Beneath the Apple Leaves(28)
Lily lowered the skirt quickly and took the sheets from Andrew, placed one under Eveline along with several towels. “I need to wash my hands, Mrs. Kiser. Andrew’ll stay with you for a minute.” She patted the woman’s knee. “It’s going to be all right, you hear me? Just keep breathing like that. In and out when the pain comes.” Lily imitated the technique, her eyes wide with instruction. “Won’t be much longer now.”
Andrew sat next to his aunt and held her hand, her clutched fingers so tight that his knuckles turned white. Her nostrils flared; her eyes stretched in horror. “I’m scared.”
He didn’t know what to say. Every time he opened his mouth, nothing came out, so he just sat there with an unwilling vow of silence and let her squeeze his hand. When the screaming began again, he closed his eyes against the strain, to witness such pain and do nothing nearly unbearable.
Lily returned, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows. “You better go now,” she told him. “But stay close.”
Andrew backed out of the room, headed to the porch and leaned against the wall. The shouting came quicker, lasted longer, stopped and started, over and over again endlessly until the house radiated with one excruciating howl. He slid to the floor and bent his knees to his chest, buried his head and prayed for the woman’s pain to end.
*
Lily cut the cords with the knife and laid one baby boy to Eveline’s chest and then another. Eveline gazed at each child, her features pulled in disbelief. Lily wadded up the bloodied sheets and towels and replaced them with fresh ones. The red and wrinkled babies were tiny, premature by months, but breathing and intact. Lily’s body finally relaxed, though her muscles were shaky and weak from the stress of the last hours.
Warmly, Lily watched the mother with her newborn sons. Mrs. Kiser was entranced with the children in the crook of her arms and Lily ached with the look. “What are you going to name them?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Eveline smiled. She was a beautiful woman, the love shining straight from her skin. “Sure I was having girls. Didn’t even think of any boy names.”
“It’ll come to you.” Lily stood then and took the crumpled sheets with her. She stopped in the doorway to the porch and watched the young man pacing back and forth, from one end all the way to the other end. “They’re boys,” she announced quietly.
His jaw dropped and he wiped his face as if he had just washed it. “Are they okay? Is she okay?”
Lily nodded and curved a finger for him to follow. In the parlor, Eveline glowed with the infants. “Come meet your new cousins.”
Andrew didn’t move, stunned by the tiny infants who hadn’t been here this morning, seemed to have appeared out of thin air. Lily nudged him and he wiped his hand upon his pants. He stepped as if his footsteps might shatter the babies, looking lost. Lily touched her throat as she watched the tall, proud figure kneel next to the couch.
Eveline tilted one side of her body to her nephew. “Go ahead and hold him.”
Andrew rose. “I better not.”
“He won’t break,” Eveline coaxed. “They’re sturdier than you think.”
Andrew’s chin lowered and he shook his head only once, the glance resting on his missing arm. “Just better if I don’t.”
“Sit,” she ordered, the tone still peaceful.
Andrew obeyed and knelt again, let Eveline place one of the babies into the curve of his arm. The terror left. His lips parted, his features melting in sweet wonderment. “I’ve never held a baby before,” he admitted, his voice daunted. “How did you—” He couldn’t put words to the emotions. “It’s like a miracle.”
Lily removed herself from the room, the young man’s sensitivity touching the sore places within her. In the kitchen, she threw away the soiled sheets and towels, washed and scrubbed her bloodstained hands. For a moment, she did not recognize the kitchen she had so often investigated during those years of dormancy. The curtains and flowers and clean counters and working stove sprouted in the space like the first signs of life on a desert plain. The Kisers had only been here for a few days and yet the old, rotted smell was already replaced with the scents of coffee, summer air and burning wood. She dried her hands with the clean towel, a longing relaxing deeply into her belly. There was life here now. New life and growing life. She touched the small vase of wild white roses, smelled the deep aroma within their folds.
“For the record,” came the deep voice behind her, “you can throw apples at me anytime you want.”
She folded the towel and smiled at the young man, suddenly taller and larger than he appeared before. He came toward her and for the first time she noticed the radiant blue eyes. A thump, nearly a knock, jolted her heart and she tapped on her chest to quell the sensation.
“How did you know what to do?” he asked, the eyes highlighted sapphire by the bright light streaming through the windows, the pupils stranded in awe.
The ache seized again. She wouldn’t tell him that she was seven years old the first time she helped her sister deliver a stillborn. “Just something you pick up, I guess. Being a woman and all.”
For a long moment, the man’s gentle face turned and stared unfocused across the room, forlorn and intense. “I don’t know what I would have done if you weren’t here.” He faced her then, the awe and qualm growing. He stared so long that she needed to shift under his gaze.