Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(104)
Panicked, she struggles futilely to free herself from the strong hands that hold her face submerged.
Drowning…I’m drowning…Mon Dieu…Mon Dieu…
Climbing the stairway to her second-floor apartment, Lucy Walsh Cavalon—who not so long ago regularly ran the New York Marathon—is pretty sure she’s about to collapse from sheer exhaustion.
“Stay strong, Lucy—stay strong!” her father used to shout from the sidelines when she was on the middle school track team.
Stay strong, she’s been telling herself for the last twenty minutes. Stay strong.
But her fatigue isn’t due to running—or even walking, really, despite the five blocks she briskly covered from her office to Grand Central and three more blocks from the train station home.
No, what did her in was standing on her feet in the aisle on an overheated train for the duration of the forty-minute commute from midtown Manhattan to Westchester County.
It’s a Wednesday—matinee day on Broadway, when the Metro North trains are always crowded with the usual commuters plus chatty suburbanites clutching theater Playbills. Lucy can always find a seat anyway, if she leaves the office with enough time to spare.
Being super-organized, that’s something she manages to do most nights without any problem.
But this was one of those frustrating days when nothing was within her realm of control: the phone kept ringing and e-mail kept popping up and she was running late. With Valentine’s Day this week, there were even more matinee-goers than usual—mostly couples—so the train was standing room only. And no one, not even the retirees who can usually be counted on for more gentlemanly behavior than their thirty-and forty-something counterparts, offered to give up a seat for Lucy.
It’s not as though she’s showing yet, but even so…
You’d think someone would have noticed that I was on the verge of keeling over.
Then again, if anyone knows better than to count on the kindness of strangers, it’s Lucy. You have to take care of yourself out there, because nobody else will.
The thing is, I’m not just trying to take care of myself. I have a baby to protect now. Again.
Please, God, let this baby be born. Please…
She crosses herself and says a quick prayer.
Ever since a pregnancy test confirmed the new life she’s carrying, she’s felt terrifyingly fragile—not that she’d confess that to anyone, even her husband. Jeremy is worried enough for both of them. She reassures him every chance she gets.
Yet it’s unsettling for a woman who’s always prided herself on being in control to accept that she’ll largely be at the mercy of fate for the next eight months or so.
She’s afraid to even tell anyone about the pregnancy this time. Her mother, her brother, her in-laws—that’s it. Even Jackie, Lucy’s closest friend, doesn’t know yet—though she’ll be one of the first Lucy will want to tell when she feels more comfortable sharing the news.
Aching and yawning, she trudges up the last few steps, wishing she could just crawl into bed and not set the alarm.
Maybe she really should, as her husband keeps urging, consider taking a leave of absence from her job as a network administrator for a Fortune 500 company. Between the stressful commute, dealing with the crowded daily chaos in Manhattan and the regular pressures of Corporate America…
“But we count on my salary,” she points out whenever Jeremy starts down that road.
“We can get by on mine.”
Not really. He’s a youth counselor at a group home in the Bronx. Overworked, underpaid.
“Or we can borrow money from my parents if we need to,” he suggests.
Maybe, but Lucy’s in-laws aren’t exactly rolling in dough. While the Cavalons won a sizable damages settlement years ago, what isn’t being held in trust for Renny was lost in a series of bad investments, or used for living expenses back when Brett was forced into early retirement from his nautical engineering job.
“Let’s just see how it goes,” Lucy keeps telling Jeremy. “Plenty of women work through pregnancy with no problem. And it’s not like I’m slaving away in a factory or something. All I do is sit at a desk…”
…for eight hours a day troubleshooting with frustrated employees whose computer systems aren’t working the way they’re supposed to…
Still, she’s really good at what she does, makes decent money with good medical benefits, her job is stable, and she generally works a regular forty-hour week. Things could be worse.
Much worse.
I just have to stick it out until maternity leave.
Please, God, let me get to that point this time.
Statistically, the odds are stacked against her carrying a baby to term after multiple miscarriages. Still, at twenty-nine, she’s relatively young, and her obstetrician failed to find evidence of a physical problem. He assured her there’s no reason to think that anything she’d done—or hadn’t done—during the prior pregnancies might have caused her to lose them.
That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be extra-careful this time around.
Thank goodness for the long President’s Day weekend ahead. Her old, hyper-industrious, non-pregnant self would have seized the opportunity to take a trip, or get things done around the house. But aside from attending Sunday mass, all she plans on doing from Friday night until Tuesday morning is sleeping. She’s pretty sure Jeremy won’t mind. It’ll give him a break from constantly telling her to sit down and take a break.