“Let’s take a look at you,” my doctor said. “Nothing out of the ordinary happened tonight, right?”
I looked at Derek who imperceptibly shook his head. I shook my head like a good girl.
My doctor took the helm and wheeled the chair down the hall.
“There are some scrubs in the basket there,” she called back over her shoulder to Derek.
“Why would I need them?”
I heard a stricken tone in his voice.
“Labor coaches come right into the birthing area, so you need to be ready.”
She and I turned the corner and I heard nothing else. In the birthing room, I gingerly stood up and the two nurses helped me get undressed and into one of those backless hospital gowns.
“It’s already happening,” I said to Nate, the big guy, as he undid the safety pins holding my jeans together and slid them off along with my underwear. “Mom told me this would happen. My modesty is down the tubes already.”
He smiled and nodded.
The nurses left and I eased onto the bed, took a deep breath and closed my eyes. One hurdle overcome. At least I was here. Then I started to worry about Rudy being early. Then I started thinking about the incidence of dwarfism. Then I thought about Fergie and my head started to hurt.
“Are you alone?”
I opened my eyes and there by the side of the bed, peeking around the curtain, stood Derek, dressed in blue scrubs rolled up a bunch of times at the bottom and a bunch of times at the sleeves.
I started to sniffle.
“For God’s sake,” he said. “Not again.”
“I’m scared.”
He took my hand. “Millions of women do this every year. Billions, maybe. It must be instinctive. You’ll be fine.” He said all this looking slightly green.
“Are you my labor coach?”
“Until I hear exactly what I have to do, I guess so. Your sister is on her way, though. Should take a few hours, she said. Then she started blathering about what I needed to do in the meantime and I said I was a quick study and she said she was on her way and hung up.”
“How did you get her phone number?”
“Let me just say lawyers have ways of getting what they need.”
I was having another contraction and people magically appeared in the room, hooked me up to a monitor, stuck something inside me to monitor Rudy’s heartbeat and put a blood pressure cuff on me, all in a few seconds.
“These people have done this before. That’s good,” Derek said.
He admired efficiency. I knew this about him.
The doctor said I was six centimeters dilated and things were moving along. The intensity would pick up, she said.
A hour and an uncountable number of howlingly painful contractions later, I was ready for it to be over, and my doctor was pleased with the progress. Derek was trying to get my attention with some relaxation rubbing that I knew Jennie had informed him about, but it just felt ticklish.
“If this is supposed to be relaxing me, you’ll have to think of something else.”
“I don’t know anything else,” he said. “Pick a point and focus on it when the contractions hit, and breathe like they taught you. You went to that class, didn’t you?”
“You don’t cut your birthing classes. Oooooooo.”
“Find something to focus on. Pick a spot. Hurry.”
And believe it or not, in my line of sight, there, even though it was only October, there was a god-damned sprig of green, of mistletoe hanging in the arched doorway.
“Maybe not that,” Derek said when he saw me looking there.
“Why the hell not? The ... and here I swore ... plant is the cause of all this...Owwwwww.”
“Focus. Focus. Focus,” Derek was offering in a soothing voice. And he was rubbing my belly and wiping my forehead and doing everything, it seemed, right, standing on a footstool by the side of the bed.
For what seemed like hours, I kept dilating and effacing and focusing and was about to ask for more ice chips, the only legal form of sustenance for now, when Derek said he was hungry.
I just glared at him.
“It’s the middle of the night, and I’m starving. Stress always makes me hungry.
“You’re stressing?”
He glared back.
“In my bag. Candy.” I ground out the words.
He stepped off the stool, rummaged around in the bag and came back unwrapping a candy bar.
“You didn’t get this from...” he said, hesitating before taking a bite.
I shook my head and felt this unbelievable urge to push, which I had learned was going to happen, but I didn’t expect it to be so intense. I started panting and blowing and Derek looked at me like I was mad. The nurses, however, called the doctor into the room.
“We’re having a baby,” the doctor said in a singsong voice I will never forget. She crouched down between my bent knees and felt around in the appropriate place. “And I was right in the middle of good stuff in my romance novel. Okay, now when you feel the contraction, bear down.”
It felt like I must have done that a hundred times. Derek stayed right by me. I had his hand. And I was squeezing it. And squeezing it.
Then on the hundred million and first bearing down, the doctor said “I see the head.” That was motivating so the next contraction, I pushed harder than I ever thought I could, and felt such relief as Rudy slid into the hands of the doctor and, I think, made a tiny sound. Somehow there were now ten or twelve people in the room and they each had something to do with Rudy or me.
“She’s beautiful,” Derek whispered close to my ear. He smoothed my sweaty hair back from my face. “They have her on that table and are doing some cleaning. Now some suctioning. Now they are measuring. Aww, now she’s crying. Like her mother.” He wiped tears from my cheeks, then from his own. They whisked her away.
“A precaution,” said the doctor. “Everything seems fine but she is early and we have to monitor breathing and a few other things for a while.”
“Go with her,” I said to Derek. “Please.”
He looked questioningly at the doctor. She nodded. He was gone in a flash.
They finished with me, who knows what they did, but I felt sleepy and exhausted, and keeping my eyes open was not possible. Images and thoughts were swirling in my head. Fergie, Mom and Jennie. A purple chair. Boss. A book. And Derek. The last thing I remembered before falling into a deep and welcome sleep was the swirling image of mistletoe, and a tall woman and a not-so-tall man, smiling and kissing and kissing and smiling. And the distinct and welcome feeling of love.
Chapter Twenty-two
A First and Last Chapter
Back at my condo a few days later, things were not quite as rosy. Rudy was being a very good newborn, as newborns go, but everyone else was freaking out. My mother was freaking out because she couldn’t get here fast enough to help me. I was freaking out because my mother was coming to town, along with my sister, to help me. Derek was freaking out because he couldn’t find things and felt out of control, and he couldn’t stop talking about the whole birth process and being there with us.
To the notion of my mother coming to town, help me to do what was my question. Derek really was all the help I needed. He cooked, he cleaned, did laundry and even changed diapers. I think he was surprising himself with what he could do, but he’d never let on, as confident as he always wanted to seem. He didn’t have access to anything called paternity leave, and couldn’t have used it anyway, so he took a week off and was at my, and Rudy’s, beck and call. Mostly Rudy’s. He was captivated by my daughter. Daughter. A funny word. Being one myself, I knew the responsibilities that go with being one. I’m just learning to be a mother myself, and now that I think of it, maybe one of them is letting my mother come and help me with her newborn granddaughter.
On our fifth day home, in one of the rare moments when I was alone, sitting on my red couch, holding Rudy, feeding her and savoring her sweet baby smell and our shared moment of qu
iet, I started thinking, again letting my mind wander, this time about the future and unfinished business.
First, there was Fergie. He had been in touch, and had seemed less possessive, definitely more involved in his exotic photo shoots now than when we last saw each other. We needed some kind of resolution, Fergie and I, and I felt it would come. We’ll be forever connected through our daughter. I know that. And, mistletoe will connect us, best represented by the soft focus photo Fergie took of the white-berried plant and candle light at Caroline’s party last year, the one I deleted from my desktop but not from my mind. Mistletoe is also connected with my daughter now, my negative thoughts surrounding it changed forever by the baby-blue eyes of a tiny infant.
Lucky for Rudy her mother is a writer, because Rudy will need stories. Her story of mistletoe, when she is old enough to hear it, hopefully will have the mention and the bitterness of her grandfather’s escapades deleted, replaced by the joy of the great times in her life she has had with her two fathers. Two fathers. I surprised myself that I could go there at all, let alone so soon.
Fergie had seen those baby-blue eyes as well in Rudy’s first wide-eyed baby photo, sent by Derek; and Fergie said he wanted more and frequent images of Rudy, which Derek and I could provide online, and we did and would. The photographer of emerging national renown who was Rudy’s biological father said that one day, he’d like to come and do a shoot, a day in the life of his daughter. That word again.
Then there was Derek. He was a fixture in my condo for sure. And a fixture in my heart, me who not so long ago had declared herself done with love and lust. He’s a skilled man, Derek. Skilled in the ways of diaper-changing, baby-holding, rocking, feeding. Skilled in the ways of food preparation, clothes washing, intelligent conversation and logical arguments and explanations. And skilled in the things I had amassed on my mental list for a life mate. Food preparation and all those other things, they are all good, but he makes me feel special and smart and sexy, even with my post-baby weight still a plump little tummy preceding me wherever I go.
Then my book. I knew now I had it, the nugget, the something to write about. Sometimes writers write to make sense off the world for themselves, or for others. Sometimes to tell a story. For me, I think it will be for the joy of putting words on paper to try to explain a reconnection with love, and with joy. I almost had the first and last sentences and that is sometimes the hardest.
I looked up from Rudy’s feeding to see Derek leaning against the doorway, arms folded, staring at me with a look that made me blush. He walked over and sat on the other end of the couch, still staring.
“What’s that look?” I stammered.
“You two females, you are gorgeous,” he said. “The little one, so cuddly and sweet, and wonderfully helpless and needing me. And you, so beautiful and strong and needing me but not admitting it. Such a challenge, such a wonderful challenge. I can’t wait to be with you. And if you feel the same, for God’s sake, tell me now. I want you in all the ways that you are willing to give.”
I put Rudy in the bassinet and on my red sofa, slid into the embrace of the man it seemed I’d always been waiting for. His words, his touches, his kisses promised great things. And I, who’ve learned a lot in the last twelve months, realized yet one more, very essential and exhilarating thing— I was not done with love, not by a long shot.
About the Author
Kathy Johncox, fiction writer, communications professional, world traveler/army brat, coffee-loving Norwegian, daughter, sister, wife, mother and a pretty darn good cook, previously published The Last Generation of Women Who Cook, a short story collection celebrating the many ways food influences our lives. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but gathered material and developed story ideas in seven states and two countries before settling down to write them at her current home in upstate New York. Her short fiction has been published in Buffalo Spree Magazine, Lake Affect Magazine and The New England Writers’ Network, and online in Inkburns, an Online Literary Journal and in Potpourri: A Magazine of the Literary Arts.
Books available in print and on Kindle at www.Amazon.com
www.kathyjohncoxbooks.com
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