The Shadow Wife - Diane Chamberlain [146]
“Is she okay?” Joelle strained to see, but the neonatologist’s back was to her as he worked on her baby girl at the side of the room. She heard a whimper. “Was that the baby?”
“Want me to go see?” Liam asked her, and she nodded.
She watched Liam’s battered face as he talked to the neonatologist. He was asking questions, then looking down at the table where her baby lay. Much as she tried to read his face, his expression remained impassive.
In a moment, though, he was back at her side. “She’s tiny, Jo, but she looks good,” he said. “She weighs three pounds, and the doc seemed impressed by that. She’s not crying exactly, but she’s making noises—”
“I could hear them,” she said, still trying to look through the neonatologist’s back to see her baby.
“Her Apgars were six and eight,” Liam said. “He said that was good, considering.”
The neonatologist wheeled the incubator toward her. “Quick peek for Mom,” he said. “Then we’re off to the NICU.”
It was hard to see through the plastic. The baby was just a tiny little doll with arms and legs no bigger than twigs, and before Joelle had even had a chance to make out her daughter’s features, the incubator was whisked away.
“I want to get up,” she said, raising herself up on her elbows. She wanted to follow the incubator to the nursery.
Rebecca laughed again. “Soon, Joelle, for heaven’s sake. Let me finish up here.”
Less than an hour later, Liam pushed her down the corridor to the neonatal nursery in a wheelchair. She could have walked, but her nurse insisted on the chair, and she wasn’t about to argue. She didn’t care how she got there, as long as it was quickly. She left the chair in the hallway, though, wanting to walk into the nursery on her own steam.
The NICU was familiar territory to her, and she showed Liam how to scrub up at the sink and then dressed both of them in yellow paper gowns. Inside, Patty, one of the nurses she knew well, guided them over to the incubator, and Joelle sat down in the chair at the side of the plastic box.
“She’s bigger than I expected,” she said, smiling at the tiny infant, who had a ventilator tube coming from her mouth and too many leads to count taped to her little body.
“Bigger?” Liam asked in surprise.
“I’ve seen a lot of babies smaller than her in here,” she said.
Patty brought a chair for Liam, setting it on the opposite side of the incubator, then she came around to Joelle’s side and rested a hand on her shoulder.
“She looks good, Joelle,” she said. “You know the next couple of days will be critical, but you have every reason to hope for the best.”
Joelle smiled up at her, then returned her attention to her baby as the nurse walked away.
“Can we touch her?” Liam asked.
“I was just about to.” She reached through one of the portals on her side of the incubator, and Liam reached through his. Joelle smoothed her fingertips over her daughter’s tiny arm. It was like touching feathers. She watched Liam touch the little hand and the baby wrapped her tiny, perfect fingers around his fingertip.
“Have you thought of a name?” Liam asked. His voice sounded thick.
She didn’t answer right away. She had, actually, but it had been a fantasy name, one she could never use because it meant combining her name with Liam’s, and although he had been with her all night and all morning, she didn’t yet trust this change in him.
“You have, haven’t you?” He looked at her quizzically, and she knew her hesitancy had given her away.
“Yes, but I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“What is it?”
“Joli,” she said, looking across the incubator at him, and he broke into a grin.
“I was going to suggest that,” he said.
“Really?” She laughed.
“Did I hear you just name her?” Patty had been working behind Joelle, and now she moved closer to the incubator, pulling the little name card from the plastic holder in the front of the box and withdrawing a marker from her pocket.
Joelle grimaced at Liam. She hadn’t realized the nurse had been close enough to hear.
“We’re naming her Joli,” Liam said firmly. “J-O-L-I. It’s a combination of our names.”
Patty cocked her