Asking for Trouble Read online

  “Hi Jennifer!” Katie waved as the woman approached.

  The woman smiled, digging through her purse for something, heels clacking on the cobblestone, again reminding me of Celeste. But it wasn’t Celeste, of course.

  “Catherine.” I heard Rob breathe the word beside me and he grabbed my arm, gripping it so hard it hurt and made me yelp.

  Catherine?

  But it couldn’t be Catherine. Catherine was tall, blonde, bright and fresh. This woman...

  “Hello Robert.”

  This woman was Catherine. Her hair was dyed, cut short, her face partially obscured by those sunglasses, but it was her.

  And she was standing there holding a gun.

  Pointed directly at me.

  “You didn’t think I’d let you win, did you?”

  “Catherine, put down the gun.” Tyler took a step toward her and she snapped her wrist in his direction, pointing it at him now. Sarah and Katie huddled against him, the puppy still squirming in Katie’s arms.

  Rob was moving, almost imperceptibly, putting himself between me and the gun.

  “When you’re dead, I’m going to tell everyone the truth.” The gun’s aim slowly traveled back towards me, except it was now also pointed at Rob.

  “You mean that you didn’t write Rob’s songs!” Sarah snapped. Tyler grabbed her arm, shaking his head and pulling her back.

  “No, Sarah.” Catherine turned her attention to the younger girl, a slow smile spreading across her face. “The truth about your brother.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sarah looked at Tyler and then at Rob, looking as shocked and puzzled as I felt.

  “Catherine, don’t do this.” Rob took a step forward and the gun moved again, jerking toward him. “Whatever you want, you can have.”

  “Can I have you?” Her voice trembled just slightly but the hand that held the gun was steady.

  “Catherine, please...” Rob pressed me further behind him as he stepped out in front of me. “Don’t do this.”

  “What does it feel like to kill a man?” She cocked her head at him, licking her lips. “You know what it feels like, don’t you, Rob?”

  What was she talking about? I looked at Rob, at Tyler, but they were too focused on the gun in her hand to pay attention to anything else. Sarah and Katie looked as confused as I felt. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, from the other side of the house—one of those electric carts I’d seen patrolling the perimeter of the gated, fenced-in property. Security. Oh, thank God.

  “It ruins you.” Rob’s voice broke and I looked up at him, seeing his Adam’s apple bob when he swallowed, and I remembered the question she’d asked him. What does it feel like to kill at man? Had Rob... killed someone? I felt like my brain was trying to make connections, but everything was moving too fast.

  “Don’t do this.” Rob was pleading with her now.

  “What do you think the world will say when they find out?” Catherine mused. “When they found out you killed a man at the age of twelve?”

  “You can have the royalties,” Rob told her, bargaining now. “Take my songs. Whatever you want.”

  “Except I can’t have you.” She offered him a small, bitter smile. “And if I can’t have you, then that little cow can’t have you either.”

  Of course, she meant me. I was the little cow. But she didn’t intend to kill me, I realized with dawning horror. She never had. She meant to kill him.

  But the cavalry had arrived. The cart pulled up in front of the Mustang and two guys in uniforms jumped out of it. I had no idea what the arrangements were, but I prayed Rob allowed them to be armed.

  “No!” Rob shoved me fully behind him and now I couldn’t see anything at all. “Over my dead body!”

  Catherine smirked, taking aim. “They say an artist’s work increases in value after they’re dead.”

  “Drop your weapon!” Security was armed. Thank God.

  Catherine didn’t drop the gun, but she turned. She had been facing us, so she hadn’t even noticed security pulling up behind her. She turned her head, just briefly, but that was just long enough for Tyler to rush her.

  “Tyler, no!” Rob warned, but Tyler already had her wrist, the one holding the gun, twisting hard, making her scream in pain. Then Rob was on her too, the two of them tackling her, pinning her down. Catherine screamed and bucked and kicked, trying to fight them off.

  I sank to the ground in relief, covering my belly with my hands, all the pent-up emotion I’d been holding in bursting forth like a dam breaking. I sobbed, seeing Katie and Sarah standing in front of the pink dog house, hugging each other, the puppy in the middle, tears running down both their faces.

  Then a gun went off. I thought it was security, firing a warning shot maybe, but the bullet hit the limestone next to me, about four feet from my head to the left. It happened in slow motion. One minute I was looking at Catherine, pinned underneath them both, her arm flung out to the side, the gun still in her hand. Tyler slammed his foot against her wrist and I heard her scream, but I also saw her eyes. Her sunglasses were gone, the wig she’d been wearing askew, and she was looking right at me.

  And she was smiling.

  “Bitch.”

  I don’t know if she said it or mouthed it because I couldn’t hear anything. My ears were still ringing from the first gunshot when the second went off, tearing into my flesh.

  Then everything was on fire.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Blood. So much blood.

  “Rob, you’re hurt.” I said it over and over in the ambulance. He was covered in it. I wanted to get up and help him—he was sobbing, in so much pain, I couldn’t stand it—but they wouldn’t let me, kept covering my face with a mask. Strapped me down. I couldn’t move.

  I called his name. Felt his hand in mine.

  Then darkness.

  I woke, seasick. Throwing up nothing.

  “Rob.” My voice was hoarse. My throat hurt. “Are you okay?”

  I felt his hand in mine. His face swam in front of my eyes. I couldn’t focus.

  “I’m fine, baby.” His voice was hoarse too. I felt his lips on the back of my hand, the inside of my wrist. “You’re the one I’m worried about.”

  “I’m okay,” I whispered. I tried to remember. It was all backwards. I remembered Rob kissing me awake. A sweet surprise. A puppy? Was I dreaming? And then darkness.

  “Catherine.” I spoke her name, the memory of her eyes, so dark and cold, that slow spreading grin. The boom in my ears, the smell of searing flesh. I remembered being shot.

  “You’re out of surgery now.” Rob, right next to my ear, stroking my hair. “Just rest.”

  “The baby?” I whispered, my hand moving to my belly, terrified I would find it empty, but no. There was my little bump. I caressed it, relieved.

  “She’s fine. Can’t you hear her heart beating?”

  Like horses. I smiled, closing my eyes, and floated.

  I woke up in pain. A few minutes, a million years, days later. I don’t know.

  “They’re giving you something for the pain.” Rob held my hand. “They can’t stop it. Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Another pain seared through my belly, a deep, cramping sensation, an unstoppable force, like something was in me and it wanted out.

  “Did she kill the baby?” I whispered, blinking up at him. My throat was still on fire. I couldn’t talk.

  Rob pressed my hand to his cheek, bent his head, and sobbed.

  It was happening. I willed my body to stop, stop, stop! But nothing I did mattered. It was a force of nature, my body doing it all on its own. My baby was coming. She was coming, but it was too early.

  “Make them do something!” I begged, clutching Rob’s hand, but they just stood there, shaking their heads, watching it happen.

  The doctor was a woman. She had small, cold hands, curly blonde hair and big, dark eyes. They were wide as she talked to me. She said she was Dr. McNeil, but I could call her Casey.
I called her Dr. Casey.

  “You’re in active labor. You’ve got a bulging amniotic sac.” Dr. Casey said. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

  They kept saying that. It was a relentless refrain, like the contractions, one after the other.

  “You’re only twenty weeks along,” Dr. Casey explained between contractions. She offered me a sip of water. I needed to stay hydrated, I thought, or else I could go into labor.

  Except I was already in labor.

  “The baby... she’s very small. And her lungs, they won’t be developed yet.”

  “But she’ll have a chance?” Rob asked, sounding so hopeful. Somehow, I already knew.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do at this point. She won’t be able to breathe on her own.”

  “Can’t you help her breathe?” Rob again. I couldn’t ask questions. I was in too much pain. The drugs made my head fuzzy, but the pain was still there.

  Dr. Casey explained, something about surfactant, a substance that allows the lungs to inflate, not being present in a baby’s lungs until later in gestation. She said, maybe, if it had happened in a few more weeks, they could have done something. None of it mattered because I was going to lose her. I was losing her right now. My body was rejecting her, pushing her out. I couldn’t keep her.

  I sobbed into my pillow and screamed during the contractions. My already hoarse voice disappeared so I screamed silently, alone in an ocean of pain and blood and loss.

  “She’s coming!” I croaked, panicked, grabbing hold of Rob’s shirt and burying my face there. “I can’t stop it!”

  “It’s okay,” he said, his face wet against mine. “Let her come.”

  But if she came, she’d die. And if she died, I would die. I couldn’t let it happen.

  She came anyway.

  There was more pain, more blood, more fire. I screamed and pushed and then she was here, in this world, far too harsh for her translucent skin and tiny limbs. She didn’t cry, but she tried valiantly to take a breath. She couldn’t.

  Dr. Casey cut and clamped the umbilical cord, the only thing left keeping her attached, and handed her to me. She was so tiny I could hold her in my hands. Rob looked over my shoulder at her, tears falling onto her little belly. I could count each of her ribs and could see hear heart beating—a dark, red throb—through her chest wall.

  “She’s beautiful.” Rob kissed the top of my head. “She looks like you.”

  She did. She had my chin and my mouth and my nose. I wished I could see her open her eyes, but they were still fused shut. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She moved in my hands, opened her mouth, stretched her arms and legs, but she didn’t breathe. Just like Dr. Casey had said, there was nothing they could do.

  “Hold her.” I held my hands out to Rob. I wanted him to feel her move, to hold her while she was still here, still alive.

  He could hold her in one hand. I put her in his palm, sobbing as I watched him kiss her tiny bald head, touch her hand gently with a fingertip. She wrapped her little hand around his finger. It didn’t span it, not even close, but she was holding on.

  “Talk to her,” Dr. Casey encouraged. “She knows your voices. Tell her goodbye.”

  We bent our heads together and whispered her name.

  “Goodbye, Esther.” Rob’s voice shook. “We love you.”

  “You’ll always be my baby,” I whispered, my tears falling onto her naked little body. I looked up at Rob, my voice nearly completely gone. “She never knew anything but love.”

  Dr. Casey cleaned me up and the nurse wrote some things down and checked my blood pressure and my I.V. and put Esther in a blanket, but then they left us alone to be with her for a while. I thought the pain of losing her would tear me apart. Then I saw Rob holding her, sobbing, and knew an even greater sorrow than I’d ever experienced. I didn’t think I could survive it.

  “I’m so sorry,” I sobbed when he put her on the blanket in my lap. She was gone now, her heart still in her chest. “It’s all my fault.”

  “No,” he murmured, putting an arm around me. “We can’t do that. We can’t blame ourselves or each other. It will kill us.”

  Us. Him and me. How could there be an “us” after this?

  “Sabrina, I love you.” His face was tear-stained, eyes red from crying. “We just lost our baby and I came that close to losing you too. I can’t... I just can’t... I couldn’t live without you.”

  We put our arms around each other and rocked together, as if it might offer some comfort. The nurse came in and weighed and measured her. When she asked if we had a name for the baby, Rob met my eyes and we both said, “Esther.” They asked if we wanted her to be buried or cremated. I thought of that name, Esther Burns, engraved on a tombstone somewhere, and it just broke me.

  They gave us a card with her footprints inked onto it and several photographs taken with a digital camera and printed at the nurses’ station. They said we would get a birth certificate in the mail in a few weeks. Born and died on the very same day.

  “You can bring in the rest of your family,” Dr. Casey urged when she came in to check on me. She had seen them all gathered in the hallway, pacing, worrying. “Let them say goodbye too. It helps. Closure.”

  I looked at Rob, helpless. He went to get them all. Tyler, Katie, Sarah, even Daisy and Jesse. They all took turns holding her, exclaiming over how tiny, how perfect, how beautiful, and she was. She was my heart they were holding in their hands, passing around the room.

  “I’m so sorry.” Katie hugged me tight, tight, and just when I thought I didn’t have any more tears left in me, I sobbed against her shoulder.

  They all hugged me goodbye with tears in their eyes.

  And then it was just me and Rob. And Esther, wrapped in a receiving blanket meant for a newborn. She was lost in it.

  “Where’s Catherine?” I asked. The details, whatever they were, would matter later. For now, that’s all I wanted to know.

  “In jail.” Rob’s face changed at the mention of her name.

  “Leave her there.” I looked up and saw he knew what I meant. I could see it in his eyes. “Don’t go after her. Don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want to lose you either.”

  He nodded slowly, reaching a hand out to take mine.

  “I’m tired.” I closed my eyes. The adrenaline of giving birth was wearing off. So was the pain medication. My shoulder throbbed.

  “You rest.” He kissed my forehead and picked up Esther, going over to put her in the bassinette. I opened my eyes to see her, so tiny in that giant crib meant for a full-sized newborn. I tried to imagine what it would have been like if I’d carried her to term. If things had gone differently. If only...

  “I’ll be right here when you wake up.” Rob pulled a chair over next to the bed, taking my hand again, like he couldn’t let go. I squeezed, holding on tight. Rob was still my everything. It had always been, and always would be. Our world could expand or contract to include as many others as the universe allowed, but at its center, the core, we were us.

  So, I didn’t just hold his hand as we both drifted off, I clung to it, desperate to hang onto my center. Otherwise, I felt like I might float away too, just follow Esther into the atmosphere and disappear into the nothing.

  ~*~

  They let me go home two days later. I left the hospital without my baby, my belly strangely flat and empty, a hole in my shoulder and another in my heart. Rob and Jesse helped me into the house—I was still weak from blood loss and woozy from the medication—and I stopped on the steps, where it had all happened, just for a moment.

  Someone had cleaned up all the blood, but there was a faint outline, a ghost of what had happened there. And there was a chip in the limestone where the first bullet had hit, a permanent reminder.

  Rob insisted on carrying me up the stairs. I couldn’t help remembering the first time he’d done that, our first night together in this house. I’d still been pregnant then. I ha
d a feeling I would have moments like that a lot over the next week, even months. Realizations that, oh, I was still pregnant then. Esther was still alive and kicking inside me back then.

  We were planning a memorial, but not until next week. Rob insisted I come home and settle in for a while before people descended, and I was grateful. Still, people crept by periodically, peering in like I was part of a freak show at a carnival, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Just let them all in!” I told Rob, settling myself up against the pillows. I was still bleeding heavily from the birth—so much blood—and my shoulder was bandaged and painful, but at least my voice was back. “Let’s get it over with.”

  I was only half-joking.

  Katie and Tyler came in first. They pulled up one of the wing-backed chairs and Katie sat in Tyler’s lap, which made me smile. Clearly, they were an item again. And they both looked good. A little tired, but we all were.

  “Sabrina, I just...” Katie blinked back tears, which made me tear up too. I cried constantly now, it felt like. My tears didn’t have an ‘off’ switch. “I’m so sorry. It was my fault. I didn’t know it was Catherine! If I’d just taken Tyler with me...”

  “She disguised herself pretty well.” Rob said from the doorway, waving Sarah in. “She fooled security at the cameras. They didn’t recognize her either.”

  “How did it happen?” I asked. I wanted to know now, and they had spent time piecing it all together while I was in surgery.

  “I bought the puppy from a mutual friend of ours,” Rob said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Vanessa breeds mastiffs and happened to have a litter. It was perfect timing.”

  “Another perfect storm you mean,” Celeste said from the doorway, shaking her head as she leaned against it.

  “Hi Celeste.” I hadn’t seen her since we got back from Europe.

  “That woman is insane.” She crossed the room, leaning in to kiss my cheek. “And now we both have the scars to prove it. Sabrina, I can’t tell you how sorry I am for your loss.”