He slid into the driver’s seat and shut the door behind him, then eased on over into the space between the seats, pulling cellophane packages out of his vest pockets with one hand while he thumbed the mike on with the other. Mirabella watched him hungrily until he grinned and handed her a packet of cheese crackers.
“Mayday, channel 9, Mayday… Come on.” He listened to silence broken only by rustling paper and munching sounds, then fiddled with the tuner and tried again. “Mayday, Mayday, anybody out there listenin’?” He heard a faint crackling and caught and held his breath while he listened with every nerve cell in his body. But whoever it was trying to reach him, the signal was too weak and too far away.
“Jimmy Joe…”
He felt something lightly touch his face and realized only then that he’d been listening with his eyes shut. When he opened them he felt as if his heart was turning clear over inside his chest, because he could see then that it was her hand that lay along his beard-stubbled jaw, her fingers stroking back the hair just above his ear. He couldn’t remember exactly but he thought it was the first time she’d touched him like that, of her own accord. And when he looked at her he knew everything he was feeling must be right there in his face for her to see.
“Jimmy Joe, it’s all right,” she said, and stopped a tiny, silent burp with her hand. She shook her head and went earnestly on, smelling rather touchingly of Ritz crackers. “Even if nobody comes, I know everything’s going to be okay. You’re here…”
He shook his head and had to look away from her, the back of his hand, clutching the CB mike, pressed hard against his lips.
“I mean it,” she whispered earnestly, “I’d rather have you for my coach than anybody. Promise you won’t leave me.”
“Lord help us, I ain’t goin’ anywhere!” he exclaimed, his voice raspy and full of bumpy laughter.
“Um, shame on you, you said ‘ain’t.’ What would your mama say?” She was laughing, now, too, but stopped when she picked up her own thread again. “I mean…even if somebody comes. Please don’t leave me. Promise you’ll stay with me until my baby is born. Please, Jimmy Joe.”
He grabbed at her hand, but it was going to be a little while before he could bring the words up out of the jumble inside him. He waited, head bowed, holding her hand while he worked at it, and when he was pretty sure he had his own voice back he cleared his throat and said, “Marybell, there’s something you’ve gotta know.” He lifted his head and looked straight at her then, facing up to the truth like a man, like his daddy had always taught him. And because he knew he was going to let her down, it was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Especially with those big trusting eyes of hers gazing into his.
He took a breath. “I didn’t lie to you. I did go to those childbirthing classes with Patti-my wife. I just… See, I never got to go through the actual birth with her. It was just the way it happened. Both times I was out on the road. The first time-”
“Contraction,” she gasped, and then went right on breathing like that, way too hard and too fast.
He yelled, “Slow down!” just to get her attention, but she stared at him and didn’t ease up on the breathing even a little bit, and he knew she was caught up in it and didn’t know how to stop. He took her face in his hands and felt her skin growing clammy to the touch.
“Breathe with me, dammit,” he said between clenched teeth, hoping he wasn’t going to start hyperventilating himself.
She shook her head frantically. He could feel that her jaw had gone rigid, see her eyes darken with panic. Lord, he thought, forgive me. He took a deep breath. And then he kissed her.
As kisses went, he supposed it wasn’t much. On a thrill scale, he would have had to rank it somewhere below an electric toothbrush and a fresh stick of cinnamon chewing gum. But it did what it was supposed to do, which was to stop her breathing long enough for her to get control of it again. To shock her enough to break the grip of her panic, like a slap in the face or a bucket of cold water. That was the way he meant it, and he hoped she would know that and forgive him for it.
The trouble was, his body didn’t know it. All his mouth knew was the shape and texture of hers, and the messages that got sent along his nerves to his brain were all about how sweet and good it tasted, how warm and soft it felt. And so of course his brain-not the thinking part of it-had to go and put the word out to other parts of his body: happy, joyful, excited messages, clanging Christmas bells and choruses singing “Hallelujah.”
It might not have been so hard if she’d stiffened up and pulled away from him like he’d expected she would. But instead, after the first frozen moment, the first shocked gasp, she leaned into his mouth-hard, and then harder, as if she couldn’t help herself, as if in some strange way there was a connection between the kiss and the cataclysm that was taking place in her body. It almost made a kind of sense to him, although he couldn’t have explained why or how. He only knew it affected him deeply-more profoundly than any kiss ever in his life before.
It ended when the contraction did, but for both of them the shock of it seemed to linger, so that their first words were whispered across an airless space of only inches.
“What did you do that for?”
“You were hyperventilating.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No-that’s okay.”
“I didn’t mean-”
“I know.”
He felt her grip on his forearms ease; until then he hadn’t noticed how her fingers were digging into his muscles. She sat back, widening the space between them. He watched her draw in a breath, long and deep, then slowly let it out, at the same time lifting both hands to sweep and hold the hair back from her face. He noticed that she still looked horribly pale-almost greenish. The residual effects of the carbon-dioxide imbalance, he was sure.
He smiled at her and lightly touched her cheek. “You gotta watch that, you know? Next time, you keep your eyes on me, you hear? Breathe with me. That’s assumin’ I’m not hyperventilating.”
She didn’t smile back; her eyes had a glazed, distant look. But as he watched, he saw them darken and focus on his face, and she nodded gravely. “I will. I’ll try. You have to help me, Jimmy Joe.” He nodded, and she took his hand and held it in both of hers. “We didn’t have much time to practice this, did we? We barely had time to get to know each other.”
“We still got time,” he said, his voice husky. But she shook her head.
“I didn’t tell you-I had two contractions while you were out there. Two. Jimmy Joe. Hard ones. It seems like there’s hardly any time between them. I just feel like one big raw nerve.” She said the last words with a kind of breathy desperation, then paused as for a moment or two she struggled to regain control. She cleared her throat and continued in a low voice, clinging to his hand. “So, I guess it’s getting serious. Isn’t it?”
There had been a couple of other times in his life when he’d wished and prayed for something to be different from the way it was, and he’d never wished or prayed any harder than he was doing right now. But he knew from past experience that in the end all a person could do was accept what was. So he nodded and said, “Yeah, it is.”
And now she did smile, a little crookedly, with her head tilted to one side. “So, it’s true? You’ve never done this before, either?”
He ducked his head and made a rueful clicking sound with his tongue. “It’s the truth. Missed the big event completely.” Lifting his eyes back to hers, he forced himself to smile. “So I guess I’m as much a novice as you are.”