Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  Although Max remained attentive, both to her and Elena, Jen could not rid herself of the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  In the second week of September, it did.

  For Jen.

  Maybe it would have been a small thing. She happened to see the credits running after a showing of the film at the ranger station where Max was working. A group of hotshots stationed in Leadville for the long fire season not quite at an end had come in to watch it. Jen was at the station to meet Max. They were going to dinner later, and she saw the credits, which she’d never seen before.

  Before a listing of any of the people involved in making the film were the words:

  This film is dedicated in loving memory to Salma Rose Garcia. No one will ever replace you in our hearts.

  Why hadn’t she been asked? Hell, why hadn’t she even been told? Because Max would know how she’d feel about it?

  She didn’t know what to do. It was a small thing, she was overreacting, it made no sense to want to run to the restroom and weep and vomit. After all, for those who’d loved Salma, the dedication was no doubt true. But Max was not simply one of those who’d loved Salma. His relationship with her had been more.

  There was nothing she could do. She wasn’t going to run home to mother over this. It was a small thing, a nothing.

  Max came out of the back room at the station, his coat in hand. He’d left his California motorcycle in California; he had another here, but today he and Jen were using her car. She wordlessly handed him the keys.

  As they walked outside, leaving the hotshots behind, he said, “Should we go home and clean up first? You look great, but I could do with a shower.” He rubbed the razor stubble on his jaw.

  “Whatever you want,” she said, making it a point to smile some as she spoke. It felt like a death grimace.

  “What’s wrong?”

  There was no point in avoiding the question. She climbed into the passenger seat. When Max had slid behind the wheel and shut his door, she said, “I didn’t know about the dedication to Salma, that’s all.”

  “Teresa and I wrote it.”

  “I’m sorry. I suppose I have some residual jealousy or insecurity.”

  Max eyed her carefully. “I’ve noticed.”

  “I’ll try to do better,” she said without enthusiasm.

  “Jen. Don’t let it get in the way of us.”

  “There’s no real ‘us,’ Max. You married me for Elena and you’d have preferred to have Salma, but she died.”

  “That’s what you believe?”

  “There’s nothing to make me think otherwise.”

  “So you want me to spend my life trying to convince you of things which can’t possibly be proven, but have to be taken on faith?”

  “Of course not. Can we just forget this? Let’s not let it ruin our evening.”

  “I think it has the potential to ruin more than one evening. I’d prefer to deal with it, now,” Max said, with no pleasure or leniency in his voice.

  “There’s no way of dealing with it, Max. We both have issues. We just have to accept that this is the way it is.”

  “But, Jen, you’re running on misconceptions.”

  She waited, hopeful.

  “First, I love you and have chosen to spend my life with you.”

  Just words.

  “I am not pining after Salma. Yes, I’m still angry about the fire, but the anger’s hard to get rid of. I’m working on it.”

  She continued to wait, to wait for him to say what he’d married her for, besides Elena, but the words did not come. Nothing came.

  She said, “Look, we’re building a partnership. We’ll have to work with what we have over time.”

  “Fine,” Max said tersely. “Just out of curiosity, why did you marry me?”

  She might as well say it, even if she could only say it bitterly. “Because I fell in love with you when I was nineteen, and when I was thirty-two it happened again.”

  His hand reached out, rubbed the back of her neck. “Maybe something like that happened to both of us, Jen. Did you ever consider that?”

  What she considered was that if it was true he wouldn’t have said “maybe” or have turned it into a question.

  WITH SOME OF HER SAVINGS, Jen invested in a high-quality video camera of her own. She’d decided she wanted to learn to be behind the camera as well as in front of it. Using what she’d learned working on the documentary of the Makal Canyon fire, she began using her free time to produce an hour-long documentary on midwives in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. She contacted Channel 4 with the finished product, and it aired before her first wedding anniversary. They asked her if she’d be willing to do more shows on mountain women, and Jen agreed to three more.

  Max was gone most of the time now, smoke jumping. He’d planned for the previous season to be his last, and now Jen wondered if that had been all talk, if he planned to keep jumping out of airplanes until the mandatory retirement age of fifty.

  He and Jen had bought her a motorcycle of her own, and she used this in her traveling for filmmaking. Her newest project was on women working in traditionally male occupations in the mountains. She had followed, filmed, and interviewed a snowplow driver—praying for early snow so that she could get footage of this woman at work—a tow-truck driver, a miner and a carpenter. She’d heard rumors of a woman logger living near Buena Vista. On the day before the anniversary she wouldn’t share with Max, who was on a fire in Alaska, she headed south to try and find out more about the logger. Elena had been spending most of the summer with her grandmother and aunt, dancing in Denver, but was still certain that she wanted to return to high school in Leadville, where she was becoming a good snowboarder.

  Jen was passing a line of cars when an SUV pulled out of the line to pass, as well.

  As she flew through the air, she thought, This is how it happens, then…death.

  HE WAS FILTHY, unwashed for five days, fighting what had become known as the Blizzard Creek fire. Soot, ash and grime caked the creases around his eyes. Sometimes when he stopped sawyering for a few hours’ sleep, he took out Jen’s and Elena’s pictures and thought of his life in Leadville, which now seemed more dream than reality.

  Finally, on his wedding anniversary, his group of jumpers was released from the fire and he began the long packout with the others. They were two miles from the road when they were intercepted by the incident commander.

  “Max,” he said, stopping, guiding him away from the others.

  Max knew that it wasn’t about the fire.

  “Elena,” he said. “What’s happened?”

  “Who’s Elena?”

  Thank God. Thank God. “My daughter.”

  “Max…”

  Something bad. Something very bad. Not Elena, please not Elena.

  “It’s your wife. She was hit on her motorcycle.”

  Dead. Jen’s dead. His heart seemed to split, his world to flatten to nothing. He saw her vibrant smile in his mind’s eye.

  “She’s in a coma.”

  THEN SHE WOULD NOT DIE, and he would not have to remember the moment when he was sure she was dead. But as he sat on one plane after another, heading back to Denver International Airport, all he saw over and over was the blazing flash of her smile, and it was as if she’d been taken from him.

  Teresa met his plane. “Elena’s at the hospital,” she said, as he swept the heavy pack he’d carried over his shoulder.

  “Just tell me about Jen.” Tell me about Jen. Tell me she’ll be the same as she was. Tell me she’ll be at all.

  “She’s in a coma, and for now there’s some brain damage, but the neurologists aren’t saying how bad. They don’t know, since she hasn’t woken up, which isn’t good.”

  Jen! A scream inside him at losing her, at losing her smile.

  He’d never even seen her spar in a genuine Muay Thai match.

  “She broke her neck and many bones, and they feel good about the surgery they’ve done there, except th
at they can’t wake her up.”

  Max found he couldn’t talk. Teresa seemed to be watching his face, calculating what was there.

  Absently, he said, “What are you doing?”

  “Working part-time for social services in Lodo and going to school.”

  She seemed far better. Maybe Jen’s not being in the home had been good for her, forcing her to take on more responsibility for herself and even for Robin.

  But Max couldn’t think about it long, couldn’t think.

  Just Jen’s smile.

  SHE WAS NOT SMILING, but he knew her hair.

  Otherwise she lay as still as if she were dead. A machine rasped for her, and Max clutched at his daughter as Elena, like someone three times her age, began to say what each machine was for.

  He needed to be alone, alone with Jen, and a nurse seemed to realize it.

  “Let’s have one at a time, sweetie,” she said.

  And his eyes grew wet.

  He did not cry.

  He grabbed the chair, took Jen’s hand.

  No response.

  Maybe he’d thought that if he came, if he was here, she would wake up.

  Had it been like this for Salma? But she’d been conscious. Things shut down one at a time, with Salma.

  “Jen.” He bent over a rail just to have his head, for a moment, touch her arm. It was awkward. “Baby.”

  A breath. But something breathed for her, didn’t it, hadn’t Elena said that? Elena who had been crying, who was afraid her mother would die.

  JEN MOVED through a dream in which she was dancing, dancing, and then she saw Max’s eyes, crying beside her face, or not crying but wet, yes, crying.

  “Jen.”

  His eyes on hers.

  Pain. Everything strange. Not dancing.

  Where was she?

  Just Max.

  Max saying, “God, I love you. God, I love you. Don’t ever leave me, Jen. Don’t ever leave.”

  And someone saying other things. “Confusion… Needs to be…”

  Strangers’ faces. “Jen, you’re in the hospital. You were in a motorcycle accident.”

  Max. Max. She tried to say it and couldn’t.

  But someone was holding her hand.

  She felt the calluses.

  She knew.

  She knew that something that had troubled her, a very big thing, was gone. And as she felt another touch, like a butterfly’s, and heard, “Mom?” she knew that Max and Elena were both there.

  She heard Max say, “I don’t want to leave.”

  “You don’t have to leave,” someone said. “Go ahead and talk to her.”

  He did. Again. He talked about how much he loved her.

  EPILOGUE

  ELENA DELAZZERI-RICKMAN, age fourteen, had believed for years—and still usually believed—that she was destined to dance with one of the world’s finest companies. She had not believed, two years earlier, that her parents’ marrying each other was a brilliant idea or that it would last. But now the idea that it wouldn’t last seemed impossible to her. Never, until about six months earlier, however, had it occurred to her that she might ever have a sibling.

  And now she did. John Norman Delazzeri-Rickman—Jack—was nine pounds one ounce, and had tons of dark hair, but otherwise looked almost exactly like Max.

  He’d been born at the little hospital in Leadville, and Elena had seen him being born. She loved holding him and watching her mom nurse him, but when her dad picked him up and held him what she felt was a little different.

  She lived, she sometimes thought, in a world of miracles. That she hadn’t destroyed her chances of being a dancer when she’d had that bad sprain in California, but even more that her mother had walked away from surgery after that motorcycle accident, that she had been okay. Lots of physical therapy and some time coming back from her head injury, but it was amazing to Elena that they were all together and fine. And her dad never went away in the summer now, as he had that first summer.

  So she had no reason to feel anything but grateful for every aspect of her life.

  Except when she saw her dad holding her little brother.

  Then, he looked up and saw her looking at him, and Elena could tell he read her mind and wished he wouldn’t. Her thoughts made her feel small, and she’d prefer no one would guess them.

  He was sitting on her mom’s bed in the birthing suite—which was basically one room in the hospital and nothing special. He said to Jen, “Do you want to take him?”

  “Sure.”

  Then, they looked at each other, and Elena thought they might be mind-reading, as well, because that was how well they seemed to understand each other. As though they’d always been together.

  “Elena.”

  It was her mother who spoke, as she held Jack, put him to her breast.

  “What?”

  Her mother looked up. “I’m sorry, Elena. I’m sorry I made the decision I did. Because your dad would have been there.”

  “Mostly,” her father said, “he’s very glad he’s here, now.” He met Elena’s eyes. “With you.”

  Elena went over to the bed and sat between them and touched Jack’s tiny hand and felt her father hug her shoulders and her mother clasp her arm. “Thank you both,” she said. “I love you. And I love Jack. God, he’s so cute.”

  She basked in the happiness of her family’s love, in this moment of their togetherness in perfect joy.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-1710-2

  BECAUSE OF OUR CHILD

  Copyright © 2007 by Margot Early.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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  *The Midwives