A Holland and a Fighter

by Lori L. Otto

  I pass through the patio doors, the quickest way to my bedroom, to find a t-shirt. I’d hoped the buzzer hadn’t awoken Coley, but she’s sitting up in bed, the moonlight shining on her.

  “What was it?”

  “Matty’s here.” I scratch my head, feeling the mess of hair up there.

  “Why?” She picks up her phone, and then mine. “We didn’t miss any calls.”

  “Not sure. I’ll handle it.”

  “He wouldn’t just come over in the middle of the night,” she reasons with me.

  “Maybe Nolan kicked him out.”

  She scoffs. “No.” She climbs out of bed, wearing nothing but her satin underwear, and ambles to the dresser. I walk over to her and kiss her deeply, feeling down the sides of her body.

  “Didn’t we just do that?” She laughs, moving her mouth to my bare chest.

  “Couldn’t we just do that forever?”

  “Not with your uncle coming up!” We hear the ding of the elevator, which means he’s in our apartment. “Get out! I’m naked!”

  I laugh and grab my t-shirt from the floor, sliding it on as I navigate the dark hallway.

  “Trey?” my uncle calls out to me.

  “All lights on,” I say aloud, watching the whole apartment become bathed in a bright yellow, mimicking the sunrise. “Hey, Matty.” When my eyes focus on his face, I can tell something’s not right.

  “Hi, Matty!” Coley follows me into the room, now in leggings and a short robe.

  “Hey, kids.” He signals to the couch. “Can we sit down?”

  I reach for my fiancée’s hand. “Sure.” We take the couch while my uncle chooses the recliner on the other side of Coley. “What’s going on?”

  “Are you okay, Matty?”

  He opens his mouth, as if to speak, but nothing comes out. Tears immediately fall from his eyes. I squeeze Coley’s hand, nervous. “I took a cab over here and tried to think of what I was going to say to you, but there is no way to tell you this, Trey. It’s… the worst.”

  “Just say it, Matty. Who is it?”

  I already know it’s dire news about someone we care about. I can tell that by the way he’s acting. Anxiety is eating away at me as I consider everyone I love.

  “It’s your sister.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Oh my god,” Coley says. “The baby?”

  I put my arm around her. “What happened?”

  He shakes his head. “She had the baby… but she didn’t make it.”

  “What?” I feel like I didn’t hear him correctly.

  “No…” Coley puts her hands over her mouth in shock. I hear her gasping for air.

  “What do you mean? She didn’t make it…”

  “It was a heart thing, Trey. After the operation to deliver the baby.”

  I stand up, staring at him in disbelief. “Who–” My voice falters. “Who told you?”

  “Your father.”

  “No,” I fall back onto the couch where my girlfriend is already crying; where she’s already accepted the news. “No.” She wraps her arms around me, but mine are limp and unable to move. I continue to look in the direction of my uncle, but the vision of him blurs. When I feel one, lone tear fall on my right cheek, I hold Coley to me with all of my strength and let her cry. The empathy in my uncle’s eyes is of comfort to me. It gives me courage. “It’s okay, laureate. Shhh… it’s okay.” I sniffle back the remaining tears.

  “It’s awful,” he says to me.

  “How’s the baby?” I ask.

  “He was doing well. Small, but the doctors are hopeful.”

  “And how’s Jon?”

  “When I talked to Jacks… they hadn’t told him about her yet. He was with the baby.”

  “Oh, shit…” I take a deep breath, considering the unimaginable pain he must be going through. “And my parents?”

  “Devastated,” he whispers, getting choked up. I nod.

  “Who else knows?” I ask him.

  “Nolan’s calling your aunts and uncles. I need to go see Shea, because she’s alone… and Will–he’s with the girls. I’ve got to take them to the hospital to be with Jon.”

  “Edie and Willow,” Coley sobs. “How are they going to handle this, Trey? They’re so young.”

  “With our help,” I tell her. “All of our help.”

  “Matty, can I go with you to Shea’s?” Coley asks.

  “We’ll both go,” I suggest. “And then to talk to Will. I’ll bring the girls to the hospital with you.”

  “Thank you,” he says. “I don’t know if I can see them and not fall to pieces.”

  “I think I can. We can take my car, too. Coley, let’s go get changed.”

  “We’ll just be… five minutes,” she tells him. We go back to our master bathroom with the same idea. I know I still feel like sex, and I don’t want to go to the hospital like this. We strip off all of our clothes and start both shower heads, each taking our own. We share the soap and shampoo, but don’t say anything to one another. I stand under the hot water until she shuts hers off, at which point I turn around and reach for her hand. She steps under my stream and, eyes still flooded with tears, gives me a desperate kiss.

  With our hair towel-dried, we find fresh clothes and dress quickly. I throw on a college tee and a button-down and Coley chooses a hoodie, even though the warm air outside doesn’t necessitate it. It’s a smart choice–it’s probably only a matter of time before word gets out, and this will be the biggest news story to hit Manhattan in quite some time.

  “We’re ready,” I say, grabbing my keys. “Do we need to pick up Nolan?”

  “He’ll meet us there. He was heading over already.”

  “Good.”

  Coley hands me a cap and dons one herself as we secure the alarm and exit the apartment.

  The car ride to the Flatiron District is quiet, save for the lingering sniffles in the backseat. Coley and Matty sit side-by-side and are holding hands when I look back there.

  “Do you think Shea suspects something’s wrong?” I ask Matty.

  “I have no idea what she knows… about where Will is, if she knows he’s gone… nothing.”

  “They were best friends,” Coley says with a sigh. I try to put myself into her shoes. I remember how it felt when I saw Max get shot, when I thought he was dead. The pain was unbearable. “Should we call her doctor first? Is there a risk of her going into labor?”

  And then I consider Shea, and what I know of her. She’s a woman who’s suffered many losses in her life. Tremendous ones, like the loss of both of her parents. Life-altering ones, like the business her mother handed down to her. The home that was essentially repossessed from her. And she said goodbye to all that she knew when she made the move to Manhattan. Shea knows how to survive. Shea knows strength.

  “I think she’s the only one who can tell Will,” I say, feeling certain of that–knowing how he cared for my sister. “And I think she’ll be equipped to handle the news, as horrible as it is.”

  “She and Livvy had the same obstetrician, right?” Matty asks. I nod my head. “I’ll see if I can get the number from Emi, just in case.”

  “I’m sure she’s already at the hospital tonight,” Coley adds. “Surely they called her.”

  I pull up to the curb in front of their building, leaving my keys in the ignition.

  “We’ll be leaving in a couple of minutes. This is an emergency,” I tell the valet. “If you can just watch it with the hazards on.” He nods.

  Inside the building, we tell the concierge we’re there to see Shea Scott. She takes no time to answer the buzzer, allowing us all to come right up.

  Chapter 17

  SHEA

  I take a deep breath and wait by the door, patting Gunner’s head. “Release,” I tell him. “Relax,” I say to myself, knowing that two Hollands and Coley coming to my apartment in the middle of the night is not a good sign–not on the same night my husband’s been called away to watch Livvy’s kids because she’s
been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.

  If she was okay, Will would be home. If the baby was here, I would have received a phone call. When I hear the ding of the elevator, I open the door, letting the dog out into the hallway to greet everyone. I’m still in my pajamas and a long robe but realize I could have better used that time to change when I see Trey, Coley and Matty.

  “What happened?” I ask, letting them all in. Trey and Coley sit on the couch; Matty leans against the end of it. I take the love seat across from them, where Gunner–too large for the small sofa, normally, but welcome right now when I see their faces–stretches across the whole thing, with his upper body draped up the back pillows and his head just behind my neck. I rub his belly, which soothes us both. He’s a perceptive animal, sensing the mood of the room as well as I can.

  Coley’s already crying. I shake my head. “She lost the baby,” I say, breaking down and putting my other hand on my belly. “Oh, no…”

  “No,” Matty says quickly.

  I gasp, looking at them all. Trey gets up and walks toward me, taking a knee in front of me. The dog smells him and gets off the couch to lick his face; Trey’s red nose gives away the fact that he’s been crying, too, although I see he’s trying to be strong.

  “The baby made it, Shea.” He takes a deep breath, then swallows. “Livvy didn’t.” His eyebrows shift in disbelief, showing that he’s still in shock.

  “Gunner, down.” Trained, he’s lying on the floor with his head on his paws immediately. I reach for Trey and embrace him tightly. “Oh, Trey,” I whisper quietly as my tears fall on his shoulder. “Oh, don’t say that.”

  “I’m sorry, Shea.”

  “No, I’m sorry, sweetie. Oh, no…” I wave Coley over, wanting to hold on to her, too.

  “Are you okay?” she asks. “Are you feeling… I mean?”

  “Charlie’s fine,” I assure her. “I’ve been worrying about Liv for the past couple hours, ever since Will left. I just had a bad feeling. I just… didn’t think it would be her. Oh my god. How is Jon?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “And your mom and dad?”

  “Heartbroken,” Matty says.

  “I can’t imagine.” I let out a few more tears. “We were gonna raise them together,” I say, feeling sad. “She was going to teach me how to be a good mom. What am I gonna do?” Suddenly, I feel panic, realizing how much I’d been relying on my friend through this pregnancy, and had planned to rely on her in the coming months.

  “You’re gonna be a great mom, Shea,” Coley says. “You’ve been watching her for years.”

  “Surely you know all the tricks by now,” Matty says, taking the seat Gunner had.

  “She was my best friend, though. It was always going to be Jon and Livvy and Will and Shea. That’s just how we are. How we were always going to be. They moved down the street to be closer to us, and now… I’ll never be able to walk down there and see her again. I can’t… this was the life we’d dreamed of.”

  “I know, Shea,” Trey says.

  “Both of us. I sound so selfish, but we couldn’t wait to push our babies around in strollers, going to Sunday brunch together. Taking them to the private school two blocks away. We had it all figured out.”

  “I know, honey.” Matty’s arm is around me.

  “Now what happens?”

  “We all help,” Coley says, stifling away tears and wiping them with her hoodie sleeve. “I’ll help. I’ll go to brunch with you. I’ll push the stroller. Jon will need help. I know it’s not the same, but we’re friends, too.”

  “Of course, we are. Sisters,” I assure her, giving her another hug. “Poor Jon. How’s he going to manage?”

  “Just what Coley said,” Trey responds. “We’ll all pitch in. He’ll never be alone in this.”

  “The girls,” I say, looking in the faces of all of them. “Do they know? Does Will know?” I reach for my phone in between Trey and Coley. “I don’t know how he’ll take the news.”

  “We want your help… telling him. We want to take the kids to the hospital. But do you think you can tell Will?”

  “Of course. Oh, he’ll be sick. He’ll be so upset. He figured they were taking Liv as a precautionary measure, but he’s been waiting for news. He’s been texting Jon for the past hour with no response. Now I understand why…”

  “Yeah,” Trey says. “Matty, did you tell Max and Callen?”

  “No, we wanted to tell you guys first.

  “Okay. Coley, someone needs to tell them. If I call the car service to take you, do you think you can handle that while we get Edie and Willow to the hospital?”

  She nods her head. “Yeah. And they can bring me to the hospital.”

  “Right.”

  “We should go now…” Matty says.

  I nod, then go to the bedroom and change. I grab some clothes for Will, remembering that he only pulled on some lounge pants and a t-shirt before he ran out the door.

  Since Will and I each have a spare key to Jon and Livvy’s apartment, we bypass the doorman and head straight up to the 55th floor.

  Chapter 18

  WILL

  As I sit in the upstairs library just outside the girls’ rooms, I hear the main door open. Relieved, I set down the book I’d been reading and start downstairs to greet Jon and Livvy, but from the top of the steps, I see my wife, Trey and Matty, instead.

  I stop dead in my tracks. “What?”

  Shea signals for me to join them on the first floor of the apartment. I shake my head, reluctant, but take the stairs, one-by-one, anyway. I don’t even need to look in their eyes to see something bad has happened. I can feel the tension surround me. I can sense the words that no one is speaking. My throat gets tight in the silence, and I’m drawing my own damned conclusions–none of which are good.

  “Somebody tell me what happened.”

  “I’m going to take you up to the third floor,” Shea says with an empathetic smile.

  “We don’t go up there,” I remind her of the strict rule that was issued months ago by both my brother and sister-in-law about their studio, which took up the entire top floor of their penthouse home. “Livvy will smell the paints on us from a mile away.”

  She tugs on my arm, leading me toward the elevator. “Let’s go.”

  “We’ll see you there,” Trey says softly, heading up the staircase with Matty.

  “What are they doing?” I ask Shea once the elevator doors close. She shakes her head, not wanting to say. “Going to wake the girls?” She looks up to stop tears from falling down, just as the doors open to the third floor of their apartment–the 57th and top floor of the building. We had only been up here once–when it was still under construction, and Jon was showing us the small corner where his workspace would be in contrast to the vast openness where Livvy would be allowed to paint with a nearly unobstructed, 360-degree view of Manhattan through floor-to-ceiling windows.

  It's a cloudless night, and the moon casts an eerie glow on all of the unfinished paintings that sit on easels and drop cloths all around us. And the paint smell is strong, as the room’s been closed-up for months. I remember how to open the venting windows that Jon had installed and do so immediately–not only to keep the smell from soaking into our clothes, but to stall from whatever bad news is on the tip of Shea’s tongue. I can tell she doesn’t want to deliver it, anyway.

  I start to look around the room at different pieces of art, standing in front of each incomplete painting and trying to figure out where Livvy was headed with it. Shea remains standing in the middle of the entire floor, still next to the elevator, leaving me be.

  I know in my heart something has happened to Liv. If it doesn’t matter that we come out of this room smelling like paint, something has happened to her. I start crying while looking at the fourth oil painting, this one nearly finished. I touch a deep, red swirling object that appears to fall deeper into the canvas. It’s kind of how I feel right now.

  When I audibly gasp for air, I
hear Shea’s footsteps quickly approaching. “Will,” she says softly.

  “It’s her, right?” I ask. Her response is simply a hand on my shoulder. I fall to my knees as guttural sobs erupt from my chest and echo within the cavernous room. Shea kneels behind me with her arms around my neck. “Is she…” They’re the only words I can choke out.

  “She’s gone, Will.”

  I turn around quickly and she welcomes me into her arms. She steadies me, and it should be the other way around, I know, but Livvy was too special to me. Her artistic soul was so much like mine that I often felt we were connected in that way.

  I hear words coming from Shea, but I’m not really listening. I’m thinking about the pretty girl I met for the first time one Christmas Eve. She’d made me an ornament. She was famous and she had dinner at my apartment, and I told the boys at school who’d bullied me that she’d come over, and they called me a liar. They didn’t believe that Livvy Holland came to my shitty apartment. They’d even made me doubt that she had–except I had the ornament to prove it.

  “Cardiac arrest…”

  I’m thinking about the girl who I swear would flutter her long eyelashes at me when she’d say, “Hey, Will,” to greet me. My stomach would erupt in butterflies. I had such a crush on her.

  “Tried everything…”

  I’m thinking about the time I got caught by my brother ogling her breasts at dinner with her whole family, at the Holland house.

  “Nothing they could do…”

  I’m thinking about the woman who forced me to dance with her at her wedding, even though I was nervous as fuck and had two left feet and knew everyone would be watching. Even though I had slept with a multitude of women by then, but still lost my breath at the sight of her in a wedding dress that day. And at the end of that day, I went back to my hotel room alone, still thinking about her, but no longer with the unrealistic dream that someday she’d realize I was the better brother.

  “Saved the baby…”

  For one thing, I’d always known Jon was it for her. For another, he’d convinced her to marry him. And lastly, she was carrying his baby.