Upheaval: Family Matters

Part II: Presence

by An Oxford Punter/Her Much Learning Hath Made Her Mad

It was the barest movement, a flutter, nothing more. I could as easily have missed it if I wasn't lying absolutely still. But Mrs. Hudson had told me what to expect and I knew it for what it was.

Heart pounding, I waited. Then, just when I had convinced myself that I was wrong, it came again, light but insistent.

A surge of fierce, primitive joy washed over me, carrying me along like a cork caught inexorably in the ocean tide and I did the only thing I could do; I put out my hand in the darkness and clenched Holmes by the shoulder.

He jerked and sat up, instantly awake. "What is it?" I could hear alertness in his low-voiced words.

"Give me your hand. Quickly!" I felt for it in the dark and placed it on my abdomen. "Be still. Wait."

We did, hardly daring to breathe. Come child, I thought, sending the words to the small, vital presence within me, don't keep your father waiting. He is not a patient man.

"Russell," he began, as if reading my very thoughts, "I don't--"

The movement came again beneath his hand. Holmes went absolutely still. I sensed no tidal wave of excitement, heard no exclamation from him, no sound at all. It was as if he had closed himself off abruptly from me--from us--and left us to our lonely communion. In another instant he would withdraw his hand, would turn over and go back to sleep with an impatient mutter at being awakened for so small a thing...

And I could not bear it. He might miss the son from another woman's body, might regret that the child moving beneath his palm was not Jamie and its mother not Irene, but I would not be denied this one shining moment after so many weeks of illness, doubts, and discomforts.

I placed my hand over his. He twitched it off irritably, and the long, sensitive fingers began to probe gently, seeking his child again. The flutter came and went, eluding Holmes' efforts to find its shape, to define it as a recognizable being.

"So delicate," he murmured, almost to himself, and I heard wonder in his voice. I felt him glance at me. "Does it hurt you?"

"No." I smiled. "It's actually rather amusing, like being tickled from the inside."

He chuckled. "I understand that will change." Then, in a different tone, "It is real. I knew, of course. . .but this." His fingers splayed across the cradle my pelvis had become. "It is more than you or I. It is us, and our parents, and their parents, and back and back so far we cannot imagine, and back farther still. Yet it is not us. He--or she--is no more us than we are our parents or they were their parents, or--" A movement told me he was shaking his head and I saw the silhouette of his shoulders lift in a shrug. "I have done many things in my life, but I never touched a miracle before." Taking my hand, he brought it to his lips so I could trace his smile. "Thank you, wife, for waking me. But it is late, or early, and you need your rest." Pulling the blankets up around me, he settled me back against him. "Sleep now." His hand came around me to pat the spot above our child. "And you as well. Let your mother sleep, if you please. She'll get little enough once you arrive."

In fine Holmesian fashion, our little miracle managed to get the last word.