The Beautiful Now

by M. Leighton

  Flash.

  The urgency in his voice as he asks her questions and gets no response.

  Flash.

  The hurried way they rush her out of the room and down to CT.

  Flash.

  Dane leading me to a chair and pressing me into it.

  Flash.

  The look of excruciating pain on his face when I look up at him.

  Flash.

  The dull ache of losing something more precious to me than my own life.

  Flash.

  Dane.

  Flash. Flash. Flash.

  Him picking me up off the floor.

  Him pressing my head to his shoulder.

  Him looking down into my eyes, agony written all over his face.

  Then there’s agony. So much agony.

  Then time. So much time.

  Hours, days, years later, Dr. Napier shows up again. His words are a jumbled mess. Critical bleed Celina’s caused a head trauma seizure.

  Or was it seizure trauma caused bleed Celina critical head?

  Or was it Celina’s seizure caused head trauma and has a critical bleed?

  I don’t know. I only know that my daughter isn’t awake. I can’t see her eyes and I can’t feel her with me.

  Since she was born, I’ve always been able to feel her presence, like a warm light in my heart no matter where she was—at preschool, at a friend’s house, on a field trip. She was always alive out there, somewhere, her lungs filling with air and her heart beating enough to keep both of us alive.

  Only now I don’t feel that.

  I can’t feel my little girl and my heart doesn’t have enough energy to beat on its own. My world doesn’t have enough energy to turn on its own. My life doesn’t have enough reason to continue on its own.

  Little by little, hour by hour, day by day, I’m dying and so is my child.

  On Thursday—or is it Tuesday?—I’m in the waiting room. I’m always in the waiting room. Something shifts beside me and I glance to my left. It’s Dane. He looks haggard, his eyes red, his hair a mess, and a thick, dark layer of stubble dusts his cheeks. He sits beside me and I stare absently at him.

  I don’t know how long he’s been there. Or how long I have. Forever. Moments. I don’t know anymore.

  I feel him take my hand. I feel the warmth of it. I feel the comfort of it.

  But I’m not warmed.

  And I’m not comforted.

  “The nurse said her vitals are improving.”

  I nod. That means nothing to me. I can’t feel my daughter.

  “The neurologist says he thinks she’s improving.”

  I nod again. I feel a tiny flare in my chest, like the spark of hope trying to take hold, but it flickers once, sputters, and dies because I can’t feel my daughter anymore.

  “She’ll make it, Brinkley. She has to.”

  It’s the tremor in Dane’s voice, the uncertainty of it that shakes me. First, I look down at our joined hands and then back up at his familiar face, and I see.

  I see.

  For the first time since all this happened, I really see Dane.

  He’s suffering. I can see it, as plainly as the bright sun painting golden triangles on the drab carpet.

  He’s helpless. I can feel it as poignantly as I feel the absence of my daughter.

  But he’s strong, too. He’s as solid as our rock and as unwavering as the earth itself.

  I blink at him.

  My eyes, they’re burning. Still burning. Always burning.

  I try to speak, but have to try twice. My mouth is so dry. “Dane, what am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to be here when our daughter wakes up. That’s what you’re going to do.”

  “What if…what if…” I can’t bring myself to say the words, even though they feel like they’ve already been spoken into existence.

  Because I can’t feel my daughter anymore.

  “She’ll make it. She’s strong. Like you. She’ll make it. She has to.”

  “What will I do if…if…”

  I can hardly think of the possibilities, much less utter them.

  “It won’t happen. You don’t need to worry about that. She’s gonna make it.”

  “Dane, I can’t…I can’t feel her. I can’t feel my little girl anymore.”

  Hysteria comes for me, swift and sweeping.

  “She’s still there, Brinkley. You’ll feel her again.”

  “I’ve always felt her. Always. Since she was born, I’ve… always… I can’t lose her. I can’t…I can’t…”

  I feel so hollow.

  So cold and empty and hollow.

  “You won’t. She will make it. This is not how her story ends. If I have to go in there and give every one of my organs to save her, I will get her back for you. I swear it. I can’t live with myself knowing I took her from you. I just…I can’t. I’ll get her back for you if it’s the very last thing I do.”

  I feel my forehead crease. “Dane, this isn’t your fault.”

  He gets out of his chair and drops to his knees in front of me, pressing our joined hands to his brow. “If I hadn’t wanted to be her donor, this might not have happened. I was so selfish. I wanted to be the one. I wanted to be the one to save her.”

  His voice is anguish, his tone misery.

  “It wasn’t your marrow that did this.”

  He’s so still, so quiet. Torment is rolling off him like frigid waves from the ocean. “I just found her. I’ll make this right. I swear on my life.”

  His words bring a kind of awakening to me. They force me not only to see reason, but to remind Dane of it. “You’re right. You did just find her, so you don’t know her. You don’t know how strong she is. She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. She’s so tough, so…determined. She’s a fighter. Even her teachers said so.”

  As I say the words, I draw a strange sort of detached comfort from them. And deep within me, a soft glow begins.

  Dane looks up and stares at me, long and hard, and somehow, little by little, we begin to draw strength from each other.

  “She can’t come from us and not be a fighter.”

  “No, she can’t.”

  He goes on, bolder. “We fight for love in this family. We fight for each other. We always have.”

  “Always.”

  “We never gave up and neither will she. She’s coming back. I promise you. She’s coming back. And we’ll be together. All three of us. A family. Finally.”

  “A family.” Although the words are but a whisper, there is a thread of steel that weaves them together. I repeat them, just so I can feel them roll off my tongue, fill the air around us, resonate in and through and between my ribs. “A family. She’ll have a whole family.”

  Dane pulls me into his arms, crushing me to him, and together, we hope. We grab onto it, we cling to it. We hold to it as desperately as we hold to each other.

  His voice is gruff and muffled when he says, “I never stopped loving you, you know.”

  Something inside me shifts, moves. Melts. My Celina…she has to come back to us. She has to come back to this.

  “Dane.” I bury my face in the curve of his neck.

  “I wish I’d told you sooner, and I know this is the shittiest time, but I want you to know. You have to know that you…you’re all I’ve ever wanted, and meeting the beautiful little girl that we made together…I’ll never be the same. And I don’t want to be. When we leave here, I want you to know that…that…” He leans away and takes my face in his hands. “You’re my home. Wherever you are, that’s where my heart is. It always has been. Even after all these years.”

  “Sommers?” Both of our heads snap up when my name is called. It’s the doctor. He’s looking for us.

  When his eyes meet mine from across the room, my heart stops. It just stops beating, my entire existence balanced on the head of a pin.

  Another countdown begins.

  Minus one heartbeat.

  Minus two.

  Minus
three.

  But then he smiles.

  And my heart, my life, my world starts back up again.

  Chapter 34

  I walk back into Celina’s room and Dane is literally in bed with her. He’s stretched out on his back with his hands behind his head, and she’s curled into the fetal position against his side, sound asleep.

  Celina.

  My baby.

  I watch her lips puff with every breath she exhales. Each time, it reassures me that she’s alive, she’s okay. She’s still with me. Even now, I can’t bear to think of where I’d be right now if she hadn’t made it, if she hadn’t pulled through. It’s as though my mind literally can’t grasp the thought.

  Nor do I want it to.

  I scan her face, her beautiful face. I’m relieved to see that her color is a little better, her cheeks are a little fuller, and the sheen of her skin isn’t waxy.

  Clutched against Celina’s chest is a stuffed turtle that Dane brought her the day she was moved to a step-down unit room and permitted to have gifts brought in. He said he wanted her to have a piece of home with her, so he brought her a turtle.

  My eyes flit over to him.

  Dane.

  My love.

  My heart does a flip.

  His eyes are closed, but he’s beautiful as always. Lying beside our little girl, he looks so big, so long and lithe, so manly and capable. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect man for us—the perfect father for our daughter and the perfect mate for me.

  If Celina is my sun, he’s my moon and my stars. He keeps me safe in the night and quietly watches over me during the day. The two of them together make up my universe, and I’d be unhinged without either of them.

  I’m content to just stand and stare at them—my child and the love of my life, alive and well. Together.

  Dane’s eyes come slowly open, focusing on me for a few seconds before his lips twist into a gentle smile. Mine curve in answer, not of my own doing, but because every time he looks at me, I smile. I can’t help it. That truly is a muscle memory response when it comes to Dane. A response to happiness.

  We stare at each other, holding an entire conversation without saying a word. He’s telling me he loves me, and how happy he is. And I’m telling him I know, because I feel the same way. It’s the same conversation we have at least once a day. It began the hour that Celina came out of her coma. We kept it up as she started getting better by leaps and bounds every day.

  My smile widens. There’s nothing not to smile about. I have everything I need lying on that bed. And I suspect that Dane feels the same way when I lie with her and he sees us there together.

  She stirs, opening her brilliant green eyes. She blinks slowly at first. It takes her a minute to rouse. Her body has been through so much, it’ll take a while for her to be back to her old self, but she’ll get there.

  She still sleeps a lot. She needs a tremendous amount of rest, so we do everything we need to do around her. Dane stayed with her so I could run back to our rental house, grab a quick shower, and then run to the mall to pick up some things for Celina.

  “Did you get it?”

  Her voice is gravely with sleep, but her eyes are brightening rapidly. I take the bag I’m holding to the bed and hand it to her as I sit by her legs. She digs in, the plastic rustling as she bypasses the couple of shirts I bought her in search of one thing in particular.

  She smiles a big, wide, beautiful smile when she pulls out the cap. It’s soft and knit and purple, and was the closest thing I could find to what she wanted to cover her slick head.

  “Is that close enough?” She uses her teeth to gnaw off the tag. “Stop that! You’ll ruin your teeth.” But I’m too late. The tag is off and tossed carelessly back into the bag as the hat goes on her head.

  She fluffs and tugs at it until it feels just right, and then she tilts her head and looks up at me from under her still-intact lashes. “Well? How do I look?”

  “You look stunning, as always. If I didn’t love you so much, I might hate you a little.” I give her a teasing grin and she sticks her tongue out at me.

  “Weirdo.”

  “Are you ever going to turn some of this abuse toward your father? He hasn’t even been initiated into your sphere of teenaged angst yet. I’m about to get offended.”

  “He’s cooler than you are. There’s nothing to raz him about.”

  “Oh, my sweet, sweet girl,” I tell her with a devious smile and a conspiratorial wink. “I’m more than happy to fill you in on all the not-cool things about your dad. For instance, did you know that he likes to chew prairie grass?”

  She turns to look at Dane. “You do?”

  He shrugs. “It tastes like watermelon.”

  “Can I try it?”

  Dane turns a dazzling smile on me that says he won, I lost. “So this is how it’s going to be. You two against me?”

  Dane and Celina look at each other and grin, then they turn to me and nod at the same time. “Yeah, pretty much.”

  Naturally, I stick out my tongue at them, but then I cross my legs and settle in for some real torture. “So, Celina, have I ever told you what it was like when I first started breastfeeding you?”

  I laugh outright when she immediately clamps her hands over her ears and squeezes her eyes shut. “Stop! Stop! Shut up! I don’t want to hear that gross stuff!”

  “I, on the other hand…” Dane says with a total man grin.

  At that, Celina turns her shocked eyes and gasps on him. “Not cool, Dad. Not. Cool.”

  A wonderful hush falls between us. I think Celina is largely unaware of it because we’re both still smiling. She doesn’t realize what it feels like to hear her call Dane “Dad.” I’m not even certain she’s aware of doing it.

  But I am.

  And by the look on Dane’s face, he is, too.

  I wish I had a camera and could record the look on his face. He’s still smiling, but there’s something different about it, about his expression. It’s like the light from inside his soul is shining through every pore. I know I won’t need a physical picture to remember what it looks like, though. It will forever be etched into my memory, filed away in a folder labeled BEST MOMENTS OF MY LIFE.

  Because this is one of them, one of the very best moments of my life.

  Chapter 35

  I walk out onto the front porch and look out at the fields. The world is coated with nightfall, everything painted shades of blue and black and trimmed in silver. As always, it holds all the promise of tomorrow.

  Endless possibility.

  Hope.

  I take a deep breath. It smells like home. I never thought I’d like that smell again, but I do now. Now everything has changed.

  I step out onto the driveway, glancing back only briefly to make sure I don’t see any lights burning inside the house. We’re staying at Momma’s for a while longer, just until everyone can recuperate. It’s easier for me to keep an eye on them both if we stay there, although Dane has made it very clear he’d like our permanent residence to be with him.

  Both Celina and I are in agreement with that.

  It will all just take time. Precious time.

  Celina’s been out of the hospital for a month, but we stayed near Duke until we got the go-ahead to bring her back to Shepherd’s Mill, which happened last week.

  The process took longer than anyone expected because of those initial complications. They never did definitively discover what caused the seizure, but they know the knock to the head is what caused the bleed. Luckily, it wasn’t a big one. That could’ve resulted in disaster. Increased risk of bleeding was one of the most serious possible side effects of the transplant. Thankfully, Celina didn’t hit her head very hard and the bleed stopped fairly quickly on its own. No one else has said it, but I know it was a miracle. No one else had to say it.

  So now, after everything, here we are. Back home. We are finally back home and finally back to some semblance of normal.

  When I left the house, Momm
a was asleep in her room. Celina was asleep on the couch with the television on, so I left her there. She still needs lots and lots of rest, so when she wants to sleep, I let her sleep. Whenever and wherever.

  Things are crazy, all day every day, but in a good way. They’re hectic, but everyone is alive and well, so that makes it all bearable. More than bearable. Just thinking back on those hours when Celina was unconscious, fighting for her life, makes me feel like I’m hyperventilating. I try to just be thankful, every day, that she made it through. That we all did.

  Time alone with Dane has been a rare commodity. A few minutes here and there are all we’ve been able to manage—in the hallway at the hospital or at the cafeteria while Celina slept or when he walked me to his truck. That was never enough, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it. Celina was priority number one. She still is, but tonight things are calm. Tonight is ripe with opportunity for us.

  Just us.

  We didn’t make plans. Nothing was said. It was just kind of an unspoken thing that floated between us tonight—the agreement that everything is finally quiet enough that we can meet. So for just a few minutes, in the dead of night, I’ll get him all to myself.

  I know he’ll be waiting at our rock. Just like I have a feel for my daughter, I have a feel for Dane, too, and I know he’ll be there. Some tingle in my heart told me right as he was leaving, when his eyes met mine and he winked, and I knew.

  Because sometimes a woman just knows.

  I make my way slowly through the wheat. I trail my hands through it. It feels the same as it always has, but also completely different. Everything is different. Everything is better, or at least well on its way to getting there.

  I smile and turn my face up to the moon, her fat, full belly shining down on me. I think of all the moons I’ve seen over the years, all the tears I’ve cried with her watching over me from above, and realize that I’ve never been as happy as I am right now. I never thought I’d be this happy. Not really. Some part of me always knew that I’d have to choose between Dane and my mom. I knew she’d never approve, and I knew I’d never stop loving him. So to think that I’d ever be here, right here, right now—going to meet my lover in the dead of night and not caring who in the world knows it—is mind-boggling.