care of him for long. Someone would have to take him in tonight. She'd better call Axell.
She hadn't planned this very well. She'd never been real good at planning. Her life was just a series of happenings she couldn't stay ahead of. She'd packed her suitcase for the hospital, but it was back at the apartment, probably buried in an unopened box. Selene had promised to find a sitter for Matty when the time arrived, but she should have remembered Selene wasn't always available.
Things would work out. She just had to take them one at a time. She picked up the telephone and started dialing 911 before she realized the phone wasn't making any noise.
Maya stared at the dead receiver in disbelief.
This just couldn't be happening. Was her name Job? Was God trying to tell her something? Or had Mercury gone retrograde and she hadn't noticed?
Grimacing, she waddled over to the window and looked out. What did one look for when phones went dead? Hanging wires? And what difference did it make? It wasn't as if she could call someone and tell them it was dead.
Summoning curse words she didn't even know she knew, Maya cuddled a quilt around her and paced up and down the front office. Walking was supposed to be good for laboring mothers, she remembered. Maybe walking would clear her head. Or ease the ache. She winced and grabbed her belly as a muscle in her lower abdomen squeezed hard. Well, so much for the backache theory. That was definitely a contraction.
She picked up the phone again. Maybe it had just been a fluke the first time.
Still no dial tone.
Would Selene have left her cell phone?
She rummaged through the desk and found nothing. She glared at the computer. No phone: no e-mail, no fax.
All right, think, Maya. She could walk. How far was the nearest house? Or the shopping center they were building over the hill. Would any of the crew still be there? Would they have telephones?
She glanced out the window at the pouring rain. It looked like California during an El Ni帽o winter. Rivers of red mud poured down the gravel drive. The lovely babbling brook through the side yard had turned into an ocean, swamping the azalea garden with a muddy, leaf-strewn pond that seemed to rise as she watched. She couldn't cut across that way.
All right, was it safer to wait in the warmth and safety of the dry house, praying the telephone would come back on and that the baby would wait, or should she risk the weather and mud and floods to seek help?
Instinct said wait. Instinct didn't like getting wet.
At least the electricity worked. She could fix a cup of tea. Selene had hooked an old CD player to the intercom. She could find a few good songs and think.
* * *
Soaked to the bone, his expensive Johnston & Murphy loafers caked in mud past his ankles, his dry-clean-only linen shirt plastered to transparency against his back, Axell stumbled out of the downpour and onto the wide front porch of the school, panting from the exertion of fighting mud and water and his own anxiety.
He could see lights in all the windows, and relief poured through him. She was here. She was fine. He was the jerk. That was okay. He'd survive.
Throwing open the door, Axell walked into a blast of Aretha Franklin screaming "Respect!" with the thundering power of a class five tornado. They must have wired the entire school with an amplifying system.
Holding on to the door frame, Axell peeled off his shoes and socks. He'd like to peel off the rest of his sopping clothes too, but striding through the house naked didn't strike him as particularly polite.
Figuring there wasn't much point shouting for Maya over the noise, he padded through the hall and toward the kitchen. Maybe they kept coffee pots there. Surely Selene didn't drink that damned tea.
Axell stumbled into the kitchen and grabbed the doorsill for support at the sight in front of him.
Maya sat wrapped in a quilt, sipping tea from one of her precious cups, and rocking in a chair he remembered had once adorned the schoolroom. Her auburn curls spilled in abandon over shoulders that appeared distinctly naked above the cover of the quilt.
At sight of him, she looked up and her pale face beamed with a tremulous smile that cleaved his heart clear in two.
"Virgo to the rescue!" she breathed happily. "Did you bring your forceps?"
November, 1945
She made a