“I’m glad he’s here with you. Tell Natalie I love her, and I love you too,” he said, smiling weakly at his daughter, and then he turned his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. He drifted off to sleep then, and she quietly left the ICU and went back to Brad in the waiting room, and they walked out in the morning sunshine. She felt like they’d been in the waiting room for a week as Brad hailed a cab and they went back to the hotel. They talked quietly in the back of the cab about what had happened. It had been the most frightening night of her life.
Everyone had a thousand questions when they saw her walk into the lobby. She looked exhausted, but not devastated, and everyone was relieved to hear that her father was doing well and would be home in a few days.
Brad went to her room to shower and change. He had class that morning, and Heloise went straight upstairs to see Natalie in her father’s apartment. She walked into the bedroom, and Natalie was wide awake, watching the morning news on TV. She had the TV on constantly now. She had nothing else to do except eat, watch TV, call her office, and watch her belly grow. And she was huge now with three babies inside her.
“Where’s your father?” she asked immediately with a worried expression. Heloise hadn’t planned to tell her, but there was no way she was going to be able to hide it from her for several days. And Natalie’s radar was telling her that something had happened to her husband.
Heloise sat down on the edge of the bed and smiled at her. “He’s fine. He’s really fine, and he’ll be home in a few days. He gave us a scare last night. He’s at New York Hospital, he had a mild heart attack, they did an angioplasty, and they said he’s going to be good as new. And I’m making him take four weeks off. He can keep you company till the babies are born.” She had told her everything in one fell swoop, and strangely, Natalie looked relieved. She knew something had happened, and she’d been panicked about what it was all night.
“Thank you for telling me the truth,” she said, clinging to Heloise’s hands. “Is he really okay?”
“Yes, he is. I promise.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“He just went back to sleep. He had a long night. You can call him in a couple of hours when he wakes up.” She jotted down the number for her and put it on the pad next to her bed. “I’ll stay here with you while he’s gone,” Heloise offered, and Natalie was relieved. She didn’t want to be alone at night in case she went into labor and couldn’t move, or had the babies right in her bed with no warning. She was terrified that would happen, although it was unlikely to happen that fast. They were planning to do a cesarean when they were ready to be born.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “I wish I could go see him instead of being stuck here like this.” She felt completely helpless and useless lying in bed, unable to do anything, but the stakes were too high. She couldn’t get up, even for Hugues now.
“He’ll be home soon,” Heloise reminded her. And then she went into the living room and lay down on the couch. She woke up two hours later when the phone rang. It was her father calling for his wife. Natalie picked it up and burst into tears when she heard him, she was so relieved. And they talked for a long time.
Heloise ordered lunch for her, and then went down to change into her uniform. She was on duty at three o’clock, but she went back to see her father first. He was out of ICU and in a private room by then, with a nurse, and happy to see his daughter as soon as she walked into the room. He thanked her again for everything she’d done the night before, and for taking care of Natalie while he was gone. Natalie had told him that Heloise was being very sweet.
She spent an hour with her father and then went back to the hotel to take her shift. She was right on time and stayed there until eleven o’clock that night. It was too late to see her father then, and she practically crawled back to her room to get her nightgown and see Brad.
“You look exhausted. Get to bed.” He was worried about her, as she shook her head and picked up her nightgown from the back of the bathroom door.
“I can’t. I have to sleep with Natalie tonight.” He looked genuinely sorry for her, and walked her upstairs to her father’s apartment, and spent a few minutes talking to Natalie before he left and went back downstairs. He was talking about giving up his apartment near Columbia because he was never there anymore. He was always at the hotel with her.
After Brad left, Heloise changed into her nightgown and got into bed with Natalie. They chatted for a few minutes, and Heloise was so tired she was about to drift off to sleep when Natalie took her hand and put it on her belly. There were arms and legs and hands and feet kicking all over the place. It felt like a war going on in a cartoon.
“How do you sleep with all that happening?” Heloise looked at her in amazement, and Natalie smiled at her.
“I don’t. They jump around most of the time.”
“It must feel so weird,” Heloise said sleepily, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. She had to go to sleep, and a few minutes later she was out like a light, while Natalie stayed up late and watched TV. The days and nights were long, and if she was lucky and they stayed in there, she had three more months to go.
Two days later Heloise’s father came home from the hospital. They brought him home in a wheelchair, but he insisted on walking into the hotel on his own. He looked pale and tired but infinitely better than when he’d left, and he went upstairs to his apartment rapidly, to see his wife. She burst into tears when she saw him, and clung to him when he sat down on the bed. He put his hands on her enormous belly and felt their babies kicking and smiled at her. This was all he had wanted, to stay alive and come home to her. He had too much to live for now to let anything happen to him. He swore she had gotten bigger in the few days he’d been gone, and he got into bed with her a little while later and lay there beside her, grateful to be home.
Heloise visited them as often as possible, but she had taken on extra work while he was gone. She came up to ask his advice and called him frequently on his cell phone, and he was happy to feel connected to the activities and decisions of the hotel. Natalie didn’t like it and was on a vendetta against the hotel now. She thought his work was too stressful, it had almost killed him, and now she wanted him to sell the Vendome. She wanted him to call the Dutch consortium and accept their offer. It was all she talked about. And when he was in the shower, she called Heloise and told her sternly not to call him so often. It made Heloise worry about him more.
“It’s out of the question,” he said firmly to Natalie about selling. “I can’t do that to Heloise. She loves this place too much.”
“She loves you more,” Natalie insisted. “If we lose you, it will destroy us all. You have to live for her and our babies, and this place will kill you if you don’t slow down.” He didn’t know how to slow down so she wanted him to sell. He was constantly on the phone to Bruce, Jennifer, and the front desk to find out what was going on.
“I’m taking a month off,” he reminded Natalie, hoping to mollify her, but Natalie’s only mantra now was for him to sell the hotel. She didn’t say anything to Heloise about it, but she said it to Hugues constantly, and he told her he wouldn’t, in no uncertain terms. She was stressing him more than the hotel. It was the only argument they had. The rest of the time they enjoyed being together. She loved having him home with her.
He went out for a walk around the reservoir every day, and came back with little treats for her. Four weeks after his heart attack, he looked better than ever, and by then Natalie looked like a woman lying under a mountain. He smiled every time he looked at her. She could hardly move.
The doctor came to visit her on a regular basis, and an OB nurse came to check her every day. It was April by then, and she was having contractions. The obstetrician thought it would be soon, but she was seven months pregnant, and the babies were growing nicely. They could survive if they were born now.
They were watching an old
I Love Lucy
rerun and eating popcorn one night, when Natalie suddenly made an odd expression and then looked at Hugues, as though she didn’t understand what was happening. She was suddenly lying in a pool of water, which rapidly spread to his side of the bed. He was afraid that she was bleeding, but when he looked at the sheets, he saw it was just water, and then they both realized what had just happened.
“Oh my God, my water just broke,” she said to him with a look of panic. But at seven months the triplets were in much less danger, even though they were small, and all three would almost certainly survive. Hugues called the doctor, and she said to bring Natalie in as quickly as possible. She had no idea how rapidly labor would happen, and she didn’t want to have the babies born at the hotel or in a taxi. Hugues called security and asked them to bring up a wheelchair. They had several of them in the hotel, one of which he’d used to come home from the hospital himself a month before. He was fully recovered, and after his long daily walks, he felt better than ever, and he had been planning to go back to work that week.
Bruce brought the wheelchair up to them in a few minutes, and Hugues helped Natalie get dressed. It was two o’clock in the morning. And he was wondering if their babies would be born that night. It was very exciting. And if so, they knew the babies would have to stay at the hospital for a while, in incubators, depending on how big they were. But in her belly they looked enormous to them.
Once she was dressed, Hugues helped her from the bed to the wheelchair, and she smiled up at him once she sat down.
“It looks like this is showtime,” she said softly. They had waited so long for this. The hormone treatments the previous summer, the IVF, and now seven months of being pregnant, and she had been in bed for nearly four months. She felt ready to face what was coming. She just hoped that their babies were too.
Hugues and Bruce took Natalie down the elevator in the wheelchair. If it had been earlier, he would have called Heloise, but he didn’t want to disturb her and assumed that she was sleeping.
None of the drivers were around at that hour to drive them to the hospital. And it was simpler to take a taxi. The doorman hailed one for them, and Natalie held Hugues’s hand in the cab. It felt so good to be out in the warm spring air and see the city again. She felt like she had been in prison for months.
The doctor was waiting for them at the hospital, and they got Natalie to Labor and Delivery just as the first serious pains started, and she was surprised by how strong they were. But once her water broke, the doctor had told her that she might go into hard labor very quickly, which seemed to be what was happening now. And she was clinging tightly to Hugues’s hand. He was quietly reassuring her and helped her into the bed, where they examined her and she immediately cried out in pain.
“You’re already dilated to eight centimeters,” the doctor explained to her. “You must have been having contractions all night.” They wanted her to have some contractions before the C-section, to get the babies ready to breathe when they were born.
“I’ve had so many lately, and they kick so much, it’s hard to tell,” Natalie said as another pain hit, and the doctor checked her again, and this time she screamed, as Hugues winced, watching her. It looked excruciating to him. Miriam hadn’t let him be there when Heloise was born, so this was the first delivery he’d seen.
“We’re not going to be able to stop it now,” the doctor said to Hugues and Natalie. “With the water broken, there’s a risk of infection, and she dilated too quickly. I’d like to see if we could slow it down a little, so we can get some medicine into you.” They wanted to give her an IV, to protect the babies’ lungs, as they weren’t fully mature. “Let’s see if we can buy a little time.” They wanted to get two bags of IV fluid into her, and the medication for the babies’ lungs. And the doctor explained to Hugues and Natalie that the best way to slow her labor a little bit would be to give her an epidural, if it wasn’t already too late. They would need it for the C-section anyway, since they weren’t going to let her deliver naturally. And if it was too late for the epidural, they’d have to put her out completely, which they didn’t want to do.
They got an anesthesiologist into the room and had him administer the epidural, through a needle in her spine. It was painful for Natalie, but once it was in place, she stopped feeling the contractions, and eventually they slowed down. It was giving them the time they needed to get the babies ready to enter the world.
Natalie was lying on her side, looking exhausted and worried. She had been poked and prodded and examined, and she was worried for their babies. A fetal monitor was reporting all three heartbeats, and Natalie lay quietly, holding Hugues’s hand, as tears slid down her cheeks.
“I’m scared,” she whispered to him, “for them, not for me.”
“It’s going to be fine.” She wanted to believe him, but she didn’t. There was so much that could still go wrong. And by eight in the morning they had gotten everything into her that she and the babies needed, and they lightened up on the epidural, and as soon as they did, Natalie was immediately in pain. There seemed to be no way to get through this easily, and Hugues hated that for her. But the doctor still wanted her to have some more contractions to get the babies’ lungs ready to breathe. She assured them that she wasn’t going to leave her in labor for long, and they would do the C-section soon. Hugues thought it looked like the worst of both worlds, a painful labor and then a cesarean section, which meant major surgery. They examined her again then, which only made it all worse.
“I want to go home,” she said to Hugues as she burst into tears. He wanted to take her home too, but with their babies in their arms, safe and sound. And for now they needed to be here.
Two more doctors entered the room shortly after, and half a dozen nurses. The epidural was stepped up, and things started to move very quickly, as they rolled Natalie onto a gurney between contractions and rolled her down to surgery, with Hugues holding her hand and the whole team following. Because she was having triplets, there was a lot more going on than usual. With hormone treatments and IVF, they were seeing many more multiple births, and three was still a reasonable number. They had delivered quadruplets the day before.