Chapter 187
“Brings
back the good old days, doesn’t it?”
Claire smiled wryly, looking around the waiting room the following
morning.
Nick just
grimaced in return. She had been taking
him down memory lane a lot lately, reminiscing on the “good old days,” as she
so sarcastically put it, as if they actually held fond memories. He did experience a sense of déjà vu, though,
in the form of the nervousness he always felt when sitting in a hospital
waiting room. But he had to admit,
having her there to joke around did help a little. It had helped a little back then, too.
He had
awoken to the sound of her voice earlier that morning, after groggily flipping
his ringing phone open, still half-asleep.
“Did you call that doctor yet, Carter?”
God, she could be bossy when she wanted to be. He decided later that all women must be born
with the nagging gene, and pregnancy activated it. She was gonna make a great mom, had that tone
of voice and everything.
After
croaking that he would do so as soon as he woke up, Nick had forced himself to
get up, hobble downstairs, and find the number for his pulmonologist while a
pot of coffee boiled. He had expected to
have to use his famous name to pull some strings and get an appointment,
knowing it was short notice, but the gods must have been smiling on him (or
winking at Claire, probably) that day because Dr. Mahmood’s secretary told him
that there had been a cancellation and that the doctor would be able to see him
that morning if he came to her office at Tampa General.
The window
of opportunity was so short that Nick hardly had time to shower and dress
himself, let alone give Claire time to get ready before he picked her up, but
somehow, they’d done it, and here they were, a whole five minutes early.
Claire
shifted in her seat, smoothing the hem of her blouse over her jeans. The black babydoll top, even with its loose
material, was not enough to completely hide the belly she had left over from
her pregnancy, and he could tell she was self-conscious. He still thought she looked great in it. Sure, she had baby weight left to lose; she
was heavier all around, her face fuller, hips wider, more meat on her upper
arms and thighs, but in a way, the look suited her. It added curves to her figure, and he found
it hard to keep his eyes from sneaking down to her rather “enhanced” breasts
when he was looking at her. He tried to
resist the temptation, though, knowing she could catch it and call him on it
for sure. She wasn’t bad to look at from
the neck up, anyway. Even her hair
seemed thicker, shinier. He took a
moment to admire it, remembering how she’d had none back in the “good old
days.” He was glad it was back now. She had pretty hair; it added a lot to her
appearance.
Claire
wasn’t looking at him anymore, but almost as if she could sense his eyes on
her, she reached up and raked her fingers through the short red locks, tucking
them behind her ear. “They need a poster
about BOOP in here,” she commented out of nowhere, staring across the room at a
framed informational poster about organ donation. “You know, like a cartoon of Betty Boop
hacking up a lung, with ‘B.O.O.P.’ in ginormous letters above her head and then
what it actually stands for in tiny, tiny print below.”
Nick
laughed at the visual. “Why?”
“’Cause…
it’d be funnier than organ donation,” she shrugged, gesturing to the poster,
which showed a child’s face in black and white next to the caption ‘I want
to live every second. Not fight for
every breath. I urgently need a lung
transplant.’
“Yeah,”
agreed Nick, “that one’s kind of a downer.”
She was nervous, he realized suddenly.
Cracking jokes, playing with her clothes and her hair… Nervous habits. It was a sign of how well he’d come to know
her that he recognized them. Back in the
days when they had sat around waiting for their oncology appointments together,
he had never dreamed she could be nervous.
Cool, calm, collected Claire – she could make anything into a joke. He had only realized later that, much like
AJ, this was her defense mechanism, a cover-up for nerves and insecurities. She got nervous just like he did. She was just better at hiding it.
The fact
that she was nervous for him today didn’t make him feel any less so. He hated being here, worrying, as he’d
worried so many times before, that some small symptom was going to be an
indicator of a much more significant problem, something that would turn his
whole life upside down again. It had
happened too often in the last six years.
A minor fracture became bone cancer; aches and pains meant a relapse,
stopped only by the amputation of his leg.
A cold turned to a lung tumor, the flu to BOOP, and here he was now,
with shortness of breath that could be a sign of any number of horrific
possibilities.
By the time
a nurse called him back to an exam room, he was thoroughly freaking out, if
only on the inside. When the nurse took
his pulse and told him that his heart rate was a little fast, he didn’t even
stop to consider that it might be due to a combination of caffeine and
nerves. Of course his heart was racing;
so was his brain. Was it the BOOP’s turn
to relapse now? Or, worse yet, had a
tiny piece of the lung tumor that had nearly killed him four years ago gone
unremoved, undetected, and slowly regenerated into another?
“Nick,
chill,” said Claire, one corner of her mouth curving into a crooked smile, once
the nurse had left the room. If he could
tell that she was nervous, she could most definitely tell he was. “It’s just a check-up… just so you can prove
yourself right that you are, in fact, one-hundred percent fine and that I’m
just a huge worrywart.”
“I know,”
he mumbled and rolled his eyes, pretending to be exasperated at her for
dragging him here. Knowing her, she saw
right through it. She was doing it
again, joking around, and suddenly it wasn’t helping anymore. He just wished Dr. Mahmood would hurry up and
get in here so he could get this over with.
***
As they sat
in the exam room waiting for the pulmonologist to return with test results,
Claire kept stealing sidelong glances at Nick.
He had been unusually jittery the whole appointment, and she knew he was
nervous. Whether he had any real reason
to be, neither of them were sure.
Dr.
Mahmood’s expression hadn’t given away much as she’d listened to his lungs, had
him breathe into a device that measured his lung capacity and function, and
sent him for a chest x-ray. She had
promised to put a rush on the results, knowing he was due to leave town the
next day and couldn’t wait, and now here they sat, waiting to see whether or
not there was anything to worry about with Nick.
Frankly,
Claire hoped she was just being a worrywart. For once in her life, she wanted Nick
to be able to say “I told you so!” and rub it in her face and tease her about
being a nag for the rest of her existence.
She prayed that’s all it was, because God knew Nick had already been
through too much. He didn’t need one
more medical problem – or a recurrence of one of the former ones – to deal with
now.
“God, I
hate waiting,” Nick groaned, dragging his fingers down his face so that his
features were gruesomely distorted.
“I know,”
murmured Claire with a patience she didn’t feel. She reached out and patted his knee, the only
part of him she could really reach from her seat. “She’ll be back soon. It can’t take them that long to develop and
read an x-ray. If she did put a rush on
it, it’s gotta be ready by now.”
Nick
nodded, and they fell back into silence as they continued to wait.
Bored,
Claire eyed the door to their room, and when it didn’t open, she sidled over to
the counter of supplies on the other side of the room and snagged a latex glove
from one of the boxes on the counter.
She felt Nick’s eyes on her as she took it back to her chair. Winking, she stuck the open end in her mouth
and started to blow, inflating the glove into a hand-shaped balloon. Nick’s eyes twinkled with amusement as she
pinched the end tight between her fingers, flashed a devilish smile, and let it
go.
The
“balloon” squealed as it flew across the room, zigzagging and loop-de-looping
in mid-air. A girlish laugh burst out of
her, and despite his nervousness, Nick cracked up too, as the deflated glove
finally fell limp against the floor.
“Jesus,
you’re worse than I am,” Nick teased her, grinning.
“Kid at
heart,” Claire grinned back. “I’m a pro
with latex gloves – one of the perks of having a dentist for a dad. He used to sneak boxes of ‘em home for me to
use as water balloons.” She had fond
memories of water balloon fights with her brother and the neighbor kids, armed
with heaps of the oddly-shaped, white water bombs.
“That
sounds like fun. Brian and I used to make
‘em out of condoms when we were touring.
We’d pelt ‘em at Kevin and Howie as soon as they got off the bus.” Nick snorted at his own memories. “They’d get so pissed… God, it was great.”
Claire
laughed, imagining the look on Kevin’s face when he realized he’d just been hit
with a water-filled condom thrown by a teenage Nick. “Sounds like something AJ would do, use
condoms as water balloons.”
Nick’s face
gleamed with mischief. “Yeah, well… they
were his condoms.”
He was
still snickering when the door suddenly opened, and Dr. Mahmood came in. Instantly, his face straightened, but Claire
had to cover her mouth to stifle back a giggle as she eyed the random glove
lying on the floor across the room. She
wasn’t sure why it was so funny; maybe it was because it was such an
inappropriate time to laugh. It made her
want to bust out laughing even more.
The
compulsion quickly left her as Dr. Mahmood started to talk. “Nick, everything looks and sounds all
right. Your chest x-ray didn’t show
anything that has me concerned. You do
have some scar tissue built up from surgery and the BOOP, and that could be
affecting your lung function enough that you’re getting out of breath more
quickly than you used to. Unfortunately,
there’s not much that can be done about it.
I am going to write you a prescription for an inhaler; it might help to
use it during or after your concerts.
The medication inside will open up your lungs more and make it easier
for you to breathe, just like it would in a person with asthma.”
Nick
nodded, and Claire could see the relief spreading over his face. She was sure he was thinking the same thing
she was. An inhaler? What a simple solution. She was glad that’s all he needed, that for
once his symptoms weren’t a sign of something that would need a much more
unpleasant treatment.
They
thanked Nick’s doctor profusely and left the hospital with a prescription for
an inhaler to fill, which they did on the way back to Claire’s condo. “I’ve never used one of these things before,”
he remarked as they sat at a red light, turning the inhaler over in his hand.
“Me
neither, but they must not be hard to get used to – plenty of kids with asthma
have them.”
“True.”
The light
changed, and he sped up again, turning left at the next intersection.
***
When they
got back to the condo, Claire said, “You’re going to come up, aren’t you, and
see the twins?”
“Absolutely,”
agreed Nick, turning off the ignition.
“I can’t wait to see them. Last
time I did, they were still in the NICU.”
An
emotional smile crossed Claire’s face.
“They’ve changed a lot already since then.”
“I bet they
have.” He certainly hoped they were less
fragile and scary-looking now. Still, as
he followed Claire up to the sixth floor of the condominium, he had no idea
what to expect.
The first
thing he noticed when she opened the door to let them in was the smell. The condo had long since lost its “clean, new
place” smell, taking on, instead, the familiar aroma he associated with Claire
– her shampoo, her lotion, the detergent she used on her laundry, her scented
candles, and a hint of the orange cleaning spray she used to wipe down
everything. But the smell was different
now, camouflaged by an odor his nose recognized only as “baby.” It was the smell of wipes and powder, which
only made him think of dirty diapers.
With four younger siblings and a godson, Nick would never forget that
odor.
“How many
diapers do you go through in a week with twins?” he asked Claire casually as he
walked in, trying to adjust to this new assault on his senses.
She
laughed. “Ohh, you don’t wanna
know. I’ll show you their room – the
size of the Luvs box in there should give you a clue. We buy ‘em in bulk.”
But she
didn’t take him to the twins’ nursery right away. Instead, they walked through the kitchen and
into the living room, where they found both of her parents. Each of them, Nick saw, was holding a baby.
“Well, that
was perfect timing,” said Kris cheerfully, smiling up at his daughter. “Your mom was just talking about warming up
bottles for the girls; they’re starting to get hungry.”
“I
figured,” Claire replied. “Don’t worry
about the bottles; since I’m here, I’ll nurse them.”
“The
appointment didn’t take as long as you thought it might,” spoke up Carrie,
looking between Claire and Nick. “I take
it everything went okay?”
“Yep. He’s fine.”
Claire’s hand swatted Nick playfully across the chest. “I’m just a worrywart… you’re not gonna let
me forget it either, are you?” she added, turning to stick her tongue out at
him.
He grinned
back. “Eh, I won’t hold it against you…
moms are supposed to worry, right?”
“Exactly,”
stressed Carrie, amusement twinkling in her eyes as she looked from him back to
Claire. “She won’t be able to tease me
about being overprotective anymore, now that she knows what it’s like to worry
about her children.”
Claire
rolled her eyes, but underneath the sarcastic expression, she was beaming. “Okay, stop teasing me and hand me one of my
kids. Nick needs to be properly introduced. He hasn’t seen them outside of an incubator
yet.”
Carrie
passed the baby in her arms to Claire, who turned to show Nick. “This here is Cait,” she said, stroking the
baby’s head, which sported a fine layer of light, reddish-colored hair.
“She’s
gonna have your hair, isn’t she?” he observed, smiling. Now that she was in her mother’s arms and not
tangled in a mass of tubes in the hospital, Caitlin looked bigger than he
remembered, albeit smaller than he expected babies to be. She was less red and shriveled too, though
she still had the slightly shrunken, wrinkled look of a preemie.
“Yep, it
looks like it. It could always lighten
to more of a strawberry blonde as she gets older, though; I’ve seen that
happen. Or she might be a ginger kid the
rest of her life. Poor thing,” Claire
teased.
“Aww, hey,
I love your hair,” Nick replied kindly, reaching to give it a playful tug. “Does she have your eyes too?” He looked down at the baby again; her eyes
were open and, indeed, they were blue.
“Could
be. I’m betting they’ll stay blue,
‘cause Jamie has blue eyes too. Lainey’s
eyes look the same, but her hair is darker.”
She handed
Cait back to her mother and took the other infant from her father. Delaine was just a little smaller than
Caitlin, and her hair was indeed noticeably darker. Jamie’s hair, thought Nick. He didn’t scowl, though, because Delaine was
too beautiful. She was still wrinkled
and drawn, like her twin, but looked much healthier than she had in the hospital,
sick and jaundiced as she had been.
“They’re
both beautiful,” he told Claire with a smile, and she glowed with pride.
“Thank
you. They had a rough start, but they’re
both gonna turn out just fine. I didn’t
tell you, but they had a check-up on Tuesday, and the tests they did on Lainey
showed that the blood vessel in her heart that was open is already starting to
close. They’ve had her on medication to
help with that since the second week, and it’s working, which means she probably
won’t need surgery to fix it.”
“That’s
awesome news,” said Nick, who remembered Claire telling him about the heart
defect Delaine had been born with on top of everything else. She had said it was a common complication in
premature babies, but still, it sounded scary, and he was relieved to know she
wouldn’t have to deal with the stress of having her new baby operated on. He put his hand on her shoulder, giving it a
gentle squeeze, as he gazed down at the baby she was cradling.
This could have been mine, the thought occurred to him. My baby. Had he and Claire actually gotten married,
had they gone through with the same fertility treatments she and Jamie had used
to get pregnant, he would have been father to Delaine and Caitlin. Maybe not biologically, but legally and in
every other sense, they would have been born his children. It was a strange realization, and it made him
feel somehow even closer to the tiny twins, knowing that, had circumstances
been different, he would have viewed them as his own daughters.
As it was,
they were more like… goddaughters, he decided.
Not officially – he wasn’t sure if they would even have godparents – but
that was how he felt about them, the same way he felt about his true godson,
Baylee, and even Kevin’s son Brayden. He
vowed that he would do anything to look out for them, and for Claire.
Just as
that thought crossed his mind, Caitlin started to cry, and, as if on cue,
Delaine quickly joined in.
“Oops –
definitely feeding time,” said Claire, eyes widening. “Hey Dad, can you grab the nursing
pillow? It’s in my room.”
Kris got up
from his chair and disappeared into the master bedroom, while Claire went to
sit next to her mom on the couch, holding a screaming Delaine in her lap. Nick was amazed at how much noise such a
small person could make. Over the
crying, Claire called, “Nick, take a load off,” and gestured for him to find a
seat.
When Kris
came back, carrying a large, C-shaped pillow, he looked at Nick sitting down
and stopped dead in his tracks in the center of the living room. Turning his gaze upon his daughter, he said,
“You’re doing this out here?” His head
turned ever so slightly back to Nick, with what was obviously a meaningful
look.
Nick, too,
suddenly clued into the fact that she was getting ready to breastfeed right in
front of him and couldn’t help but feel awkward, especially at her dad’s
apparent disapproval. Claire, on the
other hand, appeared completely unfazed.
“Yeah, so?” she replied. Looking
around him to Nick, she asked, “It’s not a big deal, is it? I mean, it’s nothing you haven’t-”
“-Seen
before, I know,” Nick finished for her quickly, feeling his face redden. He supposed it wouldn’t have been a big deal,
but the fact that she was still, technically, someone else’s wife and that her
parents were right there in the room with them made it uncomfortable. He wasn’t about to tell her that though, and
be left making small talk with her parents while she took the babies into her
room to do it, so he didn’t say anything else.
“Exactly,”
said Claire casually, and like a pro, she handed Delaine off to her mother, so
that Carrie was now holding both her granddaughters, one in each arm, and took
what was apparently known as a nursing pillow from her father. The pillow fit nicely across her lap,
wrapping around her waist like a large, cushy donut. Impressed by this simple, yet ingenious
design, Nick inadvertently forgot to look away, and a second later she was
pushing up the bottom of her black top, revealing – thank god – a white bra. At that point, he did look away… looked
around the room, at the TV, out the window, into the dining room, pretty much
any place he could look without accidentally setting eyes on her again. He didn’t want her dad to think he was a
total perv, watching his married daughter breastfeed.
He heard
some movement, and within a couple of minutes, the babies’ crying stopped. Unable to contain his curiosity, he chanced a
quick glance back at Claire, almost out of the corner of his eye. She had a baby tucked under each arm, both
supported by the large pillow and apparently latched onto a breast, though a
combination of their heads and her shirt hid this from view. Thank god, thought Nick, stifling a
groan, feeling that it was okay to include her in his line of sight again. At least she had some modesty, with her
parents around.
“Lainey’s
getting better at this,” Claire murmured quietly, softly stroking the darker
haired baby’s head. She suddenly
winced. “And Cait… yeesh. Caitlin takes after me; she’s a good
eater. It’s amazing how hard the kid can
clamp down with no teeth.”
Nick
cringed, his own nipples actually seeming to ache at that comment, and he
couldn’t help but look over at Kris, who gave him the same look in return – a
knowing look that seemed to say, Yes, this is as uncomfortable for me as it
is for you. Nick smiled awkwardly,
feeling a sense of camaraderie with the older man. Neither of them knew or cared to know what it
was like to nurse a baby, and neither of them really wanted to be there to
witness Claire doing it, but they were both there anyway because they both
loved her. It was more than Nick could
say about Jamie, he thought with some satisfaction. If Jamie was around to help Claire out the
way he should have been, none of them would need to be there.
When Claire
finished nursing, she said, “They’re gonna be ready for naps here in a minute,
but do you want to hold one first, Nick?”
Caught
off-guard, Nick faltered, “Uh… sure!
Yeah!” He got up from his chair,
but Claire pointed him in the direction of the kitchen.
“Just wash
your hands first, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh yeah…
‘course. No problem.” He went to the sink and took his time,
making sure he washed his hands carefully.
He didn’t want to risk passing on any dangerous germs.
When he
came back, Carrie got up from her spot on the couch and said, “Here, we’ll
trade places – come sit by Claire, Nick.”
She took his chair, and he sat down in the warm spot next to Claire on
the couch. While he was washing his
hands, she had set the nursing pillow aside and pulled her shirt back down, and
now she was simply holding a baby in each arm.
“You wanna
take Delaine?” she offered, as Delaine was in the arm closest to him.
“Okay…” Looking over at the baby, he was suddenly
uncertain. She looked so small and
fragile; what if he did something wrong and hurt her? He racked his brain, thinking quickly back
to the days when he had been big brother to new babies – BJ, Leslie, and
finally Angel and Aaron. He had held all
of them as newborns, even BJ (kind of – there were pictures of the two of them
with her sort of propped in his lap, anyway), and never done any permanent
damage. All he had to do was remember to
support the head, right?
“Don’t look
so nervous,” Claire laughed, though her smile was understanding. “Here… just kinda cup your hand under her
head for now, until you get her situated, and then you can let it rest in the
crook of your arm. Don’t worry… she may
be tiny, but she’s my little fighter.
She won’t break.”
Nick
appreciated her confidence in him.
Smiling back, he helped her ease Delaine from her arms into his. The transition was smoother than he had
anticipated; he was afraid the baby might start to cry, but she didn’t. She just looked up at him through
half-closed, sleepy eyes, smacking the lips of her tiny mouth a little in a
satisfied way. Nick adjusted her so that
she was nestled in the crook of his arm.
She was almost too small, but she was warm and snuggly, and just the
weight of her tiny body against his bare arm made him smile. She was precious.
I could get used to this, he thought, grinning down at
her. He hoped that one day he would have
the chance to get used to it, that he would one day have a baby of his own to
hold and feed, even diaper. It was a
scary thought, but surely, he would get used to it.
“Claire,
I’m going to grab your camera,” Carrie said quietly after a few minutes,
standing up. “This will make a cute
picture.” She disappeared and returned
a moment later with a digital camera, and soon Nick was smiling into it, still
holding Delaine, while Claire sat beside him, holding Caitlin. “Very cute,” Carrie gushed, smiling as
she pressed a button to view the picture.
“Hang on,
I’ll look at it in a minute. I think
it’s time to put them down; Cait’s almost asleep,” said Claire. Turning to Nick, she asked, “You wanna carry
Lainey back and help me put them to bed?”
“Uh, su-”
Nick was
about to say “sure” when Carrie jumped in.
“Oh, honey, I’ll get her! Don’t
make Nick carry her.” Looking at Nick,
she added, “I would think it’d be harder to stay steady on your feet with a
load in your arms.”
Nick
realized what she was worried about at the same time Claire did. “Mom,” said Claire warningly, “you’re being
overprotective again. She doesn’t even
weigh four pounds; he’s not going to drop her.
Or trip.” She met Nick’s eyes on
the last word and must have seen the panic there. What if he did stumble while carrying
her baby? It was a horrible thought, one
he probably would not have even considered until her mom had said
something. But he knew she had a point…
And yet,
Claire, the one who was supposed to be the most protective, seemed to trust
him. She had spoken firmly, and the look
in her eyes conveyed that trust. There
was a fierceness to it, perhaps inspired by her mother’s doubt. She wanted him to prove Carrie wrong.
“Come on,
Nick,” she said, and she stood up.
Holding Caitlin in one arm, she offered her free hand to him, and he
made sure Delaine was secured safely in his other arm before he took it,
allowing her to help him up from the couch.
He walked more carefully than ever as he followed her slowly back to the
master bedroom, holding Delaine tightly and looking down at the floor with each
step forward on his artificial leg to make sure its toe did not catch and trip
him up.
His caution
paid off, or maybe it was not really needed in the first place. In a few moments, he was gently lowering
Delaine into one of the two bassinets that had been placed in Claire’s bedroom. Then he stood back to watch as she positioned
the two babies on their backs and hooked them both up to what she explained
were the apnea monitors. Each consisted
of special belt that strapped across the baby’s chest and was wired to a small
box. She also had to fit Delaine with
her CPAP machine, a horrible-looking, hose-like contraption that went over her
nose and sent oxygen into her air passages to keep them open. It made the poor baby look like she’d been
crossed with some sort of robotic elephant, and the sight nearly broke Nick’s
heart. Naively, he’d expected the babies
to be “okay” now that they were out of the hospital – still a little small,
sure, but healthy. Now it occurred to
him that Claire’s worries for their health were far from over.
She seemed
to be taking it well, now that she had a few weeks’ experience under her belt
and was stronger and less hormonal. She
bent and kissed Delaine gently on the head, as if the machine were not even
there, then did the same to Caitlin. The
groggy babies had already drifted off to sleep by the time she and Nick left
the room.
Right
outside the door, she stopped him and touched his forearm. “Listen… don’t ever doubt yourself around my
kids. My mom may freak out over nothing,
but I trust you. You’re such an
important person in my life… I want you to be that for them too.”
Nick
allowed himself to smile, feeling a peaceful warmness spreading through
him. “Thanks… that means a lot to me.”
Claire
returned the smile and gave him a one-armed hug. “Well, it means a lot to me to have you here,
even if it’s just for a couple of days,” she replied, and rested her head
briefly on his shoulder before she straightened.
There was
no more contact between them as they walked back out to the living room, but
Nick still felt warm all the way through.
***