Losing Gabriel (15 page)

He shook his head. “Not really.” Silence stretched. Dawson took a deep breath, knowing this was going to be up to him. “I was kind of thinking…of maybe…Gabriel, after my great-grandfather. What do you think of naming him Gabriel?”

She thought it was as good a name as any. “Sure. That's fine.”

But Dawson could tell she wasn't enthused. “Okay, then how about Gabriel Franklin Berke.”

“That's fine.” She dropped his hand and rolled onto her side. “I want to sleep now. Really tired.” Sleep meant oblivion, a way for her to deal with what could not be changed.

Dawson eased into a bedside chair feeling wrung out, lonely, lost. He stayed until he was certain that she slept.

L
ani arrived in the nursing administrative offices, her heart pounding and her mind racing. Why had she been called in? Had she done something wrong? A volunteer didn't get called into Mrs. Trammell's office on a whim. Lani wracked her brain, mentally recounting her previous week on the job.
Running blood samples to lab, sponge-bathing an elderly woman in a bed, subbing in the gift shop midday three times, wheeling patients to and from radiology…
All routine. Tasks she'd done many times over. She paused at the outer door, chewed on a fingernail, took a deep breath, pasted on a smile, and walked inside.

“Hi, Lani,” the receptionist said. “Go right in. Mrs. Trammell's expecting you.”

Lani's knees went rubbery, but she entered the inner sanctum, where the head of nursing smiled and motioned her to sit in a chair in front of her desk. “You're not in trouble,” were Mrs. Trammell's first words. “In fact, I called you in because of your excellent work and exemplary attitude. In short, you play well with others. Every staff person who's come in contact with you thinks you're going to be a wonderful nurse.”

The praise blindsided Lani because her thoughts had never gone in this direction. “I love my work,” she said, despite her adrenaline overload.

“It's obvious.” The woman rifled papers on her desk, looked up, flashed a quick smile. “And you'll begin courses at MTSU soon?”

“Yes. In a couple of weeks.” She'd made out her class schedule, adjusted her hours at Bellmeade so as to not conflict with her volunteer hours. “But I don't mind working more hours if you need me.”

Mrs. Trammell smiled. “Good. Maybe we will. Truth is, we're shorthanded, so I'm thinking of asking you to be a snuggler. What would you think about that?”

And an hour later, Lani found herself gowned and gloved in the dimly lit preemies unit with Delilah, the RN on duty, walking between incubators and the machines keeping alive babies born too soon. Delilah spoke softly. “Snuggling's a primo job, and a simple one. Usually volunteer grandmothers do it, most are retired nurses from the community, but a couple of them are on vacation and one's out sick, so we thought we might train some of our current volunteers. And your name came up.”

“I plan to go into pediatrics.”

“Well, this is a good place to start. Simply put, snugglers hold, feed, and rock babies.” She gestured with her chin toward a grouping of wooden rocking chairs clustered in a corner. “Of course, you'll glove and gown, but the job's pretty simple. Some of these preemies will be here a long time, and they need to be held and cuddled. Human contact—very important. Incubators are a nice place to sleep, but nothing replaces loving arms. Parents and families normally do this, but sometimes circumstances come along…” She paused beside two incubators holding very frail-looking infants. “These two are crack babies, and their birth mothers walked out right after delivery.”

Lani watched as the babies twitched and trembled from drug withdrawal. The sight of them, knowing they were abandoned, helpless and addicted, took the wind out of her. “What will happen to them?”

“Health and Human Services will take them over once they're healthy enough to leave. Sometimes the mothers get clean and claim them, but not always.”

Delilah moved on, halted beside another incubator. “This little guy's closest to being released if he has no further setbacks.”

Lani read the name card…
Berke, Gabriel…
and her heart did a stutter step. The baby wore a pale blue cotton knit cap with black hair peeking from under the cap's edges. A cannula in his tiny nose delivered oxygen. “He's doing better?”

“Oxygen only now because he's off his feeding tube, and we're teaching him to suckle from a bottle.”

“Teaching him?” Lani thought babies were born able to nurse.

“His sucking reflex must be retrained. Which is where snugglers come in. His father shows up before and after work each day to feed him, and Dr. Berke stops in often, but a preemie can take a long time getting only a few ounces down. He needs six ounces about every three hours.” Delilah unwrapped Gabriel's blanket, wound round him like a cocoon, and flicked the bottoms of his feet. “Hey, little boy, wake up. Time to eat.”

The baby's face puckered as if in protest, but his eyes remained closed. Delilah brought one of the chairs closer, gestured to Lani. “Sit.” When Lani did, the nurse placed him in her arms careful that the oxygen line was unobstructed.

Lani had held several babies on the peds floor, but none this small. She was scared but didn't want to show it.

Delilah took a bottle from her pocket and pulled the covering off the smallest nipple Lani had ever seen. “Your job is to make sure he drinks all of this formula. When he drifts off, flick the bottoms of his feet to keep him awake. It's important to help him get through every feeding.”

Lani teased the nipple between Gabriel's tiny lips, but he turned his head and pushed his fists into the blanket.

“He's fighting you, but don't give up. Snuggle him close. Let him feel your warmth. That's right. Good. He's calming.” From another part of the room, a baby began to cry. “Whoops. Duty calls. Catch my eye when the bottle's empty and I'll come and put him back in his nest.” Delilah started to walk away.

“What about his mother? Doesn't she come to rock and feed him?”

“She did for a while. Not so much anymore.”

Lani gazed at Gabriel's sweet face.
Dawson's child…
She cuddled him so that his ear lay pressed against the left side of her chest, where he stilled, relaxed, drew in the formula to the steady rhythmic sound he'd heard every moment he'd been growing in the womb, the beat of a human heart.
Her
heart.

Sloan rattled around the house, drifting through rooms like a ghost. Gabriel had spent five days on a ventilator that had coated his lungs with a surfactant that all healthy lungs needed to aid breathing. Yet he remained in NICU on oxygen twelve days after being born. “Failure to thrive,” Franklin had told her and Dawson. “But he's learning how to take a bottle and is starting to put on weight. A good sign.” Dawson spent every minute of his free time at the hospital with Gabe. She did not.

Sloan thought back to when she'd gloved up and first touched the baby. Through the glove's thin membrane, Gabriel's skin felt warm and incredibly smooth. Franklin had told her, “You can hold him and rock him. That's why we have rocking chairs. It's important that he's held. To bond…you understand?”

“How about it?” Dawson had given her a hopeful look. “He's light as a feather.”

“Tomorrow.”

The allure of Jarred's plan to put the band together never ceased replaying inside her head. Especially at night when darkness ruled. She'd slept in the guest room every night since giving birth. “To recover,” she told Dawson, but also to think, to worry, and to wonder about the future and its possibilities. Dawson had broached marriage to her once more, but her heart grabbed and her palms got sweaty when he pressed her. “Still thinking about it.”

In the daylight, her thoughts dwelled on Gabriel, on his coming home. Franklin had promised a helper, a licensed RN, until Sloan felt better able to cope with caring for him. But once the nurse left, what then?
Motherhood.
The very word terrified Sloan. Texts from LaDonna, who'd somehow learned about the early birth were disturbing, insistent that Sloan and the baby return to the trailer once his hospital stay was over.

“I'm the grandmother. I got rights!”
was what she texted or shouted if Sloan answered her cell.

Sloan wondered if that was true. What kind of rights did her mother have?
Could
she make demands and
would
her demands be upheld by the law? She knew LaDonna had fought for and won her “rights” before. The memories were fuzzy, but Sloan knew that a lawyer had been involved and then bigger welfare checks had started coming. LaDonna had celebrated her legal victory with a whoop. Sloan cringed. There was no way in hell she could be a part of letting LaDonna get her hands on that baby.

Now alone in the house, Sloan couldn't turn off her thoughts or her fears. She stared out the oversized kitchen window, at the morning sunlight filtering through the limp leaves of a dogwood tree. She watched a sparrow perch on a branch, but when it caught sight of her through the glass, the brown bird stretched its wings and flitted away. She envied it.
How simple. Spread your wings and fly.
And in that instant, she made up her mind about what to do.

Sloan hurried upstairs, found her purse, fished Jarred's card from its hiding place in her wallet, and dialed his number. He answered on the second ring.

“Sloan! How are you? What's up?”

“Baby's delivered. He came early.”

Long pause. “Do you want me to come get you?”

“Yes. Now. I'm alone…you should come right away.”

He stuttered a bit, said something over his shoulder, then, “I'm on my way.”

Knowing she had about fifty minutes until Jarred arrived, Sloan grabbed her roller bag from the closet and started packing. Leaving most of the maternity clothes in the closet and dresser drawers, she packed the things she'd brought with her months before and only kept a few of the baby-mama pieces until she could get into hers again.

When she finished, she looked around the room, her gaze flitting from the cozy unmade bed to the sunlit window, and knew that she was leaving a safe haven for the unknown. Franklin and Dawson had kept the bargain they'd made with her, of paying her medical bills and meeting her day-to-day needs. Her conscience pricked and she glanced around for a piece of paper, thinking she should leave a note. What could she possibly say? She blew out a lungful of air, reminded herself that she'd kept her end of the bargain too…she'd had the baby. She left no note. Dawson would figure it out.