She marched past him, sat on the bed, put her hand on her son’s flailing leg and started singing. She sang hymn after hymn. “The Old Rugged Cross.” “Shall We Gather At the River.” “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds.” Anything and everything soothing she could remember.
Dom finally stilled, opened his eyes, and blinked up at the ceiling. When he turned to face her, his shock at finding her there was clear. Tears spilled down his flushed cheeks and he launched himself at her, his sweaty little boy body clinging to her, arms and legs tight. She got up and moved to the rocking chair she’d left in the room, a vestige of Aiden’s few late-night nursing sessions.
“Mama,” he croaked out. “Bad dream. Really bad.”
“It’s all right, honey. Mama’s here. Shush, now.”
She glanced up and caught Anton’s eye. He had Aiden in one arm and was staring at her with the strangest look on his face—somewhere between sadness and abject terror. “I’ll put him in the other room,” he whispered, taking Aiden and shutting the door behind him.
She and Dom rocked and cried together until he dropped off again and became a lead weight she lugged to his bed. When she discovered he’d been so upset he wet himself, and she’d mistaken the dampness on her front for his usual sweatiness, she put him in Aiden’s bed and stripped him out of his clothes. His arms were streaked with red marks, as if he’d been scratching himself in his sleep. She touched them, pondering the mystery of this particular boy, and wondering where his road would lead him, while she dressed him in clean underpants and tucked him under Aiden’s blankets. Then she stripped Dom’s bed and took the wet things to the basement, stuffed them into the washing machine along with her shirt, and stood up, noting the crumpled paper containing the evidence of her betrayal still on the floor.
She threw it in the trash, grabbed a clean T-shirt, and headed slowly upstairs. Anton was in their room, staring out the window at the blowing snow. When he turned to face her, tears stood in his eyes. Without a word she walked to him, unbuttoned his shirt, unzipped his jeans, shoving them down to his ankles and gripped his cock. It stiffened quickly while she stared at him.
When she dropped to her knees and took him in her mouth, she prayed harder than she ever had in her life that they might figure out some way to get past this together.
He tugged her hair, grunting and thrusting, making her nearly gag, but she kept going, sensing him on the edge. Before he finished, he yanked her up, covered her lips with his, unzipped and shoved her jeans down as he lifted one of her legs so he could slide into her. She exhaled at the blessed familiarity, still erotically perfect, and wrapped her arms around his neck, meeting him thrust for thrust up against the bedroom wall, all without saying a thing.
“I love you,” he finally whispered into her neck. “Oh, God, Lindsay, please …”
“Come, Anton.”
He groaned and gave a last hard shove, then shuddered all over, spilling into her. She held on to him for dear life, whispering, “I’m sorry,” in his ear until he pulled out of her, picked her up and carried her to their bed.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed into his chest. “I love you, Anton. I didn’t, at first, you were right, but now I do … so much. Please, please don’t make me leave.”
“Shhh, honey, it’s fine. It’ll all be fine.”
Nine months later.
Lindsay stared down at the sleeping baby in her arms. Her pursed lips were full; her hair jet-black in a way Lindsay knew would grow in dark. It had been two full days since the girl’s violent birth, after which Lindsay had been out of it, floating along on strong painkillers, antibiotics, and hydration, long enough that when she woke she’d almost forgot why she was in the hospital in the first place.
Her arms felt heavy, her heart slow to beat, her reactions off as she studied her pink-swaddled daughter, Angelique Brianna Love. The girl gave a little newborn startle, her dark eyes flying open and her tiny body tensing up. Lindsay watched as if she were observing someone else holding this baby while she put the girl to her breast, only to have her fail to latch on.
Tears rolled down her cheeks as she offered comfort the only way she knew how, by feeding the girl from her body. But it didn’t work. Her milk had dried up or failed to come in at all from a combination of late pregnancy stress and three days of hard labor, culminating in an emergency C-section.
She’d not been allowed to hold Angelique right after she was born, since her own condition had been precarious, and the doctors wanted to make sure she was stable.
So “Angel,” as her father and brothers now called her, had been held for almost two days straight by her father, who couldn’t take his eyes off her. She’d been fed chemically processed, nourishing fluid from a bottle, as Lindsay had learned when she finally awoke from her morphine-induced stupor.
She had no need of Lindsay’s milk.
A nurse came in and clucked-clucked over Lindsay’s sobs, which had set the baby off on her own crying jag. “Here, honey, you rest some more, poor thing.” She took the baby and gave her to Anton. “Go to Daddy, there’s a sweetie.”
Lindsay watched Anton feed the girl a bottle, burp her, change her tiny diaper, and then hold her for hours while Lindsay recovered, or convalesced, or whatever it was she was doing. She spent a lot of time staring at the walls of her hospital room, trying to recover her equilibrium, but it eluded her. Tears flowed non-stop. She couldn’t choke down any food, even favorites her friends brought her. They’d ooh and aah over her daughter’s perfection, then pat Anton on the shoulder, and practically give the man a gold medal for “helping out.”
Finally, the doctors claimed her medically healed and sent her home. She spent a week in her room, crying, sleeping, or staring the small TV Anton put in there for her, while her husband and her boys took care of the infant. Lindsay rarely heard a peep out of her, which meant she hardly was ever put down.
“You’re spoiling her, Anton,” she’d say, angry and not understanding why. “Go on. Leave me be.”
She stared at the ugly, re-opened scar on her lower stomach, recalling the time Anton had kissed it after Dom’s birth, and their physical reconnection after that. The doctors had, without her knowledge or permission, rendered her sterile while they “had her open” after Angelique’s birth.
“It was best,” one of them, a smirking young man barely out of medical school, declared. “Another pregnancy could kill her,” he’d claimed to Anton as a way of scaring the poor man into signing the paper for a tubal ligation. She was no longer capable of conceiving. Which, on the one hand was a relief, but on the other, gave her another excuse to cry and ignore how much her family needed her.
That was what did it. Those words, coming from her best friend’s mouth. Both Tanya and Marianne were patient with her at first. They took turns with the boys, helping so Anton could work a few hours a week. Lindsay’s brothers took them, too, sometimes overnight, or on elaborate fishing and camping trips she heard about after the fact from Kieran, who spent hours at her side. Antony, Dominic and Aiden avoided her bedroom, as if they were afraid of what they’d see.
During Lindsay’s seventh week home, on a bright Sunday morning, Tanya marched in and threw open the shades, making Lindsay protest and cover her face.
“Honey,” her friend said, “this is the day the Lord has made for Lindsay Halloran Love. Your family is out there, dressed for church. I’m in here to get you up, into a shower and some decent clothes. Let’s go. I’m through babying you.”
Lindsay glared at her. “You don’t get to boss me.”
“I’m not bossing you. I’m simply no longer enabling you to ignore the fact that all your boys, and that precious baby girl, are in desperate need of their mama. Come on, now.”