* * * * *
The blackness took me. It was an abyss opening before my feet and I choked as we fell into it. Then my feet hit the ground and I fell over, my arms still wrapped around Anna. My mouth was open in a scream but nothing was coming out.
"Mammy!" Anna found her voice. "Look!"
I lifted my head and stared at the lights on the house in front of me. Electric lights. I sat up, supporting myself on one hand, and Anna stood next to me, her hand on my shoulder. I couldn't think. My brain whirred but processed no thoughts. Then the front door slammed and a woman came out the door, wiping her hands on her flowered dress. She trotted down the front steps toward us, slowed, then stopped, her breath coming in gasps.
"Mom," I said. I reached for her. She fell to her knees in front of me, touched a trembling hand to my face, and we both began to sob.
"Meg, my darling Meg," she said, wrapping her arms around me, the wetness on her cheeks mixing with my own tears.
"Gramma, Gramma, Gramma," Anna said, bouncing up and down. In the back of my head, I was surprised that Anna remembered her, and then I realized that she was saying 'Gramma' in Welsh: "Mam-gu."
"The baby's coming, Mom," I said, breathless. "Now."
"Let's get you into the house," she said, wiping at the tears on her cheeks with the backs of her hands and not asking me any questions I couldn't answer.
I stumbled with her to the front door, clutching her hand. I was bent over in pain from the child that was coming but still lost in the thirteenth century. I found myself crying in relief at being home, and at the same time for Llywelyn, for the man who'd died in every version of history we knew, on that snowy hill at Cilmeri.
Mom kept repeating cariad over and over again, which only made me sob all the more. "We'll get you to the hospital, Meg," she said, helping me up the steps. "How long have you been contracting?"
"Days," I said. "But it's too early. The baby's not due yet, or so I thought."
"I'll get the ambulance," she said. "You sit."
While she made the phone call, Mom put me on the couch next to the door, the very same couch I'd sat on with Anna the day we'd driven to Wales. Anna climbed onto the couch and snuggled beside me. The contractions were coming strongly by the time the ambulance came, and then the hours blurred together in a midst of pain and anxiety, and finally joy.
Llywelyn and I had a son.