A Second Chance in the Show Me State - Jessie Gussman Page 0,54
keep you on your toes. I think you’ve gotten complacent now without me around to scare you once in a while.”
His smile faded, and he snapped the flashlight off, leaning back against the wall, with his head pointed toward the ceiling.
“I don’t like it when you scare me.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to go there.”
She didn’t have to say anything more for him to know she was thinking about her pregnancy and the birth of their twins as he was.
By far, the NICU had been the scariest place he’d ever been. The most stressful, the saddest, and yet somehow through it all, he’d grown closer to Emerson, closer to the Lord.
That didn’t mean he hadn’t been scared.
“You don’t have to think about it. Everything’s fine. It all turned out okay.”
“I thought I was going to lose you. I thought I was gonna lose them. It’s funny, how you only have to see your baby...not even see them, just know that they were growing inside of you, to love them fiercer than anything in this world except my wife. The idea of losing them rivaled the idea of losing you. I never want to go through that again.”
“And I’m sure you won’t. I don’t think God makes us go through things like that twice. Although all in all, looking back, it was one of the best experiences of my life.”
His head jerked around. “You can’t mean that.”
“I do. We entered that hospital a couple of scared kids. We came out parents in every sense. More mature. Closer to each other. And there was a new depth to our spiritual walk that hadn’t been there when we’d walked in.”
He had to agree. To a point.
“I was thinking that was the beginning of the end.”
“That’s because it was.”
Neither one of them said anything for a few minutes, and he wished he was still holding her hand. It was somewhere in the darkness, but he wanted to be holding it.
Having Emerson beside him in the NICU was what had made that whole experience bearable. Even though now he looked back on it as a mostly good experience. At the time, it was the hardest thing he’d ever gone through.
He didn’t know how long they sat like that in the darkness, each of them wrapped up in their own thoughts. Maybe this wasn’t something they could work out, because he didn’t know where to start.
But then her voice echoed in the stillness.
“I hadn’t considered this until just now, when we were talking about how both of us thought that going through being in the NICU with our babies had been such a growing experience. You know, even that massive debt that we had, after we got out, that could’ve been a growing experience too. But I didn’t handle it very well, and instead of letting it be a growing experience that moved us closer together, it was the thing that tore us part.”
He sighed and hung his head. “You can’t take all the blame for that. And I think you’re right. Of course. I never saw it either. The NICU felt like the trial. But that was only one of them. We went through that beautifully. But we failed the second one, didn’t we?”
“We did. Mostly my fault. You were the one who wanted to work it out.”
“But the way that I wanted to work it out wasn’t the way you wanted to. I could have compromised. I could have met you halfway.”
“I never thought of that.”
“Probably because I wouldn’t entertain any thought of your dad’s money. I wasn’t going to take a penny from him. I was the man, and I would provide. But looking back, that was probably too scary for you.”
“You’re right. It was scary. I had two babies. I was overwhelmed. My dad would make everything go away, and you refused. He said he would pay every single cent of it, and he did.”
“I know. I lost my wife and my pride.” Maybe there was a little bit of drama in his voice, but that’s how it felt at the time.
“I’m sorry.” There was a long pause. “Maybe it’s just taken me a few years to get a little older and a little wiser, but I can see now that a man’s pride is a sensitive thing, and I didn’t treat that any more sensitively than you treated my desire to have all the dates that were important to me remembered and celebrated.”
He never compared it like that, but he supposed she