by Nancy Adams
“Hey,” he answered in a sleepy voice.
“Paul,” Claire sobbed, “I’m in real pain.”
“Okay!” he exclaimed, alarm flooding his voice. “Have you called an ambulance?”
“Not yet.”
“Then I’ll call one for you and I’ll get there as soon as I can. In the meantime, don’t try to move too much. I’m gonna call the ambulance now, but as soon as I have I’ll put you on speaker phone in my car, so you’ll know how far away I am. Okay, don’t panic and remember your breathing so that you don’t hyperventilate.”
“Okay,” Claire whimpered. “But Paul.”
“Yes, Claire.”
“Be quick.”
“I will.”
With that he hung up and Claire attempted to find a position that was as comfortable as possible. But the pain in her body cramped her up no matter how she attempted to lie. Soon, Paul called back and Claire lay with her head on the phone as he attempted to soothe her with words, telling her that it was all going to be alright, that most pregnancies experience a moment of severe pain like this and it’s nothing to be alarmed about, but better to be safe. As he talked, Claire closed her eyes and concentrated on his voice. It was so soothing, like a warm sea washing over her pain, and she felt something endear him to her then, smiling and thankful that he was there.
Ten minutes later, Paul arrived right before the ambulance. He waited for them at the front door and let them in with his set of keys. After that, the crew carefully loaded Claire onto a stretched and carried her down the several flights of stairs and into the back of the vehicle. The whole time, Paul stood beside her, holding her hand, continuing to ease her tensions, telling her it would be alright. She simply lay there with tears in her eyes, her face grimacing from time to time due to the pain. His benevolent expression and warm hand in her own, however, put her at ease and made her feel so lucky to have him then.
Sitting in the back of the ambulance on the way to hospital, Claire felt the pain subside slightly and was able to talk to Paul, although she still occasionally needed a burst of oxygen.
“I haven’t been fair to you,” she mumbled up to him.
“What do you mean?” he asked innocently.
“You’ve been great to me and I just take take take from you.”
“It’s okay, Claire, we don’t need to talk about this now. Just relax, we’ll be there soon.”
“But I should let you know,” she said, “that you mean a heck of a lot to me.”
Claire reached her hand up to touch the side of his face and Paul delicately took the hand and pressed it to his lips.
They soon made it to the hospital and Claire was rushed into a cubical. A nurse immediately came in and began seeing to her. As the woman prodded Claire’s abdomen, she began asking the girl questions.
“Have you been eating much fiber lately? Drinking enough water?” she asked.
“Water, yes,” Claire answered. “But I had some friends over for a week lately and the diet got a bit waylaid.”
“I see,” the nurse said, giving Claire a stern look. “Well, my early analysis is that it’s constipation. There’s no bleeding around the vagina or the uterus, and having felt your abdomen, I can feel some blockage in your intestinal tract that’s pushing against the uterus and the womb.”
“But would constipation really cause her that much pain?” Paul inquired worriedly.
“Being this late into a pregnancy it’s common for it to hurt this much. Your partner’s uterus is very delicate at the moment. Any increased pressure on it can be felt as considerable pain. However, just to be sure, I’m going to send a blood sample off for analysis and keep her in overnight.”
The corner of Paul’s mouth lifted as half a smile emerged. It was a result of the relief that now flooded through him. Beside him, Claire too was feeling relieved. Her abdomen still hurt, but the mild painkillers that she’d taken in the ambulance were beginning to work and she was feeling herself held comfortably on the edge of the pain. With the relief that she felt, she took hold of Paul’s hand and squeezed it tightly.
Having reassured them, the nurse departed and they were all alone in the cubicle. Paul took a seat next to Claire’s bed and they sat for a moment holding hands in silence, staring at the blue curtain that surrounded them. Through his hand, Claire could feel that Paul was shaking, so she squeezed it a little tighter. He turned a worried face to her and let out a withered half-smile.
“Thanks for being here with me,” Claire said to him.
“It’s cool,” he replied. “You really had me worried.”
“I can see,” she smiled, referring to his trembling hand.
“Yeah. I really thought it could have been something serious.”
“Thank God it wasn’t.”
“You want me to stay with you here all night?”
“Have you got anything in the morning?”
“Just a couple of lectures and a tutorial. But I can skip them.”
“No. You go. Get some sleep. I’m all good now.”
“I gotta say,” Paul said sheepishly after an initial pause, “that I’d rather stay. I don’t see myself getting much sleep anyway, I’d be too worried about you.”
“The nurse said I was fine. You go.”
“But still; you being here all on your own.”
Claire turned to him and looked Paul straight in the eyes.
“You’d really stay for me?” she asked.
Paul returned her gaze and replied firmly, “No matter what, Claire Prior, I’ll always be there for you at your side.”
Claire smiled, closed her eyes and leaned forward. Paul, in turn, craned his neck and their lips met for the first time. For Paul it felt like something had been lifted from him, and the longer the kiss went on, the more passionately did he respond to it. Claire also felt something bloom between the two of them then. The kiss felt so right, so well timed. In the moment she had decided to kiss him, Claire sensed that they were caught within the slipstream of their destinies, that nothing else would happen in that moment other than the kiss.
And now that it was happening, it did feel right to her, and she rejoiced in the moment as he left his seat, took her head in his hands and kissed Claire with every ounce of his love.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Juliette sat in her lounge with her arm around Margot as the latter wept on the sofa. Jules and Claude were out at a local bar, dealing with things in their own manly way. That morning, Margot and Claude had visited the gynecologist and received some bad news. The doctor had found several polyps growing on her uterus. Polyps are small benign tumors, not fatal, but still damaging to the area where they’ve formed. This meant that Margot was essentially infertile and not even qualified for IVF or a surrogate birth. The news of her inability to conceive a child hit Margot like a brick.
When she and Claude had left the doctors, they’d immediately driven to Juliette and Jules’s and Margot had thrown herself into her best friend’s arms. Jules had then grabbed his jacket and taken Claude to a bar around the corner. Since then, Margot had remained in Juliette’s arms, attempting to cry her pain out.
“Shh,” Juliette was cooing in her ear. “This doesn’t mean that it’s the end. You can still have children. The world is full of unwanted children crying out for a loving couple to raise them. You can still be a mother, my love.”
“I know,” Margot sobbed. “Claude and I discussed it recently when we considered if one of us was infertile. But still, it was only a what if…I was still expecting to have my own…”
Margot choked on her words and fell back into a pool of her own melancholia.
“All theses year,” she began saying in the midst of her wretchedness, “all these years I put it off…and now when I decide I want children…I go and find out I can’t. What kind of trick is that? A lesson for being so selfish for so long? For looking out for only me like some spoiled brat? I’ve always been that rich bitch…”
“Don’t be so nai
ve,” Juliette said firmly to her. “When you came and got me all those years ago, pulled me out of the gutter, were you being selfish then? The way you’ve supported me, preserved me. The way you kept in contact with Jules while I was the selfish bitch. All these things are the work of a true love. Someone who is selfless. And you should go out there and prove just how selfless you are by pouring all your love onto a child that finds itself cast adrift in the world.”
Margot began smiling through her tears. She sat herself up and Juliette offered her another tissue from the box. Margot took it and began wiping her eyes, her sobs gradually subsiding.
“You’re right,” she said. “This merely gives me a chance to help someone who’s fallen at the first hurdle of life. I do have love to give and so too does Claude. I never told you this, but Claude was raised in a Parisian orphanage. His father left when he was a baby and his mother died when he was only four. He really liked the idea of adoption and even suggested that we have one of our own and then adopt another later on.”
“There you go,” Juliette exclaimed gently. “It is written in the stars. You are both destined to pull some poor waif from the very gutter of existence that it has fallen into.”
Margot smiled and wiped the last of her tears away, a fresh resolve burning brightly in her heart.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was a little over three weeks since Jenna had first arrived. She and Sam were sitting in the lounge in session, Jenna taking notes as always and Sam in his usual lying position on the red chaise longue, his head propped up slightly at one end. They were going over the last weeks of Marya’s life, how Sam felt at the time and his state of mind.
“I was so alone,” he was saying. “Only six months before she died, I would have never contemplated losing her, but now it had been confirmed—so quickly—that she was going to die. It was like someone had come into the room and shut all the curtains. I became so alone suddenly and no matter how much she attempted to calm me then, all I could see was my dying love. I became unable to relate to her anymore, because she represented the death of that light and looking at her only brought it all back. Seeing her with Jess was worse. Jess was only young, she couldn’t understand what was really happening. But Marya insisted that she be present—that she watch it all. Seeing my little girl play on that hospital bed with her fading mother, soon to be gone forever, filled me with a gaping void of sadness.”
“Tell me how you felt when you were on your own,” Jenna asked. “Tell me where you went to get away from it all. You told me in our previous sessions that you often took the helicopter and went home for a few days to revitalize yourself, as well as often seeking out empty rooms in the hospital. What were you thinking in those moments of solitude?”
Sam sat in silence for a moment as the image of Claire hovered in front of his mind’s eye. Her bright smile. Her sad eyes. Of all their talk about this time, not once had Sam mentioned his affair. Part of it was out of shame. But a larger part was out of some desire to protect Claire. Several times, however, he’d come very close to divulging everything to Jenna, and a part of him almost insisted that he open up to her. In the previous three weeks, he had grown to trust Jenna and their time together had been extremely pleasant for him. More than her sessions, her very presence alongside him had allowed Sam some respite from his own torturous emotions. He’d felt able to breathe in that presence and sensed a powerful bond opening up between them.
“There’s something I sense you’re not telling me, Sam,” Jenna said after he had stayed silent for some time. “I’ve often felt over the last weeks that there’s something of this time that you’re hiding. I can’t help you, Sam, if you don’t open up to me.”
Sam let out a gentle groan as he realized that he was about to confess to her.
Taking in a deep breath, he shook his head and said, “I can't believe I'm going to tell you this, but here goes. Just before Marya died—I mean, as she was dying in the hospice—I had an affair. I won't give you the girl’s name, but I will say that we had an affair during the last weeks of Marya's life.”
“This woman you had an affair with, you knew her from before?”
“No, I met her at the hospice, she was volunteering.”
“And where is she now?”
“Gone,” Sam muttered. “She made it clear that we can’t be together and I understand that. I’ve vowed never to contact her again.”
Jenna sat musing for a moment before saying, “The night of the crash, was it her that you were going to see in such a hurry?”
Sam squeezed his eyelids shut and his face took on a pained expression, his teeth gritted together as he recalled the painful incident of seven months ago.
“Yes,” he mumbled. “I was going to see her. I half think the reason I crashed the car was because subconsciously I knew it was wrong. She was very young—nineteen. So innocent. I took her virginity and then she told me she never wanted to see me again. I feel so ashamed…so ashamed of it.”
“Oh, Sam!” Jenna exclaimed softly. “You say this affair started when Marya was taken to the hospice?”
“Almost immediately.”
“Then doesn't that tell you something?”
“What?”
“As we’ve already been through before, you were in a very vulnerable state. You were just about to lose the only woman you'd ever loved—heck, the only woman you’d ever known. Your world was crumbling around you. You saw a glint of light on a cloudy day and you went to it. You say you met this girl at the hospice?”
“Yeah.”
“The very place where you were at your darkest. You saw something reach out to you and you took it; a faint reprieve from the gloom.” Jenna paused, before adding in a more solemn tone, “I never told you about my husband, did I?”
“No, you didn’t,” Sam agreed.
“It's because he died twelve years ago. Before I’d even finished college. We'd only been married a week when he died and were both twenty. We met in our freshman year at college, fell in love and began planning our lives together. We became engaged and put together a five-year plan that started with finishing college, then qualifying as psychiatrists, and finally marriage and kids. But it wasn’t meant to be. When we’d been together for only a year and a half, Henry was diagnosed with cancer. When he was finally classed as terminal, we married there and then in the hospice. Henry was so emaciated from the disease and the terrible treatments that he was hardly able to hold my hand during the ceremony.”
“I'm so sorry,” Sam said in a sensitive tone.
“That's why I got into studying the psychological effects of spousal loss,” Jenna continued. “Because at such a young age I got to feel the rawness of that feeling. Henry had a brain tumor. It was very quick; he died three months after diagnosis, a week after our wedding. Nothing they could do for him except ease his suffering. I watched that thing bore into him and eat what was left of my darling Henry. After that, I was so trapped in that feeling of loss—of having a limb cut off, but still feeling it there—that I sought affection wherever I could get it. I went to bars picking up guys, just so I could feel that light of human affection again, even if only for a second. In my final year of college—a year that I should have been studying side-by-side with my love—I got a terrible name on campus for sleeping around. It was so out of character for me; I’d never been promiscuous before. It was a phenomenon, one relating directly to my sudden loss; I was desperately in need of affection.” Jenna paused for a moment, as if allowing her words to sink in. “So what I'm trying to say,” she continued, “is that you were vulnerable and needed someone; someone that didn't remind you of Marya and her impending death. That's what that girl was to you; an escape from the dying light and a source of that missing affection.”
Sam sat in silence for a moment musing over Jenna's words. He'd pretty much come to the same conclusions himself during the many dark hours that he’d spent mulling the affair over in his head. Having Jenna confirm it, though, did make him
feel more resolved in his own thoughts, giving his own conclusions authenticity. However, Jenna was wrong about one thing—that Claire had only meant a chink of light to him. Sure, she had radiated him with light in an extremely dark moment. But the girl had offered him much more than mere respite. She had offered him love, and he had loved her.
But this aside, they were fated to always be apart. Jenna’s confirmation that his pursuit of her was fueled by his vulnerability of losing Marya, only made him feel better in Marya’s eyes. But he still felt guilty in Claire’s.
“This girl opened herself up to me,” Sam went on, “she told me things about herself that she’d never uttered to another soul. She too was vulnerable. We found each other in the darkness. But I was pulling her into something that she was too inexperienced for.”
“How old was she again, Sam?” Jenna put to him.
“She was a teenager. Nineteen—but still a teenager. She’d just finished her college freshman year and was volunteering at the hospice to gain experience for a life as an ER doctor.”
“You say she told you things of herself.”
“Yeah—but I wouldn’t dream of sharing her secrets with anyone else. They’re her secrets and only mine to hold on to, not to divulge. I’ll just say that I was the first guy she’d ever allowed into her heart and I feel shame that all I did was break it once I was inside.”
“Even though she was young, Sam,” Jenna commented, “a college freshman should still have an element of understanding of the world. Surely she allowed herself to be carried along by the big, world-famous tech billionaire Sam Burgess. She should have known that it was a path inaccessible for her and that the only options open to her in such a relationship would be a complete change in her life, the end of her studies as a doctor. Or that they would simply lead to heartbreak. She rightfully chose heartbreak.”
“Why do you say ‘rightfully’?”
“Because what do you think that young girl would have felt like in five years’ time as your wife? Seeing all her friends graduate, begin lives as doctors, while she lives the comfortable, yet banal life of a billionaire housewife.”