With Child

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “Oh.” The hand still clasped in his relaxed. “You’ll have to ask the nurse where to wait…”

  “No.” He met her eyes. “I mean, I’m staying right here. You’re not doing this alone.”

  Mindy stared at him. “You mean that?” she whispered.

  “You thought I was just going to lounge out there somewhere reading a good book while you went through labor alone?”

  “I…”

  He didn’t let her finish. “You need a labor coach. I’m it.”

  Her eyes filled with fat tears that immediately spilled over. “Oh, Quinn.”

  “Hey.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a change on the monitor. “Here comes another one.”

  He helped her breathe through it, then said, “Roll onto your side.”

  “What?” She started to roll toward him, but he shook his head and pushed her the other way. He untied the neck of her hospital gown and began to gently knead her shoulders. Mindy gave a throaty moan.

  Her muscles were taut under his hands, and he guessed fear was part of it. Showtime had arrived with a bang. She’d probably been worrying about whether she had a ten-pound baby in there, too, and how the hell she was going to get it out.

  He was probing tense muscles beneath her shoulder blades when she stiffened. He kept rubbing gently as the contraction crested and then ebbed. Without a word, he deepened the massage, moved down to the small of her back.

  The world seemed to narrow to the two of them, to the monitor and the nurse who checked on Mindy every little while, to the shrinking minutes between contractions and their murmured conversation.

  “You’ll call the Howies? And my mom?”

  “The minute we know whether you have a boy or girl.”

  “I should have chosen a name, and I haven’t. Except…if it’s a boy, I thought maybe Dean.”

  Normally he wasn’t a fan of juniors. But in this case… “Yeah. That’d be nice.”

  “But if it’s a girl… Oh!”

  “Breathe,” he reminded her, when a small sob escaped her. “That’s it, that’s it.”

  He was exhausted. He’d had no idea how unrelenting this process was once it began. Nature could be ruthless. And Mindy’s labor was progressing fast, from what he’d learned in the Lamaze class. What if she had a contraction every five minutes for forty hours?

  The doctor arrived somewhere in there and kicked him out while she did an exam. “Six centimeters dilated,” she announced, when he returned. “We’re well on our way.”

  “You don’t think you should do a C-section?”

  She was kind enough to do no more than give him a pat on the arm. “Mindy is doing just fine. Don’t worry.”

  “Ohhh!” Mindy wailed and he rushed to her side.

  Framing her face with his hands, he made her look at him and talked her through this one, the most intense yet.

  The contractions came faster and faster, until they were right on top of each other, one barely easing before the next roared in its wake. Her eyes never left his; she gripped his hand so hard he lost all feeling in it. The doctor coaxed Mindy to put her feet into the stirrups and draped a white cover over her knees.

  “Try not to push yet,” she cautioned, when sinews stood out in Mindy’s neck and her back arched with a powerful wave of contraction.

  And finally she said, “Oh, yes! I see the top of the head. Now, as you reach the top of the contraction, push! Yes, like that. Push!”

  The effort was enormous, primal. An agonized, guttural cry came from Mindy’s throat as her body arched from the narrow bed.

  She collapsed briefly, then did it again, and again, the doctor singing encouragement, Quinn gripping her hand and watching something amazing.

  Finally, Mindy cried out in triumph and the doctor crowed, “Yes! Here she is!”

  “She?” Quinn croaked.

  “She?” Mindy whispered.

  “You have a little girl.” Dr. Gibbs lifted a scrawny, red, mucus- and blood-covered creature that let out a squall and flapped arms and legs as Quinn gaped. “Let us clean her up, and she’ll be happier with her mommy.”

  The nurse accepted the newborn from the doctor, who encouraged Mindy to push again. A few minutes later, the nurse brought a small, white-wrapped bundle to the bed and gently laid it—her—in the crook of Mindy’s arm. The face was red and puckered and ugly as sin—and yet Quinn might as well have been reeling from the slam of a bullet, so wrenching was the pain under his breastbone, an onslaught of love for a baby that wasn’t his but felt like his.

  Damn it, she wasn’t ugly, she was beautiful—tiny, perfect features, a miniature rosebud of a mouth, perplexed blue eyes and a fuzz of moonlight-pale hair that had a hint of red in it.

  “She’s a strawberry blonde,” Mindy whispered in wonder. She looked up at him, her eyes awash in tears, her smile tremulous. “Isn’t she gorgeous, Quinn?”

  “Yeah,” he heard himself say, in a voice that wasn’t his. “As pretty as her mommy.”

  In his dumbfounded state, Mindy had never looked prettier. Her face glowed with joy and a love so gentle and profound, it deepened the ache in Quinn’s chest.

  “Oh, sweetie, are you hungry?” As if it were natural, she pulled the neck of the gown down and he realized she was going to expose her breast.

  Quinn shot to his feet. “I’ll go make those calls.”

  “Oh, yes!” That glowing smile rewarded him. “Thank you, Quinn. You’ll come right back?”

  So naturally, she was tugging that gown from her shoulder to free her breast.

  He bolted.

  In a central waiting area, he had to sink to a chair and lower his head to keep it from spinning. What had happened to him? Why did he feel this powerful bond to a woman and child who weren’t his?

  It was just the moment. The experience. It had to be, he thought desperately. It couldn’t be anything more lasting, more threatening to the even tenor of his life.

  He couldn’t let it be.

  Eventually Quinn pulled himself together enough to go to the bank of pay phones. He’d been carrying the two numbers in his wallet for the past couple weeks.

  He called Mindy’s mother first.

  A man answered, asked who he was. A moment later, Mrs. Walker came on. “You’re that friend she’s been staying with?”

  What woman didn’t know who her daughter lived with?

  “Yes, Brendan Quinn,” he repeated. “Mrs. Walker, Mindy asked me to call you. She’s had her baby.”

  He heard a squeal.

  “Is it a boy? A girl?”

  “A girl. She’s cute. Her hair looks…” What was it Mindy had called the color? “Strawberry blonde. And her eyes are blue. I guess all babies have blue eyes, don’t they?” Actually, he had no idea. “But she looks like hers really are.”

  “Oh, my goodness.” Her mother sounded genuinely staggered.

  Man, did he know the feeling.

  She wrote down the name of the hospital. Quinn couldn’t tell her how long Mindy would be staying. He promised to get in touch once he knew more.

  Then he called the Howies.

  Nancy was wonder-struck as well. “A little girl!”

  He described her again.

  “Well, Dean was a redhead,” Nancy said practically. “Oh! Has Mindy named her yet?”

  “No, during labor she said she hadn’t thought of a name if she was a girl yet. If the baby had been a boy, she was going to name him Dean.”

  “You know, Dean’s mother’s name was Jessamine. Isn’t that pretty? Do you remember how much he talked about her?”

  She was always going to come for him. He didn’t know what was holding her up, but even after his faith had eroded inside, he became enraged when anyone suggested that she might be dead or just plain not interested in returning for the kid she’d discarded. Not that anyone put it so bluntly, but Dean had known what they were saying. Quinn had envied him the ability to love and trust someone so unshakably, even if that person didn’t—or
couldn’t—live up to the trust.

  “Jessamine.” He sounded out the name. “I’d forgotten her name. I’ll mention it to Mindy.”

  “Oh, she may want to name the baby after her own mother or grandmother. Don’t put pressure on her.”

  “No. I won’t.” He shifted, resting a shoulder against the wall. “Listen, why don’t you and George plan to come over next week some day? I’ve talked Mindy into staying with me for a while, at least. Once she’s got the hang of this motherhood thing, I know she’d love to have you visit.”

  They promised they would, and he made one last call, this time to Ellis Carter.

  “You sound beat,” his partner sympathized. “Hell, I remember what it was like. Did I ever tell you about the time…”

  “Yeah, you did,” Quinn interrupted. Carter loved to tell the story about his wife’s first labor, which had—or so Carter liked to say—gone on forever. She’d been dilated three centimeters, had a further hour of vicious labor pains only to be told she was now dilated only two centimeters. According to Carter, she’d risen from the delivery table like a Valkyrie and gone for the nurse-practitioner’s throat. He’d had to bodily hold her back.

  “A girl, huh?”

  “Yeah. Dean has a baby daughter.”

  “Wow.” Carter cleared his throat. “Damn.”

  “You’ll let everyone know?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “I won’t be in today.”

  “You must need to hit the sack.”

  Quinn guessed he did. Right now he was still too wired. Too shaken. But he knew that when weariness hit, it would be hard. One minute he’d be fine, the next he’d feel as if he’d walked into a wall. That was how it worked.

  He went back to the room and poked his head in warily. Mindy had restored her gown to its place, he saw with relief. He wasn’t ready yet to face the fact that she’d be nursing regularly, that women were prone these days to doing it anywhere. That eventually, he’d probably see her breast before the baby’s mouth latched on.

  “She’s asleep,” Mindy whispered.

  His heart did another tumble when he saw her face, frowning in sleep. She made a snuffly sound and burrowed against her mommy’s breast.

  “Isn’t she amazing?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, she is.” He pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed, his gaze captured by that funny red face.

  “Did you call everyone?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Your mom sounded blown away. I think I got her up. I’m guessing she’ll be tearing in the door here any minute.”

  “Really?” Mindy looked vulnerable. As if she didn’t want to hope her mother cared, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “She was excited. Nancy was, too. She and George are hoping to come over to see the baby once you’re ready.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Nancy had a thought for a name, too. Did Dean ever talk about his mother?”

  Mindy nodded. “He thought she must be dead. He said he knew she’d have come back for him otherwise.”

  “Yeah, he was always so sure she’d be showing up any day. We’d make plans, and he’d say, ‘Except, if my mom comes, I might not be here.’” Quinn shook his head, remembering. “Just a few years ago, I offered to search for her. He blew his top. Finally he admitted that he’d rather imagine her giving him up because she knew she was dying of cancer and didn’t want him to watch than find out she’d been raped and murdered in some alley, or become a junkie.”

  “How sad!”

  “He really believed in her. He wanted to keep believing.” Weird how Quinn found he could understand Dean feeling that way better now than he’d been able to when Dean was alive. “Anyway, Nancy reminded me that her name was Jessamine. She thought it was so pretty.”

  “Jessamine.” Mindy looked down at her tiny daughter. Her voice had gone soft again. “Dean would love that, wouldn’t he?”

  “He would, but if you don’t like the name…”

  “It’s beautiful. Just like her. Jessamine.” When Mindy lifted her head, her eyes sparkled with tears. “Thank you, Quinn.”

  Alarmed, he said, “Thank Nancy.”

  “No, I didn’t mean for the name. Well, for that, but mostly for everything else. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “You’re strong,” he said, and meant it. “You’d have done fine.”

  She gave a funny laugh. “Did that choke you?”

  He grinned, a little ruefully. “Nah. It just came right out.”

  Face sobering, Mindy said, “I’m not so sure I would have done fine. This time, I really, really needed help.”

  “You know, being here for this…” He moved his shoulders, uncomfortable with expressing emotions but feeling compelled. “Today. I wouldn’t trade it.”

  Gaze on her sleeping daughter, Mindy’s smile went back to glowing. “I was scared, but you were right. It was all worth it.”

  The nurse popped in to say that the doctor had decided to keep Mindy overnight because of her condition, even though her blood pressure was good. Mindy was whisked to a room and the nurse took tiny Jessamine off to the nursery so that her mom could get some sleep.

  Dr. Gibbs, looking in on Mindy, scrutinized Quinn. “You look like you need some, too. Go home. Come back when you can stand without swaying.”

  A minute later, Quinn stood outside the entrance, wondering where he’d left the car. Across the parking lot, Mindy’s mother, trailed by some guy, hurried toward the hospital entrance. Too tired to make the effort to intercept her, Quinn turned vaguely in the direction from which he thought he’d come that morning.

  His feet stopped when they found the car. He got in and drove home in a semiconscious state. He kept hearing Mindy’s guttural cry, seeing the exultation on her face, the tiny flapping arms of the being who had emerged from her body.

  And Mindy’s wondering, loving smile. Had Dean’s mother looked at him like that when he’d been born?

  Quinn’s thoughts took an inevitable, sideways jump. Had his own mother ever looked at him like that? Had she wanted a baby at all? He could close his eyes sometimes and remember being held and swung into the air and rocked. Or perhaps the fleeting images weren’t memories at all, but dreams. Childish fantasies, cooked up when he hid in the back of the closet in the dark, filthy apartment, because he’d thought he heard footsteps stop outside the door, the knob rattle. Mommy, where are you?

  But from what he remembered more clearly, she had tried. So maybe, when he was younger and her addiction less fierce, she’d been the loving mother from those whispered memories.

  For some reason, Mindy’s surprise that he hadn’t wanted a picture of his own mother popped into his mind. Her face had become increasingly hazy in his memory. Maybe, if he actually found a photo of her when she was young and still hopeful, he’d remember more of the good times, before her addiction had become more powerful than any love she felt for him. Finding out what high school she went to wouldn’t be hard.

  He drove the car into the garage at home, right next to Dean’s shiny red Camaro, turned off the engine and sat unmoving, unable to summon the will to make himself get out and go into the house.

  Tomorrow morning, he’d set up the bassinet Mindy had ordered online. On the way to the hospital, he’d pick up some other things—diapers, maybe a couple of those tiny sleepers that didn’t look like they’d fit a doll. He’d ask a clerk what Jessamine would need. He didn’t think Mindy had bought much yet.

  Tomorrow morning, he’d be bringing mother and child home. A month ago, he hadn’t known where Mindy was. Hadn’t known she was pregnant. Now, he couldn’t imagine not having witnessed the birth of Dean’s daughter, couldn’t imagine going back to his lonely life.

  But he’d have to. He had no right to want more, to ask for more. And no reason to think Mindy would give it.

  Finally, moving stiffly, feeling as if he’d had the crap beaten out of him, Quinn shut the garage door, patted the fender of Dean’s car and m
ade it to his bedroom, where he fell face down on the bed into a sleep filled with dreams and confusion.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MINDY CALLED QUINN on his cell phone the next morning and said, “I haven’t bought a car seat yet! The hospital won’t let me take Jessamine without one. I hate to ask, but…”

  “I just bought one,” he said. “Set up the bassinet this morning, too.”

  Relief washed over her. “Oh, thank goodness! I suddenly had this image of me trying to wrench Jessamine from somebody’s arms.”

  “I’d arrest ’em if they tried to stop you.”

  Her heart gave one of those funny little hops that he seemed to provoke so often these days. Who’d have thought grim Det. Quinn could be so sweet?

  When he picked her and Jessamine up, she discovered he’d bought the Rolls Royce of car seats, a convertible one with parts that could be added on and removed to see a baby through kindergarten and the booster-seat stage. Right now, it sat facing backward and had a simple harness to buckle Jessie in.

  In the car, Mindy said, “The hospital sent me with a couple of diapers, but I suppose…”

  “I took care of that, too.” He started forward with as much care as if he were transporting someone who was badly injured. “I bought a few other things, too, that I thought you might need. I asked for help.”

  Who had he asked? She pictured him in the baby aisle at the grocery store, staring baffled at the rows of diapers of different brands, some for girls, some for boys, in half a dozen different sizes. He must have looked cute stopping some woman with her cart and asking her to tell him what a newborn would need.

  Mindy wondered what else he’d bought. Bottles and nipples? Pacifiers? Strained peas Jessie wouldn’t need for six or eight months?

  Smiling, she vowed not to tell him if he’d bought useless things. She just hoped the diapers weren’t toddler pull-ons.

  At home he let her lift Jessamine out of the car seat and then escorted them in. She stopped in the doorway to her bedroom and gaped. “Quinn!”

  “Did I go overboard?”

  Several downy baby blankets were draped over the side of the bassinet. A mobile with bright-colored faces and shapes and even a mirror dangled above it. On the bed were more diapers than any baby would use in weeks and a couple of bags from Nordstrom.