“It’s obvious.” The woman rifled papers on her desk, looked up, flashed a quick smile. “And you’ll begin courses at MTSU soon?”
“Yes. In a couple of weeks.” She’d made out her class schedule, adjusted her hours at Bellmeade so as to not conflict with her volunteer hours. “But I don’t mind working more hours if you need me.”
Mrs. Trammell smiled. “Good. Maybe we will. Truth is, we’re shorthanded, so I’m thinking of asking you to be a snuggler. What would you think about that?”
And an hour later, Lani found herself gowned and gloved in the dimly lit preemies unit with Delilah, the RN on duty, walking between incubators and the machines keeping alive babies born too soon. Delilah spoke softly. “Snuggling’s a primo job, and a simple one. Usually volunteer grandmothers do it, most are retired nurses from the community, but a couple of them are on vacation and one’s out sick, so we thought we might train some of our current volunteers. And your name came up.”
“I plan to go into pediatrics.”
“Well, this is a good place to start. Simply put, snugglers hold, feed, and rock babies.” She gestured with her chin toward a grouping of wooden rocking chairs clustered in a corner. “Of course, you’ll glove and gown, but the job’s pretty simple. Some of these preemies will be here a long time, and they need to be held and cuddled. Human contact—very important. Incubators are a nice place to sleep, but nothing replaces loving arms. Parents and families normally do this, but sometimes circumstances come along…” She paused beside two incubators holding very frail-looking infants. “These two are crack babies, and their birth mothers walked out right after delivery.”
Lani watched as the babies twitched and trembled from drug withdrawal. The sight of them, knowing they were abandoned, helpless and addicted, took the wind out of her. “What will happen to them?”
“Health and Human Services will take them over once they’re healthy enough to leave. Sometimes the mothers get clean and claim them, but not always.”
Delilah moved on, halted beside another incubator. “This little guy’s closest to being released if he has no further setbacks.”
Lani read the name card…Berke, Gabriel…and her heart did a stutter step. The baby wore a pale blue cotton knit cap with black hair peeking from under the cap’s edges. A cannula in his tiny nose delivered oxygen. “He’s doing better?”
“Oxygen only now because he’s off his feeding tube, and we’re teaching him to suckle from a bottle.”
“Teaching him?” Lani thought babies were born able to nurse.
“His sucking reflex must be retrained. Which is where snugglers come in. His father shows up before and after work each day to feed him, and Dr. Berke stops in often, but a preemie can take a long time getting only a few ounces down. He needs six ounces about every three hours.” Delilah unwrapped Gabriel’s blanket, wound round him like a cocoon, and flicked the bottoms of his feet. “Hey, little boy, wake up. Time to eat.”
The baby’s face puckered as if in protest, but his eyes remained closed. Delilah brought one of the chairs closer, gestured to Lani. “Sit.” When Lani did, the nurse placed him in her arms careful that the oxygen line was unobstructed.
Lani had held several babies on the peds floor, but none this small. She was scared but didn’t want to show it.
Delilah took a bottle from her pocket and pulled the covering off the smallest nipple Lani had ever seen. “Your job is to make sure he drinks all of this formula. When he drifts off, flick the bottoms of his feet to keep him awake. It’s important to help him get through every feeding.”
Lani teased the nipple between Gabriel’s tiny lips, but he turned his head and pushed his fists into the blanket.
“He’s fighting you, but don’t give up. Snuggle him close. Let him feel your warmth. That’s right. Good. He’s calming.” From another part of the room, a baby began to cry. “Whoops. Duty calls. Catch my eye when the bottle’s empty and I’ll come and put him back in his nest.” Delilah started to walk away.
“What about his mother? Doesn’t she come to rock and feed him?”
“She did for a while. Not so much anymore.”
Lani gazed at Gabriel’s sweet face. Dawson’s child…She cuddled him so that his ear lay pressed against the left side of her chest, where he stilled, relaxed, drew in the formula to the steady rhythmic sound he’d heard every moment he’d been growing in the womb, the beat of a human heart. Her heart.
Sloan rattled around the house, drifting through rooms like a ghost. Gabriel had spent five days on a ventilator that had coated his lungs with a surfactant that all healthy lungs needed to aid breathing. Yet he remained in NICU on oxygen twelve days after being born. “Failure to thrive,” Franklin had told her and Dawson. “But he’s learning how to take a bottle and is starting to put on weight. A good sign.” Dawson spent every minute of his free time at the hospital with Gabe. She did not.
Sloan thought back to when she’d gloved up and first touched the baby. Through the glove’s thin membrane, Gabriel’s skin felt warm and incredibly smooth. Franklin had told her, “You can hold him and rock him. That’s why we have rocking chairs. It’s important that he’s held. To bond…you understand?”
“How about it?” Dawson had given her a hopeful look. “He’s light as a feather.”
“Tomorrow.”
The allure of Jarred’s plan to put the band together never ceased replaying inside her head. Especially at night when darkness ruled. She’d slept in the guest room every night since giving birth. “To recover,” she told Dawson, but also to think, to worry, and to wonder about the future and its possibilities. Dawson had broached marriage to her once more, but her heart grabbed and her palms got sweaty when he pressed her. “Still thinking about it.”
In the daylight, her thoughts dwelled on Gabriel, on his coming home. Franklin had promised a helper, a licensed RN, until Sloan felt better able to cope with caring for him. But once the nurse left, what then? Motherhood. The very word terrified Sloan. Texts from LaDonna, who’d somehow learned about the early birth were disturbing, insistent that Sloan and the baby return to the trailer once his hospital stay was over.
“I’m the grandmother. I got rights!” was what she texted or shouted if Sloan answered her cell.
Sloan wondered if that was true. What kind of rights did her mother have? Could she make demands and would her demands be upheld by the law? She knew LaDonna had fought for and won her “rights” before. The memories were fuzzy, but Sloan knew that a lawyer had been involved and then bigger welfare checks had started coming. LaDonna had celebrated her legal victory with a whoop. Sloan cringed. There was no way in hell she could be a part of letting LaDonna get her hands on that baby.
Now alone in the house, Sloan couldn’t turn off her thoughts or her fears. She stared out the oversized kitchen window, at the morning sunlight filtering through the limp leaves of a dogwood tree. She watched a sparrow perch on a branch, but when it caught sight of her through the glass, the brown bird stretched its wings and flitted away. She envied it. How simple. Spread your wings and fly. And in that instant, she made up her mind about what to do.
Sloan hurried upstairs, found her purse, fished Jarred’s card from its hiding place in her wallet, and dialed his number. He answered on the second ring.
“Sloan! How are you? What’s up?”
“Baby’s delivered. He came early.”
Long pause. “Do you want me to come get you?”
“Yes. Now. I’m alone…you should come right away.”
He stuttered a bit, said something over his shoulder, then, “I’m on my way.”
Knowing she had about fifty minutes until Jarred arrived, Sloan grabbed her roller bag from the closet and started packing. Leaving most of the maternity clothes in the closet and dresser drawers, she packed the things she’d brought with her months before and only kept a few of the baby-mama pieces until she could get into hers again.
When she finished, she looked around the roo
m, her gaze flitting from the cozy unmade bed to the sunlit window, and knew that she was leaving a safe haven for the unknown. Franklin and Dawson had kept the bargain they’d made with her, of paying her medical bills and meeting her day-to-day needs. Her conscience pricked and she glanced around for a piece of paper, thinking she should leave a note. What could she possibly say? She blew out a lungful of air, reminded herself that she’d kept her end of the bargain too…she’d had the baby. She left no note. Dawson would figure it out.
Sloan fidgeted for the fifty minutes it took Jarred to arrive, chewing her bottom lip, pacing, staring out the front window. When his car pulled into the driveway, she gave the house, her home for months, one last look. It had been a refuge, a safe haven, but she couldn’t dwell on it. The baby was better off with Dawson and Franklin. They would know how to handle LaDonna. Staying in Windemere, being a wife and mother, was more than she could handle, and LaDonna would never go away as long as Sloan was in the picture.
She descended from the porch. Jarred tossed her things into the backseat, settled her in the front. Once on the Interstate speeding to Nashville, he said, “I’m glad you decided to do this. You won’t be sorry.”
Riding with him in his car after so many months felt awkward. She wasn’t sure of her feelings for him anymore. He was edgy, volatile, and not exactly trustworthy, but he excited her, and always had. Music was the thing that bound them. Feeling like a fleeing prisoner, she said, “I want to sing. This is best for all of us.”
Jarred reached over and cupped her hand in his. “We’re going to be a huge hit, Sloan. I got big plans for the band. I’m changing the name—did I tell you?” He hadn’t. “Yeah…Loose Change. Lots of opportunity for us in Nashville.” He gave her a sideways glance. “Um…is it going to take long for…you to, you know, get your body back in shape?”
She shot him the finger.
He grinned. “Don’t get me wrong, Sloan. You’re still pretty…like always. I’m just thinking about the way you used to look onstage. The fans loved your look. Me too.”
She leaned into the headrest. “Don’t worry, I’ll be ready when the band is.”
“Sure. Right. We’ve just got a lot of work ahead of us. The good part is that you’re on board. You won’t believe where you’ll be living. I mean, Sy’s house is one of those uber-modern places—” He stopped because Sloan wasn’t listening, but instead was staring out the side window. “Hey.” He squeezed her hand. “No matter what happened between us before, I never forgot what we once had. You still my girl?”
She was a hundred miles away from that high school girl he’d once known. “I’m my own girl, Jarred.” She rolled down the window and let the hot wind whip her hair into tangles.
Jarred turned on the radio, blasting the volume until she felt the bass vibrate through the car’s seat. He started singing to the song as the car hit eighty.
CHAPTER 20
“She’s gone.” Dawson stood in the doorway of his father’s hospital office, hands braced on either side of the door frame.
Franklin, stuffing papers in his briefcase, looked up, startled. “Who’s gone?”
“Sloan. She just up and left.”
His eyes widened. “Are you sure?”
“Hell yes, I’m sure! She promised me she would come with me tonight to see Gabriel, but she’s run away.” He’d come home to shower, pick up Sloan, and return to the hospital, but he’d felt the emptiness, the echo of silence the minute he stepped through the doorway. Bounding upstairs, he called her name. No answer. He threw open her bedroom door, saw the closet door opened wide, several hangers stripped of clothing, and the dustless places on her dresser where her cosmetics had lain. The missing guitar case was the final confirmation. At first Dawson had stood, gripping the doorknob, his gaze skimming the room, taking it all in, absorbing the truth, unwilling to truly believe it. Reporting it to Franklin only made him angrier. “She’s gone.”
“Maybe her mother—”
“She hates LaDonna. She’d never go there.”
“Any idea where she might have gone? How she left without a car of her own?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.” He balled his fists.
Franklin flattened his palms on his desk. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry, son.”
“Why would she do that? Run away?” His anger morphed into bewilderment. “Okay…maybe I’m no prize, but Gabriel…he’s just a baby. What mother leaves her baby?”
“A scared one.” Franklin shook his head. “Maybe she’ll return after some time thinking things out.”
“You don’t know Sloan. She won’t be back, and I won’t go looking for her. She doesn’t want us. I don’t want her!”
From the corridor, a voice from the PA requested some doctor to come to the third floor. Franklin straightened items on his desk, then looked to Dawson still in the doorway. “Question is, what are you going to do?”
“What kind of a question is that? I won’t run away. I’m not a quitter like Sloan.”
Franklin hunched, staring down at the mahogany surface. “It won’t be easy—raising a baby on your own.” He looked up. “We’ll talk tonight, at home. Go on to the NICU now.”
Dawson needed no encouragement. He spun on his heel and walked away.
At the neonatal unit, he gowned up, went inside, and let the nurse lift the baby out of the plastic shell and slip the blue blanketed bundle into his arms, careful to not disturb the cannula delivering oxygen. Dawson settled into the rocking chair just as he’d done every day, twice a day, waiting for Gabe to improve. He thought to all the times Sloan had declined to come to the hospital with him. In hindsight, it had been an announcement of her intentions. She had never meant to stay. The only two women he had loved had left him. Cancer had taken his beloved mother. A painful but valid exit. The other? She had deserted him. Bile rose in his throat. Like himself, Gabriel was motherless. Not fair.
He peered down at the sleeping baby, not much bigger than a football. Picking up the bottle of formula the nurse had set beside the incubator, he rubbed the nipple across Gabe’s lips. This time the baby took it without encouragement, a good sign. The little guy was growing stronger, and with health would soon come release from the hospital, and Dawson would take him home. Alone. His heart lurched. How could he do this, raise a child, by himself? Suddenly the nursery walls were closing in and he couldn’t breathe. He’d sometimes felt this way before an important race, but this was no cross-country match. This was a lifetime event.
Gabe’s knit hat slipped back and the soft down of black hair fanned out. The boy’s eyes popped open and stared up at Dawson without blinking. Dawson exhaled, calmed his jitters, and forced himself to settle. He offered a half smile and, in a Darth Vader voice, said, “Gabriel, I am your father.” The baby yawned, closed his eyes. A wave of protectiveness for the infant surged from some deep inner core. He put Gabriel on his shoulder, patted his back, and was rewarded with a tiny burp. “I won’t leave you, Gabriel Berke. I swear to God.” Then he began to rock, as much to soothe himself as his newborn son.
PART II
CHAPTER 21
Lani never much cared for the month of February. The days were often damp with light snow or freezing rain, skies were gray and bleak, the land brown and lifeless, and when the sun shone, its light looked faded and watery. February may be the shortest month of the year, but to her, it was the most dismal. Except for this February. She was on her way to an interview for a job she wanted with all her heart. She certainly needed the job, but her wanting of it transcended her need of it.
As she drove slowly down the tree-lined street in the older, most picturesque section of Windemere, the moneyed section of stately old homes dating back to the late 1800s, her mind returned to the night before and her fight with her boyfriend, Ben Claussen. Sitting in Ben’s car in front of the apartment she shared with her sister, Melody, the car still toasty warm from the heater and the hot breaths of tongue-tangled kisses, she’d t
old him about her interview. Ben had recoiled. “A job interview! You have a job. Dammit, Lani! We hardly see each other now.”
“But this will be a caregiver job, Ben. It’s perfect for me.” She’d put off telling him until the last minute because she knew he’d want to try and argue her out of it.
“Classes, your hospital duty, your current job, your horse, oh, and then Ben.” He ticked off his grievances. “I’m last in line, Lani. Last. You’re first for me.”
“That’s not fair. I told you when we first met how it was going to be. I’m not just on idle here. I want a nursing career.” She was finishing up her second year of nursing credits at MTSU, and Ben, an engineering student, was completing his third year. He had a full scholarship and mostly worked for spending money. He’d been a lifeguard at the community pool the previous summer, where they’d met, and they had been dating ever since. Ben was charming, funny, good-looking, and crazy about her. She liked Ben—she did. It was fun having a boyfriend, but Ben wanted every minute of her free time and all of her attention—more of either than she had to give. She also realized other girls would be standing in line for him, but she could only give what she had to give to being a couple.
“This interview thing sucks, Lani.”
“You know I have to work this summer, and it needs to be a better job than the one I have now.”
“News flash—it’s only February.”
“My boss at the hospital asked me to interview for the job. What was I supposed to say?” She tried to placate Ben. “It’s just an interview. No guarantees I’ll even get a job offer.”
“You’ll get it,” Ben grumbled. “And I’ll stand in the back of your line.”
Now driving down the street watching house numbers go past, she ignored the prick from her conscience about her other reason for wanting the interview. She turned off the engine in front of a large redbrick two-story house fronted by a porch with dark wicker furniture and an expansive plate-glass picture window. She thought the place charming, even in colorless February.