Have you ever been in a situation where you were powerless to help someone you loved? I will never know how I managed to get through that month. I wanted to drop everything and be by her side, but I knew that could never happen. We were just cousins, after all. So instead it was her husband and her mother - my aunt - who kept vigil. I suffered intense bouts of sorrow, regret, angst of the deepest kind, and of course I had no one to turn to, no one to share my burden.
The baby was born by emergency C-section, whisked off to the incubator, and Rachel herself was lucky to survive. I had to wait patiently for every bit of information, passed along the family chain, and it was unbelievably frustrating. But at last mother and baby were off the critical list, and I was able to visit them in hospital - with some trepidation.
By now Rachel was back in touch, by text at least, and she let me know when would be the best time, without interruptions. I brought flowers, which we could do in those days, and a cute little woollen squirrel for the baby. Nothing showy, but to us it was a reminder of the log cabin. The nurse showed me into the private room and there they were. It was as if a great weight lifted from my heart.
I knew already that it was a boy. That much had come down the grapevine. But they had held off naming him - Rachel wanted to wait until she was ready. And there, in that room, we chose the name of the newest member of the family. A new, perfect baby boy. Our baby boy. Our Alex (again, not his real name).
Before I left Rachel told me that she could never again bear a child. Another bittersweet moment, our sorrow tempered by our realisation that Alex would be the only child, the product of our union. It seemed somehow appropriate.
And so began another stage in our relationship. If it had been complicated before, it was even more so now. We were both changed - Rachel more than me. She had become more serious, somehow. She was still the woman I knew and loved, but there was another, deeper layer, a maturity beyond her years. A need to grasp life with both hands, to make the most of every opportunity.
It was six months before we had a suitable opportunity, and the day we spent together was right up there with the best of our encounters. She was as fit as ever, and I noticed an urgency, a desire I'd not seen in her before. And yet it was intimate, it was personal, it was love just as much as lust. I have to admit that I'd expected our physical relationship to decline as time went by, but that day told me otherwise.
I drove home with a memory of what she'd whispered to me when we were lying together, exhausted, at the end of the day. "I want you more than ever, I want to do everything with you, everything." Our eyes met, locked, and in our unspoken words I knew our journey together had a lot further to go.
To be continued... |
