The Nine-Month Marriage

by Christine Rimmer

  The snow kept up all the rest of that day, so everyone stayed inside, drinking hot cider, playing board games and visiting. Tess laid out a lunch of chili and corn bread that Nate said was the best he’d ever tasted. For dinner, Tess served them a savory venison stew.

  In spite of the wonderful food, Abby couldn’t drum up much of an appetite. Edna chided her for not eating. Tess asked if maybe she’d like soup or something lighter.

  “Will you two stop fussing over me?” Abby complained. She felt just a little agitated, uncomfortable in her own skin.

  Edna clucked her tongue and tucked the afghan around Abby’s legs again. Tess went off to get more tea.

  Again, Abby went to bed early. She was sure that by tomorrow, with another good night’s rest, she would feel just fine.

  But instead, she awoke in the middle of the night with an aching belly and a pounding head.

  Abby groaned and pushed the covers down. It was too hot in the bed. And her skin felt so strange, all itchy and prickly.

  She turned to her other side, moaning a little in the process, hoping the change in position might soothe her headache and make her stomach stop hurting.

  “Abby, what is it?” Cash asked out of the darkness beside her.

  She knew at that moment that she would throw up. She shoved back the covers the rest of the way and wind-milled her feet, groping her way out of the bed.

  “Abby?”

  Her feet found the soft bedside rug. With an agonized moan, she pushed herself to a standing position and headed for the bathroom, which was two doors away.

  “Abby…”

  She heard him jump from the bed, but she didn’t dare turn to him or open her mouth to answer. Pressing her lips together, willing the nausea down, she shuffled along, one hand under her stomach for support. As soon as she made it into the hall, she used her other hand to drag the wall. That kept her from falling down—and helped her to find the way through the dark. The pain in her stomach doubled her over, though her distended belly didn’t give her much room to bend.

  At last, she came to the door of the bathroom. The white porcelain of the commode glowed at her fuzzily through the dark. She shuffled toward it.

  “Abby?”

  She waved a hand behind her, the best she could do for him right then.

  “Let me help you.” And his strong arms were there, supporting her, guiding her down over the basin.

  What little she’d eaten came up. Cash held her shoulders, kept her hair out of the way.

  When it was over, she didn’t feel much better.

  Cash found a washcloth on the edge of the sink. He ran water on it, wrung it out and then stroked it gently over her face. It felt cool. “Abby, my God,” he whispered as he rubbed the cool cloth on her too-hot skin. “What’s going on? You’re burning up.”

  She leaned back against the side of the bathtub, panting, her stomach still aching and her head pounding evilly. “Something’s wrong. I…” She closed her eyes, moaned, clutched her aching belly.

  “Abby?”

  She forced her eyes open, wanting to see him, to look at his beloved face in the soft glow from the night-light next to the sink counter. He knelt before her, holding that soothing washcloth. She could make out the shape of him. But he didn’t look right. He looked…

  Her belly cramped again. “Cash. I…my stomach. Hurts so bad.”

  “Are you in labor?”

  “No. Not like that. It’s really my stomach, not…the baby. And my head. My head aches like the devil. My whole body feels awful, all itchy and…bad….”

  “All right. I’ll call emergency. Get you some help.” He started to stand.

  She reached out and grabbed his arm, thinking of the storm outside, wondering where that help would come from. “Cash. There’s more.”

  “God, Abby. What?”

  “Everything’s blurry. I…can’t see very well.”

  “Cash? Abby?”

  It was Tess’s voice, coming from the doorway that led out to the hall.

  “What’s happened?”

  She must have flicked on the light, because all of a sudden, the room seemed to explode into brightness.

  “Turn it off!” Abby cried in a torn whisper that echoed in her head like a shout. “It hurts! Turn it off now!”

  The room plunged back into blessed darkness once more.

  Cash said, “Tess. Help us. She’s vomiting. Her vision’s blurry.”

  “And my head. It hurts so much….”

  “I’ll call emergency,” Tess said.

  Abby heard the soft thuds of her slippered feet running down the hall. She held on to Cash. “What about the storm? We’ll never get out.”

  “Shh.” He rocked her, held her so close, against his heart. “You’ll be all right. I swear to you. You will be fine.”

  She pushed at him. Even the comfort he offered caused her pain. “Oh, Cash. The baby. The poor baby….”

  “Shh. Quiet. Breathe. Relax.”

  She tried to listen to him, but she was so terrified. “Dr. McClary said I had to watch my blood pressure. He talked about toxemia. About how I should be careful.”

  “Toxemia? You never said anything about that.”

  “I know, I know. There was so much going on. And my blood pressure wasn’t that high. I was sure it was nothing. Oh, Cash, what if—”

  “Shh. I mean it. Breathe slowly. And relax.”

  It seemed like an eternity before Tess came back. But at last, she appeared again, a fuzzy shape in the doorway.

  “They said the storm’s broken up enough that they can send out the helicopter. They said to make her comfortable until they can get here.”

  “How long?” Cash demanded.

  “Within an hour, they said.”

  Abby closed her eyes, against her own blurry sight, against the pain inside her head, against her whole body, which seemed to imprison her, itching and aching and hot. To her, an hour sounded like forever. She pressed her hand against her belly, where her innocent baby slept.

  “Hold on,” she whispered fervently. “Just hold on. For an hour….”

  Chapter Twelve

  Cash and Tess brought Abby downstairs to the great room to wait for help. They made her as comfortable as possible on the big sofa, which they opened up to a bed.

  Nate and Zach appeared just as Tess had finished putting on fresh sheets and Cash was helping Abby to lie down. As yet, Edna and Jobeth remained in their rooms. Cash hoped to keep it that way, though he knew that was probably impossible.

  “What’s going on?” Zach asked quietly.

  Tess calmly explained what had happened.

  They all tried to keep their voices down, not only in the hope that Edna and Jobeth wouldn’t wake, but also because loud noises hurt Abby’s ears.

  “They’re ringing,” Abby fretted. “My ears are ringing….”

  Only one lamp burned in the room, turned down very low, since bright light caused her real pain. Tess tried to get her to drink a little warm broth, but Abby swore she would throw up again if she tried to get anything down.

  A few minutes after they got her settled on the sofa bed, she had some kind of seizure. Her body flailed and twitched. It took all four of them to keep her from hurting herself. Finally, after what seemed a grim eternity to Cash, the seizure passed.

  Soon after that, Abby got the dry heaves. When that was over, she slumped to the pillows, weak and feverish, hardly able to open her eyes.

  Cash bathed her forehead with a cool cloth. Her lashes fluttered open. She forced a wan smile. “Cash?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Kinda messed up, didn’t I?”

  “Shh. No, you didn’t. You didn’t mess up. Not one damn bit.”

  He was the one who’d messed up. From the first. He’d taken her innocence and put a baby inside her. And then he’d insisted that she go back to college. He’d seen himself as so damn noble, doing that. Making sure she got on with her education, in spite of what he’d d
one to her. Not even thinking that there was only so much one smart, scrappy woman could take. He’d ordered her to push herself. And so she had pushed herself.

  And now, she would die for it. The way his mother had died all those years ago having his baby sister, who had died, as well.

  “Cash?”

  He looked down at her, hating himself, wishing only that there were some way he could switch places with her.

  She whispered, “You’re…good husband. Want you to know…love you….”

  “God, Abby….”

  “Just tell me…do you love me, too?”

  It wasn’t a big enough word for what he felt. Not by a long shot. Still, if she wanted to hear it, he would give it to her. “I do, Abby. I love you….” He couldn’t be sure if she heard him. Her eyelids fluttered shut as he started to say it. She didn’t open them again.

  Tess put her hand on his shoulder. “You should get dressed. So you’ll be ready when they come.”

  “Watch her.”

  “I will.”

  He flew up the stairs, yanked off the pajama bottoms he slept in and pulled on jeans, socks, boots and a sweater. Then he ran back down.

  “Is she…?”

  Tess put a finger to her lips. “She’s resting.”

  He sat down on the edge of the mattress. Tess handed him the cloth she’d just dipped in cool water. He bathed his wife’s hot forehead—and listened so hard for the sound of a helicopter outside that his ears hurt.

  Twenty minutes later, they heard the beating of the blades as the copter set down out in the yard. Abby went into convulsions again just as Tess was letting the two EMTs in the front door.

  Cash, Zach and the EMTs surrounded her. “Hold her gently, very gently,” one of the EMTs said evenly as he pressed an oxygen mask over her face. “Just keep her from hurting herself. That’s what we want to do now.”

  The other EMT expertly drew fluid from a vial into a hypodermic syringe. “Hold her arm,” he said to Zach. “Hold it absolutely still.”

  When the seizure finally passed, Abby lay unconscious. They took her blood pressure. If it had been high before, now it was dangerously low.

  “We need to get her to the hospital in Billings right away,” one of the EMTs said. “It’s a tertiary care center. They have the facilities there to deal with this.”

  Cash stared at Abby, who lay there so frighteningly still. He turned to the man who’d just spoken. “I’m going with you.”

  “You’re the husband?”

  “Yeah. I’m the husband.”

  The man studied Cash, then shrugged. “Normally, we don’t allow it. But you’d be hours getting there through all the snow. You can ride up front with the pilot.”

  “Fine. Thanks,” Cash said, then couldn’t help adding, “she’s out cold. Is she…okay?”

  The second EMT, who’d just come in with the stretcher, muttered something about a coma.

  Cash turned on him, grabbed him by his down jacket. The rolled-up stretcher clattered to the floor. “What the hell did you say?”

  The first man shouted, “Stop!”

  Cash froze, then let go of the second man’s jacket.

  The first man said, “Look. Now’s not the time for explanations. Or for you to be losing it. It’s our job to get this woman and her baby to the help she needs. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah,” Cash said, breathing deep. “Sorry.”

  “We can’t take you if you’ll be a problem.”

  “I won’t. I swear it.”

  Edna chose that moment to appear from upstairs. “What is going on? Abby? Oh, no. Not my little girl…” She started for Abby.

  Tess went right to her, embracing her—and, at the same time, keeping her from getting in the way. “It’s all right. The helicopter’s here. They’re taking her to the hospital now.”

  “But what’s happened?”

  Tess led Edna to a chair. “Here. Sit down. I’ll explain everything we know so far.”

  Cash realized he’d forgotten his wallet. Grateful that Tess was dealing with Edna, he ran up the stairs. He grabbed his wallet and a jacket. When he got back down to the main floor, they’d already taken Abby out to the helicopter.

  “We’ll get there as fast as we can,” Nate promised.

  “Fine,” Cash said on his way out the door. “Look out for Edna.”

  “You know we will.”

  As it turned out, Cash found the helicopter flight the most bearable part of what followed. They were moving, at least, through the darkness, above the white, cold land. Moving fast toward the hospital where Abby could get help.

  Things got unbearable pretty quickly once they got there. After filling out a ream of paperwork, Cash had to do what he hated doing: he waited. He drank machine coffee and sat. When he couldn’t stand sitting, he paced. He realized later that the doctors had worked like demons and that he really hadn’t waited that long at all—it only seemed like it.

  Finally, a doctor came out and explained to him about Abby’s condition: eclampsia, it was called.

  “It’s what we once called pregnancy-induced toxemia,” the doctor said. “And nowadays, it’s rare. Especially in a case like your wife’s, where there’s been adequate prenatal care, no indications of trouble during the pregnancy and no family history of high blood pressure. I will say that it occurs more often in young, first-time mothers, like your wife. And as has happened with your wife, it tends to strike very suddenly, in the last trimester.”

  “How is she?”

  “At this point, she remains unconscious, but stable.”

  “The baby?”

  “The baby seems fine.”

  “Seems?”

  “We’ve conducted an ultrasound. And a stress test. We have no indications of fetal distress.”

  “And?”

  “I understand that the pregnancy is thirty-six weeks along.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How confident are you of that figure?”

  “Very confident.”

  “All right, then. At thirty-six weeks, the lungs are mature enough that the child should have no trouble surviving outside the womb. As you may have deduced, the only way to help your wife is to deliver the baby.”

  “So deliver it. Deliver it now.”

  “We intend to. However, your wife’s body shows no signs of labor. Dilation and effacement are minimal. And we feel that to induce labor with the mother unconscious is not advisable.”

  Cash remembered a word from those classes he’d gone to with Abby. “A C-section?”

  “Yes. It’s the wisest course in this case. And cesarean procedures are quite safe nowadays. An incision will be made in the lower abdomen, through to the uterus.”

  Cash thought of them cutting into Abby and felt sick to his stomach. The doctor was still talking.

  “The baby will be removed, and the incision closed up. Recovery takes a little longer than from a vaginal delivery, but for most women who have a cesarean, vaginal delivery of future babies is possible.”

  Cash didn’t give a damn about future deliveries. As far as he was concerned, there wouldn’t be any of those. “Fine. Do what you have to do.”

  “Good enough.”

  “When?”

  “Immediately. We’ll have some papers for you to sign and then we’ll go ahead.”

  “Get the papers.”

  The doctor turned.

  “Wait a minute.”

  The doctor stopped, turned back. “Yes?”

  “She’s in a…coma, isn’t she?”

  The doctor hesitated, then admitted, “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

  “You said she’d get better as soon as the baby’s born. That means she’ll wake up, right?”

  “Yes. She should.”

  “She should?”

  “In most cases—”

  “Just tell me. Will she wake up?”

  The doctor sighed. “The prognosis is good.”

  “That means yes.”

 
“Yes. With reservations.”

  “What reservations?”

  “Mr. Bravo, there are no guarantees in a situation like this one.”

  At first, they tried to tell him he couldn’t be there for the operation. But he remembered what he’d learned in those childbirth classes. Fathers were often present during cesarean births.

  “But the mother is not usually unconscious,” the doctor argued.

  “If she wakes up, she’ll want me there.”

  “Mr. Bravo, she won’t wake up. She’ll be under a general anesthetic.”

  “A general anesthetic? But I thought—”

  The doctor sighed. “We do often use spinal blocks when performing C-sections. But not in the case of eclampsia. Spinal blocks can lower blood pressure and your wife’s blood pressure is too low already.”

  “Fine. Whatever. I want to be there. I will be there. I’ll stay out of the way and I’ll keep myself in hand.”

  In the end, they allowed it.

  The surgery took place in a rectangular room, with the operating table in the center and bright lights above it. Cash saw a long table against one wall. And counters and sinks lining another wall. There was more, of course, much more: cabinets filled with equipment, machines and trays of instruments that Cash couldn’t name.

  Abby lay unmoving on the center table, draped in hospital green, hooked up to a number of machines that the surgery nurse explained would monitor her vital signs through the procedure. Several drapes hung from tracks on the ceiling, surrounding Abby’s abdomen. There was a screen on wheels, which they placed at Abby’s shoulder level. Cash stared at that screen, wondering what the hell it was for. And then he understood: as long as he didn’t go around it, he wouldn’t have to see what they were doing to her.

  That was just fine with him. He’d stick with the top half of her. He’d promised to hold it together, and he would. But he could use all the help he could get.

  He asked to be able to hold her hand. They said it would be okay. So he clutched her limp fingers in his rubber-gloved fist and prayed silently that she would be all right.