Second Chance Sweethearts (Love Inspired)

by Kristen Ethridge

  “Gloria. I need your help down here.” In that instant, Rigo transformed from civilian to peace officer. There was no questioning or disobeying the tone in his voice. “It’s the pressure. It’s building up in the walls. Those holes are the best way for the water to relieve the pressure.”

  “Gloria? Gloria? What’s going on?” Tanna shouted from the bedroom.

  “It’s just the water, Tanna.” Gloria couldn’t believe that she had the ability to sound calm. Her throat was full of fear and her veins coursed with adrenaline. “Rigo’s here. We’re coming. Just move into whatever position makes you the most comfortable.”

  Gloria skittishly made her way down the stairs, afraid of the fizz of the outlets and the red of the marina fire and the ice in her heart and her stomach and the tips of her fingers.

  Rigo grabbed Gloria’s hand as she made it to the bottom of the stairs. Even though he was leading her into who knows what kind of chaos, she felt better just having his hand wrapped around hers. She could feel a callus at the base of his ring finger and vaguely wondered what had caused it. It hadn’t been there before.

  Time had changed them all. In ways both big and small.

  “Where are we going?”

  “My boat. I tied it up on the porch. But I need your help to get it inside. I can’t do it by myself. Things are getting very crazy, very fast. Look at those outlets—you can see what’s happening to the world around us.”

  She cocked her head in disbelief. “You want a boat inside the house? You’re crazy.”

  He turned and looked straight at her. “Maybe. But that boat may be all we have in a few hours—I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I have a pretty good idea, though, and I can’t afford to lose the boat. It’s small enough that it fits in the bed of my truck and light enough that I can maneuver it myself. If we can get it on its side, it will go through the door. The trolling motor just clamps on. I can unscrew it. I just need you to hold the door and help me guide it through.”

  Water pushed in waves, as the Gulf of Mexico had literally come to their door. It was rising more quickly now. Hurricane Hope was being anything but ladylike. She was making her force known.

  Rigo untied the rope mooring the small craft to the banister near what had been the front steps. He guided the boat to the door and braced it against the frame, then turned himself, grabbed the edge and heaved the boat onto its side, using the frame of the door for counter leverage.

  Gloria had never seen so much strength used at one time. He was probably right that he could easily move the boat to where he needed on an average day. But in these conditions with the water rising and the wind whipping, the strength he needed to pull off the feat she had just witnessed had to be nothing short of superhuman.

  Was that God answering her earlier prayer for strength for them all tonight?

  Had He really heard her over the howls of the wind and the cries all across the town? Was He really there?

  * * *

  Gloria ran up the stairs as fast as she could. Rigo stayed behind to tie the boat to the banister inside the foyer and move everything back from the small entryway so the vessel wouldn’t flop into it and cause more damage. Gloria wasn’t sure it mattered. Everything on the first floor of Tía Inez’s house was going to be a total loss, anyway. At the rate Hurricane Hope was growing, Gloria wondered if even the ceiling down there would be safe.

  She wondered if any of them would be safe. Or would this be the time the house that made it through the Great Storm of 1910 met its match?

  Entering the bedroom, Gloria found Tanna lying on the bed, propped up with some pillows. The room had a warm glow from the candles Inez had lit earlier, and the soft light brought Gloria’s blood pressure down several notches. It wasn’t the birthing center by a long stretch, but as long as there were no complications, everything should work out. She didn’t need to let the panic and what-ifs take over. That wouldn’t do anyone any good.

  Inez had apparently woken up. She sat next to the laboring mother, holding her hand.

  “Just breathe, niña, breathe.” The calm in the older woman’s voice contrasted sharply with the chaos Gloria had just witnessed below and could still hear from outside.

  Inez looked up at Gloria and smiled. “It’s okay. I’ve done this six times before.”

  Rigo’s voice came from the doorway. “Six times? I thought you only had five kids, Tía.”

  She smiled. “Five kids. Six hurricanes, nephew.” Stroking Tanna’s hand rhythmically, she continued. “Birth and hurricanes are a lot alike. They’re intense and sometimes unpredictable. But they only last for a few hours, and after it’s over, the sun comes out again.”

  Tanna moaned and rolled a bit from side to side.

  “But you’re so calm, Inez. You even took a nap! I couldn’t sleep if my life depended upon it.” Gloria wished she could have looked out a window, but everything was boarded up.

  “Go ahead. Hold my hand. It’s okay.” Inez rubbed Tanna’s back while the young woman grunted through a contraction, a sheen of perspiration bubbling up just below the line of thick, dark hair at the top of her forehead. “Well, it’s what Jesus did. It’s never a bad thing to follow his example.”

  “‘Put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the waters,’ hmm, Tía?” Rigo sang the line of the children’s song but stayed put in the doorway, clearly wanting to be near the light and the company, without coming too close to the action.

  “Rodrigo Vasquez.” Inez’s calm voice was replaced with a snap of reprimand for her nephew’s mocking tone. “One of these days, you’ll learn. Every Sunday morning I go to church, and there’s a reason why. I didn’t make it to this age all on my own. And neither will you.”

  Gloria would never admit to Rigo’s aunt—or her own family, for that matter—but lately, she found herself more aligned with doubt than the confident faith she saw mirrored around her. She’d known Inez for years. The older woman, as far as Gloria could tell, lived a fairly uneventful life. She always saw her at church and on the occasional trip to the grocery store, and she knew that Inez spent a lot of time with the ladies of the women’s Bible study group Gloria’s own mother attended. A lot of tamale making, knitting and chatting over slices of flan.

  If she lived Inez’s life, it would probably bore her to sleep. Even in the midst of a hurricane.

  But thankfully, a midwife’s life was far from dull. Babies were never predictable about when they were going to be born. Sometimes they decided to stay and bake for days after their due dates. Sometimes they decided to come in the middle of the night. Sometimes babies decided to come one right after the other and make their midwife sleep deprived.

  And sometimes, they decided to come in the middle of a natural disaster.

  “Rigo, would you mind stepping out for a minute? I need to check Tanna. I think we’re getting close.”

  She turned to her patient. “Unless there’s an emergency, Tanna, I’m going to follow your lead. You do what’s most comfortable for you and I’ll let nature take its course.” As she bent over and did a quick check of Tanna’s progress, Gloria laughed a little.

  “Hmm?” Tanna shifted her weight as Gloria stepped back from the bed.

  “I was just thinking,” Gloria said. “I’m perfectly comfortable letting Mother Nature take her course with your birth, but to the core of my being, I wish she’d quit taking her course with this storm outside. I just want it to be over. The good news is you’ve progressed more quickly than I expected you to, so Mother Nature will be through with you shortly, in all likelihood. You can push whenever you feel ready, Tanna. I won’t hold you back.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Tanna breathed low and slow through a contraction, then looked up when it passed. “I guess I don’t get my water birth, after all?”

  Tanna had wanted to use the deep-water birth tub at the
birthing center since her first appointment. “I’m afraid not in that way. We’re surrounded by a totally different type of water, but as for us, Inez filled the upstairs bathtub earlier today and it’s only for drinking and emergencies.”

  “Peace.” Inez wiped Tanna’s head with a wet washcloth. “Breathe deeply and think of peace.”

  The next contraction started. Tanna bore down, gripping Inez’s bony hand, but Rigo’s aunt never flinched. Gloria was amazed at her strength and her demeanor. She wondered if she could bring Inez to attend all her births.

  Tanna made instinctive reaching motions with her hand. The birthing waves were taking over, bringing her closer to motherhood.

  Rigo stood just outside the doorway, and Gloria called to him. “Rigo. Grab her hand. She needs something to push against.”

  The man, who’d stared down criminals in the line of fire and who’d already saved grown adults and children alike from the clutches of near drowning tonight, hesitated. In addition to being a certified peace officer, she knew he had to be a certified EMT for his job at the beach. Surely he’d had some training for this. Gloria looked up from where she’d been focusing, monitoring the baby’s progress. “Go on. She needs you. Just stand back by her head. You’re not going to see anything from there.”

  Gloria hastily threw a towel over Tanna’s knees and belly to preserve her modesty. Rigo stood by the headboard and looked toward the doorway, but reached out his hand and provided more than enough support to give Tanna the leverage she needed.

  She’d prayed for strength for everyone earlier tonight, and this was the second time she was seeing it in action. Tanna’s focus amazed Gloria, even as the world ran out of control and the wind battered the house, causing it to sway gently on the pilings. She’d attended more than a thousand births in her career, and thought she’d worked in every kind of condition possible—highly advanced labor-and-delivery suites, standing by in cesarian sections, working the past two years at an independent out-of-hospital birthing center at the edge of Provident Medical Center’s footprint. She’d even been present for a few planned home births.

  But until today, she’d never supervised a birth in a candlelit room with not even the most basic of equipment or running water—she’d never been crazy enough to rationally consider such a thing. Tanna, the young nineteen-year-old who, nine months ago, Gloria had initially judged as a good candidate to ask middelivery for a transfer to a hospital to get an epidural, was showing strength through adversity tonight.

  With one last forceful push and a punctuating explosion of breath, another refugee from the hurricane’s fury shot into the world. Gloria picked up another towel from her box of supplies with one hand as she held the little squealing baby with the other.

  It was a triumphant moment, made all the more incredible not just because of the amazing nature of birth, but because of how amazing it was to have this birth in the middle of this particular storm.

  The hurricane may have been merely named Hope, but as Gloria lifted the mewling baby and handed it to the euphoric, exhausted mother on the bed, she knew she was holding in her arms literal hope in the form of brand-new life.

  “Congratulations, Tanna. It’s a boy! And a strong one, too. Do you want to cut the cord?”

  Tanna shook her head, unable to tear her gaze from the tiny stranger that she already knew so well. “No. I couldn’t have done this without you and Rigo. I’d be alone in that awful apartment if you hadn’t come to check on me, and who knows what would have happened if Rigo wasn’t there to protect us.”

  Gloria met Rigo’s eyes and felt something chip at the heavy cement that had poured in her heart hours before when he walked back into her life. Tanna saw Rigo as a hero. And maybe she was right.

  She handed Rigo the scissors she’d found in a downstairs drawer upon their arrival. She’d sanitized them in some boiling water before they’d lost all the utilities. They were just common household scissors, but they’d have to do. She had one plastic cord clamp in her box of tools but couldn’t find another at the bottom of the box with the dim half-light. Instead, she tied a length of twine tightly, using it as a makeshift clamp. “Do you want to do the honors?”

  It felt so strange to be standing over a baby, sharing in a cord-cutting ceremony with Rigo. All those foolish teenage dreams and plans she’d once had for the future popped in her mind like kernels of corn.

  “Sure. Wow.” Rigo took the scissors, and with one steady press, snipped the baby’s last physical tie with Tanna. Rigo stared at the little infant as though he was seeing one for the first time. “I’ve never done that before.”

  “Not even with any of your training?” Gloria took the baby and towel-dried him. His hair stuck up in ten different directions.

  “No. I don’t think I’ve really done much past treating things like puncture wounds and doing CPR and chest compressions. That’s most of what you see on the street and on the beach. Not a lot of babies being born in the sand dunes.”

  He intently watched every move Gloria made. “What are you doing with that? That’s my sock.”

  His curiosity was so intense it made Gloria chuckle, a welcome feeling. This day needed some comic relief. It was now almost one in the morning. Today had been too long and too life-changing.

  “I don’t have a hat. An old tube sock seemed like the next best thing to keep his head warm. Is this one of your favorites?”

  Rigo shook his head. “Not anymore.”

  Inez slid off the bed and walked out to the hallway. “I’ll find something for her to eat in that box I packed. There’s some peanut butter and a bottle of coconut water. We need to keep her strength up and the coconut water is full of electrolytes.”

  Gloria finished bundling the baby tightly in a blanket. It seemed to have once had Winnie the Pooh scenes all over it, and had probably belonged to one of Inez’s children or grandchildren. Now it was soft and faded from wear and love. The baby settled and made a smacking sound.

  “Here, Rigo, hold him while I check Tanna quickly.” Rigo held his arms out. “Not like that. He won’t bite. He doesn’t have teeth. Haven’t you ever held a baby before?”

  “Well, no. Not really.” Rigo’s eyebrows raised slightly in a position that seemed to say, What did you expect? without uttering a single word.

  “Bend your arms. Here, like mine. You need to cradle him. He’s completely floppy. You have to support his head.”

  Gingerly, she laid the baby in Rigo’s arms. It felt strangely powerful.

  In just a few minutes, all the stages of labor were completely finished, and Gloria wanted to give Tanna the chance to rest and cuddle with her baby.

  Gloria tried to keep the visual of Rigo holding the baby from being burned in her mind. Tanna wasn’t the only one who needed rest. So did Gloria’s swirling mind.

  “Rigo, you can hand the little man back to his mama. Tanna, why don’t you start to try and feed him? I’m sure he’ll appreciate the comfort and it’s important to start a good nursing relationship early.”

  Inez came back in, peanut butter jar in one hand, a sleeve of crackers in the other and a bottle of coconut water tucked under an arm. This had undoubtedly been the most unconventional birth Gloria had ever attended, but she wasn’t sure she could have asked for a better crew to share it with.

  “I’ll help her with that, Gloria, while you clean up. I’ve got some experience with this.” Inez placed the food on the bedside table and got Tanna set up with pillows tucked securely behind her. “You can hand the baby to me, Rigo.”

  Slowly, Rigo moved toward his aunt.

  “Something wrong?” Gloria looked up and caught Inez studying her nephew’s face. It was as blank as the wall behind the bed.

  He continued to stare at the baby, almost tracing the little smacking lips with his gaze.

  “No,” he said quietly and f
licked a split-second glance at Gloria. “Not at all.” He laid the baby in Tanna’s open arms. She cuddled the little bundle tightly against her chest.

  Rigo backed up and headed toward the door, then turned back to the bed. “Tanna, do you have a name for him?”

  The baby squirmed, drinking in his mother’s scent.

  “No, not really.” She tore her gaze away from the tiny face in her arms for just a second. “Gloria, earlier when we were at your house, what did you say your baby’s name was?”

  Sadness pierced Gloria’s heart. She needed that strength she’d prayed for. And she needed it now.

  “Mateo,” she said, her tongue stumbling over every syllable. “His name was Mateo.”

  A smile crossed Tanna’s face. “I like it. Mateo Rodrigo, for you both.”

  White-hot shock pierced her heart. Tanna didn’t know their history. She just thought she was doing them a great honor.

  Gloria prayed for the second time today. For the second time in the past two years.

  Oh, please, God, don’t let me fall.

  Chapter Four

  As the immediacy of the birth wore off, Rigo had time to notice the demeanor of everyone around him. There wasn’t really much else to do besides sit and wait. The baby was peaceful. Tanna was euphoric, brushing the baby’s downy hair with the tips of her fingers, over and over again. Tía Inez was in her element, delivering advice and suggestions.

  Gloria seemed reflective, quietly tidying things up as best she could, keeping the makeshift birthing center comfortable by relighting the candles when they burned low and writing down details of the birth.

  As he’d watched Gloria at work earlier, he’d found himself unable to take his eyes off her. He’d pursued his career in law enforcement and rescue because he liked the thrill, the chase. The constant of never knowing what would come next—and the adrenaline buzz that came along with it.

  Gloria was different, though. She had directed Tanna’s birth without lights, without equipment, without conveniences, in a manner that connected strongly to birthing women throughout the ages before hospitals and delivery rooms. In spite of the uncertainty, he never saw fear when Gloria was in that room. She had to have been scared by the hurricane—he knew he was—but even so, he only saw the actions of a woman who was uniquely called to do that very career. Not because she chose it. Because it chose her.