Bonus Story Bean There, Birthed That #3
Pure, unadulterated wonder. A little wrinkly squid, smaller than a loaf of bread, had been inside our wife all this time.
“A baby,” I rasped, my throat raw from vomiting. “You just squirted out a baby, darling! Like your vagina was a water slide! Whoosh!”
Not my most eloquent moment, but in my defense, I was operating on approximately zero functioning brain cells. The room was tilting at odd angles, and I had to drop my head against Cas’ shoulder to stay upright.
Seri’s laugh came out as a wheeze. Her hair stuck to her forehead in corkscrews, and she looked more like a battlefield survivor than a new mom, which, fair.
Then, “Girl,” Cas announced, his voice hushed with reverence. “It’s a girl.”
A girl. I was someone’s father. The thought felt too enormous to process, like trying to swallow the ocean.
Cas was muttering Apgar scores under his breath as he got busy doing something to the little potato’s nostrils with a weird rubber bulb thingy, and I fully expected wailing to begin at any time.
That’s what babies did in movies, right?
Scream their displeasure at the world from the moment they arrived?
But our little girl apparently hadn’t gotten that memo.
She just lay there in Cas’ palm, blinking like she was trying to figure out where she’d landed and if she approved of the accommodations.
What kind of baby doesn’t scream when they’re forcibly evicted from their cozy womb apartment?
My kind of baby, apparently.
I crouched to more closely inspect the fruit of our loins. She wasn’t beautiful in the way I’d expected. She was beautiful in a way I hadn’t known existed. Raw and new and impossibly fragile.
“Who’s a squishy purple tater?” I crooned. “You are! Yes, you are!”
Her tiny fingers curled, her eyes drifted shut, and her chest began rising and falling in a peaceful rhythm. Just like that. No drama, no fuss. She arrived in total serenity, like she rode in on the tide. A baby made of love, perfect and ours.
I was shocked at how tiny she was. In my imagination, babies had always been larger, more robust, but this little spud seemed impossibly delicate, like she might break if we breathed on her too hard.
“Is she okay?” Seri panted. “I don’t hear her. She’s three weeks early. Is she—”
“She’s fine,” Cas murmured and held up our daughter for Seri to see. “Just very placid.” Then he held her out to me. “Here. Take her while I deal with the afterbirth.”
“What? Me?” Panic flooded through me. “I just threw up! Koa should—”
“Ko’s got Seri,” Cas cut me off. “You got our daughter. Just. Do. It. Zane.”
Daughter. The word made my breath hitch. Without further protest, I awkwardly positioned my arms and accepted the little bundle.
She weighed nothing, maybe as much as a bag of flour. I’d once had to explain to our father why his favorite Aston Martin was at the bottom of Long Island Sound, but not even that had terrified me like holding my little girl.
“Support her head,” Ko instructed, watching me over Seri’s shoulder. “Her neck isn’t strong yet.”
Right. Neck support. I knew that. Adjusting my arm, I cradled her head in the crook of my elbow the way I’d seen people do in movies, and something shifted inside me, tectonic plates of identity rearranging to accommodate this new reality.
“Hey, there, tater tot. I’m your pops. One of your fathers. The fun one.”
She didn’t even stir, and I took the opportunity to study her better.
She had a little cap of dark hair and skin that was rapidly losing its initial purple hue.
Her features were impossibly tiny: Button nose, bow-shaped lips, eyelashes like dark smudges against her cheeks.
Even though she was quiet, I gently swayed with her, like my body somehow knew what to do even if my brain was still catching up.
“Maybe this isn’t so bad,” I said more to myself than anyone else. “Maybe we can handle this parent thing.”
For months, I’d been frightened of fatherhood.
What did I know about raising a child? Lucian had been distant at best, cruel at worst. Mom had been taken from us when we were still small boys.
Mum roared into my life only two or three times a year.
What examples did we have to follow? But looking at this peaceful little face, I felt a strange new certainty settling into my bones.
My brothers and I would give her everything.
Love, security, acceptance. We wouldn’t fuck her up the way we had been.
I was so engrossed in examining her tiny fingers, all ten present and accounted for, that I almost missed Seri’s sudden gasp of pain. My head snapped up to see her face contort and her body tense against Ko.
“Contraction,” Cas assured us. “The body needs to expel the placenta. Situation normal.”
With a nod, I returned to my study of our daughter.
“She’s got your eyes, Ko,” I said, noticing the shape of them, “but I think that little smirk is all me.”
“She’s not smirking,” he objected, although he craned his neck to see. “She’s not even five minutes old. She doesn’t know how to smirk.”
“Trust me, I know a smirk when I see one. This one’s going to be trouble. Aren’t you, little girl?”
Seri’s scream cut off my rambling. She doubled over, nearly headbutting Cas in the process.
Holding our daughter closer to my chest and protecting her head with my palm, I peered over Cas’ shoulder to see what was happening and instantly wished I hadn’t.
Two tiny fists stuck out of Seri, like some kind of horror movie where the monster bursts through.
Nope, nope, just no. Baaad analogy. VERY bad analogy. Deep breaths. Don’t throw up again.
“What is it?” Ko demanded.
“Fists.” Swan song filled the air before I knew I was singing, making everyone feel swaddled in down and stardust. “Two little fists.”
“Twins,” Cas whispered. “We’re having twins.”
Twins. Two babies. The words tumbled through my mind, impossible to grasp fully. We’d spent all this time preparing for one child, and now suddenly there were two?
“Is that normal?” Ko’s eyes were wide. “Coming out fists first?”
“No. It’s a compound presentation.”
“But the ultrasounds,” Seri panted. “They only showed a single baby.”
“One must have been hiding behind the other,” Cas theorized, already shifting back into doctor mode. “It happens sometimes with multiple births. One twin shields the other from detection.”
“Cruor! The one I’m holding is a fang-rotted decoy!” I choked out. “Classic horror movie twist! The one coming now is the real baby!”
“Shut up, Zane!” Ko roared.
Cas’ gloves were more red than white as he grabbed the nine millimeter from the floor and slid the safety off.
“Whoa, whoa, Rambo! What’re you—” He racked the slide, and I curled my body around the baby as he took aim. “No shooting the decoy!”
“Never call our daughter fang-rotted again, firecrotch!”
“Both of you, stop.” Mount Saint Koa sounded on the verge of eruption. “Cas, gun down, safety on. Zane, get ready to hold Seri’s legs again.”
“How? I’m holding the decoy!”
“Give our daughter here, dumbass!” Ko motioned with one hand while holding Seri with the other arm, but the room was spinning like a tilt-a-whirl now, and I didn’t know which of his three hands was the real one.
“Zane?” Someone called my name, but his voice sounded like it came through water. “Eyes up, Zane!”
Too late. The room did a barrel roll. Last thing I saw before darkness claimed me was Ko lunging to grab the decoy.
#
Casimir
I stared at the space between Seri’s legs, my mind refusing to process what my eyes were seeing. Two tiny fists where afterbirth should be.
She’d had four sonograms. One at eight weeks, one at twelve, one at twenty, and one at thirty-two.
I’d been present for three of them, and the fourth—the one I missed due to a mission—I’d reviewed as soon as I returned.
The recordings were crystal clear. One baby.
One heartbeat. One placenta. One amniotic sac…
Seri’s body convulsed with another contraction, her thighs trembling, and her scream cut through my shock. The sound brought me back to my senses like nothing else ever could. Our beloved was in pain, trying to push out a baby alone while I was frozen in disbelief.
I secured my weapon while mentally reviewing everything I knew about compound presentations. Not ideal, but it was manageable. I could do this. Since Zane was down, I positioned her heels on my shoulders to free my hands.
“Seri, I need you to focus on my voice. Push as if you’re bearing down to move weight through your lower abdomen. Hard and direct.”
She nodded, determination replacing confusion on her beautiful face.
“Breathe with me. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Slow and steady until the next contraction hits.”
I heard Ko talking to Zane, trying to rouse him from his faint.
Our daughter remained blissfully asleep on Ko’s bare shoulder, unaware that her twin was about to make an entrance.
The clinical part of my brain was calculating risks, positioning, potential complications, while the rest of me focused on keeping my voice level and my hands steady.
I couldn’t afford to let my shock show, not when my beloved needed all of my expertise and confidence.
The ripple across Seri’s abdomen signaled the next contraction.
“Push. Down and out. That’s it. Good. Again. Harder.”
One more push, and the second baby arrived like a thunderclap, punching its way into the world. Static electricity pricked my skin as I caught the tiny body. Red-haired, ready to fight, voice rising in a battle cry that shook the bottles in the shower.
He was magnificent, his fury glorious.
I nearly dropped him from pure awe.
As he squalled, I lifted him against my bare chest. The vernix smeared across my skin, but I didn’t care.
His cries hummed against my sternum as I studied his tiny, scrunched face, his eyes still fused shut, his mouth open in an impressive wail, and something inside me cracked. Some wall I hadn’t known existed.