Her Best Friend's Baby. Vicki Lewis Thompson

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      “The baby…is all…I have.” He gulped for breath and held her tighter. “All I have left.”

      This couldn’t be happening. She tried to escape to some faraway place, but his words kept coming, dragging her back to the pain.

      His voice was toneless, muffled against her breast. “She was on her way…to the airport. To get…that artist. Raining…slick…she…skidded. It was instant.”

      The blood roaring in her ears was loud but not loud enough. She heard what he said. She ached all over. “I don’t believe you.”

      “I don’t believe me, either. But it’s true.” He clutched her tighter. “It’s true.”

      “No.”

      “It happened yesterday. No. The day before. I…don’t know anymore.”

      Arielle. She started to get up. “We need to go.”

      “Why?” He held her in place. “She’s gone.” He broke down again. “Oh, God. G-gone.”

      “No!” She tried to pry herself out of his grip. “We have to do something. She needs…” She searched for the words, couldn’t make herself say them. “A…tribute.”

      He lifted his head, his face twisted with anguish. “She didn’t want that,” he whispered hoarsely. “She told me…after we got married. If she died, she wanted no funeral. Nothing.”

      And then Mary Jane knew this horrible moment was real. A steel band of grief tightened around her chest. Arielle had always said that she didn’t believe in any of that. A person should be allowed to slip quietly out of this life, she’d said, without making such an embarrassingly big deal out of it. Mary Jane had thought that very sophisticated, very evolved. Now it made her furious.

      “How could she?” she cried. “How could she leave and not let us…not give us a chance to…”

      “She didn’t think how it would be.” Morgan reached up and brushed his knuckles over her wet cheeks. His voice rasped in the stillness. “How it would be for us.”

      Mary Jane stared at him for a long time. Her mind didn’t seem to want to work. “What should we do now?”

      “I don’t know.”

      She’d never felt so empty in her life, or so chilled and weary, as if she’d been forcing her way through a violent storm. He looked as if he felt the same way, as if he hadn’t slept since… She still couldn’t say it to herself. Maybe tomorrow she could say it. Or the next day. When she wasn’t so battered.

      “You need to rest,” she said finally.

      “I’ve tried. Can’t sleep.”

      But he would collapse soon. She could see that. “Come upstairs and lie down. I’ll stay with you. Maybe then you’ll sleep.”

      “You need your sleep, too. For the baby.”

      She couldn’t imagine going to sleep now, but she wouldn’t tell him that and upset him even more. “I’ll try to sleep, too.”

      “Good.”

      “Tomorrow we’ll think about what to do next.”

      He nodded. Slowly he stood and helped her to her feet. Supporting each other like war casualties, they made their way up the stairs.

      In her bedroom, Morgan stripped down to his T-shirt and shorts with mechanical detachment and climbed into bed. She left the light on as she crawled in beside him. For the first time since she’d been four years old she was afraid of the dark.

      He pulled the covers to his chin. “I can’t seem to stop shaking.”

      “Me, either.”

      As if by mutual agreement they turned and scooted into each other’s arms, holding each other close.

      Fine tremors ran through him, as if he had a fever, and his bristly chin scraped her cheek. “I tried to call,” he said.

      “I know.” Not minding his scratchy beard, she snuggled closer, needing the body contact while she tried to keep her own shakes under control, tried to get warm.

      “That was stupid. Trying to tell you on the machine. I wasn’t thinking.”

      “It’s okay.” She wanted to rewind the day and go back to that golden moment before she’d played her messages. That moment when she’d been excited about two days off. She would work every day of her life if she could make this not be true.

      “It’s not okay. What if…what if the shock of hearing it on the phone…what if something had happened to the baby?”

      She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth against the wail of despair that strained at her throat. Arielle’s baby. And the little girl was Arielle’s, in every sense except that she would develop in Mary Jane’s womb. And now Arielle would never see her daughter.

      A heavy steel door seemed to have slammed, separating Mary Jane from the woman she loved, the woman she would do anything for. Now she could do nothing. Nothing. “Oh, Morgan.” Her voice was thick with tears. “I wanted so much to give her this baby.”

      “I know,” he said roughly. “The baby is all that’s kept me going.”

      “Oh, Morgan.” She began to cry again, and so did he. They held each other desperately, shuddering with anguish.

      He choked out the word baby and put his hand over her stomach.

      “The baby… Arielle’s still here,” she said, crying.

      “Thank God.” He kissed her hair, her wet cheek. “Thank God, we still have the baby.”

      She hugged him close as tears streamed down. “Yes.”

      “The baby.” He kissed her throat between choked sobs.

      “It’s okay.” She needed to comfort him, needed it more than anything in the world. She pressed his head to her breast. “It’s okay, Morgan. Everything will be okay.”

      “Oh, God.” He rubbed his damp, bearded face against her breasts, almost as a baby might. “I need to feel….” He slipped his hand under the hem of her T-shirt and flattened it against her belly. His howl of misery echoed in the small room. “Arielle!”

      Her heart broke into a million pieces. And she understood what she’d never wanted to know, that death and birth are spokes of the same wheel. Instincts older than time moved within her. Laying her hand over his, she guided it down between her thighs.

      “She’s here,” she murmured.

      He lifted his head and looked into her eyes.

      “Here.” A wisdom handed down through the ages urged her to open her thighs. A wound this deep could only be healed with the ultimate bonding of man and woman. “Come to me.”

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