Heard It Through the Grapevine

by Teresa Hill

  Cathie’s was much more subtle than that. She tried, without letting Matt know what she was doing, to count the time between contractions, knowing if they got to the hospital too soon, they’d just send her back home, and Matt would have had a fit for sure. She was trying to make this as easy on him as possible.

  She asked him for a drink of water, to get rid of him long enough to phone her mother and father and tell them the baby was coming and to call the doctor, who told her to try to walk as much as she could and to try not to come to the hospital until the contractions were five minutes apart.

  She made it to six minutes before Matt figured out what was going on and turned nearly white with what looked like stark, deep-seated fear.

  She was so surprised she forgot about everything but him for a minute. She took his face between her hands, kissed him softly and looked into his eyes. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  He looked like a man about to be sent into a den of lions. She just didn’t understand. Her doctor told her some men were squeamish, who passed out at the first hint of pain or blood, but she felt certain Matt wasn’t one of them. Some just hated hospitals, but he’d never said anything about that, either. So what was it?

  He helped her inside, grabbed her suitcase and put her in the car, driving a little too fast and not saying anything on the way to the hospital, except to ask if she was okay.

  “It’s not bad,” she thought. “Like a bad backache.” She could do this. The breathing really helped. She hadn’t thought it would, but it did.

  They got to the hospital without any trouble, and although it seemed to take forever, it was only about fifteen minutes before she was settled into a room, a bright, sunny one with soothing, light blue walls.

  Cathie got into a hospital gown, and Matt found some soothing music on the radio. At the nurse’s suggestion, Cathie perched on the side of the bed, her feet dangling from it. When she leaned forward, her belly was practically hanging in midair, which took the pressure off her back, and Matt sat in a chair in front of her. He had his arms around her, could rub her back, and she hung onto him, her head on his shoulder.

  The contractions came harder and closer together. Matt stayed right there. She could feel the tension in his body, hear the tension in his voice, but he never left her side. He kissed her cheek, pushed the hair back from her face, held her hand, talked and talked and talked when she asked him to, because it kept her mind off everything else.

  From his reaction, she could have sworn each contraction hurt him more than her. She kept telling him it wasn’t that bad, kept trying to convince herself of it.

  The day wore on. The doctor offered her an epidural at one point, but said at the same time that her labor seemed to be progressing nicely at this point. She didn’t think it would be much longer, and that there was always a risk that the epidural might slow down her contractions.

  “Give it to her,” Matt said. He’d gotten more autocratic by the minute. This was the man who’d built a multimillion-dollar company from the ground up from nothing and ran it very successfully.

  Cathie said she was okay, for now.

  Matt swore.

  The doctor laughed and said, “I have a mother crowning down the hall. I’ll make a deal with you—if your water hasn’t broken on its own in the next hour, we’ll break it, and I bet we have a baby in no time after that.”

  She left and Matt said, “An hour?”

  “It’s all right.” Cathie moved back into her spot, half off the bed and draped over him. His wonderful hands found that spot in her back, and he did something with them that was pure magic.

  She felt like she was running a marathon while nine months pregnant. Surely that was not a good idea. Her legs felt like jelly. So did her arms. Her whole midsection was one, big dull ache. Every now and then, it was like a giant hand squeezed her silly, pushing every bit of pressure in her body onto that one point low in her back.

  She tried not to tense up and to keep breathing, to hang onto Matt.

  She wondered how much worse it could possibly get, how much longer it could possibly take, whether she’d be screaming her head off like that woman next door before this was over.

  Matt got chills every time the woman screamed. Cathie went from cold to hot and back to cold again. Surely it had been an hour.

  With the next contraction, she broke out into a cold sweat and forgot to breathe, and it hurt so bad. Once she lost her focus like that, her body tensed up, and things hurt even more.

  She cried out, finally said, “I think I want the epidural.”

  “Thank you, God,” Matt said.

  “I’ll call the anesthesiologist,” the nurse said, picking up the phone.

  Cathie slumped into Matt’s arms, the contraction over. “Is it really as good as everyone says? The epidural, I mean?”

  “Honey, I’ve seen women fall all over the anesthesiologist when he gets one going. We’ve got one who’s short, round, bald, gay and at least sixty, and women swear they’re in love with him, as long as he keeps the medicine coming.”

  Cathie smiled, exhausted but excited, too. She wanted to see her baby. “It won’t be long, will it?”

  “No, honey. Not long. You’re doing great.” The nurse put a hand on Matt’s shoulder. “You, too, Dad. Just try to hang in there a little longer.”

  His eyes met hers at the word Dad. They’d all been calling him that, the whole time he and Cathie had been there. He looked worried and was trying not to show it. She loved him so much, her heart ached with it. And she was going to have a baby soon.

  What could be more perfect than that?

  Matt was ready to kill someone.

  Cathie was beyond exhaustion. They’d been here for eight hours, but it seemed more like eight hundred. Where was the damned doctor with the epidural? The nurse kept telling Matt everything was fine, but she had to be lying. This was not fine. It could not be normal.

  He checked his watch one more time. Five minutes, and he was going out into the hall to find an anesthesiologist and drag him in here by force, if necessary. Cathie had another contraction, and he thought, if only he could do this for her, could take the pain from her, he’d gladly bear it himself to spare her this.

  The idea that some people had two or four or six children seemed absolutely insane. How could anyone voluntarily go through this again and again?

  He held onto her as best he could, whispering into her ear, “You’re doing great. It’s almost over. Skip’s turning out to be a real brat.”

  “Don’t call my baby a brat,” she said, as the contraction finally subsided.

  He kissed her and threatened to sit the kid down for a little chat the moment he made an appearance in the world.

  He’d thought that first time she’d ended up in the hospital was bad, but this was hell. It was like sinking into an alternate universe, where there was nothing but fear and pain, where the world narrowed down to next to nothing, him and her and this room and this stubborn, precious baby she loved so much. Time seemed to stand still, literally. He’d have dragged the hands of the clock forward himself, if that would have helped. But it seemed nothing did.

  He waited out the five minutes, got Cathie through one last contraction, and was ready to go hunt down the anesthesiologist when Cathie’s doctor came back.

  “How are we doing?”

  “It hurts,” Cathie said through clenched teeth.

  She didn’t get out any more than that when her whole body went tight in his arms, and before he could tell her to breathe and try to relax, she screamed.

  He looked down and saw a gush of clear fluid, and he wasn’t really worried until it was tinged pink. Next thing he knew, blood was running down the side of the mattress and dripping onto the floor.

  Chapter Eleven

  Monitors in the room started shrieking. The nurse called for help, and people started running into the room, taking Cathie’s now-limp body out of his arms and putting her onto the bed, working frantically.r />
  “What is it? What’s wrong?” he said, absolutely refusing to leave her side.

  “She’s hemorrhaging,” the doctor said.

  “I know that,” Matt said. “Why?” And how the hell did they make it stop?

  The doctor ignored him, pulled on a pair of gloves and checked Cathie and the baby. “Cathie, can you hear me? We have to get this baby out now. When your water broke, you went from eight centimeters to being fully dilated, just like that. The baby’s right there. If you can push, do it now. If not, we need to do a C-section now. Can you push?”

  Cathie looked dazed, not quite all there. The nurse got on one side of her and lifted her up into a half-sitting position, and Matt had her by the other side. Two other nurses had her legs, so that she was curled up into a ball around the baby.

  Matt glared at the doctor and mouthed a question. “Why aren’t you doing the damned C-section?”

  “If this works, it’ll be faster.”

  And they needed to get the baby out. He got it. Things were much worse than he thought. The alarms on the monitors were still screeching. There was so much blood. He wanted to scream, but there was no time, and Cathie needed him.

  “Push, Cathie. Come on, push,” the doctor told her, then turned to her side and told the nurse, “Make sure we have an OR ready.”

  Oh, God.

  “Don’t you dare let anything happen to my wife,” he said.

  The doctor ignored him and talked to Cathie, who was trying to do as the doctor asked. “Come on. Just a little bit more. The head is right here. A pretty, bald head. Come on.”

  Matt stood there, holding Cathie up. Her hair was damp with sweat, her entire body shaking and weak. All he could do was hold her and whisper in her ear. “You can do it, Cath. I know you can.”

  “It hurts so much,” she cried, and he wanted to kill someone all over again.

  “Okay. Good. Good. Come on. There! We’ve got the head out,” the doctor said. “Try to relax. We’ll ease the shoulders out together, and then the hard part’s done. Breathe. Breathe again. Try to relax. Let me do most of the work here.”

  Cathie groaned, and Matt heard a wet, whishing sound. The baby was out, but Cathie slumped over against Matt, her head rolling to the side.

  He had a hard time remembering what happened then. He heard the baby cry, and someone took the baby to a corner of the room where three people worked over the baby, which left three of them with Cathie.

  “Get out,” the doctor said, as they pumped drugs into her and worked frantically, he assumed, to stop the bleeding.

  “No.” He stayed by her side, held her cold hand and leaned over her absolutely still body, his forehead touching hers, while he willed her to be okay. When that didn’t seem to be working, he prayed. He didn’t think God had ever listened to him, but maybe, since this was for Cathie, he would.

  Two more people came running into the room. The crowd around the bed thickened.

  “Matt, get out so we can have room to work,” Dr. Adams said.

  And then the fact that they were all but shoving him aside registered. There was only so much room around the bed, and all he could do was hold her hand, which wasn’t much good to her now.

  Dammit.

  He dropped her hand and backed away from the bed. The monitors were still shrieking. He heard the doctor say, “Get a crash cart in here, just in case,” and then he thought his legs were going to give out, and he’d surely be in the way then.

  He backed out of the room. With his back pressed to the wall just outside her door, he sank down to the floor, elbows on his knees, his head falling forward as he curled into a miserable ball.

  He used to do this when his mother was drunk, when he was three or four. He’d hide in a corner and try to make himself as tiny as possible, and hope she couldn’t find him, because she got mean when she was drunk. He hadn’t thought about that in years, hadn’t felt anything remotely close to powerless in ages. Until Cathie came crashing back into his life.

  Please, God, let her be all right.

  He heard footsteps and the rumble of a cart. Crash cart. In case her heart stopped beating.

  His own was thundering. Could he will hers to go on? Could he lend her some of the strength and the speed of his, to keep her going? She was just having a baby. Millions of women had babies every year. Nothing like this was supposed to go wrong, and the real hell of it for him was that he couldn’t do anything for her. A man, like a boy, was completely powerless in some situations, and this was one of them.

  He hated it.

  He sat there trying not to scream or beat his fists against a wall. They’d kick him out for sure if he did, and then he’d really go nuts.

  It seemed like he waited forever.

  People started slowly coming out of the room. He kept his head down, watching nothing but their feet. No one said a word to him. He imagined them leaving the bad news to the doctor to deliver. He’d sue her. He’d sue the hospital. He’d ruin them and make sure they never did this to anyone again. At least, he could do that.

  Someone came out and leaned over him, a hand resting gently on his back. He couldn’t even breathe. Finally, a woman said, “We got the bleeding stopped, didn’t need the crash cart, thank goodness.”

  Matt’s breath left his body in a rush, and then he had to remind himself to draw in more air so he could ask, “She’s all right?”

  “She will be.”

  He nodded, still sitting there on the floor. He didn’t think he could get up. And then he got mad all over again. “What the hell happened?”

  “It looked like the placenta began separating from the uterine wall too soon. We call it a placental abruption—”

  “I don’t give a damn what you call it. How did it happen?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “You don’t know?” he growled, lifting his head and glaring at the doctor in her bloodstained scrubs.

  “No, I don’t. I wish I did, but no one really knows why these things happen. They just do. Not often, thank goodness. But sometimes, they do. We were lucky she was—”

  “Lucky?” Matt nearly exploded.

  “Yes, lucky it happened when she was so close to delivery, and that we could get the baby out as fast as we did. No blood flowing through the placenta means no oxygen for the baby, and without oxygen…”

  Matt felt the walls and the floor start to spin, the doctor’s voice trailing off.

  He hadn’t even thought about the baby, just about Cathie.

  But, she wanted the baby so much….

  “As I said, if it had to happen, we were lucky it came when we could get the baby out so quickly. The baby’s heartbeat dipped, but that was it. She was crying as she came out.”

  “Wait a minute. She’s okay?”

  “She’s fine,” the doctor said. “She’s in the nursery. Why don’t you go see her?”

  Matt couldn’t quite take it all in. He felt like everyone was speaking a language he suddenly didn’t understand.

  “They’re both okay?” he asked, very slowly and deliberately.

  The doctor looked him right in the eye. She was sitting on the floor beside him, Matt realized. She probably knew he couldn’t have stood up if his life depended on it. “They’re fine,” she said. “Your wife’s going to be a little weak from the blood loss, and we’re watching her closely to make sure her heart rate and her blood pressure stay up. She’s going to be out of it for a little while, but I think she’s going to be fine. And your daughter’s in the nursery. I’ll get one of the nurses to take you down there and introduce you to her.”

  His daughter?

  He thought he’d gotten used to people referring to the baby as his, but saying his daughter seemed different somehow.

  Cathie had a little girl.

  “Come on,” the doctor said, getting to her feet and offering him a hand up. “I can promise you that the first thing your wife will want to know, when she wakes up, is how the baby is, and you’ll want to be
able to tell her.”

  The nurse led him by the arm to the nursery.

  “This is Mr. Monroe,” she said, passing him along to another nurse, as if he couldn’t be trusted on his own.

  “Right this way,” the next one said. “We just got her all cleaned up.”

  Glancing around, he saw dozens of babies. They had old, wrinkled faces and tiny button noses, and were wrapped up tight like mummies, with silly hats on their heads. Some of them squirmed, trying to get loose. Some of them cried and some of them, despite the racket, were sleeping.

  The nurse led him to a funny table in a corner of the room, where a baby was sprawled out naked on her back under bright lights.

  She was completely bald and wrinkled and red. Tinier than he ever imagined. So delicate. Her little face all scrunched up in a big frown, her tiny hands clenched into fists and waving madly.

  “Congratulations,” the nurse said. “Meet your daughter.”

  Her eyes were huge and so deep a blue they almost looked violet. She had a dimple in the middle of her chin, and looked grumpy as could be, like she was ready to give someone pure, absolute hell. A troublemaker if he ever saw one.

  “You can touch her,” the nurse said. “It’s okay.”

  He didn’t think he dared.

  Did she know they’d just been through a war together? That he was not very happy with her at the moment, maybe as unhappy as she was to be here? He supposed things must have been much nicer, all snug and safe inside of her mother.

  Matt frowned at her, and she frowned up at him, a huge wrinkle showing up in her tiny forehead, her tiny lips puckering and curving down at the ends.

  “Do you have any idea the trouble you just caused?”

  He caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of the nurse’s head whipping around, gaping at him from five feet away. He supposed most people didn’t talk to newborn babies that way, but Matt was furious at this one, irrational as that may be. It wasn’t her fault. He knew that. But still…she’d scared the devil out of him.