But with a strength Vernon Barrett would have applauded, she pulled back and said, “Thanks for the steamer.”
He swallowed. “You’re welcome.”
She felt his gaze on her back all the way through the door. Heart aching, she changed out of her clothes, showered, and pulled on her flannel pants and soft forest green top. With a Herculean effort, she turned her thoughts to the girl upstairs with her belly so distended and the baby dropped into the birth canal. Perspective.
Maybe tomorrow she’d start working on the cradle. She sighed. How had it gotten to this? Oh yeah. Unconditional love. Wasn’t that, after all, what Lance wanted?
————
She woke with a jolt when Star nearly shook her teeth loose. “Rese, she had the baby!”
She shook the fog away. “Having? She’s having it?”
“Had. And she’s screaming her head off.”
She bolted up. Didn’t the screaming come before the baby? “Go get Lance. I mean Antonia. Get them both. And call the midwife.” Though what good it would do now, she didn’t know.
As Star took off for the carriage house, Rese mounted the stairs at a sprint, then stopped dead at the top. The smell of blood gagged and paralyzed her. Maria was screaming, but the baby made no sound. No way it was sleeping. It must be dead.
Lord
. She sank against the wall, shudders dissolving her legs. Her head spun. Star rushed up from behind, then Lance with Antonia in his arms. He must have scooped her out of bed in her nightgown, but she was calmly telling him they’d need string and scissors and warm towels. They disappeared into the room.
And then Rese heard the baby cry.
The fog cleared in her head. She staggered to the doorway. Blood streaked Maria’s thighs. The baby lay all clutched up and wailing on the soggy sheet, its tiny limbs shaking and a gaping crevice between its nose and mouth.
Braced by the bedpost, Antonia took hold of Maria’s jaw and bore into her with a look that silenced the screams. In T-shirt and drawstring pants, with sleep-tousled hair and shadowed jaw, Lance dropped to the bed and lifted the baby, still dangling a tubelike cord and bloody mass. He curled it into his chest. His features twisted. The tendons in his neck stood out as he covered the baby’s face with his hand, tipped back his head, and groaned, “Lord Jesus.”
The moment hung, Maria gaping, the baby gasping, Star and Antonia silent. Rese stood like stone, and she must have seen wrong from the doorway, because when Lance took his hand away there was no gap. The baby resumed its rusty-hinge cries. Finding her legs, Rese ran downstairs for scissors and string, then back up, already rationalizing. Her angle, blood on the face, her own light-headed stress and trauma.
“Tie it tight and cl … ose, but n … ot too close,” Antonia instructed her.
Lance held the baby’s tummy up as she fumbled the string around the spongy umbilical cord and pulled it tight. She looked into his face, saw the immediacy of the situation, concern, and probably adrenaline making his hands shake.
“N … ow cut.”
Rese freed the baby boy from the cord and placenta. Star grabbed a fluffy white towel from the bathroom, and Lance swaddled the little guy so that only his unmarred face showed. Then he put the baby into Maria’s arms.
————
Lance shook as he carried Nonna back to the carriage house, but not from fatigue. The midwife had arrived, cleaned and diapered the baby, and instructed Maria in his feeding. Star and Rese were there for anything else she might need. Elaine had slept through it all.
“Let me sit,” Nonna told him as he carried her into the carriage house bedroom.
He sat her up in the bed Rese had built, and stuffed pillows behind her.
“Now you.” She pointed to the foot.
He sat down and faced her. The shaking intensified.
“Don’t be afraid of it.” Her voice was stern.
“Nonna …” It was way beyond fear. He’d felt something with Rico, but nothing like …
“If God sees fit to use your hands, then use them He will.”
He knew whose power it was. But he couldn’t get his mind around it.
“Since you were born, God’s had a love affair with you.”
Lance shook his head. No way. Not the way he’d struggled and rebelled. But rooted in the struggle, hadn’t there always been a longing, a yearning so deep it groaned inside him?
Use me, Lord. Pour me out in this hurting world
.
“So now it shows.” She shrugged. “So what?”
“So what!” He spread his hands, then looked down at them in consternation. “I don’t even know it’s coming.” Because all he’d felt was Maria’s revulsion and a harrowing sadness for the disfigured infant.
“And it may never happen again. He chooses.” Her eyes took on a faraway look he’d seen on her before, the look that saw beyond. “Then again—” she shrugged—“it may.”
He swallowed painfully. “But, Nonna, how can it … work, when I’m such a screw-up?”
She laughed, clutched her hands together at her chest, and laughed some more.
He spread his hands. “Wha-at.”
“That”—she pointed straight at him—“is how it works.”
————
Thankfully Carla, the midwife, had brought diapers and things for Maria and the baby, since they’d had no time to prepare. Rese provided clean sheets and blankets, waited until Maria was nestled in with her newborn son, then showed Carla out. Now in the near dawn, she headed to her room with Star on her heels. No surprise that Star climbed into the other side of the bed. They were both unsettled, to say the least.
Rese stared at the ceiling, letting the whole scene play out in her mind. One thing was certain, she should never be in a position of authority where blood was involved.
Star rolled to her side. “Rese?”
“Yeah?”
“What happened up there?”
Rese rolled her head to face her, a thousand possible answers and none that she could voice. “I don’t know.”
They lay in silence for a while, then Star said, “I’ll tell you.” She took her hand and threaded their fingers. “Something was wrong, and then it wasn’t.”
Rese’s heart hammered as she lay there, seeing it all again. The red waxy baby curled like a caterpillar in Lance’s hands, the expression on his face she’d never forget, the baby’s own face … So she hadn’t been mistaken. But that meant …
“If I had to guess, I’d say it was your capricious God.” Star pulled Rese’s hand to her cheek and snuggled in as she had when they were little girls, sisters in all but DNA. “I hope Lance cooks breakfast,” she said drowsily. “I’m hungry already.”
R
ese opened the oven the next morning and breathed the aroma of the golden, bubbling asparagus frittata. Baxter got up from under the table and clicked across the floor to bump her legs. Rese closed the oven and took his head between her hands. “Good morning.” She rubbed and stroked his fuzzy muzzle, face, and ears. It was a good morning. Though it was only a few hours after last night’s drama, she had slept as deeply as a baby herself.
Star was still in her bed; all the house was silent. She hadn’t heard a sound from the kitchen, and she could almost believe Lance had conjured the aromatic frittata from thin air. But that thought brought last night back in vivid detail, Lance with his hand over the baby’s face, crying out, then drawing his hand away, stunned himself by what he saw. Had God brought Maria to them through Michelle just in time for Lance …
She pressed a hand to her forehead. If something was wrong and then it wasn’t, what did that mean? And was that the same man who’d kissed her last night?
“Let me prove faithful.”
She slid her fingers down to rest against her mouth. Did he even see the way God used him to change lives?
“Maybe I still don’t get it right most of the time.”
The Lord didn’t seem to share that opinion. Or maybe it wasn’t about getting it right. Maybe it was all about trying, about wanting, about getting inside God’s skin and seeing and feeling and loving.
Releasing a slow breath, Rese looked around the kitchen, trying to recall her first intentions. She laughed softly. Plans changed. Lives connected. Miracles happened.
Baxter’s tongue warmed her hand. Smiling down, she opened the door to let him outside and saw Lance, face uplifted to the sky, eyes closed, cheeks glistening with tears. His skin had a glow like gold dust from the sun.
“I did what I had to.”
He was telling the truth.
He’d been willing to give her up, to do anything for the God he loved. But she stepped out, and even though it was January, the warmth of the sun cloaked her from the crown of her hair down her arms and shoulders, to her bare feet on the rough flagstones. She moved toward him.
When at last Lance turned, he didn’t wipe his tears. He probably didn’t even know they were there. His eyes held plea and promise as he reached out his hand, and with an ache of recognition, she stepped forward to take it. Someone had to keep him connected to earth.
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