The girl shifted her position, and Faith took a better look at her, her heart sinking. Her arms were wrapped around her swollen middle, which strained against the fabric of her pale-green sweater. She wasn’t wearing a coat and shivered in the cold air. She was very, very pregnant. Her face was white, her eyes dark with fear. “I—I hurt so badly. I can’t walk.”
Feminine instinct and medical training took over, marching Faith forward on stiff legs. She tied Addy to a sapling at the corner of the shelter and hushed her with a stern warning. The little dog dropped to her belly on the cold ground whimpering with anxiety, sensing the tension in the humans around her, but obedient to Faith’s command.
Faith looked from one terrified young face to the other. “She needs to be taken to the hospital.” She took off her all-weather coat and draped it around the shivering girl’s shoulders. She was wearing the sweatshirt Mark had given her for Christmas the year before, a heavy black one covered front and back with butterflies so she would be warm enough without her coat.
“No!” The girl panted, then bit her lip and groaned, a low, guttural sound. The sound of a woman who was almost ready to give birth. Faith’s heart hammered. This couldn’t be happening. Not today of all days. The day her own child should have been born.
“Your baby is coming, and it shouldn’t be born out here in the cold. I’ll give you directions to the hospital in Bartonsville. When you get there the nurses can notify your families—”
Silvery strands of gossamer-fine hair danced in the cold air as the girl shook her head. “I don’t have a family,” she said defiantly. “Only my brother in Texas.”
“What about you?”
“I—I don’t have any family, either,” he said miserably.
He was lying, but before Faith could call him on it another contraction rippled across the girl’s belly. Less than two minutes had passed since the last one. She had to move quickly or the situation would get out of hand. “I’m Faith Carson. I live just down the road at the bottom of the next hill. What’s your name, honey?”
“Beth.”
“And you are?”
“Jamie.” No surnames. Faith let the omission pass. For the moment there were more pressing matters.
“You’re the baby’s father?”
He nodded, his Adam’s apple working up and down in his throat. “Is Beth going to be okay?”
“She needs expert care. You know that, don’t you?”
“We were looking for a hospital. We got lost. I’m—I’m not used to driving in the country. The road’s go every which way.”
“It’s okay. You’re only a few miles from a good hospital. I’ll give you directions, but you must leave now. Your baby’s going to be born very soon if I don’t miss my guess.”
“How do you know it’s going to be soon?” Beth was gasping for breath, clutching at Jamie’s arm with both hands. He stood beside the table, ramrod straight, breathing almost as hard and fast as the mother-to-be.
Faith sighed. “I’m a nurse,” she said. “I know.”
“First babies take a long time, I’ve heard. This—this only started about an hour ago.”
“Has your water broken?”
For a moment Beth looked puzzled, then nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was at first, then I remembered from health class. It was this morning. Then the cramps started.” She began to sob. “I hurt so bad. I just want to get this thing out of me.” The sobs turned to a groan, and she dropped her hands to the tabletop, lifting herself into a crouch, straining against the contraction.
“Don’t push,” Faith ordered automatically. “Try to breathe through the contraction. Like this.” She made an O with her mouth and panted.
Beth tried, but she was too upset and in too much pain for the exercise to do any good. She cried out and her knees buckled.
Jamie had gone from looking scared to terrified. “Help us. I don’t know what to do. The doctor at the clinic in…back home…told us the baby probably wasn’t due for another three weeks.”
“Have you had regular prenatal care?” Faith asked.
“I—I just went twice. I had a test where they rub a wand over your stomach—”
“A sonogram,” Faith supplied.
“Yes. My baby’s a girl. But they wanted—” Beth broke off what she was about to say. Faith guessed it was that the clinic doctor wanted to notify her family. She was a little thing, and if she wore baggy clothes, like the sweater she had on now, she probably had been able to hide her pregnancy. “If we go to the hospital they’ll take my baby away.” Beth’s eyes sought Faith’s. They were blue Faith noted, as blue as a country sky on a cloudless June day.
“No they won’t. Not unless you want to give the baby up.”
“I want my baby.” Beth bit down hard on her lower lip as another contraction began.
“Beth,” Jamie said, his tone edged with desperation. “We’ve gone over this and over this. We don’t have any money or jobs or a place to live. How can we take care of a baby?”
“Other girls have. I can, too. You don’t have to marry me. You know that, Jamie. Your parents don’t want you to, anyway.”
“I—I just don’t know how we’ll manage—” He broke off as she cried out again. “Do something,” he pleaded to Faith.
“Do you have a cell phone?” she asked.
Jamie wouldn’t quite meet her eyes. “We lost it.”
So much for the easy way out.
Faith took one more look at the car. It was a two-seater. Warmer than the open shelter, certainly, and out of the wind, but with little room to maneuver. If there was a problem with the birth she would be at an even greater disadvantage shoehorned inside it than she was now. Beth moaned again, leaning against her young lover, straining.
“Don’t push,” Faith said sharply. Beth’s labor was progressing rapidly. Even if she left Addy behind and they all squeezed into the car, the baby’s arrival would probably occur before they reached the hospital. “We’re going to have to deliver the baby here,” she said with false calm.
Beth started to cry harder. “I think so, too.”
Faith reached out and touched her fingertips to Beth’s cold cheek. She couldn’t think about her own grief, couldn’t remember that she should be laboring in the same way as this girl, bringing the baby she had longed for so desperately into the world.
“It’s going to be okay.” She swallowed against the familiar lump of sorrow in her throat, made her voice as soothing as she could manage. “I’m going to deliver your baby and Jamie’s going to help.”
“Me?” He swallowed audibly. “I… What can I do?”
“Do you have any blankets in the car? Towels?”
“We have sleeping bags. And I have a couple of clean sweatshirts. Will they do?”
“Yes. We can wrap the baby in them. How about a pair of scissors?”
The last of the color drained out of Jamie’s face as he made the connection. He shook his head. “No scissors.”
“Not even cuticle scissors? A penknife, then.” Faith held on to her composure with both hands. It wouldn’t do to let these two terrified kids see that she was almost as afraid as they were.
“I have a penknife.” Jamie pulled a small one out of his pocket. “It’s sharp.”