Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(2)

If Jeff ever left . . .

Don’t even think about that.

She’s loved him from the moment they met. He’s solid, stable, practical, reliable—everything she’d hoped for in a husband. Everything she never had, growing up with an eccentric mother and an absent father.

So she can’t share everything with him. So what?

Everyone has secrets. Some more profound than others.

Their baby’s gender has been an amusing secret for her to keep, considering how her husband has already bought a miniature Tampa Bay Buccaneers jersey for his “son,” whom he plans to call Robert.

They haven’t discussed girl names, and “Robert” is clearly out, so that little detail will have to be left until the last minute, which is a little frustrating.

Far more frustrating is the fact that Stephanie can’t ever choose which information she receives.

It would have been most helpful if she knew that her water was going to break last night, a full month before her due date, in the middle of a crowded aisle at Publix.

She wasn’t supposed to go into labor until mid-May. Which is why her mother was going to bring a bouquet of freshly picked lilies of the valley with her on the plane down from western New York.

But everything went wrong.

The baby is coming early, and the lilies of the valley aren’t yet in bloom back home, and God knows you can’t find them anywhere in Tampa on a moment’s notice, even if you know what you’re looking for, which Jeff apparently didn’t, and— “Oh, no!” Stephanie cries out as another wave of brutal pain radiates through her swollen body.

There’s a flurry of activity around the foot of the bed.

The next thing she knows, Jeff and her mother have changed their “breathe” mantra to “push,” counting their way to ten relentlessly every time they say it.

“Steph! Steph, he’s here!” she hears Jeff announce as if from a great distance.

Then . . . “Wait a minute . . . He’s a girl!”

She’s vaguely conscious of laughter, of residual pain, of a baby’s first cries. Her baby’s first cries.

As she drifts off to blessed pain-free oblivion, she remembers something she heard back home in Lily Dale, years ago.

We cry coming into the world, as everyone around us laughs with joy. And we laugh with joy leaving the world, when everyone around us cries.

Stephanie is too out of it, and Jeff too wrapped up in his newborn daughter, for either of them to hear the quiet, meaningful exchange between Odelia and the midwife.

“There was a membrane over the baby’s face, Odelia. Did you see?”

“A caul. Yes, I saw.”

“You didn’t look surprised.”

“No. My mother said she was born with a caul, and so was I.”

“What about Stephanie?”

“I had her in a hospital. I was unconscious. They gave you drugs back then. So I didn’t see her.”

“You do know what it means?”

“Yes,” Odelia says thoughtfully, gazing over at the newborn child, snuggled in her unsuspecting father’s embrace. “I know exactly what it means. But he doesn’t. And if Stephanie has her way, I doubt my granddaughter ever will, either.”





ONE

The Present

Here are the random thoughts that run through Calla Delaney’s numb brain as she stands tearfully at her mother’s burial service, flanked by her father and grandmother:

What if I faint?

What if I throw up?

What if I lose it and start screaming or crying hysterically and they have to carry me away?

Oh, and What is Kevin doing here?

She can feel him here, even if she can’t see him. But he’s not over there to the left with his parents and his younger sister, Lisa, who happens to be Calla’s best bud since kindergarten. Lisa grabbed her hand and squeezed it, hard, as Calla passed by on her way from the limo, numbly following the white coffin toward the gaping black hole waiting to swallow it.

Yes, loyal Lisa is here, crying her heart out in a stylish black dress with spaghetti straps, a wide-brimmed black straw hat, and spectator pumps. Even in mourning, she looks as though she just stepped off a mannequin’s platform at Neiman Marcus.

Kevin, Calla senses, is somewhere toward the back of the crowd of mourners, symbolically banished from the front lines now that he and Calla are no longer a couple.

It’s been over three months since he dumped her. When he did, Calla was positive that it was the worst thing that would ever happen to her, knew without a doubt that she had reached the rock-bottom depths of agony.

She was wrong.

God, she was so, so wrong.

“And so the soul of Stephanie Delaney is released from the body, and the body shall now be committed to the earth. . . .”

The minister—who is he, anyway?—sways back and forth as he speaks, sweat streaming over his fat red face, an open book in his hands.

Which book? Is it the Bible? A prayer book? An all-purpose funeral guide?

Calla wouldn’t know. She and her parents don’t go to church. It’s not something she ever really thought much about, and definitely never with any measure of regret.

Never until now, anyway.

Now, she thinks of Lisa’s—and Kevin’s—Southern Baptist family. Lisa prays for everything from her grandfather being cured of cancer to David Connor finally asking her out. Neither of those things has happened yet, but Lisa hasn’t given up. She just keeps on praying, certain that God will grant her wishes.