The baby was eight days old when he noticed a new catheter in her foot. He knocked on the nursery window, getting the attention of Regina, Sara’s personal night nurse.
“You want to come in, Mr. Cartwright?” she asked, peeking her head out the door that was always kept secured.
He shook his head. That was always her first question. “What’s the new catheter for? The one in her foot?”
“It’s not new. It’s just been moved. Her veins are too fragile for us to use any one site for too long.”
Marcus didn’t know what Regina thought of his refusal to get close to Sara and he didn’t care. All that mattered to him was that the woman keep his visits there to herself. If she found his request that she do so odd, she was professional enough not to say anything, and professional enough, as well, to agree to keep whatever gossip his visits might at some point incur away from Lisa’s ears.
“And what about the longer vial?” Marcus asked now.
“We’ve upped her fluid intake.”
“A step forward?” he asked, his hands in his pockets as he rocked back on his heels.
The nurse shrugged. “Her diaper weighed almost an ounce more this morning. That means her excretory system’s working. Your daughter’s a fighter, Mr. Cartwright.”
She wasn’t his daughter. Marcus wasn’t even sure why he had this insatiable need to know every little thing about that tiny life lying just beyond the window. But if he was somehow going to give Lisa’s baby the strength to live, he had to know what they were up against.
LISA KNEW SOMETHING was wrong the minute she walked off the elevator. There was too much commotion in the nursery. Praying that her baby wasn’t the cause, even though she knew she was, Lisa rounded the corner, her gaze straining frantically for her first glimpse of Sara’s crib.
All she could see were the medical personnel surrounding it.
Lisa ran the last couple of yards to the nursery door, pounding on the secured entrance with all her might. She had to get in there. Her baby was in trouble. And she was a doctor.
The door opened immediately when one of the nurses inside recognized Lisa.
“She’s developed some congestion in her chest, Dr. Cartwright. They’re giving her a treatment right now.”
Lisa scrubbed quickly, donning her garb faster than she’d ever donned it before, never taking her eyes from the figures bending over her daughter’s crib.
She almost cried out when she finally got to the side of the bed herself and saw what they were doing to her child. The mask on the baby’s tiny face was bad enough, but when they had to start chest percussion, someone had to lead Lisa away. There was nothing she could do to help, and if she stood there any longer, she was going to stop everyone from doing anything. It was too terrible to watch. By the time she reached the nurses’ station, the mask she was wearing was soaked with her tears.
“She’s so tiny!” she wailed. “Too tiny to have to endure so much!”
“It’s her only hope, Doctor,” one of the nurses gathered there reminded her.
And with that, Lisa was silent, her gaze once again glued to the mass of bodies surrounding Sara. Her only hope. Oh, please, God, let it work. Don’t take her from me now. But even as she prayed, Lisa wondered if she was being fair to the tiny being she’d brought into this world. How much suffering was too much? When was life no longer worth the agony?
Lisa sat there for another fifteen minutes, every muscle in her body tensed against the pain Sara must have been in. Until finally, one by one, the therapists and nurses surrounding Sara moved away, pulling off their masks, until only one nurse remained, resealing the cellophane that was Sara’s only blanket.
Lisa felt the constriction in her chest loosen just a little. They’d finished. For now.
“She’s better, Dr. Cartwright,” Jim, one of the therapists, said, stopping by the station where Lisa sat. “That’s one tough cookie you’ve got there, ma’am.”
At Jim’s words, Lisa felt the rest of her strength drain out of her. They’d made it through another crisis. Everything was okay. For now. But as she drove home later that afternoon, she couldn’t help wondering how many more crises there’d be. And how many more she could ask her child to survive.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MARCUS DIDN’T TALK to Lisa about her baby. Her father, Beth, and all her colleagues did that, he knew. His job was to distract her from the trauma just enough to keep her going. But he continued to visit the child, although he did so without Lisa’s knowledge. Not because he wanted to keep secrets from her, but because he couldn’t let her get her hopes up that he was in any way seeing himself as a father to the child. He wasn’t.
He wanted the baby to survive. He wanted to bring her home. For her sake, and for Lisa’s. Not his own.
They didn’t talk about the baby, but Marcus could always tell, even without having visited the hospital himself, when Sara had taken a turn for the worse or not gained the weight Lisa had hoped or not made any of the other progress Lisa watched for daily. He could tell the minute she came in the door, and his heart ached for her. And for the baby trying so valiantly to live.
“Let’s have dinner at Angelo’s,” he said one night almost four weeks after the baby’s birth. He knew the child had lost a couple of ounces over the past day and a half, and Lisa was worried sick. She’d dropped her briefcase by the front door as she came in from work, barely looking at him.
Lisa shook her head. “I’m not hungry.” Continuing on through the house to the kitchen, she fell into a seat at the kitchen table, staring aimlessly into space. Just as she’d done the night before. And the night before that. She didn’t even kiss him hello anymore.
“You ready to give up your fight, Lis?” he asked softly from the doorway behind her. Her apathy alarmed him.
“No!” She swung around, jumping up out of her chair. “Why would you even say such a thing? Is that what you want? For me to give up? Let her go? That would suit you just fine, wouldn’t it, if it was just you and me again. Isn’t that what you really want?”
Her words stung. “Of course I don’t want that, Lisa. I’m not heartless.”
“Aren’t you?” she cried. “Aren’t you? What do you call it, then?” She stepped closer. “Our daughter’s barely big enough to fill your hand, let alone a cradle. She may be dying. She’s certainly hurting, and still you don’t claim her. Damn you! Why don’t you claim her?” she screamed, hitting him in the chest with her fists.
The pain her words inflicted far surpassed that of the physical blows. “I can’t, Lis. I’ve tried, but I just can’t.” Grabbing her wrists, he held her hands still against him. “She isn’t mine to claim.”
She could have no idea just how much he wished, every minute of every day, that the tiny baby fighting so stalwartly was his to claim. But that choice had been taken out of his hands long ago.
“She is so yours! She’s your daughter, Marcus, just as much as she is mine.” Her voice broke. “You’re just too damn stubborn to see it.” Tears dripped slowly down her cheeks, the fight going out of her as she gazed up at him.
“I wish she was, Lis. More than you’ll ever know, I wish she was,” he said, wrapping his arms around her to hold her close to his heart. He wanted to make love to her, to sink into her velvety depths and find forgetfulness for both of them. To reaffirm that they were still part of the same whole. But she wasn’t ready. It was still too soon after her baby’s birth.
The child was less than a month old, and already she was coming between them.
LISA HAD THOUGHT, back when they’d first found out Marcus was sterile, when her marriage had been disintegrating right before her eyes, that things couldn’t get any worse. She’d thought she’d reached the depths of despair and couldn’t hurt any more than she’d been hurting. She’d been wrong. Because these days she’d discovered a whole new realm of despair where the pain was so fierce, so frightening, it rendered her powerless.
Never in her worst nightmare could
she have imagined anything like the situation she was facing. Her life’s dreams were warring against each other. Eventually one had to lose.
“I figured I’d find you here.”
Lisa turned away from the window of the nursery viewing room to see Beth sit down beside her. “I’d be in there if I wasn’t so damned worried about infection,” she said, looking back at the familiar twofoot box, the only home her daughter had ever known.
Beth’s arm slid through hers. “I know.”
“She’s not gaining like she should,” Lisa said, forcing herself to face the truth.
“I know.”
“I’ve been pumping my milk four times a day for a month, sure that she’d soon be needing every drop. My freezer’s so full that yesterday I had to throw some out.”
“Are you thinking about drying up?” Beth’s question was hesitant.
Though no one talked to her about it, Lisa figured it was what everyone wanted. Debbie Crutchfield thought Lisa was making things harder on herself, but this was one time that Debbie Crutchfield didn’t have a clue. “No.”
Beth surprised her by nodding. “Good. Your daughter’s held on too long to be robbed of any single chance she has. And once she’s ready to digest it, your milk will be the best thing for her.”
Lisa blinked away sudden tears. “Thanks, friend,” she said, squeezing Beth’s hand. “You know, I’m a mother, but I’m not. It’s like I’m still pregnant, waiting for her to be born, but instead of feeling my baby growing inside me, I have to watch her development through a maze of wires and tubes and plastic, watch other people taking care of her, changing the diaper underneath her, doing the things I should be doing. About the only time I feel like a mother is when I sit by myself with my breast pump. And someday, she’s going to be ready for all those nutrients I’m providing. I have to believe that.”
“You bet you do,” Beth said, squeezing Lisa’s hand back. “That little fighter in there deserves to have all of us believe in her. She’s already come farther than anyone predicted. And she’s going to need the support from all of us even more in the months’ ahead. There’ll be a lot of lost time to make up for.”
Thinking of what lay ahead, the least of which was the developmental catching up her baby, her fatherless baby, faced, Lisa felt a fresh surge of tears. “I know.”
“Lisa?” Beth looked at her, her brow lined with concern. “What is it? What’d I say?”
Lisa shook her head. “It’s nothing you said.” She met Beth’s gaze, knowing she had to face facts if she was going to survive. “If Sara lives, I have to leave Marcus.”
“No!” Beth shook her head in confusion. “I thought he’d finally come around. He’s been wonderful through all this, anticipating your every need, cutting back so much at work…” Her voice trailed off.
“I know,” Lisa said again, smiling sadly. “He’s been the best Which just makes everything worse. I love him so much it hurts, Beth, but he isn’t going to accept Sara. Not as his own. And if I ever get to bring her home, it can’t be to a father who rejects her. It just can’t. Can you imagine how awful that would be for her?”
She paused, then went on, “In every way that matters, Marcus is her father. She was born into our marriage. She has his name. Can you imagine how much his neglect would hurt her? Because she’d know, if we were living with him, that it was her he didn’t want. But if we’re divorced, she’d be just like any other kid in a single-parent home. Not the best situation, God knows, but at least she wouldn’t feel personally rejected.”
Beth stared at Lisa, obviously shocked. “But I thought…I mean he…the night she was born, he…”
“He what?” Lisa asked. She and Marcus had never talked about that night, other than for Marcus to tell her how awful he felt for her, how sorry he was this had happened.
“He was here, sitting right on that chair, all night.”
“Marcus was here?”
“Uh-huh.” Beth nodded. “Watching Sara. I found him here about four o’clock in the morning just staring at her crib. And other than when he left me to go call your father, we sat here together until the six-o’clock shift change. He left then just long enough to go home and get your bag.”
Hope bubbled up in Lisa as she listened to Beth. Marcus had been here. He’d watched over their daughter for the whole night. He did care. He was the man she’d thought him to be. She’d gambled on him and won, after all. Her thoughts sprang ahead to the dreams that might yet come true, the years of living and loving that might be waiting just around the corner.
But they slammed to a halt when she remembered his words to her in the kitchen several nights before.
“That must have been what he meant when he said he’d tried,” she said softly, sadly, almost to herself. She hadn’t thought it possible for her heart to break any further. “He told me he’d tried to accept her, but he just couldn’t.”
She looked through the window at Sara, still sleeping silently in her odd little bed, seeing her as Marcus must have seen her that night. Knowing him as she did, she could just imagine the torture he must have put himself through as he watched his wife’s baby, unable to get beyond the fact that her tiny features, her little fingers and toes, genetically belonged to another man.
Remembering the agony she’d seen on his face that day he’d walked in on her baby shower, she could almost feel the anguish he must have suffered sitting through an entire night of watching her baby. And as she sat there suffering in sympathy, she finally understood that Marcus wasn’t ever going to come around, not because he didn’t want to or wouldn’t let himself, but because he couldn’t. He had as little choice in the matter as she did. And knowing that, she couldn’t go on hurting him. She couldn’t force him to live the rest of his life watching from the outside. Bringing Sara home to him wasn’t only unfair to Sara, it was unfair to Marcus.
“Maybe if he had some counseling,” Beth suggested somberly, her gaze fixed, like Lisa’s, on the infant on the other side of the glass.
Lisa shook her head. “Marcus isn’t confused. He sees things clearly. Too clearly, really. It’s just that his vision is different from mine. I think being a father starts with the heart. He thinks it starts with the body. It’s an argument no one can win.”
“I can’t believe this.” Beth rubbed her hand down her face.
“Me, neither,” Lisa whispered. “Every time I pray for Sara, I know that the answer to my prayer means the death of my marriage. If my baby lives, I lose the other half of myself.” Lisa started to cry. “Oh, God, Beth, what have I done?”
Beth’s arms wrapped around her, and Lisa lay her head against her friend’s shoulder, taking the comfort that Beth gave so willingly, the same comfort Beth had taken from Lisa those months immediately following her husband’s death.
“It’s not what you’ve done, Lisa. It’s what we’ve done. I’m so sorry I ever talked you into this.”
Lisa pulled back, shaking her head. “Don’t be sorry, Beth. Don’t ever be sorry.” She looked toward the nursery again and the tiny baby lying there. “I wouldn’t trade her for anything,” she said, swiping at the tears spilling from her eyes. “I just wish Marcus could feel as I do. I wish he could find a way to accept the gift I’ve tried to give him.”
“The man’s a fool,” Beth said, but Lisa could tell she only half meant it. If Marcus was a fool, if he was wrong, if she could be angry with him, it wouldn’t be so hard to do what she had to do. But he wasn’t wrong. He was simply a man who had strong convictions and who lived his life as his conscience dictated. Even now, even in this, he was the man Lisa had fallen in love with.
She and Beth watched the baby silently for a moment, both women considering the magnitude of what they’d set in motion that morning so long ago.
“Have you told Oliver that you’re leaving Marcus?” Beth asked a few minutes later.
Oliver? He’d always been “Dr. Webster” or “your father” in the past.
Staring at her friend,
Lisa shook her head. “I haven’t even told Marcus yet. Sara’s still got a long way to go, and I’m just not strong enough, or maybe it’s that I’m not unselfish enough, to leave him before I have to,” she said, wondering if there was something else going on she should know about. She’d been so wrapped up in Sara these past few weeks that she’d barely been aware of a world outside home and the hospital.
Beth nodded, saying nothing more, but Lisa had the most uncomfortable feeling that she was missing something. It was the way Beth had said her father’s name, the familiarity in it. Lisa didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all.
A nurse came in to put a new diaper under Sara’s bottom, and Lisa and Beth watched as the young woman took the diaper over to the counter to weigh it. But Lisa sneaked a couple of surreptitious glances at her friend, as well. The years of missing John had taken their toll on her friend, adding lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before, lines that had nothing to do with the smiles Beth wore so easily.
Lisa shook her head. She was really losing it if she thought Beth had any interest in her father. The two hardly knew each other. And not only was her father a generation older than Beth, but her friend was still in love with the husband she’d lost so tragically. Thinking of her father and Beth together was ludicrous. Ashamed of herself, she apologized silently to both of them.
But as she walked back to her office later that day, her thoughts drifted to her father once again. Was it possible he would someday take an interest in another woman? Lisa had never really thought of him as a man before, only as a father, and she found it unsettling to do so now. She supposed a lot of women would find him handsome. And, in his early fifties, he was still relatively young. Certainly young enough to have sexual interests. Except that he was still so in love with her mother.
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