Chapter9
She was just at the beginning of her eighth month when she got a phone call about her mother in Boston. Theresa hadn’t been doing too well, but Kate was not at all expecting the phone call that she got from one of her mother’s neighbors. Her mother had had a stroke and had been rushed to the hospital. Things were not looking good for her.
Kate went into a panic right away and the first call that she made was to Pierce. He answered immediately and his voice was filled with worry and concern, though it was for her and the baby.
“Kate! What is it? Is anything wrong? Are you in labor?” he asked, and he could hear her sobbing on the other end of the line. His heart nearly pounded right out of his chest as he jumped straight up from the chair in his office, holding his phone hard against his ear.
“No, it’s not me. The baby and I are fine, but Pierce, it’s my mom! She had a stroke! She was taken to the hospital. I have to get to Boston right now!”
He didn’t even stop to think about it. “I don’t want you on the highway while you’re pregnant. There’s too great a chance you could be in a car wreck or something could happen. You could go into labor stuck in a car. Listen, I have a helicopter. Take that. It will take you directly there. I would go, but I can’t get away from what I’m working on right now, it’s just not possible. Listen, have the service people take you to the airport where I keep it, get in and go. It’s the fastest way up to Boston.”
“A helicopter?” she asked in utter astonishment. But as he had been talking, she realized that he was right. It was the fastest way there, and she didn’t want to miss even a second with her mother, in case her mother’s minutes were coming to an end.
“Yes, take my helicopter. I’ll phone the pilot and have him waiting for you. He makes a lot of money to be on call when I need him. He’ll be there ready to go. The service people know where it is. Please be safe and call me when you get there to update me on your mom and to let me know that you’re alright. And please try not to have the baby in Boston,” he pleaded humbly.
She felt the corner of her mouth turn up and she nodded. “Call you when I get there, don’t have the baby in Boston. Got it. Thank you, Pierce. Really… this means…” She shook her head and began to sob again.
“I know what it means. You don’t have time to be grateful. You can send me a thank you card later. Just go get in the car now and go, and call me when you get there,” he pressed her urgently.
“Okay, thank you and goodbye,” she told him, ending the call. She got the service people on the phone and five minutes later they were clicking their seatbelts and heading to the airport.
The helicopter ride was surreal and she would have loved it if her heart wasn’t breaking during every miserable moment aboard it. The machine landed at the airport in Boston and a car swept her immediately from the airport to the hospital where her mother was. She wasn’t sure she had ever been so worried and heartbroken in her whole life.
She hurried as fast as she could into the hospital and found the floor that she was looking for, and mere minutes after that, she found her mother’s room and rushed tearfully to her side. Her mother looked over at her in shock as the doctor beside her bed made notes on a chart.
“Baby girl! What on earth are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here! What can you be thinking! OH!! Look at your belly! Look at that little baby in your belly!” Her mother began to coo and to reach her hand to Kate’s belly, rubbing it gently as tears spilled out of her eyes.
The doctor looked at Kate in surprise. Kate looked from her mother to the doctor and then back to her mother in utter bewilderment. “Mama, what do you mean what am I doing here? You had a stroke! Of course I’m here!”
Her mother stared at her, mystified. “A stroke? Who told you that? I didn’t have a stroke!”
Kate felt everything in her freeze. “What do you mean you didn’t have a stroke? Your neighbor Doris called me and told me that you had a stroke and that you were taken here. Wait… if you didn’t have a stroke, then what are you doing here?” She looked up at the doctor in consternation. “What’s going on here?”
The doctor reached his hand out to her to calm her down. “Well, I can easily understand why her neighbor Doris might have thought that it was a stroke, but I can assure you that it wasn’t. Your mother has an arrhythmia with her heart. It’s not beating at the rate that it’s supposed to. Now, I’m going to recommend an ablation surgery to cauterize the area in her heart that’s causing the arrhythmia, but it wasn’t a stroke and there is no damage to her heart, her body, or her mind. She’s going to be fine. We just need to do an easy surgery to fix this. That’s all. It is a heart rate issue, and that’s not a life killer.”
He seemed pleased with his summation of what happened and what was going to happen. Kate sighed and dropped her face into her hands. “Thank god you’re okay, and dang that neighbor of yours!” Then she turned to face the doctor. “Thank you, doctor, too. You’ve been an enormous help.”
“Well, I’m not mad at Doris for calling you and telling you that I had a stroke. Poor old thing probably believes it, too. She was so upset. Anyway, look at it this way; it sure got you down here in a hurry, didn’t it?” She chuckled and Kate groaned in exasperation.
“Yes, I guess it did, and I’m so glad to see you! I missed you Mama.” Kate leaned forward and hugged her mother close and tight.
“Speaking of which, how did you get down here so fast?” Mama asked her curiously.
Kate smiled then and laughed a little. “Pierce… he has a helicopter, it turns out. I called him as soon as I got off of the phone with Doris and he told me to take it. We made it down here in record time. It was actually a really cool ride, except for the part where I thought you were dying. That wasn’t fun, but the rest was pretty incredible.”
“A helicopter! My goodness! What next?” Theresa asked with a wondrous shake of her head.
“Well… a baby next.” Kate grinned at her mother and rested her hands on her enormous belly.
“How is the baby doing?” the doctor asked, eyeing her closely.
She turned to look at him with a smile. “The baby is fine. She’s doing great.”
Her mother inhaled sharply. “It’s a girl?” she asked in a voice just above a whisper, excitement building in her as she got to experience the pregnancy and the baby for the first time.
“It is a girl,” Kate confirmed with a grin. “We found out.”
Her mother shed a few more tears as she felt the little girl moving in her mother’s belly. “My granddaughter… this is my granddaughter and you’re going to give her away and she’s going to grow up without her mother and without her grandmother.”
Theresa looked up sharply at Kate then. “I wish you could understand the kind of love that I have for you and for this little baby girl you’re carrying.” Her voice wasn’t harsh, but more like she was speaking an actual wish.
Kate sighed and rubbed her belly gently. “Oh, believe me, I understand that kind of love. I’m already feeling it.”
Her mother shook her head. “If you were feeling it, you could never let her go.”
Kate closed her eyes and sighed. “The whole thing is one big giant mess, Mama. You know it was supposed to be a saving grace for us, but here we are, and it’s an awful mess.” She turned her head away from her mother so that she wouldn’t see just how hurt she was.
“Well you sit down with that shining knight of yours and you figure out a way to work it out. There’s always a way to work it out,” she advised wisely.
“I’ll see what I can do, Mama,” Kate answered quietly. There was nothing that she could do. She knew it. She didn’t want to argue the point with her mother, especially when her mother was in the hospital, and when there was a doctor standing right in front of them.
She stayed with her mother for a long while and then when she felt sure that she had a good understanding of her mother’s condition, she kissed her goodbye and held her hand for a while, telling her just how much she loved her.
Then she went out into the hallway and called Pierce to let him know how things were going. He answered right away, sad and sorry that things had turned out like they had, but relieved that it was not a stroke.
“Are you coming back tonight?” he asked hopefully.
“Yeah, I think I will. I don’t want to be too far from the hospital when I go into labor, and my mom is fine, so I’m going to go back to New York in just a few minutes.
“Safe travels,” he told her kindly.
“Thanks. We’ll see you soon,” she answered him, and then they said goodbye and ended their call.
She kissed and hugged her mom and said goodbye to her, and then got onto the helicopter to go back to Manhattan. They flew back up the coast and she enjoyed the ride home much more with no worries or stress on her mind.
The closer they got to New York, the more clouds there were, and the more rain there was, until they got to the island proper, and the wind and rain was so bad that Kate was growing terrified of what they were flying through.
“We’ll make it. I’m one of the best pilots around,” the pilot told her with a strong vote of self-confidence. She wished that she could feel as sure as he did.
Just as they were coming up the Hudson River, a bolt of lightning shot out of a black cloud and it nailed the helicopter square on, killing the motor. Kate and the pilot both screamed as the small bird nosedived, plummeting and spinning out of control as it raced toward the water. Kate wrapped her arms protectively around her belly and ducked her head down, her body held in tight by a seatbelt.
The pilot managed to crash land it into the Hudson, but from the moment the helicopter hit the water, Kate was knocked out and everything went black.