Anna Adams - Unexpected Babies

Outside the wind whipped her hair into her eyes. She bumped into a soft figure that had to be a woman. Cate muttered a tear-choked apology and broke for the street. But she stumbled into a parking meter and fell off the sidewalk.

Her right ankle turned over. Pain nearly paralyzed her as her foot skidded through sand. Behind her, a woman’s voice shrilled, but the deep blast of a car horn seemed to finish her shriek. Cate straightened, turning. A green sports car, coming fast, froze her.

“Cate!” Alan must have followed her. He was furious, afraid and too far away.

She reached blindly into thin air, twisting back toward the sidewalk. Seconds stretched, defying the laws of nature. Alan caught her hands. She recognized the strength of his long fingers, the breadth of his palms. She grabbed at him, but she couldn’t get her feet beneath her in the sand. Holding on to her husband, she peered over her shoulder at the driver.

Intensity crumpled his face. His body lifted in the seat, as if he were standing on his brakes.

They screamed, and time lost its elasticity. Cate willed her body away from the car. Alan yanked her, but something glanced off her leg, more a jarring thump than real pain.

At first.

Alan pulled her hard against his body as a fire-edged knife seemed to slice through her thigh. Behind her, the car’s tires ground into the road and chaos faded to silence.

An unnatural silence, empty of voices or traffic, footsteps or the constant whisper of the ocean. Cate knew only pain and an overwhelming nausea. Panic clutched at her. Was she sick because of the baby, or the torture of her leg? Was she going to lose her baby?

“I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

She looked up. Alan’s fear fed her terror. She hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him about her pregnancy, and now she didn’t know how to say the words.

“Focus on me.” Alan turned his head. “Somebody call 911!”

Around them, cell phones erupted in a cacophony of beeps. Somehow, Cate found a smile, but Alan stared at her, amazed.

She concentrated on his green eyes. “You’ve always wanted to save my life.”

With his face pale as beach sand, Alan didn’t smile back. “Don’t talk.”

People she knew, Alan’s busiest carpenter and Mr. Parker, who owned the Bucket O’ Suds, edged into her peripheral vision.

“Look at the blood running down her leg, Alan.” Mr. Parker pushed a man-smelling apron beneath her nose. “Maybe you need this.”

“Get a damn ambulance,” Alan snarled, but then the muscles around his mouth worked as he fought to maintain his composure. “Cate, you’re all right.”

A resounding roar overwhelmed her silent prayer that he’d keep holding her too close for her to look down and see the blood. Pressure, like a giant hand, seemed to push her toward the ground. “I think I’m not all right.”

She was going to faint. First time she could ever remember fainting. Was she dying? “Alan, I—Dan—I want—”

“Dan’s fine.” Alan’s voice cracked. “You’re fine.”

“I have to tell you…” That strange pressure swathed her in darkness. Only Alan’s arms kept her from falling. She forgot what she had to tell him, but she hung on until the darkness swallowed her whole.

DR. BARTON’S CALM infuriated Alan. “After a thirty-six hour coma, we can’t know how she’ll be when she wakes up. She lost a lot of blood from that gash in her thigh, and she went into shock.”

Each word the doctor spoke embedded itself in Alan like a gut shot. Infuriated that he couldn’t help her, he stared at his unconscious wife. Her vulnerable, wounded body rumpled the blanket on her bed. The bank of blinking monitors that surrounded her screeched persistently enough to wake the dead. Alan bit the side of his cheek.

Men didn’t cry. So his father had preached, weeping into his beer or scrambled eggs or the ironing they’d both avoided after Alan’s mother left. Clutching Cate’s unresponsive hand, Alan alternated between an urge to bawl with unmanly pain and an acute need to break everything in the small hospital room.

“She’ll wake up,” Dr. Barton said, as if he saw through Alan’s attempt at stoic silence. “She’s healthy—no sign of infection in her wound. We just have to see where we stand. Tests, physical therapy—Excuse me, Alan, Nurse Matthews wants me.”

The doctor barely cleared the doorway before Cate’s twin, Caroline, slipped into the room.

She shared his wife’s fragile bone structure and dark auburn hair. In the old days, only he could tell them apart until Cate had begun using a blow-dryer to straighten her hair into a sleek curtain that brushed her shoulders. She’d looked more like a bank president than a loving creative homemaker. Caroline, a pragmatic businesswoman, never bothered to tame the wild curls she used now to cover her face. Neither of them seemed to see the contradiction in their hairstyles, but maybe Cate had expressed her altered feelings about her life in a not so subtle change.

Alan rubbed his fist against his temple, annoyed that he hadn’t asked her such questions before she’d decided to leave him.

Caroline eased around the bed. “What does Dr. Barton say?”

The sisters were so close they sometimes shared each other’s thoughts. If only Cate could sense Caroline’s pain, she’d wake up, feeling a compulsion to help her twin.

“Barton says the same thing over and over. We have to wait.” He stroked his wife’s forearm, grateful for the body heat that warmed her silky skin. How long since he’d touched her? How had he not noticed she was avoiding him, even in their bed? “I’m fed up with waiting.” Waiting and thinking about all the signs he should have read as he and Cate traveled to the end of their marriage.

“Where’s your dad, Alan? He’s the only member of our families unaccounted for in the waiting room, and I think you need him.”

Richard Palmer hated hospitals. Sickness scared the pants off him. “You know his phobia.”

“I thought he might have handled it for Cate.”

She clearly disapproved, and Alan didn’t blame her. “He calls our answering machine at home every ten minutes.” Alan roused himself. Last time he’d been out of this room, the waiting area had been empty. “Is Dan out there?”

Caroline shook her head. “I sent Shelly to look for him, and she called when she found him carrying a gas can down the highway. They’ll come here after she takes him to a service station and then back to his car.”

He nodded, twisting his hands on the metal bed rail. “A full gas tank probably seems pretty mundane to him right now.” He and Dan had stumbled blindly through the past two days. Cate anchored their family. Alan only hoped he was taking up enough of her slack to be a good father.

Caroline’s eyes seemed unnaturally wide as she tried to smile. “We’re all afraid. What if she doesn’t wake up? How long are we supposed to—”

“Don’t think about giving up.” Alan briefly hugged his sister-in-law. “She feels what you feel, Caroline.” It was ridiculous, putting such an airy-fairy notion into words, but Caroline met his gaze with Talbot determination.

“Don’t you worry.” She gripped Cate’s hand. “I refuse to lose her.”

Caroline’s tenacity almost renewed his faith. But it might be too late for him and Cate. Her serious injuries and the possibility she’d never let him try to win her back lingered in his mind.

He’d wanted to make her life comfortable and easy. Instead he’d let her down, and even now, he wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong.

The door swished open, and Aunt Imogen entered the room without speaking. Her bare head made Alan take a second look. She habitually wore oversize straw hats that she’d trimmed with flower displays never seen in nature. Today, only her fine gray curls clung to her temples.