didn’t want him to go, how scared she was even to ask about it, how dark and unknowable her whole future seemed.
“Back to New York?” he echoed blankly, as if she’d asked the question in a foreign language.
“Yes. Or wherever. Back to your business commitments. How long are you staying in Denver, I should have said.”
“Hell, Reba!” His voice harshened. “Weeks, if I have to. Until Maggie’s doing better. Until she’s—I can’t think. Seems impossible to think beyond the next few hours.”
“I know.”
“But I’m in this with her as much as you are, and don’t ever think you can turn me away.”
Chapter Six
“Are you going to call your parents before you eat?” Lucas asked.
Bright Colorado morning sunshine flooded the private hospital room, helping Reba to wake up more fully, after four hours of broken sleep. She felt disoriented, desperate to see Maggie again and to hear the latest report from the baby’s nurse, aware at the edge of her mind that there had to be all sorts of practical issues to deal with.
Lucas’s question concerned one of them, and there was a phone right here beside her bed, so she couldn’t argue the idea on grounds of inconvenience. It would be mid-morning in Florida by now.
But she shook her head in answer, and didn’t make excuses. “I want to wait, not burden them with this. I don’t want them worried. I want to have good news for them, first.”
She struggled to sit up. There was a breakfast tray waiting for her and, again, she knew how important it was for her to eat. A nurse had poked her head around the door a few minutes ago, when she was still barely awake, wanting to talk to her about Maggie’s nourishment, and how to provide breast milk for a baby who was way too little to suck. The whole idea seemed daunting, even when Reba knew how vital it was.
Lucas frowned at her and paced toward the window, half blocking the light. “You can’t do that. How can you wait? Her birth is the best news they’re going to get for a while.”
“Is that right?” Her spirit prickled and rebelled at his tone. “How about you? Have you called yours?”
“I’m going to, later today. As soon as there’s a window of time where I can think straight.”
“We’ve each made our own decision, I guess.”
“Is your decision a fair one? It could be weeks until we know for sure that she’s going to be okay. They have a right to know as soon as possible, so they can make plans.”
“Plans?”
“To see her, if they want.”
“I don’t want Mom burdened like that, when her health is so precarious.”
“It’s not your call, Reba.” He hunched shoulders that were already tight with tension and fatigue, but she couldn’t think about his body language, only about what he’d just said.
“If we’re talking about rights, what gives you the right to dictate to me, the way you’re doing?”
“I’m not dictating to you, I’m talking about what’s the right thing to do.”
“In your opinion.”
“This isn’t about opinions, it’s about principles.”
“Which you’re the expert on, appa—appa—apparently.” She didn’t really know why they were arguing, but finally got the word out at her third squeaky try,
and suddenly she was in tears, as if an emotional floodgate had opened inside her.
Lucas came to her at once and enfolded her into an embrace that smelled like coffee and soap and warmth, and felt as solid and safe as the trunk of a tree. “Hey…” he said. “Hey, Reba, it’s okay. I’m not going to put a gun in your back and march you to the nearest phone. Not today.”
“Oh, but tomorrow, maybe?”
He said nothing for a moment, clearly struggling to stay in control, which didn’t trouble Reba because it would be good for him to know how that kind of a struggle felt. She doubted he would ever know how it felt to be unable to stop crying like this.
“Think about it, okay?” he suggested finally, in a neutral, wooden tone. “It’s important.”
“Baby blues,” said the lactation nurse, appearing again.
“It’s not!” Reba said, through her sobs. “It’s much more real than that!”
The nurse clicked her tongue and said mildly, “I never said it wasn’t real, honey.”
This didn’t help.
“Listen, I’ve checked us into a hotel suite, five minutes from here.” Lucas’s voice vibrated deep into Reba’s body, and she calmed a little as she listened to him. “It’s an open-ended reservation. The place has twenty-four-hour room service and a business center and a pool.”
“We need a pool?”
“We need a nice place. And I’m wondering how we can get some of our things down here, so we don’t have to make the drive up to Biggins ourselves. Is there a friend who has a key to your place and can fill a couple of suitcases for you? Carla? Then one of the hands at the ranch can pick them up and bring them down, along with my gear.”
“You’re really staying?”
“You’re trying to exclude me, as well as your parents?”
“I’m not excluding anyone.” The idea seemed too unfair—unfair that he’d suggested it, unfair of her to even contemplate doing it, which, to be honest, she had—and she cried some more, silently daring the poor lactation nurse to mention those words “baby blues” again.
