After the Storm

“For my child, Lord,” she said into the night. “I’m asking for the sake of my child. He is little and innocent. Please, Lord, don’t punish my child.”

She must have drifted into a moment of sleep. She woke quickly, but lay still, breathing deeply, the pain subsided for now. When she got a bit of energy, she’d have to go to the kitchen and boil some water. And she’d need more towels and some sterilized scissors. She wasn’t sure how she was going to deliver this baby all by herself, but if her contractions got worse, she’d have to do the best she could. She felt thankful that she was in good physical shape from exercising and from walking up and down this mountain every day, come rain or shine. Besides, thousands of women had done the same, hadn’t they?

Frantically, she sat up and searched the small room for one of her baby books. Finding one on the aged dresser, she struggled to step across the space and grab it. She’d just have to follow the step-by-step instructions shown in the book and hope that everything went okay.

Keeping that thought in mind, she stood against the dresser, taking in her haggard appearance in the cracked mirror, then quickly threaded her long auburn hair into a haphazard braid and tied it with a ribbon she found in a drawer. Then she sat back against the bed, her fingers hurriedly turning pages to the spot that listed what to do if you have to give birth alone.

Another pain racked her body, causing Alisha to feel the need to find release. Dropping the book beside the bed, she gritted her teeth and groaned. She wanted to push, but was afraid she shouldn’t do that yet, so she lay back down on the bed and held to the wrinkled spread, trying to remember the breathing exercises she’d memorized from reading her pregnancy books over and over. She needed to pant so she wouldn’t bear down.

Even as she huffed and counted and tried to focus, Alisha felt a lone tear moving down her left cheek. It fell with a big, cold splotch onto the yellow-flowered flannel of her nightgown, just over her heart. It didn’t take long for other tears to follow. She could feel the wetness on her cheeks and neck, at first warm but soon turning icy cold against her hot skin.

“Mama, I’m so afraid,” she said, her eyes trying to focus on the cross through her tears. “Mama, I need you. I need someone to help me—”

Her plea ended in a scream as her water broke and a huge wave of nausea and panic hit her with all the force of the next contraction. Dazed, she glanced down to check for the color of the water. It was pink-tinged amniotic fluid, which meant her baby was getting ready to be born. But…how long would she be in labor? No one could answer that. No one was here to answer that.

She listened for answers, but only heard the hissing of the fire in the nearby den and the now-soft dance of the rain falling outside. That and her own labored breathing.

Alisha gripped the spread, then lifted a hand up to the old iron frame over her head. She was about to give birth, alone in a cabin on a mountainside, in the worst rainstorm they’d seen in these parts this spring.

“Dear God, what have I done?” Alisha asked into the muted light. “Why did I come back here?”

“Now, why did I come this way?” Jared wondered out loud as the wet wind hit him in the face and laughed around his freezing ears. It was bitter cold and icy. The rain wasn’t falling as heavily now, but the temperature was dropping by the minute. From the looks of the debris-strewn road, the wind that had just moved through had to have left some damage.

“Power outages,” Jared thought.

If he was back in Atlanta working, he’d probably be stuck at his downtown office for the duration of this torrential storm that was covering the whole northwestern part of Georgia. When trees started snapping and the roads became flooded, things didn’t go too smoothly in Atlanta. There were sure to be problems all along the many roads to and from the city. He felt sure a tornado had struck somewhere close. The forceful storm that had passed through here had been full of high winds.

Jared’s clients would need damage control, with both site evaluations and press releases assuring their customers that in spite of the dollar amount of damage from the fierce storm, it would be business as usual. But then, it had always been business as usual.

That had been his job after all, making sure that big companies always came out ahead. It was his job to make million-dollar corporations look good, look even better than they really were. It was his job to put a positive spin on any given situation, good or bad, just to keep above the competition. But he didn’t have a job and a company to go back to after this extended vacation, he reminded himself. He’d walked away, too angry and too bitter to keep fighting with his growing restlessness and his partner’s obvious betrayal.

“You figure it out,” he’d told Mack just before he walked out the door. “You got what you wanted. You got the company we built together. I’m done with it.”

And Mack got—no, make that took—something else, Jared thought, his bitterness as moving and liquid as this storm.

“Yeah, but you’ve made a killing,” Mack reminded him. “On both the company and this deal—selling out to me. Not to mention the hefty inheritance your grandfather left you.”

Jared heard the resentment in the other man’s voice. He wanted to remind Mack of what he’d received from this deal—the woman who’d planned on marrying Jared until things got too rough for her.

“Yes, I can finally travel around the world,” Jared retorted, “and you still get to clean up other people’s messes.”

While I run to the hills like the coward I’ve become.

Well, Mack was right about one thing. Jared had sold out, all right. He’d handed his ex-partner the keys to the kingdom, along with the woman who would be queen. Had Meredith really expected Jared to stay and fight?

No, Meredith should be happy now. Happy that she’d secured her future and that she’d be a society doll at last.

She should be happy, but after their parting words yesterday, Jared wondered if the woman he’d had a five-year relationship with would ever be truly happy.

“Mack gives me the things you never could,” she’d told Jared the night months ago she revealed she was in love with his partner instead of him. “He gives me security and love. We have a good future. He’s ready to make a commitment to me.”

Hadn’t Jared offered her all of that? Maybe not in words, but in deeds, at least? Obviously, he hadn’t made it plain to Meredith that he had her best intentions at heart, that he was committed to her.

“I can’t do this, Jared,” she told him, her blue eyes tearing up. “You can’t expect me to put our lives on hold, our wedding on hold, while you play nursemaid to your sick grandfather.” Then she’d pouted. “Mr. Murdock has plenty of money to hire nurses around-the-clock. Why do you feel you have to be there with him most of the time?”

“Because the man raised me,” Jared said, his voice hissing with pain and disbelief. “He’s given me his life, Meredith. Now it’s time for me to return the favor.”

But Meredith didn’t understand the connection, the concept of that kind of devotion. She thought Jared was being oversolicitous, overprotective of his aging grandfather. She also saw Jared’s wanting to wait as an excuse not to get married.

In his soul, Jared knew Meredith had been right. Mack could make her happy. Would make her happy. While Jared had mostly made her miserable.

“I’ve waited so many years, Jared. I’m tired of waiting.”

Stalking up the muddy dirt lane, Jared reached the little cedar-walled cabin. It looked quaint and idyllic, sitting there in the night, its slanted, shingled roof covered with pine needles, its little porch settled under the eaves with a soft smile of welcome. Two high-backed rocking chairs graced the small porch, one sitting on each side of the wide screened doorway. A stack of firewood lay underneath one of the wide, paned windows on one side, while on the other side, an old rickety swing rocked gently in the freezing wind.

Jared stepped up onto the porch, following the glare of the single light that had brought him here, then touched a knuckle to the wooden door behind the screen. Even if this wasn’t his cabin, maybe someone in there could direct him to it. Or at least invite him in out of the cold.

She was so cold. Alisha shivered on the small bed, her body weary as she stretched a hand toward the stack of blankets she’d dropped on the chair in the corner. Just as she reached out longingly to the soft warmth of a handmade quilt, an intense pain coursed up her spine, causing her to suck in her breath and cry out. She couldn’t reach the quilt. She needed it, needed the warmth she knew it could bring.

Alisha got up, bent over double, shivering and sweating at the same time now, but determined to get to her favorite quilt. The contractions were only three minutes apart. She could feel her lower body pushing and changing, could feel her baby dropping. Her mind was playing tricks on her now. She thought she heard a tapping at her door.

At first fear gripped her, every bit as intense and dangerous as the pain knifing through her stomach and legs. But then the fear was quickly replaced by hope. Someone had come to help her!

“Who is it?” she said, but the words were a weak whisper.

Did it matter who was at her door? Or was she just imagining that tapping noise? Was this her punishment then, to go mad while giving childbirth? To never know the sweet baby she’d dreamed about? To die alone here on this mountain, away from the city she’d once loved, away from her family and friends, without ever holding her little child in her arms?

“I won’t let that happen,” she said as she once again tried to reach for the flowered quilt. “I won’t—”

The pain became too much for her weary, frightened body. Alisha grasped air, just missing the stack of blankets and quilts in the padded rocker by the bed. Grasped and gasped, just as the knock at her door became louder. Then she felt her body falling, falling toward the hard, cold wood of the planked floor, felt the waves of pain ripping her apart as she tried to touch the fringed fibers of her mother’s quilt. The effort was too much. Her fingers brushed against the comfort she needed as her body turned treacherous and tried to break in two. Alisha accepted and gave in to the pain as she screamed out, a soft sorrow covering her as she fell into darkness.

Jared heard a scream coming from inside the cabin. Shocked into action, he hammered hard on the door. “Hello, is everything all right in there? Hello?”

He leaned in, listening. Then he heard another sound that brought a racing warning to his heart. A moan.

Someone was hurt.

Without thinking, he dropped his soaked duffel bag onto the porch and rammed his body full force against the sturdy door. He heard the splintering of wood as he fell through the door, his shoulder bruised and throbbing, then rolled over on the floor, his body briefly touching on a braided circular rug centered before the dying embers of the fireplace. He felt a gush of welcoming warmth before he jumped up and shouted out again.

“Hello? Where are you?”

“In…here.”

The reply was feminine and weak. Wondering if someone had broken in and left a victim, Jared rushed around the big, long room, noting in his confusion that the place was tidy and clean, with no signs of a struggle.

But that scream of pain still gripped at his system, so he forgot the formal tour as he raced toward the room down the hallway, just past a small bathroom.

The room with the single lamplight.