Dance Away with Me(17)

Bianca’s eyes darted frantically around the room, looking for her baby—the baby held forgotten against her father’s chest. She cried out again from the pain. Her gaze found Tess’s. They were barely focused, and yet they spoke.

“I promise,” Tess whispered as Bianca faded into unconsciousness. “I promise.”

Twenty minutes later, Bianca was dead.





Chapter Four




Bianca’s still, bloody body.

North. Frozen like a gravestone.

The baby.

Tess made herself get up from the bedside. She took the baby from him. Swallowed a scream. It was too much. It was all too much. This should never have happened.

But so much in her life shouldn’t have happened, and yet it had.

He moved. Seconds later the front door slammed. She was alone. Alone with a dead woman and a helpless infant.

Moving numbly, she cocooned the baby’s torso in Saran Wrap and then in the piece of blanket North had cut out. She opened her sweatshirt and cradled the tiny body against her skin. Sitting on the couch in the darkened living room, she kept her back to the closed bedroom door where Bianca lay still and cold. Her chatty, self-absorbed friend. The friend she’d been helpless to save. For the first time in her career, Tess had lost a mother, and nothing could ever make that right.

The hours ticked by. She couldn’t scream. Couldn’t cry. Tess’s anger had made this happen. It had seared the placental membrane, boiled Bianca’s blood until it couldn’t coagulate. Tess willed her breath into the frail baby, no bigger than a bird. She’d lost the mother. She couldn’t lose this child.

She counted the seconds between the infant’s breaths, listened for the tiny mews and watched for the faint flutters that indicated she was still alive. Pink light began seeping through the windows. The longest night of her life. She covered the baby’s eyes to protect them.

It was full morning when she heard the chop of a helicopter. The baby’s absent father must have found a way to make a call. Needles and pins shot through her legs as she got up. The baby, nested against her, still breathing on her own. Still alive.

Through the window, she watched the helicopter land in the grassy area between the schoolhouse and the gully that dipped behind it. Where there had only been quiet, there was now commotion. Two medics burst through the unlocked front door. “National Guard, ma’am.”

Tess’s voice croaked from disuse. “The mother’s in the bedroom.”

One of the medics disappeared. The second, barely more than a kid, approached her. Tess knew she looked like a wild woman in her blood-spattered clothes, and she tried to summon the authority of the profession she would never again practice. “I’m a nurse. The baby is about a month premature. She’s breathing on her own, but she needs to get to a hospital. The mother . . .” She could barely speak the words. “An amniotic fluid embolism.” The simplest answer, even if it couldn’t be proven without an autopsy. The scientific answer. But she knew better. Her own anger had done this.

They wheeled Bianca’s lifeless body out on a stretcher. The younger medic approached. “I’ll take the baby.”

“No. You have to take us both.”

She wasn’t the mother, and she expected resistance, but he nodded.

On the helicopter ride, she saw nothing but the baby in the portable Isolette and the covered body across from her. When they reached the hospital, Ian North was nowhere to be seen.

Despite Tess’s gruesome appearance, the head nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit let her stay while they hooked the baby up to a monitor and started an IV. “She’s had a rough beginning,” the nurse said, “but you did everything right, and she’s holding her own.”

Not everything, Tess thought. I lost her mother.

The baby was four pounds and three ounces, a decent weight for a preemie, but the ID band looked like a tire around her ankle. When the baby was safely cocooned in the NICU Isolette, the nurse sent Tess away. “Get cleaned up,” she said gently. “We’re watching her.”

Tess was filthy, exhausted, defeated. She saw Ian North slumped in one of the vinyl chairs in the lounge, his forearms braced on his thighs, head hanging. An abandoned parka lay across the chair next to him. The dried mud crusting his boots and jeans suggested that he’d hiked out of Tempest, which must have been how he’d been able to call for help. She made herself approach him. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was flat, devoid of emotion, uttering the most inadequate apology imaginable.

He looked up at her with dead eyes. She didn’t explain that she couldn’t have saved Bianca. How did she know that was true? No explanation would bring his wife back, and she didn’t deserve absolution.

“Have you talked to the doctor about the baby?” she asked.

The curtest of nods.

“Have you . . . seen her?”

“No.”

“You should see her.”

He snatched up his parka and came to his feet. “You make the medical decisions. I signed the paperwork.” He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket, thrust it at her, and strode to the elevator. “Don’t fuck this up, too.”

*

The elevator doors slid shut. Ian leaned against the wall. When had he turned into such a bastard? As mean as his father had been.