“One-fifty-five AM,” said Lisa, the newborn nurse. “Already noted.”
“Very good,” Niven said. She now had a blue towel in her hand and was drying Cadence off. “We have a birth APGAR score of one, two, one, one, one for a total of six. That’s pretty normal and she’s already pinking up.”
“Got it,” Lisa said, writing it down on a folding piece of paper.
“Does she have all her fingers and toes?” asked Laura.
“She has all her fingers and toes,” Danielle assured her. “She’s a beautiful baby, Laura.”
“Can I see her?” she asked.
“You can do better than that,” Niven said. “You can hold her. I’m going to put her on your chest in just a moment so we can keep her warm. Just let me clamp the cord real quick.”
While Danielle unceremoniously unbuttoned the sleeves on Laura’s gown and pulled it down to her lower stomach, Niven put two little clamps on the umbilical cord—one just about an inch from Cadence’s belly button, the other about four inches closer to Laura. Once they were clamped, she took the now screaming baby and set her belly down on Laura’s stomach, so her little mouth was near Laura’s right breast.
“Little girls are screamers, aren’t they?” asked Lisa with a smile.
“That’s the truth,” said Danielle, also smiling. It was obvious that both of the nurses particularly enjoyed this moment of their jobs.
Laura beheld the little life now snuggled against her for the first time. She was crying and smiling at the same time. “I did it,” she whispered happily.
“You did it, hon,” Jake said, tears still in his eyes as well. “Look at how tiny she is.”
“She didn’t feel that tiny coming out,” Laura said with a laugh of relief.
“You said you were planning to breastfeed her, right, Laura?” asked Niven, who was opening up another sterile package from her toolkit.
“Yes,” she said.
“Why don’t you give it a shot now then,” Niven suggested. “Lisa will help you.”
“Really? Right now?” Laura asked, excited.
“Right now,” she said. “She should have the instinctive urge to feed. And the suckling will stimulate oxytocin release. That will help your uterus contract down to normal so you can expel the placenta and clamp off anything that might be bleeding in there.”
“Okay,” Laura said. “I’ve never done this before though. Not with a baby anyway.”
“Uh ... yes, of course,” Niven said. “Like I said, Lisa will help you, In the meantime, Dad, how about you cut this umbilical cord for me.”
Jake did not respond at first because he had never been called “Dad” before. It took him a moment to realize that she was talking to him. And then another wave of emotion washed over him when he realized the terminology was correct. He was a dad now. That was his daughter there and someday she would call him that.
“Me ... you want me to do it?” he stammered.
“If you don’t mind,” she said, handing him a small pair of scissors. “I’ll show you where to do it.”
He took the scissors in his right hand. The hand was shaking a little. She pointed to a spot almost exactly midway between the two clamps on the cord. He put the cord between the blades and made the cut. It was harder than it seemed like it should be, but he managed to do it.
“There we go,” Niven said. “Good job.”
He handed the scissors back to her and then looked up at his daughter again. Lisa had shown Laura how to get her to latch on to the nipple and she was now suckling at it, weakly, but clearly suckling. Her crying had stopped.
Celia came over and put her arms around Jake, hugging him against her. She still had tears running down her cheeks. “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she told him. “Thank you for letting me be a part of it.”
“You belong here, C,” he told her, returning the hug. “You know that.”
“I do now,” she said. “I do now.”
Chapter 22: The New Life
Coos Bay, Oregon
December 29, 1997
Cadence Elizabeth Kingsley—who was four weeks and one day old on this day and was now routinely called Caydee by her parents and almost everyone else who knew her—lay contentedly in her father’s arms as he sat before a mixing board in the main room of Blake Studios Studio A. She was dressed in a warm, fuzzy green onesie and had a red pull-down cap covering the top of her head and her ears to combat the perpetual chill of the studio. Her gray-green eyes looked up at his face and she enjoyed the gentle, almost subconscious rocking he was imparting to her as he listened to the tracks playing through his headset. Jake had turned the external speaker on the board up a bit, allowing her to hear what was playing in the headsets. They had found that she tended not to cry or fuss much if there was music—any kind of music, even Matt’s heavy metal sound—playing.
Matt sat to Jake’s right, a pair of cans on his own head. Rory, one of the studio techs assigned to Project Tisdale, sat on Jake’s left, his hands hovering over the switches and dials. Inside one of the isolation rooms, on the other side of a thick pane of soundproof glass, Corban Slate, Matt’s rhythm guitarist, sat on a stool, his Brogan Troposphere electric guitar in his hands. He was strumming out an overdub of the chorus for Matt’s title cut, Faithless, a clean strumming designed to help enhance the string-strike sound of the measure. They had been working on this for most of the afternoon and, since the Nerdlys were in the other studio working on Celia’s overdubs today, they had actually been progressing fairly well. But there was still something not quite right about what they were hearing.
Jake took his left hand off Caydee for a moment and made a throat cutting gesture to Rory. Rory reached down and pushed the master stop button on the board, instantly halting all the prerecorded tracks of the piece, leaving only the sound of Corban’s guitar. Once Corban heard this, he stopped his playing as well. He looked at them through the glass, a questioning look on his face. What did I fuck up this time? that face enquired.
Jake pushed the intercom button before him and spoke into the microphone. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Corban,” he told him. “I’m just not liking the way this is playing out. Hang for a few while we talk it over.”
Corban nodded his understanding.
“What did he fuck up?” Matt asked. “It sounded okay to me.”
“No fuck up,” Jake said, making no effort to watch his language or police the language of others in front of his daughter. He and Laura had pretty much decided that Caydee might as well get used to the world she lived in and the family she was being brought up in from the outset. And the word “fuck” was an integral part of that world and that family.
“Then what’s the deal?” Matt asked.
“Like I said, I just don’t like the way it’s playing out. The notes are too subtle. The listener won’t even be able to hear a difference unless Corban goes a little stronger on them. But if he does that, it will become too obvious that there are two instruments playing in unison.”
“Then what’s the point of doing it at all?” Matt asked. Though he had come a long way since the last Intemperance album and his Next Phase fiasco, he was still a staunch conservative when it came to overdubs.
“The chorus melodies will sound a little flat if we don’t get those string strikes in there,” Jake explained. “The tune would work without them, but not as well as with them.”
“What’s the fuckin’ answer then?” Matt asked, a hint of impatience in his voice, but controlled impatience.
Jake looked over at Corban for a moment and then back at Matt. “I think the problem is that he is using the same instrument he used on the basic track. It doesn’t sound any different, so it just blends in over the top.”