Brooke’s voice trailed off, and tears shone in her lashes. Lucy felt her own eyes well up. “Next thing anyone remembers, Hayley was missing. And they were calling her name and no one could find her.” Brooke stared at her coffee. “Peter was the first to see her in the pool. He jumped in and pulled her out. She was basically dead at that point. No telling how long she’d been in the water.”
Lucy felt sick to her stomach. Now it was her turn to reach out and put her hand over Brooke’s. She had no words.
“Some days I still can’t believe it happened.” Brooke uttered a sad sound. “Even now.” After a long pause she finished the story. “Peter gave her CPR. Saved her life, for sure. I showed up as the ambulance was arriving and they rushed her here.” Brooke’s eyes were clearer now. “No one thought she’d live. Or if she did, they told us she’d be blind and living in a hospital bed.”
“But that didn’t happen?” Lucy felt hope at the center of her soul. As if Hayley had been her own daughter. “She can see and walk, right?”
The most genuine smile took over Brooke’s face. “She talks a little slower than you and me, but Hayley is perfect. She is cognitively aware of all things. She can even ride a bike. Something my dad prayed for every day.”
“Wow.” Lucy sat back and folded her arms. “I had no idea.” She felt herself opening up a little more. If Brooke could talk like this, she could, too. “I was sitting here thinking how I hate talking about our infertility. How it makes something so intimate between Aaron and me feel like a science experiment. And how it makes me feel inadequate as a mother. Like there’s something wrong with me.”
Brooke allowed a single nod, her eyes never leaving Lucy’s. “I thought you might be feeling that way. You’ve been different this past week. Quieter.” She took hold of her cup with both hands and sipped her drink. “Everyone has a story. Peter and I, we nearly lost our marriage over what happened to Hayley. But we clung to God and fought through.” She smiled again. “Next week is our anniversary.”
Lucy never dreamed they’d have so much in common, such hurt and insecurity about raising a family. She needed to be even more transparent. “A few weeks ago Aaron and I decided . . . we decided to stop trying.” The words sounded strange. Lucy set her elbows on the table and linked her fingers. “We’ll still be intimate. Of course. But no more ovulation tests and cutting out sugar and chasing after in vitro fertilization. I’m exhausted.”
“I get that.” Brooke waited, like she was being careful in choosing her words. “Aaron said the two of you . . . have been asking God for a baby for a long time.”
A sigh slipped silently through Lucy’s lips. She didn’t want to talk about this piece of it. How God impacted their situation. Or how He didn’t. “If God’s a part of all this, then He doesn’t want us having kids.” Lucy tried to cover up her anger, but her efforts didn’t work. “We’ve talked to Him a thousand times, and His answer is always the same. If He’s even listening.”
Brooke’s smile faded, but her expression filled with understanding. “I’ve been there.” She looked out the window for a long moment and then back at Lucy. “I used to stand by Hayley’s bed and beg God for her to come back. That I’d hear her little voice and laugh and see those eyes. Fully there. Fully my little girl.”
Tears blurred Lucy’s vision. She didn’t say anything. What could she say?
“Eventually God did bring her back to me. Different, but still my little girl.” A lightness lifted Brooke’s sorrow. “God heard me. He was there. He carried us through those times, I have no doubt.”
Sad as Brooke’s story was, Lucy had heard this sort of talk about God before. Someone else’s experience wasn’t about to push her to believing God cared. Or even that He was real.
Their break was just about up. Brooke stood and Lucy did the same. They tossed their empty cups in the trash and walked to the elevator. “I’m glad you and Aaron agree, about taking time off from trying.”
“Yes.” Lucy still didn’t like talking about it. But she enjoyed Brooke’s friendship more than she’d known before this afternoon. “It’s only February. Six months from now we might feel differently. I just need a rest. So Aaron and I can be us again.”
Brooke smiled as she pushed the elevator button for labor and delivery. “Sounds like a good plan.”
When they reached the nursery, they both cleaned their hands. Then Brooke made her rounds and Lucy checked on each infant in the ward. They were all well. Warm and getting whatever they needed while they were here. For the most part, healthy babies waiting to be reunited with their mothers.
This section of the nursery was the holding area for newborns who needed a little extra heat or light or medical care. Most of them stayed here less than twenty-four hours. Then they would join their moms in a regular maternity ward hospital room—at the other end of the sixth floor adjacent to labor and delivery.
But since the maternity ward also had a neonatal intensive care unit, Lucy and her peers spent most of their time with very sick babies. The NICU, as they called it, was for infants like Nathan. Children born addicted to drugs or premature or with some other sort of medical condition.
Lucy made her way to check on Nathan. His bassinet was near the front. Two other babies with difficulty breathing were in oxygen tents. But because of his gestational age, Nathan was the most critical infant in the ward.
For a few minutes Lucy put her hand on the edge of his bed and just watched him. True, his lungs were strong. But they still labored with a series of machines for every inhale. The thing with this preemie was his will to keep taking that next breath. Like he was aware of what was happening and he was determined to grab on to life. Never let go.
She would love to know who this little one was going to be when he grew up. Probably climb mountains or cure cancer or run for president. If he could get through this, he could get through anything.
Brooke’s story came back to her. All this time she’d been thinking she wasn’t enough, that she was incomplete because she couldn’t get pregnant. And here Brooke Baxter West was carrying around the reality of her daughter’s drowning. Everyone was dealing with something. Brooke was right. Everyone had a story.
But that didn’t make Lucy’s story with Aaron any less sad. No one had tried more to have a child than they had. She took the rocking chair next to Nathan’s small bed. A dozen monitors told them whether his heart rate was at a safe level and his blood pressure was enough to sustain life. Whether he was keeping up the fight.
Lucy set the rocker in motion ever so slightly.
She and Aaron hadn’t talked about having kids when they got married just out of college. They graduated from the University of Alabama and began living out their happily ever after working their way up at the local hospital. Not till they moved to Atlanta did they talk about timing.
“I’m ready if you are.” Aaron had been sitting across from her at their small round kitchen table. His eyes had looked misty, like he was overwhelmed with feelings. “What do you think?”
Lucy hadn’t answered right away. She was a nurse, working in the emergency room at the time. She needed to keep putting in hours if she was going to get moved to the maternity ward. Where she’d always wanted to work.
But as for babies of their own, all she had known was that it was still too soon. Lucy had reached across the table and taken hold of Aaron’s hand. “Now? Really?”
“Yes.” He was young, but with his master’s degree he was already being groomed to work in administration. “We can handle it. Financially.”
She felt butterflies in her heart and suddenly she looked ahead nine months and tried to imagine what life would be like with a baby. She would have her promotion to maternity nurse by then. And once a baby came she’d work fewer hours at the hospital, for sure. Lucy never pictured working full-time when she became a mommy. And for the first time the idea sounded not only possible.
It sounded wonderful.
That night they ditched their bir
th control and with everything in them they believed Lucy would be pregnant a few weeks later. When she got her period, she wasn’t worried. They made a game of it. No more birth control, no more caution. They teased about how fun it would be.
Trying to get pregnant.
Lucy stared at her flat stomach. Back then they’d had no idea what they were in for. How long the journey ahead would be. It took six months of trying before Lucy began to worry. She remembered the first time she broached the topic with Aaron.
They had been on a walk in the hills near their favorite lake, and Lucy stopped. Aaron took a few more strides before he realized she wasn’t with him. He turned and came back to her. “You okay?”
The words wouldn’t form, not easily, anyway. She looked at the path beneath their feet for a long minute. When she lifted her eyes to his, she blinked back tears. The first of way too many. “I’m not pregnant, Aaron. What’s wrong with me?”
“Honey, nothing’s wrong.” Disappointment fell like a shadow over his face. He tried to hide it, so almost at the same time a smile lifted his lips. “It can take a year. That’s what I read.” He kissed her and ran his thumb along her brow. “Practice makes perfect, right? Don’t worry, Lucy. God has a baby for us. I know it.”
She had been doubtful even then. Especially about Aaron’s unwavering faith. “How do you know what God’s going to do?”
“Because I know Him, and He’s good.” Her husband’s smile reached his eyes. “He has a baby for us.”
How Aaron had kept that same belief intact for more than a decade, Lucy would never know. Back then six months hadn’t seemed that long to Aaron. He did what he could to calm her fears and help her believe.
But six months turned into one year and in the second year Aaron brought up the topic of foster care. The state had a foster-adopt program, where a baby would be placed with them and if the parents’ rights were terminated, they could legally adopt the child.
Lucy had been skeptical. She still wanted a baby of their own, the traditional way. But the more she and Aaron read foster-adopt stories on the Internet the more it seemed like a viable option. At least they’d be helping.
“We’ll get a baby handpicked by God,” Aaron had told her the day they made their decision to go ahead with the program. “And who knows, maybe He’ll surprise us and you’ll get pregnant.”
Over the years Lucy had researched enough to know that Aaron was right. Sometimes after a couple committed to adopt, or once a foster child was placed in their home, infertility could give way to a pregnancy.
Until then they hadn’t tried shots or pills or procedures. To Aaron, two years was still not terribly long. Other couples tried that long to have a baby. And once they made their decision to adopt, even Lucy expected things to fall into place.
Their house would be full of children in no time.
After they were approved for foster care, their phone began to ring. “We have a fifteen-year-old with a drug addiction. She needs a home for the weekend until her aunt gets back from vacation.”
Lucy would have a hundred questions. Why wasn’t anyone helping the girl with her drug addiction? And why hadn’t the aunt taken her niece on vacation and how would it help the girl to drop her off with strangers for the weekend? And the biggest question: Couldn’t the social workers see what Lucy and Aaron’s profile said?
They wanted a baby.
At first they took in every child the state called about. A sixteen-year-old boy who could barely speak or read or hold a conversation. His grandfather had raised him, and didn’t start the boy in school until he was twelve. The placement lasted eight weeks before the boy tried to steal their car and the police had to be called. It was one case after another like that.
Finally Aaron contacted their social worker. No more, he told them. Babies or nothing. They simply weren’t prepared or equipped to handle severely disturbed teenagers. But since those kids made up the bulk of the foster system, the calls practically stopped.
A few weeks later they were contacted about a drug baby, an infant born to a heroin-addicted mother. She had left the hospital after the delivery. Since then the tiny boy had been hooked to a morphine pump to help wean him off the drugs. The newborn spent every minute shaking and crying and even convulsing as his little body struggled to overcome his addiction. He was still in the hospital, no family at all.
“He’s been here twenty-one days,” the social worker had told Aaron and Lucy on a conference call. “The need is urgent. If you could come get him, we think you’d make the best home.”
Dizziness and sorrow and elation had swept over Lucy all at once. “Twenty-one days?” The situation was horrific. The poor baby. “You’re telling us this baby has been in the hospital on a morphine pump for three weeks with no mother, no one to claim him?”
“Yes.” Discouragement marked the man’s voice. “It’s fairly common. The addiction is broken at this point, which is why he needs a home.” He paused. “Anyway, I have a feeling his mother’s rights will be terminated very quickly.”
Lucy and Aaron didn’t hesitate. This many years later she could still remember how her heart had bonded with that little drug-addicted baby boy—even before she first laid eyes on him. They left work immediately and drove by Target. A car seat, a bag of diapers, a few baby clothes, and they raced to the hospital.
The child was beautiful. Pink skin and a head full of dark hair. Since they were licensed, and since the baby was a ward of the state, the process hadn’t taken long. They simply packed him up, strapped him in the new car seat and signed the papers. Just like that they had a baby in their home.
A child of their own.
Because of the drugs there were long nights with little Rio. Lucy didn’t mind one minute of it. She rocked him and sang to him and together with Aaron took turns feeding him and diapering him. All the while they thanked God that He had given them a baby to love. A child to raise.
Sure there was the possibility the baby might not be allowed to stay, that the potential adoption could fall through. But Lucy and Aaron never even talked about that. How could the state give little Rio back to his mother? It wasn’t possible. That’s what they told themselves.
Friends from church came by and brought a portable crib and more clothes and a stroller. Each time, Lucy and Aaron admitted that no, the paperwork wasn’t final. But their social worker had been sure the baby would be theirs. “It’ll happen,” Aaron would say. “He’s ours.”
But six weeks later the baby’s maternal grandmother contacted Rio’s social worker. She was distraught at the reality that her daughter had delivered a baby and left him at the hospital. She explained how she hadn’t known her daughter was pregnant, and how her daughter hadn’t been home since her raging heroin addiction began.
Their social worker had no choice but to verify the woman’s claims. And every last detail checked out. Ten days later, Aaron and Lucy packed up the baby clothes and diapers and infant gear, strapped Rio into his car seat and took him to the social worker’s office.
Lucy could still remember holding Rio to her chest and telling him goodbye, cradling him as her tears fell on his soft cheeks. She had made a photo album of his baby days at their house, a gift she sent on with him. So he would always know what he looked like his first two months of life. Next to her, Aaron had quietly wept. Cried harder than she had. Rio was his boy.
Neither of them knew how they’d survive saying goodbye.
The memory lifted. Lucy felt the familiar ache in her heart.
Enough.
She stood and smoothed out the wrinkles in her uniform, her eyes still on baby Nathan. As long and sad and painful as her own story was, remembering it only made things worse. She studied the tiny infant in his incubator bassinet. “It’s okay, sweet boy. You’re going to make it.” She leaned in and cooed the words near the part of the hood where her voice could get through. “Keep fighting, Nathan.” And there just for a moment—she could see baby Rio again, hear his pained
little cry.
She could feel him in her arms, his warm, helpless little body pressed against hers. Little Rio. The son she would always love. The baby she hadn’t told her new friend Brooke about.
And for a single instant she remembered what it felt like walking out to the car that day at the social worker’s office without Rio. How she had known then that something would forever be missing. Because she had left a piece of her heart with that sick baby boy.
A piece she would never get back.
9
Elise felt like she was losing her mind. She couldn’t be pregnant, couldn’t have Randy’s baby growing inside her. The more she thought about her ex-boyfriend, the more she knew there was nothing normal about their relationship.
Not even for the bad girl she’d become when she was with him.
Now, there was no way she wanted Randy’s baby. He didn’t want a child, either. He’d made that very clear.
But more than a week after telling Cole that she might be pregnant, she still didn’t have her period. Her nausea and vomiting were worse, and she still hadn’t told her mother about any of this. She couldn’t. Her mother would be crushed.
She had avoided going with Cole to the local crisis pregnancy center. The thought of it made the entire situation too real. Still, she had to find out, so that day, after school was out, she began walking to Walgreens for a pregnancy test. Snow was falling, and Elise didn’t have her warmest coat. But she didn’t care. She had to know if she was pregnant or not.
She was still on the school grounds when Cole must’ve spotted her. He slowed his Explorer and rolled down his window. “I can give you a ride.”
“No, thanks.” Elise didn’t want to talk to him. She’d been doing everything possible to avoid moments like this. She shook her head. “I’m just going to Walgreens. It’s close.”
Cole looked frustrated. “Then I’ll take you there. Coach canceled practice.”
“No.” She kept walking. This situation was her fault and she would handle it. She had no right to involve Cole Blake. Even if all she wanted was to spend every spare minute with him.
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