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.
Bianca was gone. His beautiful, fragile Bianca . . . His inspiration, his burden, his touchstone, his punishment . . .
He rubbed his eyes. Tried to ease the ropes strangling his chest. He’d hiked for miles in the dark, slogging through the trees and the frozen underbrush, barely staying above the flooding as he searched for an elusive cell signal. He had to get help. Had to make this end differently.
His flashlight battery had failed, but he’d kept moving, sometimes managing to avoid the fallen logs and tangled roots, sometimes not. When he’d finally cleared the flooded highway, he’d tried to hitch a ride, but there weren’t many cars on the road, and those that passed weren’t eager to pick up a filthy wanderer.
It was dawn before he’d managed to get a call through. The state police picked him up not much later and took him to the hospital, where the staff put him in a small consultation room. Finally, a social worker appeared to tell him his daughter had arrived and he could see her. He’d sent the woman away.
A doctor showed up and explained it to him. “We can’t be sure yet, but all signs point to an amniotic fluid embolism. The condition is fatal without surgical intervention.”
Putting a name to what had happened didn’t change the outcome. Bianca was gone.
The elevator hadn’t moved. He’d forgotten to press the button.
The doctor had talked to him about the baby. He didn’t remember much of what she’d said. Didn’t care. But Tess Hartsong cared, and since he had no heart, he’d dumped everything on her—the unhappy Dancing Dervish—and now here he was.
The elevator doors opened. A woman on the other side took one look at him and quickly stepped back. His eyes itched. His throat felt as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper.
Bianca was dead, and it was his fault.
* * *
The wad of cash North had thrust at her before he’d stalked off burned her palm. She didn’t want his money. Walking out on his daughter, trusting someone he hardly knew to make life and death decisions, was wrong. But Tess recognized grief all too well, and she almost understood.
One of the nurses found her a sanitary kit and a set of scrubs. She could never look at her bloody clothes again, and she tossed them in the trash. She hesitated only over Trav’s sweatshirt, but it now smelled of blood and death. She shoved it in the bin along with her jeans, then locked herself in a cubicle and threw up.
* * *
She fell asleep in one of the NICU recliners.
Bianca’s tortured face. “Help me! Why won’t you help me?”
Blood pooled around Tess’s ankles. An ocean of blood pulling her into its depths. Leadened arms. Missing legs . . .
She jolted awake from her nightmare. The skin between her breasts was damp with sweat. She blinked her eyes. Tried to get her bearings.
It was evening. The baby lay in the Isolette, cradled in a horseshoe-shaped nest of blankets with an IV, a pediatric cannula in her tiny nostrils, and electrodes fastened to her chest. In the way of preemies, she looked like a frog. “Let’s give her twenty-four hours,” the nurse said, “and then you can hold her.”
Tess didn’t want to hold her. Didn’t want to contaminate her more than she already had. But she knew hospital protocol. All babies needed skin-to-skin contact with their mothers—none more so than preemies. Except Tess wasn’t her mother. This little one had no mother, and right now, no father. Tess’s skin was the only skin the little one could count on.
She fled the NICU. The corridor was deserted. She leaned against the wall and made herself breathe. Made herself do the right thing
The volunteers at the information desk steered her to a B and B only a few blocks away. From there, she walked to the closest store to pick up a couple of changes of clothes and some toiletries with Ian North’s money.
She set the bedside alarm clock for exactly one hour but she couldn’t fall asleep for fear the nightmare would return. Eventually, she got up, took a shower, and walked back to the hospital, where she once again settled in a lounger near the baby.
Toward morning, a nurse took the baby from the Isolette and asked Tess to unbutton her top so the infant could feel her skin. Tess had made the same request of dozens of new mothers, but she wasn’t this baby’s mother, and her fingers trembled on her buttons.
Tess put the infant in the proper position, holding her upright against her breast, the head turned so she could breathe. The nurse placed a blanket over them both for warmth.
Bianca should be holding her baby. Or North. But there was only Tess.
The infant nestled against her breast. Nothing there for you, little one. Nothing there.
* * *
The next few days passed in a blur. Tess learned from the nurses that North had checked in by phone, but he didn’t contact Tess. She called Phish. The town grapevine had been at work, and everyone knew about the baby and Bianca’s death. Tess didn’t ask what people thought, but Phish wasn’t one for subtlety.
“Hey-ll, Tess. It’s all anybody’s talkin’ about. Nobody knew you was a nurse, and now all kinds of stories ’re floatin’ around. People are sayin’—”
“I can imagine. Is the road open?”
“Yep. You want me to come and get you?”
“No. I . . . I need to stay here for a while.”
* * *
Tess began feeding the baby. Each day, she held her longer, the little bird clad only in a diaper as she rested against Tess’s bare skin, both of them wrapped warmly in a blanket. The infant had a fuzz of dark hair underneath her newborn’s cap. Tess counted the baby’s breaths and listened to the little protests she made.
Tess would have to hire a lawyer. She wasn’t certified to practice midwifery in Tennessee, and Ian North would almost certainly sue her. Maybe the state’s Good Samaritan laws would protect her. Maybe not. Either way, the legal fees would ruin her, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
One day passed into another. Phish called. He was making Savannah and Michelle fill in for her, which was certain to make them dislike her even more. She spoke to the nurses when she needed to and exchanged a few necessary words with the couple who ran the B and B she only visited to shower and change clothes. Otherwise, she held the baby and thought about Bianca.
A week after they’d arrived, the doctor informed her that the baby would be released the next morning. Tess felt only dread. She still hadn’t seen North. Would he even show up? And what would happen to this helpless baby bird if he didn’t?
* * *
All the doilies, peacock feathers, and china cupids in the Victorian B and B suffocated him. Ian liked big, clear spaces: high cement walls, vast canvases, empty horizons.
He reached into his pocket for a tissue. The head cold he was just getting over hadn’t bothered him much. A head cold had boundaries. Sooner or later it went away, unlike other disasters.
He’d spent the last few days in Manhattan. Bianca had no family left, but she had business acquaintances. He’d fended off their questions about the baby and arranged a memorial service.
The front door opened.
Tess stopped inside the archway that led to the parlor. She wore jeans and a bulky white sweater, her dark hair curling in a free-for-all around her face. No makeup. She was tired and drawn. But alive. Functional. Despite the shadows under her eyes, she was solid and practical. Everything Bianca hadn’t been. Tess Hartsong was a creature of the earth instead of the sky. Ready to strip down to her underwear and dance her furious dirge. He wanted to make her dance for him, dance all the emotions he couldn’t voice. Her dark eyes—the color of manganese violet paint—took him in. Seeing right through him. Judging. And why shouldn’t she?
A single, awkward move in this overstuffed room could unleash a domino chain of Victorian clutter. He had to get on with it. Get out of here.
He gazed at her forehead instead of into those eyes. He had to absolve her. It was only fair. “About what I said at the hospital . . .” Don’t fuck this up, too.
But if he absolved her, he’d lose his advantage.
Was he really going to try using her guilt against her? The doctor had confirmed what Tess had told him about the cause of Bianca’s death, but there had to be an autopsy. That meant cutting into Bianca’s perfect body. And Ian was responsible. Not Tess. Ian himself. But he needed something from her. And guilt was a powerful tool.
He gazed at the fireplace with its glass cloches and enameled urns, its gilded mirror and marble clock. His eyes fastened on a badly executed seascape of roiling water and misshapen headlands.
He couldn’t do it.
He cleared his throat. “What I said at the hospital . . . It was unfair. I know you couldn’t have done more.”
“Do you?”
He couldn’t deal with her guilt. He had enough of his own. He should never have given in to Bianca’s pleas to come to Tempest with him. He should have stayed with her in the city, but she’d been so adamant.
He bumbled on. “About this baby . . .”
“Your daughter.”
“There are some complications.”
* * *
Complications? Tess tried to calm herself, but there he stood. Hard and distant. No longer haggard the way she was. He looked almost respectable in dark pants and a blue dress shirt. Clean-shaven. Hair still long, but trimmed.
She beat back the panic that kicked in her chest. “Yes, there are complications. Preemies are fragile, and they need special care.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.” He came closer. “I want to hire you to take care of her.”
“Hire me?” He had to be crazy.
“Until I get everything sorted out. A couple of days. A week at the most.”
“That’s impossible.” She hadn’t been sleeping or eating. She was living on adrenaline, and she had to get away from them both. “There are nannies specifically trained to care for preemies.”
“I don’t want a stranger. I’ll pay whatever you ask.”
“This isn’t about money.” She’d stayed with the baby at the hospital. She couldn’t put herself in any more emotional jeopardy. This man. This baby. They were living reminders of her own failure. “I’ll get some recommendations from the nurses and make a few phone calls.”
“I don’t want anyone else. You’re smart. You’re competent. And you’re no bullshit.”
“I appreciate your trust in light of what happened, but I don’t want to do it.”
He regarded her with steady eyes and struck his lowest blow. “I guess you’ve forgotten.”
“Forgotten?”
“The promise you made to Bianca. Right before she died.”
* * *
The hospital made certain his immunizations were up-to-date and gave him instructions on infant CPR that caused him to break out in a cold sweat. They told him about car seats and something called kangaroo care, which he hoped Tess knew all about because he sure as hell wasn’t going to provide it. He tried to focus on the birth certificate worksheet they’d given him. His handwriting was barely legible.
Tess sat on the other side of the lounge. She didn’t look at him. Didn’t speak. He stopped writing. “They want the baby’s name.”
Tess got up from her chair and walked toward him. She took the clipboard. Took his pen. Wrote something, then handed everything back to him.
Wren Bianca North.
Not right, but good enough.
The nurse came to get them, but he stayed where he was while Tess followed her. Minutes ticked by. He shifted in his seat. He was a hard man. Not sentimental. He put his identity into his work. Only there. That was the way he lived. The way he wanted to live. And now this.
Tess appeared with the baby. He tried not to look at either one of them.
They were silent in the elevator
Eventually, the doors opened. As they passed through the lobby, people smiled, seeing them as loving parents bringing their precious newborn home. He wanted to run. Get away from everyone. He wanted things the way they used to be when he could block out the world with his brushes and spray cans, his posters, stencils, and murals. When a new commission, a new gallery exhibition, a new army of critics praising his work meant something.
When he still knew who he was and what his work meant.
He left Tess long enough to pull her car up to the hospital entrance. Yesterday he’d retrieved her keys from her cabin and hired a kid who worked at the gas station to take care of the rest—installing a car seat and getting her car from Tempest to the hospital. He had his own car here. Tess would have to take the baby with her.
Anything else was unthinkable.