by Iris Parker
Then my whole body seemed empty and weightless, and the floor slipped out from under me. I felt myself tumbling down, falling for what seemed like forever.
The next time I opened my eyes, I was staring at a paramedic.
Chapter Six
Dominick
My brain was stuck in a fog, even while my mind was buzzing faster than I could measure. The paramedics had said it was safe to move Helena to the hospital, and I'd been pacing the halls of Massachusetts General ever since. I still had no idea what was going on, which made it all-too-easy to imagine all the terrible possibilities.
I barely had the awareness to take in my surroundings, but did notice that most of the people in the waiting room were men. Several of them seemed way too happy to be sitting in a hospital, but a couple of them were sporting the same panic-stricken look I felt on my own face.
I drank another coffee from the machine, and paced some more.
I was getting the occasional double-take from some of the other guys, but I had no idea if any of them recognized me.
I didn't care, either. It didn't matter one bit if anyone recognized me, at least as long as nobody called the local news. The last thing I—or Helena—needed was for the media to show up and make everything infinitely worse.
The situation was bad enough on its own. The drive over to the hospital had been grueling, my body cold with fear despite the hot weather. I'd been alone then, just like I was alone now. Helena had been taken in via ambulance, and mercifully Ali was with her grandfather and missed the entire thing.
Thank heaven for that. At least for the time being, nobody else had to shoulder this worry. If everything turned out okay, nobody else would have to either.
That was good.
I was so concerned that I hardly had time to drive myself crazy, at least initially. As time wore on however, echoes of Helena's ominous speech came back to me. I still had no idea what she'd been trying to say, but there was no way it was something pleasant.
Very little good news begins with phrases like "there's no good way to say this," or "I hope you can understand," or "I'm sorry, but…."
But what? I asked myself, but a deep dark place inside of me felt like it already knew. Building the porch had been reckless and impulsive, there was no doubt. The more that I thought about it—and in the purgatory of the waiting room I had nothing but time to think—the more I realized just how stupid I had been.
How could I expect Helena to trust me with Ali, if she couldn't trust me with her house?
Hell, it wasn't even her house, as Helena had pointed out earlier. It belonged to Mrs. Lauer.
And, for that matter, Helena had never trusted me with Mrs. Lauer's house in the first place.
It was almost impressive, how I'd found a way to screw everything up.
Stupid.
The more I thought about it, the worse I felt…but also the better I felt, because it meant I wasn't thinking about where I was, or what might be going on with Helena deep inside of the hospital. In a way, it was a relief to have such a pleasant distraction.
Such a pleasant, crushingly upsetting distraction.
"Dominick Henderson?" a soft female voice called, catching my attention through the din of doubts and fear.
It also caught the attention of a few of the other guys in the room, unfortunately. They'd seemed cheerful before, but now they looked downright excited.
Who the hell gets happy like that in a hospital?
"That's me," I said finally, my eyes landing on the pink-clad nurse who'd called me. Tight cords of tension in my neck strained as I forced myself to remain calm, trying not to panic or yell. I had a thousand questions and wanted to ask them all at once, but a single one took priority above all. "Is she okay?" I asked.
"She will be fine," the nurse said with a nod before checking her clipboard. "You're the father?"
"Yes," I agreed quickly, intense relief already flooding through me.
"It was just low blood-pressure. It's common, and there was no damage from the fall. She's lucky she had you there to catch her," the nurse explained. "Would you like to see Ms. Bramford now? She's been asking to see you for some time."
I let out a hoot of excitement, incredibly relieved at the good news. The other guys cheered back at me, shouting congratulations my way.
Elated, I followed the nurse past the main doors and into a nondescript hallway. I entered Helena's room in silence and listened as the two women spoke to each other for a moment, then the nurse turned and left.
As happy as I was, Helena clearly wasn't. Within seconds, her body language had changed completely. She seemed to shrink inward onto herself, subtly cringing away from me when I stepped closer. She was avoiding eye contact, and her expression had gone from neutral to terrified.
But, she'd looked okay when I came in. It was only after the nurse had gone and we were alone that the shift occurred. Whatever Helena was upset about, it didn't seem to be related to the hospital.
It was about me.
And at that moment, everything finally clicked. All of the clues made a sudden, horrible sense that I couldn't deny no matter how much I wanted to.
At that moment, I knew.
"I just realized that the nurse asked if I was the father," I said after a few moments of grave silence.
Helena didn't respond, instead closing her eyes as her face scrunched up in pain. Without saying a word, she had all but confirmed my fear.
"Am I?" I asked quietly.
"Of course you are," Helena whispered.
"But she wasn't asking about Ali, was she?"
"No," Helena said, so softly it was little more than a heavy breath. "She wasn't."
Helena
Dominick was silent for a long time.
There were so many things I wanted to say, but I just couldn't find the words. Even if I could, I wouldn't have known where to start.
I just wanted to cry.
Instead, I opened my eyes and looked at him.
He was staring at my stomach.
"You're due in less than eight months, aren't you?" he asked.
"Yes."
What else could I say?
There was another silence, this one long enough that it felt like all the air was being sucked from the room until my lungs threatened to burst. There was nothing left to distract me, no lies left that I could tell myself. All I could do was wait, helplessly staring the horrible truth in the face.
Nothing would ever be the same between us again.
Dominick ran his hands through his hair and sighed, shaken by the news. He took a few steps back, retreating into a corner of the examination room, and just stood there for a while, his expression hidden away as he rubbed his eyes in dismay and disbelief.
I shivered, and the throbbing of my heart felt like it was freezing in my chest. Beat-beat-freeze, beat-freeze-beat. The erratic rhythm would've been maddening, except having something else to focus on was all that could keep me sane.
"How?" Dominick finally asked, the word breaking minutes of cold silence. "Why?"
"I didn't plan for it to happen this way," I said, my throat dry. "Obviously."
"What did you plan for, Helena?"
"Going through my life without ever meeting you, or even knowing who you were. Just like how it happens to everyone else who uses a sperm bank," I said, drawing my knees up to my chest and hugging myself as I sat on the cold examination bed. "They contacted me last year, telling me that they would not keep your sample for much longer. By all logic, it was going to be my last chance to give Ali a full-blooded sibling."
"So you said yes," Dominick continued, almost breathless.
"Not right away. Bringing another life into the world isn't something you do on a whim. I thought about it a lot at first, and for a long time I just couldn't decide. Eventually, I went away with Ali for a week. We took a trip to Maine, and we rented a beach house. It was beautiful there. We spent our time looking for shellfish and baking pies. It was far from
our normal, but we both enjoyed it. It gave me a lot of time to reflect."
"And you asked Ali if you should do it?" Dominick asked as he rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingers.
"No, at least not directly. I just asked how she felt about the idea of having a little brother or sister. I made sure to explain to her how much work it would be, and how I'd need to split my attention and give a lot of time to the baby."
"And she agreed?"
"Yes. She was very excited…she started asking a lot of difficult questions about it. Like how I could reproduce asexually," I said, remembering how funny the question had seemed, particularly her use of that word. Of course, Ali seemed both very old and very young at the same time, leading to amusingly naive questions worded with surprising sophistication.
Dominick chuckled a little, too, and for the first time I felt like I could breathe again. I was still being crushed by an intense weight of guilt and worry, but now it felt just a little bit lighter.
"I explained again how I did it before, getting pregnant with her. How I never met you, but thanks to the magic of freezers and turkey basters it didn't matter."
"You actually said that?" Dominick asked, surprised.
"Not quite in those words," I explained. "But I've never tried to hide the truth from her, either. She had a right to know, and she was asking directly…besides, have you seen the internet? No amount of monitoring or firewalls can stop everything. I can't even imagine what she would've gotten if she had tried Googling it."
"Fair enough," Dominick said. He didn't exactly sound happy, but the fact that he was speaking to me at all gave me courage.
"So we talked about it. A lot. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I bet that's when she decided to track you down. Lord, maybe she even thought I needed to find you to make another baby. That would be ironic."
"Ironic how?"
"Because then we never would've met if I hadn't done this. But because I did this, maybe we won't…," I began, trailing off and tearing up as I struggled to say the words. "We won't be together anymore."
"Helena," Dominick said, taking a few steps forward and putting his hand on my shoulder. My skin reacted immediately to his touch, warm and reassuring.
I shivered.
"I've been dreading this day," I said, sniffling despite my efforts not to. "You have no idea."
And then he finally asked the big question.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"You were a stranger at first," I said quickly, almost automatically. I had imagined this moment more times than I could count. So much so that I dreamed about it, sometimes. And in those dreams, I'd inadvertently rehearsed half a hundred different speeches. "I needed to be careful, to protect my family."
"You didn't trust me," Dominick said.
"I didn't know you. At all. Can you blame me for being careful?" I asked. "I heard what Alton said about me the other day. He thinks this is all a big scam."
"I didn't agree with him," Dominick pointed out.
"No, but you told him you talked to your lawyer about me. You were being careful, too, Dom. Just like I was."
Dominick chewed his lip and let out a soft sigh, nodding his head a little. "But that was a long time ago. Why didn't you tell me after that?"
"At first you were a stranger, and I couldn't tell you because I didn't trust you. Then you weren't a stranger, and I'd been hiding something huge from you. It was such a gradual, seamless transition, I didn't know how to deal with it. I handled it badly," I said, a tear running down my face. "And I tried to tell you. Over and over. But something always happened…I always let something happen. I'm sorry."
Dominick chewed his lip in thought before nodding slowly.
"The nurse explained that it was just low blood pressure, and you were fine," he said finally. "Is—how is the baby?" he asked in a soft voice, a hushed tone that was so delicate I'd never heard him sound like that before. It took me a second to adjust to the change of topic.
"Probably fine…the probably is what's taking so long. They couldn't see anything wrong, but they wanted to run a few more tests to be sure."
Dominick's body relaxed visibly, even as he still carried obvious tension in his neck and shoulders. Moving even closer, he sat down next to me on the hospital examination bed.
Without saying a word, he put his hand on my knee.
And we waited.
Dominick
My head was swimming, overwhelmed by the sea of revelations. I had strong feelings, but I couldn't have even begun to identify exactly what they were.
Was I angry? Helena had essentially lied to me.
Was I relieved? Helena was okay. Half an hour ago, I would've said that was all that mattered. A huge part of me still felt like it was all that mattered.
Was I excited? We were—she was—having a baby, after all. I had missed so much of Ali growing up, but now I'd have the chance to experience all of it. Every birthday, every tantrum, every soiled diaper.
Was I worried? Once upon a time, Helena had obviously been concerned that I wasn't a suitable father. Did she still feel that way? If she trusted me, was she right to do it? I'd been getting by, but a baby was taking it to a whole new level. Maybe, on some level, Helena's instincts had been right.
And then there was the fact that the baby was probably fine. From the sound of it, the odds of something being wrong were extremely slim.
But not so slim that they sent Helena back home immediately.
My stomach churned at the thought. Even though I hadn't known about the pregnancy until tonight, I could no longer imagine going back to the way life had been just yesterday. Helena and I had things to do and a new life to plan.
Assuming Helena even wanted me along for the ride.
And that I was actually worthy of it.
So yeah, I had no idea how I was actually feeling. Judging by the look on Helena's face, that made two of us. It was sure to be a long and confusing night, but at least we were in this together.
When the exam room door finally opened, I felt half a second of absolute gut-wrenching horror, more intense that any I'd experienced. But then I saw that the doctor was smiling, and I breathed a sigh of relief that threatened to bring me to tears.
"Everything looks good. Strong heartbeat, no signs of distress or injury. It's lucky that you were around to catch her," the man said, nodding to me as he spoke. He continued to rattle off several numbers that I couldn't begin to interpret, but Helena seemed to have no trouble following.
It all sounded like good news.
"Have you been working hard? Exerting yourself too much? Physical activity maybe?" The doctor asked in quick succession as Helena kept shaking her head, answering each question with a silent no. The tension was starting to creep back up on me, inching its way through my body. Just what was the doctor getting at?
The doctor nodded along to Helena's answers, making the occasional hmming sound but otherwise not giving very much away. "We should keep an eye on your blood pressure, and you should try to take it easy for the rest of the pregnancy. As much as possible, don't strain yourself, and get as much bed rest as you can."
"Should I be worried?" Helena asked, her voice much more calm than I knew mine would've been if I'd tried to speak.
It seemed to me like the answer to Helena's question should've been a resounding yes, but the doctor smiled softly and offered reassurances that I could barely process. The baby was fine, that much at least seemed clear, but my chest felt constricted and tight as I found myself wondering whether or not Helena was okay.
Sensing my agitation, the doctor turned and gave what was probably meant to be a reassuring smile. "Don't worry, Mr. Henderson, you're both in good hands. A nurse will be in with discharge papers soon enough. Oh, and just one last thing," he said finally, taking a dramatic pause.
Helena and I looked up at him, eager to hear whatever else he had to say.
"Congratulations, it's a boy," the doctor said, shaking my han
d as he spoke.
I desperately tried shake his hand back, and to look like I was doing fine with the night's revelations, but I knew the slight hang of my lower jaw was giving away how overwhelmed I felt. It seemed strange to be congratulating me, when Helena had done all the work. My contribution thus far had begun, and ended, with a fairly unmemorable half-hour spent in a private room over ten years ago.
So far.
Maybe all that was about to change.
As the doctor left, the atmosphere in the room seemed different than before. There was a faint ghost of a smile on Helena's lips, and for the first time since she'd seen the porch I felt like I could envision a moment when I would be able breathe again—as soon as I'd brought Helena back home, and she was warm and safe in her bed.
Plenty of rest was what she really needed, just like the doctor had said.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Helena began to laugh. She sounded so light and radiant that I couldn't help but join in, even though my own laughter had a more nervous edge to it. Part of me was still an absolute wreck.
But a wreck who was going to be the father of a baby boy.
"A boy," I said, still laughing as I ran my fingers through my hair. "We're having a boy."
Dominick
The rest of the evening passed by in a blur of hospital procedures. I was so overwhelmed by the flurry of emotions that I struggled to make sense of anything. Still feeling lost, I turned to something I at least knew I was good at—practical details. As I tried to think of everything that still needed to be done, one thing became clear. There was a lot to do, and relatively little time to do it.
Did Helena have a crib for the baby?
What about toys?
Or one of those things that hangs above the baby, playing music and spinning around little plastic models? Were those actually important somehow? Shit, I didn't even know what they were called!
Suddenly, saying that I had a lot to do felt like a wild understatement.