Chapter 23 #2
The petulant Cassie began to rear her head more fiercely.
She wanted to hurt Red because she was hurting, and it didn’t seem fair that she had to hurt alone.
She wanted to scream at him and loathe all men through him, because he could never have a child, but he could make a child grow inside a woman and then leave her to die alone.
She even daydreamed of taking a swing at him several times. The China Doll controlled all those ugly impulses, though, kept them tucked inside, free to rage in her imagination without harming the man who was her only grasp on life.
Suddenly, the pains changed. She felt as if she were caught up in the center of a tornado.
The whipping winds whirled around her, but she herself was spared their violence for an instant.
Then weight, like the entire mountain over her head, pressed down on her belly, crushing her, crushing her baby.
She wanted to cry out because of the unfairness of their home caving in on her after she’d been through so much.
Red’s voice reached her, warring with the terror in her mind, offering words of calm assurance.
Red sat beside her on the bed. He prayed over her as he wiped sweat from her brow. He calmed her as the mountain receded and her bedroom took shape. He moved away from her, and she wanted to cling to him.
“It’s coming, Cass, honey. The baby’s coming.
I see the head. It’s almost time. It’s almost over.
” He kept talking, kept calling on God to be with them, to give them strength sufficient to the task they faced.
The words eased the rest of the weight from her, even as the agonizing pressure returned.
But the mountain didn’t cave in again. Red’s words kept the roof from falling.
Strength sufficient for the task. That’s all she needed.
She asked for that herself, speaking the words out loud.
She didn’t need to take on the whole world…
or even face the next twenty-four hours that it would take for the baby to be born.
She only needed to survive the very instant she was living in.
She asked for the baby to live even if she gave up her own life, as seemed inevitable now.
The pressure intensified, then relented enough for her to take a breath, then came surging back.
Red shouted just as the strain on her body became unendurable.
And in an instant, she went from agony to relief.
And Red laughed out loud, and something dark lifted away from Cassie’s mind, far enough that she heard a quavering noise.
The noise, that tiny cry gripped her heart and held on so tightly, it would never let her go, and she would never want it to.
Her eyes darted toward the noise. Red stood with a writhing, noisy, messy creature in his hands.
She was so exhausted that she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing.
Reality tried to force its way past her confused, exhausted mind as a tigress awoke in her at the sound of her unhappy child, but for a long minute, she couldn’t make that squalling, white-and-red bundle in Red’s arms be the baby she knew she’d just borne.
Then Red pulled a soft blanket around the little form.
He sat on the bed beside her on her left and held the bundle in the crook of his left arm.
He leaned close until the noisy infant would have rested across her chest if he’d put it down.
He tilted the baby so she could see its face, and the wild confusion that was fogging her mind cleared and the baby was real to her at last.
Red laughed and drew her attention briefly away from the child, the extension of herself.
Red was a mess. A joyful mess. His hair was wild as if he’d run his hands through it a thousand times in the few minutes since her pains had started.
His brown shirt was wet and tinged pink all across the front.
His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows as he liked to wear them when he did his woodwork in the evening.
She forgot about his being a mess when she looked in his eyes. He was looking at the baby, and for a moment, Cassie beheld the eyes of a man who had witnessed a miracle. She drank in the wisdom and purity of what she saw in Red and absorbed his joy into her soul.
After a bare second studying him, she looked back at her baby with a renewed strength of her own. All she could see was a tiny, wrinkled face. Red had the blanket she’d knitted wrapped snugly around the squirming infant, even over its hair.
The baby howled with its eyes shut tight and its mouth wide open.
The child’s whole body shook from the force of the cries.
Suddenly, five tiny fingers poked up from the blanket.
Cassie was awestruck by the miniature perfection of her baby.
One of Red’s big work-callused hands reached between Cassie and the baby, and he touched the wee fingers with one of his own, lifting and caressing gently.
The baby grasped Red’s index finger. The tiny hand didn’t reach all the way around, but the grip was tight. Each finger bent, grasping firmly. Nails, so little they were barely visible, tipped each finger.
Everything a human being ever had, the baby brought with it into the world in a package so small, it would fit inside a mother’s belly. No wonder Red looked as though he’d seen a miracle. She was witnessing one too.
Red was still smiling. His eyes still blazed with joy. But now a tear streaked its way down his face. Cassie’s whole world tilted dangerously at the sight of the single tear. She wasn’t aware of moving, but her hand touched Red’s face and wiped the tear away.
Something solid stretched between them as their eyes locked.
More than an emotion, more than a shared memory, it was a connection so tangible that it could have been built from stone.
Whatever it was, it wrapped around her just as the baby’s cry had, entwining with her heart so deeply that it could never be undone.