Heard It Through the Grapevine

by Teresa Hill

  Matt sat down and took Cathie’s hand in his. He stared at the monitor for what felt like forever, watching every little blip of the baby’s heart, willing it to keep going. As if there was anything he could do to make that happen.

  Cathie finally stirred in her sleep, and he grimaced as the lines on the monitor changed in ways he didn’t understand. He leaned over her, smoothing back her hair. Her eyes fluttered open. She looked confused for a moment, and then her eyes filled with tears.

  “Don’t,” he said, easing down until they were practically cheek-to-cheek. He carefully wiped away her tears. “Don’t do that. The baby’s fine. See? There’s Skipper’s heartbeat. One-forty. Perfect, the nurse said.”

  Cathie turned her face into the crook of his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  He kissed the side of her forehead, wishing he could take every bit of pain and fear away. “For what?”

  “For this. For everything. For pulling you away from that problem in Texas—”

  “Cathie, I don’t give a damn about what’s going on in Texas,” he said.

  “And because… I guess I just did too much, and if I’ve hurt the baby—”

  “Skip’s going to be just fine.” He was trying to convince himself as much as her.

  “You don’t know that. Even the doctor said she doesn’t know that.”

  He fought to control his reaction to the news, glad she couldn’t see his face right then. Just how bad was it?

  “I thought about this happening,” Cathie said, sobbing. “When I first found out I was pregnant, and I was so scared, I thought…maybe I’d just lose it. Maybe it would just go away, and I’d never have to tell anyone or make a decision about what to do. I thought all my problems would go away. How could I think that, Matt?”

  “You were just scared,” he said. “Besides, you can’t think a baby away. It doesn’t work like that, and you know it.”

  “Still…I didn’t want to be pregnant.”

  “And now you do.”

  “I do. I want this baby so much.”

  “And the baby knows that, Cathie. If Skip knows anything, it’s how much you love him. It’ll be okay. You’ll see.”

  “Ahh.” Her entire body curled up around her belly. She grimaced, her hand clamping down on his.

  “It hurts?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  Oh, God. Don’t do this. Matt was ready to run and find the nurse, but one of them came rushing into the room, her eyes going directly to the monitor.

  “Ooh. That’s a bad one, huh?”

  Cathie nodded.

  “What’s going on?” Matt asked.

  “Her contractions are picking up.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Cathie, listen to me. You need to calm down, okay? I know that’s hard right now, but that’s what your baby needs. So you lie there and breathe for me. I’m going to talk to Dr. Adams, and we’ll see about getting you a higher dose of terbutalene.”

  “What’s that?” Matt asked.

  “The medicine that we hope will stop her contractions.”

  “And what if it doesn’t?”

  “Let me get the doctor first,” the nurse said, slipping away before he could catch her.

  He tried to slip his hand from Cathie’s, so he could go and catch the nurse, but Cathie wouldn’t let him.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “Please.”

  “I just want to ask the nurse something—”

  “What happens if they can’t stop the contractions?” she guessed.

  “Yes.”

  “I already asked.” Cathie looked heartbroken. “There’s nothing. If they can’t stop the contractions, and the baby comes now…it’s too soon. Twenty weeks. The baby won’t even have a chance.”

  Chapter Nine

  He sat by her side all through the night, leaving only long enough to make a phone call. She had finally dozed off sometime after four in the morning, sleeping fitfully, but her eyes slid open as Matt settled by into his chair by her bedside.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

  “Nothing. I just called your parents.”

  “You told them about the baby?”

  He nodded. “Actually, I told them the day of the wedding.”

  “Matt?”

  “Shh. Don’t worry. They were fine with it. I should have told you already, but you seemed so happy lately. I didn’t want you to worry about anything.” He wanted to stand between her and her baby and the entire world and make sure nothing ever hurt them again, and fool that he was, he’d actually thought he could do it.

  “I was happy,” she said.

  “Well, so are they. They can’t wait to be grandparents,” he said. “Your father hardly grumbled at all, and your mother kept saying, ‘A baby?’ in a voice I’ve never heard her use before. Like you’d given her the world on a silver platter. It’s been killing Mary not to say anything to you about it until you decided to tell them. But now, I thought you’d want your mother with you.”

  “I do,” she said.

  Then he’d done the right thing. At least in this.

  “They’ll be here soon.” He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Your father told me to give you that, and your mother made me promise not to let go of you for a second until they get here.”

  He already had her hand back in his. Mary had sworn it made a difference. That with everything a women went through to have a baby, as simple as it sounded, having her husband beside her, holding her hand, honestly helped. He didn’t see how it possibly could, but he didn’t know what else to do. So he kept hold of her hand.

  But then, he remembered how he’d felt all those years ago when Cathie had taken his hand and tugged him into the midst of some family tradition or a holiday or a celebration. All those times when he’d known he didn’t belong and had intended to hang back on the fringes, and she’d refused to let him.

  He was surprised to find that right now, he wouldn’t have let someone pry him away from her side for anything in this world. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten that this baby wasn’t his or that their marriage wasn’t real. It was that somewhere along the way, those things had ceased to matter to him.

  She mattered. The baby mattered.

  Not such a surprise, he told himself. He’d always cared about Cathie, even when he hadn’t cared about anyone else, not even himself. And the baby…well, any baby of Cathie’s would be special.

  “Did something happen while I was asleep?” Cathie asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “You just look… I don’t know. It scared me for a minute.”

  “Everything’s fine. The nurse comes in every now and then, but all she says is that we’ll have to wait for the doctor, who should be making rounds soon.”

  “Thank you for coming back,” she said.

  “Of course I came.” He sat down on the side of her bed and took her loosely in his arms. “Didn’t you know I would?”

  “You said it was an emergency, and you jumped on a plane. I wasn’t sure…”

  How could she think that? It made him furious. “I own the damned company, Cathie. I sent somebody else down there this morning. Hell, I should have done that in the first place.”

  “No. I promised you we wouldn’t be any trouble. That we wouldn’t disrupt your life—”

  Disrupt his life? He was furious, and yet a part of him could only sit there and think, What life? He had a job, a company, and a house that had never felt like a home. He had a lot of money and a fast, expensive car and could have gone anywhere he wanted in the world and found someone willing to go with him.

  But that wasn’t a life.

  It wasn’t what he’d found with her the last few months. He’d known there had to be something wrong with that.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He was saved from answering when the doctor appeared. She tapped twice, quickly and softly on the door, and without waiting for an invitation, came inside. “How are we doing this
morning?”

  Matt got off the bed and stepped back, out of the doctor’s way, still hanging onto Cathie’s hand, as Mary had told him to do. “You tell us,” he said.

  “Okay.” She looked at the chart at the foot of the bed, then studied the strip coming out of the monitor and the monitor itself, her face unreadable. “Felt any contractions recently?”

  “No,” Cathie said. “But I’ve been dozing.”

  “Good. Sleep is good.” The doctor uncovered Cathie’s abdomen, the big belt of the baby monitor still wrapped around her, and pressed here and there on Cathie’s abdomen. What in the world did that tell her? “Let’s check your cervix to see if you’re dilating. Dad, if you’d step out and give us a minute?”

  “No,” Cathie said, hanging onto him.

  “Okay,” the doctor said. “You’re the patient.”

  She pulled back the sheet, and when Matt realized what she was doing, he turned his back to the doctor and watched Cathie’s face. They weren’t going to hurt her, were they?

  “Okay,” the doctor said a moment later, backing up and straightening the sheet. “Here’s what we’ve got.”

  Matt turned back around, glad that Cathie couldn’t see his face at the moment, feeling a kind of desperation he thought he’d left behind years ago. He didn’t do desperation anymore. He didn’t care enough about anything to be desperate about it.

  It scared him, feeling like this after so long. He’d forgotten what a lousy feeling it was, that he’d vowed to never, ever feel that powerless or that desperate again.

  “The baby looks fine on the monitor,” the doctor said. “The heartbeat is strong and steady. The ultrasound that we did last night didn’t show any abnormalities. Right now, it looks like the medication has done what we needed, which is to stop the contractions. Your cervix was open just a bit, from the contractions, a few hours ago, but I think it’s closing back up, which is also what we want.”

  “So, she’s okay? And the baby’s okay?” Matt asked.

  “Right now, they’re fine.”

  Right now? He needed for them to be fine for a lot longer than right now. He wanted things to be just peachy for them forever. Where did he go to get that kind of guarantee?

  “So what happened?” Matt tried.

  “The lab work showed a slight elevation in Cathie’s white blood cell count and she has a slight fever, which usually means there’s an infection somewhere in the body and infections can trigger something like this. Maybe that’s all it was.”

  “Maybe?” Matt was ready to explode. They’d been here for hours, and all they got was a maybe?

  “I know it’s frightening,” the doctor said. “But so often in cases like this, we never pinpoint exactly what caused the problem.”

  He took that thought and let it roll around in his head. It was simply unacceptable. “Then how do you know it’s not going to happen again?”

  “We don’t.”

  Oh, he was going to hit something. Hard. As soon as he could let go of Cathie’s hand and get far enough away that he didn’t scare her. “So, what now?”

  “I think we’d be safe sending you home, Cathie, if you have someone who can stay with you for the next forty-eight hours or so?”

  “I’ll stay with her,” Matt said.

  “Okay.” The doctor gave him a gentle smile and put her hand on his arm. Did she know how much he needed to hit something? “We’ll continue the medication we’re giving her here and add some antibiotics. Hopefully we can clear up the infection and with some bed rest, we’ll keep the contractions from coming back.”

  “That’s it?” Wait? Hope?

  He wasn’t good at waiting, and he’d never gotten very far on anything as flimsy as hope.

  “Sorry. I wish there weren’t so many uncertainties to having a baby. I’m afraid that’s just the way it is.”

  And it sucked. That was it. It truly sucked. How did so many people get through this? Tons of them, year after year? All those kids in the world…all their parents lived through uncertainties like this?

  “So, when will we know the baby’s going to be okay?” Matt asked.

  The doctor frowned. “I was going to say when it’s born healthy, but then you have a whole host of other things to worry about. Like keeping them safe and healthy. I’m not sure parents ever truly relax. My son just got his driver’s license, and he terrifies me every single day.”

  As reassurances went, that sucked, too. So every damned thing about this was terrifying? Matt barely managed not to say, So why does anybody ever do it? Why do they become parents? He didn’t think that would go over well with the doctor or with Cathie. It sure didn’t sit well with him.

  “Cathie, I’m going to send a nurse in to unhook the monitors and take out your IV. Why don’t you get dressed while Matt and I will take care of the discharge papers?”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  Matt squeezed her hand and waited. He’d made a promise.

  “I can get dressed all by myself,” Cathie said. “And I can see that you have at least a dozen more questions for the doctor. Go ahead. I’ll be right here.”

  He followed the doctor around the corner and into the hall. Before she could say anything, he said, “I want her and this baby to have absolutely everything they need. If it’s a question of money, it’s not a problem. Not at all.”

  “It’s not,” the doctor said. “Unfortunately, you can’t buy yourself a healthy baby. At least, not legally and not through any kind of medicine we can provide in this day and age. Sometimes, things just go wrong. But the thing you need to realize, is that the vast majority of the time, everything is fine. Cathie is young and healthy and fit. She doesn’t have any risk factors to indicate she shouldn’t have an absolutely normal pregnancy and a healthy baby.”

  “But she’s not having a normal pregnancy.”

  “She may have one that’s absolutely normal from this point on. Try not to go borrowing trouble, okay?”

  He didn’t know if he could do that. He’d been ready for trouble his entire life and more often than not, it had found him.

  “Take her home. Get some rest. I want to see her in forty-eight hours, sooner if anything unusual happens.”

  Matt took her home and put her to bed, fussing over her and staying right by her side. It was sweet, and it made her tear up a bit, which worried him all over again. But she blamed it on being tired and worried and the fact that the doctor said the medicine that would hopefully keep her from having any more contractions often made women jittery and all out-of-sorts.

  The doctor gave Cathie a few pills to help her sleep, too, swearing it would not hurt the baby and that she needed the rest. Cathie took them.

  When she woke up, her mother was sitting by her side.

  “Oh, Mom.” Two words, and she was in her mother’s arms.

  “Shh. It’s all right, my darling.”

  They held each other for a long time, and when Cathie finally let go, she saw that her mother had a beautiful smile on her face.

  “A baby,” she said, just like Matt said she had. “I can’t believe there’s going to be a baby. I’ve been about to bust, I’m so excited, and you didn’t even tell me.”

  “I’m sorry. I was afraid you’d be upset. Or that Daddy would be.”

  “Your father may be more excited than I am,” her mother confessed.

  “Still, I know it’s not…I know we should have—”

  “Yes, you know. And I know you know. But…these things happen, my darling. You’re certainly not the first, and the important thing is that you and Matt are together, and you love him, and you’re going to have a baby. And babies are wonderful.”

  “I do love him,” she said. “And I love this baby so much, and Matt’s been wonderful.”

  “Of course, he has. I know he’ll take good care of you both. I never doubted that for a moment. Neither did your father. Now, tell me about this baby? Matt said you wouldn’t let the doctor tell you if it’s a boy or a girl?”<
br />
  “No.”

  “I never did, either. Couldn’t stand to spoil the surprise.”

  “It’s due in July,” Cathie said. “Matt took me out on Valentine’s Day and we bought out the store, getting things for the baby’s room, and I’ve been trying to figure out what color I want to paint the nursery.”

  “Well, figure it out soon, and your father and I will do that while we’re here.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.

  “So am I, darling. So am I. I get to spoil this baby monstrously, don’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father’s already wanting to fix up a nursery of our own at the house. It’s the cutest thing. He has all sorts of plans. He may turn out to be worse than I am. He was gone so much of the time when you and your brothers were little.”

  He had been, but she’d always known he loved her, that if she ever needed him, he’d be there. He’d been a wonderful father, and she wanted to believe Matt could be, too. She’d wanted to believe everything would be just fine, but she felt like her pretty little illusion had just shattered at her feet.

  “Guess I forgot to tell you that marriage can be terrifying,” Cathie’s father said.

  “No, you didn’t mention that part,” Matt said.

  They were sitting in near darkness in the family room, which Cathie had made to look like a family actually lived there. Matt was sipping a Scotch, and Jim, surprisingly, was having one, too.

  “And kids? God have mercy, kids are even more terrifying.”

  “Just what I need to hear, Jim.”

  “But they’re miracles, too. And the most precious gifts. You end up being thankful, despite the terror, because they will bring you so much joy. They’ll fill up your life. Make it worth living. You’ll see after a while that the other things tend to fall away, and the only things that really matter in life are the people you love and the ones who love you.”

  “You’re telling me a man has to be terrified on a regular basis to be happy? That is the screwiest thing I’ve ever heard, and I always thought you were such a smart man.”