9.19pm
The apartment is dark. The apartment is empty. I call her name cautiously and hear no reply. I switch on the hall light and go down to her room but I slip and land on my ass halfway down. Quinn, or someone, has spilt something on the floor and not cleaned it up. It’s wet and a little sticky. It’s not water. It smells odd. I get up and wipe my hands on my pants.
Quinn is not in the bedroom. Something else is missing. The emergency bag has gone. The bag we take to the hospital. A sudden sinking feeling is forming in my belly, a sudden fear. All of the pieces have fallen into place. How long has she been gone?
And then another thought intrudes. I see her delivering our boy and I’m starting to imagine the same thing happening again. She’s coming too early. This is happening again. Quinn had said: I deserve this, I do. I ruined us. Now I understand how that feels. Because now she delivering, or has already delivered, and I’ve missed it because I’ve just screwed up the best thing that has ever happened to me and I’m only just starting to get it through my thick skull.
I take a deep breath and call Jen, Quinn’s backup person.
“Hello?”
“It’s Judd. Is Quinn okay? What’s happening?”
“Just a minute,” she says, and it sounds like she’s walking somewhere.
“Where are you?” she asks me, and I’m feeling a little deja-vu.
“At home.”
“You’d better get down here fast. She’s close.”
“Tell her to hold on.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Judd. Your daughter is coming and she’s not going to wait for anyone.”
The line goes dead and I’m left standing there, shaking, excited and intensely afraid all at once. I call another number, someone I did not expect that I would call ever again.
“Judd?” says Wade on the other end.
“Quinn’s in labour,” I tell him. “I’m freaking out. I can’t drive like this. Come and get me.”
“Sure. Where are you?”
“Out the front of my apartment.”
“Look,” he says, “about the other day...”
“Tell me on the way. Just hurry.”
“I’ll be right over.”
I hang up and start to the elevator, but something on the kitchen bench catches my eye. The yellow envelope sits there mocking me, telling me that it will be forever between Quinn and me, lurking in the shadows.
I pick it up and try to place it where it belongs again when I see that it’s open. I pull out the document and turn through the pages, one by one. I find my signature. It’s written in faded, angry letters. There used to be a blank line next to it but it’s not blank anymore. Quinn’s flowing name is there. If I could analyse writing, which I can’t, I might say that hers holds no anger. Only regret.
“Crap,” I say. Now I know that she knows where I have been. Now I know that she has seen the final death of us, right on the verge of the new life coming between us.
Now I see her name there, I realise just how final everything seems, how tenuous, how brief. Things are born and they die in an instant. We can’t change that. We can try and hold onto things with all of our strength but in the end they just slip through the narrow gaps between our fingers. Nothing lasts.
But I don’t believe that. I guess I finally believe in love and hope and forever. I can’t let her go. Not now. Not ever.
Wade is only a few minutes. He’s driving one of his fast little cars that can barely fit two, let alone three. But it has to, because Chloe is in the passenger seat. I climb in behind them.
“Chloe,” I say. “What are you doing here?”
“You don’t think I’m going to miss this, do you?”
“I guess not. It’s just last time I saw Wade he was in a motel room.”
“Not anymore,” Wade says. “You’ve missed a lot in the last twenty four hours.”
“Apparently so.”
“Tell him,” she says to Wade.
“Okay. Look. Yesterday. In the room...” He winds down the window and swears, swerves the car.
“Just get us there in one piece,” Chloe says. She clutches her stomach. “Your driving is making me queasy,” she tells him.
Wade looks over at his wife and then briefly back to me. “There’s something you should know, before you go in there,” he tells me. His eyes are firmly on the road, like they are avoiding mine.
“Wade, this isn’t the time,” Chloe says to him sharply.
“This is the time,” Wade shoots back.
“What the hell are you two talking about,” I ask them.
“It’s nothing,” says Chloe, who then turns her attention to Wade. “He doesn’t need to be distracted in there. He needs to focus on Quinn and the baby.
“You’re right,” he says. “Sorry. Where was I?”
“Yesterday,” I remind him, “in the room...”
“Right… Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen. Quinn and I are history. She came over to give me something.”
“The box.”
“The box? Yeah, the box. And about that... It’s not what you think it is.”
“I think it’s for her to remember her time with you, where she went wrong, that’s all. Just to remember.”
“Oh… Okay… Then it is what you think it is. Anyway she gave it to me. She told me that she needs to give it up, give me up totally, before she can be completely with you. You get that right?”
“Actually I do. What did you do with it?”
“He showed it to me,” Chloe said. “And he came clean. He told me the whole story from start to finish, even the bits he left out before. He told me even though I might hate him, even though it might hurt me. It was a brave thing, and something I’d have never thought he’d do. But he did. And we destroyed it together and he let Quinn go too.”
“And you’ve made up then?” I ask her.
“We’re starting to. I think I can trust him again. But can I say something?”
“Sure.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you. I don’t think you deserved it, not all of that. If I’d have known you then, then I would have been a friend to you.”
“Thanks.”
“So, about Quinn. You’re going to forgive her for the box, now you know the truth?”
“Yeah. But there is another complication. She might not forgive me.”
“What did you do?” Wade asks.
“She might think that I slept with Penny again.”
“What? Why would she think that?”
“She rang me. I think it was her. I guess, thinking about the timeline, she was telling me that she was in labour. Anyway Penny answered.”
Wade starts to laugh. “Damn,” he says. “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”
10.35pm
I enter the labour room like I did months ago when she was bleeding: bursting in without introduction, full of fear and pain. There are only two people in the room: my wife and Jen. Both of them look tired. Quinn is in a simple nightdress. She has her hair tied up. Her face is red and sweaty, like she’s just run a couple of miles flat out.
“You called him?” Quinn says to Jen accusingly.
“No,” she says back. “He called me. There’s a difference.”
I step up to her, but she doesn’t reach up to me. She doesn’t look at me. The wall has come back up between us and that is the hardest thing to see. “It wasn’t hard to work out what happened,” I say. “And Jen is your second choice.”
“Congrats Sherlock,” Quinn says sarcastically. “Now...what do you want?”
“I came to see you.”
“I’m a little busy at the moment if you haven’t noticed.”
“Yes,” I say with a slight smile. “So I see. I’ve come for that too.”
“I don’t need you. I’ve got Jen.”
Jen steps away, looks down at my wife with bloodshot eyes. “But you don’t have Jen,” she says. “Jen has been here for hours. Jen is exhausted. Jen needs to eat. Je
n needs a cigarette.”
“You don’t smoke,” Quinn points out.
“Jen does. At times like this, Jen smokes. Look you two, talk to each other for god’s sake. I mean, I don’t know if you realise this, but you two are about to have a baby, like real soon.”
Quinn reaches out to her friend. “I need you.”
“You have Judd. He’s done the classes. I’ve done like one.”
“But I don’t want him.”
“Well, that’s too bad, isn’t it? You two chose to start this, and you’re going to finish it together.”
Jen turns to me. I can feel the terror starting to build. My heart is beating fast and hard. My mouth is dry. “She was nine centimetres an hour ago when they checked,” Jen says. “I guess they’ll be along soon to check again. The contractions are coming every three minutes, so... you have about two minutes and change to talk. After that she won’t hear a word you say.”
“Wait,” I say to Jen, who’s almost out the door. “Who have you called? Who knows what’s going on?”
“Everyone,” Jen says, and vanishes from the room.
Then I look down at my wife. “Quinn, look at me.”
“I can’t look at you,” she says. “I’m too angry.”
“I need to know that you’re hearing me.”
“Fine.” She does. Her eyes are red and hard. Her lips are tight together.
“I spoke with Wade.”
“Great,” she says sharply.
“He told me that you gave him the box. That’s what you were doing in his hotel room. He also told me that you two didn’t sleep together.”
“You should have known that.”
“I know. And I didn’t trust you, and I’m sorry.”
“Well, that’s the way we are now. You don’t trust me, I don’t trust you.”
“The thing is,” I say, “I know why you had that box. I know that it was only memories of where