The Midwife's Special Delivery

by Carol Marinelli

  And whether he understood or not, Ally told him, held the little boy close and told him that his mum was doing well and that just as soon as she could she’d come back to him. Tears streaming down her face, Ally wished she could share the good news with the other person who really needed to hear it. Only it wasn’t her place to tell him anything any more.

  Rory had made that choice when he’d walked out on her for the second time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ALLY didn’t want to be at work—her maudlin mood not quite fitting for Maternity—but she did her absolute best, smiling and chatting with a new admission, checking the expectant mother’s obs and going through her birthing plan, trying hard to portray all the confidence she’d had only yesterday, to have as much faith in Mother Nature as she had before and be as positive of a good outcome as she had been before it had all gone so tragically wrong for Fiona.

  It was a relief when her shift ended.

  A relief to pull off her name tag and step out into the late afternoon sun, a relief to finally be able to stop smiling.

  But as much as she’d willed her shift to end, Ally didn’t particularly want to go home either, didn’t want to face the silence of an empty house with no Sheba staggering down the hall to greet her, no Rory to moan at about the mess he’d left in the kitchen, just a pile of jumbled thoughts that Ally didn’t have the mental energy to examine.

  Instead of going home, Ally drove to the shopping centre. She toyed with the idea of ringing Becky and Donna to meet for coffee, while knowing she couldn’t—the information Win had directed her to, the news she had supposedly stumbled upon, not really hers to share.

  When even fifteen minutes of trying on shoes in her favourite store failed to cheer her up, Ally gave in, buying instead the biggest bar of chocolate she could find and giving herself a good talking-to as she walked along.

  One more night to wallow in self-pity, Ally decided.

  One more night of feeling sorry for herself and that would be it!

  She’d already wasted three years on Rory and she certainly wasn’t about to go there again—Rory Donovan didn’t deserve it.

  Her glimmer of optimism lasted all the way to the pet shop. Staring in the window, a ghost of a smile played on her lips as she watched three tiny puppies nuzzling together, each one vying for the warmest spot—each one missing its mother.

  God, why did everything have to make her cry?

  Why wasn’t she standing here and thinking about baby Anderson or Sheba now?

  Why did every road lead to Rory?

  The house, as Ally predicted, was gloomily quiet, no tail thumping on the wicker basket, not even that appalling, musty, old-dog smell to chase away by opening windows and lighting some incense. Placing her chocolate in the fridge, Ally showered and changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and after pulling on a pair of flat sandals she filled a water bottle and headed for the beach, for the first time in living memory not even bothering with mascara, hoping a brisk walk and another good talking-to might clear her head a bit. She only made it a few steps, remembering in an instant the last time she’d been here with poor old Sheba, who had tried bravely to pretend she had been enjoying herself for the sake of her mistress. Ally gave up trying to be brave. Sitting down on the sand, she pushed Rory and Fiona and baby Anderson aside and cried for her old friend, the one soul she’d always confided in. The one soul who really understood.]

  ‘Ally?’ Rory’s tentative voice was neither expected nor welcome, and she pointedly didn’t look up, just sniffed loudly, squinting into the low sun as Rory sat down on the beach beside her.

  ‘I’m not crying about you,’ she said finally, still refusing to look at him. ‘In case that’s what you think. I’m crying about Sheba.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘After yesterday and everything, I never really got the chance to mourn her.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain your tears to me,’ Rory said, and Ally nodded.

  ‘You’re right—I don’t.’

  She wouldn’t have looked at him—in fact, Ally was determined not to look at him. Pride, coupled with naked eyelashes, was enough incentive to stare fixedly ahead. But the sound of whimpering noises coming from Rory’s direction got the better of her and, turning around briefly, Ally stared at a pink nose jutting out of a box Rory was attempting to keep closed on his knee.

  ‘I don’t want a puppy, Rory,’ Ally snapped. ‘If I want another dog then I’ll go out and buy one for myself when I’m good and ready.’

  ‘It might not be for you,’ Rory said, pushing the lid down on the box. ‘I might have got it for me.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Ally bristled. ‘Dogs take commitment, Rory, which is something you appear a little short of! You can’t just up and go when you feel like it when you’ve got a dog. You can’t just decide you want to hop on a plane or stay out for a couple of nights just because you feel like it.’ Her voice was rising a bit now. ‘You can’t just walk away because all of a sudden you’ve changed your mind!’

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ Rory said, trying to catch her eye, but Ally wouldn’t even give him that, ignoring the puppy’s whimpers and jerking her head back towards the bay. ‘But I’ve decided that I’m ready for that sort of commitment now. Mr Davies rang to ask when I’d be back and I told him tomorrow.’

  ‘He told you the good news about Fiona?’

  ‘He did,’ Rory said. ‘But even before I’d heard that, I’d made up my mind that I was coming back to work. I completely overreacted yesterday. I came to say thank you to you for preventing me making a big mistake—I could have really messed up my job.’

  ‘That’s what you came here to say?’ Ally asked, the stupid jolt of hope that had unwittingly flared when he’d joined her on the beach seeping out of her like a leaky balloon—as if Rory was going to come bearing gifts, as if Rory Donovan was about to apologize to a woman for breaking her heart.

  Again!

  ‘That, and sorry.’ It was Rory avoiding looking at her now. ‘For walking out on you.’

  ‘Which time?’ Ally asked ungraciously.

  ‘Both times,’ Rory answered. ‘Ally, I haven’t been completely open with you.’

  ‘You haven’t been at all open with me,’ Ally corrected, and Rory’s breath whistled through his clenched teeth.

  ‘You’re not making this very easy, Ally.’

  ‘Why should I make it easy?’ Hurt eyes met his. ‘Why should I make this easy for you when it’s been hell for me?’

  ‘I said those things because I was upset yesterday. I know we were all upset, but it hit me especially hard.’ Rory took a deep breath and Ally held hers, knowing what was coming next and willing herself to hold it together, to not give in to the tears that were threatening. ‘My mother died during childbirth, Ally.’

  She didn’t say that she already knew, didn’t say anything at all for a moment, just bit hard on her lip as Rory tentatively continued.

  ‘She had a heart attack during labour. Apparently she had undiagnosed mitral stenosis. It didn’t show up until the post-mortem.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ally gulped, and it would have been the easiest thing to fall into his arms, to cry with him for all he had lost and all he had been through, but the path of least resistance wasn’t what was needed here. If they were ever to get ahead, they had to face the obstacles square on, stand up to the enemy and defeat it.

  Ally, do you understand now why—?’

  ‘No.’ She stopped him right there, had to say what she had to say and now was the time to do it. ‘No, I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re not even trying to,’ Rory pointed out, but Ally wasn’t about to be deflected that easily.

  ‘What do you want, Rory? For me to say, “Oh, that explains it, then” or, “That makes it OK”? Well, it doesn’t make it OK. If anything, it makes it worse.’

  ‘Worse?’ Rory frowned back at her.

  ‘Worse.’ Ally nodded. ‘Yes, there was a reason for you to be upset yest
erday, yes, there was a reason for you to lose it and threaten to give up your job, but the fact of the matter is you never shared that reason with me. In all the years we’ve known each other you’ve held back what’s probably the biggest piece of you, leaving me to join up the numbers.’

  ‘I know.’ Rory stood up. ‘I thought if I came here and explained, maybe you’d understand, maybe we could scrap what I said yesterday and start again.’

  Mascara or no mascara, Ally blinked up at him. ‘Till the next time?’

  ‘What next time?’ Rory frowned.

  ‘The next time something goes wrong in your life, the next time something happens and you decide to walk instead of talk. If yesterday was an isolated incident, then maybe I could accept it, Rory, but it was just a repeat of what happened three years ago. What was your excuse then, Rory?’

  ‘I’ve already told you.’

  His back was to the low sun and Ally had to put up her hand to shield her eyes, his face unreadable in the shadow.

  ‘When?’Ally snapped.

  ‘Just then.’

  She frowned up at him, trying to recall the conversation, shaking her head at what must have been so fleeting it had been missed.

  ‘I don’t ever want to have a baby.’ Rory’s voice was unwavering. ‘I’m positive about that.’

  ‘That’s your prerogative, Rory,’Ally said. ‘But what on earth has that got to do with what happened three years ago?’

  ‘Because I felt the same then as I do now. Look at you, Ally, you’re barely five foot two and look at me.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re tiny. If you had my child…’

  ‘Rory.’ Blinking in the harsh sunlight, Ally frowned back at him. ‘I wanted an honest relationship with you and we barely made it through the first night. I wasn’t thinking about what type of babies we’d be making.’

  ‘I was.’

  The directness of his statement shook her to the very core—forced Ally to examine her own honesty in all of this, because she had been thinking about the type of babies they’d make—oh, not all of the time, hardly at all really, but every now and then she’d let her imagination wander to that delicious, elusive place and picture herself pregnant by Rory.

  ‘Rory, I…’ The words strangled in her throat, her strong, brave stance crumbling as the truth was realised, as finally he revealed to her his biggest fear. Sitting down again beside her, he took a moment before going on, a moment both of them needed, because Ally’s mind seemed to have frozen, her mind stalling as she tried to fathom what he was telling her.

  ‘It was always relatively easy to walk away from a relationship. As soon as marriage or babies were even hinted at, it was my cue to end it. Sometimes I even managed to convince myself that a life-long relationship wasn’t what I wanted…’

  ‘Sometimes?’

  ‘Whenever I wasn’t thinking about you.’ Tears were swimming in his eyes as he held her gaze. ‘Mother Earth with attitude!’ He gave a regretful smile. ‘Ally, within a few months of moving in with you I knew how easy it would be to get serious about you. I broke up with Gloria because I’d met someone else that I like—you.’

  ‘You broke up with Gloria because of me?’

  ‘Because of you.’ Rory nodded.

  ‘And you didn’t think to tell me?’ She was angry all over again, angry at him for holding back on her, angry at the years he’d wasted. ‘You’re telling me that you decided we weren’t going to have a future together because my pelvis wasn’t wide enough for you, because of my lack of childbearing hips…’ She stopped talking as Rory laughed, a tear-filled laugh but a laugh just the same, and Ally managed a weak smile, too.

  ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that but, yep, that about sums it up.’

  ‘I could always have a Caesarean.’ It was an attempt at a feeble joke but after what had happened yesterday it all came out wrong. And the sort of laugh he’d managed died then, and so did Ally’s smile.

  ‘I couldn’t take that chance with you, Ally, couldn’t bear if what happened to my mother…’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’Ally whispered, and Rory nodded.

  ‘I know that,’ Rory said. ‘I know that! The sensible, medical part of me knows that, but at the end of the day…’ His hand gripped hers. ‘I wasn’t exactly small. I heard my dad talking to my grandmother once, saying that…’

  And despite her vow that she wouldn’t cry in front of him about it, despite the anger for all the years he’d made them waste, Ally cried then, cried for his pain, cried for a little boy who had grown up with guilt etched on his heart, without a mum to tell him that it was never, nor could it ever have been, his fault.

  ‘Rory, it happened. And like the same way it happened to Fiona, no one could have predicted it and no one could have prevented it. I’ve spent years working in midwifery, safe in my little cocoon, utterly convinced that there was way too much intervention, that birthing was a completely natural process that women had been doing since the beginning of time…’ Ally gulped as the firm rules she’d practised her craft by blurred a little. ‘Women have been dying since the beginning of time, too—and even though, with modern medicine, with proper antenatal care and monitoring, yes, the risks are minuscule, there are still no written guarantees. I see that now. But you knew the risks all along, you’ve lived your life knowing them. I just don’t understand why you went into obstetrics, knowing what you know, knowing how devastated you’d be if it happened.’

  ‘Because I thought I could somehow prevent it.’ Rory swallowed. ‘You’re right, though. When I first went into medicine, obstetrics was the last field I thought I’d be specialising in, but when I did my rotation I found out I really loved it, and I guess a part of me thought that in some way I could make a difference somehow…’

  ‘Honour your mum?’ Ally suggested softly.

  ‘Sounds like a bit of an ego trip, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Ally smiled. ‘I’ve seen you work, remember. I know how much you care about your patients. Yes, we may clash every now and then and, yes, I might think you’re a bit heavy-handed with the monitors and pain control, but I can truthfully say that if I was in labour, you’re the doctor I’d want to see.’

  ‘You won’t be in labour, though.’ Rory visibly winced. ‘I couldn’t bear it, Ally. Couldn’t live for nine months dreading the outcome. You want babies, your own babies, you know that you do…’

  ‘Rory, I want you.’ Ally’s voice was unwavering. ‘I’ve always wanted you, baby or no baby. If you don’t want children, I can accept that.’

  ‘But can you?’ Rory shook his head. ‘It’s easy to say that now, but in a few years you might change your mind.’

  ‘I might,’ Ally said, looking at this big proud man who was so scared inside, and finally, after the longest time, she understood where he was coming from. ‘And then I’ll remind myself how I felt today, how I felt for the three years you were gone, and then I’ll know that, baby or no baby, I made the right choice. Anyway…’ Ally sniffed, tears streaming down her face, but she forced a smile. ‘We could keep dogs! We could be one of those strange couples who put bows in their dogs’ hair and dress them in little coats, tell all our friends how clever they are…’

  ‘It wouldn’t be enough.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Ally smiled out at the ocean. ‘The only thing I do know is I’m not waiting another three years for you to make up your mind, Rory. If you turn your back on us again, then so will I. I’ve spent the last three years waiting for your call and I have no intention of hitting thirty and finding myself still staring at the phone. Here we are sitting talking about babies and we haven’t even managed to sleep in the same bed two nights in a row.’

  ‘Are you propositioning me?’ Rory grinned and it was the nicest smile she’d ever seen, a flash of the old Rory who could always at a thousand paces melt her heart. ‘Because, if you are…’ His voice trailed off, and Ally realised that she’d lost her audience now. The pu
ppy, thoroughly fed up with his box, was yapping loudly, and Rory was lifting the lid and peering inside.

  ‘It’s for me really, isn’t it?’ Ally asked hopefully, but her expectant smile turned to one of horror as Rory lifted the lid and pulled the tiny grey and white pup out. Ally stared at the pink beady eyes that matched the snuffling nose, curls already coiling in its coat, and the biggest paws she’d ever seen on a dog.

  ‘Rory, have you any idea what you’ve bought?’

  ‘A dog.’ Rory grinned again, putting the little guy down and hovering over him like a proud parent as he bounded around in the sand, squatting and yapping at Ally, pink eyes pleading for her to love him.

  ‘It’s an old English sheepdog, Rory,’ Ally gasped. ‘It’s going to weigh a ton. It will eat you out of house and home…’

  ‘I can’t actually keep pets at the apartments.’ Rory gave an apologetic grimace ‘You’re right—I did buy it for you.’

  ‘Rory, this dog’s going to be huge!’Ally exclaimed, pushing him away as Rory held him up to her face. ‘No, I don’t want to hold him, because if I do I’ll get attached and then I won’t be able to let him go. Just get rid of him, Rory!’

  ‘The guy at the store said that, despite their size, they’re very affectionate,’ Rory said, and the double meaning wasn’t lost on Ally. ‘They’re devoted, in fact, and, according to the shopkeeper, once they accept who’s the boss they’re apparently very easy to train. He did say that they get lonely, though—they love to have a mate. We could have two—they could have matching bows!’

  ‘We?’ Ally checked.

  ‘We.’ Rory nodded. ‘If you’re sure you want him.’

  ‘I do want him,’ Ally sobbed, and she didn’t need to be strong any more because Rory was holding her, the puppy squirming between them as Rory kissed her hair, her eyes, her lips, and together they made up their minds, in unison they said the words that both wanted to hear…