Do You Take This Child?

by Marie Ferrarella

  Sheila, overwhelmed and pleased at this unexpected show of friendship, laughed. “The thought does occur to me.” She looked from one woman to another. “So, how are you all doing?”

  “Fine,” Erin Lockwood was the first to declare. Shorter than the rest, she made up for it with her liveliness.

  “Terrific.” Nicole Lincoln beamed at her twins. Everything was terrific these days, now that she had the babies and Dennis in her life.

  “Couldn’t be better,” Marlene attested.

  “How about you?” Mallory asked. “Are you going to be able to make my wedding?” Mallory had sent her an invitation just yesterday. She stepped closer to Sheila, peering at her face. “You know, you do look a little peaked.” She glanced back at her friends. “Anything any of us experienced mothers can help you with?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Erin laughed at Mallory. The latter had only been a mother for a month. “Like you really know what you’re doing.”

  Mallory pretended to take affront and lifted her chin. “I’m learning every day.” She looked at Marlene, the most sedate of the group, as well as the oldest. “And what I don’t know, Marlene fills me in on.”

  “Hey, how about me?” Nicole protested. She held one baby, her son Ethan, in her arms, while the other, her daughter Erika, lay in an infant seat at her feet. “I’ve got two of them, that gives me twice as much experience.”

  “Or, put another way, twice as many opportunities to make a mistake,” Mallory teased, a grin playing on her lips.

  Marlene had learned how to walk the tightrope of delicate negotiations almost since the time she took her first step. Peacemaking was second nature to her. Setting her son into his infant seat, she cut through the good-natured teasing and stood beside Sheila.

  The woman did look a little worn around the edges, she noted, and wondered if there was anything she could do to help. More than the others, she related to Sheila. The doctor was just as closemouthed about things that bothered her as she was.

  “Anyway, the four of us all got together and thought that it would be nice to give you a baby shower—after the fact.”

  Not to be outdone by her sister, Nicole interjected, “Your nanny tells us that more congratulations are in border.” Nicole saw the hurt look in Sheila’s eyes before the latter could shut it away. Had she said something wrong? Feeling her way cautiously, she continued slowly. “She said you married Slade Garrett in one of those eleventh-hour situations.” Afraid that she’d inadvertently said something wrong, her smile was a little forced as she added, “Nice work.”

  “Slade Garrett?” Erin echoed. This was news to her. She hated to be at the end of the line when it came to information about someone she knew. “Is that the same one who writes those articles for the Times? The one who always seems to be right in the middle of every war and conflict on the globe?”

  Nicole studied Sheila’s face. Was that what was the matter? Her new husband’s career? “One and the same,” Nicole assured Erin when Sheila didn’t.

  Marlene could only bite her tongue for so long. “Is anything wrong?”

  Sheila shook her head. She wasn’t about to be a wet blanket, not after everyone had gone to so much trouble.

  “What could be wrong?” she asked brightly. “I have a beautiful baby and wonderful patients who bring presents and pay their bills on time. Life couldn’t be better.”

  Marlene exchanged glances with Nicole. They’d both noticed that Sheila hadn’t volunteered anything about her new husband, hadn’t mentioned him in her litany of things she was grateful for. Maybe that was just an oversight. Getting accustomed to new routines and new men in their lives was something they all shared. All of them knew just how very tricky striking the right balance was.

  Marlene placed her arm around Sheila’s shoulders, silently communicating her support. One look into her eyes told Sheila that Marlene understood more than was being said.

  “C’mon,” Marlene urged. “We brought over a great cake. My housekeeper baked it this morning, and she said it’s only good for a day. So we’re all going to have to make the supreme sacrifice and finish it off before we leave.”

  Mallory was already on her way to the kitchen. “I think we can bear up to it, seeing as how it’s an emergency and all.”

  Arms filled with babies, Erin and Nicole closed ranks around Sheila.

  “Boy, we sure do make some cute babies,” Erin commented easily as she looked at Rebecca, then back at her own son. “Must be something in the water.”

  Sheila thought of the beach the night she and Slade had made love. She struggled against the ache that threatened to overwhelm her.

  “Must be,” she agreed.

  Chapter Ten

  For the first time that he could remember, his mind hadn’t been on his work.

  The stint in Washington, D.C., couldn’t be considered one of his roughest assignments. In comparison to the ones he was accustomed to, this was relatively easy. But even so, Slade had to constantly struggle in order to focus his mind on what was going on.

  The situation at home invaded his thoughts with such regularity that Slade could have set his watch by it. Sheila’s expression, a mixture of anger, disappointment and hurt, was one that he couldn’t wipe out of his mind. He saw it waking and sleeping.

  The more he thought about it, the more it seemed as if her outburst was a cover-up for something else. Something larger. His lie had triggered something within Sheila, something that was deep-seated. He intended to get to the bottom of it.

  The thought that haunted him throughout his week’s assignment was that he might lose her. Somehow he had to be able to find a way to make her tell him what was really wrong.

  He desperately wanted to make this marriage work.

  Maybe because he was so adamant about it, he’d screwed it up for himself, he thought. But he could fix that. He could fix anything as long as he had the chance.

  His eyes felt really heavy as he drove the last leg of the journey home. It was a continuing battle just to keep them open. Slade could feel them trying to slip closed.

  A paper cup semifilled with coffee, now cold, sloshed beside him on a cardboard tray. He’d taken the red-eye back from Washington, D.C. Altogether, that put him on his feet, or at least conscious, for close to thirty-six hours now. By this time, he was running on adrenaline, stale coffee and caffeine-laced cola drinks.

  He’d covered terrorists letting loose some poisoned gas not too far from the Capitol itself from every conceivable angle that he could. His rhetoric brought out, in vivid colors, the fears of a nation that now saw themselves at the mercy of insane men with powerful weapons and causes.

  Nothing that hadn’t existed before, he knew, but it was something no one had ever said out loud until it actually happened. It brought home the fact that no one was safe, and, ultimately, everyone was vulnerable. Life was precious and had to be lived to the fullest. Now.

  Covering the story, seeing the victims trying to put their lives together, those who still had lives to put together, helped Slade place his own problems into perspective. It convinced him that he was going to make his marriage work.

  Slade exhaled loudly, drowning out the steady stream of nonstop chatter by the deejay on his radio. If he had to crawl and ask Sheila’s forgiveness, he was secure enough in his own identity to handle that. It would be a start on the road to fixing whatever it was that was wrong.

  If he knew nothing else, he knew he wanted this woman in his life. Permanently. Her, and the child they had created. The child who, within such a limited amount of days, had a stranglehold on his heart. The child who he intended to watch grow up.

  And if any man came within five feet of her before she turned thirty, he’d kill him, Slade mused. With his bare hands.

  His mouth curved. Especially if that man was a footloose foreign correspondent.

  Slade’s head jerked up. Damn, his eyes had almost closed. He blinked, hard, trying to keep awake. The headlights from the oncoming car in the
other lane broke up like a high beam searchlight against his windshield, jarring him further.

  He groped for the coffee and downed the remainder of the liquid. It tasted foul.

  He was going to have to concentrate if he didn’t want to wind up in the morgue with a tag tied to his toe, he upbraided himself.

  The wise thing, he knew, would have been to pull over on the side of the road and get a few hours’ rest. But anticipation made him anxious. He wanted to see Sheila tonight. Wanted to say he was sorry if he’d hurt her or had unwittingly dredged up bad memories with his lie. He wanted to tell her that he loved her.

  Love wasn’t something that developed gradually, not in his case. Love was something that came with the strength of an uppercut, hitting him square on the chin and demanding attention here and now.

  He intended on giving it its proper due. He just had to convince Sheila to let him.

  It felt like déjà vu.

  It was raining again, just as it had the night before he left. This time, though, it was only drizzling. He let himself into the house quietly. The suitcases, the ones he’d left in his wake, were still there. Someone had moved them off to the side where they stood, like patient vultures awaiting their turn at the carcass.

  The marriage wasn’t dead yet, he vowed silently to himself. Taking a breath, Slade got a second wind.

  He’d unpack the suitcases in the morning, he promised himself. Right now, he had something far more important than clothes to see to.

  Making his way up the stairs, Slade saw that there was light spilling out into the hallway from the nursery. He smiled, glad he hadn’t waited until morning to return home.

  Good, Sheila was up. He wouldn’t have to debate whether or not he should wake her.

  One problem down, a hundred to go.

  Very softly, Slade eased the door open.

  Light from a small lamp threaded through the room, casting it into a mournful dimness. Sheila was pacing the floor with Rebecca, her face a mask of concern. The mewling noises he heard coming from his daughter sounded almost pitiful.

  The cries of other children, children racked with illness and hunger, rang in his ears.

  Something was wrong. He would feel the tension in the air. “Sheila?”

  She turned toward him, startled. Worry had cocooned itself so tightly around her that she hadn’t heard Slade come in. Hadn’t heard anything but her baby’s cries.

  For a second, she thought she was imagining him. In the last week, she’d thought about him returning a great deal, vacillating as to what she would do and say, playing the scenario a dozen different ways. But now, something far more grave had taken precedence in her life.

  The scent of his cologne, mingling with the smell of rain, almost made her cry. For the very first time in her life, she desperately wanted someone to lean on. And he was here.

  “Oh, Slade, she’s sick.”

  If he hadn’t guessed, the look on her face would have told him before she uttered a word. He crossed to Sheila quickly, looking down into Rebecca’s face. Even in the sparse light from her lamp, he could see that the baby’s eyes had that ill cast to them.

  The wails were weak and wrenched his heart.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Sheila was a doctor. Why wasn’t she doing something instead of just pacing the floor?

  The cold realization that perhaps there wasn’t anything to do began to skim along the perimeter of his mind, but he refused to admit it in.

  Sheila pressed her lips together, rocking her body, trying to lull Rebecca to sleep. It felt as if every coherent thought had fled her mind.

  “She won’t keep anything down. She’s been throwing up and crying since early this afternoon.” There was a catch in her throat and she struggled to talk past it. “I don’t want to sound like a panicky new mother—”

  This had to be bard on her, Slade thought. Hard for her to meld professional feelings with personal ones. He’d learned that lesson himself a long time ago, on his very first foreign assignment. The pain and suffering of children could never be forgotten.

  “But you are a new mother,” he insisted, “and sick babies are something to panic about.”

  He’d seen too many in his time, too many babies with eyes that had the same glazed cast as Rebecca’s. Babies who died because there was no doctor to care for them.

  Sheila knew she was behaving badly. She was a doctor, for heaven’s sake. There was no reason to feel helpless like this. And yet, the longer she walked the floor with her child, the less secure she felt.

  “I’m taking her to the hospital,” Sheila decided suddenly. Originally hoping that things would get better by morning, she no longer wanted to wait another minute.

  It was what he was going to suggest. “Let’s go, I’ll drive.” Walking out into the hall, he wondered how Ingrid was managing to sleep through the commotion. “Where’s Ingrid?”

  “At her mother’s house. Sick.” Slade turned to look at her. “She has the flu.” The young woman had come home from college on Tuesday, complaining of aches and pains. By Wednesday, she was throwing up. Her mother had come to take her to stay at her house. “There’s something making the rounds, I heard.” Her voice trailed off.

  Sheila didn’t realize how much she had wanted him to return home until very this moment. She didn’t want to face this first crisis on her own.

  - Grabbing a blanket, she wrapped it around Rebecca. She hadn’t bothered undressing for bed, even though it was past eleven. She’d been with Rebecca, walking the floor, trying to get her to go to sleep, for the better part of the evening.

  Slade opened the front door for her. “I’m surprised you haven’t taken her already.”

  She followed him to his car, parked in front of the garage. Sheila hunched her shoulders against the light mist, pressing the baby to her breast. Slade opened the rear passenger door for her and she slid inside. His suitcase was on the seat next to her. God, she was grateful that he’d returned.

  Slade pulled the seat belt out, buckling Sheila in as she held the baby in her arms.

  “I kept hoping that it would pass. It’s only been a few hours,” she confessed as he got behind the wheel. “But she hasn’t been eating at all. She cries when I try to feed her.” Sheila stifled a sob. “And she has such a healthy appetite.”

  “Takes after her old man,” Slade quipped as he started up the car. He pulled out quickly. If a policeman stopped him, he could use the escort, he reasoned. Slade glanced at Sheila in the rearview mirror as headlights sliced through the car, illuminating her face. “Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.”

  He was reassuring her, she thought, a sad smile playing on her lips. “I should be the one saying that to you.”

  “Go ahead,” he coaxed. “I wouldn’t mind hearing it myself.” He smiled, but he was serious.

  Slade didn’t want to share the fear that was ricocheting through him, a fear brought on by the memory of looking into the faces of children without hope. Children who had had their childhood torn from them by men bent on war.

  Children who had died before they had a chance to live. Sheila licked her lips. They felt so dry. “When I brought Rebecca into the office the day you left, Lisa mentioned that there was a strain of flu going around.”

  She was sure that somehow, she was responsible for exposing Rebecca to it. Slade could tell by the agony reflected in her eyes.

  “It was my fault,” she murmured to herself. “I shouldn’t have taken her in.”

  “Why? Was there someone there who was sick?”

  She shook her head. “No, but—”

  “Then don’t beat yourself up for it,” he advised, his voice mild, even, as if he were talking a jumper from a ninth-story ledge. “Maybe she caught it from Ingrid, or even when she was still in the hospital.” There were a lot of possibilities. “You can’t put her in a plastic bubble, Sheila.”

  She knew that, but it still didn’t help dissolve her guilt, or make her feel less helpless. “I kn
ow.” Sheila’s voice was low, filled with the tears of the helpless. “She looks so tiny.”

  That she did. But he wasn’t going to dwell on anything that might happen. Life was too full of negatives. The only way he had ever managed to make his way was to concentrate on the positive.

  “And before you know it,” he told her, “she’s going to be asking for keys to the car.”

  Sheila sniffed. If Slade could manage to keep a positive outlook, so could she. It was just that something so grave had never come so close to her before.

  Her eyes met his in the rearview mirror. “I thought you were buying her a Corvette.”

  “I am.” Stepping down on the accelerator, he flew through a light that had turned red just as his tires touched the white line. “But she’ll want to drive before I have a chance to buy it for her. You know how women are,” he said, tossing the words over his shoulder for her benefit.

  The tires of his car squealed in protest, reminding him that he needed air in them, as he pulled up almost directly in front of the emergency room entrance.

  The sleepy feeling that had been tightening its grasp around him was completely gone. Adrenaline was pumping through him, hard and fast, just the way it had when he’d been covering stories overseas.

  Except that this time, the stakes were far more personal.

  He was at Sheila’s side before she had had a chance to even open the door. He took Rebecca into his arms as Sheila got out. The infant continued whimpering.

  Damn it, this wasn’t supposed to be happening. She was too young, too tiny, to fight off anything on her own. Sheila looked up at Slade, fear nibbling away at her nerves. “She sounds weaker.”