The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True (91 page)

In the elevator, on the way down to the morgue, a blessed numbness had come over him. What got him through the ordeal was knowing it wasn’t really happening, in the morning he would wake up to find it had all been a terrible dream. How could that cold, blue thing on the table be Isabelle, who’d shone brighter than the sun? He’d touched her hair. It was long and fine, the color of ale. He wound it about his fingers. It seemed alive, clutching at him, cutting off his circulation until he was forced to let it slip from his grasp.

He calmly asked the medical examiner, a far too hearty-looking older man, for a pair of scissors. The man looked at Aubrey pityingly, as if suspecting he’d gone mad. Aubrey wished it were so, for insanity would have been a welcome reprieve from the torment he was soon to face. Scissors in hand, he snipped several strands and carefully coiled them before tucking them in his pocket. The man asked kindly if he wanted to see his baby. He declined. For him to do so, even in death, when Isabelle had been denied that joy, would have been grossly unfair. He tried to imagine her in heaven with their child— a son, he’d been told—but found he no longer believed in heaven. In fact, he no longer believed in God.

Days later, as he knelt at her grave, it wasn’t to God he spoke, but to Isabelle. They were the last words he would ever speak aloud to his wife.
Je t’aime.
I love you. Now and forever. There will never be another to take your place.

And there hadn’t been, until now. Were Gerry anything at all like Isabelle, he’d have guarded against her fiercely. Yet gradually, almost without his being aware of it, she had crept past his defenses. Until one day he’d realized he was in love with her. The thought terrified him. How could he love this woman without letting go of Isabelle? Gerry wasn’t the type to take a backseat. Gerry, with her animated gestures and bawdy laugh, who filled a room merely by walking into it. By her very nature she cast a shadow in which his wife’s memory would wilt like a plant robbed of sunlight. It wasn’t until tonight, when he’d kissed Gerry good-bye, that he’d realized he was killing any chance with the one woman since Isabelle who’d made him feel alive.

Stirring as if from a deep sleep, Aubrey brought a hand to his cheek and found that it was wet. He found himself remembering a letter Debussy had penned while composing
La Mer.
He’d written of the sea,
I have an endless store of memories, and to my mind, they are worth more than reality, whose beauty often deadens the thought.

That’s what he’d done—prized his memories over life itself. Like the music with which Debussy had captured the essence of the sea, he’d transformed something fluid into a beautiful score of fixed notes and measured tempo.

Aubrey tapped on the glass divider, and waited what seemed an eternity for it to slide open. “Take the next exit,” he ordered. All he could see of the driver was the neatly clipped hair on the back of his head and a pair of mildly curious eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Sir?”

“We’re going back to Carson Springs.”

They arrived at the hospital without running any red lights, where the woman at the desk in the ER informed them that Mrs. Kiley was upstairs in Maternity. As they rode the elevator up, it occurred to Gerry that she hadn’t been to that floor since Andie and Justin were born. She glanced at them now, Justin with an arm about his grandmother, and Andie with hers crossed over her chest. Gerry couldn’t think of any two adults who’d have been more coolheaded in the face of such an ordeal, and had never been prouder.

The doors thumped open, and Gerry strode over to the nurses’ station. “I’m looking for Mrs. Kiley,” she said to an older gray-haired nurse built like the USS
Constitution.

The woman consulted a chart. “Mrs. Kiley? I see here that she’s on her way into Delivery. Why don’t you take a seat? I’ll keep you posted.” She smiled pleasantly, waving in the direction of the lounge just down the hall.

“You don’t understand. I’m her coach.”

The nurse glanced once more at the chart. “Well, in that case, she won’t be needing you. I see here she’s scheduled for a C-section.”

Gerry struggled to maintain her composure. “Is Doctor Rosario here?”

The nurse pointed down the corridor, where Gerry caught sight of Inez Rosario, in green scrubs, consulting with one of the residents, a young man who didn’t look old enough to wipe a baby’s bottom much less deliver one. Thank God, Inez had made it in time. Gerry motioned to her mother and kids to wait in the lounge, then hurried over.

“Inez, you have no idea how glad I am to see you.”

Sam’s OB had delivered Andie and Justin, and just the sight of her now, her crisp iron hair and firm, no-nonsense manner, inspired confidence. Inez broke away from the resident, gesturing for Gerry to join her as she strode off down the hall. “Sam was lucky,” she said. “A few bruised ribs, a mild concussion—but the baby seems to be in some distress.”

Gerry’s heart bumped up into her throat. “I don’t want her to go through this alone.”

Inez paused to eye her thoughtfully. “Ordinarily, only fathers are allowed in for C-sections,” she said. “But I suppose we could make an exception in this case.” Her brown eyes searched Gerry’s, communicating the need for absolute calm.

If she hadn’t looked so stern, Gerry would have kissed her. “Is Ian going to be all right?”

“It looks to be a multiple fracture, so I don’t know how soon he’ll be up and about. The good news is he’ll be spared walking the floor at two a.m.” Inez allowed herself a tiny smile. They’d reached the double doors to the OR, and Gerry followed her into the prep area with its rows of sinks. “And here’s the kicker—the orthopedist told me he kept on insisting his leg could wait, that he needed to be with Sam. That is one determined father-to-be.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

Gerry thought of the way he’d fussed over Sam like an Italian grandmother, nagging her to put her feet up, and tempting her with delicacies, like the pomegranates she craved. For all those doubting Thomases who’d once pegged him as footloose, Ian had proved them spectacularly wrong.

Minutes later, garbed in a mask and gown, Gerry was peering down into Sam’s pale, anxious face. A kind of tent had been erected over the table on which she lay, shielding her lower half from view. Her hair was tucked under a cap like the one Gerry had on, and she was reminded of when they’d been in high school primping for dates. Right now, Sam looked all of sixteen.

“I wasn’t sure you’d get here in time,” she said weakly.

Gerry took her hand and squeezed it. “What good is an understudy who can’t go on when the leading man breaks a leg?”

On the other side of the tent, doctors and nurses flitted in and out of view. A monitor beeped and instruments clattered against a tray. Inez, quietly issuing orders, might have been speaking Swahili for all Gerry knew. She didn’t pry her eyes away from Sam until a nurse popped her head in to announce that Dr. Steinberg was on her way.

“Thank God, it’s Dorothy,” she heard Inez mutter.

Gerry recalled that Dorothy Steinberg, an old friend of Mavis’s who had to be pushing the envelope as far as retirement was concerned, was the chief neonatologist here at Community. The baby would be in good hands. Even so, she said a little prayer.

She looked back at Sam to find her eyes swimming with tears. “I can’t lose this baby,” she said hoarsely. Sam, the bravest woman she knew, didn’t look so brave right now.

“Hush. What a thing to say,” Gerry scolded, mildly taken aback to hear her mother’s voice emerge from her mouth. “You’re both going to be just fine.”

“I know I didn’t want it in the beginning.” Sam’s chin began to tremble, and a tear slipped down one temple. “Do you think God is punishing me?”

“God doesn’t punish you for thoughts. And no one is as good or loving a mother.” Gerry started to take a swipe at her own brimming eyes before remembering she was wearing gloves. “Dammit.
Now
look what you made me do. And here I was, saving my tears for the christening.”

She was rewarded by the faintest whisper of a smile.

On the other side of the tented sheet, Gerry heard Inez instruct briskly, “Okay … we’re cutting through the fascia … let’s have some suction.”

Sam gripped her hand. “I don’t feel it. I don’t feel a
thing.
Just … pressure. How do I know if he’s okay?”

“I’ll bet you ten dollars it’s a girl.”

“You’re on.”

They fell silent, gripped by the awesomeness of it all, then Inez announced with reassuring authority, “We’re cutting through the amniotic sac now … I’ve got the head … okay, now a shoulder.” She paused. “Oh, my goodness, it’s a boy!”

“A boy.” Sam’s voice was soft with wonder.

Gerry grinned. “Looks like I’m out ten bucks.”

They waited for the familiar sound that would put all their fears to rest, and when it didn’t come, Sam stared at the sheet as if she could burn a hole through it.

“He’s not crying. What’s happening? Is he all right?” Her voice rose on a high, panicked note.

Gerry was worried, too, but she patted Sam’s shoulder. “Relax. Inez knows what she’s doing.” Though admittedly Andie’s and Justin’s births had been a Sunday walk in the park compared to this.

Not like your first one.

A memory surfaced. Then suddenly, in her mind, she was being whisked down a corridor on a gurney. The pains no longer coming in waves, but gripping like a giant fist. She cried out that she felt sick, but the nurse at her side merely smiled and said it would all be over soon. She didn’t understand what Gerry was telling her. When she
did
throw up, the beady-eyed woman looked annoyed.

“Where’s my mother? I want my mother!” Gerry cried with the anguish of a girl barely out of her teens who’d never known sickness without Mavis’s bending over her with a cool cloth and soothing hand.

“Your mother is in the waiting room,” she was informed. “Now be a good girl, and stop making such a fuss.”

When Gerry opened her mouth, an anguished howl emerged. The pain had ascended to new heights, not just gripping but
tearing
at her from the inside out.

A set of double doors swung open, and the gurney bumped over a threshold. A man’s face, its lower half obscured from view by the mask he wore, loomed into view. All she could see were a pair of bright blue eyes netted in wrinkles and bushy white-blond brows. “How are we doing, Miss Fitzgerald, hmm?” His lips moving beneath the mask made her think of Boris Karloff in
The Mummy.

“Who are you?” she croaked.

“Doctor DeCordillera is out of town,” she was told. “I’m Doctor Perault.”

Gerry shook her head. No, she didn’t want some stranger. But no one seemed to care what she wanted. She was lifted onto a table and her feet placed in stirrups. Something cold was swabbed over her privates, which in the past twelve hours had come to seem like public property instead—poked and prodded and shaved, and now mercilessly on view.

It soon ceased to matter, though, for the area between her legs might have been the burning gates of hell. She writhed and screamed and begged, but God took no pity. That’s when she knew for certain that He was punishing her.

“Push.” The command was muffled by the roaring in her ears. “Give us a big push now. Good. Now one more. You’re doing fine. Take a deep breath. Okay, again. PUSH!”

“I can’t!” she screamed, feeling as if she were being split right down the middle, a ripe avocado from which the baby would be scooped like a pit.

But somehow she
was
pushing. Grunting and heaving like an animal all the while. Something warm slipped out between her legs, and the pain abruptly eased. She fell back gasping. A baby was crying, but with the sweat that was pouring down her forehead into her eyes she couldn’t see it—only a blur of limbs, a thatch of whorled hair.

“A girl!” she heard a voice crow.

She held out her arms. “Let me hold her.”

A swaddled bundle was placed in her arms, a pair of blue eyes peering up at her intently. A great love welled up inside her, and she instantly forgot the torment she’d been through. She watched the little rosebud mouth purse as if in anticipation of being fed, and felt an answering tingle in her breasts.

Abruptly, the baby was taken from her.

“It’s better this way,” she was told. In her mask and gown, the woman might have been a thief robbing Gerry of all she held dear.

“No … wait.” Gerry started to say she’d changed her mind. How could she have known what she’d be giving up? But it was too late. The nurse, along with her baby, was gone.

A hole had opened in her chest then, and black wind came whistling through. She began to weep, and for the longest time it seemed she would never run out of tears. She wept for hours and hours, beyond all consolation, until she’d exhausted herself enough to fall into a deep sleep that was more like unconsciousness.

“What’s wrong? Why isn’t he crying?”

Gerry was jerked back into the present by Sam’s anxious voice. She stepped out from behind the tented sheet to see for herself. What met her gaze alarmed her even more—Inez and Dr. Steinberg hunched over the table on which the baby lay, working frantically to get him to breathe. “They’re suctioning him,” she reported back. She didn’t tell Sam how limp and blue he’d looked, and was glad for the mask partially covering her face. Sam had always been able to read her like a book.

“What’s taking so long?” Sam looked like an animal desperate to reach her young. “Is something the matter with him? He’s not …” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

Gerry had run out of reassurances. All she could do was stand there squeezing Sam’s hand and hoping for the best. Where was God when you needed Him most? Hiding out like all the other men who’d let her down, leaving women to do the dirty work.

Just when she’d begun to think the worst, it came: a baby’s cry. Loud and lusty and pissed off as hell.

Sam let out a whoop of joy. Gerry released the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Inez Rosario exclaimed, “Listen to that set of lungs! You won’t be getting much sleep with this one.” She stepped into view, her warm brown eyes crinkled above her mask. In her arms was a bundle wrapped in a white receiving blanket.