by Lilian Darcy
Pregnant women were said to need the bathroom a lot, Lucas reminded himself, and when they needed it, they needed it at once. She’d be back in two minutes, with a look of relief on her face. He forced himself to stay seated, argued himself out of his sudden ill-ease, looked at his watch. He’d give her five minutes, and then if she wasn’t back… Rationally he was sure she would be.
She wasn’t.
After the sixth and seventh long, long minutes, he went up to the head waiter and said, “Look, I’m worried about my…uh…fiancée.” The word felt strange in his mouth. “Can I check in the bathroom to see if she’s okay?”
“Of course, sir.”
He knocked. “Reba?”
“Lucas…” The moment he heard the way she said his name, he knew something was wrong. Barging in without even looking at the feminine mirror and fittings, he heard her voice again, from behind the closed cubicle door. “Lucas, is that you?”
“What’s wrong?” His voice was hoarse.
“I’m losing the baby.” Hers was shaky, squeaky, shrill and tight with tears.
“How do you know? How can you know that? What’s happening?” The flat of his hand landed on the door like a blow, and his heart began to thud.
She told him what was happening, and he felt sick. “Let’s go to the hospital,” he said. “They can do something. They can save it.”
“I don’t think so.” The words wobbled all over the place. He wanted to break down the door. “When cows—”
“Reba, sweetheart.” His throat hurt. He wanted to hold her in his arms and never let her go, but she had the door locked. “You’re not a cow.”
But she was right. The baby couldn’t be saved.
Hands wet on the wheel, Lucas screamed into the ambulance bay at the hospital, and someone screamed at him to get out again. They had an emergency transfer, they had a major highway smash, they had an ambulance due, they had a retrieval team flying in from Denver. He parked illegally farther along the curb, and got Reba inside.
The whole emergency department was frantic, and though the staff seemed caring, it wasn’t the kind of big New York teaching hospital that Lucas was used to. It made him nervous. They had to wait for an hour, during which Reba’s pain and bleeding eased.
For most of the time, Lucas held her hand as she lay in a curtained cubicle, or stroked her hair, feeling ill and helpless. Neither spoke very much. Then, finally, a doctor came—young, distracted, but certain about what he found.
“The cervix is open. From the amount of blood you’ve told me about, and from the fact that you had cramping and pain, yes, I’m sorry, you’ve lost the pregnancy. It’s very common, especially this early, and especially with first pregnancies. Around twenty percent, maybe even as high as a third.”
He told them to wait a while, if they needed to, until Reba felt ready to leave. A nurse brought her a cup of water to sip on, and tissues for her tears. Those would have come in handy an hour ago. The handkerchief Lucas had given her was sodden.
The emergency department seemed quieter now. He sat beside her, sensing she still didn’t want to talk, not sure if she wanted to be touched. He ached to touch her. She finished the water, then gave him a rusty little smile, as if she hadn’t used those muscles for a long time, and wanted to check that they still worked.
“I guess we don’t need to get married now, after all,” she said in an empty voice.
He nodded carefully, and tried to think about what he felt. Care, yes. An empathy for her that ripped him up inside. He felt sorrow, too, but then, as he delved a little deeper, God have mercy, he also found something else.
The baby hadn’t been real to him yet, in the way it had been real to her. The baby’s conception was a complication that neither of them would have chosen, if the choice had been theirs to make. Marriage was something he hadn’t considered for a second, before the news of her pregnancy.
And now the pregnancy was gone, swept away.
“I guess we don’t, do we?” he answered.
He felt the treacherous whisper of relief grow a little, and he knew that for a long, horrible moment she could see it there on his face. She turned away from him, her face crumpled with anger and pain.
Chapter Five
“How could you have thought that any of that was faked?” Reba almost yelled at Lucas, in the cluttered privacy of the steakhouse manager’s office. “The trip to the hospital, the anger because you were so clearly relieved there was no more reason to get married, the grief…”
“What, no woman in history has ever faked a pregnancy, or the loss of one?”
She drew herself up higher in the chair, even though it didn’t feel good. “I haven’t. I wouldn’t. What you see is what you get, Lucas. I’d have thought you’d at least know that about me, after the time we spent together.”
“Except if that’s true, I’m having a hard time getting my head around the fact that you’re still pregnant, you’ve known you were still pregnant for, what, three months…?”
“I went to my doctor, just after Christmas, and he ordered the scan that showed one baby with a beating heart,” she explained.
“…and you didn’t tell me? You crossed the street and disappeared into a store when you saw me coming. You knew you were still pregnant, that day, didn’t you? And you didn’t want me to guess.”
“After your reaction when I lost the baby, I didn’t consider that you needed to know.”
He ignored this for a moment, and asked, “When are you planning to give up work?”
“I haven’t decided, yet. I’d like to save a little more money, first.”
This goal evaporated into complete unimportance when the band around her stomach did its sneaky little squeeze again. Please God, my baby can sleep in a box. This doesn’t mean anything, does it? It’s normal. It’s not like November, when the bleeding came.
Lucas exploded at her statement about money, and swore. “Why didn’t you come to me? The moment you found out you had a second baby that had survived, you should have told me, the way you did in the beginning, that day you came out to the ranch. You should have called me, at least, in New York.”
“I figured you’d had your chance,” she told him now. “Dear Lord, Lucas, you were relieved!”
“No, it was more complicated than that.”
She didn’t listen. “Do you think for a second that I couldn’t see it? Was I going to confront you in the main street of town six weeks later and say, ‘Um, excuse me, I’ve just discovered I’m actually still pregnant after all, so can we go back to the original plan?’ Do you think for a second I’d have considered your proposal in the first place if I’d known you’d only suggested the idea, on your lawyer’s advice, because it would have protected your right to more control over how our baby was raised? I felt like an idiot for getting distracted by your camouflage of champagne and flowers and taking you seriously enough to try and work out how I felt.”
“That’s not the issue.”
“It is! It’s the only issue. You had your chance to be the right kind of father to this baby, and you blew it, Lucas. I felt—and I feel—no obligation at all to give you another shot at being involved.”
“You’re wrong,” he insisted. His jaw was rigid and his eyes cool. “On two counts, you’re wrong. First, you don’t know how much I grieved about what we lost. When I came in here tonight, it was in part to tell you that. I ached, Reba, all through the winter. Second, there’s a principle at stake here that goes beyond the rights and wrongs in how either of us reacted. I’m this baby’s father and I deserved to be told.”
“Okay, well in that case consider that I just did.”
Reba stood up awkwardly, signalling that their confrontation was over. Lucas knew the full truth now. Yes, she’d had a miscarriage back in November, but she’d been carrying twins, and one of the babies had survived.
That was it, as far as she was concerned.
Game over.
She wasn’t interested in
his financial support, didn’t know if she believed his claim about grief, and she wasn’t hurt—couldn’t afford to be hurt—by the changed emotions that vibrated between them, in such contrast to what they’d felt that first afternoon at the cabin.
She would arrange for some moderate level of access if he wanted it, but he’d have to take her to court if he wanted a fifty-fifty share, and she doubted he’d feel strongly enough to do that. Marriage was out of the question, and she felt naive for having taken his proposal at face value, back in November, even for a second.
The next move was up to him, and he had more than three months to consider what it should be, before the baby was due to be born.
Wait a minute.
Three months?
Her body had other ideas on this subject.
Wait a minute…
For a moment, she thought it was all her imagination, a flashback to that awful night in November, but no, it was real—this really was happening—this warmth that shouldn’t be there, between her legs—and she saw the same panic reflected in Lucas’s face that she’d seen that night, and that she knew was in her own face right now.
“What’s happening?” he said. “I can tell something’s not right, Reba, so don’t try to pretend.”
If his eyes hadn’t been locked on her face, he would have seen, and if the noise from the restaurant hadn’t been so loud, he would have heard.
“My—my waters must have broken. Just now, when I stood up.”
Her legs were already completely soaked inside their jeans, and so were her socks and sneakers. She knew instantly that this wasn’t good, she didn’t need to refer the issue to Carla’s greater expertise. And she knew now, too late, that those ebbing and flowing pains in her back and stomach, all evening, had indeed meant more than just too many hours spent on her feet in front of a hot grill.
She had a moment to wonder, also, if the stress she’d felt lately—tonight!—could be a contributing factor, as well as the drive to provide for her baby, which had led her to keep her long steakhouse hours.
In other words, if this was her fault.
All her fault.
Most of what she felt, however, was sheer terror. She’d already lost and grieved for her baby’s twin. She couldn’t lose this one, too.
“What does that mean?” Lucas said. “Hell, I know what it means…”
“We need to get to the hospital.”
He grabbed the phone on the manager’s desk without another word and barked his way through the emergency call like the corporate bulldog he was. At a moment like this, there was something intensely reassuring about his take-charge attitude, the only thing Reba had to cling to, right now.
“Fifteen minutes,” he reported to her, when he’d finished the call. “You should lie down until they get here.”
“Will that help?”
“Can’t hurt.”
“Can you call my friend Carla in? The red-haired waitress with the ponytail? I’d like to talk to her.”
“Okay, I’ll find her in a minute, when we’ve gotten you more comfortable.” His mouth barely moved when he spoke, and his lips had thinned to two hard lines. “How many more weeks to go, Reba?”
“Fourteen.”
Lucas didn’t say a word to this, because there wasn’t anything to say. He shaped his jacket into a make-shift pillow for her head and she lay on the carpet. He brought wads of paper towel to deal with the clear, innocent-seeming amniotic fluid, then he left the room to look for Carla.
While he was gone, two of those dull, ambiguous pains gave their sly squeeze to Reba’s abdomen and her back, then slowly set her free again. She tried to tell herself that they weren’t getting any stronger, any more regular, or any more defined.
But she was kidding herself.
Carla came in, knelt beside her, asked a couple of searching questions and told her, “You’re doing the right thing. And the weather is holding off, so far. You want me to call your parents?”
“No, not yet. Please don’t, Carla, I don’t want them to worry.”
“Let me stay with you, honey, till the ambulance gets here.”
“It’s okay. Go. I’ll be all right. The place is a zoo tonight.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Lucas and Carla passed each other in the doorway, no smiles exchanged, and Lucas dropped beside Reba again. He took both her hands in his and growled at her, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have accused you of staging the miscarriage. I had no right.”
“That’s not important, now.” But she was glad he’d said it, all the same.
His hands stayed folded around hers and she didn’t try to push them away, because this wasn’t the moment for that, not when their baby might be born tonight and might not survive.
Time passed like ice creeping down rock, until Reba and Lucas both heard the siren. Lucas leaped up and shot out of the office. Reba heard Gordie McConnell’s voice out in the restaurant, cut off by another bark from Lucas. Gordie appeared in the doorway a moment later, white-faced.
“What’s he done to you? I’ll kill him!”
“Nothing.”
“Maybe we should have gotten married, after all…”
“I’m telling you Gordon McConnell, that’s not what I’m thinking about right now.”
He kept standing there, shoring up the doorjamb, until the paramedics nudged him aside. They went through a couple of questions with her, but didn’t waste much time. Getting wheeled on a gurney to the waiting vehicle, Reba felt several snowflakes on her face and thanked heaven that the fall was only light, hopefully not enough to slow them down on the hundred mile journey to Denver.
“What should I do?” Gordie’s voice again. “Someone tell me.”
Nobody did. Carla might have, if she’d overheard, but she would have been pretty blunt about it.
Instead Lucas told the paramedics, in a tone that invited no discussion, “I’ll follow in my car,” and the words gave Reba a rush of relief that left her weak to her bones.
She didn’t know why she so badly wanted him with her, all of a sudden, when only half an hour ago she’d considered that he had no right to be involved, and when they’d been so hostile with each other. She just knew that she did want him—for his decisiveness, his strength, and most of all his primal biological connection to her unborn child.
“Which hospital are you headed for?” she heard him ask the paramedics.
“Rocky Mountain University Hospital, in Denver. It has a high-level neonatal intensive care unit. Are you related to the patient, sir?”
“I’m the baby’s father.”
In the background, Reba heard a woman shriek at this news.
At least Gordie didn’t do the same. He was one of the few people who’d already known, as had Carla. Gordie’s repeated offers to marry her “after all” had come prepackaged with the attitude that she’d owe him favors in return for the rest of her life, if he took on Lucas Halliday’s child, and when she heard Carla’s voice in the background telling Gordie just to please go home, she heartily hoped he’d stay there for the next month. No, forever.
One of the paramedics jumped into the driver’s seat, while the other closed the rear doors and took her place beside Reba. “Any more contractions?” she asked.
“Another one, just then.”
“Are they getting stronger?”
“I— Yes. Yes, they are.”
“Hold on, okay? Safest way to transport a preemie baby is inside the mom.”
“Won’t the doctors be able to stop this?”
“You probably don’t want them to, honey, not at this point, with your amniotic sac ruptured. The risk of infection and complications is too great.”
Reba didn’t ask any more questions after this, she just tried to relax and breathe, as the paramedic instructed, so that her baby would stay safe inside her all the way to Denver, more than a hundred miles through the falling snow.
Darkness and snow, frustration
and fear.
The world narrowed to a tunnel of highway, slashed by the SUV’s yellow headlights that seemed to catch each falling flake and fling it in Lucas’s face. He’d never even gotten to order a meal at the steakhouse, let alone eat it, but hunger was the least of his concerns right now.
He had no clue what was happening inside the ambulance. He had followed it out of town, but it was travelling on full lights and sirens and he soon lost even the red glare of its taillights ahead of him.
Until they reached the Interstate, the snow on the road made each tight bend treacherous, and every time he rounded one, he held his breath against the imagined sight of the ambulance piled and crumpled against a tree.
The Interstate was a stroll in the park by comparison, giving him time to experience a jarring sense of unreality when he thought about last September, and all the contrasts between then and now. Heat instead of cold, brilliant sun instead of darkness, his link with Reba one of sizzling, brazen, challenging desire, in place of the dragging fear he felt for her and the baby now.
The way they’d made love, the way they’d laughed and sparked off each other. Even the way they’d sometimes clashed had been a part of the attraction. Who knew it would lead to this? Who knew where it would go next, if their baby was born tonight?
Approaching Denver at last, after more than ninety minutes on the road, he realized he had no idea where Rocky Mountain University Hospital was. He pulled into a gas station, just off one of the last exits before the city. There, he filled up and bought a street map, which showed the large institution located several miles north of the downtown area, not far from where he currently was.
The stop had delayed him, and the ambulance must already have arrived, some minutes ago. Reba would have been hustled inside on a gurney, and taken…where? After finding a visitor’s parking lot, parking the ranch pickup and negotiating the main reception desk, he knew only that he should “try the E.R,” because her name hadn’t yet shown up on the computer data base.
By the time he got to her, she’d been taken to the Maternity floor because a doctor’s examination had shown her to be in “established labor,” so they made him put on a cap and gown.