Another Man's Child

As the days passed, one after another, he found himself thinking about the tiny little girl lying across town in her funny little bed. He worried about her. Almost constantly. And almost every evening, on his way home from work, he stopped by the hospital and stood at the nursery window watching Lisa’s baby wage her battle for life.

The baby was eight days old when he noticed a new catheter in her foot. He knocked on the nursery window, getting the attention of Regina, Sara’s personal night nurse.

“You want to come in, Mr. Cartwright?” she asked, peeking her head out the door that was always kept secured.

He shook his head. That was always her first question. “What’s the new catheter for? The one in her foot?”

“It’s not new. It’s just been moved. Her veins are too fragile for us to use any one site for too long.”

Marcus didn’t know what Regina thought of his refusal to get close to Sara and he didn’t care. All that mattered to him was that the woman keep his visits there to herself. If she found his request that she do so odd, she was professional enough not to say anything, and professional enough, as well, to agree to keep whatever gossip his visits might at some point incur away from Lisa’s ears.

“And what about the longer vial?” Marcus asked now.

“We’ve upped her fluid intake.”

“A step forward?” he asked, his hands in his pockets as he rocked back on his heels.

The nurse shrugged. “Her diaper weighed almost an ounce more this morning. That means her excretory system’s working. Your daughter’s a fighter, Mr. Cartwright.”

She wasn’t his daughter. Marcus wasn’t even sure why he had this insatiable need to know every little thing about that tiny life lying just beyond the window. But if he was somehow going to give Lisa’s baby the strength to live, he had to know what they were up against.

LISA KNEW SOMETHING was wrong the minute she walked off the elevator. There was too much commotion in the nursery. Praying that her baby wasn’t the cause, even though she knew she was, Lisa rounded the corner, her gaze straining frantically for her first glimpse of Sara’s crib.

All she could see were the medical personnel surrounding it.

Lisa ran the last couple of yards to the nursery door, pounding on the secured entrance with all her might. She had to get in there. Her baby was in trouble. And she was a doctor.

The door opened immediately when one of the nurses inside recognized Lisa.

“She’s developed some congestion in her chest, Dr. Cartwright. They’re giving her a treatment right now.”

Lisa scrubbed quickly, donning her garb faster than she’d ever donned it before, never taking her eyes from the figures bending over her daughter’s crib.

She almost cried out when she finally got to the side of the bed herself and saw what they were doing to her child. The mask on the baby’s tiny face was bad enough, but when they had to start chest percussion, someone had to lead Lisa away. There was nothing she could do to help, and if she stood there any longer, she was going to stop everyone from doing anything. It was too terrible to watch. By the time she reached the nurses’ station, the mask she was wearing was soaked with her tears.

“She’s so tiny!” she wailed. “Too tiny to have to endure so much!”

“It’s her only hope, Doctor,” one of the nurses gathered there reminded her.

And with that, Lisa was silent, her gaze once again glued to the mass of bodies surrounding Sara. Her only hope. Oh, please, God, let it work. Don’t take her from me now. But even as she prayed, Lisa wondered if she was being fair to the tiny being she’d brought into this world. How much suffering was too much? When was life no longer worth the agony?

Lisa sat there for another fifteen minutes, every muscle in her body tensed against the pain Sara must have been in. Until finally, one by one, the therapists and nurses surrounding Sara moved away, pulling off their masks, until only one nurse remained, resealing the cellophane that was Sara’s only blanket.

Lisa felt the constriction in her chest loosen just a little. They’d finished. For now.

“She’s better, Dr. Cartwright,” Jim, one of the therapists, said, stopping by the station where Lisa sat. “That’s one tough cookie you’ve got there, ma’am.”

At Jim’s words, Lisa felt the rest of her strength drain out of her. They’d made it through another crisis. Everything was okay. For now. But as she drove home later that afternoon, she couldn’t help wondering how many more crises there’d be. And how many more she could ask her child to survive.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MARCUS DIDN’T TALK to Lisa about her baby. Her father, Beth, and all her colleagues did that, he knew. His job was to distract her from the trauma just enough to keep her going. But he continued to visit the child, although he did so without Lisa’s knowledge. Not because he wanted to keep secrets from her, but because he couldn’t let her get her hopes up that he was in any way seeing himself as a father to the child. He wasn’t.

He wanted the baby to survive. He wanted to bring her home. For her sake, and for Lisa’s. Not his own.

They didn’t talk about the baby, but Marcus could always tell, even without having visited the hospital himself, when Sara had taken a turn for the worse or not gained the weight Lisa had hoped or not made any of the other progress Lisa watched for daily. He could tell the minute she came in the door, and his heart ached for her. And for the baby trying so valiantly to live.

“Let’s have dinner at Angelo’s,” he said one night almost four weeks after the baby’s birth. He knew the child had lost a couple of ounces over the past day and a half, and Lisa was worried sick. She’d dropped her briefcase by the front door as she came in from work, barely looking at him.