by Lilian Darcy
“No.”
“Let me do that for you, and it should speed up this last bit.”
Soon. It would be soon now.
The freight trains got serious about doing their job, and the pace and length of the contractions intensified even further. There was hardly enough break between them now for her to take a single breath, and the pain didn’t stop. The anesthesiologist was apparently on his way.
Too late.
“A good nine centimeters dilation, now, Lauren, you’re doing great!” said the nurse. “The head’s way down. It won’t be long. You’re almost there.”
“My epidural…”
“You don’t have time now, honey.”
“I hate her,” Lauren gasped, after the nurse had left the room.
“You mentioned that before,” Daniel said. “Except that it was a different nurse.”
She grabbed his arms again—both of them now—and gasped and panted, and squeezed those warm, familiar muscles until she couldn’t squeeze any harder.
“I want to be rescued,” she said. “Remember that night we first met? Didn’t it feel great when we got rescued?”
“You have a little more work to do on your own first, this time, sweetheart.” His voice was a croak.
“Help me!”
“I’m here, honey. I will. I love you, Lauren.”
How many times over the past few terrible hours had he said it to her? Daniel wondered.
Momentarily released from her grip, he pressed his fingers into his eyes to stop the flickering pattern of light that his fatigue had produced. His back and his head ached. Every joint felt stiff. Like the day he and Lauren had first met, in a concrete duct cavity under a broken building, they had people around them and yet they were totally alone. Just him and her, a baby on its way, and a level of inescapable honesty that was more confronting than anything they’d faced physically.
Well, no, he revised. For Lauren, this time it was different. She’d entered a zone of pain that was beyond his own experience. She was walled up inside it, consumed by it, and what she said wasn’t honest anymore, it was wild and desperate and beyond logic.
Or so he’d hoped, because she’d said more than once, now, that she hated him.
While I’m telling her that I love her as if there’s no tomorrow.
Had he actually stopped to think about whether it was true?
The whole world had shrunk out of sight. The only thing left was her pain, her face, her need, her courage and her falling apart. He felt as if he’d do anything to make it go away, to share its inexorable weight. So he’d told her, over and over, that he was here, that he’d never leave.
And that he loved her.
Was this the most heartless piece of dishonesty ever to fall from his mouth, or did he mean it?
I never said it to Becky, he remembered, when she was giving birth.
He’d put a lock on his tongue during her labor, so that he wouldn’t let fly with something that had never been true. He’d never loved Becky, and he’d refused to demean both of them by saying it while she labored to produce their twins. He couldn’t have said it if he’d tried. That was the moment when he’d finally accepted just how bad their marriage really was.
So am I lying to Lauren now?
No.
No!
These were the best, truest and most liberating words he’d ever spoken. They made him giddy with happiness and hope and relief. Exultant…drunk, almost…with confidence and power. He loved her. He loved everything about her. He already loved the baby that was about to be born, though it wasn’t his. The baby was part of Lauren, and that was more than enough.
Her grip on his arm tightened once more and he steeled himself for the sting of her nails digging into his flesh and the painful squeeze on his muscles. He slid his hand along the inner skin of her arm, leaned forward and brushed the damp hair back from her forehead.
She was so beautiful! Even with her face drained and contorted, her hair hanging limp to her shoulders, sweat shiny on her upper lip, her temples, her throat, she was just so beautiful to his sight.
She began to shake, and he said once more, urgently, as if he might never have another chance, “I love you, Lauren!”
She hadn’t even heard. “Help me! I have to push! It’s coming!”
Yes, but slowly. Too slowly. She gave it nearly an hour of intense effort, with almost no rest between each contraction, and at last the head crowned. Daniel saw on the monitor the way the baby’s heart rate had started to dip dramatically with each contraction, and felt sick with fear. Dr. Feldman had arrived at some point. He hardly remembered when. Now, a second nurse wheeled out the regular newborn warming bed and wheeled in a different one, which even Daniel’s untrained eye could see was equipped with specialized features for intensive care.
Lauren was working too hard and was in too much pain to understand that anything was wrong. One final, mighty push and she delivered the head, and Daniel thought it was all over. His little twins had both slipped free with ease at this point. He’d kissed Becky on the forehead.
But this time, it wasn’t happening.
“What is it?” he asked the doctor hoarsely. Didn’t dare to be more specific in case Lauren guessed there was a problem.
“We’re fine. The shoulder’s a little stuck, that’s all.”
All?
Daniel looked at the monitor and saw that the heart rate was way, way down. He knew there wasn’t much time. “Get it free!” he hissed between his teeth.
“We’re working on that. Pant through this contraction, Lauren,” the doctor told her.
She said, “I can’t!” on an agonized gasp, then did it anyway. “Huh…huh…huh…” Her eyes were open and staring, fixed, on a point in space.
Daniel felt his own helplessness like a rope tightening around his neck. He would have torn his whole arm off, just to make this a tiny bit easier for her. You wanted my arm, Lauren. Here, have it, if it helps. On the clock, each tick of the second hand seemed to teeter and hold its breath before it moved.
“Okay, push now, Lauren. Huge push!” Dr. Feldman said.
Daniel didn’t want to think about how the obstetrician’s hand was positioned.
“Huge, huge push. That’s great.”
The baby shot out like a cork, almost projecting off the end of the bed. Lauren moaned and began to work her lungs like an athlete after a marathon. She was shaking uncontrollably.
“It’s a girl!” the doctor said. There was a silence, then the sound of a strong cry. “There! A beautiful baby girl!”
“Is she okay?” Daniel asked, his voice rasping painfully.
“She’s fine. She’s beautiful. We’re just going to give her a little oxygen… Does she have a name?”
“Callie Jean, after my mother,” Lauren gasped, then began to cry. “Oh! Oh! I have a baby girl! I have a precious baby girl!”
“Callie,” the nurse said. “That’s pretty.”
“Mom’s name was really Caroline, but no one ever called her that,” Lauren said through her tears. “I’ve always loved the nickname just for itself.”
“Here she is, and she’s beautiful.”
The nurse laid the baby on Lauren’s stomach, still slick and red and naked. She was big, with a wet cap of black hair, and she was still crying. Lauren looked at her, her hair shading her face. She said, “Oh!” over and over again, and Daniel thought that he’d never heard such happiness in a human voice, such musical emotion. He could actually hear the smile.
But he couldn’t share it. She hadn’t asked him to. It made his own love for the baby meaningless, when he’d felt so exultant about the new emotion just a short while ago.
She hasn’t even looked at me, he realized. His breath tightened and stopped in his lungs. He could hardly see her face. She hasn’t touched me since she stopped needing my arm. “I have a baby girl,” she said. She hadn’t ever told me she’d decided on the baby’s name. In all those conversations we had, she never
even mentioned it. This isn’t my baby. Lauren hasn’t asked me to love her, or to love Callie. What on earth am I doing here?
“I need to get out of here,” he muttered, speaking to no one, hardly able to breathe.
He got himself out of the room as fast as he could. Didn’t know where he was headed at first. He was simply escaping. He prowled for several minutes, breathing shallow, limbs shaky, eyes stinging with fatigue. He hadn’t eaten for, what, around twenty hours? His stomach was totally hollow, yet he didn’t feel hungry at all.
Finally, with a sense of defeat, his mind crystallized and was ready for action. Only one thing to do. The thing he should have been doing all along. The only thing he should have been doing.
His job.
Lauren didn’t know when Daniel had left. It seemed as if one minute she was squeezing his arm, ready to die, and the next, as she looked up to smile at him, starry-eyed and pain-free, from the magic sight of her baby at her breast, he wasn’t even in the room.
“Where did Daniel go?” she asked the nurse.
“He said something about…uh…getting out of here,” the nurse said. She looked a little taken aback.
But then, she didn’t know that Daniel wasn’t this baby’s father. He was probably calling his office, or his mother and the boys. He was calling his real life.
“I’m done,” he would say on a heavy sigh. “It’s been a nightmare of a night, but I’m free now, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”
Something like that.
Lauren had kept him hostage here for about seventeen hours, since the end of yesterday’s tour.
He told me he loved me. I can’t remember when, but I know I didn’t imagine it. He said it more than once.
Yes, and what had she told him, almost as often?
That she hated him. It wasn’t true. She couldn’t think, now, why it had seemed so important to lash out at everyone within reach. But it had felt totally necessary to say it at the time.
If she hadn’t meant it, she had to assume that he hadn’t meant it, either.
Pain-free, exhausted, euphoric about her baby…then flat.
Flat. Empty. She hadn’t known that feelings could ebb and flow like this. Her emotions were like king tides, sweeping in and out, churning everything in their wake.
When she was settled in her room half an hour later, with baby Callie fast asleep in a Plexiglas crib right beside her bed, Daniel still hadn’t returned. Maybe he wasn’t coming back at all. She was watching Callie when he appeared in the doorway at last.
“Listen, I have some good news.” No greeting, no smile, just that.
“Yes?” Her heart was pounding. Just the sight of him, tall and strong, wearing the long night’s fatigue like battle dress, was enough to make her dizzy with need. And love.
When had it happened? She couldn’t pinpoint the moment, or the day, or even the week. She just knew, the way she knew her own name, the way she knew she’d die for Callie, that Daniel was a part of her heart and her soul.
He came toward the bed, then stopped awkwardly, several feet from it. His body was partially masked by Callie’s crib.
“I wanted to tell you right away,” he said. “I’ve found the guy. It was what you said about Ben’s six floors of office space standing empty that gave me the idea. Ben’s shareholders weren’t the only ones hurting when he fled the country. He had other creditors, too, and with a company like his, whoever leased him office space would have been high on the list. I had the police check it out last night, and they confirmed it just now. It was a Boston college kid whose father owned the building Ben’s company worked out of. They’ve already made the arrest.”
Lauren looked at him across the heavenly vista of her sleeping baby girl. His face looked blank, professional, tight-lipped. She spent about seven seconds debating the issue of whether she should tell him how she was feeling right now.
The answer was yes. Give it to him with both barrels.
“Is that what you think I care about?” she demanded, her voice rising higher and louder with each word. “I look down for my very first peek at my new baby girl, and when I look up again, you’ve disappeared. I have no idea if you’re ever coming back, and when you do, all you can tell me is that they’ve made an arrest? That’s great! It’s peachy! You’ve done your job, and you should be proud. Now you can get out of my life!”
She burst into tears. Pain and release, inseparably mixed. Hormones? So be it! Hormones made a lot of sense. Much more sense than security consultants who were too strong and too competent for their own good.
Daniel came closer. He sat on the bed. He stroked a single finger along the back of her hand. “I love you.”
“And I hate you. We had this whole conversation during labor, remember?” She sniffed, snatched her hand away from his delicious touch, mashed a tissue into her face, sniffed again and looked at him. “Do we have to repeat it?”
“You don’t hate me,” he said.
“And you don’t love me. Apparently men and women lie to each other during labor. The truth comes out when the baby’s born.”
“I do love you. I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve let go of something since I met you. A kind of mistrust that was dormant inside me even before my marriage to Becky. It would probably have disappeared in a good marriage, without me even knowing. Becky and I didn’t have a good marriage, Lauren.”
“You told me that the first night we met.”
“And I spent the next six months wishing I hadn’t. Denying myself the chance to see you again because I wished so much that I hadn’t told you what I did. Scared about the power of the connection we made under that rubble. I love you. And it hurt, Lauren, when you didn’t include me after the birth. It seemed to me like I didn’t count for you then, when I’d just realized that you meant everything in the world to me, and I’d spent the whole night proving it.”
“If you knew that, that I meant so much, why did you leave?”
“I left because it hurt too much to stay, feeling like I didn’t belong. That you didn’t want me, and you didn’t even consider that Callie meant something to me, too.”
She tried to say that wasn’t true, but he ignored her.
“Seemed like the only thing I could do was to do my job. So I did it. I made the final connection that got our guy out of the picture, and now—I love you. If you don’t want anything to do with that, fine, I guess I’ll just have to learn to live with it, but it’s still true, so don’t accuse me of letting you down.” His words were angry, rushed, intense. “I was there. For you and for Callie. It didn’t look like you wanted me. If you do want me, tell me that, don’t yell at me about leaving you. I’m here, I want to marry you, and if you say yes, I’ll be here for the rest of your life.”
What could a hormonal postpartum new mother do, after a speech like that, except burst into tears?
“Why am I doing this?” she whispered, her voice jerking in her throat. “The sun has just come out in my heart, and instead I’m sobbing like it’s broken.”
“Gee, yeah, so strange,” Daniel whispered, kissing the tears away. “Couldn’t be seventeen hours of horrible pain and no food or sleep, could it?”
“You know, the pain really wasn’t so bad.”
His shout of laughter could have been heard six floors away, and his grin could have lit up three counties. “Tell that to my arm!” he said. “I’m still wondering when the feeling’s going to come back in it.”
“Poor arm.” She held it again, softly this time. Used it shamelessly as leverage to pull him closer once more. “And it’s still wearing a business shirt, too. I’m glad you took off your tie.”
She stroked his jaw and his warm neck, reached her hand behind his head and made it quite clear to him exactly where she wanted his mouth. He obviously had the same idea. Time seemed to stand still as their lips met. He didn’t let her go until they heard a strange new sound behind them.
Callie. Crying.
A nurse
came in and said cheerfully, “I think she’s hungry, Mommy. Are you planning to breast-feed?”
“I’m hoping to,” Lauren answered, a little nervous. “Are you, um, giving lessons?”
“That’s why I’m here, and I know you’ll do fine.” She turned to Daniel. “Would Daddy like to hold his baby girl, while Mom and I get ready?” His baby girl. The words sounded so right—as right as the way Daniel’s little boys felt in Lauren’s arms when she hugged them. She knew now that he felt the same. Would he say it? If he said it, her happiness would be complete. In silence, holding her breath, she watched his face. Watched him smile and reach out his arms as the nurse picked up the tiny, perfect bundle that was Callie.
Her daughter. Their daughter.
“Daddy would just love to hold his baby girl,” Daniel said softly.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6952-5
PREGNANT AND PROTECTED
Copyright © 2002 by Melissa Benyon
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