Hotel Vendome

by Danielle Steel

  Heloise ordered lunch for her, and then went down to change into her uniform. She was on duty at three o’clock, but she went back to see her father first. He was out of ICU and in a private room by then, with a nurse, and happy to see his daughter as soon as she walked into the room. He thanked her again for everything she’d done the night before, and for taking care of Natalie while he was gone. Natalie had told him that Heloise was being very sweet.

  She spent an hour with her father and then went back to the hotel to take her shift. She was right on time and stayed there until eleven o’clock that night. It was too late to see her father then, and she practically crawled back to her room to get her nightgown and see Brad.

  “You look exhausted. Get to bed.” He was worried about her, as she shook her head and picked up her nightgown from the back of the bathroom door.

  “I can’t. I have to sleep with Natalie tonight.” He looked genuinely sorry for her, and walked her upstairs to her father’s apartment, and spent a few minutes talking to Natalie before he left and went back downstairs. He was talking about giving up his apartment near Columbia because he was never there anymore. He was always at the hotel with her.

  After Brad left, Heloise changed into her nightgown and got into bed with Natalie. They chatted for a few minutes, and Heloise was so tired she was about to drift off to sleep when Natalie took her hand and put it on her belly. There were arms and legs and hands and feet kicking all over the place. It felt like a war going on in a cartoon.

  “How do you sleep with all that happening?” Heloise looked at her in amazement, and Natalie smiled at her.

  “I don’t. They jump around most of the time.”

  “It must feel so weird,” Heloise said sleepily, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. She had to go to sleep, and a few minutes later she was out like a light, while Natalie stayed up late and watched TV. The days and nights were long, and if she was lucky and they stayed in there, she had three more months to go.

  Two days later Heloise’s father came home from the hospital. They brought him home in a wheelchair, but he insisted on walking into the hotel on his own. He looked pale and tired but infinitely better than when he’d left, and he went upstairs to his apartment rapidly, to see his wife. She burst into tears when she saw him, and clung to him when he sat down on the bed. He put his hands on her enormous belly and felt their babies kicking and smiled at her. This was all he had wanted, to stay alive and come home to her. He had too much to live for now to let anything happen to him. He swore she had gotten bigger in the few days he’d been gone, and he got into bed with her a little while later and lay there beside her, grateful to be home.

  Heloise visited them as often as possible, but she had taken on extra work while he was gone. She came up to ask his advice and called him frequently on his cell phone, and he was happy to feel connected to the activities and decisions of the hotel. Natalie didn’t like it and was on a vendetta against the hotel now. She thought his work was too stressful, it had almost killed him, and now she wanted him to sell the Vendôme. She wanted him to call the Dutch consortium and accept their offer. It was all she talked about. And when he was in the shower, she called Heloise and told her sternly not to call him so often. It made Heloise worry about him more.

  “It’s out of the question,” he said firmly to Natalie about selling. “I can’t do that to Heloise. She loves this place too much.”

  “She loves you more,” Natalie insisted. “If we lose you, it will destroy us all. You have to live for her and our babies, and this place will kill you if you don’t slow down.” He didn’t know how to slow down so she wanted him to sell. He was constantly on the phone to Bruce, Jennifer, and the front desk to find out what was going on.

  “I’m taking a month off,” he reminded Natalie, hoping to mollify her, but Natalie’s only mantra now was for him to sell the hotel. She didn’t say anything to Heloise about it, but she said it to Hugues constantly, and he told her he wouldn’t, in no uncertain terms. She was stressing him more than the hotel. It was the only argument they had. The rest of the time they enjoyed being together. She loved having him home with her.

  He went out for a walk around the reservoir every day, and came back with little treats for her. Four weeks after his heart attack, he looked better than ever, and by then Natalie looked like a woman lying under a mountain. He smiled every time he looked at her. She could hardly move.

  The doctor came to visit her on a regular basis, and an OB nurse came to check her every day. It was April by then, and she was having contractions. The obstetrician thought it would be soon, but she was seven months pregnant, and the babies were growing nicely. They could survive if they were born now.

  They were watching an old I Love Lucy rerun and eating popcorn one night, when Natalie suddenly made an odd expression and then looked at Hugues, as though she didn’t understand what was happening. She was suddenly lying in a pool of water, which rapidly spread to his side of the bed. He was afraid that she was bleeding, but when he looked at the sheets, he saw it was just water, and then they both realized what had just happened.

  “Oh my God, my water just broke,” she said to him with a look of panic. But at seven months the triplets were in much less danger, even though they were small, and all three would almost certainly survive. Hugues called the doctor, and she said to bring Natalie in as quickly as possible. She had no idea how rapidly labor would happen, and she didn’t want to have the babies born at the hotel or in a taxi. Hugues called security and asked them to bring up a wheelchair. They had several of them in the hotel, one of which he’d used to come home from the hospital himself a month before. He was fully recovered, and after his long daily walks, he felt better than ever, and he had been planning to go back to work that week.

  Bruce brought the wheelchair up to them in a few minutes, and Hugues helped Natalie get dressed. It was two o’clock in the morning. And he was wondering if their babies would be born that night. It was very exciting. And if so, they knew the babies would have to stay at the hospital for a while, in incubators, depending on how big they were. But in her belly they looked enormous to them.

  Once she was dressed, Hugues helped her from the bed to the wheelchair, and she smiled up at him once she sat down.

  “It looks like this is showtime,” she said softly. They had waited so long for this. The hormone treatments the previous summer, the IVF, and now seven months of being pregnant, and she had been in bed for nearly four months. She felt ready to face what was coming. She just hoped that their babies were too.

  Hugues and Bruce took Natalie down the elevator in the wheelchair. If it had been earlier, he would have called Heloise, but he didn’t want to disturb her and assumed that she was sleeping.

  None of the drivers were around at that hour to drive them to the hospital. And it was simpler to take a taxi. The doorman hailed one for them, and Natalie held Hugues’s hand in the cab. It felt so good to be out in the warm spring air and see the city again. She felt like she had been in prison for months.

  The doctor was waiting for them at the hospital, and they got Natalie to Labor and Delivery just as the first serious pains started, and she was surprised by how strong they were. But once her water broke, the doctor had told her that she might go into hard labor very quickly, which seemed to be what was happening now. And she was clinging tightly to Hugues’s hand. He was quietly reassuring her and helped her into the bed, where they examined her and she immediately cried out in pain.

  “You’re already dilated to eight centimeters,” the doctor explained to her. “You must have been having contractions all night.” They wanted her to have some contractions before the C-section, to get the babies ready to breathe when they were born.

  “I’ve had so many lately, and they kick so much, it’s hard to tell,” Natalie said as another pain hit, and the doctor checked her again, and this time she screamed, as Hugues winced, watching her. It looked excruciating to him. Miriam hadn’t let
him be there when Heloise was born, so this was the first delivery he’d seen.

  “We’re not going to be able to stop it now,” the doctor said to Hugues and Natalie. “With the water broken, there’s a risk of infection, and she dilated too quickly. I’d like to see if we could slow it down a little, so we can get some medicine into you.” They wanted to give her an IV, to protect the babies’ lungs, as they weren’t fully mature. “Let’s see if we can buy a little time.” They wanted to get two bags of IV fluid into her, and the medication for the babies’ lungs. And the doctor explained to Hugues and Natalie that the best way to slow her labor a little bit would be to give her an epidural, if it wasn’t already too late. They would need it for the C-section anyway, since they weren’t going to let her deliver naturally. And if it was too late for the epidural, they’d have to put her out completely, which they didn’t want to do.

  They got an anesthesiologist into the room and had him administer the epidural, through a needle in her spine. It was painful for Natalie, but once it was in place, she stopped feeling the contractions, and eventually they slowed down. It was giving them the time they needed to get the babies ready to enter the world.

  Natalie was lying on her side, looking exhausted and worried. She had been poked and prodded and examined, and she was worried for their babies. A fetal monitor was reporting all three heartbeats, and Natalie lay quietly, holding Hugues’s hand, as tears slid down her cheeks.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered to him, “for them, not for me.”

  “It’s going to be fine.” She wanted to believe him, but she didn’t. There was so much that could still go wrong. And by eight in the morning they had gotten everything into her that she and the babies needed, and they lightened up on the epidural, and as soon as they did, Natalie was immediately in pain. There seemed to be no way to get through this easily, and Hugues hated that for her. But the doctor still wanted her to have some more contractions to get the babies’ lungs ready to breathe. She assured them that she wasn’t going to leave her in labor for long, and they would do the C-section soon. Hugues thought it looked like the worst of both worlds, a painful labor and then a cesarean section, which meant major surgery. They examined her again then, which only made it all worse.

  “I want to go home,” she said to Hugues as she burst into tears. He wanted to take her home too, but with their babies in their arms, safe and sound. And for now they needed to be here.

  Two more doctors entered the room shortly after, and half a dozen nurses. The epidural was stepped up, and things started to move very quickly, as they rolled Natalie onto a gurney between contractions and rolled her down to surgery, with Hugues holding her hand and the whole team following. Because she was having triplets, there was a lot more going on than usual. With hormone treatments and IVF, they were seeing many more multiple births, and three was still a reasonable number. They had delivered quadruplets the day before.

  Once they were in the surgical suite, everything moved quickly, too quickly for Natalie to even know what was going on. They turned the epidural up and numbed her completely. Her stomach was being swabbed, three pediatricians came in, three incubators appeared out of nowhere, and a sheet was put up just past her shoulders so she couldn’t see what was going on, and they asked Hugues to stand near her head. Both her arms were strapped onto boards with IVs into them, so he could no longer hold her hand, but he bent to kiss her face, and she smiled up at him through her tears. And then things started moving even faster. One of the heartbeats had become irregular on the monitor, and the doctor in charge of the team told her they were starting the procedure.

  Hugues sat down on a stool next to her, and the monitors kept bleeping, and he wasn’t sure, but he thought he could only hear two heartbeats now instead of three, but he didn’t want to ask, and he didn’t want to frighten Natalie, who was terrified enough as it was.

  There was a constant exchange between the fleet of doctors, and then suddenly as he pressed his face next to Natalie’s, they both heard a tiny wail coming from the other side of the sheet.

  “You have a little boy,” the doctor announced proudly as both Hugues and Natalie burst into a sob at the same time, and a pediatrician whisked him away to examine him and put him in the incubator. And then within seconds there was another tiny wail. This one sounded stronger. “And a baby girl.” Hugues and Natalie were beaming through their tears. Neither of them could hear the monitor then, and Hugues was wondering if they had turned it down, but for a long time there was no third wail. And then there was a rhythmic slapping sound, and stern exchanges between the doctors.

  “What’s happening?” Natalie asked in a choked voice. And none of them answered. But without being told, they sensed what was happening. There was still no third wail, and they could hear both of their other babies crying. The doctor came around the sheet then and looked at them both, and the moment they saw her face, they knew.

  “We tried to save your second little girl. Her heart gave out. She was just under two pounds. We’ve been trying to revive her … I’m sorry,” she said, looking genuinely distressed, as Natalie broke into wracking sobs, and Hugues gently stroked her face, as his own tears fell onto her cheeks. They had two healthy babies, but they had lost the third. The bittersweetness of life, to receive two enormous gifts and have another taken away.

  The team was sewing Natalie up, and the doctor came back to speak to them. “The little girl you lost is beautiful. She’s all cleaned up. Would you like to see her and hold her for a few minutes?” She knew from experience that sometimes people that didn’t imagined all kinds of things, that the baby had been stolen or switched or hideously deformed. Natalie nodded her head in answer to the question, and a few minutes later they freed her arms and brought her the baby that had been stillborn. She had a sweet little face, and black hair like Hugues, and she looked like she was sleeping in her mother’s arms, as Natalie sobbed and Hugues touched the tiny face. And then a nurse gently took her away. And as Natalie lay crying, they brought both of the others and held them up for her to see. Their son was crying lustily with a fuzz of blond hair and looked like his mother, and their little girl had the face of an angel and curly dark hair. Both babies were just over three pounds. And the one that hadn’t made it had been half their size. But even having two was a victory, and the one they lost was a baby who had never been meant to be. The doctor tried to focus their attention on the ones that had lived. They were put in incubators, but the doctor said they could go home when they reached four pounds.

  And by then Natalie had been all sewn up. They covered her with a warm blanket, and she had a violent case of the shakes, from the shock, the emotion, and the surgery. She was shaking like a leaf. And Hugues felt as though they had gone over Niagara Falls. He was happy and sad, excited and victorious and heartbroken over the baby they had lost, all at once, and so was Natalie. They kept Natalie in the operating room for an hour and then wheeled her into a room. And the baby that had died had been taken away. The other two were in the neonatal ICU because they had been premature, but both were doing well.

  When they got to Natalie’s room, Hugues took her in his arms and told her how proud of her he was, how brave she had been, and how beautiful their babies were, and like the doctor, he tried to remind her how lucky they were to have the two they did. Natalie couldn’t forget the face of the tiny baby girl they’d lost as Hugues spoke to her quietly.

  And as soon as she calmed down a little, they called Heloise and told her the news, that she had a brother and a sister, and then she waited, and her father told her that they had lost a little girl. It saddened her too, but she was relieved to hear that Natalie and the other two were okay, especially with the risks involved. She would be coming back to the hotel in four days, and the twins in a few weeks.

  “How is Natalie taking it?” she asked her father soberly. Natalie was still shaking too hard to talk.

  “She’s fine, and she was very brave. We’re both sad, but we’r
e very grateful to have the two … and you,” he added with a smile.

  “Can I see her?” Heloise asked him, but Natalie was in no shape for visitors yet, especially given what had happened.

  “Maybe a little later. I think they want her to sleep for a while.” She was totally overwrought, and completely worn out, and she couldn’t stop crying. One moment they were tears of joy, and the next they were tears of grief. And he felt as though he had been on a roller coaster too.

  “Are you okay, Papa?” Heloise worried about him too, especially since his heart attack. This was hard on him as well.

  “I’m fine.” But he was worried about his wife. She had been through so much.

  “I’ll tell everyone at the hotel.” Jennifer put up pink and blue balloons, and Heloise discreetly told them that they had lost one of the triplets, but the other two were fine, a boy and a girl, and Natalie was doing well.

  She worked all day with the concierges, and then she and Brad went to see them that night. They saw the two babies in their incubators, and Heloise said they were gorgeous. And her father told her quietly in the hallway that as soon as Natalie left the hospital, there would be a burial service for the third baby. It made Heloise infinitely sad for them and put a damper on the moment, especially since they couldn’t bring the other two home yet, and she wished they didn’t have to go through it, but as her father said, it was part of life.

  Natalie looked so exhausted and was in pain from the cesarean, so they didn’t stay long, and afterward Heloise and Brad went back to the hotel and talked about it. It sounded like she had gone through so much, and her father had too.

  “It seems so complicated,” Brad said sadly. He never wanted Heloise to go through anything like it. And they talked about the future now, even though they were both young. It was one of those relationships that happened early and seemed to stay on a straight path. They knew they wanted to be together for a long, long time. And Brad pointed out that his aunt had waited a long time to have babies, and he agreed with Heloise that they were lucky to have the two that had survived. She could have had them earlier in the pregnancy and lost them all. It put it back into perspective, but Brad held her close that night, grateful that they had found each other nine months before. All he wanted was to protect her and take care of her, and he hoped they survived whatever bumps life provided them in the years to come.