by Cherry Kay
“I think it’s time,” she said encouragingly to Elise. “We’re going to get through this.”
Elise could only close her eyes and cry, praying in desperation for the safe delivery of a healthy baby. The doctor came in and David scrambled to look through the open door until they closed it. He couldn’t see enough to sooth the anguish that was engulfing him.
The contractions were nearly constant as the doctor pulled gloves on and readied Elise for her delivery. Sarah held her hand tightly as she closed her eyes and listened to the doctor while he instructed her to push and breathe. She pushed for what seemed like forever, and the doctors and nurses were anxiously working around her trying to help her. The baby was turned so that it wouldn’t come out when she pushed, and the pain felt to her as though she were being torn right in half from the legs to the top of her skull. She cried out and pushed over and over, losing her breath and straining hard from the pressure, and just as the medical team was about to give up and cut her open to deliver the baby cesarean, the baby turned just enough that Elise was able to push again a few more times, panting in exhaustion, and then in a moment of wonder, the doctor was holding her baby in his hands.
Sarah was weeping with joy, and she looked down at Elise and said happily, “It’s a girl! You have a girl!” Elise felt some relief as she looked at the doctors and nurses rushing around her tiny baby.
They let her glimpse the baby for a moment, and in that moment, Elise fell in love with her daughter for the rest of her life. She had caramel colored skin and tiny dark curls on her head. They cleaned her quickly and rushed her out of the room and past David, who was waiting just outside the door. The doctor helped Elise finish her delivery and the nurses cleaned her up and let her rest.
David caught a quick look at the baby and the nurse who had sent him out the door smiled at him as she rushed by, letting him peek for an instant at the infant screaming in the plastic bassinet tub she was wheeling past him.
“It’s a girl, David, you have a daughter. You’ll have to wait to see her.” And with that, the nurse rushed the baby away. David watched them wheel her swiftly down the hall and he covered his mouth with his hands, closing his eyes and weeping silently in gratitude that she was born alive. He hoped with everything in him that she would be alright. One of the other nurses stepped out of Elise’s room and he grasped at her arm and asked with wide anxious eyes, “Is Elise alright? Is she okay?”
The nurse nodded and patted his hand. “They are both alright, but your daughter is going to need some time to grow. They’ll both be okay.”
David thanked her gratefully and eased himself down into a chair with a long winded sigh, letting some of the stress in him go as he focused on the positive aspects of it all.
***
Sarah held her hand almost the whole time, comforting her and promising her that things were going to work out. The nurse gave Elise a sleeping pill, and wheeled her out of the delivery room toward her own room. When they passed David in the hall, Elise turned her head away from him and refused to look at him or answer him as he called out to her. She looked at Sarah and the nurse as they got her to her room and she said, “I don’t want to see him at all.”
The nurse looked at her sympathetically. “Well, we can keep him out of your room, but he is the father of the baby, so if he wants to see her, he can. You let me know if you need anything. My name is Mary.” With that, Mary walked out of the room and left Sarah holding Elise’s hand as she slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep.
When she awoke, Elise saw that Sarah was sitting in the chair near her bed, reading a book.
“You’re still here?” she asked, looking at her best friend in surprise.
Sarah looked up at her with tired eyes and smiled. “Of course I’m still here, what kind of a question is that?”
The corner of Elise’s mouth turned up and she looked around her room. “What happened to the baby? Where is she? I want to see her!”
Sarah stood up and took her hand, holding it gently. “She’s alright; she’s in an incubator right now. They said she’s going to be here for a couple of months.”
Elise closed her eyes to hold the tears back, but they came anyway, rolling down her cheeks as she drew in her breath and let out a sob. Sarah hugged her tight and held her close to her heart. “It’s alright, she’s going to be alright, she just needs a little more time here, that’s all.”
Elise took a shaky breath and looked up at Sarah. “I want to see her.”
Sarah nodded. “I’m sure you can. We’ll call the nurse and get you in there.” She reached for the call button on the bed wand and pressed it.
“Listen, I don’t think this is a good time to talk about whatever is going on between you and David, but you should probably know that he’s here and he’s in there with your daughter since you don’t want him in here with you. I don’t know why you don’t want to see him, but if you go in there, you’re going to see him. I’m just telling you right now.”
Elise closed her eyes and shook her head. “You were right about him. You were right all along.”
Sarah held her hand and stroked it. “We don’t have to talk about that now, Elise, this is a happy day. Your baby girl is here and I’m betting she needs her mama right about now.”
Elise nodded and smiled through her tears. A few minutes later, Mary came into the room, loaded Elise into a wheelchair and rolled her down the hall to the NICU room where her daughter was.
Sarah had been right. David was sitting right beside the machine that their daughter was laying in. He looked up when he heard them coming and rose immediately to his feet. His eyes were red and swollen and his face showed all the emotion he had wrestled with that day.
He looked from Elise to Sarah for a moment, and Sarah only looked back at him with a poker face, no story to tell him at all about what might be happening with Elise. Elise did not look at him at all, her attention was solely on the little angel resting in the machine before them.
She gazed in through the plastic and looked at her daughter laying there, tiny and sweeter than anything she had ever seen. Elise lifted her hand to her mouth and tried to hold in some of her emotion, but she wound up smiling through her tears.
Mary addressed all of them. “Elise, you had a hard delivery, so we’re going to keep you here for a couple of days just to be sure you are alright. We also want you to start pumping breast milk for your daughter so we can feed her the good stuff right away. It’ll be the best thing for her. She is going to be here for a couple of months, until she passes all of her tests and weighs enough to go home. You are both welcome to see her any time you want to, and I’ll tell you now, from all of my experience here in this unit, the more often you are here, the better it will be for her.”
Mary smiled at both David and Elise. “I’ve seen babies born sooner than she was that made it just fine. I have no doubt that she will be healthy and strong and home with you soon.” They thanked her and she left them to go to the nurse’s station.
Elise stayed as long as they would let her, watching her new baby girl in silence, smiling at her and feeling overwhelmed by all of the emotion in her heart, and after a time, Mary took her back to her room and put her to bed so that she could rest. Sarah said goodbye to her and told her she would be back to visit. David stayed beside his daughter, watching her and talking to her, coaxing her along and encouraging her to be healthy and strong so she could go home.
Chapter8
When Elise awoke again, she was disoriented for a few moments. Then, all of the memories came flooding back to her and her heart was pulled into a tug of war between sorrow and happiness. She called for the nurse and Mary showed up in her room a short time later.
“You’re still here?” Elise asked in surprise.
Mary chuckled softly. “I’m almost always here. I’ll go home in a while, then I’ll be back again later on today.” She paused a moment and then looked at Elise and said, “I’m not the only one who hasn’t gone
anywhere. Your husband hasn’t left your daughter’s side since she was brought in there. He slept part of the night in the chair there, but the rest of the times he’s been awake, he has been talking to her and singing to her. I’m not sure what’s going on with you two, but I thought you should know that. He is truly dedicated to that little girl.”
Elise listened to her in surprise. “He sang to her?”
Mary nodded. “He did, a few times. I think he was telling her stories about some big bear waiting for her at home, too.”
Elise sat in silence, wondering at David’s actions and though she wouldn’t admit it to herself, it touched her that he was doing all that he was for their daughter.
Mary walked Elise into the NICU and she sat at a chair beside David in awkward silence for a little while, watching her daughter.
David didn’t want to further damage his situation with Elise, but he knew they couldn’t sit there beside each other, ignoring each other for ages while visiting their daughter. He took a deep breath and spoke softly to Elise, without taking his eyes off of the baby.
“We should come up with a name for her,” he said quietly.
Elise stiffened at hearing his voice, but she knew he was right. The silence was almost unbearable to her anyway.
“I like Sirena and Jaden,” Elise said in a quiet tone.
David thought about the names and smiled a little. “What if we use them both? Jaden Sirena?”
Elise almost smiled but stopped herself. “I think that would be beautiful.”
“That’s what we’ll do then,” he said.
It was quiet a while between them, and then Elise broke the silence. “Mary said you were singing to her.”
David pursed his lips and blushed in embarrassment. “I did sing to her, it’s true.”
Elise couldn’t hold back the slight upward curve at the corner of her mouth. “I didn’t know you could sing,” she said in a hushed tone.
He shook his head. “I can’t sing but Jaden doesn’t know that.”
Hearing her name spoken aloud for the first time touched both of their hearts and made her seem more real to them, and made them both feel like parents.
After another long silence, David said, “I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you.”
Elise felt ire rise up in her and she lowered her brow. “This is no place to talk about it,” she said. “Jaden doesn’t need any negativity around her.”
“Then let’s go sit over there in the hall and talk about it, please.” David looked at her fully and implored her.
She shook her head. “I’m not here to talk to you and listen to your lies. I’m here to be with my daughter.”
David felt like she had gut checked him, but he knew he deserved it. “I realize that, but soon enough it will be time for her to leave here and then we’ll have to make decisions about what we are going to do. We need to talk. We’re here, so let’s talk. Please. We’ve got to work it out for her, however it ends up.”
Elise sighed heavily and nodded. She knew he was right. She owed it to her daughter to get the mess between her and David sorted out as quickly as possible. So she stood up and walked slowly toward the hall. David tried to reach out to help her but she swatted his hand away from her. They reached a corner of the hall that was lit by wide windows. They sat together.
David looked at Elise and shook his head, sorrow spilling out of his heart. “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am that you found out the way that you did. I didn’t intend for any of it to happen the way that it has. I’m going to tell you the whole thing from the beginning and you can do what you like from there.”
Elise sighed. “Alright. I’m listening.”
He took a deep breath and sat up. “A little over a year ago, I was working on a few possible business deals and one of them was a take-over of a small company in Oakland. The company is owned by a man named Marvin Jackson. His company was in real financial trouble and he wanted to do a merger with me, allowing me to absorb his company into mine and keep on all of his employees. I wanted to buy him out and close down the company because the company was, and remains, dead in the water. It’s a financial ruin and it would be bad business on my part to take it on. I like taking on dead weight and expecting to swim far with it, it just doesn’t work. We discussed it over a few meetings and, at first, I was willing to buy him out and kill the company but he was dead set against it.
“He had started the company from scratch and he wanted to keep it going and keep all the employees. I understood what he wanted and why he wanted it, but it would have been such a bad decision on my part to do what he wanted me to do. He begged and pressured and even tried to bully me, even guilt me into it, but after looking at it from every angle, I decided that the best thing I could do would be to walk away from it. That was when he went over the edge and he fought with me, telling me that I was turning my back on him because he was black. He called me a racist, and came at me, attacking me. I fought with him and when the police arrived, they arrested us both.”
Elise stared at him with wide eyes, stunned at what he was telling her.
“He threatened to take me to court and I wasn’t sure if he would follow through with it or not until he filed paperwork for it. We knew he was going to take the case as public as he could to garner sympathy for himself, and try to get as much money from me as he could through a lawsuit. That would be the only way he could save the business he had created that meant so much to him. We knew going to court with him would mean that he would be slandering me all over kingdom come, telling the public that I was a racist, and that would be a truly devastating blow to me, to my company, to my life, to my public image. That was when Carlson decided the only way we could save my public image and convince the public that I wasn’t racist, was to take on a wife who was black, and to have a child with her. That’s when you came in.”
David took a deep breath and sighed. “It was a good plan in the beginning. Hire you on, marry you, have the baby, show the public and the courts that I am not a racist, and then when he had lost the case and gone his way, we could divorce and we would have a child to share. You’d be paid a good sum, and I would avoid the nightmare he was trying to put me through. But then I fell in love with you and everything changed.”
Elise felt her heart skip a beat. She watched him talking, and as he explained it all to her, everything became clearer to her, bit by bit.
He slumped down in his seat a little and gazed off into space as he spoke. “At first I didn’t want to tell you because we weren’t sure how it would go with his attempts to get it into court. And, we wanted to keep the lid on it as much as possible to prevent any backlash from it: tighter lid, smaller mess. That’s what Carlson said. He was right, to a point.
“Things progressed with you and Carlson kept filing all kinds of motions and things that delayed the date further and further, hoping that all the delays and court costs would be more than Jackson could afford and he’d drop the case against me and give it up. That dog went through his company and took up a collection from his employees for legal counsel and he found a black attorney that is bent on dragging me through the ringer and is representing him for next to nothing.
“He wants money from me, one way or another, and he isn’t going to let it go until he wins. Well, I didn’t say anything because we weren’t sure if we were actually ever going to get to court plus, because I had fallen in love with you, I must’ve known how deeply wrong everything was. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but more importantly, I didn’t want to admit it to you. That is, until the judge put it on the docket and now there’s a court date and the first thing Jackson’s attorney did was give a press conference about it, which is how you wound up getting hounded by the reporters. They had his side, so they wanted mine. It became a sensational story to print, and our situation went from not needing to let anyone know about it to everyone knowing about it and me losing you in the process.”
He looked up at her and saw her wa
tching him with a sorrowful expression and tears in her eyes.
“I can’t lose you, Elise. I love you. You’re my wife in every single sense of the word, and that is our daughter lying in that machine in there, and we are a family. No matter how we found our way to each other, we are together and we can’t lose each other. You two are the most precious gifts I have ever had in my life. Please say that you understand what happened and that you will come home to me. Be my wife, Elise, always.” He looked at her with pleading loving eyes and her heart melted in her chest.
She reached for him and they held each other and wept into each other’s necks, bleeding out all of their sorrows until they were stilled and quiet. He let her go and looked at her and she closed her eyes and covered her face.
“I’m so ashamed,” she whispered.
He looked at her, stunned. “Whatever for?” he asked in confusion.
She raised her face from her hands and looked at him fully. “I was so upset that I went into labor. If I had just listened to you at the house and given you a chance to explain, I’d still be pregnant and Jaden wouldn’t be in that machine!” She began to sob and he stopped her.
“No! No, that’s not it at all. It wasn’t because you were upset. The doctor said it was just the way your pregnancy went. I asked him about that because I thought it was my fault for upsetting you. He told me that it just happened. It had nothing to do with what was going on between you and me. Please don’t think that because it’s just not true.”
Elise took a gasping breath and looked at him in wide-eyed relief. “It wasn’t my fault?” she asked breathlessly.
He shook his head and pulled her close to him. “No, honey, it wasn’t your fault at all.”
They comforted each other for a while and he looked at her as they rose to go back to Jaden. “Will you please come home with me when you leave here?” He felt like his heart was in his throat as he asked, but he had to know.
She nodded. “I will be glad to,” she said softly, reaching for him and hugging him warmly.