Chapter 14 #2
“I guess I can see the monkey resemblance, but their cheeks are so perfect and their little mouths are just adorable.” Their eyes were scrunched up, and she couldn’t really see the rest of their bodies, because they had them wrapped in towels or maybe a special blanket, but they looked like kitchen towels.
“All right, I can do this,” Becky said. She tried to figure out the best way and decided that she was most comfortable with the head in her left arm for some reason.
Maybe that was so that her right arm would be there to catch it if she dropped it.
That didn’t sound like the best reason, but she just kept that information to herself.
Surely she wasn’t going to drop the baby.
She put her arm underneath the head and awkwardly managed to get baby Marley into the crook of her elbow.
There was a rocking chair right beside the bassinet, and she thought that she would probably have less chance of dropping her if she sat down, so she carefully scooted around the front of the rocking chair and sank into its depths.
Now she wasn’t going to move for a very long time. Preferably until the baby was old enough and big enough to crawl on her lap on its own and she wouldn’t have to worry about dropping it.
“All right. You made that look easy.” Rodney studied the child still sitting in the bassinet. “But I think I’ll just leave him there.”
“Really? You’re going to let his sister get all the attention? That is not acceptable.”
She looked up at him, figuring that he needed a little bit of prompting in order to get the nerve up to do what she had just done. Rodney was brave at some things, but she understood that babies were a completely different story.
Rodney pressed his lips together and gave her an annoyed look, like he knew she was right, that he needed to do it, but he didn’t want to.
Still, he shifted around, getting an arm under the baby’s head and pulling Kevin up toward himself.
“All right. I understand why you sat down. I should have moved another rocking chair over beside you to begin with.”
“I’m feeling a little more comfortable. Maybe I can do it.” She got her right arm and put it around her left, just to give the baby more stability, and then she leaned forward, standing up. Presto. She didn’t drop the baby, and she was standing. She felt like she should get applause or something.
“I’d clap, but my hands are full.”
“Thank you. I was wondering where my appreciative audience was. I feel like I deserve a standing ovation.”
“I’m standing anyway,” Rodney joked.
She grinned at him, and he smiled back, and part of her resented the fact that the past had just left, and he hadn’t paid for it at all, but that was what forgiveness was. Her saying she would take the check this time. She had it. She paid for it.
And that’s what she’d done. She paid, and then she was supposed to forget about it. Wasn’t that what Jesus had done for her? He paid, and then it was finished. No one had to pay again, and he didn’t keep rubbing it into her face, making her feel bad that she didn’t pay.
It was over. And that’s what she had to do. Otherwise, the forgiveness that she granted was worthless.
By that time, she’d gone over by the rocking chair that was on the other side of the bassinet and grabbed a hold of the back of it, carefully holding the baby in her left arm.
She slid the rocking chair around the bassinet and got it in position beside hers.
“Wow. That was pretty impressive,” Rodney said.
“I was scared the whole time.”
It was true. She had been, although she’d been lecturing herself too.
And now, grateful that was over, she went back to her chair, positioned herself in front of it, and then sat down carefully, realizing as she did so that she needed to move the baby a bit so she didn’t bump her head on the arm of the chair.
“Watch when you sit down that you don’t bump his head. It’s easy to do. I almost did that time.”
“Thanks for the warning,” he said, getting ready to settle down, putting his left hand underneath the baby’s head. She realized he was holding Kevin in his right arm.
The way they had the chairs positioned, the babies would be “looking” at each other as they sat there.
She was pretty sure that the babies couldn’t recognize each other, since it would have been dark in the womb, and she wasn’t sure the babies’ brains were developed enough for them to actually see anything and know what it was.
“How old are they before they can look at something and recognize it?” she asked.
“You mean they can’t do that right now?” Rodney asked.
“I don’t think so.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “I’d like to Google it right now. I should have been doing this before. But I didn’t realize I was going to want to know all these things. Need to know them.”
“Me either. I guess I knew that we were getting babies, but it didn’t dawn on me how much information I was going to want to know.”
“‘You don’t know what you don’t know,’ right?” she said. It was something that they had said to each other over their teenage years as they found out new things that surprised them.
“That’s right, Beckpet.”
The nickname that he had for her rolled off his tongue almost like it was a habit. Although she knew he hadn’t used it for at least five years.
Her back started to bristle at it. She didn’t want him to use a nickname. He didn’t have permission to be that familiar with her.
But forgiveness.
She forgave. She had to let it go. She couldn’t hold on to the resentment and the ill will.
That didn’t mean she had to use his nickname.
She kept her eyes on the baby in her arms. Praying for her sister. She just wanted to continuously pray for Rita, that things would go well, that they would get all the cancer, that these babies would know their mom all their lives, that Rita would have a long and healthy life.
“Rodney and Becky?” a low, soft female voice said.
They looked up to see a doctor in scrubs with a hairnet on and the face mask pulled down from in front of her mouth.
“That’s us,” Rodney said, moving as though he were going to stand up.
“You can stay seated. I just… I just needed to come talk to you. I was with Rita. Is that your sister?” she said, looking at Becky.
Becky nodded.
“All right. She had you two listed on her consent form as the two people we can share her medical information with.” The doctor closed her eyes and took a breath.
Then, with compassion flowing out of every pore, she opened her eyes and said, “Dr. Melbourne got the babies, and then I took over. We were hoping to remove the cancerous tumor that had wrapped around her intestines. It was intertwined with her liver and pancreas as well. It was much more involved than what we realized. And if you know much about cancer, you know it takes a lot of blood to feed it, and…” She swallowed.
“She bled to death on the operating table. I am sorry that I have to give you this news.”