by Amira Rain
Now extremely self-conscious and wondering if it were even possible I was pregnant with triplets, I sat back down in my seat and grabbed another of Jill’s discarded pickle chips. “I’ve just been eating like a maniac, guys. That’s all. And Christine says everything is completely fine. So, please…don’t make me start worrying. I think Ryan has done enough of that for the both of us lately.”
While I ate my pickle chip, Jill, Claire, and Hillary all exchanged glances, irritating me, but no one said anything. I ate the last of Jill’s pickle chips. She offered me some fries from her sandwich basket, and I took a few, thanking her. While I chewed one, a few other young women strolled by our table, waving hello, and looking at me a bit curiously, or at least that’s what I felt like, although I was now so self-conscious about my baby bump that I couldn’t tell if I was just being paranoid. At any rate, what I perceived as the women looking at me curiously made me have a sudden thought so startling that I nearly choked on my fry. Only after a few large swallows of iced tea was I able to speak.
“I get it, you guys…I get what you might be thinking. But it’s not true at all. I was not already pregnant before coming here to Briarwood.”
Rolling her eyes but smiling at the same time, Jill said that she, Claire, and Hillary already knew that. “You took a pregnancy test at your doctor’s office as part of the physical form we had you send in with your application, remember?”
I’d actually forgotten all about that.
Gently swirling the remaining inch or two of her raspberry lemonade in her plastic cup, Jill continued. “No one thinks you got pregnant in the month after you sent in application before you came here, either. No one’s thinking anything along those lines. It’s just that we’re all kind of entertained by how big you’re getting so early.”
I snorted, irritated once again. “Well, I’m glad that I’m providing ‘entertainment’ for everyone.”
Giving her head a little shake, Jill fixed me with a look an exasperated parent might give a small child. “That’s not how I meant it.”
Sighing, I leaned back in my chair, moving my hands to rest on my rounded stomach. “I know.”
Hillary said that she hadn’t been “entertained” by my first-trimester development. “In fact…well, I’m not even going to mince words. I’m not saying anything is wrong with your baby, Julia, but I think you need to visit Christine again very soon. There’s something very…just not right about your pregnancy. Again, I’m not saying anything is wrong, but….”
Before she could finish her thought, my phone rang, and I saw that it was Ryan. After excusing myself, getting up from the table, and walking a short distance away for some privacy, I asked him what was up, and he hesitated before responding.
“I don’t want to upset or alarm you in any way, Julia, but I think we need to pay Christine a visit today. This morning when you were still sleeping, I was looking at your beautiful face and your beautiful little baby belly, just thinking how gorgeous you are from head to toe, but then I got here to the logging site, and….”
“And what?”
Again, Ryan hesitated before responding. “I’m not saying that I think anything is wrong with our baby, and I don’t want you to feel any anxiety, but…I just think we need to visit Christine and get an ultrasound done today. No more waiting.”
Between what Hillary had said and now what Ryan was saying, not feeling any anxiety was completely out of the question. In fact, now I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t felt profoundly anxious the entire previous week. Something was clearly wrong with my pregnancy. Hillary knew it, Claire and Jill probably knew it, and Ryan knew it.
Before responding to what Ryan had said, I turned my back to Hillary, Claire, and Jill so that they wouldn’t see that a little moisture had suddenly welled in my eyes. “Can you get from the logging site to the village in twenty minutes? I’ll call Christine and see if she can get me in right away.”
Ryan said he’d shift into his wolf form and meet me in ten. I soon pocketed my phone and wiped my tear-filled eyes with the back of my hand, hoping with everything in me that our baby was okay.
CHAPTER TEN
I didn’t full-tilt cry when Christine examined me. I didn’t full-tilt cry when she reported that my uterus was “significantly larger” than it had been the previous week. I didn’t cry when she began doing my ultrasound, silently gliding a wand across my stomach with her gaze locked on a video monitor that Ryan and I could see as well.
However, my full-tilt tears finally came when I saw an image of our baby on the monitor. It wasn’t that it didn’t look like a perfect baby; it did. It looked like any other baby in utero. To me, it looked beautiful.
It was just that it was so large for a baby just five weeks post-conception. So well-formed. Something definitely wasn’t right with my pregnancy; that was crystal clear. The baby I was seeing on the monitor looked like a baby at least five months in the womb.
Sitting beside me in a folding chair, Ryan held my hand and smoothed my hair, white-faced, while I cried, and while Christine continued performing the ultrasound, just as white-faced as Ryan.
She hadn’t even been gliding the wand over my stomach for a full minute when she put it down and spoke in a voice that held a bit of a tremor. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I mean, nothing is wrong with him. He looks like a perfectly healthy baby about five months post-conception.”
Three words she’d said had had the effect of slowing my tears, and those words were him, perfectly, and healthy.
Sniffling, I spoke in a voice that held a bit of a tremor, just like Christine’s. “You said it’s a boy? And he really looks perfectly healthy to you?”
Eyes wide, she suddenly clapped a hand to her mouth for a moment. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I wasn’t even thinking. I should have asked if the two of you wanted to know the baby’s sex.”
Managing a little smile even in the midst of my anxiety and fear, I told her it was fine. “Ryan and I already decided that we wanted to find out whenever it was clear on the ultrasound. We just didn’t think that it would be possible so soon.”
I soon dissolved into full-tilt crying again, begging Christine to just try to figure out why the baby was growing so abnormally fast.
Wincing, she said she’d have to call in an obstetrician from the FDS. “I’m so sorry, but I’ve just never seen anything like this before. I have no answers.”
Later that afternoon, the obstetrician from the FDS arrived, having raced up to Briarwood on a dragon’s back no less. Dr. Thompson was a larger woman, probably in her fifties, with platinum blonde hair wound up in a bun and kind, honey-brown eyes.
She told Ryan and me that she’d been an obstetrician for twenty-nine years, had delivered thousands of babies, and also held a degree in obstetric sonography. “So please know that you’re in very experienced hands.”
I figured that if she couldn’t tell Ryan and me what was going on with my pregnancy, probably no one could.
Like Christine had done, Dr. Thompson examined me and performed an ultrasound, then had a brief private meeting with Christine before giving Ryan and me her verdict while wearing a slight frown, which she hadn’t been wearing when we’d first met her.
“I’m sorry to tell you both this, but like my colleague Dr. Adams, I’ve been unable to determine just why your pregnancy is progressing at such a rapid pace. Frankly, I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years of practicing medicine. Dr. Adams told me that your uterus has more than doubled in size from her measurements last week, and this just leaves me at a complete loss.” Frowning even harder, she paused briefly. “If I had to completely hazard a guess, I’d say that the baby being a shifter child might have something to do with what’s going on. There’s still so much we doctors don’t understand about shifters, both physically and genetically, which means that we can’t possibly know everything about their offspring and how they develop, from the womb to adulthood. It’s completely possible that a very small per
centage of shifter children just naturally develop very rapidly, for whatever reason. Maybe we doctors just haven’t been able to observe this phenomenon yet simply because there haven’t been enough shifter children born yet in order for us to discover any anomalies.” Pausing again, Dr. Thompson took a deep breath before continuing. “My advice to you parents-to-be may seem impossible, and will be much easier said than done, I’m sure, but I’m going to tell the two of you to try to relax and not worry. As of right now, your baby boy appears to be perfectly healthy. Try to focus on that fact as much as you possibly can.”
Although everything she’d said had made me feel immeasurably better, Dr. Thompson’s advice to “relax and not worry” almost made me want to laugh out loud. I knew there was no possible way I couldn’t not worry until my baby was in my arms. The upside to this thought was that, at the rate the baby was developing, it might only be a mere couple of weeks until he was born.
I wasn’t wrong. At six weeks pregnant, I looked like I was six months. At seven weeks pregnant, Dr. Thompson, who was kind enough to fly into Briarwood every three days to help Christine care for me, said that the baby’s measurements were exactly in line with a baby at a gestational age of seven months. At the end of my eighth week of pregnancy, I was as big as a house and getting bigger and bigger seemingly by the hour because of my still-ravenous appetite and near-continual eating. Dr. Thompson and Christine both agreed that I was nearly ready to deliver.
Obviously, everything was happening faster than Ryan and I could really process and absorb. He worried constantly about me. I worried constantly about him, afraid that he was going to work himself into complete exhaustion between leading his pack in numerous daily patrol runs, and also running the community’s logging enterprise, in addition to taking care of me at home, since I was becoming so big that my back hurt terribly if I was on my feet longer than just a few minutes. This meant that I was no good to cook anything but the simplest of dinners anymore, and the most intensive housecleaning I could do was a few quick passes with a broom or a mop. Ryan hated me exerting myself to do that anyway, but I still did sometimes when he was gone, even though this simple act often left me breathless. Even showering felt like a heck of a task some days. I couldn’t even tie my own tennis shoes anymore.
We both constantly worried about the baby, who we’d decided to name Alexander Michael, just because we both liked the name. We’d call him Alex for short. During these stressful, anxious days, one of our only solaces besides each other was when we could feel Alex kick, which I’d started to be able to feel the same day that Dr. Thompson had first come to Briarwood. Smiling, Ryan often put a hand on my stomach, asking Alex if he was “around,” as in, “You around, buddy?” which never failed to make me laugh for some reason. Usually, whether roused from hearing Ryan’s deep voice or my laughter, this never failed to make Alex do a few little kicks. Ryan would usually comment that we had a very strong boy, and it seemed that we really did. One night, I wasn’t able to sleep a wink on account of Alex repeatedly kicking me hard in the ribs, each time just as I was drifting off.
Our only other solace during these trying days was that Frederick Bennett and his pack of Graywolves continued to keep to themselves in Shadow Fen, not attempting any attacks on Briarwood or any of the other villages in Denton, and not even dispatching any spies. This allowed Ryan to be much less busy than he would have been otherwise, even though he was still plenty busy even without constant Graywolf problems. In addition to the daily patrols, the logging enterprise, and taking care of me and the animals, even cleaning the cats’ litterbox, he was also planning some new construction in the village with his council members, which included Steb and five other men.
When I was exactly nine weeks pregnant, he was at a council meeting around six in the evening when I felt a pain nothing like the sharp, stabbing sort of pains that had continued all throughout my pregnancy. This new pain was something like a tightening and a squeezing, painful in an insistent yet dull sort of way.
Jill had brought me over a pan of lasagna, knowing it was one of my favorite meals, and she’d stayed to eat with me upon learning that Ryan was still at the council meeting. Now, sitting at the dinner table with Jill, I paused with my last bite of my second helping of lasagna halfway to my mouth, feeling what I was pretty sure was a contraction. While it squeezed my entire rounded midsection like some kind of an invisible constrictor snake, I made a faint noise that sounded something like Oh, and Jill immediately looked up from the last few bites of her lasagna, salad, and bread.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
While the tight, constricting sort of pain seemed to move around from my stomach to my lower back, I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly before responding. “I think I might be in labor.”
Like I’d been slightly afraid she might, Jill basically freaked out, for lack of a better way to put it, jumping up from her chair so fast that she actually overturned it, startling the heck out of Jake, who was sitting near my chair waiting for the bite or two of dinner I always gave him.
Not paying any mind that she’d overturned her chair, Jill whipped out her cell phone. “I’ll call 911. I’ll call for an ambulance. Oh my God, we don’t even have ambulances here in Briarwood!”
“Jill, I don’t even think I need-“
“If we can find two long sticks, I can make you a stretcher out of a blanket. I’ll carry you out to your car on it, then I’ll drive you to Christine’s clinic.”
“Jill, I-“
“But we’re going to need one other person to carry one of the ends of the stretcher. I can’t be in the front and back of it all at once!”
With her face an almost comical mask of anxiety, she bit her lip hard, and I suddenly had to struggle mightily to stifle laughter, realizing that she was being completely serious about the stretcher. She wasn’t trying to be funny. She actually thought that constructing a makeshift stretcher for the purpose of carrying me through the house to the garage might actually be helpful.
“Jill, I really don’t think I need a stretcher.”
Seemingly oblivious to the fact that I’d had to speak with a hand over my mouth to conceal the amusement that I was sure was written all over my face, Jill began rubbing her temples with an expression that could only be described as a mask of anguish. “Well, other than trying to make a stretcher, I just don’t know what to do. I may have been your matchmaker and your giving-away person at your wedding, but I never dreamed I’d have to deliver your baby. I know I’m actually going to have a baby of my own before long, but for some reason, this situation right now is just feeling way too adult for me.”
“Jill. Just listen for a sec.”
“I’ll just do the best I can. Hillary’s always telling me that I need to work on ‘maturing’ a little, and I feel like helping a person bring a baby into the world is probably one of the most mature things a person can do.”
“Or, you could put off full, exceptionally mature adulthood a little while longer and just call Ryan right now. He’ll probably race on over here from the town hall, probably within a few minutes, and I really don’t think I’m going to have the baby before then. I’m sure I’ll at least have enough time for Ryan to take me to Christine’s clinic in his truck. All you’ll have to do is stay here, put the dinner leftovers away, and maybe take Jake out before you leave.”
Breathing heavily, as if she’d just run a mile, Jill leaned over the table, bracing herself with her hands. “Oh my God…you’re right. I’ll just call Commander Wallace. It didn’t occur to me, but it makes perfect sense. He can drive you to Christine’s. He can carry you out to his truck in his arms. We won’t even need a stretcher. ‘This isn’t the movies, Jill,’ you’re probably thinking. Right? I’m thinking that, too. But it’s time for me to just grow the hell up now and get my head out of Hollywood. This isn’t a scripted drama. This is real life.”
Another contraction suddenly hit me, this one a little stronger than the first. Holding m
y stomach, wincing, I glanced up at Jill.
“Do you think you could call Ryan now?”
“Oh, God. Right.” She immediately began swiping and tapping at her phone screen. “Commander Wallace. Just give me a minute to figure out if I put him under C or W.”
While she sorted that out, I got up from the table and began heading toward the ground floor bathroom. I was nervous, excited, and worried about baby Alex, hoping with every fiber of my being that despite my bizarre pregnancy, he’d be born healthy and strong. However, I also had a more immediate concern on my mind, even though it wasn’t one trillionth as important. I wanted to brush my teeth and swish with mouthwash before Ryan arrived so that I wouldn’t breathe garlicky dinner breath on him or anyone else while I labored.
A few minutes later, I’d just spit a mouthful of mouthwash into the sink when my water broke, suddenly gushing down my legs and pooling in a puddle on the floor. Not two seconds later, a powerful contraction hit me, followed by another one almost immediately after the first one had ended. Leaning against the wall, waiting for the pain to pass, I had a feeling that baby Alex was going to be making his entrance into the world very soon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For as absolutely crazy as my pregnancy had been, my labor and delivery could not have been more routine. I didn’t even experience a lot of pain, at least not pain that was excruciating or unbearable. Two muscle relaxer pills might have helped with that. It also might have had something to do with the fact that my labor was short, only lasting a little over two hours. Dr. Thompson said that since my muscles were fairly relaxed, this made it so that my body wasn’t trying to “fight” the contractions.
Holding Alex for the first time was like a dream. I cried. Alex squawked and flailed his little arms. Ryan’s eyes become shiny, and he cleared his throat at least a half-dozen times. We counted Alex’s fingers and toes. We marveled over his full head of dark brown hair. We both glanced at each other, laughing, when I remarked that Alex’s sweet, tiny, little legs kind of resembled frog legs. Then I returned my gaze to his tiny, little legs and began crying again. He was just so precious and perfect in every possible way.