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With what little strength she had, Joanna dragged her elbows into her sides and struggled to raise herself up again.
“What…? What’s…wrong? Something wrong…with…my baby?”
“No, no,” he assured her, pushing her gently back down. “Just that your husband should be here, not me.” Or at least the paramedics, he added silently.
“Don’t…have…one,” she gasped. She felt lightheaded and fought to keep focused and conscious. Here came another! “Now, Rick, now!”
Rick saw her face turn three shades redder as she screwed her eyes shut.
This was all happening too fast.
He didn’t have to tell her to push. He didn’t have to tell her anything at all. Suddenly, whether he was ready or not, it was happening. The baby was coming.
Rick barely had enough time to slip his hands into position. The baby’s head was emerging. He could feel the blood, feel the slide of flesh against flesh.
Wasn’t giving birth supposed to take longer than the amount of time it took to peel a banana skin back?
And why hadn’t the fire trucks arrived yet? Were they the last two people on the earth?
It felt that way. The very last two people on earth. Engaged in a life-affirming struggle.
“Pull…it…out!” Joanna screamed. The baby was one-third out, two-thirds in. Why had everything stopped?
She fell back, exhausted, unable to drag in enough air to sustain herself. Beams of light began dancing through her head, motioning her toward them.
Toward oblivion.
In mounting panic, Rick realized that she was going to pass out on him. One hand supporting the baby’s head, he leaned over and shook Joanna’s shoulder, trying to get her to focus.
“I can’t pull it out,” he shouted at her. “You can’t play tug of war with a head, Joanna. You have to push the baby out the rest of the way.”
“You…push it out…the…rest of…the way. It’s…your…turn.”
And then she felt it again. That horrible pain that she couldn’t escape. It bore down on her, tying her up in a knot even as it threatened to crack her apart. It didn’t matter that she had no strength, that she couldn’t draw a half-decent breath into her lungs. Her body had taken over where her mind had failed.
“Oh…God…it’s not…over.” How was she going to do this with no strength left? How was it possible?
Panting, gasping for air, she looked at Rick. He was right. This was wrong, all wrong. She should never have decided to have this baby, never agreed to leave Rick without explaining why.
Too late now for regrets.
The refrain echoed in her brain over and over again as heat surrounded her, searing a path clear for more pain.
The tablecloth below her was soaked with blood. “Push,” Rick ordered gruffly, hiding the mounting fear taking hold of him. What if something went wrong? Should there be this much blood? She couldn’t die on him, she couldn’t. “C’mon, Joanna, you can do this!”
No, she thought, she couldn’t.
But she had to try. She couldn’t just die like this. Her baby needed her.
From somewhere, a last ounce of strength materialized. She bore down as hard as she could, knowing that this was the last effort she was capable of making. If the baby wasn’t going to emerge now, they were just going to bury her this way.
Fragments of absurd thoughts kept dancing in and out of her head.
She thought she heard sirens, or screams, in the background. Maybe it was the fire gaining on them. She didn’t know, didn’t care, she just wanted this all to be over with—one way or another.
She felt as if she was being turned inside out and still she pushed, pushed until her chest felt as if it was caving in, as if her very body was disintegrating from the effort.
And then she heard a tiny cry, softer than all the other noise. Sweeter.
Her head spinning from lack of oxygen, Joanna fell back against the tablecloth, the grass brushing against her soaked neck. She was too exhausted even to breathe.
Rick stared at the miracle in his hands. The miracle was staring back, eyes as wide and huge as her mother’s. He felt something twist within him. He was too numb to identify the sensation.
“You’ve got a girl,” he whispered to Joanna, awe stealing his voice away.
He dripped with perspiration, but he knew it was chilly. There was nothing to wrap the baby in. He stripped off his shirt and tucked it around the tiny soul. The infant still watched him with the largest eyes he’d ever seen.
Several feet away from him, a fire truck came to a screeching halt. He hardly acknowledged its arrival. All he could do was look at the baby he’d helped to bring into the world.
Joanna’s baby.
The scene around them was almost surreal. People were shouting, firefighters were scrambling down from the truck, running toward them. Running toward the fire.
In the midst of chaos, an older firefighter hurried toward them, his trained eyes assessing the situation quickly. Squatting, he placed a gloved hand on the woman on the ground as well as one on the man holding the newborn. “You two all right?”
“Three,” Rick corrected, looking down at the new life tucked against his chest. “And we’re doing fine.” The smile faded as he looked at Joanna. “I mean—” She’d gone through hell in the last few minutes. He might be fine, but she undoubtedly wasn’t. “She needs to get to a hospital.”
Rising to his feet, the firefighter nodded. “I can see that.” Turning, he signaled to the paramedics, who were just getting out of the ambulance. The firefighter waved them over, then glanced back at Rick as the two hurried over with a gurney. He nodded toward the burning buildings. “Anyone else in there?”
“I don’t know.” Rick looked to Joanna for confirmation. She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I just got here myself,” he explained.
“Not just,” the firefighter corrected, looking at the baby in Rick’s arms.
Rick had no time to make any further comment. A paramedic took the baby from him. He felt a strange loss of warmth as the child left his arms.
“We’ll take it from here,” the paramedic told him kindly. “Thanks.”
The firefighter and a paramedic had already lifted Joanna onto the gurney. Strapping her in, they raised the gurney and snapped its legs into place.
“You the father?” the first paramedic asked.
Rick was already stepping back. He shook his head in response. “Just a Good Samaritan, in the right place at the right time.”
He avoided looking at Joanna when he said it.
She and the baby were already being taken toward the ambulance. The rear doors flew open. Rick remained where he was, watching them being placed inside. For one moment, he had the urge to rush inside, to ride to the hospital with her.
He squelched it.
He was in the way, he thought, stepping back farther as hoses were snaked out and firefighters risked their lives to keep the fire from spreading.
“Lucky for the little lady you were in the neighborhood,” the older firefighter commented, raising his voice to be heard above the noise.
The rear lights of the ambulance became brighter as the ignition was engaged. And then it was pulling away from the scene of the fire.
Away from him.
“Yeah, lucky.”
Rick turned and walked toward his car. Behind him, the firefighters hurried about the business of trying to stave off the fire before it ate its way down the block and up the hillside.
There was no doubt about it, Rick decided. He should have his head examined.
After he’d gone out to look over the proposed site for the construction of the new corporate home office, instead of returning to the regional office he was temporarily working out of, he’d taken a detour. Actually, it had been two detours.
He’d gone to see just how much damage there’d actually been to Joanna’s house. He was hoping, for her sake, that it wasn’t as bad as it had looked last night.
In the light of day, the charred remains of the last house on the block—a call to the fire station had informed him that the fire had started there with a faulty electrical timer—looked like a disfigured burned shell. But the firefighters had arrived in time to save at least part of Joanna’s house. Only the rear portion was gutted. The front of the house had miraculously sustained a minimum of damage.
Still, he thought, walking around the perimeter, it was going to be a while before the house was livable again.
With a shrug, Rick walked back to his car and got in. Not his problem. That problem belonged to her and her significant other, or whatever she chose to call the man who had fathered her baby.
As far as he was concerned, he’d done as much as he intended to do.
For some reason, after Rick had gone to what was left of Joanna’s house, he’d found himself driving toward Blair Memorial Hospital, where the paramedics had taken her last night.
Joanna didn’t look surprised to see him walk into her room.
The conversation was awkward, guarded, yet he couldn’t get himself to leave.
He had to know.
“You said last night that you weren’t married.”
He’d promised himself that if he did go to see her, he wasn’t going to say anything about her current state. The promise evaporated the moment he saw her.
“I wasn’t. I mean, I’m not.”
“Divorced?” he guessed.
“No.”
“Widowed?”
She sighed, picking at her blanket. Had he turned up in her life just to play Colombo? “No, and I’m not betrothed, either.”
She was playing games with him. It shouldn’t have bothered him after all this time, but it did. A great deal.
“So, what, this was an immaculate conception?” Sarcasm dripped from his voice. “What’s the baby’s father’s name, Joanna?”
She took a deep breath. “11375.”
He stood at the foot of her bed, confusion echoing through his brain. “What?”
“Number 11375.” She’d chosen her baby’s father from a catalogue offered by the sperm bank. In it were a host of candidates, their identities all carefully concealed. They were known only by their attributes and traits. And a number. “That’s all I know him by.”
Trying to be discreet, Joanna shifted in her bed. She was still miserably uncomfortable. No one had talked about how sore you felt the day after you gave birth, she thought. Something else she hadn’t come across in her prenatal readings.
She raised her eyes to Rick’s. His visit had caught her off-guard, but not nearly as much as his appearance in her bedroom last night had. All things considered, it was almost like something out of a movie. A long-ago lover suddenly rushing into her burning bedroom to rescue her. After that, she doubted very much if anything would ever surprise her again.
What kind of double talk was this? “I don’t understand. Is he some kind of a spy?”
“No, some kind of a test tube.” She saw his brows draw together in a deep scowl. He probably thought she was toying with him. This wasn’t exactly something she felt comfortable talking about, but he’d saved her life last night. He deserved to have his question answered. “I went to a sperm bank, Rick.”
If ever there was a time for him to be knocked over by a feather, Rick thought, now was it. Maybe he’d just heard her wrong. “Why?”
“Because that’s where they keep sperm.”
This was an insane conversation. What are you doing here, Rick? Why are you eight years too late?
She ran her tongue over her dry lips. “I wanted a baby.”
For a second, he couldn’t think. Dragging a chair over to her bed, he sank down. “There are other ways to get a baby, Joanna.”
Suddenly, she wanted him to go away. This was too painful to discuss. “They all involve getting close to a person.”
Memories from the past teased his brain. Memories of moonlit nights, soft, sultry breezes and a woman in his arms he’d vowed to always love. Who’d vowed to always love him.
Always had a short life expectancy.
“They tell me that’s the best part,” he said quietly.
She looked away. “Been there, done that.”
Her flippant tone irritated him. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask if there’d been money involved in this transaction, as well. But the question was too cruel, even if she deserved it. He let it go.
Rick rose, shoving his hand into his pockets as he looked out the window that faced the harbor. “So there’s no one else in your life?”
“My baby.” Her baby would make her complete, she thought. She didn’t need anyone else.
Rick looked at her over his shoulder. “Someone taller.”
She knew she should be fabricating lovers, to show him that she could go on with her life, that it hadn’t just ended the day they parted, but she was suddenly too tired to make the effort.
“Not in the way you mean, no.”
Funny, whenever he’d thought of her in the last eight years, he’d pictured her on someone’s arm, laughing the way he loved to see and hear her laugh. It had driven him almost insane with jealousy, but he’d eventually learned how to cope.
