He Let Me Crash on Christmas Eve, So I Took Our Daughter novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Go With Them
A gray SUV wrecks Susannah's car on Christmas Eve, Nate tells her to go with the paramedics, and by discharge day she has emptied the nursery and put his badge on hold; he beats on the NICU door with Kendra behind him and she turns her chair around.
I was thirty-three weeks pregnant when a gray SUV ran a red light and hit my car.
It struck the back door on my side and spun me into a lamppost.
The airbag knocked the air out of me.
The SUV did not stop.
I watched its taillights climb the hill, and then I couldn't see anything but cracked glass.
I called 911 first.
"A gray SUV hit me and drove off," I told the dispatcher. "I'm thirty-three weeks pregnant and my stomach is cramping."
Then I called my husband.
It rang four times before Nate picked up.
Behind him I could hear a piano and a lot of people laughing.
"Nate, I've been in a crash. My door is stuck and I'm bleeding."
"Hold on, Zanna." His voice moved away from the phone. "Kendra, sit down. Let me see it."
Kendra was his ex-girlfriend.
Her father ran the construction company that had made Nate's career, and every year on the night before Christmas he threw a dinner for his staff.
Nate had told me it was work and the wives weren't invited, so I had spent the evening at my sister's instead.
"Nate. Please. I'm still in the car and I can't get out."
"There's an ambulance coming, right? Go with them." He didn't sound scared, only tired. "Kendra just walked in shaking. She cut her wrist on something and she won't stop crying. I can't leave her like this."
"I'm eight months pregnant."
"I know. You're strong. I'll call you later. Merry Christmas."
He hung up.
A paramedic had been kneeling at my window for the last part of it.
She had heard every word through the speaker.
"Is there anyone else we should call, hon?" she asked.
"No," I said.
They cut me out of the car, and by the time we reached Mercy Hill Hospital the cramps had a rhythm.
My daughter was born by emergency C-section at 11:14 that night.
She weighed four pounds and two ounces.
She didn't cry, and they carried her out of the room before I saw her face.
I texted Nate from the recovery bed: "Emergency C-section. She's alive. She's in the NICU."
He answered at 1 a.m.
"Oh my God. Is she okay? I'll come first thing."
He did not come first thing.
On Christmas Day I sat in a wheelchair beside an incubator and put one finger through the porthole.
My daughter's whole hand closed around the tip of it.
I named her Joy.
At four o'clock my phone buzzed.
"Stuck at Kendra's family's till late, they set a place for me. Give her a kiss from me."
He sent a picture of the table with it.
There were eleven plates.
My sister Lorna read it over my shoulder and said a word I'd never heard her say in front of a baby.
I was discharged on the twenty-eighth.
Joy had to stay.
I texted Nate: "I'm being discharged this morning. I have no car. I need a ride."
He took forty minutes to answer.
"Can't, I'm helping Kendra pick her car up from the shop. She got a ding in the church lot. Take a cab. Wait for me at home."
I read it twice in the lobby.
Then I called Lorna, and she came with her husband and a rented truck.
We opened our front door at noon.
The house smelled like the pine candle Nate liked.
My mother had painted the nursery yellow in November, and it took three of us forty minutes to carry it all out.
The crib, the dresser, the lamp shaped like a moon, the little box of hats I'd knitted.
I left the room with bare floors.
On the dining table I set down my wedding ring, my house key, and the divorce petition I had printed at the library and signed in the truck.
A lawyer Lorna knew had filed my request for an emergency order that morning.
By two o'clock a judge had signed it.
Nate could not go near our daughter until the hearing.
I sat in the NICU that evening with Joy on my chest, skin to skin, her breath light against my collarbone.
Behind me the unit door gave its flat red beep.
I heard it again, and then again.
The charge nurse said, "Sir, I'm sorry, your badge has been put on hold."
I knew the voice that answered.
"There's a mistake. I'm her father. Susannah? Zanna, is she in there? Susannah!"
Through the glass of the door I could see his hand slapping the plate, and behind him Kendra, her wrist wrapped in white gauze, her eyes wet.
She had driven him here.
"Zanna, please!" Nate shouted. "She's mine too!"
Every nurse in the unit was looking at me.
So I turned my chair around.
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