Forever Family (Forever #5) Read online

  As we approached the glassed wall of the NICU, I stopped dead. I couldn’t go in there. No way. My heart hammered fiercely, and my palms sweated. Through the window I could see the rows of cribs, mothers rocking in padded chairs.

  I felt faint. I realized I was holding my breath. I hadn’t done that in ages, my old coping strategy to make myself go unconscious when life got too hard. I thought I was better, but I could see now that no matter how happy my current life got, my past never left me.

  The nurses pushed the crib with Jenny’s baby between the sliding doors, but Darion stayed with me. “They won’t let you in right now anyway,” he said.

  I nodded, focusing on my breathing. Air in, air out. Even though we were outside the windows and couldn’t hear any sounds from inside the NICU, my ears roared with the helicopter chh chh chh of a ventilator. I could picture Finn lying in his crib, that terrible sound the only thing we heard for the seven days he lived.

  It was the most horrible noise imaginable, although there was one that was worse.

  The silence after the machine was turned off.

  My eyes started to show polka dots. I had forgotten to breathe again. I sucked in a great gasp of air.

  Darion took my arm. “Corabelle, are you okay?” he asked.

  I had to act normal. “You can go in, right?” I asked, forcing my voice steady. “Jenny wanted us to watch over the baby.”

  “I think I’ll stay here with you.” He moved farther down the window, to another room where babies were cleaned and weighed. A set of grandparents were there, watching a newborn girl get washed. The father was inside, taking pictures and beaming.

  Moments I never got. Remorse bubbled over. I thought I was handling Jenny’s pregnancy fine. She was my best friend. I was happy for her. But all the resentment and bitterness and jealousy I’d held in for nine months suddenly spilled out.

  Why was she getting a baby and I wasn’t?

  She hadn’t even known Chance’s last name when it happened!

  Why did everything bad have to happen to me?

  Darion’s hand pressed into my back, and I realized I was panting. “Do you need to take a little break from all this?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer. There was nothing I could say. If I walked away, it meant I couldn’t manage, couldn’t control my feelings. If I didn’t, I would continue to suffer, to nurse all these negative, terrible emotions.

  “I’m sure Tina is having a hard time too,” Darion said. “Sometimes I come through this ward and see her here, forehead against the glass.”

  I had no idea she did that. “Why does she torture herself that way?” I asked.

  “She pushed her pain aside for a long time. Now she knows she has to actually work through it to get to the other side.”

  Working through it. I wondered if I had done that. If Gavin had. I wasn’t sure what that really meant. Mostly you just kept on going.

  I looked back through the window. A nurse was dressing the other baby in a white long-sleeved onesie and pink-striped hat. The infant tightened her eyes every time her father flashed another picture.

  “Should you go check on Jenny’s baby?” I asked.

  “They didn’t call in a specialist,” Darion said. “I think they’ll clean her up and let her go back. She’ll have monitors to make sure everything’s okay. The first night is the most critical.”

  He turned and led me away from the window to an alcove with a waiting area. I sat down on a gray cushioned chair, and he settled across from me. I focused on anything that would take my mind off the babies. Darion’s dark hair curled across his forehead, a little longer than it was when he and Tina first met. His eyes were concerned. I noticed the paint spatters across his pale yellow T-shirt. “What were you doing when Jenny called?” I asked.

  “Painting a portrait,” he said. He looked down at his shirt. “These are my art duds.”

  They’d dropped everything to come be with Jenny. That’s what friends did. They didn’t put themselves first. I had to pull myself together, for her.

  “Go on, then, and check on the baby,” I said. “I’ll let Gavin know what is going on. Then we can update Jenny if Chance can’t get back to the room anytime soon.”

  Darion stood up. “You sure you’re okay?”

  I nodded. “It’s not easy, but it’s been five years. I can manage it.” I smiled up at him as convincingly as I could. “Besides, it will be your and Tina’s turn next.”

  “Maybe. I have to convince her first.” He turned toward the NICU. “Is Gavin going to come?”

  “Yes. He was playing pool with Mario tonight while I went to the concert, nothing important.”

  Darion headed toward the NICU entrance. I picked up my phone as if I was going to send a text, but as soon as he was out of sight, I set it down again.

  The past hour was a total blur. When we were busy, trying to follow Jenny’s commands for the wedding and the ambulance ride and the doctor, I was fine. But now, I could barely contain my emotions.

  The image of Jenny’s baby coming out and that tiny first cry was like a stab to my heart. Finn hadn’t cried. I hadn’t known that he should have. I was so young, just seventeen. I had no idea how wrong everything could go.

  Within minutes of the birth, Gavin had taken off with the NICU crew, just like Chance. And then he’d come back alone.

  I leaned my head back on the chair. An older couple passed carrying balloons and flowers. Happy family, meeting their new member. More things I hadn’t known.

  Might never know.

  Gavin had gotten a vasectomy in the dark days after Finn died. Sometimes I tried to imagine the places he had been, the horror that was his life after he ran. But I knew that awfulness. I had been there, alone too, and not by choice.

  Even though we’d found each other again, we might never get back to that place of hope. The vasectomy reversal process was expensive and didn’t always work. Gavin had gone to some illegal hack shop in Mexico for the procedure. No telling what they had done to him.

  And then there was money. I was in school. Gavin was pulling every shift at the garage that Bud would give him, down to just one night class this semester. It took everything we had to manage classes and work. Having a baby anytime in the near future seemed hopeless.

  Chance came out of the NICU with Darion. I jumped out of my chair. “What’s happening?” I cried. “Where’s the baby?”

  “She’s fine,” Chance said. “They’re about to bring her around to the window for cleaning. I was going to see if Tina wanted to take pictures.”

  I looked up at Darion for confirmation.

  “She’s six pounds, which isn’t a lot, but on target for her gestational age,” Darion said. “Everything looks really good.”

  I turned back to the window. They were rolling the other baby girl out of the room with her father. “So, she’ll come here?” I asked.

  “Yes, in just a minute or two,” Chance said.

  “I’ll go fetch Tina,” Darion said.

  I stood at the window, fingers pressed against the glass. Darion took off down the hall and Chance got buzzed back into the NICU.

  The room was empty, a few clear plastic cribs waiting under heat lamps for their next occupants. My throat tightened again. I felt like a seesaw, swinging up and down and down and up. Control, then losing it. Happy for Jenny, miserable for myself. How did anyone bear something like this?

  I remembered I had never texted Gavin and wrote a quick message.

  Jenny had the baby. A girl. Small but healthy. We’re at the hospital if you want to come up.

  He wrote back quickly.

  Be right there. You holding up okay?

  I held on to the phone for a moment. Tell him the truth, or play it off? I opted for truth.

  Struggling not to fall apart, actually.

  Coming now. I won’t let you go through this alone.

  I leaned my forehead against the glass, cool and smooth. The halls were quiet on a Saturday night. />
  I closed my eyes and let myself pretend that I was waiting on my own baby, that the sounds and smells around me were part of a world that waited for me. In just a moment, the newborn would be rolled into the room, and my parents would snap pictures and smile.

  Calmness flowed through me, a quiet joy. I would get there, somehow. We’d find a way.

  A clatter on the other side of the window startled me and I opened my eyes.

  The back door to the room had opened, and a nurse in pink scrubs rolled a crib into the room. The paper sign taped to the top had Jenny’s last name, GILLESPIE, written at the top, crossed out, and then Chance’s last name, MCKENZIE, written below. I had to smile. Chance knew he had to get that right or Jenny would have a fit. The name change was the whole reason for her rushed ambulance wedding.

  The nurse had just positioned the baby near the window when Darion and Tina turned onto the hall. I waved my arm to hurry them along. “She’s here,” I called out. “They are about to clean her up.”

  But Tina didn’t rush. I could see the mixed emotions on her face, ones that mirrored exactly how I was feeling. I had gotten seven days with my Finn. Tina had gotten only a few hours.

  When she reached the window, I took her hand. “You doing okay?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Probably about as well as you,” she said.

  Her mascara was smudged. Like Darion, her long button-down shirt was spattered with paint, untucked over rainbow tights. Her signature short twiggy ponytails made her seem like a character on a kids’ television show. But her expression was tight. She wasn’t bothering to fake it.

  She squeezed my fingers and let go, raising her cell phone to take shots of the baby. “They don’t have a name picked out,” she said as she clicked.

  “It’ll come,” I said.

  Tina lowered her camera to watch them unwrap the baby, whose feeble cry quickly ramped up into an all-out wail. “With Jenny, who knows what it might be,” Tina said. “She’s got the celebrity bug, so she’ll probably go with something crazy like Apple or Rainbow or Celery.”

  This made me laugh. “Celery?”

  “Or Rhubarb. Actually, don’t mention Rhubarb because she would totally go for it.”

  Darion leaned his forearm on the glass. “Chance doesn’t have a say?”

  “That boy is totally steamrolled by the force of Jenny,” Tina said.

  It was true. Chance was a southern gentleman to the core, and he was no match for his whip-cracking fast-talking California media-junkie wife.

  “They’ve really struggled with how to incorporate Hannah and Bryan into the name,” I said.

  “Middle name, for sure,” Tina said. “It’s just too soon to be naming her after the sister. It hasn’t even been a year.”

  Chance’s sister had died shortly after he and Jenny met.

  “They’ll do what they think is right,” I said.

  The nurse passed a wet cloth over the baby, whose face was bright red from crying. Chance looked like he was about to collapse from stress over watching her misery.

  “This is going to be difficult, isn’t it?” Tina asked, her voice soft. She lowered her phone. “I already want to smash something.”

  Her tone made tears spring to my eyes. “We’re holding up so far,” I said.

  Darion cleared his throat. “This is probably the worst part,” he said. “From now on, Jenny will have the hard work of managing the baby, and that isn’t very glamorous. She’s going to be jealous of you most of the time.”

  Neither of us answered. Maybe he was right, maybe not. But as we watched Jenny’s baby get swaddled into her blanket like a burrito and settle down, and as Chance got his opportunity to pick up the baby, love all over his face, Tina silently handed the phone to Darion to take over the photographs.

  Then we both simply had to turn away. Some things were just too hard to be borne.

  Chapter 6: Tina

  When Chance left the nursery with the baby to head back to Jenny, I peeled away from Corabelle and Darion to stop by my art therapy room. I’d had enough of babies and happy-freaking-joy. I needed some downtime. Alone.

  The lights were out in the classroom, and I left them that way as I stepped inside. The glow filtering in from the observation window was enough to provide a soft illumination on the low desks, the paints and clay and tiny easels.

  Almost all my art therapy classes were children now. The program had grown in popularity, and we were in the process of hiring a second therapist to expand the number of classes for adults. The main roadblock had been space. Hospitals were notoriously low on empty rooms. Even my favorite Surgical Suite B, which had been used for storage — and sometimes for me and Darion— was now in operation.

  I sat at my desk to pull myself together. I wanted to erase all the images from the last two hours from my head. Not the wedding. That had been hilarious. But the labor and birth. And the baby in that blasted room, getting cleaned and primped for her return to Jenny. I felt sick with bitterness. I wanted to wallow in it, dive headfirst into the sludge until it dragged me under.

  My phone buzzed. I didn’t look at it right away, resting my hot forehead on my cool wrists. Even though my scars were pale and barely noticeable now, I felt the throb of the lines as if the wounds were fresh.

  For the first time in years, I heard the siren call of the razor blade. To damage myself. To bear visible scars.

  Jesus. How far we can fall so fast. It was just a baby. Jenny having one didn’t change anything about me or my past. I needed to get my shit together.

  I picked up my phone. It was Darion, asking if I was all right. I typed off a quick note that I was going to visit Albert and that I could catch a ride back to the condo. He said he’d wait. He always had something to do up at the hospital, and now that his sister was staying part-time with their dad, we had more time to overwork ourselves to an early grave. We needed to get that habit in check.

  At some point we needed to plan the wedding. Get a life. Make one. Our painting together tonight was one of the things we were doing to ensure we had some life balance.

  The chair rolled away from me as I stood. My body blocked the light from the window, leaving half my desk in shadow. I shifted so I could see my mermaid sculpture, one Albert had made for me. He was one of my first art therapy patients, an elderly artist with Parkinson’s.

  I’d been working with him for several weeks when I discovered that he was a famous artist who had been reported dead from suicide by his assistant, and he’d been paying someone to keep his Wikipedia entry updated with that erroneous information ever since. When I almost lost my job at the hospital due to my lack of qualifications, he endowed my position with the stipulation that I could work there as long as I wanted.

  He was my mentor, and these days, one of my best friends.

  But the end was coming. I headed out of the art therapy room and to the elevator. For the first months Albert was in the hospital, he could still paint and sculpt on good days, when the meds were working on his muscle tremors. But his decline had begun to accelerate, and no cocktail of Levodopa/Carbidopa seemed to really help anymore. His weakness and trembling meant he mostly lay in bed, his ladylove by his side, and talked me through my problems with my current art projects.

  His ward was quiet and dim. Regina, the charge nurse, glanced at me and nodded as I passed. When I arrived at Albert’s door, I eased it open gently to make sure I didn’t wake him if he was sleeping.

  Layla was long gone this late, so Albert was alone in the room. I could see her simple touches even in the semidarkness. A dried flower wreath over the bed. A crocheted doily beneath a hand-painted vase. She was a crafter, an artist who dabbled, as she liked to say. The two of them had met in my therapy room, and I was more than thrilled to see the late-in-life romance bud between them. Even as we were facing the end, we needed love and hope.

  Albert wasn’t asleep, and his pale eyes followed me as I approached. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words didn�
�t come right away. After a couple more attempts, he finally got out “Tina.”

  I sat on his bed and took his trembling hand. His tremors were extra bad today, his entire hand rocking as if keeping beat to some tribal rhythm. Even my holding it did not calm the spasms. Such a horrible disease. The worst for someone whose lifeblood flowed through his talented fingers. Albert’s art had been sold the world over, when he could still make it.

  “Jenny had her baby,” I said. “A girl.”

  He almost smiled, but I could see him remembering, and his fingers squeezed around mine. “Sad, then?” he asked.

  I nodded. “About the same as if you saw someone butchering one of your famous clowns.”

  His mouth twisted in a wry smile. “That’s…called greeting cards,” he managed to get out. “Every day.”

  “They put your grim little clowns on greeting cards?” I asked.

  Another smile. “And calendars…damn agent.”

  I tried to picture the maniacal characters gracing someone’s day planner. I guessed there was a market for anything. They’d made Albert famous enough that he went into hiding. And when his assistant found him with his wrists cut and told the world he had died, he was relieved to be out of the public eye.

  He spoke slowly, with great deliberation. “What are you working on?”

  “Still the cliff painting,” I said. It had been months since I had been inspired to paint my baby, Peanut, at the age he would be now, standing on a cliff over the ocean here in San Diego.

  “Perspective right yet?” he asked.

  “I’m on attempt number eight,” I said with a sigh. His hand felt papery and thin in mine. The tremor ran through his muscles like a heartbeat.

  “Just getting started,” he said.

  I pushed out a rueful laugh. “I know. I’ve totally let go of the idea that I can do anything worthwhile on the first — or twentieth — try.”