33 The Return of Bowie Bravo

by Christine Rimmer

  “Right here.”

  She cast a quick glance at the kitchen clock. It was ten after ten. “Watch the clock. The second hand. Starting now. Time this contraction…”

  “Gotcha.”

  Glory started screaming. Bowie moved in close again. He held her up and he watched the clock. She heard herself swearing. Really bad words. Terrible words. It didn’t make the pain any less, but she swore anyway.

  When it faded, at last, she asked him, “Well?”

  “Fifty-four seconds.”

  “Great,” she said, for lack of any other reasonable response. She noted the time. “There’s a pencil and paper in that little desk on the other side of the table. And a Timex watch with a second hand. Get them now.” He didn’t say a word. Just went over there and got what she’d asked for. She instructed, “Write down the time that contraction started and how long it lasted.”

  “Got it.” He wrote on the paper.

  “Do that every time I have one. Can you handle that?”

  “Will do.” He put on the watch and stuck the paper and pencil in a back pocket. “How about a cell phone? Your mom got one? We could try it. Or maybe Angie or Brett has one?”

  She shook her head. “My mom never bothered to get one. Angie has one, but they still don’t work here in the Flat. The canyon walls block the signal. You have to go up to the heliport to get any bars.”

  “Is there someone else we should call?”

  She thought of her three sisters who still lived in town: Tris, Clarice and Dani. She loved them all dearly, but she didn’t see how having them there was going to help her much. She wanted Angie. And Brett. And failing them, her mother.

  He said, “My mom?”

  Chastity. Yeah. Chastity had been good to Glory over the years. They were friends. And she was definitely the best choice given the options. “Call her.”

  He did. “Not answering,” he said after a minute.

  Glory said a word so bad that it would have dropped her aunt Stella in a dead faint. “Where is everybody? They’re always underfoot until the moment you need them.”

  Bowie left a message. “Mom, it’s Bowie. I’m at Glory’s house. Her baby’s coming—fast. And there’s no one to help. If you get this, she needs you to come over here right away.” He hung up.

  Glory shut her eyes and whispered prayerfully, “Please, Brett. Angie. Call me, get over here.…”

  The phone rang as if on cue. She held out her hand. Bowie frowned again but he passed it to her. “Angie?” she cried. “Angie, oh God, I’m so glad you—”

  “Don’t be alarmed,” said a pleasant recorded voice. “Your credit remains excellent. I’m Amy from Credit Card Services and I’m calling to tell you—” Muttering yet another unacceptable word, Glory hung up.

  “What?” Bowie demanded, looking slightly freaked.

  “Robo-call.” She passed the phone back to him. “Call Mina again, please. See what the holdup is.” She sighed and laid her head back on the counter as he called the clinic.

  When he hung up, he said, “Mina tried to reach Brett and Angie. Twice. It looks like the phone’s out at Redonda’s house. She got dead air when she called over there. She said she’d keep trying.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “Maybe we should just try 9-1-1, see if we get some help that way,” he said.

  “Do it.”

  He started to dial, then put the phone to his ear. “We’re out, too.” He switched it off and then on again. “Nothing. Deader than a hammer.” He handed it to her.

  She listened. And heard only silence. The storm must have knocked down some lines. “No,” she cried. “Oh, no.…” Shoving the useless phone away down the counter, she lowered her cheek to the granite again. “This isn’t real,” she moaned. “This can’t be happening.…”

  He loomed above her, wearing that determined look, the same one he’d worn when he stood at her front door. “You don’t look comfortable bending over the counter like that.”

  She rolled her eyes and stayed right where she was. “I’m about as comfortable as I’m going to get, considering the circumstances.”

  “I think we probably ought to get you to the bedroom, I really do. And shouldn’t I be boiling water or something?”

  “Boiling water. He wants to boil water.…” She let out a laugh that was almost a sob. “I’m having a baby and there’s no one to help me.”

  “There’s me. I think you’re going to have to work with what you’ve got,” he said with more humor than she could have mustered at that point. “For the moment, I’m it. You’re going to tell me what to do and everything is going to be fine.”

  “Tell you what to do?” She pretty much screeched the words. “How can I tell you, Bowie? I don’t even know myself.”

  “You’ve had Johnny.”

  “Yeah, with Brett there to tell me when to push, with Angie there to hold my hand and coach me through every contraction.…”

  “You’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out.”

  Glory yearned to call him a bunch of bad names and scream at him that he didn’t know his ass from up. Unfortunately, he had a point. They would have to figure it out. There was no other choice. She had a couple of books on pregnancy and childbearing. One of them was bound to have a section on emergency births at home. They would refer to the chapter, follow the damn instructions.

  She muttered out of the side of her mouth, “I hate you, Bowie Bravo.”

  “I know.” He took her shoulders and pulled her off the counter and upright again. “Let’s go.”

  Redemption, Bowie thought as he coaxed Glory up the stairs to her bedroom. That was pretty much what he’d come back to his hometown to get.

  He wanted to know his son and to try, at least a little, to be an actual father, the kind he’d sure never had. To maybe make peace with Glory. And to help her however he could, with Johnny, with the new baby, with the damn hardware store she’d inherited from Matteo Rossi, if it came to that. He’d had this idea he’d do whatever was needed to make up for all the years he hadn’t been there when his son and his son’s mother needed him.

  He hadn’t gotten off to such a great start, he had to admit. She’d started out mad at him and then gotten madder.

  And then, all of a sudden, she was screaming and clutching her big stomach. She was having her baby. Now. Today.

  Way to go, Bowie. He showed up, and instantly Glory went into labor. The doctor, the nurse and her whole family turned out to be unavailable. It was too dangerous to try driving to the hospital. Cell phones didn’t work and the landline was dead.

  It was all his fault, for showing up when he probably should have just stayed away. For pissing her off so bad that she started having contractions.

  Redemption at this point didn’t seem all that possible. In fact, it seemed like a ridiculous thing for him to have imagined he wanted, a silly crock of crap.

  Right now, redemption didn’t matter in the least. Glory was having her baby. And if anything happened to her or the child, well, he knew damn well whose fault that would be.

  Halfway up the stairs, she had another contraction. She leaned over the railing, holding on to it with one hand and him with the other. She had quite a grip on her for a small woman. She gritted her teeth and yowled. And she swore. A long, harsh stream of amazingly bad words.

  “Time?” she demanded when she stopped swearing. She blew a hank of sweaty brown hair out of her big brandy-colored eyes and looked at him like she dared him to answer that question.

  But he was ready. He had the watch and he’d actually remembered to glance at the second hand when that one started. He told her—both the length of the contraction and the time between it and the one before it. And then he pulled the paper and pencil
from his pocket and wrote everything down.

  Once that was dealt with, he wrapped his arm around her again and coaxed her the rest of the way up the stairs.

  The master bedroom was at the front of the house, big, with bay windows the same as in the family room below it. It had a separate sitting area, its own bath and a walk-in closet. All so damn tasteful, wallpapered in blue- and-white stripes, with sheer curtains and antique furniture that had probably been in the Rossi family—in that very house—for generations. He thought of Glory and Matteo sharing the big four-poster mahogany bed and then decided not to think about that.

  She’d been happy with him, that was what mattered. He’d made her happy and he’d been good to Johnny. And he’d left her well set up when that sudden rock slide hit his car last summer and rolled him right off the road into the river gorge way below.

  “There are going to be fluids,” Glory said.

  He didn’t know whether to laugh—or run down the stairs and out the front door and never again let himself even consider coming back to the Flat and trying to make things right. “Good to know.”

  “We need a sheet of something plastic to protect the mattress.”

  “A shower curtain?”

  “Good. The curtain liner in Johnny’s bathroom is plastic.” She pointed. “It’s across the hall.”

  He ran in there and started ripping the inner curtain liner off the hooks, aware in a distant sort of way of the clothes hamper by the door with the leg of a pair of boy’s jeans hanging out of it, of the bright plastic toys in the corner bin, of the jungle mural on the wall across from the old-fashioned claw-foot tub.

  The task should have been simple, but the curtain hooks didn’t seem to want to let go.

  “Bowie?” Glory called from across the landing.

  “I’m coming!” After forever, he had the damn thing free. He dragged it out of the bathroom and across the hall.

  “About time,” said Glory. She was kneeling in the sitting area, her head on a chair, a hand under the giant curve of her belly. “I was starting to wonder if you’d decided to have a shower while you were in there.…”

  “Sorry, I…”

  She put up a hand. He knew from her expression that another one was starting. He dropped the curtain liner, checked the time on the watch and went to kneel beside her.

  One hour later, the phone was still out and the snow was still coming down. No one had come to their rescue—not Brett and Angie, not Rose, not Chastity. Bowie had already volunteered to go down the block knocking on doors to see if anyone was around who might be able to help.

  Glory had grabbed his hand. “If you leave right now, I will curse you until the day you die.”

  So he’d stayed. He’d found the place in one of her pregnancy books that told what to do in an emergency delivery.

  He’d followed the instructions to the letter, stripping the bed and covering it with the plastic, and then covering the plastic with an old sheet. Between contractions, he’d coaxed Glory into the bathroom for a quick shower and then had her put on a T-shirt with nothing on under it.

  She hadn’t put up any argument about being pretty much naked in front of him. It wasn’t like that, not in the least. It was just about doing the job of getting her baby born. Getting through it with both her and the baby safe and well.

  He’d washed his hands thoroughly. And more than once, too.

  He had two stacks of towels ready and another of clean, ironed receiving blankets from the baby’s room. And ice chips. Between contractions, he’d bolted downstairs to the kitchen and gotten them for her, like the book said, so she could keep hydrated.

  Every contraction had been timed and recorded—just in case a miracle happened and Brett showed up before the actual delivery and wanted the numbers on how far her labor had progressed. The contractions kept getting longer and closer together. And while they were happening, Bowie spoke soothingly to her, just like the book said. He comforted her and reassured her, per the instructions.

  She continued to swear a blue streak and scream like it was the end of the world. She also clutched his hand so hard that she almost cut off the circulation to his fingers.

  Now and then, when she wasn’t screaming, when things settled down for a minute or two and Glory closed her eyes and seemed to be dozing, he thought of how he should have been there like this for her and for Johnny, when Johnny came. He thought about how much he’d missed, how many ways he’d gotten it all wrong.

  And then he thought about Wily Dunn. He’d lost Wily only two months ago. The old man had died nice and peaceful in his sleep on the day after Thanksgiving. But if Wily was still around, Bowie knew what he would say about now. That is water under a very big bridge. Let it flow on by, son. ’Cause there sure ain’t no bucket big enough to catch it.

  “Bowie?” Glory squeezed his hand. “Another one. Starting now…”

  He checked the watch on his wrist and then she was screaming and he stopped thinking about all that he’d done wrong—stopped thinking altogether. He said soft, soothing things and told her to take quick, shallow breaths and to go with it. Just go with it and keep on breathing.

  An hour and fifteen minutes after he’d gotten her upstairs, she was all the way down at the end of the bed, her head and shoulders supported by a pile of pillows, her feet on two chairs, knees wide. Bowie knelt on the floor between them. It was the last place he’d ever expected to be on the day he returned to New Bethlehem Flat.

  The top of the baby’s head appeared. Bowie said what the book had told him to say. “Pant, don’t push. Easy, easy…” Glory moaned and panted. She seemed pretty focused now, and she wasn’t even screaming. She did mutter a string of bad words, though, as she blew out quick, short breaths and moaned and swung her head to get the sweaty hair out of her eyes.

  He used his hands—washed again a few minutes before—to apply gentle pressure as the head emerged. The goal, the book said, was to keep the head from popping out suddenly. The faster, the better, Bowie thought. But, hey. He followed the instructions and told himself to be grateful that so far, everything was going pretty much the way the book said, which he took to mean that everything was going okay.

  The head slid free. It was all scrunched up and covered in sticky white stuff. The tiny, distorted mouth opened. But no sound came.

  He reassured Glory. “Good, good,” he said. “Really good.”

  “What does that mean?” she demanded furiously. “Good, good. Hello? That could mean anything.”

  He glanced up into her sweat-shiny face. “It means that so far, we’re doing fine.” And then he was back to business again. Gently, he stroked the sides of the tiny nose and downward toward the neck. And then he went the other way, upward from under the chin, to expel mucus and amniotic fluid from the nose and the mouth. It worked. Slimy, gooey stuff came out.

  “What’s happening?” Glory moaned, straining to see. “Is the baby…”

  “Fine. It’s fine. Shh, now. Shh…”

  “Don’t you shush me, Bowie Bravo.”

  “Shh…” Next, as gently as he could, he took the baby’s sticky head in his two hands. “Okay, Glory. Now. Push!” She stopped griping at him and started grunting and bearing down and he pressed the baby’s head very carefully downward at the same time.

  And it happened. Just like in the book. One shoulder slid out.

  After that, it was all so quick that he didn’t have time to do what the book said. Nature did it for him. The other shoulder slid out. And then the rest of the tiny body came sliding fast in a rush of fluid, so fast he barely had time to catch it, let alone have the receiving blanket ready.

  Glory cried, “My baby, my baby…”

  And he said, “It’s a girl,” and then the tiny little thing opened her mouth and let out a big yelp follo
wed by a long, angry cry. He smiled. Just like her mother, the dark haired little scrap of a thing didn’t hesitate to make her feelings known.

  “Is she…”

  “She’s perfect, Glory. Just perfect, I swear it.” He got a blanket and put the baby on it, still with the cord connected. The book had said not to cut it, to wait for the professionals.

  Bowie was just fine with that. There was also something called the placenta that might or might not be popping out before help came. He sincerely hoped that he might get lucky and not have to deal with that.

  Glory was crying. “Serafina Teodora,” she sobbed. “After Matteo’s mom. Sera. She’s Sera.…” Glory held out her arms. And Bowie put another blanket around the tiny, red, sticky little body, to make sure she stayed warm. And then he lifted her up to give her to Glory.

  But right then, as he levered up on his knees, carefully raising her to put her in Glory’s arms, trying to hand her over without pulling on the cord that still connected her to Glory, he looked down and saw that the baby was staring up at him.

  The little thing was quiet now. Calm. Her eyes watched him so seriously from that tiny, red, old-person face. Her mouth was a round O.

  It was like…she knew him. That little baby knew him.

  And she accepted him, absolutely. Instantly. Unconditionally, unlike her mother and most everyone else in his hometown where he’d never managed to do anything right.

  He, Bowie Bravo, was okay with Sera Rossi, no questions asked.

  And inside him there was a rising feeling, all warm and good. Right then, for that too-brief moment, looking into that baby’s eyes, he could almost believe that everything would come out right.

  Chapter Three

  Glory was crying, the tears sliding along her temples into her already-sweat-soaked hair. “Come on,” she said softly now, still holding out her arms. “Come on, give her to me.”