CHAPTER TWELVE
LISA AWOKE with a feeling of dread and she reached for Marcus automatically, thinking even through her groggy confusion that whatever was wrong was manageable with Marcus beside her. Her hand bumped against the cold rail on the side of her hospital bed, instead. And it all flooded back to her. Her baby! Oh, God, was she…
Fumbling frantically, she found the call button for the nurse among the covers on the side of her bed, depressing the lever immediately and continuously. A young nurse she barely knew flew into the room, her short dark hair framing a no-nonsense face.
“Yes, Dr. Cartwright? Do you need help?”
“My baby. How’s my baby?” Lisa asked, clutching her bedcovers.
“She’s alive, Doctor.”
Lisa released the breath she’d been holding. “She made it through the night. That’s a good sign,” she said almost to herself, while visions of underdeveloped lungs and kidneys filled her mind. There was so much that could be wrong, that could take her baby from her at any moment. Her chest tightened.
The nurse smiled shyly, her features softening into prettiness. “You’ve got a fighter there, Doctor,” she said.
Lisa nodded, trying to smile. Trying to be strong.
“Your husband brought some clothes for you. I can help you get ready to go if you like. Dr. Crutchfield will be here to release you shortly.” The nurse picked up an overnight bag from the floor at the foot of her bed.
Lisa heard one thing through her panic-induced haze. “Marcus is here?”
The nurse nodded. “Dr. Montague’s been here, too. Your husband just left to get some coffee, at her instigation, and I’m willing to bet he’ll wish he hadn’t. He really wanted to be here with you when you woke up. I wish my husband were half that besotted with me,” she confided.
Lisa smiled, barely hearing the nurse’s small talk. Marcus was here. She just had to hold on a few more minutes and he’d be with her. And then she’d face whatever news was waiting down the hall in the nursery. She’d find out what kind of battle her tiny baby was fighting.
There was a knock on the open door, and Lisa turned her head to see her father standing there, holding the biggest teddy bear she’d ever seen.
“Hi, honey,” he said, his eyes only for her.
“Let me know when you’re ready to get dressed,” the nurse said softly, and slipped out the door as Lisa opened her arms to her dad.
“Oh, Daddy…”
Dropping the teddy bear on the end of the bed, Oliver pulled her into his arms and held her tightly, wordlessly, telling her with his touch what no words could convey. They’d both lost so much. They needed Lisa’s baby to fill the voids left in their lives.
“Have you seen her?” Lisa asked when Oliver finally pulled away to sit on the side of the bed.
He nodded. “She’s the prettiest one in there,” he said. But his eyes, moist with unshed tears, frightened her.
“She’s going to make it, Dad,” Lisa promised. She’d been too young to save his Sara, but she’d save her own. Somehow.
Oliver nodded and patted her arm. “I know, honey. Now, did I hear the nurse say you could get dressed?”
Lisa nodded. “They’re letting me out of here. It’s supposed to be better, you know, under the circumstances, for me to be at home as soon as possible.”
“Then I’ll leave you for now, sweetie. Call me when you get home, okay?”
Lisa nodded, and he bent to kiss her head. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Dad.”
Lisa called for the nurse again the minute Oliver left. She couldn’t stand the silence in her room that allowed her medical knowledge to torture her. A body that small fighting against the world of disease into which it had been born. Why, even a simple cold could—
“You ready to get dressed?” The nurse was back. Thank heaven.
At Lisa’s nod, the young nurse helped Lisa lift herself from the bed.
“You okay here, or would you like me stay?” the nurse asked as she let go of Lisa in the bathroom.
Lisa swayed on her feet for a moment and then took a step, moving cautiously as she felt the pull from her stitches. “I’m fine,” she said as soon as she knew it was true.
“Feel free to take a shower, then, and call if you need me.” The nurse closed the door behind her when she left.
Lisa was just soaping down in the shower when she heard the door open again.
“Lis? You okay?”
Marcus. “Yes.” Now that you’re here. “Would you mind waiting, though, just in case?”
“I’m right here, sweetheart. How do you feel?”
“Physically a lot better than I thought I would,” Lisa called back. She finished rinsing and shut off the water. Marcus handed her a towel as she pulled open the shower curtain.
His blue eyes warmed her instantly. “She’s alive, Lis.”
“I know.” She wanted to ask him if he knew any more than that, but she couldn’t. Not now. Not yet.
Debbie Crutchfield came in as Lisa was pulling on the loose denim jumper Marcus had brought her, and after a quick look at Lisa’s stitches, announced that Lisa could go home whenever she was ready.
“I’ve ordered an injection to dry up your milk,” she said, as she was signing off Lisa’s chart.
“No!” Sara was going to need that milk.
“It’s going to be quite a while before your baby’s even able to suck, Lisa, if ever. You’ll be miserable.” “I’ll pump six times a day if I have to. My milk will be better for her than anything else once she’s ready for oral consumption.”
Marcus walked over, putting his arm around Lisa’s shoulders. “Will it cause Lisa any harm to do as she wishes?” he asked.
Debbie shrugged. “No harm. Just a lot of discomfort.”
“I have a feeling,” Marcus said, “that the discomfort you refer to will be nothing compared to what it would do to Lisa to miss this chance.”
Lisa smiled up at him. Her knight in shining armor. She could only imagine what this was costing him, being a part and yet wanting no part of the tragic events of the past hours. But he was here for her. Just as he said he’d be. How was she ever going to find the strength to send him away?
Just as Debbie was leaving, Randal Cunningham arrived. The silver-haired doctor gave Lisa a report too detailed for her mother’s heart to handle. Not her baby. How could he just sit there and discuss her little Sara’s chances, or rather, lack of them, like that? Like she was just another case.
Except that, even as her soul protested, Lisa’s doctor’s mind understood that Randal was handling things in the only way he could—impartially, professionally. He couldn’t allow himself to become emotionally involved with his patients. It could mean the difference between life and death, the making of a tough decision that could save a life—or lose one.
And so Lisa listened to the things she needed to know, her mind already jumping ahead to probable crises and ways to fight them.
“Because of the risk of infection, it’s best that only the few personnel taking care of her be near her right now, but I’m not going to tell you you can’t go in there, Lisa. I will ask, however, that it not be for more than an hour twice a day.”
Lisa nodded, realizing the necessity for Randal’s request. But one hour twice a day! It seemed like a prison sentence.
Please, dear God, don’t let it be a lifetime one.
Marcus helped Lisa gather her things together as soon as Randal was gone, putting Oliver’s teddy bear in her lap as she got settled into the wheelchair the nurse had left outside the door. He began to push her slowly down the hall.
“I need you to take me to her, Marcus,” she said, afraid he’d freeze on her again. But her need to be with her baby was too great.
“I know. That’s where we’re headed.”
He wheeled her down to the nursery window and then turned the corner, entering the nursery viewing room. He let go of her chair, and Lisa panicked, afraid he was going to
leave her. She needed to draw on his strength to help her through whatever she might discover when she looked through that window.
“Don’t go.” She was breaking his rules.
“I’m right here.” But he was looking at her, not the window.
Lisa held his gaze for another second and then slowly turned. Her eyes found her daughter instantly, knowing just which part of the nursery housed the neonatal babies. Cartwright Girl, she saw. Sara. Her name is Sara.
They were going to have to change that card.
And then she brought her gaze to the minuscule body lying so quietly in the cellophane-wrapped warming bed.
Forgetting everything, even, in that moment, her husband standing behind her, Lisa rose from her chair, motioned for a nurse to let her in and went through the door into the overly warm nursery. She saw nothing but the baby in front of her. Her baby. Her Sara.
Mindless of her own discomfort, she scrubbed at the sink by the baby’s crib and tied a mask over her face, her eyes still on her daughter. She had a daughter. She was finally a mother.
With tears in her eyes, gloves on her hands and more than nine hours after giving birth to her, Lisa finally touched her baby. She couldn’t hold her, couldn’t take her away from the healing warmth of her crib, but she touched her.
“Hello, my precious,” she whispered through her tears, running one finger lightly along the baby’s side.
Sara was lying on her back, completely still, breathing only with the help of the tube taped to her mouth.
Careful of the various wires and vials attached to the baby’s body, Lisa lay her hand against Sara’s belly, needing the contact, needing her daughter to feel her touch, despite the gloves she wore and the plastic covering the baby. Her baby. Her Sara. Lisa had never felt such an overwhelming rush of love in her life.
“Mama’s here, my Sara,” she said, her voice stronger. “You be a good little girl and do just what the doctor tells you, you hear?”
Lisa stood beside the crib for the entire hour she’d been allotted, rejecting the rocker a nurse brought over to her. She wanted to be as close to Sara as she could possibly get.
And throughout the hour, one eye on the monitors attached to Sara, she talked to the baby, bonding with her new daughter, not in the usual way, but bonding with her just the same.
The nurse told her when her hour was up, and Lisa nodded, running her hand along Sara’s side one more time. “You’re going to be just fine, Sara. Just fine. Mama’s going to be watching over you every second now, so don’t you worry.”
“She’s a strong one, Doctor. If ever a preemie had a chance, it’s this one,” the nurse said, smiling down at Sara.
“She hasn’t opened her eyes, has she?” Lisa asked, still watching her daughter.
She knew the answer even before she heard it. “No. It could take weeks.”
Lisa nodded. “I know,” she said. But they’d be blue when she did. They were meant to be blue. Like Marcus’s. Except that he couldn’t allow himself to claim them.
“Her pulse and blood pressure are fluctuating,” Lisa said, glancing again at one of the monitors attached to her little darling.
The nurse nodded. “It’s something we expect at this stage.”
Glancing at the monitors, the nurse took a small blood-pressure cuff from a tray beside the crib and lifted the plastic around the baby enough to fit the oneinch-long cuff around the baby’s arm. Sara’s arm was barely as thick as the nurse’s middle finger.
Lisa couldn’t bear to watch anymore.
“I love you, Sara,” she said one last time, bending to brush her masked face against the tip of the cap covering the baby’s head. Sara didn’t respond.
Stopping only long enough to ask that the baby’s nameplate be changed, Lisa stripped off her sanitary garb and went out to find Marcus, more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.
She practically fell into the wheelchair he had waiting for her, only then becoming aware of how much she ached, thankful she didn’t have to make it down to the car on her own. She wasn’t sure she had the strength even to make it out to the hallway. Nor the will. She’d just left her heart with a tiny bit of humanity who couldn’t so much as open her eyes. Or cry when she was hurt.
Marcus didn’t once look toward the nursery as he helped her into her coat and wheeled her out, and all during the drive home, Lisa waited for him to say something, anything, about the child they were leaving behind.
She waited in vain.
MARCUS DROVE Lisa back to the hospital that evening for her second hour with her baby. He hated the toll this premature birth and resulting vigil was taking on Lisa, the panic that came to her eyes every time the telephone rang. He hated, too, his helplessness to make things better.
This was supposed to have been a happy time for her. One of the happiest times of her life. Instead, she’d cried when Hannah had met her at the door with an uncharacteristic hug. And she’d cried over the cards and flowers and gifts that had been arriving steadily all day—from her colleagues, from his, and from the matriarchs of the families on New Haven’s social register.
She’d cried when she’d talked to Beth on the phone. And she’d cried when he’d carried her by the door to the nursery they’d decorated, too. Her heart was breaking, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
He waited outside the hospital nursery while Lisa visited the baby, though a well-meaning nurse had invited him in, too, with the provision that he scrub and dress as Lisa had in the sterile garb. He saw the look of hope in Lisa’s eyes, but she didn’t ask him to come. He wanted to be there for her, to fulfill her wishes, but he just couldn’t cross that final line. He’d be there for her, but outside the nursery.
The entire time Lisa was in with her baby, he watched the child, as he had the night before, thinking that her color looked a little better, though she was still awfully red. Most of the tubes and wires were just as they’d been that morning. Marcus didn’t know if that was good news or bad. Still, he prayed for the child. Prayed she had what it took to win with the impossible hand she’d been dealt.
He noticed, too, that her nameplate had been changed. Sara Barbara Cartwright. She still had his name.
OLIVER PICKED BETH UP from work the next evening. After spending most of the afternoon with Lisa, he needed a means of forgetfulness. They drove straight to his house and she was barely in his door before he took her in his arms. Not with passion, that would come later, but with warmth, seeking and giving comfort,
“I’ve needed this since the hospital called yesterday,” he said.
“Me, too. I’ll bet you barely made it home in time to get Marcus’s call. We’re going to have to tell them about us, you know,” Beth said.
“Yes. But not yet.” Oliver was afraid to trust the happiness that had begun to bloom in him again. It seemed so delicate, so fragile.
“Not until we know more about Sara’s condition?”
“Right.”
“You think Lisa’s going to take our relationship hard?”
“Maybe. What do you think?” Oliver had been wanting to ask her that since the first time he’d kissed her. Beth was Lisa’s best friend. In some ways she knew his daughter better than he did.
“I think she’s going to be shocked,” Beth said. “And I’m sure she doesn’t need to hear about it now.”
“Then we’ll have to be careful for a while.”
“Right.” She kissed him gently, almost innocently.
“I’m a grandpa.”
She smiled at him softly. “I know. She’s beautiful.”
“She is, isn’t she? Prettiest one there. And the strongest, too. She’ll be making more noise than all the others combined before we know it.”
Beth pulled out of his arms, turning her back as she moved to the front window and looked out. “Her chances aren’t very good, Oliver. You realize that, don’t you?”
He stood his ground. “I hear what they’re saying.”
�
��This is one time I wish I didn’t know even half of what I learned in medical school.” She shivered. “The things that could go wrong…I can’t even imagine the hell Lisa must be putting herself through.”
Oliver hated to think of the anguish his own little girl must be suffering. He’d watched her torture herself all afternoon. It was just too much. First she’d lost her baby sister. And then her mother.
They weren’t going to lose Sara Barbara, too. They just weren’t.
SARA’S HEART CONTINUED to beat. As the hours turned slowly into days, the baby lay in her warming crib, relying on a respirator for her every breath, but still alive. Her oxygen level fluctuated, her body temperature fluctuated, and she slept constantly. But she was alive.
A week after the baby’s birth, Lisa’s doctor ordered Lisa back to work. Part-time only, and nothing but office calls, but back to work. Debbie was worried about Lisa’s mental state and said that working would not only give Lisa something to do other than anticipate what could go wrong with Sara, it would also bring her closer to Sara for more hours during the day.
Marcus agreed with Debbie’s reasoning, knowing that being near her baby would bring its own measure of comfort to his wife.
He returned to work himself, though only part-time, as well. He wasn’t going to leave Lisa home alone any more than he had to. Nor was he going to have her sitting in the nursery viewing room for hours every day letting her fears eat her alive. Instead, he bought her a ship-to-shore radio and took her to the Sara. He picked up several romantic comedies at the video store and sat through them with her, although he had to take cold showers after every one of them. He missed making love to his wife.
And daily, he told her how strong she was, how capable, hoping that if she ever needed to rely on that strength, she’d know it was there.
He also held her when the anguish was too much for her and she could no longer hold back her sobs.
As the days passed, one after another, he found himself thinking about the tiny little girl lying across town in her funny little bed. He worried about her. Almost constantly. And almost every evening, on his way home from work, he stopped by the hospital and stood at the nursery window watching Lisa’s baby wage her battle for life.
Another Man's Child Page 17
