by Lilian Darcy
Had Lucas come into their suite later, when she was already asleep?
Probably not.
She certainly hadn’t heard him, and surely she would have done, because she hadn’t slept well. Now, she could see the darkening of new beard growth on his chin and jaw, and his hair had begun to look overdue for a trim. His muscles must ache from his twisted posture in the chair, his eyes must feel gritty and his clothing stale.
She knew all this, because she’d slept a couple of nights in that chair herself, although Lucas refused to let her do it very often. “If exhaustion dries up your milk…” Probably the only argument in the world that he could have gotten her to accept.
Maggie would be two weeks old tomorrow.
Reba had counted each day like counting precious pearls on a string. Their baby had survived another precious day. She’d gotten even more beautiful to Reba’s gaze. She’d tolerated a barrage of medications and all the noise and touch and treatments that stressed her immature nervous system. She’d put on a few precious grams of weight.
Precious, precious, precious.
If Reba had had only her own body to consult, however, she wouldn’t have had a clue about the days. Like the hospital meals, they’d all blurred, as had the phone calls she and Lucas had both made regularly to their families, to keep them posted on Maggie’s progress, as had the sheets and sheets and books and books of information about preemies that Lucas had gathered.
Reba looked at these sometimes, drawn to them like a moth to a flame, even though she knew that too much information only threatened the fragile hold she had on her emotional control. Lucas seemed to draw something positive from them, but she couldn’t.
How did it help to learn that a baby born at twenty-six weeks gestation had a twenty-eight percent chance of dying, and a forty percent chance of needing medical or surgical treatment for a scary thing called necrotizing enterocolitis? How did it help to read the true stories of other preemies, even when those stories ended happily?
A couple of events stood out from the mist. Reba had had her one-week postpartum check-up and everything was fine. Maggie had had a course of treatment with a special blue “bili” light because her body had turned yellow with jaundice, which they were told was very common in preemies and not a cause for concern. And she had come off her first course of the medication to close her open heart ductus, which had encouraged Reba and Lucas to risk a cautious celebration.
A pay-per-view movie and takeout pizza in their suite, with a surprising amount of laughter and connection in the mix.
Woo-hoo!
But even that had turned to ash a couple of days later, when the hole in the heart had opened again and Maggie had been put back on her medication—another series of three doses, through her IV line, over the course of twenty-four hours. This second course had been given five days ago, and when Reba saw Lucas keeping such an uncomfortable vigil in the chair her whole gut lurched.
Had he stayed all night because he knew something Reba didn’t? Had the hole opened again? Was Maggie facing surgery, now?
Where was Shirley? This should still be her shift, not Angela’s. Okay, here she was, coming toward this little corner of the unit with her usual comfortable gait. She must have snatched a bathroom break.
Not wanting to disturb Lucas or Maggie, Reba went to meet the nurse. “How has she been, overnight? Has Dr. Charleson seen her since yesterday afternoon?”
“He dropped by at around midnight.”
Reba tried to laugh. “Does that man ever go home?”
“His wife sure doesn’t think so,” Shirley shot back, then added more seriously “No, he was on call, and we had some drama, but not over Maggie.”
“So her heart hasn’t opened up again?”
“No, she’s doing great. Her levels are good. Dr. Charleson was pleased.”
“So Lucas stayed all night just because…?”
“Because he can’t stay away, honey. He has to stay on top of everything, at every moment. Some parents are like that.”
“I don’t understand it. And I don’t see how you can act so calm about it. Seems like he’s practically shouting that he doesn’t trust you.”
Shirley shrugged and smiled. “We’ve seen it before.”
“Does that mean I’m burying my head in the sand because I don’t want to know every detail?”
“No. You’re taking care of yourself, in your own way. Getting the rest you need, I’m hoping.”
“I’m only doing it for Maggie, because of the milk.”
Maggie wasn’t even taking the milk, yet. Her tiny digestive system hadn’t matured enough. She was still on nutrition fed directly into her veins and the stump of her cord. But she’d be ready for the milk soon, if she continued to progress, and so Reba had to make sure it was available. She stored sterilized jars of it in the hotel suite’s bar fridge whenever she was there, and ferried them to the neonatal unit’s freezer each day, and every one of those jars was the product of an hour of effort and frustration.
“You should be doing it for your own sake. And so should Lucas,” Shirley said. She dropped her voice below the murmuring pitch they were both using. “It would be great if you could get him to take some time out.”
“I doubt he’d listen…”
“A man who does what he wants?”
“A man who owns his whole universe, I think.”
“That would fit.”
Yes, it would. She’d known this about Lucas Halliday, corporate wheeler-dealer, from the beginning. She’d never expected to have to apply it to a situation like this. “He does look exhausted,” she said out loud, seeing him with Shirley’s eyes.
“See what you can do.”
He stirred, at that moment, just as Reba and Shirley arrived back at Maggie’s little world.
Reba froze, not wanting to disturb his rest, even such as it was.
But then he grunted, pressed his fingers into his face, dragged his eyes open and saw her. “What’s the time?”
“Six-thirty.”
“You didn’t need to come in this early.”
“You didn’t need to stay all night.”
“I wanted her to know I was here.”
“In case the ductus reopened?”
“No, Dr. Charleson said it would have happened by now, if it was going to. That’s one hurdle she’s over.” He said it the way he might have announced the completion of an agenda item at a business meeting.
“You should make up a chart,” Reba said, “listing every possible complication of prematurity. Give her gold stars in each square, or teddy bear stickers, for every one she avoids.”
He ignored the wobbly, accusing humor. “All her levels look good.” He was really speaking to himself. “Can I grab her chart, Shirley?”
He flipped through it like a seasoned accountant flipping through a budget spreadsheet, and muttered about various figures. Watching him with Shirley’s words still hovering in her head, Reba saw the way his hand shook slightly, saw the fatigue-reddened whites of his eyes, and felt a stab of shock.
Exhausted?
No.
He looked beyond exhausted, as if he was subsisting purely on nerves. What would happen if he had a complete collapse? If he got seriously sick?
Instinctively, she put a hand on his shoulder and realized he’d even lost weight and muscle tone in the two weeks since Maggie’s birth. He hadn’t worked out in the hotel gym, or used the pool he’d told her about. He hadn’t said a word about Halliday Corporation business, normally so high in his priorities. And, truthfully, neither of them was eating right.
Her anger evaporated.
“Lucas?”
“Yep? Want to sit down?”
“I’m fine. Stay.”
“No, I could do with a stretch.” His limbs practically creaked as he stood up.
“Let’s…” What? She’d forgotten. What did people do when they needed a break? Normal people. People who didn’t have their newborn baby in the NICU,
weighing less than two pounds, still hugely at risk. “Uh, let’s go for breakfast somewhere in a little while,” she suggested, not taking the chair he offered.
Did he realize that he was swaying?
She almost reached out her arms to catch him and sit him down again, but he steadied and worked his arms over his head, loosening his long spine.
“You mean not at the hospital?” He frowned.
“There are these places called restaurants. You’d be amazed. They have these big menus, and the staff come to you to find out what you want. You don’t have to line up and point. The scrambled eggs are made fresh, not left sitting for an hour in a metal dish over a big tray of hot water.”
“Comedian, this morning.”
“Pretty shaky at it.”
“Still…”
“Hungry, Lucas. And a bit desperate. Remind me what color the sky is, again?”
“Yellow, last time I looked.”
“Blotchy yellow? Because you were so tired. You were probably about to faint. We both need to get out of here. Shirley, um, pointed it out. When it’s daylight. And not so we can just crash over cold cereal in our hotel suite.”
He looked at her in silence, his gaze flicking up and down, catching on a couple of details, here and there. She was wearing yesterday’s shirt and, yes, okay, it had a dried drop or two of last night’s pasta sauce spilled on it because the fork had felt so heavy in her hand she hadn’t held it straight. She needed to get laundry done…
“Okay,” he said eventually. “But only after Dr. Charleson’s stopped by. He said last night he would, before he went off call this morning.”
“How are those two doing?” Angela asked Shirley, during their shift change-over conference, beside Maggie’s isolette.
The two nurses both looked over at Reba and Lucas, who stood out of earshot at the water cooler near the nurses’ station. Then they looked back at Maggie.
The tiny baby was still receiving one-on-one care, and would be until she outgrew the likelihood of some of the common preemie problems that were still a very real concern. Staff never dwelled on those, to parents, but they didn’t hide them, either. Baby Maggie wasn’t out of the woods yet, and neither were her parents.
“Wearing themselves out,” Shirley answered. “Don’t you just ache for the ones who care this much?”
“Oh, truly! And I’m not sure what to think with these two. They’re not married, right?”
“No, apparently not, but that doesn’t necessarily mean very much.”
“So you think they have a strong commitment?” Angela asked.
“To Maggie, totally. To each other?”
“That’s what I meant.”
Shirley sighed. “I’m not going to go there. I’d just like to see both of them take a little more time away from here. Otherwise I’m not taking bets on which of them is going to collapse soonest, and in the most spectacular fashion. I told Reba she needed to get Lucas to take some time, but really it was just as much for her sake.”
“So I’ll tell him the same thing. If they’re prepared to do it for each other, that says something about how they feel, don’t you think?”
“You’re such a romantic, Angela!”
Angela shrugged. “Is it wrong to want a happy ending, and two loving parents for this little girl?”
“It’s not wrong. Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Let’s just focus on getting her strong, and getting her parents to take some time for themselves. The rest, they have to do on their own, if they can.”
Dr. Charleson didn’t get to Maggie for another hour, but when he did, the news remained good. He took the stethoscope from his ears and told them, “Her heart sounds beautiful, now, just the way it should, and that’s confirmed by all her figures. Her gut is good. We’ve turned the settings on her respirator a little lower, and she’s doing the extra work herself.”
“Oh, that’s so good!” Reba breathed. “That’s so great!”
She laughed and her eyes went bright with tears. She clasped her hands together, then flattened them against her chest, just above her breasts, and the laughter dropped away. With closed eyes, she muttered something about wrestling with the beast, which Lucas was too tired and unfocused to understand at first.
He was worried about Reba, this morning. There was something about her restless energy that he didn’t like. He’d been sending her back to their suite every night and she hadn’t argued, but that didn’t mean she was resting the way she should.
And she’d begun to develop quite a tearful, combative relationship with the electric breast milk pump. She swore at it, sometimes. The words she used were mild, but the tone was anything but. She probably spoke like that to stubborn yearling cattle at shipping time, while herding them out of a corral.
It didn’t fit the peaceful, madonnalike image portrayed on the cover of the breast pump’s instruction booklet, but it certainly fit the effort she had to put in to get results—precious drops of the perfect nutrition for Maggie.
Okay, now he understood. Of course. This was the “beast” she’d just talked about. She needed to go and pump. He could see her switching from her happiness at the news about Maggie to a combination of determination and reluctance that twisted his heart.
“Fun, fun, fun!” she said.
Hell, he should have been more on top of this—on top of Reba’s energy levels. He should have been the one teasing her about the existence of restaurants, not the other way around. He didn’t normally let half his obligations slip, like that.
Yes, they should definitely go out for breakfast, as soon as she was done, and then some retail therapy at a really good mall. He’d never met a woman, yet, who wouldn’t consider that the perfect cure for practically anything.
He asked Angela, who directed him to a place called Cherry Creek, where he and Reba found a quiet little restaurant and shared a fruit platter, as well as each ordering juice, eggs, bacon, coffee and toast—all of it fresh and delicious compared to the indifferent hospital food.
By the time they’d finished, all of the mall’s stores were open. Acres of marble and granite gleamed, plate glass display windows reflected the ambient lighting without a fingermark in sight, and he told Reba, “I have credit cards burning a hole in my wallet. What shall we buy for Maggie?”
They browsed a store full of plush toys and chose a squishy, rainbow-colored soccer ball and a little pink and white bear. Wandering farther, they found an elegant children’s clothing store, full of top quality American and European-made outfits that even a hardened financier such as himself couldn’t help but consider adorable. Delicately stitched pastel playsuits and dresses, miniature fabric shoes, stretchy nightwear featuring ladybugs and buttercups.
“The sizes are all so huge,” Reba said. “There’s nothing small enough for her.”
“She’ll grow. How about this little dress with the overskirt? Or this playsuit with the embroidery? And the white shoes? I know, they’re as big as boats, but one day they’ll fit.”
Reba lifted the smallest size coral pink dress off the rack and held it up. The gauzy overskirt looked misty in the store’s clear white light. She riffled her hand along the row of lilac and lemon playsuits. And then she fisted her hands into the delicate fabric of the pink dress and scrunched it into messy creases without even knowing what she was doing.
“I can’t,” she said.
“If these are too fancy for a little cowgirl, we can try a different store.”
“No. I just can’t.” Her voice was panicky and tight. “Not today. Not…not yet.”
She stood in front of the dress rack with her eyes closed and her head bowed, and now Lucas understood what she meant. Understood, too, that she didn’t even dare to put her superstition into words.
She couldn’t buy these miniature-yet-still-too-big clothes for Maggie, in case Maggie never—in case she didn’t get a chance to—
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Let’s just go. Now.”
&nbs
p; He hooked the creased dress back on the rack, took Reba’s hand in his and pulled her out of the store with his jaw aching so hard it felt as if it might crack.
The sales clerk’s cheery, “Have a great day!” seemed to chase after them like a malign spirit, and he felt a powerful, primitive urge to wheel around and yell at her about just what kind of great days he and Reba had been having for the past two weeks, how many more such days there might be, and how did anyone have the gall and the insensitivity to say something like that to people who could be grieving, terrified, in pain…
He took a deep breath and coached the rage away, with a painful effort at staying rational.
It wasn’t the sales clerk’s fault. She didn’t know. How could she?
And, hell, maybe it was the best thing she could have said.
He and Reba needed a great day.
Desperately.
“I’m sorry, Lucas.” Reba’s tone was foggy, the sound of her voice barely louder than a whisper.
“It’s okay. I understand.” He still had her hand locked in his, and it probably hurt, the way he was gripping. Again, he had to coach himself, with the small part of his rational brain that still functioned, to soften his fingers, lace them through hers, turn the contact into a caress instead of a clamp.
“We should get back to the hospital,” she said.
Yeah, to the fluorescent lighting, the institutional food, breathing alarms going off, other parents in tears, doctors too busy to talk. All of that would definitely make it into a great day!
“No,” he told her. “Not yet. That’s just going to plunge us right back into— Let’s window shop for a while, or something. I…uh…couldn’t help but notice you have a spot or two on your top.”
“Pasta sauce.” She tried to joke about it. “Latest designer accessory. I haven’t managed to get laundry done.”
Another thing he could have stayed on top of, on her behalf.
“So we’ll buy you some new stuff,” he answered. “What else? His ’n hers haircuts? Mine’s driving me nuts.”