Fairytale Lost

by Lori Hendricks

  The shorter of the two doctors kept looking over his shoulder at Emmalyn and frowning. Lukas was just about ready to demand that they tell them what was wrong with his daughter when Emmalyn screamed, not the scream of someone in pain but a scared and frustrated scream. The sound stunned everyone in the room, including the baby, who began to cry in earnest.

  Then, one of the machines began to beep angrily, followed by another. Emmalyn’s blood pressure was spiking. Lukas bent down and kissed his new wife on the forehead. It was hot yet clammy feeling. Lukas looked to the doctors hoping someone had an answer. One of the nurses came around to his side of the bed and tried to usher Lukas out of the room.

  “I’m not leaving my wife,” he protested.

  “Make sure they save the baby,” Emmalyn exhaled. She didn’t have much voice left and zero energy. “Whatever happens, make sure they save Gia.” The words ended on a moan and the sound of water splashing. She gripped his hand with a strength that surprised them both. Her eyes clouded over as wave after wave of pain tore through her. Her color drained.

  “Emmalyn, I need you.” He didn’t want to say it aloud, but he’d sacrifice just about anyone to keep Em by his side.

  “Swear it to me, Lukas. I need to know my girls will be okay, or all this will have been for nothing.”

  “All of what?” Lukas looked at Emmalyn as if she’d lost her mind. Of course he would save Emmalyn. He’d love his kids, but he needed Em as much as he needed air or water. She was the strong one, the responsible one. He couldn’t raise two little girls by himself.

  “Sir, we need to get your wife prepped for surgery. You need to leave so we can try to save her life.” The nurse forcefully pulled Lukas’s hand from Em’s deathgrip, pushing him toward the doors.

  “For a little thing she was very strong,” he thought somewhere in his mind. Then the nurse’s words sank in and he rounded on her, causing the her to pause for the briefest of moments before pushing him out the door completely.

  “Save her? What the fuck do you mean save her? Emmalyn!” As he stumbled out, he saw the puddle of blood on the floor beneath Emmalyn’s legs. Two security guards were waiting outside the room for him. They each grabbed an arm and pulled him away from his wife and daughters toward the waiting room where eight concerned family and friends waited. What was he going to say? His knees buckled, and nothing in him could stop the free fall.

  “Lukas, what’s wrong?” Delma was on him before he hit the ground. He was in shock.

  “Lukas, how is Emmy? Where are the babies?” This question came from Zavia.

  He looked up at Delma and Zavia, saw the joy and hope in their eyes. It broke him. “I don’t know,” he croaked out. He wasn’t able to get air in his lungs. A strong slap to the face brought him out of his misery, and his anger to the surface.

  “Damn it, Lukas, snap out of it. Where are Emmalyn and the babies?” Delma yelled.

  “I. Don’t. Know,” Lukas ground out between clenched teeth. He staggered to his feet, walked over to the row of chairs, and slumped down into the first one he came to. He leaned over in the seat, his head cradled in his hands. He didn’t have the strength to fight the tears. “She’s lost a lot of blood. She birthed one of the twins, but the other wasn’t coming. Ava. She named her Ava. She asked me to make sure they saved Gia. The nurse…the nurse said they have to get Emmy to the OR to try to save her.”

  Delma fainted. Brian and Isabel helped her up and over to a chair.

  “Save her? Save Emmalyn you mean?” Isabel asked, jaw trembling from fighting the urge to cry out.

  “That’s what they said,” Lukas replied. His chest ached as did his hand. He looked down and saw that his knuckles had swollen and were beginning to turn blue. Somewhere in his mind was a vague memory of Em squeezing his hand and snapping the bone.

  No one spoke for what seemed to be an eternity. Delma had snapped awake, but merely cried softly on Brian’s shoulder. What could any of them say? There were no words of comfort for any of them.

  A nurse came out after some time, holding a tiny pink bundle. “Mr. Upton? Would you like to hold your daughter?”

  Lukas couldn’t move. Neither could Delma. The nurse looked at him in understanding. Zavia walked over to the nurse and peeked into the bundle. She barely backed away before the sobs hit.

  “She looks just like Emmy,” was all she could get out before crying in earnest. She turned to her husband and buried her face against his shoulder. Robert held on to his wife as her grief washed over her.

  “Please ask someone to give Mr. Upton and Mrs. Upton’s mother an update,” Robert asked softly. “The wait is killing them.”

  The nurse nodded and stepped back into the area where the rooms were. She stopped at the door and turned back to Lukas. “Ava will be in the nursery when you’re ready, Mr. Upton.”

  No one asked about the second baby. They didn’t think they needed to.

  Another two hours passed before the short doctor, of the worried face and harried whispers, stepped into the waiting room. Lukas took one look at the man’s face and knew.

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Upton. We weren’t able to save your wife or your second daughter, Gia. We realized too late that Gia’s umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. She was stillborn when we removed her after performing the emergency C-section. At your wife’s insistence, we did attempt to save Gia.

  “Your wife had lost a lot of blood. It would appear that she had been bleeding for some time. Her body was very weak and couldn’t take the trauma. I take it she didn’t say anything to you about the trouble she’s been having?” He paused and looked around at the people in the room. “So much grief,” he thought.

  “No. She didn’t say a word,” Lukas whispered. His brain had stopped functioning. All he needed now was for his heart to stop beating. “I can’t understand it. People have babies everyday.”

  “I’m very sorry, sir. Your wife had gestational diabetes, which resulted in pre-eclampsia. At some point over the last few weeks, she developed eclampsia. The bleeding was a symptom of her elevated blood pressure. If she had checked herself into the hospital sooner, we could have possibly saved her and the second baby. Her doctor—“

  Lukas cut him off with a roar and a new bout of tears. “She told me she’d had her last doctor’s appointment two weeks ago, and now we were just waiting for the babies to come. I didnt know, didn’t question it.”

  The doctor sighed as he understood more about what happened. He hated this part of the job. “ I would bet your wife was told to have the babies earlier to reduce the strain on her body. Any doctor worth his degree would have recommended that.” He waited for Lukas to regain control of himself. The poor man was grief stricken and dumbfounded. He didn’t blame Lukas. Any man would have reacted the same to finding that his wife had sacrified herself to give the babies a better chance at survival. “Ava will be ready to be discharged in a couple of days. She’s basically a healthy baby girl, very lucky indeed. You will need to work with her on her breathing, and the nurses will explain exactly what needs to be done.”

  “Can I see her?” Lukas asked as the doctor turned to go back to the maternity ward.

  “Ava?”

  “No. Emmalyn. Can I see her?”

  The doctor nodded in understanding. “I’ll make the arrangements,” he replied.

  The doctor turned and walked away from the broken man and the people who’d loved the woman he’d spent the last several hours trying to save. He couldn’t understand why the woman hadn’t told anyone about how sick she was. It should have been enough to cause anyone concern. The situation quickly zipped out of his mind as another round of alarms went off, signaling a new emergency.

  *

  Lukas couldn’t look at the woman lying on the bed and equate her with the woman he’d married earlier that day. And he absolutely couldn’t look into the small crib that sat to the bed’s immediate right. He slipped quietly into the room and sat at the foot of the bed, the stark silence
of the room a testament to lack of life.

  “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, Emmy. You’re supposed to be here. We’re supposed to do this together. You promised we’d be a family, and now you’re gone. What am I going to do?” he asked the silence in desperation. “I can’t take care of Ava without you.”

  His grief overcame him with the force of a tractor trailer. Lukas folded over and cried until there wasn’t a tear left in his body. His head ached terribly, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave the room.

  Jaxon, Pop, and Delma watched quietly from outside the room. Each was lost in thought, though all of those thoughts centered around Lukas, Emmalyn, and Ava.

  Jaxon wanted to go to his brother and offer support, though he had no idea what to say. It wasn’t going to be okay. Nothing was going to be all right about this situation. He turned and walked back to the waiting room, unable to deal with the pain that was storming in that hospital room.

  Delma had stopped to check on Ava on the way to say goodbye to her daughter. The baby looked just like Emmalyn, same dark hair, same perfect brown skin, same wise, knowing eyes. Delma’s chest felt like she’d been kicked. She wanted to help Lukas, but the weight of her own grief was draining her. She turned to leave as well, not able to face her daughter’s body, nor that of her dead granddaughter. Before she walked away, she turned to Pop.

  With malice and hatred vibrating in her voice she said, “If you say a single thing against my daughter to that boy in there or to my granddaughter, you won’t live to regret the choice. Count on that.”

  *

  Pop entered the room, intent on nothing but ushering his son to the nursery. He couldn’t stop himself from creeping deeper into the room and peering in at Gia, the second twin. She looked so beautiful and peaceful lying there. Emmalyn’s face was pale and gaunt, likely from the loss of blood. He quickly turned to Lukas, who’d risen from his seat and was prepared to fight.

  “Going to tell me that you told me so,” Lukas challenged.

  “No, son. I was going to take you to visit your daughter. She needs you.” Pop took a step back, frightened by the violence and grief in his son’s eyes.

  Lukas’s shoulders slumped, all the fight gone from him. “I…I can’t, not yet.” Lukas unwillingly looked down at Em’s body. His shoulders shook, but he didn’t make a sound.

  Pop reached up and pulled Lukas’s face toward him. “Yes, you can. And you have to. Ava is completely innocent in all this, and she needs the love of her father. The bond may not happen right away, but a day will come when Ava will be everything in the world to you. And it will be enough. I swear it.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I had that moment with you and your brother after your mother killed herself. I refused to accept it because I missed that woman so much it burned in my skin. In that refusal, I turned into a hard bitter old man, who wouldn’t know good luck or fortune if it bit me on the nose. I can’t let that happen to you. You’re right—Emmalyn was not like your mother. Em would never have left you, no matter what you’d done.

  “I know it won’t happen now, but you’ll be given a chance to open your heart to that little girl, and when it happens, you have to take it, for both of your sakes.”

  “She’s gone, Pop. She’s gone.”

  “I know. And you’re going to grieve more than you think you’re capable of. But right now, you need to go hold your daughter.”

  Lukas nodded and followed his father out of the room, unable to turn for one last look at the only light in his life.

  Epilogue

  Little Ava had her mother’s eyes. Two years later and Lukas still had the hardest time looking into his baby girl’s chocolate-brown eyes. He and Emmalyn were supposed to have the happy ending, but life had a funny way of getting in the way of the fairy tale. He missed his Emmy endlessly. After her death, Lukas honestly believed he would never recover. He didn’t want to eat, sleep, or even to live without Emmy on this earth.

  The pain was more than he thought he’d ever be able to live through despite putting one foot in front of the other each day. Yet every night he saw Emmalyn’s face that day in the hospital, begging him to save the baby, even if it meant losing her. Every morning, he’d lie in bed with his eyes closed for an extra second and pray that it was all a mistake and Emmy would be there holding Ava and Gia. Every morning he turned over, her side of the bed was empty, and the grieving process would begin again.

  Because he was so lost in his grief, Lukas’s motherin-law had moved back east to look after Ava for a while. However, the grief Delma felt seeing her lost daughter in her granddaughter’s eyes became too much. She railed at him to get it together and care for his child, the child his wife—her daughter—had sacrificed her life for.

  Then his father and brother stepped in for several months to help. Jaxon put off his next assignment to stay with his brother and try to help Lukas with his grief. Eventually, Jaxon talked Lukas into going back to Charleston to clean out the apartment he and Emmalyn had shared. At their apartment, he went through every piece of paper Emmalyn had saved.

  Right after the funeral, he’d reached out to Em’s doctors to get the truth of what she’d been hiding from him. The pregnancy had been difficult from the start, and it had been recommended that Em terminate the pregnancy or at the very least stop working and focus on her health. The doctor went through it all—the gestational diabetes, the endless fatigue, her inability to eat and gain weight, the pre-eclampsia. She told him that at thirty weeks she had recommended a C-section to Emmalyn, and to let the girls try to survive outside the womb. She’d told Emmalyn that her body couldn’t survive another ten weeks of carrying the twins.

  She’d known. She’d known all along, and she never said anything to him. It was his fault for not being there at the appointments. Lukas could see Em wasn’t well, but he too easily wrote it off as normal pregnancy woes. But he couldn’t quite understand why she would risk all that she was, her life, to carry those babies. He would have given her anything in the world she ever wanted. It wasn’t like he couldn’t afford it, but she didn’t trust him enough to ask for help. He’d live with that guilt for the rest of his life.

  While packing, he found the box Emmy had with every letter he’d written her, every trinket he’d ever bought her, even every ticket stub for every movie they’d seen together. It was all he could do to close the box and put it back in the closet. He was tired of crying and couldn’t take the memories those items evoked. He would ask Zavia and Isabel to hold on to those things until Ava was ready to know about her parents’ courtship.

  In time, the physical pain in his chest and his broken hand faded. The pain of the memories would take a lot longer to fade, but he was determined that Ava would know what an amazing woman her mother was. Lukas would eventually look back at the man he was and appreciate the man he had become. He knew things had happened as they were meant to, but he couldn’t help but be sad about the family that could have been and the life he’d always dreamed of with the woman he loved by his side.

  *

  Then the day his father had sworn would come had finally come. Lukas finally looked at Ava and understood what Emmy had fought for, this beautiful little girl with a quick laugh and endless energy, just like her mother. And he knew his love for his lost love would be supplemented by the boundless love he had for his daughter. He watched Ava playing in her room. She smiled up at him brightly, and for the first time in a long time, he found his smile.

  His daughter’s shining smile was a constant reminder to Lukas of his Emmy, and he couldn’t stop himself from falling a little more in love with Ava every day.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank everyone who helped me write and publish my first romance novel. It was a long road and I am ever so appreciative of the support and advice I have received along the way.

  In specific, I want to thank Madhuri Blaylock for beta reading and giving me pointers on how to spice my story up. Yo
u are an amazing writer and an awesome person, and you don’t know how much I appreciate your help. If you haven’t read her books, you simply must check them out!

  About the Author

  Lori Hendricks is an IT project manager by day and novelist by night. A longtime lover of words, she reads science fiction, fantasy and paranormal romance novels regularly (when there is time). When not reading, writing or working, Lori can most often be found watching football or basketball with her adorable cat, Mona.

  For More information on Lori or her works:

  @LAH_Author

  lahendricksSFFWriter

  www.queencitynovels.com