Return to Tradd Street
She stared at the closed door while the water continued to run, both of us unsure what to do. My first thought was that I hoped the tub and sink weren’t stoppered, because that would mean an overflow of water and a leaky ceiling below that I couldn’t afford to fix. I shook myself, wondering when I’d become Sophie.
My mother’s head was bent, her eyes closed, as if she were listening closely.
“What is it?” I asked.
She raised her finger to her lips. “I smell roses,” she said quietly. “But she’s not alone.”
We faced the door again as it unlatched and then slowly opened, a billow of steam escaping through the doorway like an expelled breath.
“Wait,” I said, rolling carefully out of bed.
She held up her hand. “Don’t come yet. I think they’re gone, but I want to make sure.”
I nodded, my hands resting on my belly, watching as my mother entered the bathroom. I felt a small twinge in my abdomen, stronger than one of the kicks I’d grown used to. I waited for a moment to catch my breath, listening as my mother moved around the bathroom.
“Louisa was here,” she said from inside the bathroom. “But the other one was, too. I got the impression that they were arguing. I don’t know about what.” She paused, and when she spoke again, the tone of her voice had risen. “Mellie? I think you need to come in here.”
Walking as quickly as I could, I stepped into the steamy bathroom, finding it hard for a moment to catch my breath as another twinge squeezed me from the inside. My mother took my arm and led me to the long marble vanity, then pointed at the mirror above it.
There, written by what appeared to be a narrow finger, somebody had rubbed out the steam on the mirror to write a single word: Mine.
I opened my mouth to say something, but was distracted by the feel of water beneath my bare feet. “Oh, no. They flooded the bathroom.”
Instead of rushing to the tub or sink to pull out the stops, my mother stepped forward and lifted my nightgown. “I don’t think so, Mellie.” She dropped the hem and gave me a wobbly smile. “But I do think you’re about to have your babies.”
CHAPTER 27
I sat in the back of the van with my mother while Jack drove very, very slowly through the streets of Charleston, although he claimed he was speeding. My father and Nola were in his car behind us as my dad flashed his lights and honked his horn like an emergency vehicle. I could only hope that he wouldn’t be stopped by the actual police for reckless driving.
Despite the constant pains that were now about five minutes apart, I was still in denial that I was in labor. “It’s not March twenty-third,” I continued to insist to both my mother and Jack, until they both pretended to be hard of hearing.
“It’s too early,” I insisted, trying a new tack. “The babies are too small.”
My mother sent me a dubious look. “At your last visit with Dr. Wise, she said she thought the babies were well over six pounds. You were six pounds, four ounces when you were born, and you turned out just fine.”
She and Jack exchanged a glance in the rearview mirror that I had to ignore because another pain gripped me. When it was finished, I gasped out, “Where’s my phone? I need to change my nail appointments, and . . .” I stopped as another thought occurred to me. “Did you call Dr. Wise to tell her to have the epidural ready as soon as we hit the parking lot?”
My mother clasped my hands in hers. “She’ll have to examine you first. You might be completely dilated when we get there, which means there won’t be time for an epidural. These babies are calling the shots right now and we just have to go with it.”
I shot a malevolent look toward Jack. “They got their bossiness from their father. He’s always wanting to call the shots.”
“What? I’m the one calling the shots? What planet have you been living on for the last two years, Mellie?”
I was prevented from answering by another stabbing pain. My mother glanced at her watch. “They’re coming a little closer together now,” she said calmly. “Don’t worry; we’re almost there.”
I pressed my head against the back of my seat. “I’m not ready! My calendar is full of things I need to take care of before the babies get here. I still need to organize their little sock drawer—have you seen how many they have, and how tiny? And I hadn’t decided which toy organizing system to order—the catalogs are still in the basket by my bed.” I closed my eyes. “And preschools! I’m still collecting all the brochures. How will I ever get it all done?”
My mother squeezed my hands. “Mellie, you are not alone, all right? You have lots of family here to help. And what doesn’t get done? Well, I think you’re about to find out the hard way that sometimes you just have to let it go. You might even find that you’ll enjoy the ride.”
I stared at her in panic as another pain gripped me, worse than any of the ones before. I looked at the back of Jack’s head. “Hurry,” I said in a gasp. “I don’t want to give birth in a minivan!”
I wasn’t sure whether it was my imagination, but I thought I heard the engine race as the van jumped forward. I sat up, another thought sending me into a near panic. “We haven’t even settled on names!”
“We have,” Jack corrected me. “Two girl names and two boy names. You wrote them down on a notepad and stuck it in my glove box just in case.”
I shook my head. “No—their last name. We haven’t even talked about it.”
“Yes, we did,” he said steadily. “Right after you told me you were pregnant.”
My hands tightened over my belly at the approach of another contraction. “We weren’t talking about names then. . . .” I forgot what I’d been about to say as I felt my muscles tighten again.
The contraction hit like a fist from the inside, taking all of my breath.
My mother kept her voice soft as she patted my hand. “Keep breathing, Mellie. That will help. Like this.” She began panting like General Lee after a long walk on a hot summer afternoon, but without the lolling tongue.
The contraction subsided and I stared at her. “What are you doing?”
“It’s Lamaze breathing. I’ve seen it enough on televisions that I thought—”
“Please stop. I appreciate it; I do—but you look ridiculous and it’s not helping.”
I shifted in my seat, trying to get more comfortable, before I realized that there really weren’t any options at this point. I held the seat belt strap away from my neck—that was the only place it would fit, since it wouldn’t stretch over my belly—then glared at the back of Jack’s head.
“What did you mean that we talked about the babies’ last names? I don’t rememb—” I stopped, remembering.
He completed my thought out loud. “When I asked you to marry me and you said no. That would have settled it.”
My eyes stung, and I told myself it was from the labor pains. “But that’s why I said no. I didn’t want you to marry me only because you felt obligated to do the right thing.”
“That’s what you thought? Do you actually believe—” he began, but was cut off by a bloodcurdling scream that seemed to be coming out of my mouth.
The contraction this time was longer, the pain sharper, my scream higher-pitched. As I came through the other side of it, my mother gave me a reassuring pat. “At least that means you’re breathing.”
“What else was I supposed to think?” I screamed at Jack, my voice raw. “I’d already told you how I felt, and all you could say was, ‘I’m sorry.’ So what was I supposed to think when all of a sudden you ask me to marry you right after you found out that I was pregnant?”
I heard a screech of tires as Jack made a sharp turn into the hospital parking lot before the van came to an abrupt stop at the emergency entrance. My dad’s car drove past, still honking and blinking the lights, toward the visitor parking lot. Jack hopped out, then slid open the back panel where I was sitting. He leaned in and unbuckled my seat belt, but didn’t step back.
“Do you still love me?” he asked.
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The skin over my belly tightened while both sets of little arms and legs seemed to start pummeling me from the inside, demanding an answer.
“Yes,” I gasped out as another contraction hit, taking with it my powers of dissembling along with my ability to evade difficult questions.
He rubbed my arm as I began to scream, waiting patiently until I’d stopped. “Good,” he said, stroking my cheek. “That will make this a whole lot easier. I’m going to ask you again, but I promise it will be the last time. I’m not good with rejection. As a matter of fact, until I’d met you I hadn’t had that much experience with it.”
I felt the perspiration dotting my skin, making my hair cling to my face, a pair of maternity sweatpants and a trapeze top in tie-dye—a gift from Sophie that I’d hidden until my mother discovered it when trying to dress me for the trip to the hospital—draped over my voluminous body. I felt like a character from the bar scene in the original Star Wars movie, without benefit of cool weaponry. In none of my schoolgirl fantasies had I ever imagined this scenario when daydreaming about a marriage proposal.
His face was very close to mine, his eyes bluer than I remembered. “Mellie—will you marry me?”
My mother appeared behind him on the sidewalk. “Jack, shouldn’t you wait until she has regained all of her mental faculties?”
“Absolutely not,” he said, his eyes not leaving mine. “I want her to make a decision using her heart for once instead of her head.”
I listened to my grandmother’s voice, very distant and very small, but crystal clear. You need to decide sooner rather than later what you want. And then be ready to fight for it. Despite months of denial, it suddenly become very clear what it was that I wanted, and what I needed to do.
The next contraction began creeping closer, starting in my back this time before sweeping forward. “Yes,” I whispered, and then, “Yes,” I screamed as the contraction hit, just in case he hadn’t heard me the first time.
“Good,” he said after it had passed, kissing me gently on the lips and wiping away the hair that was clinging to my forehead. “I know a probate court judge who can be at the hospital within the hour so we can get our license, and I’ll put in a call to the minister at my parents’ church. He’s a big fan of mine, and I’ll promise to put him in a book. We’ll have a real wedding later—if that’s what you want.”
He slid his arms underneath me and lifted me out of the van before carrying me into the reception area of the hospital.
“Jack?”
He stopped walking, his expression worried. “Yes?”
“I’m going to need your help to keep my house. I can’t let it go without a fight.”
“I can’t wait,” he said, placing me in a wheelchair that had been brought by a nurse. “We make a good team, Mellie. We always have.”
The nurse began to wheel me toward labor and delivery while Jack jogged along beside me. I turned toward him, wanting to ask one last question about half-remembered words spoken before I’d been taken away in the ambulance from Maddie’s Christmas play. But another contraction gripped me, the worst one yet, making me feel as if I’d just been knocked into next week by a three-hundred-pound linebacker.
The pain consumed me, altering my reality, and any claim I might have once possessed to sobriety and gentility disintegrated completely. I tilted my head back like a shrieking hyena and screamed out what every laboring woman since Eve has at least thought about the man who’d put her in that predicament: “This is all your fault, Jack Trenholm! I hate you!”
Both Jack and the nurse looked nonplussed. She turned to Jack as she backed us into an elevator. “Don’t pay any attention. They all say that.”
“Good to know,” he said, taking my hand and squeezing as the elevator doors closed.
Just slightly more than twenty-four hours later, I was sitting up in my hospital bed with two bassinets beside me, one with a pink blanket and the other with a blue one. The boy, JJ—for Jack Junior—had already outdone his sister in size, weight, enthusiasm for breast-feeding, and ability to perform amazing sleep marathons. The only time he wasn’t sleeping was when he was eating. I had been more than a little alarmed when Amelia told me that Jack had been the same way.
Sarah Ginnette—named after my grandmother and mother—was smaller by eight ounces and one and a half inches, with a strong chin and a delicate nose. The only thing the twins seemed to share besides their last name and birthday was their identical heads of thick, black hair and deep blue eyes. Although the nurses kept reminding us that all babies had blue eyes, I was confident that they would look just like their father’s and half sister’s. Jack’s DNA was most likely as persistent as he was.
Despite feeling like I’d been run over by a tractor-trailer twice, I felt startlingly content every time I looked at their tiny precious faces, or counted their adorable fingers and toes, and I was already looking back at my labor and delivery through a hazy fuzz. Jack had been with me the whole time, coaching me as if he knew what he was doing. I had a slight memory of shouting things at him that made one of the nurses blush, but I was happy not to remember it too clearly.
He had turned green around the mouth at one point and had to briefly sit down, but he’d never once let go of my hand, even when the judge and minister came into the room to ensure that our children weren’t born out of wedlock. I considered the possibility that Jack couldn’t let go of my hand because I’d squeezed too tightly and broken all of his fingers when I learned that it was too late for an epidural, but I quickly dismissed the thought.
Still, even though we had the papers to prove it, I didn’t feel married. He’d promised me a church wedding later, the kind I’d once dreamed about as a little girl walking around in my mother’s shoes and grandmother’s jewelry, but I was unsure whether even that would solidify our relationship as husband and wife. I’d told him that I loved him, and then he’d asked me to marry him—again—and I’d said yes. But there was one important element missing from that scenario, yet I hesitated to bring it up for fear that I might not like the answer. If I was to walk down a long center aisle toward a minister while wearing white and my grandmother’s pearls, I needed to hear those three little words. So far we’d done everything in our relationship backward, and I allowed myself to hope that there was still more to come.
I looked up at the sound of gentle tapping on my door and smiled when I saw Detective Riley hanging back in the doorway with a huge bouquet of yellow roses.
“It is visiting hours, right? I thought you’d have a crowd.”
“Jack’s parents just left, and my parents, Jack, and Nola went home to shower and change and put the car seats in the van before coming back for us.”
“They don’t keep you very long at the hospital, do they?”
I shook my head. “I’m lucky to be here this long. Dr. Wise wanted to make sure that all of my preeclampsia symptoms were gone before she’d release me.”
He walked across the room to place the roses on the table by the window that was already crowded with bouquets of balloons and flowers from family and friends. “News travels fast,” he said, indicating my collection.
“Charleston might be a city, but it’s a small town, too.”
“That’s for sure,” he said, stopping by the bassinets. He was silent for a moment as he studied the babies. “Not that I’m surprised, but those are probably two of the prettiest babies I’ve ever seen. And with my family, I’ve seen a bunch.”
I grinned. “Thank you, but I can’t take any credit. I seem to have been an incubator for their father’s clones.”
He chuckled as he pulled up a bright yellow metal-and-plastic chair and sat down next to my bed. “Don’t sell yourself short, Melanie. You’re not hurting in the looks department, either.”
Blushing, I swatted a hand at him. “Detective Riley, you have inherited the Irish gift of blarney. But thank you. I haven’t seen a mirror yet, but knowing what I’ve gone through in the last twenty-four hours,
I can only imagine what I look like.”
The expression on his face told me that he didn’t see anything lacking, and I blushed again.
He cleared his throat. “So, I hear you’re married.”
“Wow, I knew news traveled fast here, but I didn’t know it was supersonic. How did you find out?”
“I’m a detective, remember?” He gave me a self-deprecating smile. “I also have a cousin who works downstairs in reception. She owed me a favor.”
“Yes, Jack and I are legally married. We both decided last-minute that it was the right thing to do—for the children. It was all sort of . . . sudden.”
He leaned back in his chair, stretching out his long legs. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I’d even say that it’s been a long time coming.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he cut me off. “Even a blind man could see that you two were meant to be together. I tried to fool myself that maybe I was wrong, but I knew. Can’t blame a man for trying, though.”
“Oh, Thomas. You’ve been such a great friend to me—and a wonderful companion during my whole pregnancy, not to mention the fact that I now know how to make the best omelet on the planet because of you. You made me feel pretty and desirable when I felt anything but, and you didn’t point and laugh when I told you I could see dead people.”
“Point and laugh?”
“You know—what the mean kids at school do to kids who are a little different.”
He grinned. “I already told you—you’re quirky. And I happen to like quirky.”
“Well,” I said, clasping my hands on top of the blanket, “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I treasure your friendship, and I don’t want it to end.”
“Thank you, Melanie. That means a lot to me.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Is it back yet—your sixth sense? Because if you’re still interested, I’d love your help with some of my cold cases.”
I shook my head. “Not yet. My mother’s came back right away, but mine seems to be taking its time. I guess it’s a good thing, since I’m in the hospital. They’re like cemeteries—somebody’s always wanting something.”