by Lilian Darcy
“It’s pretty hard,” Reba managed to add.
She told her mother about Maggie’s birth, then heard her father pick up the extension, and had to re-cap and fill in details. It was a confused, emotional conversation, and that awful crying was tough to keep at bay. She hardly registered the click of the door at the far end of the suite, as Lucas let himself in.
“No, Mom, I’m not letting you fly all this way. Not yet. She’s too little to hold. She may not even— She’s…fragile. Wait until she’s stronger. Until the weather’s warmer here.”
“That long?” Mom sounded teary, too.
“She’s going to be in the hospital for weeks and weeks.”
Dad said, “We’ll talk it over, Reba. We don’t like to think of you on your own.”
“I’m not on my own. Lucas is here.”
She’d told her parents about the father of her baby months ago, when she’d first realized she was pregnant, but had warned them there was no likelihood of a future between Lucas and herself, despite the fact that his family’s corporation had bought Seven Mile. Mom and Dad had been so good about it. No judgments. No negative questions. Just care and concern.
“He flew in?” Dad asked now.
“He was out at the ranch. He came into town, and— The details aren’t important, right now. We’ll talk about all that later. But it meant that he was here, and he wants to stay. For Maggie’s sake. Until she’s well and strong. We’ll have a lot to talk about, and to work out. We’re not ready to think about any of that yet. But I want you to stay put in Florida until everything’s—until I tell you it’s okay to come, all right? That’s all I’m asking from you, right now.”
“Well, if that’s really what you want, honey, we’ll respect it,” her father said. “I know you’re concerned about your mother.”
“Look after yourself,” Mom put in. “Call us every day, if you can, because we’re going to be sitting by the phone.”
“I’ll call. Just don’t worry, okay. I love you. Bye.”
Reba put down the phone and looked across the room to find Lucas watching her in silence. She expected a repetition of his insistence, three days ago, that her parents should make their own decision about coming to Colorado to see Maggie, and steeled herself to put a lock on the subject. She wouldn’t hesitate to tell him again to butt out, if it came to the point.
She might actually tell him to butt out right now, before he even opened his mouth!
But no.
No.
What was that look on his face?
Her stomach suddenly dropped and she levered herself off the edge of the bed, her strength gone in an instant. “What’s happened? I thought you must be getting breakfast, but—have you been at the hospital?”
“No, I’ve been—” He cut off, as if the explanation was irrelevant. “The doctor called while you were still asleep, Reba. They want to talk to us about her heart.”
Reba’s hands shook so much as she dressed that she could hardly fasten the buttons on her shirt. The tears that fogged her vision didn’t help. Neither did the sound of Lucas pacing impatiently near the door, waiting for her. Striding toward the elevator, he moved so fast that she would have had to run to keep up. Would have wanted to run, too, but she was still a little sore and cautious in her movements, following the birth, so she kind of loped along, like a wounded rabbit.
In the lobby, he peeled away from the direction of the exit and she followed him instinctively, then couldn’t believe it when he disappeared through the door of the hotel’s business center.
“Lucas?” she almost yelled. “You’re trading stocks, or something, when Maggie might be—?”
But she knew she’d gotten it wrong the moment he turned and she saw his bleak face. Heard his tight tone, also. “After the doctor called, I came down here and went on the Internet to see what more I could find out. He didn’t say much about it over the phone.”
“Oh. Right.” Reba felt as if her throat had been gripped by a metal clamp.
“Mr. Halliday?” said a cool-voiced office assistant.
“Yes?” He whipped around to face her. “Is everything printed out?”
“Here it is.” The woman gave a professional smile and handed him a manila file filled with printed sheets. It had to be an inch thick.
“All that?” Reba said. “That’s all related to Maggie’s heart?”
“It’s information on preemies in general, and on the condition she has—patent ductus arteriosus—from about ten or twelve different sites,” Lucas answered. “They seem reputable. A couple are run by children’s hospitals, one by a neonatology association.”
Standing close and holding the file folder so she could see, he flipped it open to a random page, where Reba saw the stylized diagram of a preemie baby’s heart. He flipped again, and weird words jumped out at her.
Ventriculomegaly.
Subependymal.
Parenchmyal hemorrhage.
Hemorrhage was the only one she recognized, the only one she would even try to pronounce, and it meant bleeding. Was Maggie bleeding?
“I don’t want to look,” she told Lucas, close to total panic. “What’s the point of this? I only want to hear what the doctor thinks we need to know. Or it’ll just get me more scared.”
“The doctor didn’t say much. I wanted some background on this—factual, detailed medical background—so I know what to ask.”
“Okay. That’s your choice. Can we just get to the hospital now and see her? Find out?”
Morning traffic was still thick on the roads and their vehicle seemed to crawl. At one point they came to a complete standstill, and to cool his impatience Lucas pulled yet another sheet from the manila file and frowned at it as he read, saying nothing. Reba wanted to scream. She also wanted to grab the printouts from his hands, crumple them and hurl them out the window.
Something about the way he needed to tackle the morning’s news rubbed her raw, but when the traffic started moving again and she looked across at him and saw the way he kept raking his lower lip with his teeth, the way his hands were so tense on the wheel, she could see her own fear mirrored in every strung-out movement he made, and every new line on his face.
When she saw all this, suddenly, she wanted to reach out to him, soothe that tight face with her fingers, massage his neck and give him all the promises that Maggie’s doctor had refused to make.
It seemed hours before they reached the unit, and then to torture them further, Dr. Charleson wasn’t there.
“He’s in the delivery suite right now,” Angela told them. “He’ll be back as soon as he can.”
“How is she?”
“She’s doing great.”
“Angela, please stop saying that,” Reba begged. “We know she has a heart condition. Lucas had a call from Dr. Charleson.”
“A lot of preemies have this condition. Before birth, the heart doesn’t need to pump much blood through the heart, so there’s a kind of in-built bypass. In a full-term baby—a baby who’s born at the right time—it closes after birth, but sometimes in preemies it doesn’t. It’s not regarded as a defect, honey, not in the same way as some other conditions.”
“But it’ll need treatment.”
“It’s starting to look that way. He’s put her on some medication, and—”
“Not just medication. I’ve done some reading,” Lucas cut in. “She may need surgery.”
“Please wait until Dr. Charleson can talk to you about that. Yes, she may need surgery, but she may not.”
Surgery on a baby this small.
Heart surgery.
Looking down at Maggie, Reba couldn’t even imagine it. How delicate must such a tiny heart be! How minuscule were its blood vessels? And how would Maggie’s precious little body withstand an invasion like that, even if it was intended to save her life?
Lucas made a sound that could have been an oath, or a rusty sob. He scraped his teeth across his bottom lip again, and his shoulders hunched up as if Ang
ela’s reassuring words and her relaxed way of moving around Maggie had sent his blood pressure shooting through the roof without any input from Dr. Charleson.
“Have you guys eaten this morning?” Angela said, a moment later.
“Uh…” Lucas looked at Reba.
“I haven’t, no.”
“Me, neither.” His voice rasped. “I’ll get us coffee and Danish, Reba, okay?”
“Could I have an orange juice, too. A banana, if you can.” Keeping her vitamins up for Maggie, giving Maggie strength through her milk.
“Sure,” Lucas said. “Back ASAP.”
He left the unit, his big body all angles and thrusts as it moved, and Angela pulled up a chair for Reba. “Sit, honey.”
Maggie’s color didn’t appear so good this morning. Reba looked at the monitors and saw that the baby’s oxygen settings were higher than they had been last night—a fact she wouldn’t even have recognized just three days ago.
“How did Dr. Charleson pick up the heart condition, Angela?” she asked.
“He heard a murmur through the stethoscope. That’s not necessarily significant, but she’s needed more breathing support since last night and her heart rate has climbed a little. When that happened, they gave Maggie an echo-cardiogram—it didn’t hurt her, it’s just sound waves, the same principle as the ultrasound you would have had during pregnancy—and then he knew for sure.”
“Right. I understand.”
Okay.
It was time.
Reba knew she had to ask the question that had tortured her since the moment she’d realized there was no stopping her labor and her baby was going to be born, three agonizing days ago.
She took a breath, and her voice came out steady. “Did I make all this happen?”
Angela’s hand stilled over the sheet of medical notes she was adding to, and she looked across the baby’s isolette at Reba. “You mean, was it your fault that Maggie came early?”
“Yes.”
“Well, honey, did you go out parachuting the day before? Bungee jumping, maybe? Did you have a drinking binge or take cocaine?”
Reba gave a shaky laugh. “No!”
“Didn’t think you looked the type for any of that. Now look at me, and read my lips. No, you didn’t make it happen.”
“I—I kept working, though. I did five shifts a week as a short-order cook at our local steakhouse. I was there—I was working—when my waters broke.”
“Plenty of women keep working in physically demanding jobs right up until the birth with no problems. Some women push their luck in all sorts of ways and breeze through the whole pregnancy and birth. Others, like you, do everything right—right diet, right exercise—and have a truckload of complications. It’s not fair.”
“Feels pretty unfair, right now, for sure!”
“But it’s most definitely not your fault.”
“I was feeling pretty stressed, though. A lot of stuff was happening. When the miscarriage happened a few months ago, and when I went into labor.”
“And stress is your fault, too, right? Life is your fault.” Angela pretended to raise her voice, and grinned as she spoke. “Hey, everyone, good news, we’ve found her, the woman we can blame for everything. Traffic. Floods. Bad TV.”
Reba laughed again, although from the outside it might have looked more like crying. “I get your point.”
“Don’t burden yourself with guilt, along with everything else you’re dealing with, okay? Just don’t. Promise?”
“I promise to try.”
Lucas came back a few minutes later, and they ate breakfast in the parents’ room just outside the unit. Dr. Charleson found them as they were finishing their coffee.
“Don’t skimp on the details,” Lucas warned him, hard on the heels of the brief greetings they exchanged. “Don’t give us the soft version, okay? I want all of it, and I want it straight.”
What if I don’t? Reba wondered. What if I’m not strong enough for that? Do I get a choice?
She almost spoke out in protest, but then she felt Lucas’s arm dropping around her shoulders and his hip and thigh against her side. He squeezed her close, his chest shoring her shoulder blade, and she leaned her head back to pillow against the pad of muscle just below his collar bone. His fresh scent enveloped her and she could almost feel his strength seeping into her pores, making her just a little stronger, too.
For Maggie’s sake, they were in this together and she wasn’t going to argue her own weakness in front of their baby’s doctor.
“Yes,” she said, swallowing what she felt. “Please give us the whole story, Dr. Charleson, as clearly as you can.”
“How long before you’ll know if she needs the surgery?” Lucas asked. He felt as if they’d been closeted in the parents’ room with their baby’s doctor for hours, but it was probably closer to ten minutes.
He still held Reba, her willowy body positioned against his right side and chest. He could feel the way she was breathing—almost the same way she’d breathed through labor, as if the deliberate, conscious action of expanding and contracting her lungs was the only thing stopping her whole body from flying apart.
He knew how much she didn’t want to hear any of this, how much she just wanted to be told the punchline to Fate’s latest cruel joke. But he knew there was no punchline, yet, so they had to hear about all the ifs and buts, the wait and sees, the let’s hopes, the worst-case scenarios.
He’d first held her in order to help her through all of this, but within seconds he lost track of who was helping whom. He might be stronger than her physically, and he might possess more outward fight, but the touch of her and the warmth of her gave back to him just as much as he gave out. He wanted her, needed her, valued her.
And he wondered how they’d feel about each other when all this was over, when Maggie was out of danger and ready to go home. Would they be friends? Or would their teeth set on edge every time they had to be in the same room?
He knew he wasn’t prepared to let Maggie out of his life, whether she was strong and healthy and normal or…not. How would he and Reba work it out?
Please God, let us get safely to that problem, don’t let those decisions get taken out of our hands by something worse…
“Definitively, how long?” Dr. Charleson said, in answer to his question. “By the time she’s a couple of weeks old.”
He sketched out a possible scenario—that the drugs they were giving Maggie to close the open ductus in her heart would appear to work, but then the hole would open again after a few days without medication. They’d try a second course of medication at that point, and if they had the same failure, they’d then move on to the surgical option.
“Is she in danger if you wait?” Reba asked.
“We’ll have to work harder at supporting her breathing and her heart, while the ductus remains open, yes. If you consider that this increased support can also lead to increased chances of various other problems, then I’d have to say—I can’t soften this for you—there could be consequences. A ripple effect.”
“And if you don’t wait, if you decide to perform the surgery now?”
“We’re not going to do that. The medication is a better option. We’re going to cross our fingers that it works.”
“Crossing your fingers?” Lucas repeated. “Latest medical technique?”
“Sometimes, it’s all we’ve got. I will tell you, though, that I’m very optimistic on this one. She’s responded well to the medication so far. We’ll know within twenty-four hours whether the hole has closed.” Dr. Charleson looked at his watch, then added, “I’m not rushing you, please ask any questions you have, but if you’re okay with what we’ve discussed, I will get back to another newborn I’m concerned about.”
“We’re fine,” Reba answered quickly. “Thank you. We have no more questions right now.”
When the neonatologist had left the room a few moments later, Lucas said to her, only half teasing, “Afraid of what I was going to ask next?�
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For some seconds, she didn’t answer, then said finally, “Do you like roller coasters, Lucas?”
“Nope.”
“Neither do I. Not even for one three-minute ride. Now we’re both strapped to the front of the lead car, and the ride isn’t going to stop for weeks.”
“And you want to close your eyes?”
“No, closing your eyes is worse. I just want to put my hand in front of my face and peek when I have the courage, to get an idea of what’s coming. Since there’s no way to get off.”
“Whereas I’m gripping the bar with white knuckles, while trying to calculate the angles of force and the breaking strain on the car couplings?”
“Something like that.”
“Do you recommend your own approach?”
“I don’t think either of us has a choice. We are who we are. Don’t you think? We’re not going to change.”
The statement seemed designed to stress the distance that divided them, and Lucas didn’t like it. Was that really what she meant? He’d felt pretty close to her since Maggie’s birth, like they were on the same team. Now he wondered if Reba saw their tentative connection breaking down, sometime soon.
She would know, as he did, that the stress of something like this could break even a close, loving couple apart. A lot of marriages failed when there was a baby with special needs in the family. And he and Reba hadn’t had any kind of a foundation in the first place. Not a marriage, not even an ongoing involvement.
Statistically the odds couldn’t possibly be in their favor.
Chapter Eight
Lucas appeared to be fast asleep, his big body dwarfing the uncomfortable upright chair he was sprawled in, beside the baby’s isolette. Reba wondered if he’d been sleeping like that all night.
He’d sent her back to the hotel from the hospital at ten yesterday evening, after they’d grabbed a meal together in the hospital dining room. Already, she couldn’t remember what they’d eaten. Pasta? Or was that what she’d had for lunch? The indifferent cuisine blurred together after a while—overcooked glop that she ate purely to keep body and soul in one piece.
