by Austin Boyd
Laura Ann’s mouth fell open. “When did you have time?” she asked. “You were with us in Wheeling yesterday until five or six.”
Ian smiled, rubbing his eyes with mock fists. “Took us a couple of late nights. Some guys helped.” He held a small line attached to the harnesses. “You can pull these back across the creek when someone leaves them on the other side. You’re gonna get your feet and legs wet, but at least you can cross safely.” He offered her a harness. “Ready?”
Five minutes later, she and Ian climbed into her farm truck at the top of the rise. On the slope behind them, two sets of tracks narrowly avoided ruts worn deep by heavy rain. She marveled how he’d driven the truck back up this hill.
Laura Ann sat in silence for most of the ride home while Ian drove. She ran her hand across the nap of the cloth seat, stained with bits of dark oil and umber clay from workdays in the field. The cab smelled of diesel, the sweet heavy scent of tractors, the fragrance of good times. Outside, poplars and sweetgums burst forth with new green after the deep watering of the rain, lining the road with fresh growth. Blackberries sprouted verdant brambles, and brave weeds fought for a foothold in the tire tracks of an unused road.
Topping the ridge, the truck emerged from the wood and home beckoned. Laura Ann wondered what Sophia might have thought when she followed this path. What did she feel when she drove out of this dark forest tunnel into the light? When she saw the white farmhouse, red barn, and undulating green pastures filled with black cows? Dr. Murphy filled her mind’s eye for a moment, his dire predictions ripping a hole in Laura Ann’s heart.
She put a hand on Ian’s arm. “Stop for a minute.”
He pulled over at the top of the pasture and she stepped out of the truck to sit at the cattle guard, looking downhill toward home. Ian followed, curling up in some tall grass at her side. She leaned back against a rusty metal post, wrapped her arms about damp jeans, and rested her chin on her knees, in wonder.
I have three loves.
Her lifeblood sprang from these fields, from the forest behind her, and from the house beyond—her first love. Ian captured her heart — her second love, if he would have her. Yet, in Wheeling lay a third love — in the bosom of her new friend. A sister from another culture, from another country, years older, tied to her by a powerful maternal bond she would not sever. Much as she missed this place, much as she longed to fall into Ian’s arms this moment, some part of her yearned to be back on the bedside with Sophia. She leaned left a bit, her head resting tentatively on Ian’s shoulder. His arm circled about her but he felt distant. Not the firm grip of days gone by.
“Something’s different,” she said, at a loss for the right words. Like a tiny thread run through her heart, she felt the tug to race back to Wheeling, fifty miles north. Her heart tore, pulled in three directions.
“Different? Maybe,” Ian replied. “But some things have never changed.”
She fed the silence, inviting an explanation.
“I cancelled our reservation at the Blennerhassett,” he said at last. He pulled her closer in a reassuring hold. “But that didn’t change my reason for inviting you.”
Her heart leapt and she looked up at him. “Aye,” she replied in the mock brogue of her daddy’s people. “And what might that reason be?”
Ian’s eyes twinkled with the sparkle of a secret he could barely contain. She let go of her knees, and leaned into his chest, her ear to his heart.
Ian’s hand found its way to her head. Like a human brush, he ran his fingers through brown tresses, sweeping them slowly back over her shoulder. Each pass, with his fingertips starting at her forehead, she tingled. She matched his rhythm, breath for breath, his chest rising and falling with hers.
Ian’s hand rested on her head at last, the brushing stopped. His hand quivered, the faintest of a shake in his arm. He inhaled deeply, and then spoke, his voice cracking just a bit. “There’s something I’ve waited a long time to ask you.” He paused. “But maybe now’s not the time.”
Laura Ann sat up, pulling away to look at him. “Ask me now,” she implored, desperate to bury the past and move on.
“Okay.” Ian reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out what looked like a house key, with a small leather tab bound to the key ring, three letters embossed in brown. It read “L. A. S.” Her heart skipped.
“I changed the locks on the house … since you’re going to be away for a while. Here’s the new key.” He rubbed his thumb across the embossed letters. “I took some liberties with the monogram.”
Laura Ann sat up and spun around, grabbing both of his hands, her eyes wide with surprise. He released one hand and reached up to touch her, the first caress of his fingers on her face like touching a high-voltage line, sending jolts of joy down her spine.
“I don’t bring much to this relationship except a pickup truck and a small savings account, Laura Ann — “ “No! You do — “
He shook his head, interrupting her. “And I still don’t know exactly how to deal with all the things you told me. But I do know you — we’ve been friends for too long to let it end here. Whatever led you down the path to that fertility clinic in Morgantown, whatever motivated you to keep it such a secret, I know that you did it to honor your dad and your family. It was the wrong thing, in my opinion, but you made that sacrifice for the right reason.”
A million words rose in her throat, the first one his name, but Ian put a finger to her lips to quiet her. He pulled on her one hand to get up from a sit and knelt before her. He palmed the leather key fob and held it up. “L. A. S.,” he read, with a smile. “Laura Ann Stewart.” He took a deep breath, and then continued. “I think it has a nice ring to it.”
“I love it,” she said, her voice cracking.
Ask me now!
Ian held her left hand with his right, his fingers encasing her palm, and then shoved his other hand in a pants pocket.
“Laura Ann McGehee, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. My one true friend.” He cleared his throat, the beating of his heart telegraphing itself in his temples. “But I don’t want to be just friends.”
He opened the other palm, revealing a small diamond ring, a tiny stone in a Tiffany setting. Sunlight danced off the facets of the little gem, glimmering in his hand.
Her heart racing, she launched a silent prayer of thanks.
“I didn’t really change the locks,” he said with a little laugh. “That’s the key to my heart, Laura Ann. It’s always been yours, tucked away, right here,” he said, touching his chest. “If you’ll have it.” With a shaking hand, Ian slipped the diamond onto her ring finger, then looked up, his eyes misting.
“Will you marry me?”
“She kissed me first.”
Daddy’s words arose from nowhere, the first he’d spoken in half an hour of tending trotlines in the Middle Island Creek. Wading in green-tinged summer water up to her waist, twelve-year-old Laura Ann tended her own line, some twenty feet upstream from him. Bare feet feeling her way across a muddy bottom, she listened as she worked.
Like her, Daddy followed his own line, a stout cord strung between trees on opposite banks, suspending a series of shorter lines that descended into the slow waters of summer. Like her, he pulled chicken livers from a pouch at his waist, threading them one at a time on sharp treble hooks. Livers that would beckon dinners from the creek’s lazy pools. Catfish.
Daddy moved through the deepest water, baiting his line of hooks, not looking up when he spoke. He wandered through the water, lost in another world, in daydreams of a time years ago.
“I was thirteen,” Daddy said, speaking to the water. “She was twelve. Your age.” He laughed, pausing in the memory. “I thought I was all growed up, schooled to seventh grade in one room. Headed off to the big middle school in town.”
Daddy slid dark crimson livers expertly onto each hook, sinking razor-sharp barbs into bloody flesh. Three silver tips, hidden in wait for their prey. He moved at one with the water, Daddy, the master of
the fish.
“She was a bonnie lass.” Standing still, Daddy’s eyes focused on some distant mirage. “I asked her to meet me at the Valentine’s dance.”
Daddy peered down at the deep red of the next bait as though into a crystal ball, somehow connecting with a life that had been torn from him far too early. Ripped from him like a fish tearing the liver from this treble hook, a gash that would never heal.
“Your granddaddy took us home that night. He pushed me out the car door when we dropped her off at the Sinclair place.”
Daddy threaded the next liver and dropped it in the creek, the weighted line forming a brief hole in the water. Like this memory, it dropped out of sight of the present, yet waited to be retrieved by the simple tug of an invisible thread.
“Not a word she spoke on that porch,” Daddy said a bit later. “Just those eyes. The green and blue emeralds of Hope, staring up at me.”
He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, staring at the line where it dropped into the green-black of the creek. His wet hand tarried at his lips, connecting mysteriously with a woman she barely remembered.
“She kissed me first.”
Laura Ann moved to his side, submerged to her armpits in wet life.
“Aye, Peppermint. Never another. She was the only one for me.”
CHAPTER 22
JULY 27
Rectilinear. The entire room screamed, “Square.”
In the harsh purple glare of artificial light, Laura Ann’s eyes wandered foot by foot from the familiar view of Sophia’s bed to the walls, floor, and ceiling, every surface made up of right angles. Sophia, the only curve in the room, lay fast asleep, snared in a web of medical plastic that connected her to machines, monitors, and life-giving fluid. The hospital spider spun a cocoon about her, locking her to the bed, her home for the past month.
Standing at the one narrow window, Laura Ann rubbed sleep out of her eyes. To the east, the first rays of a rising sun broke over the ridge and the old gravestones of Greenwood Cemetery, a penetrating glare that beat back the recliner aches of a night’s fitful sleep. It seemed just moments ago she’d been with Ian, seated at Sophia’s bedside, the three of them talking late into the night. Where had he gone? How late did he leave?
Below her window, employees exited cars, headed for an early morning hospital shift. Most of them clad in blue or green, some in the brown garb of this floor’s medical smocks, they ignored the lone girl above, a soul desperate to feel sun, to taste wind, and hear the outside world.
Nurses clamored in the hall, bustling with the first sounds of a new day. The cutlery on breakfast carts clanged, announcing the arrival of another bland meal. New voices replaced old ones, women conferring in muffled tones about patients, the high pitch of their voices echoing against a background of electronic chirps. Beeps for Sophia’s respiration if it went too low. Beeps for her blood pressure if too high. Every heartbeat announced with a digital tone, in synch to the metronome of the Staples World Clock, ticking the seconds away behind her. Two million seconds spent in this room, and counting.
Green. She starved for grass, for trees, and for the color of life. Laura Ann turned back to the room, its only green a single metal port for oxygen, situated above Sophia’s bed. Life green, it poked out of the off-white wall, a valve unused. She moved to the bed, her hand to Sophia’s shoulder, rising up and down with her friend’s shallow breaths. Laura Ann, starving for the outside world, stood guard, while inside Sophia another life grew.
She marveled at the ring on her finger, then glanced back at the clock, another six hundred seconds since she arose to capture the sunrise at half-past five. Every second precious for this baby, yet every one an eternity. She swallowed her pain and prayed for Sophia—for her child—and for six more weeks.
“Laura Ann?”
The voice tugged at her, a fist pounding on the door of her dream.
“Laura Ann?” The voice begged again, higher in tone, almost raspy. She awoke.
Sophia panted in her bed, her head turned to the side, an IV-punctured arm and hand thrust Laura Ann’s way. Beneath crusty lids, in the dimmed light of the nighttime hospital room, Laura Ann saw fear in her friend’s eyes.
“Laura —,” she gasped. “I — I can’t breathe!”
Laura Ann shot straight up, her eyes diverted first to the clock. A few minutes before nine p.m. Then to the monitors above the bed. Her oxygen saturation, blood pressure, EKG, fluid drip rates — terms and metrics she’d learned fast as Sophia’s hospital companion. Bright lights warned of trouble on every display, one glowing red with a fearsome pronouncement: “Hypoxia.” Red lights mirrored the panic in her friend’s eyes.
Sophia gasped again, her fingers clutching at something in the air. “I — I can’t catch — my breath,” she wheezed, struggling against some unseen monster on her chest, her face flush with desperation. Before the next pant, a brown-clad nurse burst through the half-open door, headed straight to the bed.
“Saturation’s way down,” Laura Ann said, forcing her voice to sound calm. She squeezed her friend’s hand. “She can’t get a breath.”
“Heart rate’s up. Look at that flutter,” the nurse said, a finger to the EKG display. She pushed a button on the call panel above the bed, summoning another nurse. “Page Dr. Murphy. Possible A-fib in 44B.”
All business, the nurse turned to Sophia. Her friend’s confused eyes darted back and forth between them, from Laura Ann to the woman in brown. Her mouth wide open, she gulped at air. Moments later, her eyes rolled back, a bare whisper escaping her lips. “I’m so — so weak.” Her right hand moved over her chest, dragging the oxygen saturation sensor with it.
“Hurts. Here.” Sophia’s fingers rested over her heart, and her eyes closed. Moments later, they shot open, and she lifted out of the bed, her hands jerking tubes with them as her fingers sought her belly. She nearly tipped over two poles of IV fluid, pulling a web of tubing when she bolted upright.
“Oh!” she screamed, her voice cut short by a lack of air, her hands to her abdomen.
Another monitor beeped, the spike of a first contraction displayed, like watching a wave pile into a Hawaiian beach, growing fast from a low swell into a towering wall. She screamed again, a short burst wheezing into a sad whine. No air in her lungs to complain, Sophia fell back on the bed.
The nurse stabbed at a blue button on the call panel again. “Code Blue! Cardio in 44B. On-call OB to 44B. Stat!”
Hands flew across the bed, the nurse moving with an urgency Laura Ann had not seen in weeks. For a brief moment, the nurse caught Laura Ann’s eye, her words laced with fear. “She’s in labor.” Another nurse dashed in the room, medical terms shared between them that Laura Ann could not understand, but whose implication she could not mistake.
Sophia’s life—and James’s—hung in the balance.
Dr. Murphy stood at the door of Labor and Delivery, draped in a surgical gown, a mask over his face. “She’s asking for you, Ms. McGehee.”
Laura Ann jumped up from her plastic seat and headed for the swinging doors behind the doctor. Inside the Delivery Suite, another nurse stood at the gateway to a room where gowned nurses and technicians bustled in and out. Ushered away from Sophia an hour ago, Laura Ann had waited in desperate prayer.
The nurse waved her in, pointing toward a bed where three nurses attended to various monitors and another swabbed cleanser on Sophia’s belly. The dark orange of the antiseptic confirmed her fears. Caesarean birth.
Sophia’s gaze caught Laura Ann’s, and a weak smile lifted her pale cheeks. She extended a frail hand and Laura Ann took it.
“I can breathe better now.” Sophia’s limp squeeze belied brave words.
“Rest. It won’t be long,” Laura Ann replied. “There’s a baby on the way.” She forced a smile, some sign of the joy they both wanted to share at this incredible moment. But she felt no joy.
Sophia pulled at her hand, a sideways nod of her head urging her to move closer, to some place priv
ate. The nurse to Laura Ann’s left, swabbing at a bare belly, caught a glimpse of Sophia’s eyes, then set down her antiseptic and motioned to the other nurses. “Give them a moment,” she said, shooing her coworkers out the door. She smiled in Laura Ann’s direction as the team left the room.
Laura Ann wrapped both her hands about Sophia’s, leaning close. She felt breath on her cheek, shallow regular pants, not the zesty life of the vibrant woman who landed on her drive a month ago.
Sophia’s fingers tightened with the quiver of her chin, lips drawn tight. “It’s time,” she said at last, words whispered in a shaky voice.
Laura Ann fell upon her, burying her face in the pillow next to Sophia’s head, her arm seeking some hold of her friend. Below her, she could feel the timid heave of Sophia’s weak chest, each breath a struggle, fed by too little air and a desperately weak heart.
Cotton and pine. Laura Ann breathed freely of the scent of fresh-pressed sheets and the aroma of Sophia’s hair, washed just yesterday when Laura Ann tended to her. The soft tresses of her friend’s black locks lay like scattered weeds between Laura Ann’s face and the pillow. She pulled Sophia as tight to her as she dared, seeking to absorb her into her bosom and pour into her the strength her friend craved.
“I am blessed,” Sophia said. Neither woman moved, their minds tracking like those of identical twins. Sophia nudged her and Laura Ann rose up. She lifted her hand to place her forefinger over Laura Ann’s lips, tarrying for a moment, drawing in the deepest breath she could muster. “I’m blessed to be the mother of this baby — no matter how long that lasts.”
Sophia’s hand moved behind Laura Ann’s neck. She pulled her face close, wet cheek to wet cheek, mingling tears like their mixed blood in Sophia’s womb. “Our son,” she said, emphasizing her words with a gentle squeeze of the nape of Laura Ann’s neck.