À la Carte

by Nia Forrester

  Saying “my fiancée” would not have had the same impact but calling Dani my wife feels strangely accurate. Garrett is right. I need to make that official, pronto. The hell with a huge wedding.

  I slide my driver’s license toward the agent and she barely glances at it, because what the hell is that supposed to do anyway? Change the weather?

  “Mr. Reese, I’m so sorry. But we don’t want to make your wife a widow. It just isn’t safe up there right now. I’m sorry.” She shakes her head again.

  Nodding, I retrieve my ID and turn away from her. I brush aside the rivulets that are still streaming down my face.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  There is an incessant banging coming from the direction of the den, that sounds like someone making a drum out of a steel pot or hammering something. The idea of Rocket with a tool as potentially dangerous and destructive as a hammer makes me sit up in alarm.

  “Rocket, what’s all that noise?” I call.

  “Nothing.”

  I glance over at Jennifer, and she shakes with quiet laughter. “He’s a handful, isn’t he?”

  “A little bit. I’m usually fine with it when I’m more … mobile.”

  “Want me to go check and see what’s going on?”

  “Please,” I say. “If you could.”

  I watch Jennifer leave the room, with a little bit of envy at the ease and agility with which she springs up from her seat. I can scarcely remember what that feels like. By comparison, I am a beached whale. Not only have I gained forty pregnancy pounds, my feet and ankles are swollen, and my face looks like someone inserted an air-hose and inflated me like a balloon.

  I am in what my OB has been referring to for the past four weeks as “the homestretch”. Or, at least I was, until I had my appointment this morning and was told that the finish line was not only in sight, but mere hours away. My due date has been accelerated, because of persistently low amniotic fluid, and low blood pressure. So, tonight at seven, I am checking in at the hospital to be induced.

  Baby Girl Reese is on her way.

  Trying not to sound frantic at the thought of him not being here, I called Rand as soon as I heard, and let him know that he had to come home. And soon.

  ‘How soon?’ he’d asked, the panic I was pretending not to feel audible in his voice.

  ‘Soon-soon,’ I emphasized.

  ‘Leaving right now,’ he’d told me.

  At that, I’d exhaled a deep, prolonged sigh.

  Though my life with Rand has been marked by firsts—first lover, first love, and now … first baby—of all the firsts, this is by far the scariest one of all.

  My pregnancy has been a series of mini-crises almost from day one—unexpected bleeding and cramping, persistent morning sickness … and afternoon and evening sickness as well. And lately, wildly fluctuating blood pressure readings and now, low levels of amniotic fluid.

  Even with more frequent than normal trips to the doctor, I didn’t have too many misgivings about Rand going to New York to cover a game for the weekend. After all, it was a short two-and-a-half-hour flight away, and frankly, I felt like he could use the break.

  The poor guy—who I’d made the mistake of thinking of as an old hand at this pregnancy thing, given that he had Rocket—was not ready for all the fuss that came ever since we saw that little plus sign. He has worried, hovered, and barely slept ever since that first ultrasound, terrified that something might happen to me or the baby.

  Jennifer is re-entering the room just as my cellphone rings.

  “He’s fine,” she says, reporting on Little Rocket. “Some building toy he’s working on. Apparently, the banging comes with the territory.”

  “Okay, good. Could you …?” I try to sit upright again, and reach for my phone which, though only sitting on the coffee table, may as well be a hundred miles away.

  Jennifer hands me the phone and I see with relief that it’s Rand calling.

  “Are you on your way?” I ask without first saying ‘hello’.

  “Ahm … yeah, but …”

  “What happened?”

  There is a moment’s hesitation. My assumption that there was some disaster probably rattles him because I am not usually the nervous kind. But being pregnant has changed not only my body, but my emotional barometer.

  “Flights were canceled because of the weather, so I’m driving instead.”

  “How long’s that going to take?” I try to keep the alarm out of my voice.

  “Almost seven hours, but …”

  “I’m being admitted at seven. You won’t get here until …”

  “It’s okay, Dani. I promise I’ll be there in time.”

  “That’s impossible, Rand. It’s already after two-thirty. You can’t … are you driving yourself? I hope you’re not driving yourself.”

  “No, I have a driver. It’s cool. I promise …”

  “Stop promising,” I say, my nerves beginning to fray. “It is literally, humanly impossible for you to get here by seven unless you teleport yourself. And I …”

  ‘I can’t have this baby alone,’ is what I want to say, but stop myself from saying, just in time. As frantic as I’m beginning to feel, I know that Rand is doubly so.

  “I won’t be there by seven when you check in at the hospital,” he amends. “But I’ll be there before the baby comes. What time are they planning to get things started?”

  “I don’t know. I guess within a couple hours of me getting there?”

  “Do this: call the doctor to find out what time you’re going to be induced, and I’ll call my sister and see how soon she can get there. Is anyone there with you now who can go to the hospital with you at seven?”

  “Jennifer’s here. But she has to leave. She can’t stay.”

  “Ask her,” Rand insists.

  “I don’t think …”

  “Eva!” Rand says suddenly. “Eva is still there, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. But …”

  “Hand her your phone,” Rand insists, not bothering to listen to the rest of my protest.

  He doesn’t have to ask me twice. I am at this point terrified of being alone.

  “Jen, could you call Eva, please?” I ask.

  Jen looks intrigued but does as I ask and heads toward the suite where Eva stays. When they return, Eva in a housedress, and looking like she might have been napping, I simply hand her the phone without explanation. Her expression doesn’t change as she listens to Rand speak. She says ‘yes’ and ‘okay’ and then ‘of course’ a few times, then hands the phone back to me.

  “I’ll just go change,” she says as she leaves.

  “It’s handled,” Rand says on the other end of the line. “I’m about to hang up and call Freya. I don’t think Garrett’s off work yet. When Freya comes to take Rocket over to her house, Eva will ride with you to the hospital and stay till Freya gets back, or I get there.”

  “Eva is coming with me to the hospital to deliver our baby? Rand, I don’t think …”

  “Dani!” His voice is sharp. “I don’t want you going alone.”

  “Jen is here.”

  “You just said she had to leave.” He sounds exasperated.

  “Yeah, but … I wasn’t thinking you were going to ask Eva to come with me. I thought you just needed someone to watch Rocket.”

  “Well, this is the plan. If Jen wants to go to the hospital with you that’s fine, too. But someone has to be there with you while Freya is getting Rocket over to her place.”

  “That won’t take her very long. I could …”

  “Don’t overthink it, Danielle. Just … I made a plan, let’s stick with it.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  When I hang up, Jen is looking at me with saucer eyes.

  “He asked Eva to go with you to have the baby?” she mouths.

  I nod.

  Jen claps a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. “I’ll hand it to him. That takes some nerve. Who said you want that woman at … or come to think of it, why
would he think she would want to be there?”

  Jen sighs and shakes her head.

  “Maybe if you were able to come …” I begin.

  Jen grabs my hand and squeezes it.

  “Are you crazy? Of course I want to come. If only to see how this all plays out.”

  “It’ll play out fine. Eva is a lovely woman. It’s just … strange, that’s all. I mean …”

  “It’s strange alright,” Jen says.

  My driver can tell that I’m not in the mood for conversation, so he says almost nothing except to occasionally answer my questions about road conditions and our ETA. I’m paying him several hundred dollars to get me home, so I’m guessing he doesn’t care even if we ride the entire six hours plus in complete silence.

  I realize as we drive that Pennsylvania is a huge state. I made the mistake of thinking that once we’d crossed the state line, we were on the homestretch, but there is plenty more road to cover. Most of it is rural and nondescript, and there’s still a driving rain that follows us from New York. There is nothing to do except listen to the music my driver plays, volume turned low, and to occasionally check my phone to see what’s happening at home.

  Freya checks in by text when she gets to the house to pick up Rocket, and then again when she’s done getting him settled in with Matt and Lance and is on the road again back to the house. She tells me when she gets there that Dani, Eva and Jen have already left, even though it’s not yet six. That’s when I start to allow myself to feel excited.

  Tonight. I’m going to be a father again, tonight.

  I look down at my phone aimlessly, and smile.

  In all the confusion and planning and working on logistics, I didn’t spare much of a thought for the goal of all this—making sure my daughter gets safely into this world. But I’m thinking about it now, and about finally meeting her. And it makes me smile.

  I am still smiling and thinking about my baby girl when my driver lets out a curse. I look up just in time to see him swerve, and the car goes spinning. My last thought is that it makes perfect sense that it would end this way.

  A car accident. Of course.

  Because karma is a bitch.

  ~10~

  Everyone knows that labor is painful. But I don’t think the word ‘painful’ is the most accurate descriptor. Childbirth is like having someone reach inside you, grab ahold of your innards, and try to make a balloon animal out of them. The sensation is one of overwhelming tension, and twisting, and unbelievable pressure in my lower abdomen. It feels interestingly, exactly like what it is: someone inside you wants to get out. And they have a bigger head than the canal they must come through, and they have … shoulders, and they will not be denied; they must get out.

  I tried to get the doctors not to give me the medicine that would begin my contractions, because I hadn’t yet heard from Rand. I wanted to go through every second of everything with him, but they told me time was of the essence. The attending physician, who is not my personal OB, is a young woman named Dr. Treadway. She doesn’t have a great bedside manner. She used that phrase over, and over again: “time is of the essence.” So, the medicine was administered, and the contractions began.

  When my OB, Dr. Hubbard, finally shows up, it’s after eight o’clock and she holds my hand when she tells me what’s really going on.

  “The fetal heartrate is not what we’d like it to be,” she says.

  She says that the baby’s heartbeat shows signs of “variable deceleration”, which basically means that it drops when I have a contraction, which is how it should be, but is dropping a little too much, or doesn’t begin to accelerate again as quickly as it should. That news is panic-inducing.

  Freya is there when I hear it. She grips my free hand and squeezes it so hard it hurts. Just outside my private room, Jen and Eva are waiting. They both left when my doctor came in, to give me privacy. But privacy is the least of my concerns. Every half hour someone has come in to peer between my legs and see how things are “moving along” and in the meantime I’ve been wondering where Rand is. So, no … I couldn’t give a shit about privacy. And now this … my baby’s heartrate is worrying the doctors.

  I turn to look at Freya, hoping to get some resolve from her, but her smile is weak.

  “I’m recommending that we do a C-section,” Dr. Hubbard says.

  “A C-section?” I repeat.

  It is as far from a natural birth as one can get. The birth plan that Jen teased Rand about? Well, it was low intervention, minimally intrusive and involving as little medication as possible. A C-section is the opposite of that.

  But best laid plans and all that.

  All I care about now, is having a healthy baby. And about Rand. Where the hell is he?

  “Call Rand,” I tell Freya, tugging my hand free of hers. “Please.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I’ll call him right now.”

  She steps away from the bed and takes her phone to the far corner of the room. She is fumbling as she tries to make the call, and I know she is as worried as I am. This will be the fourth time she’s tried to reach him by phone. Each time there is no answer. The last time they had contact, she was telling him that she was on her way here, and Freya hasn’t heard from him since.

  She doesn’t say it, but I know she’s thinking what I am thinking—that there is no way, if he could, that Rand would not call to check in on me. He hasn’t called back because he can’t. And the reason he can’t is what scares me.

  “How … how much time do I have to decide?” I ask.

  Dr. Hubbard gives me a kind smile. Her bedside manner is much better than Dr. Treadway’s.

  “I shouldn’t have said ‘recommending’,” she tells me. “A C-section is the only responsible choice at this point, Danielle. I’m sorry.”

  It’s then that I begin to cry. Silent tears, streaming down my face.

  “Right now?” I ask.

  Dr. Hubbard nods. “You’ll get an epidural. You’ll be awake the whole time. And it will be over before you know it. The entire procedure takes less than an hour from incision to stitching. And you’ll have a healthy baby when it’s all said and done.”

  “And it’s the only way?” I ask.

  I recall all those YouTube videos that Rand warned me not to watch, of women being cut open. C-sections are major surgery, no matter how routine.

  “If I had a window into your womb and could tell you what’s happening with your baby, I would be able say if there’s another way. But from all indications, and from all we can tell from the monitors, she isn’t responding well to the contractions. It isn’t worth the risk to have her go through the birth canal when we don’t know what’s going on.”

  Her referring to the baby as “she” is what helps me make up my mind. This isn’t some abstract medical decision, this is me making my first difficult decision as a mother, in the best interests of my child.

  “Okay,” I say. “Then I’m ready.”

  The epidural isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I think the contractions prepared me for it. After all, what’s a needle in the spine when you’ve gotten an inkling of what it might feel like to have a person come charging headfirst out of your body? Once it’s done, I feel remarkably normal. The pain is gone, and I have no awareness of anything below my waist.

  I get wheeled back to my room, and hold my breath as the door swings open, hoping that once I get there, Rand will be waiting, perspiring from the effort to get to me in time, and with effusive apologies for being so late. It is almost nine p.m. now, and the only person in the room is Eva. Neither Jen nor Freya are in sight.

  I think Eva sees the disappointment on my face, because her expression changes as well, to one of sympathy, and when the nurse and orderly get me positioned, she comes to sit next to the bed, maneuvering carefully with her injured leg.

  “Ai, pobrecita,” she says. “I know, I know.”

  This time the tears are not silent. I lean toward Eva, and I sob.

  “Whe
re is he?” I say. “Where is he?”

  Eva holds my hand and strokes it, making ‘shh, shh’ noises, just like a mom would.

  Freya and Jen return about ten minutes later, just as Dr. Hubbard is explaining to me what to expect in surgery. She tells me that I will have an anesthesiologist sitting next to me the entire time, and that I can have one other person. My one other person isn’t here. The only person I want is Rand, and he isn’t here.

  I look at Freya, who is the next best person available, and she blanches.

  “I’ll try,” she says. “But I’m telling you right now, I’m so squeamish about these things, that … I can’t guarantee I won’t get lightheaded.”

  Dr. Hubbard shakes her head. “You have to be sure. We won’t have time to take care of two patients in the operating theater. You have to be sure.”

  “I’ll try,” Freya says again.

  “And if you can’t, I’m happy to do it,” Eva says.

  Jen, Freya and I look at her in unison.

  “It’s alright.” Freya looks a little freaked out by the suggestion. “I’ll hold it together.”

  “Good,” Dr. Hubbard says. “Well, someone will be back to get you in about ten minutes, Danielle.”

  When she is gone again, I look expectantly at Freya. I don’t even have to ask the question. She shakes her head regretfully. She still hasn’t reached Rand.

  I take a deep breath. I’m just going to have to power through on my own then. I have no other choice. I reach for the corner of the bed-sheet, wipe my eyes and take another breath to steel my resolve. I can do it on my own. I have no other choice.

  Just before the orderly comes to get me, Freya calls home and lets me speak to Rocket. He sounds really hyped up and wide awake and tells me excitedly that Uncle Garrett said he doesn’t have to go to school tomorrow, so he can stay up late.

  “Because my baby sister is coming,” he says, as if he’s telling me something I might not know.

  “Yes, baby, she’s coming tonight,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice steady. “As soon as she’s here, and they let me use the phone, I’m going to call you okay?”