"Keep pushing, Mary Ann! You're doing great!" Roy Hinkley encouraged his wife. The brunette, beads of perspiration popping out on her forehead, groaned with the effort and bore down one more time.
"The head is crowning!" Roy exclaimed. "You're almost there!"
Mary Ann pushed with all her might and felt the baby slide from her body.
"It's a boy!" Roy exclaimed, but instead of hearing the lusty wail of a newborn, as she had when her daughter Dawn had been born three years previously, Mary Ann heard perfect silence broken only by the low murmur of quiet voices. She glanced around frantically but saw nothing but doctors and nurses and medical equipment.
"What is it? What's wrong? Where's my baby?" she cried frantically. She looked at Roy, but his attention was focused on what the doctors and nurses were doing. "Roy?" she asked uncertainly.
"It's all right, Mary Ann. It's all right," he said in an attempt to soothe her, but it was easy to see that he was as badly shaken as she herself was.
"His Apgar score isn't what it should be," the physician told the Hinkleys. "We're going to have to take him to the NICU and run some further tests on him."
Mary Ann was taken to her room, where she collapsed in helpless sobs. Roy held her and comforted her as well as he could.
Several hours later, the pediatrician, Dr. Daniels, came to talk to them. "There's a problem with the blood flow between the left and right sides of your son's heart," he told them. "He'll have to remain in the NICU until he's strong enough to undergo surgery."
"When can I see him?" asked Mary Ann.
"Why, as soon as you want," the physician told her.
Roy pushed his wife to the NICU in a wheelchair, where their tiny son lay sleeping in an incubator. His skin had a bluish tinge, but other than that, he was beautiful, with long, dark eyelashes lying against his cheeks and tufts of fine dark brown hair covering the top of his head.
"Oh, Dusty," Mary Ann said softly, gingerly reaching for him and taking him into her arms. They'd planned to name him Dustin Roy Hinkley and call him Dusty for short.
As she held her tiny son, she felt the same overwhelming love she'd felt when she'd held Dawn for the first time. Lightly she traced her fingers over his oh-so-soft skin and the fine down covering his head. "I love you so much," she whispered to him before handing him to his father.