story would have to wait.
Okay, Karin. I do need an explanation.
Josiah’s imagination argued pointlessly with a woman whose brain was leaking or swelling or whatever brains do when they’ve been shaken like a maraca.
His stomach churned. His turkey wanted out.
A hospital staff member with Housekeeping embroidered on her unisex polo breast pocket pushed a wheeled cart into the surgery waiting alcove. She bent to pick up a scrap of paper and deposited it in the waste receptacle on her cart. Josiah let the window slats rattle back into their resting position and met her at the cart with his sandwich cellophane. The offending odor now gone, his stomach could right itself. Unless the surgeon walking toward him had news to match his graveyard facial expression.
The soles of Josiah’s feet itched, as if begging him to run before the surgeon started speaking. Josiah would have shaken his hand, but his palms had gone from bone dry to damp as a Brazilian jungle floor at the sight of the man with news. He crossed his arms and stuck his hands in his armpits. Swayed back and forth. Yeah, that looks natural. He stopped swaying and let his hands fall to his sides.
Focus, man. The good doctor’s talking.
“Remarkably, we were able to save the child, for now at least.”
The woman’s thirty-four, Doc. Hardly a child.
“If your wife had been farther along, we might not have been so fortunate. Especially in light of all the pelvic trauma.”
“Farther along?”
“The abdominal impact was absorbed by your wife’s body, not the baby’s.”
A tremor shook Josiah’s skeleton loose from its moorings. Freight train? Earthquake? “Karin?”
Dr. Whatshisname’s plastic smile showed far less energy than it must have taken to produce it. “She’s in recovery. I’m sorry I can’t let you see her yet. As soon as we have her—”
“I want to know what happened to her.” Josiah winced at the taste of bile his inflection produced.
The surgeon tugged at his v-neck and drew in a breath that when expelled smelled of Mentos and sadness. “Her brain injuries are by far our gravest concern.” His eyes widened as if horrified at his use of the word grave. “In addition to the baby, of course.”
Freight train. Definitely a freight train. “There was a child with her?”
“Let’s find a place where we can talk in private.” The doctor cupped Josiah’s elbow and steered him toward an open door that led to the world’s smallest conference room. Three chairs of the same ilk as those in the waiting alcove. An end table. A lamp. Not that it shed appreciable light.
The child was not in the car with Karin. It was inside her. Inside her.
And medical science told him it couldn’t be his.
Chapter 4
No matter how high your problems mount, remember the One who scales mountains with the same elegance as when He walks on water.
~ Seedlings & Sentiments
from the “Challenges” collection
Severe internal injuries. Brain swelling. Intensive care unit. Critical. Ventilator. Intubation. Next forty-eight hours.
The words came to him in fragments, not complete sentences, though Josiah noted the doctor’s lips moving among the dark shards. When the professional lips stopped, Josiah dumped the words accumulating in his own mouth. “I had no idea I’d be so worthless in an emergency.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re going to have to repeat everything you just said. I can’t process . . .”
The lips twisted into a much warmer plastic. “Mr. Chamberlain, I assure you I’m prepared to do that. Right now, I have another critical patient to attend to.”
Critical.
“One of the ICU nurses will come get you when they have her settled enough to allow you a brief visit. They’ll explain our intensive care family visitation policies. A strict ten minutes per hour. I know how much you want to be by her side, know how worried you must have been about both Karin and the baby, but it’s important that the staff have the freedom to give her all the attention she needs to battle through these fragile hours.”
Battle through this. Attention. Yes, let’s give her attention. Both of them. Don’t forget about the baby.
So, the driver wasn’t a good Samaritan. He was—unlike Josiah—a sperm factory. And they were coupled. A couple.
No. Karin would never do that to him. Inconceiva—
Find a different word that doesn’t have the word conceive in it.
Josiah swallowed a vile thought about a devil-child growing inside Karin, a fetus draining blood and oxygen and life from a woman who needed all of that and more to “battle through this.”
She’d been unfaithful to him? Like, seriously unfaithful? How was that possible? Mistake. All of this—a mistake. Somehow.
He picked at the tissue he’d snatched from a lonely looking box on the lamp table. I love her. I love her not. I love her. I love her not.
A day earlier, not loving hadn’t been an option. Now?
Even immutable truths had derailed. If he hadn’t been exhausted, maybe it wouldn’t feel as if he were watching that freight train plunge from a bridge into the water below, trying to tug it back onto the tracks with a frayed length of string.
The room—her ICU room—did nothing to reassure him. Built for service, not aesthetics, it blinked and buzzed and clicked its equipment as if only the things with electrical cords deserved to be there. But a woman lay within the circle of wheezing machines.
If asked to identify the body lying on the bed before him, Josiah would have to say no. No, that’s not my wife. Karin bought foundation in a color called “Flawless” and lipstick named “Perpetually Pink.” Good husband that he was, he’d been with her on the color hunt too many times. Not enough times.
The pseudo person lying on the bed with a distorted, bloated face would—if called to match skin tones—have to tell the cosmetics counter lady she needed foundation and lipstick in “Napa Valley Purple.”
But her hospital identification bracelet said her name was indeed Karin Alecia Chamberlain and he was her NOK—next of kin. The nurses hovering like dragonflies called her Karin. Repeatedly. As if she suffered from Alzheimer’s.
“Karin, I’m going to check your vitals now.”
“Karin, let’s see if we can’t adjust your pillow a little better.”
“Karin,
