by Lilian Darcy
She went out and fed the horses then made a big farm breakfast, cooking a batch of hot biscuits inside the stove, in the old cast iron camp oven that had been here for as long as she could remember, crisping bacon on the griddle, and adding eggs when she heard Lucas coming down the stairs.
They didn’t spend long over the meal, and began to pack up with impatient efficiency as soon as it was over. Although Lucas didn’t say so out loud, Reba knew he shared her own sense that today was like the last day of summer school vacation. You couldn’t cling to it the way you wanted. Awareness of what was coming next impinged too strongly. They’d be back at the hospital in a few hours.
Suddenly she felt desperate to see Maggie again.
“All her stats still looked good when I took over from Helen,” Shirley reported to Angela, at the Monday morning shift change, after a long night. “Although her heart monitor went off several times in the early evening, Helen said. Phil and Cynthia both took a look at her and decided to notch up her ventilator settings, just after I came on. But her color still wasn’t looking too great, or her oxygen sats. And when I took her temp at midnight…”
She handed the chart over to Angela, who muttered, “Looks like she got sicker pretty fast after that. When are Reba and Lucas due back?”
“Sometime today. This morning, I think. By lunchtime, they said to me initially, and I don’t see them delaying. Helen says Lucas called just after she came on yesterday afternoon, and she told him that everything was fine. Which it was, then. I hate that this happened while they weren’t here.”
“Oh, please!” Angela raised her hands. “They’ll blame themselves.”
“And us, probably, for making them go.”
“They won’t dare to leave her side for a second, now. So she’s on…?”
Shirley listed the medications that they all hoped would combat the infection that had invaded Maggie’s tiny system, and finished, “She’ll beat this. She was doing so well. She has to beat this, Angela.”
“I know. I’m not looking forward to breaking the news to her mom and dad.”
“Is there a way we can call them?”
“Is there a point? We know they must be on their way here, anyhow.”
“I’m going to call the contact numbers they left for us. I just think they’ll want to hear about this as soon as possible.”
“Let me know if you reach them. I need to take her temp and put up more fluid.”
“Diaper, too.” As always, the staff tried to group caring activities together as much as they could. “She’s about due.”
“Is Phil around?”
“Delivery suite. Baby Esposito is going home today, but looks like we may have another twenty-five weeker by the end of the morning. Mom’s in second-stage labor right now.”
At the nurses’ station, Shirley couldn’t get hold of either Lucas and Reba or Reba’s friend. Cell phones were out of range. Land lines weren’t picking up. It was still early—just on seven, but ranching people started their days before dawn and so did small town folks like Carla and her husband.
Shirley left a couple of messages, including one at Reba and Lucas’s hotel here in Denver, but she didn’t want to make them panic. She knew it was a pointless concern. They would panic, anyhow, as soon as they heard her voice. She spoke calmly but her words still came across a little stilted, on the different answer machines and message services.
There was just no way to spare them this news. At best, the infection wouldn’t clear for several days. At worst…
Back at Maggie’s bedside, she saw Angela reach in to change the tiny diaper. Maggie twitched and flinched and grimaced, not really awake but not peacefully asleep, either. She made little sucking motions with her mouth, trying to console herself, but she couldn’t. As soon as Angela had finished the diaper change, she broke open a plastic packet containing a sterile preemie pacifier which she gently slid into Maggie’s mouth.
“Go on, little girl,” she murmured. “See if you can keep a hold of this.”
But Maggie couldn’t do that, either.
“Any luck with the phone call?” Angela asked, when Shirley had stepped back into her field of vision.
“I left messages,” she answered, speaking low for Maggie’s sake. “Don’t know whether to hope they get them, or not.”
Angela sighed. “You know what? I really hope they don’t. I want to give them that extra couple of hours of peace before this hits them. I’m not going to try calling, since you’ve left messages already.”
“See you tomorrow morning, then.”
“With you handing me a happier baby, I hope.”
“Want to drop in at Carla’s?” Lucas asked Reba, as they rumbled over the last cattle guard on the road out of Seven Mile Ranch.
“No, I just want to get back. I don’t even want to unpack our things at the hotel.”
“We should have called in at the main house.” He knew they probably would have, if it had still been on its old site, familiar to Reba, and closer to the ranch buildings where the hands were at work.
“We saw Lon,” she said. If she’d avoided the house because she still couldn’t quite handle seeing it up close, she didn’t say so out loud. “He said there hadn’t been any phone calls overnight.”
“Yeah, but he’d left the house by six-thirty, along with the other hands. I should have thought before that it would be a good idea to call. I’ve been focused just on seeing her. We’d only lose ten minutes if we looped back there now.”
“Let’s not. I just want to get to the hospital. It feels like we’ve been away too long.”
“Want me to drive fast?”
“Drive safe. I just want to get safely back to her.”
They didn’t stop once on the journey, and every mile seemed to get harder.
“We shouldn’t have done this. We shouldn’t have gone,” Reba said.
“It was the right thing,” Lucas answered her.
It seemed clear to him, right now. He felt more relaxed. Stronger. Happier. More confident. Pleased with various wheels he’d set in motion regarding the ranch. Closer to Reba, too, and not just because he’d wanted her in his bed so badly, last night.
She would lose this panicky feeling as soon as they hit the NICU again, less than an hour from now, he predicted.
And he was confident they’d made the right choices, this weekend.
Chapter Eleven
“I don’t get this,” Lucas growled at Angela.
“These setbacks are hard, I know, because they’re—”
He cut into the nurse’s soothing speech. “Hard! As of around three o’clock yesterday afternoon, she was fine, and now, suddenly, she has this massive infection that you didn’t see coming and that’s already set her back—” he broke off, rustling her chart as he flipped a page, then continued “—to the point where she weighs less than she weighed when we left.”
Hearing him with Maggie’s sensitive ears, even though they were standing well away from her isolette, Reba wanted to tell him, “Don’t talk so loud. Don’t be so noisy with the chart. She’ll start to crash if you do that.”
She hardly cared about his words. What was the point of challenging Angela, or trying to work out why this had occurred! They’d been warned. Infections happened. Setbacks happened.
Yes, she burned with regret that she and Lucas hadn’t been here, and she burned with regret that she’d kept her parents away out of some impossible, wrongheaded desire to spare them, but Maggie didn’t need regret. If she could even feel such a negative emotion coming from the people who loved her—hopefully she couldn’t—it wouldn’t do her any good.
She just needed the love.
Angela’s second attempt at a soothing response to Lucas sounded like white noise. Reba didn’t even hear it. “Does this mean we won’t be able to hold her today, after all?” she asked softly.
“Dr. Charleson doesn’t think it’s a good idea yet, honey,” Angela said. “Maggie’s battling with every
thing she has, right now.”
“I can see it. Her color, the way she’s holding herself.”
It hurt just to look.
“She’s showing signs that she’s not tolerating any kind of touch too well at the moment, even the kind that was doing her so much good before. She starts to crash the moment we get near her.”
“I know. I saw. Just now. Her oxygen saturation dropped.”
“Tell me more about the infection,” Lucas demanded. “Is it bacterial? Viral?”
“We’re testing for bacterial, and there may be some of that, but we think the real problem is Candida. A yeast infection.”
“Yeast?”
“Yeast is everywhere. We’re full of it. The air is full of it. Our systems can handle it, but sometimes a preemie’s can’t.”
“You can treat her for it, though, right? You are treating her.”
“We’re treating her.”
“And it’ll get better.”
“We hope so.”
“Hope? Just hope? You don’t know?”
“We’re really hopeful, Lucas, but—”
“You’re not going to make promises,” he muttered. “This could cascade into other problems. Haven’t I heard this? I thought I wasn’t going to have to hear it any more. Hell, look at her vent settings. Higher than they were when she was three days old!”
He blinked several times, squeezing his eyelids together tight and fast.
“I’m going to put my jars in the freezer,” Reba said, so thinly that probably neither Angela nor Lucas heard.
As always, his insistence on details and facts and worst-case scenarios made her feel as if someone was slowing peeling the protective sheath away from every nerve in her body, and she just had to get away, escape, where she couldn’t hear it and where she wouldn’t think about all the vivid, unbearable pictures he conjured with his scalpel-sharp questions.
In the small room at one end of the NICU that was not quite a kitchen and not quite a medical lab, the refrigerator-freezer unit hummed. Reba had her own designated section inside it for the storage of her specially labeled jars. She opened it up and added the impressive set of sterile containers she’d accumulated over the past two days.
She’d planned to boast about them to the nurses.
See? I’m so totally on top of this now, I could give lectures. I look exactly like the picture on the cover of the instruction booklet.
Yeah? Who was she kidding! She was so tense her whole body had locked up, and she knew she’d be back to square one with the cursed pump.
And when would Maggie get to use all this, anyhow? Would she ever?
Standing in front of the open freezer, with its mist of frozen vapor rolling down her body, she had to fight with everything she had, in order to keep the faintest shred of hope.
Maggie needs me to hope.
She’s strong.
She’s fighting.
And her doctors and nurses are fighting for her.
I won’t let her down.
“What did you do?” Lucas’s angry voice hit her from the far side of the open freezer door. She hadn’t heard him or seen him until he spoke. “What in heaven’s name did you do to make Maggie come so early, and have to suffer all this?”
“Oh, dear God!” she whispered.
Her stomach caved in as if he’d punched her, but he hadn’t finished yet. His eyes were like smouldering coals, red-rimmed and as narrow as slits. His jaw shook. Already, he seemed to have lost the light tan he’d gained out riding over the past two days, and to have stepped back inside the aura of rumpled, off-the-planet exhaustion and almost tangible stress that nine out of ten parents in the NICU wore, also. He hadn’t shaved at the cabin and his jaw looked dark and rough.
“Why did you go into labor that night?” he demanded. “Did you get sick and not tell your doctor? Did you even ask him if you could keep working? When you started feeling something, why the hell didn’t you say so immediately and take the rest of the shift off? There has to be a reason for this. A concrete—”
“Does there, Lucas? Why?”
“It didn’t just happen, out of the blue. You could have spared her this torture, and us, if you’d just listened to your body, if you’d been more careful. What in hell did you do wrong?”
“Nothing.” Reba stepped back, as if from a blast of furnace-strength heat. “I did nothing wrong.”
She’d had to tell herself this so many times. Even after Angela’s firm reassurance a couple of weeks ago, she’d still had black doubts, sitting beside Maggie’s isolette at midnight or dawn. She’d asked Shirley, she’d asked Helen, they’d all told her the same thing. Not her fault. And she didn’t need Lucas’s accusations now.
He gripped the top of the open freezer door, then gave it a violent shove and it slammed shut, rattling all those precious jars—not just hers but the ones belonging to the other strung-out, exhausted mothers that both of them had met and talked to often by this time. He focused on the sound, clenched his teeth and sagged against the laminate surface of the adjacent bench.
He looked ill.
“Shoot, Lucas!” she said. “Do you think I haven’t asked the staff about this? Do you really think I haven’t thought about that myself? Do you think it didn’t torture me all the way to the hospital, that night, thinking it was my fault?”
“Yeah?”
“Angela promised me it wasn’t. Shirley and Helen promised. And I believed them, and I don’t know how I’d have gotten this far if they hadn’t said it. Maybe you should go ask the nurses yourself, before you break apart every moment of closeness we’ve had, every piece of meaning in the things we talked about on the weekend. Because I can’t—I won’t—I will not listen to you.”
She fled the room blindly, left the unit, took the elevator and somehow ended up in the cafeteria just because it was a place she knew. The lunch rush hadn’t yet ended and the place was crowded with people and voices and food smells. She stood just inside the entrance for several minutes, letting it all wash over her, not able to go any farther. Her legs wouldn’t move.
One thought drummed in her head.
Her baby’s father blamed her.
It hurt.
And it made her angry, which felt even worse.
A huge part of her wanted to tell him, “Fine, if this horrendous, unlivable situation is my fault, then let me be the one to live through it with Maggie. Just leave. No one’s asking you to share the consequences.”
But she slowly realized that she’d never say it.
Lucas loved Maggie.
He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t.
He wouldn’t have made those wild accusations if he didn’t.
And since he loved her, he had the right to be here, no matter how Reba felt about him, no matter if they couldn’t manage to exchange a civil word. She had to cling to this understanding, force herself to remember it.
She joined the line snaking past the pile of plastic trays and the glass-fronted cabinets of hot and cold food, and mechanically took a bottle of juice and a carton of milk, looked at the sandwiches and the Pasta of the Day and just couldn’t do it.
Maybe just some soup, for Maggie’s sake. What was it today? Cream of broccoli? Okay, whatever. No bread roll, thanks.
Lucas found her when she’d already spooned half of it down without tasting a drop, but she wasn’t ready to listen to him yet, let alone forgive him. Maybe he wasn’t here to apologize anyhow. She just looked at him, silently daring him to sit down.
He didn’t take the dare, but spoke while standing. “I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Even though you meant it?”
“I should have asked the medical staff, like you did.”
“Did you ask them just now?”
“Yes. I asked Dr. Charleson.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said he’d just attended the birth of a twenty-five weeker who never even made it out of the delivery suite. Born to a drug-addict mother.�
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“You didn’t think—”
“No, of course I didn’t think you’d abused your body or our baby that way. But sometimes the mother does do the wrong thing. You didn’t. He told me that. I’m sorry, Reba, this has been a hell of a day, and my emotions just got out of control. I shouldn’t have accused you.”
She tried to laugh. It sounded like someone sawing open a rusty tin can. “You spend half the weekend convincing me we need to be rational, we need to act in a logical, sensible way, we need to mistrust our feelings until we understand them, and then suddenly you attack me, and claim it’s ‘just your emotions getting out of control,’ as if that’s all that needs to be said. Is there a consistency, here, that I’m not seeing?”
“No. There’s no consistency at all. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happening to me.” He worked his face painfully, then rubbed his jaw between his thumb and forefinger, and she could hear his beard growth rasping.
“Welcome to the world!” she said.
He dragged a chair out from the table and sat down, and there seemed to be no words in either of them—or no breath and strength left to push them out.
Finally, after she’d finished her soup and her milk, he asked, “You going to drink that juice?”
“No. You have it. I want to get back to Maggie. And I want to find a phone and call my parents.”
“To tell them what’s happened?”
“To ask them to come, if they want to.”
“Now? You wanted—”
“I was wrong. If I’d let them come before, they could have seen Maggie when she was doing comparatively well. Now, if this infection doesn’t respond to—” She closed her eyes, shook her head, swallowed and tried again. “If I’m going to feel guilt and regret, it’s going to be about that. Keeping my parents away. You were right. I shouldn’t have tried to protect them. I shouldn’t have tried to make a decision that was rightfully theirs, not mine.”
