The fog that had surrounded them on waking had blown off by noon the next day and Brenna and Molly were on their way to the rest home with a fresh arrangement of tulips, lilacs and pink roses. Brenna had remembered Jared’s family soon after she awoke and then had attempted to push the memory of them to the back of her mind. There was nothing she could do...everyone had their turn with grief and pain, but this was not hers and she couldn’t afford to worry about it. Her emotions were precarious enough right now.
Molly buried her face in the flowers. “These smell so wonderful. I'll have to take some home with me.”
“Take whatever you want, there’s sure enough to go around.”
Brenna had pulled her hair back with her favorite combs and put on a brightly-flowered dress, as if cheerful clothing was a shield against misfortune. Molly had just thrown her overalls on with a t-shirt and seemed to be in her usual high spirits.
They stopped in at the rest home to see Helena first.
“Hi, how’s Helena today?”
“She’s doing well. I’m sure she’ll be glad to have visitors.”
They found her in front of her window, this time with a soft rose shawl over her shoulders.
“Oh, I am so glad you could visit. Are those flowers from my yard?”
Brenna smiled. “Yes, they are. This is my friend, Molly, from Portland. Molly, this is Helena Montgomery.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Molly.
“Oh, likewise, dear.” Helena looked out the window and her eyes drooped for a minute. Brenna thought she was falling asleep and moved toward the door when Helena started and said, “Now, where was I? Oh, yes. I don’t get around so well these days, you know. I’ll have to ask you to take down all the curtains and wash them and wash the windows also. Martin does appreciate a clean house. I’m just going to rest in the rocker here for a spell, and then I’ll work on polishing the silver.”
“That sounds just fine, Helena,” Brenna said, and she ushered Molly from the room. “Sometimes she knows me, but even so, she falls really quickly into the past. I just go along with it and bow out fast.”
“Too bad, she seems like a sweetie.” Molly took a last glance back at her, alone in front of her window.
“Yeah, she is.” They climbed into the Blazer and sped north on the highway.
Brenna turned up the stereo and rolled down her window. The trees between the beach and the highway gradually thinned until they vanished. Here and there they noticed beautiful beach houses with expansive windows.
“Now, I’ll take one of those!” Molly told her.
Brenna smiled. “In your dreams.”
They spent the afternoon walking the streets of Port Evan, looking at Victorian homes and in all the shops. Molly was thrilled to find a store selling home-made candy and bought two pounds of fudge. When the air began to take on a chill, they ordered take-out hamburgers and left for home.
That evening, Brenna closed the windows as the evening grew more cold and damp.
“I love this fireplace,” Brenna said complacently. “I don’t care if they do pull heated air from the room. It still keeps me warm and provides an atmosphere that a wood stove just can’t.” She looked up at her new painting. “You know, other than being kind of lonely sometimes, I am really happy here. Yesterday excepted, of course.” She walked through into the kitchen to let the cats in and closed the back door.
“Molly, want some cocoa?” she called.
“Is it your homemade kind?”
“Nothing but the best for you, dear!”
Molly laughed, “Yes, please, I’ve been having cocoa withdrawal since you moved.” She curled up on the couch and looked out the bay window at the sunset coloring the sky in shades of rose and lavender.
Brenna poured the cocoa into china mugs trimmed with roses and carried them carefully into the parlor.
Handing a hot mug to Molly, she sat down in her rocker and pulled her feet up under her. She carefully held onto her cocoa while Olivia hopped into her lap.
“Oh, Brenna, I think you had the right idea. It is so restful to come up here. I mean even if we’re busy doing things, there’s just a different quality of life. One thing concerns me, though. There don't seem to be a lot of guys out here. Adam's cute, is he single?"
Brenna nodded.
"Then again, he seems awfully serious. But I guess 911 calls are serious. Hmm. How do you know he's single anyway?"
"Wendy at the coffee shop told me. I think she was trying to set us up. You know I don't want to date anymore, not for awhile anyway. It’s just not worth it. I mean, either you know you’re supposed to be with someone or you don’t. He didn't seem interested anyway."
“It’s not always so black and white. And besides, don’t you miss sex?”
Brenna laughed. “You’ve gotta remember, you and I are very different.” She paused and changed the subject. “Molls... I’ve been having the weirdest dreams lately. Not just the usual ones, I still have those too, but I seem to have had three dreams about the same person. It's as if I am the woman in the dream, except that it's not me, it's someone else. The dreams all center around the woman being pregnant and losing her baby.”
Molly considered what she’d heard while blowing on her steaming cocoa. “Off the top of my head, could they be triggered by leaving the NICU and moving to a new place? Maybe it’s your unconscious trying to reconcile everything you’ve gone through lately.”
Brenna thought about it for a minute. “I suppose...the woman's inability to have more children could represent my break with nursing...her loss of the baby could be the loss I’ve felt through the years. I don’t know though, it just seems like there’s more to it than that, as if I know her. Although, I suppose if she was representing me, I would know her, wouldn’t I?”
“Well, maybe this place will eventually have a healing effect on you. If any place could, it’s here. Or the Bahamas of course, but then I wouldn’t get any cocoa!”
Brenna went to bed earlier than usual, tired from all the walking they had done. Tucking her blankets in snugly around herself, she looked around her at the pretty room with its warm pink walls, then turned off the bedside lamp.
She stood in the operating room checking the equipment on three radiant warmers that would keep the babies warm after delivery. Three. Why three? She checked the mother’s chart on the circulator’s table. Triplets, that’s why. Where were the other NICU nurses and the pediatricians? There should be a team for each baby. She shivered in the cool OR and checked the blood type, A+, good. Looking at the name on the chart, she gasped. Molly! It couldn’t be her Molly. Surely there were other...the OR door swung open as a crew wheeled Molly in with tears streaming down her face. “Brenna, Brenna! They’re too early! Please, you’ve got to help them! Please, Bren...” The labor nurse tried to comfort and calm her.
Brenna called back to the nursery to check on the other teams, but the phone just rang and rang. Hanging up, she raced back to the warmers and made sure everything was in order as surgery began. Molly continued to cry silently; she had chosen epidural anesthesia instead of a general. If her babies weren’t going to make it, she wanted to see them alive if she could, at least hear them cry once if that was all she would ever hear from them. Brenna told herself, "You’ve got to do this. You can do this..." They handed her the first baby, a little squall issuing from his lungs. She popped him into the warmer and dried him off, careful with his fragile skin, but trying to provide stimulation. He continued to cry weakly as they called her to take the second baby. She put her in the warmer beside her brother. She was blue and stimulation didn’t help. She grabbed the bag and had only gotten a few puffs in when they called her for the last baby. Molly was sobbing as she looked over at her tiny babies, and the anesthesiologist put medication in her IV to calm her. The last baby, another boy, cried and stopped breathing. Brenna gave him a couple puffs and looking at his brother, saw he was no longer breathing. Sweat rolled down her back as she gave the first boy some ventilation. They wer
e just too early, their lungs were shutting down...”I need some help here!” The babies, all well under two pounds, lay next to each other in one warmer and turned varying shades of gray and blue. She tried to give each a few puffs at a time...she didn’t even have time to check heart rates. There probably weren’t any anyway. “I need to intubate! Get me some surfactant!” But the surgeons continued to calmly finish the surgery as Molly fell asleep from the medication. Desperately, Brenna quickly stuck the floppy little bodies into a warm transporter and ran, pushing it to the NICU. She never realized the hallway was so long...and so deserted. She ran and ran, unnoticed tears rolling down her cheeks...the cats bounded down the hall toward her and jumped on her, trying to climb her legs. “Not now!” she yelled but they persisted...
Olivia kept pushing her nose into Brenna’s eyes, trying to lick the tears away, waking her in the process. She wiped her face, but continued to cry. “Oh God, I’m so tired...so tired of all this." She pulled her kitty close and cried herself back to sleep.
Chapter 10