Awakening (Lily Dale #1) by Wendy Corsi Staub
PROLOGUE
Seventeen years ago
“Breathe, Stephanie. And focus on the lilacs, like they taught you in class. Come on . . .”
“They’re . . . not . . . freaking . . . lilacs . . . Jeff,” Stephanie pants to her husband, straining forward with the exertion. “They’re . . . lilies.”
Calla lilies, to be precise, but she’s in too much pain to utter an extra word. And if she had enough energy to get one more out, it sure wouldn’t be “calla.”
No, it wouldn’t be pretty.
“Are you sure?” Jeff is asking above her.
If she had the strength, she would probably reach out and jab him. Hard. This whole baby thing is his fault. If it weren’t for him— “Stephanie, sweetheart, don’t forget to breathe.”
It takes a moment for Stephanie to recognize the new voice, coming from somewhere near the bed. Odelia Lauder isn’t prone to quiet, soothing inflection.
Stephanie’s mother is more likely to jabber on and on in her usual excitable, opinionated way . . . unless she’s giving a reading.
She’s always quiet and soothing toward the strangers who come to her door day after day.
“Breathe, Stephanie. Breathe.”
They don’t always get along—all right, they rarely do— but Stephanie’s glad she’s here. Purely for her mother’s sake, of course, she tells herself—Odelia would have been upset if she missed the chance to welcome her first grandchild.
But you need her here, too. You’re in pain and you’re afraid and you’ve already gone through hell—and she’s the only one who knows about that. Just her and—
A tremendous contraction nearly tears her in two. Oh, God. . . .
She might be twenty-three years old, but she desperately needs her mommy. Needs to see her. She strains to get a glimpse of the familiar face.
“Mom!” she exclaims as her mother comes into view at last.
For God’s sake, Mom, blue eye shadow?
That’s what she wants to say, but she doesn’t. Mostly because she can’t.
All she can manage is, “When—?” before she’s forced to break off, unable to push another word past the pain.
“I caught the first flight out of Buffalo this morning, and I had to change planes in Charlotte, and . . .”
Mom rambles on about her spur-of-the-moment trip to Florida, oblivious to the fact that another brutal contraction is sweeping in, until Stephanie screams in agony.
Then she says, again, calmly, “Breathe, Stephanie.”
“Dammit! I’m . . . breathing . . . ,” she bites out as the midwife bustles at the foot of the bed.
“Not the right way,” Jeff reminds her. He gives an example of the rhythmic panting they learned in a childbirth prep class a few months ago.
So now she can’t even breathe right?
Well, they’re the wrong damned lilies. So there!
She’d say that aloud, but her abdomen is currently being crushed in an invisible vise.
They were supposed to be lilies of the valley, dammit!
She craves the delicate white blooms that grow wild in the woods near Lily Dale every spring; never tires of their heady scent. They have special meaning for her.
But nobody here, not even Mom, knows about that.
Anyway, a vase filled with lilies of the valley was supposed to be her focal point for labor, a technique suggested by the woman who taught the childbirth class at the hospital.
That was back when Jeff was still trying to convince her that a home birth attended by a midwife was dangerous. He couldn’t understand why she was so reluctant to go to a hospital . . . and she couldn’t tell him the truth.
The hospital might require too much information about her . . . past.
When Odelia visited from western New York, she took it upon herself to find a midwife and bring her over to meet Stephanie, all in the space of a day. Ordinarily, Stephanie would have resented her mother’s meddling. This time, she welcomed it.
Jeff was effectively overruled. It would be a home birth.
Still, Stephanie agreed that some of what they learned in the hospital class was useful.
Like the breathing.
And using a visual focal point.
But instead of her chosen lilies of the valley, the bedside table holds a stupid water glass filled with stupid supermarket-bought calla lilies. They were the best Jeff was able to do on short notice.
“They’re white lilies,” he said cluelessly when she told him they were all wrong. “You said white lilies.”
She probably shouldn’t have cursed him out, regardless of her excruciating pain. He was only trying to help, almost as nervous about becoming a father as she is about giving birth—even though she at least knows intuitively that everything will be all right.
She and the baby will both survive, and the baby will be a girl, regardless of the so-called penis the doctor saw on the ultrasound screen back in December.
Stephanie is no doctor, but that was no penis. It was the umbilical cord, or a shadow.
Her baby is a girl.
She knows that with absolute conviction, the way she’s always known certain things.
Odelia doesn’t realize her daughter shares that gift, though. And, of course, Jeff doesn’t know about any of it. There are some facts—hugely important facts—he doesn’t know about her past. And he never will, as far as she’s concerned. He would never understand any of it. Look at Stephanie’s father. He didn’t get it . . . and he couldn’t live with it . . . so he left.