Two hours passed, then three. Feeling like an ass for doing it, I called Stefan and texted him. No response…because of course, he was busy. There were cars piled up all over, a four-car wreck on Highway 51. He didn’t really understand the physics of driving that big rig. The sharpest pity was reserved for people whose kids died on Christmas, on their own birthdays, on their wedding day…but I was being an idiot. The sharpest pity was reserved for people whose kids died just when they’d survived their worst challenges, when the sky was big and brilliant. I was being an idiot, driving myself nuts. Another hour passed, a slower hour marked by eight-minute increments, the most I could force myself to wait between bouts of checking my phone. Jep got out the ham to make a sandwich.
“How could you eat anything?” I snapped at him.
“It’s been three hours since my last feeding,” he said, one of those expressions his sister used to infantilize men, which drove me nuts.
Instead, I decided to join the devil. I ate another huge slice of the dessert, just to keep from checking my phone. When I picked it up, it rang, as if my touch had brought it alive. The number was unfamiliar. Hadn’t I asked for an ordinary life, with ordinary fears? This was ordinary life in a Wisconsin blizzard. Black ice on a road, on a frigid night. The paramedics would say he was breathing on his own, which was good…stop, Thea, I said. Stop it. But the universe was talking. There was no shutting it up.
It was Stefan. And he was calling from someone else’s phone because he’d left his in the truck.
“What happened, Stefan?”
Jep set his second sandwich down and came to stand next to me.
“It’s Rebecca. She’s in trouble here. The baby is coming. It’s awful. I’m taking her to the hospital.”
I pulled on my coat and Jep grabbed his.
“You don’t have to drive me,” I said. “You know I’m a better driver than you are.”
“Please,” he said. “Don’t disgrace the holy day by lying through your teeth. Anyhow, it’s more that there will be two of us if we get stuck.”
We got stuck within fifteen minutes, the car having spun like a figure skater and nosed into a snowbank. I was stunned by the amount of snow that had fallen, easily twenty inches. By then, I could see the lights of the hospital, like watch fires through the snow. “I’m going to walk,” I told Jep, who just shook his head. A few blocks on, I realized that the lights of the hospital were the urban equivalent of being able to see the Rockies from western Kansas. I was unavoidably reminded of the night Belinda died. Even my eyeballs were wet. A Jeep pulled over just ahead of me. In it were two boys, maybe eighteen years old. “Do you need a ride, lady?” one of them said. It crossed my mind that this was how murder podcasts began. It was the driver saying “lady” that convinced me to risk it, that and the fact that I had about four steps left in me by that point. When I got inside, I looked so woebegone that the person at the ER desk asked me the nature of my injury.
There were so few people in the hospital that someone from the information desk volunteered to personally walk me up to the OB floor, probably to have something to do. “She’ll remember this blizzard, huh?” the woman said, and I thought, Rebecca would be hearing this for the rest of her life.
Stefan came running the minute the elevator doors opened.
“Mom! Oh god, you have to help her, something awful is going on. She’s in terrible pain!”
While we waited for the nurses to finish Rebecca’s check, Stefan told me what happened.
The Alice Hodge Safe Home was the last house on his plow list. He promised Rebecca he would check on her. When he finished plowing, he texted Rebecca twice. No answer. The lights were on in the kitchen so he glanced inside. To his horror, he saw Rebecca on all fours on the kitchen floor.
“I’m coming!” he shouted, fumbling for the big blue-collar key ring on his belt. When he got inside, he asked, “Are you doing exercises?”
“Exercises? I’m trying to get my phone out from under the cabinet so I can call an ambulance.”
“You don’t need an ambulance. I’m here.”
“Great. What a relief. Can you help me up?”
Stefan lifted Rebecca to a standing position.
Within minutes, he had her in the truck.
“The pains are just minutes apart,” the nurse told us. “Are you her family?” She nodded to Stefan. “Dad?”
“Yep,” he said. We looked away, so as not to laugh and then were whisked into gowns and caps.