Heard It Through the Grapevine

by Teresa Hill

  Then she’d been hanging out with really stupid men, he decided, knowing right then and there he was going back to the jewelry store to get the necklace he’d considered. No reason he couldn’t spoil her, to try to make up for all the stupid men who’d had the chance and blown it.

  It wasn’t like it was hard to make her happy. She was kind and generous and made everything so easy. She found joy in every day and even managed to make him laugh, and most everything in the world was better with her.

  It scared him sometimes, thinking about how much better things were with her.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go. I’ve been warned that this place covers about five acres. I hope you have some idea of what you want. Otherwise, we might not make it out alive.”

  That proved to be true. How many different ways were there to make a crib? Or sheets for a baby’s bed? And exactly how much stuff could one little baby need?

  They kept selecting things, and he hoped the place had movers and trucks to haul it all to the house, people who wouldn’t let Cathie lift a thing. They spent a fortune. Not that he cared, but she would have. He tried hard not to let her look at a price tag. She’d have been horrified.

  He was doing just fine in the store until they got to the baby clothes. Cathie picked up a little pink and white thing. A pretty knit sweater and a matching cap.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “Tell me the Skipper’s going to be bigger than that when she finally gets here.”

  She checked the tag on the sweater. “Nope. Sorry. This is a twelve-month size.”

  Matt felt a little light-headed. “A year before she’s even that size?”

  “Maybe. Some of them grow faster. Haven’t you ever been around a baby?”

  “Not really.” How did anyone keep something that tiny alive in this big, scary world? Something that little would have to be so vulnerable. One wrong move and…he didn’t even want to think about it. Up to this point, he’d just worried about Cathie and the pregnancy. Now he had the baby to think about.

  “You’re not going to faint or anything, are you?” she asked.

  “I have never fainted in my life.”

  “I guess this is not the time to tell you we need to talk about scheduling childbirth classes?”

  Childbirth?

  Cathie laughed. He’d heard stories. About childbirth classes and the birth itself. He’d thought, How bad could it possibly be? This was the twenty-first century, after all. They weren’t a primitive culture. Medicine had come so far, coming up with miracles every day.

  Despite all that, he’d heard it was still brutal—giving birth to a child.

  He didn’t want her going through anything like that, had imagined he’d just insist they gave her all kinds of drugs so nothing really hurt, and they’d somehow get the baby out. End of story.

  He and Cathie skipped the clothing. She had a hand on her back as they walked to the car and admitted she thought she might have overdone it a bit. It was all he could do not to insist she call her doctor.

  Instead, he took her home, picking up takeout on the way, and made her go to bed. She didn’t eat much, and he thought she might be a little warm. She made fun of him for fussing and thanked him again for the baby things, telling him she couldn’t wait to get started putting the baby’s room together.

  He decided he could do that himself. She could sit in the rocker they’d picked out and supervise.

  A month later, Matt got a call early on a Sunday morning about a problem with a system in Dallas that held the financial information of a quarter of a million people. The firewalls his company had erected had held up, protecting the most sensitive information, but still, the hackers had gotten farther inside the system than they should have.

  He was on a plane two hours later.

  Cathie drove him to the airport, hating to see him go again. She was feeling odd again. Achy and hot, kind of like she had the flu. Except she didn’t have a sore throat or a runny nose. And her back hurt.

  She lazed around the house, reading a history assignment and staring at the room she’d picked out for the baby, trying to figure out exactly what color she wanted on the walls and where all the furniture would go. They’d special ordered it. It was supposed to be here any day now. She couldn’t wait to see it in the room.

  Later, feeling better, she worked a bit in the garden. She was on her hands and knees, trying to get a stubborn weed out from around a bush, when her back stiffened in the oddest way.

  Cathie sat down on the ground rubbing at the spot in her back. She’d never had back problems before. Must have been a muscle spasm. The things she’d read said it wasn’t unusual. Pregnancy definitely strained the back.

  She went back to work. By the time she was done, her back really hurt. She walked stiffly inside, got a glass of water and went upstairs to lie down on the bed, wishing Matt was here.

  A few minutes later, her back did that thing again. It was so tight. Instinctively, she put a hand on her belly, over the baby. Her belly was tight, too.

  Scared, she told herself to breathe, to not jump to any ridiculous conclusions. She was fine.

  A moment later, she felt absolutely normal. Nothing hurt. Nothing was tight. She was just starting to relax again when, about five minutes later, it happened again. It didn’t hurt. Not really. It just felt…odd. And it scared her.

  But then, she had all sorts of odd aches and unusual feelings in her body these days. Like it just wasn’t her own and was completely out of her control. She’d had twinges in her belly before and dull aches, which her doctor said weren’t unusual at all, because the muscles were stretching and finding the strength to hold up the baby, and the baby got heavier all the time. Same with her back. She’d learned to ignore a lot of twinges. This one went away before it could scare her too badly.

  She went into the bathroom to rinse off, because she’d been digging in the dirt for a while. In the shower, it happened again. Everything in her belly went tight. Cathie got out and dried off, dressed quickly, and then got in bed, thinking she had done too much and her body was letting her know it. No reason to panic. She wished she could call her mother, but they hadn’t even told her parents about the baby yet, although they’d have to soon.

  She talked to the baby and tried to tell it everything was fine, not to worry, that she loved it and was going to take good care of it. But those odd feelings kept repeating. They were fairly regular, and after a while, they either got harder or she got more scared, because they hurt.

  There was no fooling herself anymore.

  She was having contractions.

  Shaking, Cathie called her doctor’s emergency number and, at the prompts, keyed in her phone number. Why they couldn’t just answer, she didn’t understand. She wouldn’t be calling if there wasn’t a problem.

  Things had been going so well. Too well. Everything seemed to be falling into place, just the way she’d hoped and dreamed and prayed they would. Matt looked so happy, and she’d almost forgotten the marriage wasn’t for real and that this wasn’t his baby she was carrying.

  It was a dangerous thing—forgetting like that—but that’s what she’d allowed herself to do. He was going to love her. He had to.

  Dr. Adams called her back, listened to everything she had to say about the off-and-on back pain, the flu-like feeling and the contractions and said, “I think you should meet me at the hospital, so we can find out what’s going on.”

  “My husband’s out of town.” Cathie closed her eyes, thinking, please, please, please. “Is it really bad? Does he need to come back?”

  “Cathie, these things happen, and most of the time, it turns out to be nothing.”

  “Most of the time? I’m not going to lose this baby, am I?” she cried.

  “I can’t promise you that. No doctor can. But I do know with absolute certainly that getting upset at this point is not going to help your baby or you. Call your husband and tell him to come home, if that will make you feel better.
But call a taxi first. I’ll meet you at the hospital in thirty minutes.”

  She dialed directory assistance and got a taxi. Then she had to call Matt. He worried so much about her and the baby already, even when nothing was wrong. She’d thought that was so sweet and taken it as a sign that he did truly care about them. She didn’t want to have to tell him this.

  What if something was really wrong, and she’d sat here too long and made it even worse?

  She would have said a little prayer, but she still felt guilty about being pregnant in the first place. She hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to even pray. She just kept talking to the Box. A silly distinction, she knew, but that seemed easier for her now.

  She kept it in her nightstand, way in the back behind her exercise clothes. She pulled it out, then ripped off a tiny strip of paper from one that held Matt’s phone number at his hotel in Texas. She was thinking she might as well start out this time by writing, Sorry, it’s me again. And God would groan and shake his head and think, Is poor Cathie ever going to get it together?

  She scribbled down a hasty, Please let my baby be okay, and wanted to add, Please let Matt be here soon, but that seemed like asking a lot. She always worried about asking too much.

  She folded up the tiny strip of paper and put it inside the Box, wondering if she should be taking some things out.

  How much happiness did any one person get, anyway?

  Maybe she just wanted too much.

  Matt picked up the phone and just the way Cathie said his name sent chills through him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I think I’m having contractions. My doctor’s meeting me at the hospital. Now. Can you…will you come home?”

  He didn’t remember much of what he said at that point. He just knew she was scared, she needed him, and he was hundreds of miles away, terrified. He had to trust an anonymous taxi driver and her doctor to take care of her and the baby until he could get there, which just felt like hell. He didn’t like depending on anyone. Having to do that with Cathie and the baby while she was trying to go into labor way too early…

  He wanted to hit something, and he hadn’t hit anyone or anything in at least ten years. When did the world get so damned scary? He didn’t remember being scared in the last ten years, either.

  Matt got himself a taxi and chartered a small jet, truly grateful he had so much money he could, all the while cursing himself for ever leaving when she hadn’t been feeling well.

  If anything happened to this baby…

  She loved it already, got the sweetest, dreamiest look on her face when she thought she was alone and talking to the baby. It embarrassed her, when he caught her doing it, and he teased her about it. But he thought it was the sweetest thing. How much she loved that baby when it didn’t even seem real yet.

  Matt tried to call the hospital from the plane, but all he got was a runaround from the hospital switchboard. They couldn’t find her in the computer. The nurse in the maternity ward said things were crazy, that they didn’t even have rooms for all of the patients they had. Maybe that was why he couldn’t find her. He’d entrusted her and the baby to a hospital that couldn’t even give them a room?

  He was slowly losing his mind, thinking of those damned books he’d read, all the things that could go wrong.

  It was an excruciating five hours from the time he got her call until he walked onto the maternity ward like a madman, insisting that someone find his wife now. A nurse in pink scrubs with little panda bears took pity on him and took him by the arm, promising to find Cathie and take him to her.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “First baby?”

  “Yes. Not due until July.”

  “Oh.” Her entire demeanor changed.

  She punched Cathie’s name into a computer, and this time, the damned machine knew where she was. The nurse led him to a room down the hall. It was dark inside, and it was only then that he realized it was nearly midnight.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got,” the nurse whispered.

  She went to the chart at the end of the bed and picked it up. Matt had to stop and take a breath, then two, bracing himself before he let himself look at Cathie. She was lying in the bed, wearing a plain, blue hospital gown, sleeping on her side under a light pink blanket, the baby nothing more than a tiny impression under the blanket. Cathie’s pretty, light brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. She was obviously worn-out.

  She had an IV in the back of her right hand and some kind of monitor around her tiny belly. He saw squiggly lines and numbers on the readout, but had no idea what they meant.

  “Okay,” the nurse said softly. “Looks like we have some contractions. Definitely not what we want at this point in the pregnancy. But at the last check, they weren’t as strong as they had been when she came in. Ultrasound looks fine.” She picked up a thin strip of paper that the monitor was spitting out and examined it. “The strip’s not bad. It measures her heartbeat and the baby’s and the contractions. Baby’s heartbeat looks fine.”

  “Heartbeat?”

  “Yes.” She pointed to the digital readout on the monitor. “That’s your baby’s heartbeat.”

  His baby? People called it that. The doctors. The nurses. The clerks at Baby Extravaganza. He and Cathie both just smiled and let them. He couldn’t imagine feeling more for this unborn child at the moment than if it had been his.

  Then he noticed the digital readout on the heartbeat monitor. “One-forty? It’s too fast.”

  “For a baby, it’s perfectly normal.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He sank into a chair by Cathie’s side, still scared to touch her. “What happens now?”

  “We wait and see. We have her on medication, which we’ll continue and hope it stops the contractions.” The nurse put her hand on his shoulder and said, “I know it’s hard to do at a time like this, but the calmer your wife is, the better, okay?”

  Matt nodded. He had to find a way not to let Cathie see how terrified he was.

  “Dr. Adams has a delivery, but I’m sure she’ll be in soon.”

  “Thank you,” Matt said.

  And then she left him alone in Cathie’s room.

  He tried sitting, but he was too antsy for that. Tried pacing, but the space was so small. Tried staring out the window and thought of begging, but he felt like he needed to be at Cathie’s side.

  He’d spent years feeling as if he were completely at the mercy of the world, and his world had been crazy. He hardly had any memory of his father, except for the fights between his parents. They screamed. They threw things, slapped each other around. Matt used to close his eyes and hide and tried to pretend nothing was happening.

  Once his father was gone, his mother drank even more. Sometimes she screamed and threw things and slapped him around, until he got faster and smarter than she was. Sometimes she passed out on the floor for hours, and he’d come out from his hiding place, trying to figure out if she was dead. He’d just sit there and wait until she moved. Sometimes hours would go by, before he knew.

  He took care of himself as best he could, learned not to care about anyone, not to count on anyone but himself. He took to the streets as often as he could, got angrier and stupider with every passing year, until he got caught with Cathie’s mother’s car.

  He’d thought he was going to jail for sure. He wasn’t even angry anymore, just tired and cold and hungry. What the hell? It wouldn’t have been the first time, and the food sucked, but they served it right on schedule, three times a day, which was more than he could usually say for mealtime for him.

  He’d gone instead to a place that looked like every throwaway kid’s dream. A regular house. A big one. Old, but one people had taken care of. With a real family living in it, claiming they wanted him there.

  He hadn’t believed a word of it at first and decided, first chance he got, he’d take everything he could grab and run. Maybe try to steal Mary’s car again.

  But it turned brutally col
d the day he got there, and Mary was a fabulous cook and Cathie… Cathie had walked right up to him and slipped her tiny hand into his and decided to keep him for her very own. Like he was some kind of prize. She wouldn’t leave him on the fringes of anything. She’d pull him into the midst of everyone, daring them not to accept him.

  He’d heard Jim and Mary talking late one night when they thought everyone was asleep, talking about how they didn’t know if they’d ever be able to reach him and what they could do. Mary had said they couldn’t give up on him, that Cathie would never forgive them. And they hadn’t.

  He’d let himself stay, but he’d been careful to never let himself count on it lasting, to never let himself forget he didn’t really belong. He always told himself if they kicked him out the next day, he’d be okay.

  As long as he could take care of himself, he’d be okay. He’d been fearless in the beginning with his company, taking outrageous chances, because he hadn’t quite been able to believe he’d ever have anything that good. People mistook the attitude for shrewdness and daring, but all along, he’d known it was nothing but not believing he’d ever be able to hang onto anything. Knowing that if he lost it all tomorrow, he’d be fine. He had an education, and he figured he’d always be able to find a job. He’d never live on the streets or go hungry again. No one could truly hurt a man who didn’t believe in anything or expect anything.

  He was more careful with the company these days, a complete turnaround from what he’d once been, because he thought now it had grown big enough and stable enough and he had enough money in the bank that he could keep it going, no matter what. His house was paid for. His car was paid for. He didn’t let himself owe anyone anything, except Cathie’s parents.

  Until a few months ago, he would have said he was a fabulously successful man. And none of that mattered at all now.

  He didn’t think he’d ever been so scared in his life or felt so powerless.