(Two months later)
Bud stands at the sliding glass doors of Betty’s fifteenth-floor condo watching snowflakes streak by the patio lights. He shivers. “I feel like a prisoner.” He hears a snicker and turns to Nicki, sitting cross-legged on a sofa cushion she had pulled onto the floor in front of the faux fireplace. In the dimmed light, her face is aglow with the gas flame.
“If this is jail, I wouldn’t mind a life sentence. You’ll just have to endure winter for a few more months.”
Bud looks about the posh room, the tribal masks on the wall, the memento wooden statues on the end tables flickering grotesque shadows onto the walls. Betty’s home base, a place to recuperate between her excursions to study yet another lost tribe in a remote corner of the globe. It’s probably worth a million, triple what she had paid twenty years ago; a gutsy investment for a young woman still working her way through graduate school. The abstract above the fireplace, a gaunt shaggy-headed man meditating on a beach, is their father, Nicki says. Betty painted it herself.
“Besides, Bud, Chicago was your idea.”
Bud turns back to the window. Below, Lake Shore lights twinkle in the driving snowfall. Farther out, navigation beacons blink like fireflies floating in the Lake Superior blackness. How did a contented beachboy wind up in mid-winter Chicago?
≈≈≈
Betty scheduled Christmas in Saint Martin before continuing on to join an expedition into the Brazilian rainforest. She ate Christmas day lunch at the La Belle Creole’s bar while Zuzu filled drink orders. Nicki waited tables and Bud bussed. During the after-lunch lull, Nicki went behind the bar and washed glasses with Zuzu. Bud sat on a barstool beside Betty.
“I was telling Zuzu how much you love Chicago, Nicki.”
Nicki didn’t look up.
“You’d probably like to live in my condo, go to my alma mater Northwestern. I could put you on my checking account.”
Nicki, unable to pass up a dig at her mother, snubbed the offer saying with a grin how happy she was being a waitress at La Belle Creole. Nicki knew this casual refusal, her lack of ambition, would drive her mother nuts—and it did.
Betty turned to Bud, “How about you then? You could start the spring semester in a couple of weeks.”
Zuzu shook her head, opened her mouth to object when Betty cut her off.
“I owe you, Zuzu. This won’t be full payment, but it will help me feel better about the debt.”
Zuzu looked out at the ocean still shaking her head. “We’ve never been apart.”
“You’ll have to give him up sometime. Bud will get the itch to see what’s beyond this island. Give him a chance at college.”
“The cost—”
“I’ve been living on grant money for twenty years. My salary as a professor is direct deposited to an investment account. This won’t even be interest on what I’ve got stashed away.”
“Bud,” Betty cupped his chin in her hand. “Want to start the spring semester? You graduated with honors, so there shouldn’t be any problem getting in, but I’ll send a note to the dean anyway. You’re made of sterner stuff than your fickle sister. So go make something of yourself. The next four years are on me.”
A week later, Bud pressed his face against the porthole of his window seat as his plane flew between a stratum of dingy overcast and the crinkled ice of Lake Superior. Ahead of the plane, tall obelisks emerged from the haze, some with red beacons flashing on top; others jutted up into slate-colored clouds. He turned his head to see if anyone else looked panicky, at the stewardess serving drinks, the stranger sleeping open-mouthed in the next seat, then back to the window to quell his claustrophobia.
He rehearsed what he should do after disembarking. Nicki had visited her mother in Chicago several times during school holidays and tried to prepare him.
“Follow the signs to luggage. A prompter on the wall will list your flight number and the conveyor your bag will be on. You’ll need to spot your bag and pull it off as it comes around. Then look for an arrow that says taxi…”
She sounded so cosmopolitan as she went on and on, looking past him as she talked as if seeing the skyscrapers, rumbling trains, powdery snow she described. She made the condo elevator sound like a spaceship to Mars.
“I don’t want to go,” he told her.
“Nonsense, Bud. Don’t be a dummy like me. This is your big chance.”
“You won’t miss me?”
“Of course. But you’ll meet so many girls at college, you won’t even think about me. I won’t be able to beg you back here for a visit.”
Somewhere after Miami, with every mile the plane carried him farther north, away from the island, away from Nicki, the giddiness of adventure morphed into dread. He pushed his hand into his pants pocket to assure himself he had not lost Nicki’s notes—the address of the condo, code for the door.
Bud stepped out of a cab in a nylon blazer and the only pair of long pants he owned. He looked for the glistening snow Nicki had waxed on about, but all he saw was a mound of frozen sludge three feet high that he had to climb over to get to the condo entrance.
He called his mother as soon as he got inside Betty’s condo. He took a deep breath, tried to quell his desperation before she answered.
“Everything’s great,” he told her. He told her how pretty the snow was, how friendly everybody was, how excited he was to start college. He said everything she wanted to hear, deserved to hear, while wiping tears from his eyes.
“Bud, are you alright. You sound sick.”
“It’s the weather change, the flying and stuff. Got my sinuses messed up. I’m great.”
“Nana’s right here. Says she’s proud of you…” He hears his grandmother whispering in the background, “…and she’s praying for you.”
At that moment, Bud could see them clearly, behind the bar, bandanas over their hair, heads leaned together over the phone to hear his every word. If he could have reached through the phone line, touched them for only a moment, everything could have been made bearable. He had put his palm over the mouthpiece, screamed at the ceiling, bumped his head against the wall. He should admit defeat, tell the truth: I shouldn’t be here. I’ve never been cold before. I didn’t even know what cold was. It hurts. This condo is turning me into a blubbering idiot. Please, Mom, send me a ticket—
“Bud, are you still there?”
“Someone’s at the door, Mom. I’ll call you later. Love you. Tell Nana I love her.”
Zuzu had agreed to let Nicki visit for a week after her graduation in May. Nicki found one excuse after another to extend the stay. Bud wants me to show him…there’s a concert coming up…until the end of summer. It had been a fun time, a perfect time. When her pregnancy was confirmed, the stay became indefinite. Neither of them returned to the island until Spring Break weekend. Nicki had signed up for the fall semester at Northwestern. At least, that was to be her excuse for returning to Chicago.
≈≈≈
“Bud, quit sulking and be a good coach. Let’s practice.” Bud sits behind her on the sofa and she scoots back between his knees. “I’ll practice breathing and you can pretend to feed me ice chips.”
Nicki has read everything online about natural childbirth, explained the whole birthing process to Bud a dozen times, always ending with a delicious grin as if already cradling the baby in her arms. At seven months, she enrolled them in a Lamaze class. Every Monday night for two hours they practiced—breathing, when to push, the words the coach should say and when.
“All the hype about excruciating pain is just women wanting sympathy,” Shannon, their instructor, a fat mother of seven, assured them. “Babies are born every day without drugs. It will be an adventure for the two of you to share.”
Bud massages Nicki’s shoulders as she sucks in deep breaths and blows out through her teeth.
“I’m at seven centimeters, contractions five minutes apart. What do you say?”
“Squirt the damn thing out and let’s go home?”
“You say that and I’ll…” Nicki becomes walleyed, lips an O. Her whole body shudders. The first contraction slowly releases and she falls back against the sofa between Bud’s knees, gasping for air, eyes darting as if looking for escape.
“False labor,” Bud declares, and then forces a smile of reassurance when her face of terror looks up at him. “Relax. Remember, Shannon told us to expect this the last month. Just your body getting ready.”
A weak smile creeps onto her face. The frightened, caged bird regains confidence. She sits up again and props forward onto her hands, “I can do this,’” she says. Then the smile stiffens to a glare, eyes flicking to him, and then away as if listening to a faraway voice. “It’s coming back, Bud…” She jerks back between his knees, body stiff with anticipation. The contraction hits quick, and hard, forcing her breath into a moan. Her legs retract, arms hook around her knees, head arches forward. Taut tendons in her neck ripple; bulging eyes glare straight ahead. She uncoils finally, collapses back, and frantically gasps for air. Bud becomes light-headed, hyperventilating, vicariously feeling her panic.
Nicki goes limp, her breathing imperceptible, eyelids flaccid as if— Fear strikes Bud like a lightning bolt and he grabs her head and shakes until her eyes fly open.
“Bud, take me to the hospital. Something’s wrong.”
Bud jumps up and looks to the door. Shannon’s words chastise him. “Be kind but firm with her when she wants to give up. She will thank you later.” He turns back to Nicki, in charge again. “It’s too soon. They will only send us home again.”
“Bud, please hand me my cell phone,” she says with controlled sternness.
He looks at her cell phone on the end table, then back to her.
“If you don’t take me this instant, I’m calling 911 for an ambulance.”
≈≈≈