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Chapter Nine
Nine Weeks Pregnant…
“You look nervous,” Jazmina asked as she was led to the medical wing.
Frankly, Brenda was lucky to have suck a dedicated attendant. If she had to try and find her way through the seemingly endless, labyrinthine corridors of the estate, she’d never make it.
She wrung her hands and then gripped tightly on her wrist. “It’s the first ultrasound. If the company hadn’t had a mess in accounting back in London, and then those rebels hadn’t firebombed a bazaar south of here, then we’d have done everything earlier. I guess that’s the price of being with Jamsheed. He has so much he has to give for his country, and I can never get in the way of that. Still, it’s given me so much time to think.”
“And?”
“The blood tests are fine, but it’s not like the blood tests can tell me if there are conjoined twins in here or maybe if the baby’s heart is on the outside of his chest. What if it’s some ectopic thing!”
Jazmina frowned. “Do you have cable in your room?”
“Yes.”
“And I hear there are a few medical channels. Have you been, perhaps, watching them too often and letting your imagination run wild?”
“It’s not too often or too soon to be prepared for everything that could happen as a mother. I had the same fears with Haley. It’s just that now the Live Life Channel is telling me about metabolic diseases so rare only forty people have them and in a pre-Google and super cable TV world, how would I have known?”
Jazmina shook her head as she pressed her security badge to the OB/GYN ward of the medical wing. “Haley was fine, wasn’t she? She came out just fine with ten fingers and ten toes and everything else as well, and you didn’t need to Google or television or to worry about diseases you didn’t even know existed before an internet search.”
“True, but I was probably just lucky, super lucky. I know something feels different this time around.”
“Perhaps it is really a boy, and you are noticing differences that way,” Jazmina said.
“It’s a bit too early to tell,” she admitted. “Still, I know this feels different and Haley was an easy, perfect pregnancy so this must be something bad. I have this intuition about it.”
Jazmina stopped and whirled around to face her. Pushing an errant, graying braid from her face, the older woman patted Brenda’s shoulder. “Then trust my intuition. This is a union blessed by the needs of the people, blessed by the one God, Allah, himself. I know that everything is fine. Like I say. You, my sheikha, are blessed.”
***
“What?” she asked, her eyes open wide.
Beside her with one hand covering hers and the other now caressing her stomach, even though the ultrasound gel hadn’t been removed yet was Jamsheed. His eyes were as comically huge; he looked like an owl blinking under the moonlight. If the lukewarm gel bothered him, he didn’t say, just kept running his hand over her stomach as if she were the damn Blarney Stone, and they needed the luck.
Oh boy; maybe they did.
Jazmina, however, bounced on her heels and clapped. “See. I told you it was a blessed union. Triplets. Now a kingdom that seemed to have no true heir shall have three. It’s wonderful news. When the citizens hear, there will be feasting for days.”
Brenda nodded mutely and looked down at her stomach. “Three. There are three of them?”
“Sometimes, it’s not uncommon for older women to be prone to releasing more eggs when they ovulate,” Dr. G offered.
“Three children,” Jamsheed said, his tone as incredulous. “Wait, three strapping boys…”
“Oh, girls are good too. Haley could rule a whole kingdom on her own tomorrow,” Brenda interjected. “I know she has me wrapped around her little finger. Are you sure? Three?”
The doctor nodded and pointed to three little blobs on the ultrasound screen. “There are three fully functioning hearts and, yes, three separate zygotes. I do not believe there is any twinning or identicals here, no.”
“But three?” she asked.
Wow, she was in her forties. She’d set off for adventure, even agreed to be the sheikha of a country she was still getting to know in order to help a man she cared a great deal about. All of that so far had been both difficult and a damn whirlwind, but three children? She hadn’t been kidding about Haley being an easy pregnancy. That had included the delivery of only five hours and with little pain once the drugs kicked in.
But triplets? How did you get three of those out of there?
“It will be Caesarean of course,” Dr. G said.
