At just past four in the morning, Audrey cried out in alarm and very nearly broke Amanda’s finger bones. Amanda coaxed Audrey to take deep breaths, breathing in and out to try and calm her. When the contraction stopped, Amanda removed her bright red and white fingers from Audrey’s grip, jumped over Audrey’s legs, and grabbed her phone. Through moans, Audrey asked her what she was doing.
“Hey! Mom? Sorry to wake you up. I think it’s the real deal with Audrey. Yep. Heavy contractions every five to seven minutes now. I think I’m going to take her in. Could you call Aunt Lola and Aunt Christine? Great. Thank you.”
Audrey clamped her eyes shut and pursed her lips in a straight line. Somewhere in the back alleys of her mind, she’d thought that maybe, if she’d tried hard enough or hid out here in Amanda’s room, she would be able to stop the labor.
But it was clear: Baby Sheridan was headed straight toward them, like a rocket ship on the way to the moon.
Amanda was all movement after that. She was Susan Sheridan’s daughter, after all, and she’d had a to-do list for Audrey’s labor and delivery since about January 21, when she had decided to stick around a bit longer. Audrey had also teased her about this incessantly. Right now, though, she was grateful for it.
“I also already packed you a bag,” Amanda said as she yanked open the closet and grabbed one for her and one for Audrey. “I have all the essentials in there. And I even researched what most mothers wish they would have brought once they’re at the hospital.”
“I don’t know what I would do without you,” Audrey told her. Her voice hummed with her familiar sarcasm, but both Amanda and Audrey knew how much she meant it.
“Okay. I have to wake up Grandpa,” Amanda said as she shoved a sweatshirt over her head and ruffled her hair.
Amanda disappeared for a few minutes, while Audrey fell into another wave of panic, pain, and horror. She heard the vague grunts of her Grandpa Wes, who was clearly very confused. She then heard Amanda’s explanation, which was met with excitement and fear and a number of “Wow!”s from her grandfather. Despite the pain, even Audrey had to grin. He was so exuberant.
She supposed it made sense, as he hadn’t been allowed the beauty of a family, of closeness, of love, in many, many years. He was the most selfless man she knew in the world. How grateful she was for him.
And, of course, her gratefulness was only compounded a few minutes later, as she sat tenderly in the back seat of the car with Grandpa Wes himself. He beamed at her, excited, then splayed out his hand and bowed his head toward it.
“You can try to break my fingers if you want to,” he told her with a sly grin. “Your grandmother very nearly did when she went into labor with Susan. I’ll never forget it. My fingers certainly haven’t.”
Wordless, Audrey slipped her hand through her grandfather’s fingers and dropped her head back against the car seat headrest. Amanda started the engine, and she slowly eased them through the snowy, somber, dark morning. Audrey’s stomach and back continued to roar with ever-present pain as each contraction became stronger and stronger. All the while, she squeezed her grandfather’s hand until she felt sure she might break the bones.
Grandpa Wes didn’t complain.
Not even once.
Chapter Four
During Audrey’s first semester at Penn State, she had told some of her new friends she was clairvoyant. “I swear. Think something, anything, and I will tell you what you’re thinking,” she’d said between vodka shots. “I swear. I’ll know.”
As Audrey lay back in the hospital bed as the clock rounded over into five in the morning, she remembered this long-ago era and felt, with a funny twitch in the back of her mind, that she could read exactly what her mother was thinking. Lola hovered to the left of the hospital bed; her eyes were large, and they reflected excitement and fear for Audrey. She gazed down at her one and only daughter. All the color drained from her cheeks while she tried to smile.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Audrey finally gasped. She scrunched her forehead and blinked up at her mother. “You’re looking at me like you think I’m going to — ”
She couldn’t finish the sentiment. It was too dark. And Christine interrupted her, anyway.
“Those contractions were closer, weren’t they?” she asked. Audrey nodded in response as the fear consumed her. She was sure her mother could see it clearly etched on her face and in her eyes now. Lola grabbed her daughter’s hand, knowing she was frightened, and squeezed it gently. “You got this, okay. You’re going to be fine, honey. You’re a Sheridan. You go this!”
In all honesty, she was terrified but so grateful to have her mother by her side. The baby was too early, and the nurses seemed rushed and panicked. They had hooked up a Doppler device to monitor the heart rate of the baby, and every time they looked at the monitor, a weird look marred their faces. This was no “typical” birth. Audrey sensed it, but she couldn’t fully prepare for it. All they kept telling her was to breathe and push through the contractions when they came, like she was taught through Lamaze classes. She wished it was that simple.
Audrey finally looked at the nurse that was jotting down something on her chart and asked, “Is everything okay?” The nurse turned and placed a hand on her belly. “Everything is fine, honey. This is standard procedure and you have nothing to worry about.” She said, flashing Audrey a smile before leaving the room
Time operated strangely. There was a lot of downtime. Audrey dropped her head back on the pillow and billowed out her cheeks and watched videos on her phone for a while. Her Aunt Christine and her mother seemed busy texting. Probably, they texted one another, as they didn’t want to worry Audrey.
“Hey,” Audrey said once, at around nine in the morning.
This forced both of their eyes upward. They looked like frightened children who’d been caught in the middle of doing something wrong. Audrey giggled softly, then shrugged and said, “Don’t worry about it. Get back to your text-marathon.”
Lola popped up from the chair again, walked toward Audrey, and smoothed her hair behind her ear. “You okay, honey?”
Audrey shrugged. “I guess. Just waiting for another round of pain, you know? That’s all life is.”
Lola rolled her eyes and turned back toward Christine. “Did you just hear what my nineteen-year-old daughter told me?”
Christine chuckled. “She sounds like she knows what she’s talking about.”
“You’re not even twenty years old!” her mother said with a wry smile.
“We can talk the optimism back into her after labor and delivery,” Christine stated as she stood up from her chair. “Right now, Audrey, you can be just as sarcastic and pessimistic as you want to be.”
“I just want to make sure my baby’s first words are sarcastic,” Audrey groaned, trying to get comfortable. “Christine, if I’m not around for a while, you have to put the phone up by her crib and let me talk to her. Every day, I need her to know and learn my unique snarkiness.”
“Maybe she’ll luck out and be more like Amanda. Or Susan,” Lola replied with a hearty laugh. “Responsible and kind.”
“That sounds awful,” Audrey affirmed. “Don’t tell Amanda I said that. You know I love her more than anything.”
“Maybe your baby will come out with a to-do list all made-up,” Christine teased. “Number one. Learn how to talk. Number two. Learn how to walk. Number three. Rule the world.”
But again, another contraction rolled through Audrey’s body. She scrunched her eyes tight as the muscles in her stomach hardened, and she knocked her head deeper into her pillow. The moan that escaped her lips didn’t sound like her. It sounded animalistic and Audrey started to pant quickly now.
“Slow down your breathing, honey. You don’t want to hyperventilate.” Lola told her while running a hand through her hair.
When the contraction finally ended, Audrey blinked through her tears and looked at her mother and Aunt Christine alongside her bed. They both looked like worried mother h
en’s.
“Are you guys also in labor?” Audrey asked as her voice rasped. “You look like you’re going through something.”
Christine laughed and then excused herself a few minutes later to grab some food down the hall. This left mother and daughter and incoming granddaughter there in the hospital room. Lola lifted Audrey’s hand to her lips and kissed it tenderly. It had been quite a while, actually, since Audrey had been alone with her mother. In previous years, it had only been the two of them. Now, they had the entire Sheridan universe.
“Hi, Mom.” Audrey’s words were simple, yet they also embodied all these thoughts at once. “How are you hanging in there?”
Her mother’s eyes glowed as she chuckled. “How am I doing? You know, I was watching you the other night with your friends from college.”
Audrey arched an eyebrow. “Creep.”
Her mother chuckled. “No. Not like that. But I noticed something. I noticed how much more mature you are than them, now.”
Audrey rolled her eyes playfully. “Really, Mom? Mature?”
“Seriously. I know you never wanted that word to be attributed to you, but here we are. Those girls are living out their college days, and doing their homework, and flirting with boys. And I know you want that life back so badly. But I can’t help but admire the person you’ve grown into while you’ve been here on the Vineyard.”
Aunt Christine entered the room again with two steaming cups of coffee. She glanced from Audrey to Lola and back again, as though she sensed the seriousness of the conversation. She then passed the coffee off to Lola. Audrey’s throat felt thick with sorrow and fear. She wanted to tell her mother not to say any more, not so soon before she gave birth to her daughter. It almost felt as though she was saying goodbye.
The pain ramped up, hour after hour. Before long, Audrey had been in labor for ten hours, and the fatigue and confusion and fear swirled in the back of her mind like a kind of storm. When she blinked forward, she saw dark and white spots. The pain itself seemed to be the color red. Sometimes, it was separate from herself, something she was battling, and at other times, the pain seemed to extend along her entire body. She heard her primal screams erupt from her own throat only sometimes; other times, they seemed to come from some other place.
At about eleven o’clock at night — around nineteen hours after Audrey’s arrival to the hospital, the real games began. All eyes were upon her in the delivery room. She was propped up, with her legs in stirrups, and the space between her legs all on display for everyone to see.
Vaguely, she joked to Aunt Christine that she felt like some girl at a fraternity party — always ready to open her legs wide! At this, Lola said, “Audrey! That’s an awful thing to say,” even as Christine burst into wild laughter.
Obviously, emotions were high. In the midst of horrendous pain, Audrey didn’t care who was looking at her privates. She just wanted everything to be okay and over with. She always wanted everything to be okay.
The pain was astronomical. Audrey glared at the doctor between her legs like he was the devil himself. He coaxed her, along with her mother and Aunt Christine, to “give all you got with this contraction,” and “just another push,” and “just another one.”
“I can see the head,” the doctor told her.
It seemed strange that this man should see her baby before she ever did. Audrey craned forward to take a peek but couldn’t yet see anything over the big mound of belly she still had.
“Come on. One final push,” he told her.
“One more, Audrey!” her mother cried.
With a wild rush of adrenaline, Audrey shut her eyes, gritted her teeth and performed one final, horrible, wretched push.
And at that moment, her baby entered the world.
But after that, seconds blurred together strangely.
There was no cry from the baby. The limbs flailed a bit as the doctor snipped the umbilical cord and instructed a nurse to take the baby away. Audrey’s eyes turned, panicked, toward her mother’s. She knew at that moment that her mother had even less idea of what had happened than Audrey did. Her heart fell into the space in her belly where her baby had been.
“Where are you taking her?” Audrey demanded.
“Audrey, we still need to get the placenta out,” the doctor informed her.
“Where are you taking her?” she asked again. This time, her voice sounded forceful and aggressive. She wanted to know what was happening.
“Your baby needs a little help,” the doctor said. “And we need to get this placenta out of you. One more push for me, okay?”
Audrey’s nostrils flared as she did his bidding. How she hated this man! If she’d been anywhere else but in this vulnerable spot, maybe she would have smacked him across the face. She had never felt this kind of panic before. As she pushed with another contraction, she let out a loud groan and then fell back against her bed, feeling exhausted. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she turned her attention toward her mother.
“Mom, where did they take her? What is going on?”
Lola squeezed Audrey’s hand. She was terribly pale. “I don’t know. I don’t know, baby.”
“Find out!” Audrey demanded. Anger flew through her. “FIND OUT.”
The news came not long after, just as the doctor realized that Audrey was hemorrhaging.
“Your baby isn’t breathing properly,” the doctor informed her, even as the world began to cave in, and Audrey’s blurry view grew even blurrier. “We had to put him on a breathing machine. We’ll know more soon.”
Aunt Christine and Audrey’s mother’s voices swirled together in a kind of haunting sing-song. Audrey blinked into nothingness and felt herself give over yet again to pain. She couldn’t comprehend what the doctor was saying.
My baby isn’t breathing. Am I hemorrhaging? My baby isn’t breathing.
Several minutes or hours later, Audrey had no idea how to tell — she lifted her eyes to find her mother slouched over in her chair with her palm across her cheek and her eyes toward the floor. It was clear she had been crying. Audrey’s heart hammered in her throat. She opened her lips to try to ask the question she so desperately needed the answer to —
But her throat and lips felt as though they’d never tasted water before.
Finally, she heard herself whisper, “Mom? Mommy?”
But somewhere, from the depths of whatever sleep Lola was in, she heard her daughter’s voice. She jumped from the chair and rushed toward her, dropped down, and presented Audrey with the slightest smile. She passed her some water so she could take a drink.
“How are you doing, Audrey? Oh, my baby. You did amazing. You know that.”
Audrey’s eyes filled again with tears. She feared the worst so much that, now, she dreaded to ask.
“They’ve taken your baby to the NICU,” Lola finally explained, as though she could sense the ominous question hanging in the air. “You need to rest, Audrey. Your baby is in good hands, but you have lost a lot of blood. You need to rest. They’ve done all they can so far, and they will keep going. Trust them.”
But Audrey couldn’t possibly trust them. She placed a tired hand over her stomach and felt outraged with panic. This baby had been a part of her for almost nine months! She’d carried it with her everywhere! She’d felt they could dream the same dreams!
And now, what?
She just prayed that the medical team knew what they were doing.
She burst into another round of tears, ones that shook her entire frame. Finally, she gave herself over to sleep again, knowing that it awaited her, anyway. Her body was sore and uncomfortable. Once upon a time, maybe, Audrey had had control over that body.
She no longer felt she did.
Chapter Five
Christine didn’t know she was shaking. She stood just outside the labor and delivery section of the hospital with her knees knocking together and her eyes glazed over. It was just past midnight, and she’d spent the previous twenty-some hours at the hospital. She
spread a hand out against the nearest wall and attempted to steady herself. With each blink, she saw only the tormented face of Audrey as she’d gone through a very rough birth.
Now, the baby had been rushed away, and the doctors had said only, “We’ll let you know when we know more.” In essence, the baby wasn’t breathing. The baby wasn’t breathing, and Audrey was hemorrhaging, and the world had stopped spinning, and Christine had forgotten why the heck she had come out into the hallway in the first place. She wanted to crumple up into a ball and give herself over to pain.
A hand wrapped around her shoulder. Suddenly, she flung around and fell into the open, strong arms of Zach. She squeezed her eyes shut as a wail erupted from her throat. She hadn’t seen Zach since hours before, when she’d checked on the rest of them in the waiting room, had a brief coffee, and told them that, “Everything is going to plan—right on schedule.”
When their hug broke, Zach dropped his nose against Christine’s and gazed into her eyes. His own glowed with tears. He played with her hair and then gently set it back across her shoulders.
“What happened?” he finally asked.
Christine hardly recognized his voice. For the first time since she had fallen in love with him, she could see the man he’d been in the wake of his daughter’s death. She could see the real damage, the real heartache.
“I don’t know. One minute we were telling her to push, and then the next thing we knew, the baby was whisked away in a panicked rush. They said the baby wasn’t breathing. They told us to wait. And then, Audrey started to hemorrhage, and we were all told to leave the room. I just came out here. I just ... “
Christine gasped again as her tears took hold once more and she couldn’t stand still. After a moment, she sucked in a breath and she strung her fingers through Zach’s, and the two of them walked out toward the coffee and vending machines, located next to where the family sat, waiting in uncomfortable plastic chairs, their eyes downcast. Amanda hustled up, her eyes tinged with red. Susan appeared beside them a second later, as well.
A Vineyard Lullaby (The Vineyard Sunset Series Book 7) Page 3
