True Colors

“It could have been dust in his eyes.”

“It wasn’t.”

Aurora sat back.

Vivi Ann looked down at her swollen belly. “I miss her lately all the time. I want to—” She gasped in surprise as a cramp squeezed her abdomen. Hard. She had just gotten her breath back when another one hit; this one hurt even more.

“Are you okay?” Aurora asked, leaning forward.

“No,” Vivi Ann gasped. “It’s too early . . .”

Vivi Ann had never been one of those people who thought about the bad things that could happen in life. When she heard people say, Life can turn on a dime, she usually smiled and thought: Yes. It can always get better. On the rare occasions when morbid thoughts did cross her mind, she pushed them away quickly and focused on something else. She’d learned early on that optimism was a choice. When asked about the buoyancy of her outlook she replied jauntily that good things happened to good people, and she believed it.

Now she knew why people often frowned at that answer. They knew what she had not yet learned: Optimism was not only naïve. Often it could be cruel.

Bad things did happen, even when you did everything right. You could get married when you fell in love, conceive a child in the bed of that love, give up every habit that endangered your child, and still give birth six weeks early.

“Can I get you anything else?”

Vivi Ann roused herself enough to open her eyes. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been lying here with her eyes closed, replaying it all in her head. “Have Dad and Win come by yet?”

Aurora stood by her bed, looking sad. In the last few hours her sister’s poufed-out bangs had fallen flat across her face and her makeup had faded. Without all that, Aurora looked thin and worn-out. “Not yet.”

Vivi Ann smiled as best she could. “It means a lot that you’ve been here for all of this, Aurora. I forgive you for stealing my birthday tiara.”

Aurora brushed the still-damp hair away from Vivi Ann’s face. “I never stole your stupid tiara. You’re the princess in the family.”

“I wish they’d let me see him again. He’s so tiny.” That last word broke a piece of her control away; fear rushed through the crack. She reached over to the bedside table and picked up the pretty pink scallop shell she’d kept in her purse for years. It was as close to her mother as she could get.

“Don’t go down that road,” Aurora said. “You’re a mom now. He needs you to be strong for him.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Of course you’re afraid. That’s what parenting is. From now on you’ll always be a little afraid.”

“Couldn’t you lie to me? Tell me it’s a bed of roses?” Vivi Ann closed her eyes, sighing tiredly.

All this honesty was crippling. The truth kept banging around in her head: thirty-four weeks . . . undeveloped lungs . . . complications . . . we’ll see if he makes it through the night.

She heard the doorknob turn and opened her eyes. Had she fallen asleep? For how long? She looked around the room for Aurora or Dallas, but they were gone. The room was empty. They’d given her a private room, which would have been great if she didn’t know why. They wouldn’t put her in a room with another new mother because Vivi Ann’s son might not make it. She knew this without being told.

Then Winona and Daddy walked into the room. Vivi Ann felt tears well in her eyes. The fear she’d been holding back spilled over when she looked at Winona. No matter what had happened between them, Win was still her big sister, her mom in a way, the one who always made things right. Vivi Ann hadn’t realized until this moment how much she’d needed her. “Have you seen him, Win?”

Winona nodded, coming over to the bed. “He’s beautiful, Vivi.”

Dad’s big, rough hands curled around the bed’s metal rails, looking like old roots against the shiny metal. Up close she could see how hollow his face looked; how tightly he was controlling his emotions.

It was a look she’d seen on his face all her life, or at least since Mom’s death. “Hey, Daddy,” she said, hearing a catch in her voice.

The change on his face was as subtle as cold butter turning soft around the edges on a warm day, but in it, she saw everything that mattered. It was how he used to look at her, back when she was his favorite little girl who could do no wrong, and he was the ground beneath her feet. Winona would have wanted words to go with that look, and Aurora wouldn’t have noticed the change at all, but Vivi Ann knew what it meant: he loved her. And it was enough.

“He’s too small,” she said, starting to cry. “They say he might not make it.”

“Don’t cry,” Winona said, but she was crying, too.

“He’ll make it,” Dad said, and his voice was firm now, the voice of her youth, gone in the years since Mom’s death and suddenly back. It reminded her in a painful flash of who they all had been with Mom between them.

“How can you be so sure?”