--Dante, Inferno, Longfellow trans.
Mike looks so tired. "April?"
I grab him, hold onto him, and he winds his arms around my neck, slowly, carefully, like
an old man. I realize his hands are bandaged, decide it's better if I don't ask.
"April, would you and Casey mind if we went down to the farmhouse for a couple
days?"
"No, no, not at all. Do you want a ride down?"
"No," he says carefully, "we...we kind of need to do this ourselves."
"All right. You want some food or anything? I can pick up--"
"We just need to go. I'm sorry--"
"It's okay, Mike."
"Look, if we don't come back--" he stops then; I think he sees the look on my face.
"Don's got some money in the trunk under his bed. Under some stuff, you'll have to look,
but it's there."
"Mike--"
"We want you to take it. Buy the girls something nice, something they'll keep, okay--
"
"Mike, you can't just--"
"April," he says, "please..." and we both start crying. "please, April, promise me..."
"Mike, I can't..."
"And the rest of the stuff, the personal stuff, burn it, just burn it. Please, April, my
stories, all of it. Please..."
How can I promise him this?
"April..."
"All right, Mike. I promise."
"Thank you," he whispers at my neck. "Thank you so much."
And he's gone.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
He wakes up in the morning and can't find Don, panics, fights it, gets to the kitchen,
starts some pancakes, tries to focus on the food. And it works; in a different kitchen, in
the cold clear light, he can keep his attention on the batter, isn't even startled when Don
walks in.
"I wake you up?"
"Don't think so," Mike says.
"Smells good." Don walks over to the drawer and grabs some silverware.
"Found some blueberries in the freezer."
"Great." He sits at the table, watches Mike pour out another pancake. "I just took a
walk...went out to the cave..."
Mike flips a pancake, walks over to the cabinet and gets a pair of plates out.
"You were right," Don says. "This is...better. A lot better."
"Yeah," he says, sliding the first pancakes onto a plate and handing them to Don. His
jaw's tight; something's wrong. It takes Don a minute, but he gets it.
"You gonna call her when you get back?"
"I don't know," pouring out another pancake, "it's been so long...she's probably..."
He loses it and Don gets up, turns the burner off, puts his arms around his brother.
"You gotta take it off the heat..." Mike sobs, and Don takes the pan off the burner, pulls
him closer. He puts his head on Don's shoulder.
"When's she due?"
"Thirteenth," Mike says miserably.
"We'll be back before then."
"She could--"
"It's her first baby, right? Remember, April said your first one's never early? Remember
how she was late?"
"Yeah," Mike sniffles, and it feels good to Don to be the one with his shit together for a
change, to be trying to make Mike feel better for a change. He's been leaning on Mike so
hard lately...
"So you can call her and see how she's doing, right? It's gonna be hard, her parents are
gone, right? She got any other family?"
"Her brother's in the Peace Corps, out in Nigeria or something...Angola, maybe, I don't
remember..."
"So she's gonna be all alone with her little-- she know if it's a boy or a girl?"
"No, she didn't wanna know." He lets go of Don, wipes his eyes, turns the heat back on.
"I gotta get back to these pancakes, I'm starvin'."
"So what do you think it's gonna be?"
"What?" He grabs a fork and takes a bite from Don's plate. "Sorry, they're a little
overcooked."
"They're great, Mike. The baby. Boy or girl?"
"I don't know..."
"You can't lie for shit, Mike. Whaddya think?"
Mike smiles a little, turns back to the stove. "It's stupid."
"No, it's not. C'mon, tell me."
"All right," he tells April. "First thing we gotta teach you is how to block a
punch."
April frowns. "That's first?"
"You wanted to know how to defend yourself, right?" She'd taken all right to the
weights, but the fighting was gonna be an uphill battle. Of course, this was probably not
the ideal time to start, either, when they hadn't heard from the guys for days, but Casey
thought it might take her mind off things. It took him two days to clean up the training
room, and even now he knows April can tell something's wrong. Oh well. He'd done
what he could.
He didn't think April had realized how close to the edge the guys were until Mike came
down that day. Neither of them had even seen Don since they broke him out, but judging
from Raphael's last report, it was just as well.
"You taught April to fight yet?"
"Raph, will you friggin' drop it?"
"Look, Don's gonna have to spar with somebody, this'd be the perfect
time..."
"Very funny."
"You really think I'm kidding?"
April's voice brings him back. "Look, maybe this wasn't such a good idea...I mean, if the
kids need us..."
"The kids are asleep, remember? If they need us we'll hear 'em on the monitor," he says
firmly. Last night she'd had such a miserable nightmare...well, let's just say it was enough
for him to rethink his position.
And he had to admit that his own nightmares were starting to get to him.
Friggin' snow. This storm came outa nowhere, she'd checked the forecast, she'd been
careful. Nobody said anything about a storm, much less anything like this. The snow
just kept coming, sometimes changed to sleet, impossible to drive through much less find
your way, and it was dark, and God she was lost.
She'd seen the hospital sign, couldn't have been more than a mile back, she can hardly see
the road much less the signs at this point but the road's changing to dirt and even out here
they don't put hospitals on dirt roads.
If she hadn't panicked the second she figured out what was going on...
Too late to worry about it now.
She focuses on the brown ribbon of dirt, hoping to see a house, a driveway, anything--
What she sees is the river.
Shit.
She doesn't want to skid so she cranks the wheel around, hard, feels the car skidding,
slowing, though, inching back, back, oh god oh please I'm too young to die I've
got...
The impact almost feels like it's in slow motion, backsliding into the concrete, spinning
around until the car is parallel with the river-- with the abyss where the bridge has gone
out-- but stops. The engine sputters out.
For a second, she's relieved.
Then she tries to start the car; nothing. The pain hits again, harder this time, and she
realizes she's just as screwed now as she was twenty seconds ago. She opens her car door
and looks around; nothing but white as far as she can see. She zips up her coat, finds her
scarf and her gloves and puts them on, wishes she'd worn heavier socks. Too late
now.
She gets out of the car. What else can she do?
Don lifts his head up from the book. "What was that ?"
"Geez, don't tell me somebody's out there." Mike gets up and peers out at the gloom.
"Almost sounded like a car," Don says.
"They should have seen the flares--"
"Mighta burnt out by now, gotten covered up by this crap--"
Mike frowns and grabs his jacket. "I'll check."
"If they went in the drink, I doubt either of us can do anything."
Mike shrugs his shoulders and opens the door.
He sees the four-ways flashing first; some car at an incredibly odd angle. And there's
someone coming up the road.
He shines the flashlight beam in its direction. "Are you okay?"
"Mike?"
He stops for a second, then picks up the pace. "Yeah, yeah, it's me..."
He gets to her and it's like they've been apart for thirty years, the way he grabs her and the
look on her face, and he kisses her, the first time they've kissed and she notices
something funny about his mouth but not anything she can put a finger on, and they kiss
until reality hits her again and she breaks away from him.
"Mike."
"What?"
"I'm in labor."
Don darts further in the house to call the rescue squad and Mike's left helping her get
her coat off, easing off her shoes, another contraction starts and they stop everything for a
second, Maureen squeezing his hand.
"What are you doin' down here?" he asks her.
"Getting the last of those fucking papers signed...why I ever dated that man..."
They hear Don swearing in the other room.
"What?" Mike asks.
"Phone's out."
"You guys got a car?" Maureen asks, and Mike shakes his head.
"How did you get out here?"
"Caught a couple rides down to Northampton, hiked out here mostly...there's not much
traffic this way in winter."
"You hiked out here?"
"Yeah. It was nicer weather then..."
"So how..."
"I'll hook the radio up," Don says, appearing suddenly in the living room. "We can call
them that way."
Don's probably fifty pounds lighter than his brother, almost sickly looking he's so skinny.
Probably the one who was in the accident, she thinks. Wonder where the
others are... "Hey," she says, looking at them both now Mike's out of his coat, "why
are you guys..."
And she remembers Mike's kiss and it clicks.
"Oh, God," she says, sinking into the couch and looking back and forth from Mike to
Don, Don to Mike... "They're not costumes, are they?"
Mike's face freezes. "No," Don answers bluntly. "They're not."
For some reason, he can't reach the rescue squad, but he finds one of the guys he used
to talk with on ham radio, the one who lives with a midwife, and she talks him step by
step through the miracle of childbirth, which is not a miracle Don has any interest
in witnessing but the way his luck is running, he has a nasty suspicion he's gonna be front
and center. He runs out, checks the position of the baby, relays questions between the
midwife and Maureen-- no, there haven't been any complications, the OB/GYN had said
her pelvis is nice and roomy, she's early, but not that early, the contractions are about five
minutes apart now, getting a little closer-- puts his head to her stomach to hear the
heartbeat, takes every piece of advice the midwife gives.
"Let her stand up, have her walk around some. That way you get gravity on your side,
too. All right?"
"Yeah."
"Now call us back if you need to when she gets close, and we'll talk you through it again,
but you should be fine."
"How do I know when she's getting close?"
She laughs. "You'll know. If you can't tell, she'll let you know."
He's trying to radio the rescue squad again when the power goes. The backup lights he
installed years ago flicker to life. One of the connections must've gotten nailed by the
ice.
Images, nightmares, flash into his head; Maureen dying, the baby getting the cord tangled
around its neck--
Donatello. Stop. Get it together. You've got two people back there-- three-- and they
need you. Now.
"Right," he says to no one in particular, and gets up.
Mike's piling wood into the stove when he comes in. "How's it going?"
"I'm in labor," Maureen snaps at him from the couch. "Any other stupid questions?"
She's half-lounging on the couch in one of April's old maternity bathrobes. Mike must've
found it somewhere.
"Nah," Don says. "If it's any consolation, I just learned more about the female anatomy
than I ever wanted to know."
Mike asks, "Didja get the ambulance?"
"If you feel like it," Don tells Maureen, "you oughta get up. The midwife says you get
gravity on your side if you're standing."
"I take that as a no," she says, struggling to rise.
He holds out his hand to her. "That's a no. You're stuck with us."
"You don't have a generator?"
"Yeah," Don says, "I was gonna fix it but I hadn't got around to it yet."
"It'll take that long?"
"Three or four hours. Midwife says you're probably getting pretty close."
Mike asks, "What happened to it?"
"Raph tossed Leo into it, remember? Took off for New York?"
"Yeah, but that was years ago--"
"It's not like I didn't have anything else to do--
"Yeah, you were probably too busy working on some game--"
"Look, I can't do everything around here, the lights shouldn't have gone in the first place--
"
"Can I remind you both that I'm in labor?" Maureen screeches.
Don looks at her, crosses his arms over his chest. "And what exactly do you want us to
do about it?"
"I--" she says. "I-- I--" She throws up her hands. "How the hell should I know?" And
they all start laughing, and the tension's broken.
"Three or four hours. And the midwife said I'd be faster than that?"
"She's not sure, you could plateau, she says that's not uncommon--"
"But I could have this baby--"
"At this rate, in an hour or so. Maybe less."
"Wow," Mike says. He's leaning into the stove, grabs the pack of matches, tries to light
the fire. The match burns down to his fingers, and he drops it, cursing.
"Let me do it," Don says, taking the lighter out of his belt. "You take care of her,
okay?"
"Okay." Mike smiles at her. "What do I do?"
"Keep track of the contractions and keep her calm," Don says. "The less nervous she is,
the easier the labor is."
"Calm," Maureen says sarcastically. "Yeah. That should be easy."
Mike puts his arms around her and asks, "Does that help?"
"A little," she says, smiling in spite of herself.
"You want a little music?" He sways her gently back and forth. "I think we got a radio
that works...I can go look."
"No," she murmurs, takes his hand. "You stay."
They start kissing again-- a challenge between his shortness and her stomach-- and Don
finishes lighting the stove, goes to look for the radio.
Maybe we shouldn't start with self-defense, Casey thinks after a while. Every
time he makes a move toward her, she panics. Maybe if he got her to hit, it'd build up her
confidence a little.
"Look," she says, "this was just a bad idea, I'm not--"
"We're gonna try something different," he says, hands her a baseball bat. "Teach ya how
to beat on people instead. You know how to hold one a these?"
"Yeah," she says, grabbing the bat. She takes the classic baseball stance. "How's
that?"
"You'll hit a home run, but you won't do that much damage." He takes her hands, adjusts
them on the bat. "More like this. Then you can hit overhand, too." He leads her over to
the punching bag, little more than a mass of duct tape at this point. "Try it."
She halfheartedly taps the bag.
"Aw, c'mon. I know you can do better than that." He gestures, trying to show her the
best way to swing it.
She steps back a little, hits it with a bit more force, enough to get it moving ever so
slightly.
"April, come on, it's just a bag, go ahead, nail it."
"It's stupid," she says, "I'm too old to start doing this..."
"You gotta be pissed at something-- come on, I know you can get mad...just imagine that
bag is every shitty problem you've had for the past six months."
A bitter laugh and another unenthusiastic swat.
Maybe if he gets a little more specific. "Think about it like this: that bag is the reason
you've been asking me to teach you how to fight. Okay?" He walks up to the bag.
"'C'mon, Albert. Say hi." A little bit of a spark. "You remember Albert, don't you,
April? Tony's cousin from Selma?" He looks at her and she's simmering. Good.
Smack. "Oh, yeah," she says. "I remember Albert."
"Now ya got the idea," he says.
"I'm on my way to the goddamn hospital," she snarls, "and Albert decides it's time
to get romantic." Slam.
"And he shoves me up against the wall, that son-of-a--" Slam.
The bag's really swinging now; Casey's afraid it might start shredding again.
"And I felt so helpless, here I am in labor and this creep comes up-- how
dare he!"
Hell, we can buy a new bag, Casey thinks. She's hitting with real enthusiasm,
now, right about where she should be, and she's got more strength in her arms than he'd
figured.
"And then I get to the hospital and I'm too nervous--" slam-- "and then
they tell me I gotta have a cesarean--" thwack-- "and I don't even get to see my
own baby girl for hours--" tears coming out of her eyes now, but her aim's still pretty
true--
"Looking good," Casey comments, at just the wrong time, and she turns to him.
He knows she's pissed, but he doesn't really see it coming 'til she's sunk the baseball bat
into his stomach.
Slam.
"And you...where the hell were you?"
"What?"
He ducks the next blow, over his head, but he leaves the rest of his body wide open and
her foot comes crashing between his legs. Shit. That's gonna hurt in the
morning...
"That creep starts trying to mess with me, where the hell are you?"
"I was gettin' the car, April! Don't you remember?"
"We coulda gone down to the car together, for Christ's sake--"
"You told me--"
"I know what I told you, where the fuck were you?"
"April, April--" she's stopped hitting, that's one thing, maybe he's got a chance-- "just--
one second, please, baby, this really hurts--"
And he closes his eyes and tries to ride the pain out and April starts coming back to her
senses. "Casey, omigod--"
"Baby, I'm so sorry," he groans, and April drops down beside him.
"Oh, God, Casey, how hard did I--"
"'Salright, just gimme a second--"
She throws her arms around him, and he whispers, "I'm so sorry, April."
"It's stupid Casey I'm the one who told you to take Shadow down to get the car--"
"No," he says, "not just that--" he shakes his head. "When they took you into surgery--
God, April, all I could think of was what had happened to Gabe, and I just--"
He starts sobbing, and April grips him tighter. She can't remember ever seeing him
cry.
"I flipped out, I just flipped."
"I don't remember it very well...everything happened so fast, and the drugs--"
"I just lost it, and they dragged me out of the room, and gave me, something, I don't know
what the hell it was-- and I wasn't there for Raven, I wasn't there for you..."
"Casey--"
"I mean, I wasn't even there to hold her, a stranger had to do it-- I let you guys down. I
mean, what kind of a husband-- what kind of a father--"
And it hits her. "This was the problem all along? The vasectomy wasn't the
problem?"
He looks up. "What?"
"You were so upset about failing as a husband you just decided you'd be an asshole and
get it over with?"
He looks at April like a puppy that's been kicked for the first time. Wrong thing to
say...she searches her brain frantically, remembers..."Casey?"
"Yeah?"
"When I woke up, you know the first thing I realized?"
He shakes his head.
"I knew you were holding my hand...and you were there, and Raven and Shadow were
there and I thought, 'this is what I've wanted all along...' a family...our family..." Her
hands come up to his face. "Casey, I love you."
And they stay like that for a long time, just staring at each other.
After a while he smiles, puts his hands up to hers and pulls them to his mouth, kissing
them, left hand, right hand..."Baby," he says, "why don't we start this training thing again
tomorrow? And I'll wear a cup?"
They both start giggling, and she almost slides into his lap but he stops her.
"Nah, nah, that's not such a good idea..." and she straddles him and rests on his thighs
instead, leaning towards him, her lips brushing the back of his neck, and he slips his arms
around her, touches her back, finds her bra and unhooks it. "April," he murmurs into her hair, "it's been so long..."
