Them (Him #3) (21 page)

“Logan?” Sarah asks once her contraction has passed.

Christine rests her hand on Sarah’s calf as she replies, “He’s going to spend the night at our house and help Uncle Brian with Calvin and Reilly.”

“And Dad?” She looks up at her mom.

I stand so Mrs. Price can have my chair but move up toward the head of the bed so I’m still within eyesight of Sarah.

“He picked up Will’s mom and they’re both on the way right now.”

For the next hour, Sarah faces each of her contractions like a trooper and when Dana comes back to check on her, we’re told she’s dilated to 5 and can get her epidural. I wish I had my phone out and could have taken a picture of the relieved expression on Sarah’s face when she heard the second part. My girl is ready for some drugs.

By the time Mr. Price and my mom make it to our room, the effects have started to kick in. The monitor is still showing the rise and fall of her contractions, but she isn’t feeling a thing. If anything, she’s sleepy.

Another hour goes by and Dana pops back into our room to check on Sarah. I’m the only one who stays while the rest of the family steps out into the waiting room to give Sarah privacy.

I’m waiting to find out what the latest dilation update is when Dana surprises me by hurrying out of the room without a word. Sarah and I glance at each other and I shrug. Within moments, Dana is back with both Dr. Abbott and Dr. Stacey.

They all take a moment to examine Sarah before Dr. Abbott leaves the room and Dr. Stacey moves to stand next to me.

His eyes are on Sarah. “Hello, Sarah. Will.” His eyes briefly meet mine before moving back to her. “Your water has broken. It appears the umbilical cord has come down, as well. This is called cord prolapse, and we need to move forward to deliver the baby via Caesarian section immediately.”

Dana hands me a set of scrubs complete with a face mask and cap for my head. I hurry to pull them on as Sarah is shifted from her hospital bed to one with wheels. In what seems like only a blink of an eye, we’re in the hall and moving to another room on the same floor. Sarah’s panicked eyes hold mine as I tightly grip her hand. Dana is behind me, pushing the bed.

“What about our family?” I ask, not bothering to look back.

“One of the other nurses is letting them know right now.”

I gulp. Any fear or concern I have, I command my body to conceal any outward display of. I need to be strong for Sarah even though I’m not sure if I’ve ever been more scared in my life.

They ask me to wait outside of what I assume is an operating room. Once they let me in, I quickly cross the room to reach Sarah. There’s a fabric half-wall settled over Sarah to prevent her from seeing her stomach. I weigh my desire to see the actual procedure and decide I’d rather not witness Sarah cut open. That means I am staying on this side of the curtain wall. I drop to my knees next to Sarah so she doesn’t have to look up at me.

Tears have welled in her eyes. “Do you think our baby is okay?”

My throat is thick as I nod, unable to form words.

“I’m scared, Will,” she whispers.

“Shhhh.” My hand drifts over her hair, smoothing it away from her face and hopefully comforting her.

My focus is one hundred percent on her. In the background, I can hear our doctor giving directions to one of two nurses who are now in the room with us. It’s all white noise, though, almost as though I’m underwater.

I focus on her, holding her face in my hands. Her normally chocolate-brown eyes are wide with concern, but I don’t know what to say to reassure her. All I can do is stay by her side, letting all the love I have for her speak through my eyes.

Suddenly, there’s a baby crying, our baby. I want to celebrate, but Dr. Sterling is now barking orders and frantically working on his side of the curtain. The door to the room swings open and another doctor rushes in. They don’t offer to have me cut the cord, and the fact that they don’t causes me to stiffen as I try to get Sarah’s attention.

Her eyes are closed. The moment they reopen, after she blinks, I know something is wrong.

“Will? Is th—” Her face pales and her eyes are unfocused as mid-sentence her jaw relaxes.

“Sarah.” I reach down to squeeze her hand and am alarmed when it remains limp within mine.

“Sarah!” I shout and realize at that moment the white noise around me is gone.

I drop Sarah’s hand and press my hands to either side of her face, my nose inches from hers. “Sarah, darling, please wake up. Please, please, please wake up. Sarah, I need you, darling, please.”

Someone grips my shoulders from behind and tries to pull me from her.

“No!” I howl, grabbing onto the side of her bed. “I won’t leave her.”

5 years later

“But Daddy, I need to have the shoes with the sparkles on them.”

My daughter, a veritable force of nature, is standing, feet spread western shoot-out style, in the kids’ shoe aisle of Target. Our current shoe mission is for a pair of rain boots, not the sparkly Mary Janes Chloe has her eye on.
If only Sarah were here,
I wistfully think.

“Chloe, darling, you already have sparkle shoes. Today we need rain boots. See these ones with the flowers all over them? Aren’t they pretty? Or what about the ones with the ladybugs? You love ladybugs.”

Her bottom lip pops out. “No, I don’t.”

I take a deep cleansing breath, not my first since becoming daddy to a mini drama queen, and I’m certain it won’t be my last. “Chloe Marie Price, you have five seconds to pick a pair of boots, or I’m going to pick them for you. Five, four, three, two.”

She dashes forward, grabs the ones with the ladybugs on them and drops them into our cart with a huff.

“Was that so hard?” I grumble.

She elects to employ her trademark silent treatment in response and steps onto the bottom shelf of the cart, facing forward and gripping the side in her nonverbal display that she’s ready to go.

When we reach the cash registers, she turns her big blue eyes back to me. “Daddy, can I please have a red slush drink?”

Those damn drinks are half sugar. She’ll be bouncing off the walls if I get her one.

She latches on to the immediate lack of a no and asks again, this time a couple decibels louder. The woman in line in front of us looks back with a judgy expression on her face. I smirk at her and stare her down until she drops her eyes and looks away. Chloe asks again, even louder this time, as if there was any possibility that I hadn’t heard her the first two times.

I ignore the smirk on Logan’s face when we pull into our driveway twenty minutes later and he sees Chloe holding a red slush.

“I thought you said you were never getting her one of those again” he says, walking over to help me unload the car.

“It was that or face World War 3 in the check-out aisle,” I grumble.

“Amber!” Chloe shrieks, racing across the yard to hug Logan’s girlfriend.

“I see you’ve patched things up,” I murmur, tilting my head in her direction.

He nods solemnly. “I’m going to marry her someday.”

I set the last of the bags from the trunk to our asphalt driveway and shut the lid before reaching up to muss his hair. “Just remember I’m not ready to be a grandfather yet.”

He rolls his eyes and starts toward the house. I stand, watching him go. He’s grown into an amazing young man, a freshman at University of Georgia on a partial lacrosse scholarship. Amber has stayed home and is going to a local community college. Over the summer, it seemed like they were going to break up.

Logan said she didn’t want to hold him back and was miserable as she tried to push him away. It was then, one night, I pulled him aside to tell him the cliff-notes version of Sarah and me. How, when we were their age, something drove us apart and we lost seven years we could have spent together. I told him to fight for Amber and, if he loved her, to trust in that love.

Seeing her here can only mean he took my advice. I grab the bags at my feet and make my way toward the house. Amber holds the front door for me before walking out to tie a bundle of balloons to the mailbox. I can see they’ve been busy since I took Chloe to Target so she would be out of their hair while they got the house ready for her birthday party.

The living room is a riot of pink, purple, and green streamers and balloons. The latest Disney princess’s face is plastered everywhere. I continue on to the kitchen. The bags I carry are full of chips which need pouring into the bowls laid out on the kitchen island.

“Daddy, did you see my cupcakes?” Chloe cries, her mouth and lips red from her slush.

For a moment, I’m struck motionless as it hits me what a carbon copy of her mother she is. Except for her blue eyes, every little molecule of her is Sarah.

“Will.”

My eyes snap to the brown eyes of the woman who owns the other half of my soul. She’s standing next to Sawyer, her hip leaned against the island.

“Look at her dress! She got red slush all over it,” Sarah groans, resting her hands on top of her head. “People are going to be here any minute.”

I lean down to capture her lips with mine, ignoring Chloe’s muttered, “Eww, gross,” in the background. Once I’m sure she’s thoroughly kissed, I lift my face and gaze into her blinking eyes.

“You are so lucky you’re still hot,” Sarah teases before pulling away to empty the chips I bought into bowls. “Now, hurry and take her upstairs to change into something else.”

“But I want to wear this,” Chloe howls from the other side of the kitchen.

“So sad, too bad,” I advance, grabbing her and tossing her over my shoulder to carry her up the stairs fireman style.

“But, Daddy,” she cries.

“Do you want to wear one of your princess gowns?” I ask.

That shuts her up fast. “Can I?”

“Sure. It’s your birthday, baby girl. Live it up.”

She squeals when I set her on her feet and runs straight to her toy chest, pulling a pale pink tulle explosion from it. “Will you put pink clips in my hair, Daddy?”

Five years ago, I never would have thought I’d turn into a toddler hairdresser. Sarah still does the pig and ponytails better than I do, but I can hold my own when it comes to clip placement.

“Sure, honey. Let’s get you changed first.”

Once Chloe is fit to see her subjects, er, party guests, I take her back downstairs. The doorbell rings as we walk back into the kitchen. Chloe takes off like a shot to go answer it and I sneak a cupcake.

“Will.” Sarah laughs as I toss its paper cup into the trash.

“What?” I ask innocently, tugging her toward me. “I needed some sustenance before our house is overrun with twenty five-year-olds.”

“Ten. There are only ten five-year-olds coming,” she corrects, kissing my cheek.

“And Calvin.” I widen my eyes in mock fear and she laughs.

“Calvin is a handful, but Brian promised to wrangle him this time.”

I’m still annoyed that the last time my demon nephew was over, he broke a new lens for my camera. Brian offered to replace it but Sarah refused, saying it was an accident. Accident, my ass; I saw the gleam in that brat’s eye when he did it.

“Hmp,” I reply.

She smacks my arm and shakes her head up at me. “Babe, let it go. It was two years ago.”

I ignore her and kiss her instead. I’ve never been shy of showing my affection for her, but I tend to hold her longer and tighter around Chloe’s birthday. I’ll never forget the day our daughter came into the world. I almost lost them both. Sarah had an emergency C-section because of cord prolapse which cut off Chloe’s oxygen supply.

Once Chloe was delivered, Sarah started hemorrhaging. They pulled me from the room as they worked to stop the blood loss and save her. I was a wreck, terrified that I could lose her but desperate to see Chloe. Even though she was delivered, she was by no means out of the woods.

She had trouble breathing initially in addition to already being born four weeks early. Once Chloe was stable, I was able to see her first. I’ll never forget her little body, covered with wires in the incubator. She needed to stay under the lights so I couldn’t hold her. All I could do was reach my gloved hand through an opening in the glass and hold her little hand.

I don’t know how long I sat there like that, just holding her little hand. The movement of time didn’t impact me. All I did was pray to every single God I had ever heard of that Sarah would make it. I swore to cherish each and every moment forward with her. I offered up my life for hers. There was nothing I would not do if it came down to it. I found out later that I had sat there, praying as I held my baby girl’s hand, for over three hours.

I only left Chloe when Sarah’s doctor came to get me and bring me to her. She was asleep. I collapsed into the chair next to her bed and laid my head on her hand before exhaustion took me. Sarah’s recovery was slow—she was in the hospital two weeks—but Chloe’s was slower. Chloe was in the NICU (neonatal) unit for a little over a month. She developed a heart murmur, but thankfully she did not need surgery.

I took disability from work to care for them both. Our family, community and the school all rallied around us. Logan stayed with my mom while Sarah was still in the hospital. When she came home, she wasn’t allowed to walk up or down the stairs for the first week, not that she had the energy to even consider it.