The Friendship Pact

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  His whole organ donor approach really spoke to her.

  She knew exactly what he was saying, felt the intensity of his words. She was pretty sure Kora had never told him about their pact to give each other a kidney; they’d promised never to tell anyone. Still, his words reminded her of it.

  She only hoped Kora would see it the same way.

  * * *

  I was going home. Dr. Hersey had just come back with my test results. She wasn’t happy about the baby’s size and weight. She wasn’t happy about my iron deficiency, either, particularly in light of the fact that I’d been taking the recommended supplements. But we were going home.

  “You make absolutely certain that you eat at least three meals a day,” she told me as I sat in a wheelchair, wearing the robe Danny had thrown around me that morning. I was ready to be pushed out to the car Bailey had gone to get.

  “I will,” I told her. “I’m throwing my menus and scales out the door and I’ll eat healthy food, but in the portions I used to eat before I was pregnant.”

  I’d worried too much about excessive weight gain, apparently, and had actually been losing weight.

  “You make sure she does,” the doctor said, her gaze stern as she looked at Danny, who was standing with an arm around my chair, and holding my hand.

  He’d been touching me in one way or another every second since he was allowed back in my room. It was as though he was afraid that if he let me go, I’d disappear.

  I couldn’t wait to get him home and reassure him. I wasn’t going anywhere. Period. That man was stuck with me for the rest of his life.

  “And no sex for at least a week,” Dr. Hersey said. “It’s just a precaution, but I think it’s best. Until we’re positive that this was no more than a diet thing.”

  She’d already ordered another ultrasound for later in the week. And was going to be doing them regularly until she was certain that our baby was growing on schedule.

  “Next time, we’ll talk about amniocentesis. After we get a look at the ultrasound, we might want to go ahead and do that, too. Just as a precaution.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t see Danny, but assumed he nodded, too. I wasn’t eager to have a long needle stuck in my stomach, but if it would help my baby, I’d walk on hot coals.

  “Okay, unless I hear from you again, I’ll see you at the end of the week.”

  Then the doctor was gone; Danny and I were alone. Bailey was on her way to get her car, to drive us home, and my folks would be bringing dinner.

  I looked up at him, ready to reassure him that our life was as perfect as always.

  That was when I felt a pool of warmth fill my underwear.

  Chapter Nineteen

  July moved slowly into August. Bailey worked as much as she had to in order to keep up with her cases. She spent the rest of her time with Kora. Between her and Danny and Mama Di, they weren’t leaving her on her own much at all.

  Kora and Danny had named the baby boy William Daniel, after his daddy and granddaddy. They had a little funeral and they’d buried him in the Mitchell family plot at the cemetery outside town.

  Dr. Hersey had done a thorough workup on Koralynn and had assured her that William Daniel’s dangerously premature birth had nothing to do with her. Or her eating habits. Nothing she could have done would have prevented what had happened. Koralynn’s job was to get well and think about the future. There was no reason she couldn’t try again in a few months. And no reason to believe that something like this would happen again.

  Millions of women miscarried. And went on to have multiple children that they carried naturally and healthily to term.

  Bailey made certain that she told Koralynn this on a regular basis. For the first time in their lives, she was the one who got lucky. And the one who had to be positive and upbeat for both of them. Kora had pulled her out of the muck so many times. Which was why Bailey knew how to do it.

  Danny, who was taking the miscarriage almost as hard as Kora, had said very little to Bailey lately, except to make absolutely certain that she not breathe a word of her donor information to his wife. For the time being, the confession plan was out.

  What did he think she was, an imbecile? And cruel, too? Of course she wasn’t going to tell Kora that she was carrying Danny’s baby! Not when Kora’s baby was six feet underground.

  “Bail?” They were out in Kora’s garden a week before school started, weeding the beds that would be filled with flowers again the following spring. They didn’t really need weeding, since winter would kill even the hardiest interlopers, but Kora had wanted to weed so they were weeding.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going to be okay, you know.”

  “I know.” She did now. Truth was, she’d been scared shitless the past few weeks. She couldn’t imagine a world without Kora’s Pollyanna outlook.

  “I buried a part of myself with him.”

  Bailey understood that, too. Every night since Kora’s miscarriage, she’d knelt by her bed to offer words of thanks that her baby had grown through another day. And to envision a full-term birth.

  “Did you have your ultrasound?” Kora asked now.

  Bailey wasn’t saying anything about the baby unless Kora asked, knowing she’d ask when she was ready to hear. “Last week.”

  “And?”

  “He’s a boy.”

  A boy who’d have no idea how great it would’ve been to grow up side by side with Kora’s son.

  “We said we’d have girls first.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, little Matthew Brian,” Kora said. After Bailey’s brother.

  “Yeah. I think I’ll call him Mattie, though. At least when he’s little.”

  “Shouldn’t we be starting childbirth classes?”

  She’d put them off. “Maybe I won’t bother....” There was no way in hell she was putting her friend through the agony of watching what she should have been experiencing herself.

  “No, Bail! You have to. “ Pulling off her gardening gloves, Kora straightened, standing there in her shorts and tank top. “I said I’d do this with you, and I will. I want to.” The tears in her eyes caught at Bailey as Kora said, “I need to, Bail. I lost a child.” She paused. “I didn’t die.”

  “I know, Kor, but give yourself some time....”

  “As soon as I get the go-ahead from Dr. Hersey, we’re going to try again, just like she recommended,” Kora told her. “Nothing, nobody, can take Will’s place, but we have room in our hearts and our home for his siblings, like we would have if I’d carried him to term. We’ll just be welcoming one of them sooner than planned.”

  That was so Kora. Her friend thought the reason she was always happy was that she’d been so lucky in life. Had everything easy.

  But Bailey knew differently. Kora was the strongest person she’d ever met. She was always happy because she always found a way to be. No matter what kind of shit life handed her.

  * * *

  All that autumn, Danny and I tried to get pregnant. Dr. Hersey said it could take some time. Remembering how long it had taken before, I wasn’t all that worried. It would happen when it happened.

  I just hoped, every single month, that I’d miss a period....

  I spent a lot of time up on my mountain that fall—on the little mountain road outside town where I’d go to think. The place where Danny had asked me to marry him. I didn’t find any answers there. But I found a certain measure of peace.

  Christmas came and went. Bailey spent most of the holiday week with us, camping out in our spare bedroom, rather than lugging stuff back and forth in the snow and ice.

  She was huge. And beautiful.

  We’d run into Jake and his wife at a party in early December and I’d seen how he looked at Bailey, like she was the most gorgeous woma
n on the face of the earth in her flat shoes and tent-like dress. Only a man in love with a woman would find her that compelling when she resembled a whale.

  He’d left soon after. With his arm around his wife.

  I hurt for him. For Bailey. And for Jenna, too.

  I had a great group of kids that year and spent more time than necessary planning special projects for them. As the old saying has it, when a door closes another one opens, and I saw those little children—on loan from their parents—as my open door. Just until I healed enough to sleep through the night without waking up in tears.

  Bailey and I completed her childbirth classes. I had my coaching duties down and had studied the birthing procedures, as well, for when I needed them. I’d take the class again with Danny, of course, when it was my time, but it didn’t hurt to get a head start on something as important as bringing Danny’s baby into the world.

  Still, I was bit nervous when, on the third Wednesday in January, our phone rang at 2:11 in the morning.

  “Kor?” I knew what was going on as soon as I heard her voice.

  “Did your water break?”

  “No, I just started having—” the pause was a long one “—pains. They woke me up, so I have no idea how long they’ve been going on or how far apart they are, but they’re really bad.”

  “Don’t move,” I told her, already shrugging into the jeans and sweatshirt I’d had on a chair by my bed every night for a week. “We’re on our way.”

  Danny was in the bathroom and I knew when he reappeared he’d be dressed. I was the coach. He was the driver.

  The three of us had a job to do.

  * * *

  Matthew Brian came into the world at 9:45 a.m., weighing seven pounds six ounces. His birth, while far more painful than she’d ever imagined, was as perfect as her pregnancy had been and less then twenty-four hours after she’d gone into labor, Bailey was back home again, alone with a baby to care for.

  Kora, his godmother and Mama Di, his gram, had both insisted they were going to stay with her. She’d compromised, letting them return first thing in the morning, to help her get up and bathed. But she wanted the night to herself.

  She and Mattie were a family now. Her job was to care for him.

  She had to do this alone.

  Mama Di relented only because Kora and Danny were so close by.

  Danny hadn’t looked at her son once—although he was noticeably attentive to Bailey, helping her in and out of the car, carrying things for her.

  Everyone thought his lack of reaction to her son was because Mattie’s birth reminded him so acutely of the loss he’d recently suffered.

  Only Bailey knew about the stake that must be piercing Danny’s heart.

  There was nothing she could do about that.

  Kora, on the other hand, seemed to take comfort from little Mattie’s entrance into the world. She came over every second she could during the next few months. She held the baby every chance she got. Changed him. Bathed him. And even spent the night a couple of times when Danny was out of town on business so that Bailey could get some sleep.

  And when Bailey went back to work three months after Mattie’s birth, Kora picked him up from the sitter’s—the retired wife of an older lawyer in her firm—as soon as school was over and stayed with him at Bailey’s house until she got home.

  Danny didn’t complain.

  He didn’t join in, either.

  From what Kora said, he tried practically every night to make a baby with his wife. Kora was worried about him, about his obsessiveness.

  She didn’t know the half of it.

  “You want to hold him?” Kora asked, adjusting the blanket around Mattie’s sweet sleeping face. They sat in the bleachers at a park near the high school they’d attended more than ten years before.

  “No, he’s comfortable where he is.” Bailey grinned at the sight of her son in her best friend’s arms. She was finding that she was a bit...unfriendly, as mothers went.

  She didn’t want a lot of people handling her son, getting their germs on him.

  But Kora—sharing with her felt just...right.

  “I’m glad Danny and the boys decided to do this,” Kora said, watching as her husband, an offensive running back on the private adult football team, ran from the field to the sidelines as the other team took possession of the ball.

  “They were good in high school,” Bailey, who’d never been all that fond of football, said. “But who knew they’d go on to win city league their first year out as adults?”

  That league championship had been in the fall. Danny’s team had then been asked to play in this spring tournament for charity. All ticket sales and refreshment money was being donated to a program designed to finance sports in public schools that had been forced to adopt pay-to-play policies. The charity paid the fees for students whose families who couldn’t afford to.

  The other team had the ball, and half of the spectators cheered them on.

  “Imagine what they would’ve done if Jake had joined the team,” Bailey said now. She hadn’t heard from him at all, and that was fine with her.

  Still...lately...she’d been thinking so much about him.

  “I guess he’s kicking himself for listening to Jenna on that one,” Kora said, not surprisingly filling in the blanks. Despite Jake’s history as a high school sports star, his wife had been against the whole idea of a men’s football team. Because of the time it would take. And because of the risk of injury...

  “He’s traveling a lot for his job. Sounds like he loves it,” Kora added.

  Bailey was glad.

  “He seems to love her, Bail.”

  Okay. Good. That’ was all she needed to know. “You’ve seen them together then?”

  “Yeah, but only in groups. Like at that Christmas party. We don’t do anything as couples. Frankly, I don’t think Jenna likes me.”

  Who wouldn’t like Kora?

  Except maybe a woman married to the man who was in love with Kora’s best friend?

  Or who’d been in love with her, Bailey amended. She glanced at the bundle in Kora’s arms, at the peaceful face of her sleeping son. He was so tiny. So vulnerable.

  He was her life now.

  The crowd around them cheered and surged to their feet, but Bailey stayed seated with Kora. The other team had the ball and since Danny was on offense, whatever was happening out on the field didn’t matter that much to them.

  Danny’s team was ahead by twenty-one in the fourth quarter. They’d pretty much bagged this one.

  The cheering grew to such proportions that Kora leaned over and said, “Stand up! Find out what’s going on!”

  So Bailey stood, but she couldn’t see much. It looked like their team had intercepted the ball and was running it back to score. But the other team was closing in and the defensive linebacker who’d gotten the interception was veering toward the sideline, aiming for out of bounds to end the play, Bailey determined.

  That was exactly what she told Kora when she sat back down.

  The cheering stopped, changed to gasps and groans, and Bailey stood up again. There was a big pileup of bodies on the grass, out of bounds. Judging by the color of the shirts, all nine men on the other team had ended up in it.

  As the crowd grew hushed, she tried to figure out what was going on.

  “Danny’s down,” a woman in front of them turned around to say. “He was standing on the sideline, talking to their coach and didn’t see the play coming right at him.”

  Bailey took Mattie, and Kora popped up, craning her head.

  “He’s unconscious,” a guy a couple of seats down told them. “It was a bad hit. Their entire offense took him out on their way to get Jeff.” Jeff. The defensive tackle who’d intercepted the ball.

  Bail
ey couldn’t see much besides a huddle of men on the field.

  But she saw her friend turn white and race down the bleachers toward her husband.

  * * *

  “He’s going to be just fine, Bail.” I held my phone to my ear as I paced the hallway outside Danny’s hospital room. The only way she’d agreed to take the baby home was if I agreed to call her the second I knew anything.

  It helped that my folks said that if I needed Bailey at the hospital, they’d go over and sit with little Mattie.

  None of us wanted to expose the baby to hospital germs.

  “Is he talking much?”

  “Yeah. He’s completely coherent and I know he’s going to be okay,” I continued as I huddled in a corner to keep our conversation as private as possible, “because there he is, all bruised up, with a broken wrist, cracked ribs, and cuts and bruises, but the only thing he cared about was that he took a foot to the groin. I guess it hurt like hell, in spite of the cup he was wearing, and when he first came to, they said all he talked about was getting it up.”

  Bailey’s laugh was halfhearted, but I understood. She didn’t really need to hear about my husband’s sexual preoccupations. I shared them anyway. Because I knew she’d listen and I needed to talk.

  I’d spare her the part where, when Danny and I were alone in the room, he’d begged me to do him with my hand, just to make sure he was okay.

  I hadn’t wanted to. I was scared to death I’d raise his blood pressure and cause hemorrhaging or something, but when I saw how upset he was about the whole thing, to the point that I worried about his blood pressure, anyway, I did as he asked.

  “There’s no doubt that he still, uh, works in that area,” I said now.

  “Oh, good!” Bailey’s enthusiasm was a little odd, in light of her halfhearted response a few seconds ago, but I definitely had the same reaction.

  “They’re keeping him overnight and I’m going to stay with him,” I told her. “But we’ll be home in the morning.”

  “You want me to come and keep you company?” she asked. “We could raid the vending machines at 3:00 a.m.”