"Push," the doctor said in an entirely reasonable, pain-free voice that made Kate want to scratch his eyes out.
She screamed and pushed and cried until as quickly as it had begun, the agony was over.
"A perfect little girl," the doctor said. "Dad, do you want to cut the cord?"
Kate tried to lift herself up, but she was too weak. A few moments later, Johnny was beside her, offering her a tiny pink-wrapped bundle. She took her new daughter in her arms and stared down into her heart-shaped face. She had a wild shock of damp black curls and her mother's pale, pale skin, and the most perfect little lips and mouth Kate had ever seen. The love that burst open inside her was too big to describe. "Hey, Marah Rose," she whispered, taking hold of her daughter's grape-sized fist. "Welcome home, baby girl."
When she looked up at Johnny, he was crying. Leaning down, he kissed her with a butterfly softness. "I love you, Katie."
Never in her life had everything been so right in her world, and she knew that, whatever happened, whatever life had in store for her, she would always remember this single, shining moment as her touch of Heaven.
Tully begged for an additional two days off of work so that she could help Kate get settled in at home. When she'd made the call, it had seemed vital, unquestionably the thing to do.
But now, only a few hours after Kate and Marah had been discharged from the hospital, Tully saw the truth. She was about as useful as a dead microphone. Mrs. Mularkey was like a machine. She fed Kate before she even mentioned she was hungry; she changed the baby's handkerchief-sized diapers like a magician; and taught Kate how to breast-feed her daughter. Apparently it was not as instinctual a thing as Tully would have thought.
And what was her contribution? When she was lucky, she made Kate laugh. More often than not, though, her best friend just sighed, looking both remarkably in love with her baby and profoundly worn out. Now Kate lay in bed, holding her baby in her arms. "Isn't she beautiful?"
Tully gazed down at the tiny, pink-swaddled bundle. "She sure is."
Kate stroked her daughter's tiny cheek, smiling down at her. "You should go home, Tully. Really. Come back when I'm up and around."
Tully tried not to let her relief show. "They do need me at the studio. Things are probably a real mess without me."
Kate smiled knowingly. "I couldn't have done it without you, you know."
"Really?"
"Really. Now kiss your goddaughter and get back to work."
"I'll be back for her baptism." Tully leaned down and kissed Marah's velvety cheek, and then Kate's forehead. By the time she whispered goodbye and made it to the door, Kate seemed to have forgotten all about her.
Downstairs she found Johnny slumped in a chair by the fireplace. His hair was a shaggy, tangled mess, his shirt was on backward, and his socks didn't match. He was drinking a beer at eleven o'clock in the morning.
"You look like hell," she said, sitting down beside him.
"She woke up every hour last night. I slept better in El Salvador." He took a sip. "But she's beautiful, isn't she?"
"Gorgeous."
"Katie wants to move to the suburbs now. She's just realized this house is surrounded by water, so it's off to some cul-de-sac where they have bake sales and play dates." He made a face. "Can you imagine me in Bellevue or Kirkland with all those yuppies?"
The funny thing was, she could. "What about work?"
"I'm going back to work at KILO. Producing political and international segments."
"That doesn't sound like you."
He seemed surprised by that. When he looked at her, she saw a flash of remembrance; she'd reminded him of their past. "I'm thirty-five years old, Tul. With a wife and daughter. Different things are going to have to make me happy now."
She couldn't help noticing that he'd said going to. "But you love gonzo journalism. Battlefields and mortar rounds and people shooting at you. We both know you can't give it up forever."
"You only think you know me, Tully. It isn't like we traded secrets."
She remembered suddenly, sharply, what she was supposed to forget. "You tried."
"I tried," he agreed.
"Katie would want you to be happy. You'd kick ass at CNN."
"In Atlanta?" He laughed. "Someday you'll understand."
"You mean when I'm married, with kids?"
"I mean when you fall in love. It changes you."
"Like it's changed you? Someday I'll have a kid and want to write for the Queen Anne Bee again, is that it?"
"You'd have to fall in love first, wouldn't you?" The look Johnny gave her then was so understanding, so knowing, she felt skewered by it. She wasn't the only one who was remembering the past.
She got to her feet. "I gotta get back to Manhattan. You know the news. It never sleeps."
Johnny put down his beer and got to his feet, moving toward her. "You do it for me, Tully. Cover the world."
It sounded sad, the way he said it; she didn't know if what she heard was regret for himself or sadness for her.
She forced herself to smile. "I will."
Two weeks after Tully got home from Seattle, a storm dumped snow on Manhattan, stopping the vibrant city in its tracks. For a few hours, at least. The ever-present traffic vanished almost immediately; pristine white snow blanketed the streets and sidewalks, turned Central Park into a winter wonderland.
Still Tully made it to work at four A.M. In her freezing walk-up apartment, with the radiator rattling and ice collecting on her paper-thin antique windows, she dressed in tights, black velour stirrup pants, snow boots, and two sweaters. Covering it all with a navy-blue wool coat and gray mittens, she braved the elements, angling her body against the wind as she made her way up the street. Snow obscured her vision and stung her cheeks. She didn't care; she loved her job so much she'd do anything to get there early.
Inside the lobby, she stamped the snow off her boots, signed in, and went upstairs. Almost instantly she could tell that much of the staff had called in sick. Only a skeleton crew remained.
At her desk, she immediately went to work on the story she'd been assigned yesterday. She was doing research on the spotted owl controversy in the Northwest. Determined to put a local's "spin" on the story, she was busily reading everything she could find—Senate subcommittee reports, environmental findings, economic statistics on logging, the fecundity of old growth forests.
"You're working hard."
Tully looked up sharply. She'd been so lost in her reading that she hadn't heard anyone approach her desk.