she said and started to weep.
But the next pain, hitting her just two minutes later, made her shriek so loud that a redheaded nurse who looked like she was barely a teenager popped her head through the door. “Is everything all right?” she asked timidly.
“No, everything is not all right.” Alex jumped to his feet from where he had been sitting on the side of his wife’s bed and grabbed the nurse’s forearm before she could escape. “You need to get the doctor, a real doctor. Now.”
The nurse’s blue eyes widened in alarm, her freckled face paling. She wordlessly nodded, and as soon as Alex loosened his grip on her arm, she fled the room, returning two minutes later with Eliza’s ob-gyn. Dr. Manning, a kind, graying man with spectacles, had delivered thousands of babies in his lifetime.
In seconds, Dr. Manning checked Eliza, and in a calm voice which apparently masked his concern, he delivered the news to the young couple. “Eliza, you were right, your pains aren’t normal. We have to do an emergency C-section to get the baby out as soon as possible. He is pushing against the umbilical cord. We have a matter of minutes to get him out.”
Eliza’s whole body started to shake uncontrollably. She looked over at Alex, who was standing against the wall, and saw his face turn nearly gray with fear. A nurse covered her with a warm blanket and suddenly she was being wheeled on a gurney into the operating room, counting down. Thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, eight…
CHAPTER 5
BABY CAMERON WAS BEAUTIFUL, his skin flawless from the C-section delivery that hot August night.
Eliza and Alex had said prayers of gratitude every night for weeks that their baby boy had made it through. That gratitude sustained them for a few months, even when Cameron developed colic, but soon started to fade into sleepless nights and long days with Alex working constantly, many times on jobs throughout the weekends, to get overtime to pay their bills while Eliza healed from her surgery, nursed the baby, and fought postpartum blues.
Eliza had to eventually go back to work at the diner so they wouldn’t lose the apartment and resentfully placed nine-month-old Cameron into a day care. She hated leaving him but knew the alternative would be that they would be living in a shelter or on the streets.
Some light finally shed on the little family when Alex received a well-deserved promotion to team leader of his roofing crew. Eliza had discovered that his hopes for getting the leadership position based on stellar reviews from his superiors had been the good news her husband had never managed to share the day she told him she was pregnant.
Managing a bunch of roofers was tough work, and he often came home even more surly than he used to be, but the pay was nearly double what he had been making.
Eliza could finally quit her waitress job and work from home part-time doing data entry, which meant she could spend a little more time with baby Cameron. But it turned out that the accounting job started taking up so much of her time that she had to put her one-year-old son back into day care.
When Cameron was almost three, Alex and Eliza had finally saved up enough money to move from their dingy two-bedroom apartment into a little ranch house in the suburbs of Glendale just outside of Phoenix.
And one month later, Eliza announced she was pregnant again.
AUSTIN TRELLIS WAS BORN on Father’s Day, a fact that, in years to come, would delight Alex who would always fondly say it was his best Fathers’ Day gift ever.
Eliza thought since Cameron’s birth was difficult, and since she was also fortunate to have a shorter stint of morning sickness during her pregnancy with her second son, she was sure that Austin’s birth would be easier.
But she was wrong.
Eliza still had narrow hips for child birthing, but she was determined to have a natural delivery after her C-section. She ended up experiencing twenty-four hours of excruciating labor pains, the last half in agony when the epidural didn’t take. Eliza felt like her bottom was being ripped open when the doctor pulled ten-pound baby Austin from her, and it took her weeks to heal from the episiotomy, and months for the postpartum blues to slip away.
Cameron was a big help to her with the baby. Too tired and depressed to get up off the couch most mornings, she would ask him to fetch a bottle from the fridge or the baby’s pacifier when he cried or sometimes some cereal or crackers for himself when he wanted a snack.
She knew she relied too heavily on her older son when he was practically still a baby himself, but Eliza couldn’t help the overwhelming depression and anxiety that flooded her.
Eliza usually waited until both Cameron and Austin were napping to go to her little desk set up in a spare nook of the house, which doubled as the laundry room. She had to make sure the washer and dryer weren’t on when she was talking to clients, though inevitably sometimes, she’d be on an important call and she’d hear the baby cry on the monitor, or Cameron would get up early from his nap and forget what she had warned him not to do and come bounding into her makeshift office yelling “Mommy!”
Sometimes she lost her temper then asked the client if she could call him or her back and yelled at Cameron. “Don’t you remember Mommy told you never to come in here talking or yelling, to always walk into Mommy’s office quietly and to wait until I was off the phone to speak?”
Cameron always told her he was sorry, then she felt exasperated and guilty.
Alex typically didn’t get home in time for dinner, and some nights he rolled right into bed around ten p.m., too exhausted to do much more than say goodnight if she was even awake.
When they did manage to talk for a few minutes, she often lied to him about her day, cheerfully telling him as he started falling asleep that she and Cameron had played for hours.
BUT THE NIGHT he walked in after she had discovered his gambling debt, all of the lies both of them had harbored were revealed in all of their ugly truth.
Eliza was in the living room, bank statement in hand, ready to confront him as soon as he laid down his briefcase and loosened his tie.
“I’ve found out where you’ve been going, and that you’ve charged more than five thousand dollars gambling,” she said, her voice and hands trembling. “I cannot believe you’ve not only been spending time away from me and the kids for who knows how long each week, but you’ve been wasting our money. Making payments on a gambling debt, money I could have spent on clothes and shoes for the kids, or even maybe going out with you once in a while.”
Alex had removed his jacket during her rant and then put his hands on his hips defensively. “Well, if you could work more hours at a real job and make a little more money, and wouldn’t spend what we have so carelessly, like ninety-nine dollars on a pantsuit, maybe I wouldn’t have to try to go to desperate measures to try to get more income.”
“That’s just an excuse, and you know it!” Eliza waved the paper statement in front of her husband’s reddening face. “You just don’t want to be with us, you don’t even care about us anymore! Do you think it’s easy raising two boys on my own? Did you ever think maybe I would like to go out and play slot machines or whatever it is you’re throwing money at?”
Alex practically ignored her, walking past her to go into the kitchen and grab a beer from the refrigerator. He popped open the can, stood leaning against the counter, and started to guzzle the contents.
Eliza followed him, her fury mounting. She couldn’t stop the words from slashing out of her mouth, didn’t want to. “You know what, Alex Trellis? You’re a terrible husband and a terrible father!”
“Well, you’re just a hypocrite!” He slammed the half empty beer can onto the countertop, sending beer suds spilling out. “You sit home pretending to work while you practically have our older son babysitting or watching TV all day.”
Eliza felt her face flush with shame. How did he know that?
As if to answer her unspoken question, Alex continued. “I know