Stevenson turned. For some reason, Quincy had always believed her to be taller than she actually was, possibly because she had an imposing presence. But in reality, she wasn’t all that big a woman. Didn’t matter. She faced down the nontulip with a searing look. “Who the hell do you think is the doctor in charge? Did I or did I not tell you to return to your stations?”
The seven fled, the women going first, the men trailing behind, the nontulip last. He stopped at the door. “I don’t get it.”
Stevenson said, “Well, when you become a doctor, maybe you will. Right now, you’re working under me, and if you question my orders, kiss your job good-bye.”
Quincy, still cradling Ceara in his arms, decided that Dr. Stevenson was one hell of a lady.
She folded her arms at her waist, scrunching her scrub smock into pleats under her breasts. Meeting Quincy’s gaze, she said, “I have two patients. I’d really like both of them to survive. Good for the résumé. In the ordinary course of my days, I don’t have to make a choice between one or another. Do you get that?”
Quincy nodded. Ceara lifted her head from his shoulder and cried, “Me babe is dying. I need to hold her in me arms. Do ye get
that
?”
“I do.” Stevenson directed her gaze to Quincy. She had blue eyes that could cut straight through a man. “I just need to know that you understand, Mr. Harrigan. If you take her in there, I have no magical medicines to offset the result. Are we clear on that? This is beyond what I learned in med school. It’s beyond
everything
in this world, as we know it.”
Quincy tightened his hold on his wife. “So you do believe what I told you?”
Stevenson nodded. “Life never ceases to amaze me. I do believe what you told me. Now believe me.” She shifted her gaze to Ceara. “Your vital signs have been irregular for the last hour and a half, Ceara. Low blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, and a couple of times we nearly had to put you on supplemental oxygen. I know about your gift and that you used it to heal your husband’s wrist. That somehow drained you in a way that my medicine can’t treat. If you go to the NICU and try to heal your baby, same goes. I will have nothing in my arsenal to help you, and if you grow worse, with your blood pressure diving as it has been and your heart patterns bouncing all over the place, there will be no way for me to fix you.”
“I ken what ye’re saying,” Ceara replied. “Do ye have any wee ones of yer own, Dr. Stevenson?”
“It’s Marie, and no, I don’t. Not yet.”
“Well, when ye hold yer firstborn in yer arms, ye’ll understand how I feel right now. ’Tis na a choice fer me. ’Tis what I
must
do, ye ken?”
Marie Stevenson nodded. “I ken.” She looked at Quincy. “Don’t just stand there. Take your wife to the NICU. I’ll have staff standing by to help me afterward. We’ll be on the ready right outside.” Tears filled her eyes. “So now it’s your turn to say a prayer for me, Mr. Harrigan. Ask God to slip a couple of miracles up my sleeve.”
Quincy hurried from the room and angled left up the corridor. He paused for a second outside their daughter’s unit. If he walked in there, he’d be putting his wife’s life on the line. His pulse slammed in his temples, and for just a second he almost lost his nerve. Then, acutely aware that someone might rush up to stop him at any moment, he said, “To hell with it,” and bent to open the door. The big nurse in the colorful balloon top whirled from the incubator to gape at him and Ceara.
“You need to leave,” Quincy told her.
“No, sir, you’re the ones who need to leave. I’m still checking on your baby girl.”
Quincy took two steps into the room. “I’ve cleared this with Dr. Stevenson, and you need to go.” He didn’t want this wonderful nurse to be held responsible for anything that was about to happen. “Please, at least go out and check with the doctor. If she doesn’t back me up, you can always rush right back in here.”
The nurse glanced at Ceara, taking long measure of her pallor. “She should be in her room, not here.” Despite the protest, the woman slumped her shoulders and cut a circle around Quincy to reach the door. “I hope you know what you’re doing. Your wife is sick, you know.”
Quincy wasn’t sure anymore if he knew what he was doing—or sure about much of anything, as far as that went. From the moment he’d found Ceara in Beethoven’s stall, his whole world had been turned topsy-turvy, and things he once wouldn’t have believed now made total sense to him.
He gently deposited his wife in the recliner. She smiled weakly up at him. “I love ye, Quincy Harrigan. I need ye to ken that now, fer I may ne’er be able to tell ye again.”
Quincy’s heart felt as if razor-blade chips were being pumped through his valves. He cupped her pale face in his hands. “I’d like to hear you tell me your way, Ceara.”
Her eyes went bright with tears. “Looking at yer dear face makes me heart dance with joy.”
Quincy swallowed hard to make his voice work. “You’ve brought color into my life. Before you dropped into my arena, my life was painted in different shades of gray. Now it’s painted in bright hues and sunshine, even on rainy days.”
Her tears spilled over her lower lashes to trail down her pale cheeks. For what seemed an endless moment, their gazes locked, and messages that couldn’t be expressed with words passed between them.
“Ye’ll be a good da,” she whispered. “I ken that ye will always be there fer her. And ye’ll tell her every single day how much her mum loves her? With me words, not yers. Ye’ll tell her in me own way?”
Quincy nodded. “And I’ll make sure your mum sees her, and that our little girl sees your mum—all of them, all of your family, in the crystal ball. Loni will do that for us.”
Ceara nodded and smiled again. “’Twill be good fer her to know me family.” Just then, the baby grunted, trying to discharge a breath, and Ceara glanced over at their tiny daughter in the incubator. “’Tis time, Quincy. Give her to me.”
Quincy turned to do that, but the baby had so many wires and tubes hooked up to her that he didn’t know how to pluck her minuscule body out of there.
“Take all of it off,” Ceara told him. “She shall have no need of it once she’s in me arms. ’Tis me word ye have on it.”
Quincy’s hands shook as if he had palsy, but he started removing lifesaving tubes, leaving the breathing tube for last. His baby girl was so tiny that he was able to lift her out through the hole, using only one hand, with his other cupped against the dome just in case, so he wouldn’t accidentally drop her. The love he felt when he actually held his daughter nearly overwhelmed him.
“Hurry,” Ceara whispered. “I canna bring her back if she dies. I can only heal her.”
Quincy carefully placed their baby in his wife’s slender, fine-boned hands.
“Ach,” Ceara said. A radiant smile spread over her pale face as she tucked her daughter close against her neck, just under her chin. “Me precious wee one.” With one last look at Quincy, she whispered, “Ye make me heart sing happy songs,” and then she closed her eyes and began whispering prayers in Gaelic. Even as Quincy watched, Ceara’s face turned whiter—so white that the faint tint of pink to her lips went chalky.
Never in his life had he felt so helpless. Seeing Ceara do this . . . Oh, God, allowing it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He dropped to his knees beside the chair, afraid to touch mother or child for fear he would somehow put more drain on his wife’s body. He rested his head against the cushiony recliner back, his cheek against Ceara’s burnished curls as he gazed down at their daughter and the rhythmic movement of his wife’s chest. One of the baby’s itty-bitty hands was splayed over Ceara’s collarbone. Quincy watched those fingers, barely wider than a strand of uncooked spaghetti, go from purple to a healthy pink.
“’Tis done,” Ceara murmured. “Ye must take her now. Swiftly.”
Quincy carefully lifted their baby into his hands. He was startled half out of his wits when the infant jerked and started to cry, her wails as tiny as she was, but even so, Quincy knew his little girl now had functioning lungs. One glance at Ceara almost made his knees fold. She had gone limp and slumped sideways on the chair, her head resting on one of its arms. Her skin looked waxen. The only colorful bit of her left was her beautiful hair. And—oh, God—Quincy no longer saw her chest rising and falling.
“Help!” he yelled. “Now, Marie! Hurry!”
The door burst open. Quincy tucked his daughter against his neck, as he’d seen Ceara do, and stepped back so hospital staff could try to care for his wife. Bedlam. Cursing. So many people in the tiny room that Quincy backed into a corner, both hands cupped over his daughter, which was overkill. He could have protected her on all sides with only one palm. A gurney was brought in. Men worked in tandem to gently but quickly lift Ceara from the recliner and put her on the mattress. Before Quincy could blink, his wife was wheeled from the NICU.
The big nurse in the balloon smock entered the room as soon as the doorway cleared. When she saw the empty incubator, her gaze shot to Quincy’s cupped hands just under his chin. “Oh, my God, what have you done?”
Quincy felt his daughter’s tiny arms and legs moving, and in one part of his brain, he wanted to shout,
I’ve saved my baby!
but the other half of his brain was yelling,
I just let my wife commit suicide.
He leaned into the corner, no longer trusting his legs, and as Ceara had done only seconds earlier, he told the nurse, “Take her. Swiftly. I think I might pass out.”
The nurse muttered curses as she took the baby from him. She didn’t waste time on any more words as she rushed to the incubator to get the infant hooked back up to life support. Quincy watched it all in a daze, unable to push away from the walls that pressed against his body like an embrace to keep him on his feet. Other nurses rushed in, both male and female. In the dizzying kaleidoscope of his reality, all of them were a blur. Words bounced into his brain and then ricocheted around, like echoes inside a canyon.
It’s a miracle
.
Look at her, breathing on her own
.
Have you ever seen anything like this
?
My God, sweetie, what a little fighter you are
.
Brett, she doesn’t need to be intubated now. Let it go
.
Slowly, Quincy’s senses righted enough for him to gather the strength to stand on his own. He got to the door, and then found himself in the hall. His mind felt as if it were stuck in neutral. But he had to get down that corridor to Ceara’s cubicle.
Ceara, his precious Irish rose, was dying. He had to be with her, let her know again that he understood, that he would be all she wanted him to be for their beautiful daughter. Even unconscious, she’d sense, somehow, that he was with her.
Chapter Nineteen
P
revented from entering Ceara’s room, Quincy found himself on a corridor bench, staring stupidly at the floor. Shock? He didn’t know.
This isn’t happening,
he thought. It was crazy beyond belief, totally off the reality chart. But as Father Mike had said the night of his and Ceara’s marriage, there were mysteries in the universe that mere humans could not grasp.
So all of this
was
happening. His wife had just put her life on the line to save their baby. Their little girl was now doing well on her own. And Quincy had allowed all of it to happen. His guts churned and clenched.
Ceara
. Dear God, how could he have let her do it?
Even as Quincy asked himself the question, he knew he’d done the right thing. He couldn’t have denied Ceara the opportunity to do what he would have done himself if only he’d had the ability. Not if he believed in equal rights. And he did, damn it. It just sucked that in this instance, standing up for what he believed in might cost him so dearly. Knowing you’d done the right thing didn’t make it easy.
Quincy felt disconnected from everything around him, yet the pain in his chest was so intense it made breathing difficult. He had to concentrate on it. In. Out. Again. Suddenly Quincy remembered that he hadn’t called his family. He knew they couldn’t help, but when the going got tough the Harrigans hung together. He had enough problems right now without all of them screaming at him for not contacting them. Pawing blindly at his belt, he located his phone. He decided to text Clint, because his dad, not being of the cell phone generation, often missed calls and messages.
Need u at hosp. Urgent. Get Father Mike over here, pronto
.
As Quincy stuffed his phone back into its case, he realized he had no clear recollection of where he was in the hospital. He guessed maybe that was because his entire being yearned to be elsewhere—with Ceara, a woman so sweet and dear that she had filled up his whole world with her light. His chest ached so much he wondered whether it would kill him. But that would be too easy, a quick end and a fast escape. Life never played out that way. He could lose Ceara, his fiery-haired, beautiful, impossibly precious wife. And somehow he had to live through it to raise their child, just as he had promised her he would. Quincy knew his father had somehow managed to keep going after losing his wife, solely for the sake of his kids, but Quincy didn’t know if he had it in him.
Suddenly Stevenson sat beside him. He had no idea where she had come from. It seemed to him she’d shot up out of the floor tiles. She seemed to sense the agony he felt, for she touched his hand.
“You made the right choice,” she said softly.
“Did I?”
Her fingers squeezed his. “It was the
only
choice. Ceara wanted it, and if either of us had tried to stop her, she never would have forgiven us. Where there’s still life, there’s still hope. Let’s not give up just yet.”
Quincy felt as if his thoughts floated in thick syrup, and bringing one to the surface so he could focus on it took gargantuan effort. “Hope? I thought the baby was doing great.”
Stevenson chuckled. “Oh, yes. I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s a preemie in every way, but all the symptoms that usually present such risk with a preterm birth have vanished. She’s perfectly okay now except for being so incredibly tiny, and over time, she’ll grow.” She sighed. “I only wish Ceara were doing as well. I’ve tried everything I know, but I can’t get her to stabilize.”