Choices (A Woman's Life)

by Marie Ferrarella

  Reid turned around and stepped on the gas. She was definitely scared. “First baby?”

  And last. “Yes.”

  The field of red taillights up ahead looked brighter than they should. That could only mean cars were braking. Another jam? He hoped not. “They say first babies are usually late.”

  She clutched her stomach with both hands, wishing she could just squeeze the baby out and be done with it. “They lie.” Shanna clamped down on her lower lip to keep from yelling out. That much control she still had.

  Her moan at the next red light had him turning around again. The woman’s head was thrown back against the cushion. Light from the street lamp was streaking in and Reid was able to get his first clear look at her face. And then it came to him.

  “The Bahamas.”

  Shanna opened her eyes. Weren’t they ever going to get there? “What?”

  “The Bahamas,” he repeated. “I met you in the Bahamas five months ago.”

  It was ebbing away. Thank God the pain was ebbing away again. She let out a huge sigh, feeling only marginally human. She dragged a hand through her hair, moving it away from her face. “I don’t remember.”

  But he did. Hers wasn’t a face to forget easily. He wondered what she was doing out here by herself at this time of night in her condition. Where was her husband? “Your husband still in the hotel room?”

  Her head jerked up. Leaning forward, she touched the plastic surrounding the identifying photograph on the back of the front seat.

  She stared for a moment at the smiling face she saw there before looking up at Reid, her eyes opened wide in recognition.

  “You.”

  “Me. Small world, isn’t it?” His mother had always been a firm advocate of destiny. Until this moment he had never believed in it himself.

  Shanna leaned back in the seat as she braced herself again. “Could we please save the reunion for later and get to the hospital? This baby doesn’t want to WAIT!” She shrieked out the last word as the contraction crashed into her like a doubled-up fist. She could have sworn she felt the baby trying to kick its way out through her side. The front of her abdomen began quivering uncontrollably and wouldn’t stop.

  Shanna struggled to hold back her sob.

  They had slowed to a crawl. Before them was what looked like the mother of all traffic jams. Reid let out a breath through his teeth, thinking. They weren’t going anywhere for a while, that was obviously clear. He wondered if the woman could hold out. The strangled cry from the backseat answered his silent question and had him debating driving on the sidewalk. He was game, but there wasn’t enough room to do it. The alley up ahead on his right led to a dead end. There was no alternate route. This was it. They were stuck.

  He draped his arm over the back of the seat as he turned toward her. She looked bad, he thought. What the hell was he supposed to do with her? “Primary night isn’t a good time to be out on the road.”

  It sounded like an accusation. Maybe he thought this was fun for her.

  “It wasn’t exactly up to me,” she snapped. Another wave, larger, more powerful than the last, began to build on the heels of the one that had just passed. She clutched at the folds of her dress, needing desperately to hold on to something.

  Panic was growing with each wave. “I think the baby’s coming.”

  It was about three miles to the hospital from here. They were never going to make it in time. Reid looked around anxiously for a policeman, but there wasn’t a single one in sight. Nothing but cars and blaring horns. She certainly wasn’t in any condition to walk, and gallant though the thought might be, he couldn’t carry her there. She’d probably give birth right in the street.

  Or in the car.

  He glanced toward the alley and made up his mind. Leaning on his horn until the driver in front of him turned around, Reid pointed to himself and then jerked his thumb in the direction of the alley. The car in front pulled up as far as it could, moving to the left.

  There was hardly enough room to maneuver, but with two tires bumping along on the sidewalk, Reid managed to pull the taxi into the alley. He went as far as he could, then cut the engine.

  It was a narrow alleyway between two relatively old apartment buildings. Uncovered garbage cans pockmarked the area. It didn’t smell very good, either, but then, he doubted that the woman in the backseat would really care about that right now. He was trying to give her as much privacy as he could.

  “You got a cell phone?” he asked her. “I can’t call. My radio’s out and my battery’s dead.”

  “A cell phone?” She blinked, suddenly remembering where she’d left hers on the desk before she’d come out onto the street. “No.”

  “Great.” He bit his lip, shaking his head. “I guess we’re really on our own, aren’t we?”

  When he got out of the car, Shanna’s distress was ripe, ready to explode. He wasn’t just going to walk away and leave her here, was he? “Where are you going?” she cried.

  He knew panic when he heard it. “Nowhere. I’m right here,” he said softly. He opened the rear door and got into the backseat next to her. “First baby, you said.”

  She stared at him with wide eyes, shrinking into the corner of the car as far as she could. “Yes.”

  He smiled encouragingly at her as he took her hand in his. “That makes two of us.”

  Was he saying that he was going to ... ?

  When he reached for the hem of her dress, she pressed her palm down over it. “No!”

  He was all for modesty in the right place, but this wasn’t it. Circumstances had plunged them both beyond polite niceties. “Lady, I don’t want to do this any more than you do, but right now I’m all you’ve got.”

  He was right. She was going to give birth inside a filthy cab in a filthy alley. This was more awful than anything she could have imagined.

  “Have you ever done this before?’ she asked suddenly. Maybe he had training in assisting at childbirth. Policemen did, didn’t they? Maybe taxi drivers did, too. Her thoughts began winking in and out, making no sense as they chained together.

  “I’ve never delivered a human baby, no. I helped my dog have puppies, once. I was twelve at the time.” He saw horror mingle with pain in her eyes. He reached over and took back the clenched hand into his, holding on tightly. For now, the best thing he could do for her was give her comfort. “Don’t worry, these things have a way of never leaving you.” His eyes were warm, as was the feel of his hand. “Like riding a bicycle.”

  She had no idea who he was, or even his name. She had glossed over that because his face had startled her when she had looked at his photograph. For all she knew, he could be some closet homicidal maniac or a rapist.

  But there was something about his eyes that made her trust him. Besides, she had no choice.

  Shanna hated the fact that it had been taken out of her hands. Again.

  As another contraction slashed through every fiber of her being, making her want to scream, making her want to beg for mercy, she damned Jordan with the last breath within her exhausted soul.

  Shanna tightened her hold on the taxicab driver’s hand and held on for all she was worth.

  Chapter 16

  Reid knew he would be sweating it out before the evening was over, but he had thought it would be because he was wrestling with difficult questions on his final exam, not sitting in the backseat of the taxicab he drove, trying to assist a pregnant woman deliver her first child.

  Who would ever believe this? He could just envision the look on his professor’s face as he told him he missed his exam because he was helping a lady give birth in an alley. Talk about truth being stranger than fiction.

  He looked at her face and saw the fear. “Lady,” he said softly. Her eyes darted toward his face, bewilderment and apprehension reflected in them. He sought for a way to reassure her. His fingers were still tangled up with hers and going numb fast. The intensity of her grip was constricting the flow of blood. “It’s going to be all right.
I promise.”

  “Easy for you to SAY.”

  The words were torn from her by the jolt of intense pain, which, once there, refused to weaken, she was certain that she was going to die in its grasp. Death was actually becoming a preferable alternative to what she was going through. There didn’t seem to be an end to this agony, just wave after wave of excruciating pain. She couldn’t cling to respites, gathering her strength for the next onslaught. There weren’t any respites. The pain no longer came and went. Now it decreased only slightly and then intensified with a vengeance. She wasn’t going to make it.

  She had an incredibly strong hold for someone who looked as thin-boned and delicate as she did, Reid thought. He began to wonder if he’d ever be able to flex his hand again. “What’s your name?”

  Her lids felt heavy as she struggled to keep them up. “Why?”

  “Because we’re going to be getting very close here in a few minutes and I can’t keep calling you ‘lady.’”

  Reid eyed the hem of her dress, hesitant to raise it even though he knew he had to. This wasn’t exactly how he had pictured getting to know her when he had sat in his beach chair five months ago, watching her stare off into the ocean. Obviously staring wasn’t the only thing the woman had done.

  “Shanna,” she bit off, tears rising of themselves to her eyes. Tears created by pain. She started to give him her last name, then stopped. Which one? Brady? Calhoun? The divorce wasn’t final yet. “Just Shanna.”

  She didn’t trust him, he thought. He couldn’t think of a single reason why she should, except that she really didn’t have much of a choice. If the situation had been reversed, he wouldn’t have been happy about it either. It was a hell of a position to find yourself in. It was probably frightening enough just to give birth for the first time without having to do it in an alley, with no hospital or doctor, just a total stranger for help. She had to be terrified.

  “All right, ‘just Shanna,’ my name’s Reid.” He tried to smile at her encouragingly. His own insides felt a little like Jell-O over what was ahead, but he wasn’t about to let her know it. “Who would have ever thought that when we met on the beach in the Bahamas, we would wind up in the back of a cab, waiting for your baby to be born.”

  He was making jokes while she was dying right in front of him. Didn’t he have any feelings? “I take it driving a cab is only temporary work until you get a job as a stand-up comic.” Startled by the magnitude of this contraction, she yanked hard on his arm. “OH GOD!”

  “He’s not making house calls tonight, Shanna.” If she kept this up, he wouldn’t be able to do anything to help her. She would have pulled out his arm. But he let her go on holding his hand. “Now think. What did they teach you at your childbirthing classes?”

  She hadn’t gone. There hadn’t been anyone to go with her and she had been too embarrassed to ask her mother. “To say no next time.”

  He looked around outside the car. The apartments on either side were still dark. No windows had been thrown open. No one was hanging out, prompted by curiosity as to what a taxi was doing, parked nose-first in the alley. At least that part was good. “Maybe you should be the one to get the job as a comic,” he suggested gently.

  Reid saw her eyes dilate as her hands flew out, grasping at the air as if there was something there that could pull her out of the spiraling pain. Then as he watched, her eyes rolled back in her head. He shook her. She couldn’t pass out on him. “Hey, hang on, Shanna. Don’t pass out on me now. You’ll miss all the fun.”

  His words penetrated, drifting slowly to her mind.

  She fought to stay conscious. She had no intention of passing out. No intention, she kept saying over and over in her head. “A man would say that,” she panted.

  “A scared man, yeah.”

  She looked at him. “You’re scared?”

  He couldn’t afford to have her lose confidence in him. Reid managed a grin. “Let’s call it opening-night jitters, okay?”

  As politely as he could, he pushed her dress up to her thighs, then slipped off her underwear. He purposely kept his eyes on her face, trying to spare her as much as he could.

  “It’s going to be all right, Shanna.” His voice was now low, soothing. Just the way it had been when he had talked to Judy as he held her. Except that with Judy, it hadn’t been all right. She had died before the doctor could arrive. Reid had been too late, had bandaged her slashed wrists too late. She had lost too much blood to be saved. The woman he had adored, the woman who had jilted him, had died in his arms.

  Reid shook his head, as if to shake off the memory. He couldn’t think about Judy now. This woman needed him. He looked around helplessly, wishing that there was a blanket or something within the cab that he could use to make her comfortable. But there wasn’t. Not even the bare necessities. She didn’t even have enough room to lie down properly.

  He smiled encouragingly at her. “Times like this, I wish I was driving a stretch limo.”

  A stretch limo. Luxury. “With champagne to toast all this.” She was getting delirious, she thought, perspiration pooling all along her body. She clamped her teeth together to imprison the scream that was escaping and it was transformed into a guttural moan.

  Reid reached up and switched on the overhead light in the car. It helped a little. As he positioned himself where he was needed, he thought he saw the crown of the baby’s head, but he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything. Wasn’t this too soon to be happening?

  He looked up at Shanna as she tried to suppress another scream. “Do you have an urge to push?”

  She nodded, swallowing, then gasped for air.

  This much he knew. “All right, I want you to lean forward as best you can, hold on to your knees, and push the next time you get the urge.” He prayed that nothing would go wrong.

  “Is that what you told your dog to do?” She was babbling nervously now, but couldn’t stop.

  “It was a well-trained dog.” He became serious. “I keep the TV on in the background when I study. Public-television broadcasts mostly. You pick up things occasionally that help.”

  She had only heard one word. The rest had faded, swimming off somewhere into the background. “Study, study for what?”

  “My degree. I’m a political-science major.” He suddenly remembered the exam. He glanced at his watch. “That’s where I’m supposed to be right now, taking my final. Up to twenty minutes ago I thought that was going to be one of the most difficult things I’d ever have to face. Now it seems like a piece of cake.” He saw the anxiety tighten her features. “We’re going to get through this.”

  “What ‘we’? Only one of us is pregnant.”

  “Shanna, if sympathy pains mean anything,” he assured her, “we both are.”

  “Reid?” She clawed at his arm again.

  “Right here, Shanna,” he said in a voice someone used to reassure a small child that there were no monsters living in the shadows of her room. “Right here.”

  “Oh-oh-OH!” Arching against the racking pain, she felt as it her pelvis was being cracked apart like a lobster.

  Show time, he thought. Unconsciously he sucked in his own breath as he spread his hands wide beneath her. “Okay, push, Shanna. Push!” He heard her grunting, but nothing was happening.

  She fell back, her head hitting the side window. She was exhausted beyond words. “I can’t, I can’t. It won’t come out.”

  There was no time for niceties, no time for trying to spare her embarrassment or his. With quick, probing hands, Reid felt the shape of her stomach. “I’m no expert in this, but it feels as if there’s nothing out of shape. I don’t think it’s breech.”

  In a haze, she was still surprised at his assessment. “Breech? How would you know?”

  “I grew up on a farm,” he told her, then flashed a quick smile at her before repositioning himself again, “if that makes you feel any better.”

  “Only if I was a chicken.” Another urge came, more demanding than the last. She d
idn’t think she had enough strength to follow through, but the pain was insistent.

  Unable to stop herself, she let loose with a scream that sliced through the heavy, humid air like a sharp hunting knife.

  Reid blinked back his own sweat as it fell into his face. He never lifted his eyes. It had to be any second now. That was the crown he saw. “If that doesn’t bring the police, nothing will.” Even if they were arriving, sirens and all, he wouldn’t have heard them. All Reid’s concentration was trained on the opening that was beginning to stretch.

  And then it was happening.

  “Okay, okay, you’re doing it, you’re doing it.” Reid’s own excitement was almost overpowering. “He’s coming, Shanna, he’s coming. The head—the head’s out,” he declared, feeling triumphant for both of them. “All right, now push again.”

  She couldn’t. There wasn’t an ounce of strength left within her. “I can’t.” Even saying the words was difficult for her. She was so drained, so very drained.

  He looked up at Shanna. There was no way he could take the child from her. He had nothing to hold on to but the tiny head. She had to push the shoulders out before he could help. She couldn’t stop now.

  “Push, goddamn it. You don’t want him knowing his mother’s a quitter, do you?”

  It was the right thing to say. She squeezed her eyes shut tight as she mentally cursed the man in the taxi with her, heaping every name she could think of on his head. Not a single one made it to her lips. She didn’t have any breath in her to say them out loud. Every ounce of energy was focused on ridding her body of the invader that was subjecting her to this torture.

  She squeezed every muscle in her body, pushing, then collapsed against the window again.

  The baby’s shoulders were free. Reid slid the tiny form out completely, hardly believing what was happening. He was holding an actual tiny newborn in his hands. There was blood everywhere, on him, on the baby, in the cab. He didn’t notice. All he knew was that he had to keep this little person safe.