#720
Olga and Silva looked fearfully from the open plane door. Every time she attempted to put a toe on the step to come down the stairs, the guard at the door growled at her from under his bushy mustache, and then grinned. Thou rally enjoying himself by bullying the timid mouse woman, he played at terrorizing her all the time Clora and Mark raced for the ambulance and Warren scooped up his grandchildren and disappeared into the airport terminal.
It was very dark, Olga and Silva were totally frightened, and suddenly there wasn't a familiar face to help them find the way home.
Nervous, strung out with exhaustion and sick from the plane ride, Olga figured a way to make the man allow them to pass.
She threw up on him, wailing and pinching Silva until the child howled in accompaniment to her mother. The guard quickly lost all enjoyment of bedeviling the poor American woman, and practically threw her down the stairs and ran her into the terminal.
"Thank you Silva," Olga whispered to her daughter, "let us hurrys to the ladies restroom where he vill not follows." Together they scurried out of reach of the guard. Olga had her phone in hand, dialing Stephan many times and not reaching him. Near the end of her phone's charge, she switched over and called the cousin of her cousin to come get her.
It wasn't until Clora was back in a room, sleepy and groggy from the anesthetic, that she asked Mark how Olga was doing.
Mark went from proud and doting father to conscience stricken fool in three seconds flat. "Ah...she's fine," he mumbled as he raced out of the room and down the hall where Clora couldn't hear him call Warren.
"Dad! We forgot Olga and Silva at the airport, would you go back and look for them?" Mark's throat was tight with worry, how could he have forgotten them. It was inexcusable.
The Linderman kids sound asleep in the van, Warren shook himself awake enough to drive back to the airport. When he got there he asked to have Olga and Silva paged, and suddenly realized he didn't know their last name. It sounded so lame to ask to have just the two first names put out over the loud speaker, but it was either that or call Mark. Olga was paged for a half hour and there was no response.
Warren had missed her by 45 minutes.
Finally admitting defeat, Warren drove back to the hospital and called Mark. "I can't find them," he almost whispered in the phone. "Nobody has seen them and the guards at the plane said she left after we had gone. Good heavens what do we do now?"
While Mark and Warren tried to get their act together, Olga decided what was going to happen. She rode out to the cousin of a cousin's house, went to bed for an hour or so and then had to get up and go to the hospital herself.
Back in the hospital, Mark had concluded that he needed to go get Stephan, to help untangle the mess he was in. Walking out of the birthing unit, he passed the waiting room and by curious force of human habit, looked in to see who was there. Silva was sound asleep, sitting upright and leaning against the wall.
Mark was so excited to see her, he scared the poor child out of her wits by speaking loudly to wake her up. Silva started crying, and Mark realized his mistake a little too late. Picking the thin child up to comfort her, Mark walked to the information desk and inquired about Olga.
The older woman manning the desk raised her eyebrows in startled condemnation. "I thought you just had triplets," she stammered in astonishment.
"We did," Mark said proudly, "two boys and a girl."
Silva said some thing from the security of Mark's arms, and the nurse only heard "Daddy."
Silva said, "I want my Daddy," but the prim and proper nurse only heard the last word. Turning frosty and accusing, the nurse snapped at Mark, "I'll call and see how the labor is progressing." At breakneck speed, she zoomed back into the ward to tell the nurses what she had just found out, that the man that had been with the woman that had triplets, had another woman in labor.
They were all busy tisking about the sorry state of affairs the world was in.
Olga had started the process and then calmed down and smoothed out. Mark thanked the unusually strange woman and went out the door with Silva in search of Warren and the van. If he hurried, he would have time to go to the valley, drop off the kids and pick up Stephan, and get back to the hospital in time. It was a good theory.