Somewhere Out There (38 page)

“Did you trip?” he asked, and again she shook her head, then spoke, her voice wound tight.

“I’m pregnant,” she gasped. “Something is wrong.”

“Call 911,” Nick directed, though to whom, Brooke didn’t know. She couldn’t open her eyes. All she could think about was her baby.

Nick rested a hand on her back. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Just stay still. Help is on its way.”

She nodded as the pain in her uterus squeezed again, and she felt as though she might be sick. She wanted to know if she was bleeding or if her water had broken, but she was in too much agony to check. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Nick. “I meant to tell you . . .”

“Hey,” Nick said. “It’s okay. I thought you might be, but I didn’t want to be the asshole who asks and gets punched in the face for being wrong.” He paused. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Brooke finally managed to crack open her eyes, only to see a circle of employees and customers with concerned looks on their faces. But she didn’t have time to be embarrassed, with only a few words running through her head:
Please, God. Let my baby be okay.

The paramedics came ten minutes later, pushing all the other people away. Before Brooke knew it, they had lifted her onto the gurney and she was wheeled out of the building and slid into the back of an ambulance. They checked her vitals, and she told them how far along she was. “I think I might be bleeding,” she said, unable to fight back her tears. “Or my water broke. I’m not sure.”

“Okay,” the medic who had stayed in the back with her said. She was a blond woman who looked to be in her late twenties. “I’m going to check on that, then. Is that all right?”

Brooke’s jaw and bottom lip quivered, but she bobbed her head. The medic lifted the blanket they’d placed over her in the restaurant and gently pushed Brooke’s thighs apart. When she returned her brown eyes to Brooke’s, they were unreadable. “There’s some blood,” the medic said.

“Oh, god!” Brooke cried out, rolling her head to one side, unable to look at the medic a moment longer. She was losing this baby . . . just like she’d lost everyone else. Her tears came in earnest then, and painful, heavy sobs took her over. The ache in her uterus hadn’t gone away.

The medic placed a reassuring hand on Brooke’s arm. “Hold on now. That could mean any number of things. Let’s get you to the ER and the doctors will figure out exactly what’s going on. No matter what, they’ll take care of you, I promise. They’ll do everything they can.”

Brooke was crying too hard to respond. The medic held Brooke’s hand as she spoke over a radio to the ER, describing Brooke’s symptoms. When they wheeled her through the automatic sliding glass doors, Brooke was rushed into an exam room, where the medics left her and two nurses took over.

“I’m Gemma,” the older one with silver hair said. “And this is Mark.” She gestured to the short, stocky bald man in blue scrubs who was setting up an IV. “We’ll be taking care of you today. I understand that you’re pregnant?”

“Twenty-three weeks,” Brooke said, trying to ignore the biting ache in her gut. “Am I going to lose it?” Her voice shook, and she pressed a hand across her mouth to keep the sobs from taking back over.

“I don’t know,” Gemma said. “We have to run some blood tests and do an ultrasound before we know for sure what’s going on.”

“We’ll get you started on fluids and check for a fetal heartbeat,” Mark said. “The obstetrician is on her way.”

“Is there anyone we can call for you?” Gemma asked. “The baby’s father?”

Brooke dropped her hand back to her abdomen and considered what would happen if she asked the nurse to contact Ryan. So far, he’d done as she’d asked and stayed away, and she didn’t want to call him now and make him think she’d changed her mind about accepting his help.

“He’s not involved,” Brooke said, rubbing her hand over the pain in her belly. Her hip joints ached like nothing she’d ever felt before.

“Anyone else?” Mark said. “Your mother, maybe, or a friend?”

“No,” Brooke said, her eyes filling again. She realized that the one person she wanted to be there was Natalie. She knew her sister would hold her hand; she would push her hair back from her face and tell her everything was going to be okay.

“All right,” Gemma said, and several minutes later, the door swung open and to Brooke’s surprise, Natalie rushed into the room.

“Your manager called me. You listed me as your emergency contact on your application,” she said, answering the question she likely saw on Brooke’s face. Natalie’s cheeks were red and she was breathing fast. “I came right away.”

“And you are?” Mark asked, poising his fingers over the keyboard attached to the computer next to the bed.

“She’s my sister,” Brooke said, and then Natalie stepped over and grabbed her hand, the two of them waiting for the doctor to come.

•  •  •

“There we go,” Dr. Patel said as she pushed the ultrasound wand along Brooke’s belly and the familiar, comforting
whoosh, whoosh
of the baby’s heartbeat filled the room.

“Oh, thank god,” Brooke said through her tears. Natalie still held her hand and now gave it a hard squeeze. “What happened? Where did the pain come from? Why was I bleeding?”

“My guess is the pain was from your ligaments stretching and your hips beginning to expand. For some women, especially first-time mothers, this can hurt quite a lot.” Dr. Patel, an attractive East Indian woman who spoke with a musical lilt, kept her eyes on the screen as she continued to move the wand on Brooke’s stomach.

“What about the bleeding?” Natalie asked.

“It wasn’t much,” Dr. Patel said, “even though I’m sure it felt like it was. We don’t always know what causes it. Possibly too much exertion, or it could be for no real reason at all. The good news is that it stopped, and it didn’t contain any kind of tissue. The baby looks wonderful.” She finally glanced back at Brooke. “How’s your pain?”

Brooke shifted a bit in the hospital bed, trying to gauge her answer. “I’m still a bit achy, but the shooting pains went away.” Her baby looked wonderful, she thought.

“Excellent,” Dr. Patel said. “We’d like to keep you overnight, just to monitor both you and the baby. If all remains well, you can go home tomorrow.”

“But everything is still okay, right?” Brooke asked, anxiously. “The baby’s fine?”

“Yes,” Dr. Patel said. “She looks perfect.”

“She?” Brooke froze. “I’m having a girl?”

“You’re having a girl!” Natalie said, and her brown eyes lit up.

“My apologies,” Dr. Patel said. “I assumed you already knew. I do hope you didn’t want it to be a surprise.”

“No,” Brooke said, and a happy, fluttering feeling filled her chest. “It’s fine. I wanted to know.” She looked at Natalie, unable to deny that she was thrilled to have her sister with her as she received this news.

Dr. Patel stood. “The nurse will be back in a bit to finish the admit process, and I’ll update your regular obstetrician. Congratulations!”

Brooke thanked her, and after she’d left, Natalie finally let go of her sister’s hand and sat down in the chair next to the bed. They were both quiet, not looking at each other. Brooke wasn’t sure that she forgave Natalie completely, but she did know that she’d never been as happy to see anyone in her life as she was when her sister showed up. That had to count for something.

The only sounds in the room were the steady beeps coming from the monitors to which Brooke was attached. She wished she knew exactly what to say, how to express the crazy mix of emotions rushing through her. Foremost she was relieved, but she also felt wary, unsure of how to navigate a conversation about finding the background check in her sister’s kitchen that day. But having met Natalie, having spent just a few precious weeks with her, Brooke knew she needed to find a way to work things out—she couldn’t deprive her daughter of the same thing Brooke had been denied. She couldn’t allow a single argument to ruin the one chance at having a family she’d ever had.

“Thanks for coming,” Brooke finally said, in a soft voice. She looked at her sister, searching her face for some clue to whether Natalie was here out of a sense of duty or because she truly wanted to come.

“I thought you’d be pissed,” Natalie said, and the tension in her face visibly relaxed.

“But you came anyway.” Brooke paused, and gave her sister a wry smile. “We’re both stubborn. So there’s that.”

Natalie’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry, Brooke. I can’t apologize enough for hurting you. I never meant—”

“It’s okay,” Brooke said, holding up her hand to stop Natalie from saying more. “I get it. Kyle ran the report without telling you, and I understand why he did. If I was him, I probably would have done the same thing. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Natalie eyed her for a moment, looking as though she were trying to decipher whether or not to take Brooke at her word. “Okay,” she said.

And then Brooke asked the question that had been in the back of her mind since the last day they’d seen each other. The day she’d given Natalie the box filled with the details of their birth mother’s life. “Have you seen her yet?”

The look on Natalie’s face told Brooke her sister knew to whom she referred, and Natalie shook her head.

Brooke’s eyebrows both rose. “Why not?”

“I’m not sure. I guess I’m afraid.”

“That she’ll reject you?” Brooke asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper. This was another reason why Brooke had stayed in her car when she drove to her mother’s clinic—she could never work up the courage to face the possibility that the mother who had let her go over three decades ago would simply turn her away.

“Yeah. I think that’s probably it.”

“Me, too,” Brooke admitted. And then she spoke again, before she could change her mind. “Maybe it would be easier if we saw her together.”

Natalie looked at her. “Really? Are you sure?”

“No,” Brooke said, wondering if she would regret what she’d just offered to do. “But it has to be better than either one of us going alone.”

I raced down the hall from my office to the front of the building, where I’d been summoned the moment a woman entered the reception area, cradling her bleeding dog in her arms.

“Where are they?” I asked Chandi, who sat at her desk by the door, typing something into her computer. Like me, she was in her midfifties, and at this point, we’d worked together for more than thirty years. She was my business manager, my accountant, and, besides Evan, my closest friend. When Randy had retired and sold me his practice, one of the first things I did was make sure Chandi knew I couldn’t run the clinic without her.

“Room three,” she said, nodding in that direction. “Paula is with them.” Paula was one of the inmates I’d worked with for the past six years, a woman convicted of check-writing fraud. As I had, she earned her vet tech degree while still incarcerated, and when she was released, I gave her a full-time job. She was a short, heavyset woman with a big smile and sparkling green eyes; since joining my team, she’d met and married her husband, and given birth to a little boy named Joseph. Not all of the women from the prison took to the service-dog training program—some quit, some ended up committing other crimes and returning to jail—but Paula was one of my success stories.

“Dr. Richmond,” Paula said as I entered the exam room. She wore light blue scrubs, and her auburn hair was pulled into a ponytail on top of her head. The dog lay on the paper-lined table, its white fur bloody along its side, its breathing pattern staggered and irregular. I looked at the owner, a woman I recognized as someone new to the clinic—I’d seen her and her dog only a handful of times, so I had a hard time recalling her name. “This is Gretchen,” Paula continued. “And her pup, Wiley.”

I stepped over to the table and rested a gentle hand on the dog’s head. “It’s okay, boy,” I said in a soothing voice. He had a deep, six-inch laceration along his rib cage that I immediately knew would require stitches. But first, we’d need to get him into X-ray to make sure he didn’t have any broken bones, and then perform an ultrasound to find any possible internal bleeding. I raised my eyes to Gretchen, a thin blond woman who was trying not to cry. She appeared to be in her mid- to late thirties.
The same age as my girls.
I blinked a few times, attempting to push down this thought. Even now, more than three decades after I’d last seen them, they were always lurking in the dark corners of my mind, ready to take me back to the moment in which I lost them. I still wrote each of my daughters a letter on her birthday, filing them away in the same box where I kept the notebooks I’d written in while in prison. I told them about my marriage to Evan, my growing vet practice, and the volunteer work I did with other incarcerated women. I told them that after I’d reached out to my mother several times over the years, her husband finally called me and said that she’d had a sudden heart attack when she was fifty-seven and died. I told them how deeply I grieved the fact that she and I never were able to resolve our differences, and that I hoped their relationships with their new families were healthy and strong. I told them that I thought about them every single day.

“What happened?” I asked Gretchen, forcing myself to focus on the situation right in front of me.

“I was at the grocery store,” she said. “I opened the hatch to put the bags inside and he just took off across the parking lot, into the street. A car’s brakes screeched and tried to stop, but it still hit him.” She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut, remembering. “The sound he made was so horrible . . . like he was screaming. It sounded human.”

I nodded, carefully moving my hand down Wiley’s neck to check his pulse. It was fast, but still strong.
A good sign.
“Dogs can do that when they’re in pain or scared,” I said. I glanced toward Paula and looked down at Wiley’s head. She stepped over and held it steady, as she understood I needed her to do in case Wiley decided to try to bite one of us. His dark eyes were glassy, and he seemed to be in shock; from his earlier appointments with me, I remembered him being a sweet, gentle boy, but an injured dog was an unpredictable creature..