Winner - Round 6
Title: My Beloved Max
Author: Karen
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I own nothing. I profit nothing. No harm, no foul.
Summary: This is the sequel to My Beloved Wife. Maria's past comes back to haunt her. This one is told from Maria's POV.
Prologue
Max is in love with another woman.
She was early, over a month so. I ignored the pain in my belly for as long as I could, assuming it was just another false alarm or gas pains or…something. My pregnancy hadn’t been easy. I threw up all the time. My bones and muscles ached constantly. At one point, I started to wonder if my body was “rejecting” its newest inhabitant, if in some way our daughter wasn’t meant to be carried by a human being.
That, of course, led to fears of having a green, three-eyed baby. Max was so supportive – he’d just laugh at me and kiss my head and tell me I was worrying needlessly. Then my hair started to fall out and for the first time in my life I had a cavity in one of my molars. It felt like my body was slowly falling apart.
I read books and found out that the hair loss thing and the cavity thing were normal. I then hoped that Max was done spreading sperm around because I was going to end up bald and toothless if he kept impregnating me.
Those thoughts led to depression. I would become so moody that Max would come home from work and poke his head around the door to see what kind of mood I was in. Sometimes, he’d have a rather nervous expression on his face, there would be some babble about needing to run ‘an errand’ and then he’d disappear again. It was on those nights that I realized I looked like the Hydra…a thought that would immediately put me into tears as soon as he left. Not that I blamed him, not with my emotional instability.
Other times, though, he was more tender and caring with me than I ever thought I could deserve. His body is so warm and his caress so tender that being in his arms would immediately put my doubts to rest. I might spend all day thinking I was fat or unattractive or just the biggest bitch in the world. But at night he’d hold me like I was the most delicate, precious thing and all of those self-hates would flutter away. He has a healing soul, an uncanny ability to patch everything that is wrong.
We bought a small house in the suburbs with a yard for “Junior” to play in once she’s old enough. I didn’t really mind leaving the city behind – my little one-room apartment was full of bad memories, the only good ones being those of Max finding me there and rescuing me from my rapid downward spiral. The only bad thing is that Mae-Ling is farther away now. But she’s a plucky chick and the distance doesn’t seem to bother her.
In my last few months of pregnancy, I took a leave of absence from work. My feet ballooned and there was just no way I could take the daily trek from the train or bus to the office. Max offered somewhat tentatively to drive me, but after last Thanksgiving, we decided that Max’s time behind the wheel would be limited. He’s okay with that – he runs, he walks, he rides his bike when the journey is short. When it is not, he takes the bus or the train like everyone else. For a country boy, he’s adapted to city life rather well.
In my few months of ‘vacation’, I kept gaining weight and retaining water until I was so uncomfortable that I just wanted it over. Little did I know that when the time came for it to be over, I’d kick myself for mentally hurrying things along. But, I digress.
One day while I was waddling around our new house, only able to stand for short periods of time, Mae showed up with paint, wallpaper and a ladder. I laughed when I opened the door, more at her fashionable paint-covered overalls than anything else. Then she’d promptly let herself in, welcomed herself into the nursery and started to set up shop. She retrieved a camping chair from the garage and plopped me in it in a corner. After that, she’d quizzed me on how I wanted to decorate the baby’s room.
We spent a week like that, me squatting in a corner while Mae hand-painted story-book murals on the walls. She did all of it free-hand, biting the corner of her lip speculatively as she worked. In the afternoons, we’d plop on the couch to watch soap operas until Max came home. Often, Mae would lie with her head against my belly, laughing at the tiny kicks and punches coming from within. I’m sure in her head she was wondering what lost soul was in there, waiting to be reborn, to have another chance at life.
I missed Mae’s company once her vacation was over and she had to return to work. She left behind a masterpiece in the nursery, something I will have a hard time painting over some day when Junior no longer wants bunnies and fairies on her walls. I missed having Mae there to make me laugh and make me forget that my back felt like someone was squeezing it with a vice or that my boobs felt like over-inflated footballs.
I missed having Mae there more a few days later when the bleeding started.
I can’t imagine anything more horrifying than finding a puddle of blood between your feet and knowing it came from your own body. I had been washing dishes, grimacing through the pain and incorrectly assuming it was just my body protesting its expansion again. I hadn’t even gotten dressed yet that morning because I felt like I needed to just crawl back in bed. When something splattered on my foot, I looked down to see a crimson pool that scared me more than anything in my life ever had.
Panic flared inside of me and I knew the rapid pumping of my heart would only cause me to bleed faster, but there was nothing I could do to stop my bodily reaction to knowing something very bad was happening. Unsteady, I made it to the phone and dialed Max’s cell phone. I managed to wheeze his name before I passed out.
When I awoke again, I was in the hospital and something was definitely different. And not just different in a morphine-induced kind of way. Different in that my belly was gone. Not entirely, as my skin had yet to shrink back to its pre-pregnancy state, but enough that I knew something…was missing.
Max was by my bed, his eyes red, his face wrought with worry. He didn’t realize I was awake at first and I drunkenly watched him for a few long moments, thinking how utterly beautiful he was. One hand was half covering his face and he looked like a man who had had his world ripped from beneath him. I reached out to him, my fingers seeming tingly and very far away.
“Hey, baby,” he said, trying to cover the grim expression he’d held only moments before.
I was too tired to respond so I simply smiled weakly at him. Then I remembered the absence of the lump in my belly and gave him a questioning look. “My…” I tried to speak, but my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Max had my hand in between both of his, his body pitched forward in his chair. “What are you trying to say, honey?”
“My…” There was that echo again. “My baby…”
I think he choked. A sob, maybe? But it could have been the drugs.
Alexandra Elizabeth came into the world the same way her father had tried to go out of it – screaming and bloody. From what I pieced together, Max had received my call and had rushed home to find me lying on the kitchen floor. There are some really cruel fates in the universe that would turn the tables on us and make Max witness something I had seen the night he tried to take his life – someone he loved lying in a pool of blood. An ambulance ride to the hospital ensued and then the emergency C-section.
I didn’t get to witness my daughter’s birth. I didn’t get to hear her first cry, though Max has described it to me tearfully many times. Instead, I had emergency surgery and a blood transfusion coming my way.
I was in the hospital for a week. Allie – as we’ve decided to call her – was there for three weeks while her lungs finished developing. It was the worst three weeks of my life. I wanted to breast feed her, so even after I was released I needed to be there. It hurt to travel so much. To avoid suspicion from the doctors, Max had been unable to heal my incision quickly – I had regular check ups and the sudden disappearance of the wound would be hard to explain. So, taking stairs hurt, getting in and out of the car hurt. Getting to the nursery and sitting down to take her in my arms exhausted me. But as soon as I held her again, I knew it was all worth it.
Our daughter is perfect. She has very little hair, and what she does have is blond and wispy – I don’t think she got blessed with her father’s thick hair, but that’s okay. Her eyes are lighter as well and I think maybe they will end up green or hazel. She has ten fingers, ten toes and human blood cells. Some power out there let my human DNA mold with the half of Max’s that’s human and now we have this perfect little being.
Max is in love with another woman. It’s obvious now as I watch him sleeping with her on the couch. He’s on his back, one arm thrown over his head and draped across the back of the sofa. His other arm is curved around her bottom as she lies on her belly against his chest, her legs drawn up beneath her. She’s three months old now and has solidly taken her own place in her father’s heart. Her face is turned in my direction, her tiny lips parted slightly as she sleeps. I can’t help the smile that comes to my face – she snores. It might be a light snore, but she snores nonetheless. In that regard, there is no doubt that she’s Max’s daughter.
Unable to resist, I rise from my chair at the kitchen table and kneel on the floor beside them, the man I love and the child I bore. She gives a little baby-sigh and I smile as I reach to smooth her sparse hair. I know what it’s like to be curled up against that chest, sweetie – I don’t blame you for sighing.
Seeming to sense my presence, there is a hitch in Max’s breathing and his eyes crack open. I give him an apologetic smile, but he just blinks lazily and opens his arm to me. Shifting Allie to the other side of his chest, he makes room for me beside him and I slide into his embrace. I put my cheek against his chest and my arm around our daughter. I like that there’s room enough for both of us, that we can share the comfort of his touch.
In only moments, he’s asleep again, his chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm. Allie makes some more baby noises as she slumbers and I feel myself starting to be sedated by my husband and daughter. I want to stay here forever, on this couch, because everything just seems perfect.
Perhaps too perfect.
tbc
But when the muse beckons, you must follow...