Post by thankful24 on Mar 24, 2007 20:52:48 GMT -5
One week later
Twisting the rubber band around the low ponytail at the base of her neck with slight difficulty, Keira sat on the edge of her hospital bed, legs falling over the side and hovering a few inches from the floor. Through the large windows in front of her, the rising sun shone brightly, causing her sensitive light brown eyes to narrow. Beside her on the stiff mattress sat her sneakers, her small suitcase on the floor at the foot of the bed.
From the slightly opened door behind her sounds of the busy hospital drifted in to her, teeming with people even at this early hour, but they came dull and muffled, as if she were underwater. On the windowsill sat the 7 white roses he’d brought her, the edges of the petals wrinkled and brown, the crown of the buds hanging bent over the tops of the stems. Three petals lay dried and cracked on the sill surrounding the bottom of the crystal vase someone had placed the flowers in. All the other flowers that had flooded her room during the course of her time there she’d sent to the pediatric ward, the elderly patients on her floor, even some of the nurses.
All except those roses.
She’d been pregnant with his child. He would have been a father. Thoughts of the tiny baby that hadn’t even had the chance to take it’s first breath, a baby that he’d never have the opportunity to hold in his arms, caused his eyes to flood with tears, and his head bowed, drops sliding from his eyes and dropping to the concrete below his feet. A tiny little person that would have been half him, and half her… that he would never know.
“Keir? Are you almost ready?” Ashlee’s voice drifted to her ears, and she turned slowly to face her best friend.
“Yeah, I just have to put my shoes on.”
Sliding the magazine into the front pocket of her duffel bag, she zipped the pocket and began pulling on her sneakers, tying the laces as best she could with the cast on her wrist. She’d spend the next however many days in an NY hotel until Aden, her son was strong enough to take back to London, then she’d go home with her son and try to rebuild her life… without the center of her world to base it around.
Her slow footsteps resounded off the walls of the corridor as she made her way to say goodbye to her baby long enough to check in to a hotel. Dressed in a little blue undershirt and tiny white socks, Aden stared up at her through wide sapphire eyes. They’d moved him out of NICU two days ago and his bassinet now stood in the center of the room, surrounded by other newborns. She reached her fingers into his bassinet, smiling when his tiny fingers grasped one of her own. Warmth radiated from his touch and a surge of pride, of overwhelming love, rushed through her body. This beautiful little piece of perfection was all her own, something she’d helped create. The only thing that would make the moment better would have been HIS presence.
“Hey there, handsome. Mommy’s gonna go for a little while, but I’ll be back soon, okay. Make sure you behave yourself. No flirting with the other little girls in here, you got me? I know you’ve inherited that from your Daddy.” The mention of Orlando brought on a fresh wave of sadness, and she bit her bottom lip to hold her emotions at bay. “Your Daddy would love you to pieces if he knew about you, Aden. Mommy’s so sorry she didn’t tell him about you when he called, but you have to believe that it’s for the best. He’s got a new life now, and we love him too much to take away something that’s made him happy again, right?” She sniffled back her tears and leaned over to kiss the tiny hand fisted around her index finger. “I love you, Baby.”
She tucked his blanket around his tiny legs, and walked out of the nursery to where Ashlee stood waiting by the elevator. Keira crossed her arms over her chest, looking once over her shoulder down the hallway, and Ashlee put her arm around Keira’s shoulders. With a pained sigh, one tear pushed past her lashes and streaked down her cheek, followed by another, then another, and in that elevator, with Ashlee's arms around her, she cried. Tears for Aden, tears for Orlando, tears for herself… and the life she’d thrown out the window with one sentence spoken into her phone.
“I lost the baby.”
From now on it would be chance meetings, awkward conversations at public events, and the question hovering over her head if she’d made the wrong decision. They wouldn’t be Orlando and Keira, anymore. They would become strangers, and what they had together would become a distant memory.
~*~
A bundle of nervous energy, she paced the length of the living room. Ashlee and Brian would be arriving any minute to her flat in London with Aden, and the seconds ticked by much too slowly. In his 24 days of life, she hadn’t been away from him more than 4 hours and it had been quadruple that since she’d seen him last. Jerry had been adamant about Keira being gone from New York before the baby was released form the hospital, hoping the effort would squelch the stories circulating about her accident and her child. No one but the necessary was to know the truth about her son, and subsequently his father, whom she hadn’t spoken to in the two weeks since their talk, and it was something that Keira wholeheartedly agreed to.
Twenty-fours hours ago, she had flown back to London with Caleb, trying to convey to the persistent eyes of the press that she was well enough to head back to work. Most of her wounds had healed, with the only exceptions being her broken wrist and the thin line of stitches just above her left cheek close to her ear. There had been a few reporters in the airport, and a few fans had stopped her for autographs, but for the most part it had been a quiet trip home.
She looked up as the front door opened, all wide eyes and thundering heart. Her exuberance was quickly dimmed when, instead of the baby her arms ached to hold, her mother appeared in the doorway. “Oh… hi,” she said unenthusiastically.
“Well I can hardly stand the excitement coming from you, Keira. Maybe you should go lie down,” Sharman remarked dryly.
“I’m sorry Mum, but Ashlee is suppo-” her words halted in her throat as the echo of a closing car door reached both women’s ears. Keira’s eyes brightened and she bit her bottom lip to hold back the squeal threatening to break free as she almost ran through the door her mother had left open. Her smile grew with each step she took toward her own car that Caleb had driven to the airport to pick up the three people she’d been waiting all day for, reaching it just as Brian was lifting the car seat from the plastic base they’d fitted securely in the backseat. Hopping from one foot to the other, Keira couldn’t fight the grin that overtook her features and she lifted the blanket covering the entire seat to peak in at her baby. “Hey there little guy,” she spoke in a soft whisper as she took the carrier from Brian. “Mommy missed you.”
The other three adults present could only smile as Keira continued to chat with the infant in a low tone while she carried him into the air-conditioned house. She sat the seat on the couch and listed the blanket off, exposing the sleeping child to everyone.
Keira lifted the baby out of the seat, cradling him to her chest in a way that once seemed foreign but was now so natural. His little body felt warm against hers, and a feeling of complete and utter pride swept over her body. He was home. Sharman watched her daughter and the tiny miracle she held in her arms, tears burning her eyelids. Seeing Keira with that baby was one of the most beautiful sights she’d ever been blessed to behold, but sadness tugged at her heart at the thought of one very important piece of the happy family puzzle missing. As much as she loved her daughter, Sharman couldn’t understand for the life of her why Keira was keeping Orlando in the dark.
“Have you ever seen anything more beautiful in your life?” Keira asked on an expelled breath, intently watching the sleeping little boy in her arms.
“He looks a lot like you, Keir. Same little nose, same tiny mouth…” Ashlee said, leaning over Keira’s shoulder.
On a sigh, Keira cradled the baby closer to her chest. “And he’s got his Daddy’s eyes,” she whispered.
~*~
“Orlando, it’s Mom. Are you there?…Orlando?…Sweetie, I’m worried about you. Dad says you’ve been acting strange. Call me when you get this, okay. I love you.”
Orlando sat in his living room on the floor, nursing a beer amid the glow of a couple candles while he leaned back against the couch, listening to the message his mother left.. He took a long sip from the bottle in his hand and starred out the window, blinking as a flash of lightning brightened the sky, followed closely by a loud clap of thunder and the sound of raindrops pelting the pane of glass. He finished the last of his drink and then got up to pull the shades, blowing out the candles one by one. When he’d reached the second last candle, the phone above it began to ring on the wall again. He stared at it for a minute, then picked it up on the third ring.
“Hello?” His voice sounded strange and unfamiliar to him.
“Hey, Orlando. How are you?”
“Great Sam. Things couldn’t be any better,” he said sarcastically, looking towards the window at another flash of light.
“You’re still thinking about Keira, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement they both knew to be true.
“I can’t stop,” he said, playing with the flame of the candle. Orlando licked his thumb, then closed it along with his index finger over the flame of the candle, smothering the flame.
“Orlan…” Sam started, but Orlando was quick to cut him off.
“It’s not just her, man. She was…”
“She was what, Or,” Sam asked, sensing the emotion in his younger brother’s voice.
“Keira was pregnant.” A tight band formed around his throat at the mention of the child he’d never know, and Orlando fought back the tears that threatened to develop behind his eyes.
There was no sound coming from the other end of the line, not even the whisper of breathing, and for a second Orlando wondered if his sister had hung up. “Sam?”
“Yeah, yeah… I’m here. Just trying to… what do you mean, ‘Keira was pregnant’? She’s not anymore?”
“Sam… the accident…” This conversation was wreaking havoc on Orlando’s ability to form a complete sentence, something that didn’t happen too often.
“She lost it?”
“Yeah.” Orlando’s voice was barely above a whisper and cracked as he spoke the single word.
“Or… wow. I’m so sorry. I… how long have you known about this?” Sam was floored by Orlando’s confession. He’d told no one about what his phone call with Keira had entailed other than her standing by her decision for them to be apart. The fact that he’d almost been a father was never spoken aloud to anyone.
“Three and a half weeks,” Orlando said, closing his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger, trying to squeeze out the sight of Keira in a hospital bed that had been burned into his imagination.
“Why didn’t you tell us, Orlando?”
“I don’t know. I just…. I don’t know.” He pressed his fingertips to the glass of the windowpane, watching as the drops of rain slid down the glass. Somewhere in the recesses of his memory, the image of Keira standing in their hotel room, so close but never further away, floated forward. The night he’d tried to force her to listen, just as he had tried over the phone.
Orlando watched as condensation formed around his fingers, fogging just the way they had around hers as well, and one lone tear broke free from the dam he’d put up to hold them back. He’d lost count of how many times he’d begged to God to make everything that had happened in the last five months a dream, but it seemed God was too busy to hear his pleas. And all he felt was pain.
~*~
Twisting the rubber band around the low ponytail at the base of her neck with slight difficulty, Keira sat on the edge of her hospital bed, legs falling over the side and hovering a few inches from the floor. Through the large windows in front of her, the rising sun shone brightly, causing her sensitive light brown eyes to narrow. Beside her on the stiff mattress sat her sneakers, her small suitcase on the floor at the foot of the bed.
From the slightly opened door behind her sounds of the busy hospital drifted in to her, teeming with people even at this early hour, but they came dull and muffled, as if she were underwater. On the windowsill sat the 7 white roses he’d brought her, the edges of the petals wrinkled and brown, the crown of the buds hanging bent over the tops of the stems. Three petals lay dried and cracked on the sill surrounding the bottom of the crystal vase someone had placed the flowers in. All the other flowers that had flooded her room during the course of her time there she’d sent to the pediatric ward, the elderly patients on her floor, even some of the nurses.
All except those roses.
She’d been pregnant with his child. He would have been a father. Thoughts of the tiny baby that hadn’t even had the chance to take it’s first breath, a baby that he’d never have the opportunity to hold in his arms, caused his eyes to flood with tears, and his head bowed, drops sliding from his eyes and dropping to the concrete below his feet. A tiny little person that would have been half him, and half her… that he would never know.
“Keir? Are you almost ready?” Ashlee’s voice drifted to her ears, and she turned slowly to face her best friend.
“Yeah, I just have to put my shoes on.”
Sliding the magazine into the front pocket of her duffel bag, she zipped the pocket and began pulling on her sneakers, tying the laces as best she could with the cast on her wrist. She’d spend the next however many days in an NY hotel until Aden, her son was strong enough to take back to London, then she’d go home with her son and try to rebuild her life… without the center of her world to base it around.
Her slow footsteps resounded off the walls of the corridor as she made her way to say goodbye to her baby long enough to check in to a hotel. Dressed in a little blue undershirt and tiny white socks, Aden stared up at her through wide sapphire eyes. They’d moved him out of NICU two days ago and his bassinet now stood in the center of the room, surrounded by other newborns. She reached her fingers into his bassinet, smiling when his tiny fingers grasped one of her own. Warmth radiated from his touch and a surge of pride, of overwhelming love, rushed through her body. This beautiful little piece of perfection was all her own, something she’d helped create. The only thing that would make the moment better would have been HIS presence.
“Hey there, handsome. Mommy’s gonna go for a little while, but I’ll be back soon, okay. Make sure you behave yourself. No flirting with the other little girls in here, you got me? I know you’ve inherited that from your Daddy.” The mention of Orlando brought on a fresh wave of sadness, and she bit her bottom lip to hold her emotions at bay. “Your Daddy would love you to pieces if he knew about you, Aden. Mommy’s so sorry she didn’t tell him about you when he called, but you have to believe that it’s for the best. He’s got a new life now, and we love him too much to take away something that’s made him happy again, right?” She sniffled back her tears and leaned over to kiss the tiny hand fisted around her index finger. “I love you, Baby.”
She tucked his blanket around his tiny legs, and walked out of the nursery to where Ashlee stood waiting by the elevator. Keira crossed her arms over her chest, looking once over her shoulder down the hallway, and Ashlee put her arm around Keira’s shoulders. With a pained sigh, one tear pushed past her lashes and streaked down her cheek, followed by another, then another, and in that elevator, with Ashlee's arms around her, she cried. Tears for Aden, tears for Orlando, tears for herself… and the life she’d thrown out the window with one sentence spoken into her phone.
“I lost the baby.”
From now on it would be chance meetings, awkward conversations at public events, and the question hovering over her head if she’d made the wrong decision. They wouldn’t be Orlando and Keira, anymore. They would become strangers, and what they had together would become a distant memory.
~*~
A bundle of nervous energy, she paced the length of the living room. Ashlee and Brian would be arriving any minute to her flat in London with Aden, and the seconds ticked by much too slowly. In his 24 days of life, she hadn’t been away from him more than 4 hours and it had been quadruple that since she’d seen him last. Jerry had been adamant about Keira being gone from New York before the baby was released form the hospital, hoping the effort would squelch the stories circulating about her accident and her child. No one but the necessary was to know the truth about her son, and subsequently his father, whom she hadn’t spoken to in the two weeks since their talk, and it was something that Keira wholeheartedly agreed to.
Twenty-fours hours ago, she had flown back to London with Caleb, trying to convey to the persistent eyes of the press that she was well enough to head back to work. Most of her wounds had healed, with the only exceptions being her broken wrist and the thin line of stitches just above her left cheek close to her ear. There had been a few reporters in the airport, and a few fans had stopped her for autographs, but for the most part it had been a quiet trip home.
She looked up as the front door opened, all wide eyes and thundering heart. Her exuberance was quickly dimmed when, instead of the baby her arms ached to hold, her mother appeared in the doorway. “Oh… hi,” she said unenthusiastically.
“Well I can hardly stand the excitement coming from you, Keira. Maybe you should go lie down,” Sharman remarked dryly.
“I’m sorry Mum, but Ashlee is suppo-” her words halted in her throat as the echo of a closing car door reached both women’s ears. Keira’s eyes brightened and she bit her bottom lip to hold back the squeal threatening to break free as she almost ran through the door her mother had left open. Her smile grew with each step she took toward her own car that Caleb had driven to the airport to pick up the three people she’d been waiting all day for, reaching it just as Brian was lifting the car seat from the plastic base they’d fitted securely in the backseat. Hopping from one foot to the other, Keira couldn’t fight the grin that overtook her features and she lifted the blanket covering the entire seat to peak in at her baby. “Hey there little guy,” she spoke in a soft whisper as she took the carrier from Brian. “Mommy missed you.”
The other three adults present could only smile as Keira continued to chat with the infant in a low tone while she carried him into the air-conditioned house. She sat the seat on the couch and listed the blanket off, exposing the sleeping child to everyone.
Keira lifted the baby out of the seat, cradling him to her chest in a way that once seemed foreign but was now so natural. His little body felt warm against hers, and a feeling of complete and utter pride swept over her body. He was home. Sharman watched her daughter and the tiny miracle she held in her arms, tears burning her eyelids. Seeing Keira with that baby was one of the most beautiful sights she’d ever been blessed to behold, but sadness tugged at her heart at the thought of one very important piece of the happy family puzzle missing. As much as she loved her daughter, Sharman couldn’t understand for the life of her why Keira was keeping Orlando in the dark.
“Have you ever seen anything more beautiful in your life?” Keira asked on an expelled breath, intently watching the sleeping little boy in her arms.
“He looks a lot like you, Keir. Same little nose, same tiny mouth…” Ashlee said, leaning over Keira’s shoulder.
On a sigh, Keira cradled the baby closer to her chest. “And he’s got his Daddy’s eyes,” she whispered.
~*~
“Orlando, it’s Mom. Are you there?…Orlando?…Sweetie, I’m worried about you. Dad says you’ve been acting strange. Call me when you get this, okay. I love you.”
Orlando sat in his living room on the floor, nursing a beer amid the glow of a couple candles while he leaned back against the couch, listening to the message his mother left.. He took a long sip from the bottle in his hand and starred out the window, blinking as a flash of lightning brightened the sky, followed closely by a loud clap of thunder and the sound of raindrops pelting the pane of glass. He finished the last of his drink and then got up to pull the shades, blowing out the candles one by one. When he’d reached the second last candle, the phone above it began to ring on the wall again. He stared at it for a minute, then picked it up on the third ring.
“Hello?” His voice sounded strange and unfamiliar to him.
“Hey, Orlando. How are you?”
“Great Sam. Things couldn’t be any better,” he said sarcastically, looking towards the window at another flash of light.
“You’re still thinking about Keira, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement they both knew to be true.
“I can’t stop,” he said, playing with the flame of the candle. Orlando licked his thumb, then closed it along with his index finger over the flame of the candle, smothering the flame.
“Orlan…” Sam started, but Orlando was quick to cut him off.
“It’s not just her, man. She was…”
“She was what, Or,” Sam asked, sensing the emotion in his younger brother’s voice.
“Keira was pregnant.” A tight band formed around his throat at the mention of the child he’d never know, and Orlando fought back the tears that threatened to develop behind his eyes.
There was no sound coming from the other end of the line, not even the whisper of breathing, and for a second Orlando wondered if his sister had hung up. “Sam?”
“Yeah, yeah… I’m here. Just trying to… what do you mean, ‘Keira was pregnant’? She’s not anymore?”
“Sam… the accident…” This conversation was wreaking havoc on Orlando’s ability to form a complete sentence, something that didn’t happen too often.
“She lost it?”
“Yeah.” Orlando’s voice was barely above a whisper and cracked as he spoke the single word.
“Or… wow. I’m so sorry. I… how long have you known about this?” Sam was floored by Orlando’s confession. He’d told no one about what his phone call with Keira had entailed other than her standing by her decision for them to be apart. The fact that he’d almost been a father was never spoken aloud to anyone.
“Three and a half weeks,” Orlando said, closing his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger, trying to squeeze out the sight of Keira in a hospital bed that had been burned into his imagination.
“Why didn’t you tell us, Orlando?”
“I don’t know. I just…. I don’t know.” He pressed his fingertips to the glass of the windowpane, watching as the drops of rain slid down the glass. Somewhere in the recesses of his memory, the image of Keira standing in their hotel room, so close but never further away, floated forward. The night he’d tried to force her to listen, just as he had tried over the phone.
Orlando watched as condensation formed around his fingers, fogging just the way they had around hers as well, and one lone tear broke free from the dam he’d put up to hold them back. He’d lost count of how many times he’d begged to God to make everything that had happened in the last five months a dream, but it seemed God was too busy to hear his pleas. And all he felt was pain.
~*~