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CHAPTER SEVEN

Nadia clawed her way out of sleep. She sensed Sayid sitting in the hospital chair next to her, but she still felt too weak to speak. She listened to the muttering of his low voice as he prayed, and then she heard him start reading his Arabic Old Testament. Muslims did not regard it as an infallible text like the Koran, but she knew he read it anyway.

"Now therefore," he was reciting, "the sword will never depart from your house, because you have despised me…And Nathan said to David, Allah has put away your sin; you will not die. However, because your deeds have led the enemies of Allah to blaspheme, the child that is born to you will surely die."

When Nadia heard these words she began to weep silently, and she found the energy to speak. "Sayid, is the baby dead? Is our baby dead?"

He slammed the book shut, set it aside, and grasped her hand. He smoothed the hair back from her brow with his other free hand. "No, Nadia, no. They found the heart beat. The baby is alive. They do not yet know what is wrong, but they are…the…the baby is alive."

"Then why do you read such awful things?" she asked.

"I didn't know you were awake." The baby was indeed alive, but Sayid was, at present, not at all hopeful it would remain so. He who had not much worried about Nadia's pregnancy until now suddenly felt a great weight of fear press down on him, and with it came a queasy certainty that Allah was about to repay him for his past sins in the worst way possible.

He had been content too long; he had buried the past far behind his marriage; he had begun to believe he deserved his happiness. And now Allah was going to wake him up from this pleasant dream he had been living and parade before him the ugly sins he thought he had escaped. And Nadia would hate him for the curse that he had brought upon their house.

But he would not say such things to Nadia. He would put on a strong face for her, of course. He regretted that she had heard him read the passage.

"I'm thirsty," she muttered, and he brought a cup of water to her lips. "Where is Sigh?"

"Claire and Sawyer are watching him. He will be fine. You will be fine. The baby will be fine."

"You don't believe that," she said, and turned her tired eyes upon his face. "You think our child will die as punishment for your sins."

Sayid shuddered. How could she know that? How could she know his mind so intimately?

"The passage," she muttered, "you think you are like David."

What should he say? "Nadia, my love—"

"When will you let go?" she asked him almost angrily. "When will you let go of this self-loathing? Put your past behind you. Do not even remember it."

"How can I forget it?"

"By living for today. Do not disregard Allah's gifts. Do not doubt His generosity. I know this baby will be well. I know."

Sayid kissed her hand, her brow, her lips. He murmured her name repeatedly. "I want to believe you," he said, "I want to believe you."

"Mr. Jarrah," called a voice from the doorway, and a doctor stepped in. "I—" He saw that the patient was awake and began addressing himself to her. "Mrs. Jarrah, I am going to need your consent to perform an emergency C-section."

"But," said Nadia, "but the baby is only at twenty-three weeks old. I cannot possibly—"

The doctor then began to talk about Nadia's condition. To Sayid, the words seem to swim about in a sea of technical jargon, and they swept over him like a deafening wave. The only thing he really heard was, "Mrs. Jarrah, you need to understand that if we do not perform this C-section tonight, there is a very good chance you could die."

Nadia squeezed Sayid's hand and looked at him questioningly. "Nadia," he said, "you have to let them do it."

"I know," she said, but she was crying again. Silently, resolutely, and with control…but she was crying. Sayid felt the foreign dampness on his cheeks and realized with an odd, surprised kind of numbness that he was crying too.

While they wheeled her to the operating room, Sayid walked beside her. "Some premature babies have survived as young as twenty-two weeks," the doctor was saying. "It's rare, but it happens in about two percent of cases. I don't want to give you false hope, but this isn't necessarily an end either. At twenty-three weeks, the odds of survival are much higher, but still less than twenty percent. And if your baby does survive…" Here Sayid heard only "NICU," "days or weeks," and "possible permanent damage."

The lights in the hallway were too bright, he thought. The walls were too white. The halls reeked of too many antiseptic fumes. Nothing was right.

They went past the waiting room to cross to the other side of the hallway, and Sayid caught Sawyer out of the corner of his eye. The man rose from the chair where he'd been sitting, and Sayid thought he hadn't looked so haggard since the day he had returned from the raft. Had Claire sent him? When? Had he been in the waiting room all this time? Sayid caught his eye and half-nodded. It was the closest thing to gratitude he could express. Sawyer nodded back, let out a shaky breath, and watched them continue on.

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Sayid rested his fingertips against the outer glass of the window looking in on the NICU. His daughter lay under a protective chamber where a machine was helping her to breathe until her lungs were strong enough to do the work on their own.

"Merry Christmas," said Sawyer from behind him. It was the third time he had said those words tonight, but it was the first time he had sounded sincere.

"It is not Christmas anymore," replied Sayid. "She was born at 11:59. It is almost two."

"Do uh…do uh…" Sawyer swallowed and forced the question out: "Do they think she's gonna live?"

Sayid had once said he wished for a little girl with her mother's eyes and her mother's courage. Well, Adara Shannon did not have her mother's eyes; she had Sayid's—deep and serious and yet distinctly tender. But she certainly had her mother's courage.

"She's a fighter," all the nurses had told him.

"She's a warrior, this one," the doctor had said.

"Yes," he answered Sawyer. "She is going to live."

"Claire told me to tell you that she'll stay at your house with Sigh for as long as you need. She quit that job, you know…firing people."

"I didn't know."

"Yeah. She just decided tonight. Anyway, she'll stay as long as you need. She's moving to L.A."

"Good," Sayid answered distractedly, looking back at his daughter.

Later, when Sayid was back by Nadia's side, he told her that he felt sure Adara was going to make it. She smiled weakly, but every so tenderly, at him. After he had bent to kiss her, just as he began to draw away, she whispered against his lips, "I told you I had a Christmas present for you."