Chapter 29
MOLLY
People often say that birth is intense, and since the pain is forgettable afterward, they describe it as the most beautiful experience of life.
What they subtly imply, through careful words, is that birth is the most physically overwhelming event a human body can endure.
The ability to forget the pain acts as a biological mercy, a trait evolved to ensure species survival.
If women remembered the full pain clearly, there might be significantly fewer second children born.
Maybe that’s why I’m an only child. My mother never forgot anything.
I was asleep, but then I’m wide awake, and I’m not sure why.
Pavel sits up next to me, gun pointed at the door.
“Put that down—I’m fine.”
He sighs and tucks the gun back under his pillow. “You sure? You don’t usually—”
“Oh.” My hand goes straight to my stomach when there’s a cramp.
“You are not okay.” He’s on his feet in a flash, grabbing our go bags.
“No, I think it’s just—oh shit.” Not a cramp. This is something else.
It’s two a.m.—a time that seems like one twins would choose for a coordinated entrance.
Pavel asks, quietly, “Now?”
“Now.”
Pavel becomes a different person between the bedroom and the car.
He is functional. He is doing everything correctly—the bags, the call to the doctor, the driver, the sequence of things that need to happen in order and are happening in order—but underneath the function, there’s something I haven’t seen before.
He’s panicking.
I find this, in the middle of a contraction that makes me grip the car door handle with considerable force, genuinely comforting. He’s panicking for me, which is different from panicking at me, and much better.
“You’re breathing wrong,” he says, in the car.
“I’m breathing how I’m breathing,” I say through my teeth.
“The class said—”
“Pavel, I’m aware of what the class said, I was there, I’m doing the best I can.”
“You’re doing well,” he says immediately. “You’re doing very well.”
“I know I am.” Another contraction. The city moves past the windows, and I breathe through it. He puts his hand over mine and says nothing else, which is what I need. Talking is a challenge.
I have had nine months to get ready for this, but the hospital outdoes me on that score. The doctor is present, and the process of becoming parents begins in earnest under bright lights with people who know what they’re doing moving around us with the purposeful calm of competence.
I’m grateful for each and every piece of this puzzle.
Pavel performs calmness poorly, but the effort is endearing.
He stands beside me and holds my hand and says the right things and responds to the medical staff with the appropriate precision, and underneath all of it, he’s scared.
I feel the terror in the grip of his hand, which is careful and steady and slightly too tight.
“You can breathe,” I tell him, between contractions.
“I’m breathing,” he says.
“You’re holding your breath every time I have a contraction.”
“I’m not.”
“Pavel.”
He exhales. It’s a substantial exhale, blowing the hair that’s fallen near my face.
“Better.”
“Focus on yourself,” he says, with the dignity of a man redirecting. “This is not about my breathing.”
“It will be if you pass out on top of me.”
“I can move away—”
“Don’t you dare.”
He looks at me with those pale blue eyes, and there is something in them that is beyond what I have words for, and I squeeze his hand, which is still too tight around mine.
He looks down at our hands and eases his grip, and we don’t say anything else for a little while because there are other things to attend to.
The next several hours are grinding and relentless and loud, louder than I expected. Mostly because of me. “I cannot believe you fucking did this to me!”
“You have my endless apologies, wife.”
“Do you think that’s helpful?”
“Not at all. Just wanted it on the record.” The man is infuriatingly polite about it.
“I need something to break—”
He offers his hand.
I raise a brow and glance down at his groin.
“There are limits.”
“Fine.” I huff right before another contraction hits.
The doctor is steady and talks me through what’s happening with the practical honesty I asked for at the beginning. But it’s the nurses who are my heroes. They manage the space between Pavel and the medical process with the skill of people who have done this many times and know what partners need.
Pavel holds ice chips. “Are you certain she can’t have a little food? In Poland, it’s no big deal for a woman to eat during labor.”
The younger nurse says, “Sorry. It’s hospital policy, in case we need to take her into surgery, or God forbid, she chokes from the pain.”
He exhales loudly through his nose, irritated.
But after that nurse leaves, the older one says, “I didn’t see you give her a bag of chips from the vending machine in the waiting room two doors down from here.” She winks, then leaves.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
But I shake my head. “I can’t think of eating right now. This hurts too much.”
“Do you want an epidural? There is no shame in that.”
But a few weeks ago, I watched a video of the removal of one, and it still gives me the heebie-jeebies. “No. I don’t want—ow.” At first, I grip the bed railing and force myself to breathe.
But then it gets worse, and I grab Pavel’s hand. He looks at my face, and his goes white. I would find it funny, except I don’t have the capacity to find things funny right now.
The staff burst back in, as if they already know we need them. The doctor checks me again. “We’re close.”
We’re close.
Close is a nice euphemism for the most excruciating, all-encompassing pain of my life. It’s as if my innermost parts are being torn apart from the inside of me.
No thoughts. No breath.
Only pain.
I try to be present, but my body forces me to go somewhere else in my mind. Maybe it’s a safety mechanism that the brain does… perhaps that’s why we forget the pain. I don’t know. Even though I’m aware of the pain, it registers as less than it was.
And then, we are there.
The first cry is the most extraordinary sound I have ever heard.
I’ve been trying to prepare myself for it, researching and anticipating and constructing a mental model of the experience, and none of the preparation touches what it actually is.
It’s the sound of a person who didn’t exist a moment ago announcing their existence.
It’s this cosmic thing, and I’m too small to contain everything it hits in my chest.
Pavel makes a sound that is not a word. He is completely undone—the composure is simply gone, not managed or controlled or performing anything, just gone, replaced by something raw and enormous that he’s not trying to contain.
Then, there’s more tearing, more shredding, and my head is so far gone that I feel like the time I ate a weed brownie in high school. Again, the pain is there, but I care less about it than I care about finishing this.
The second cry follows, and the second person announces herself, and the room contains four of us now, which is the most improbable and most true thing I have ever experienced.
They are placed on my chest, and I look at them—these two small, extraordinary, furious, smush-faced people who have been with me for nine months and are meeting the light for the first time. I didn’t know there were things larger than joy and relief and love, so I never knew I’d feel them.
I am so grateful to these two tiny strangers for letting me feel them.
Pavel looks at them with the expression of a man who has been unmade and remade in the space of the past several minutes, and is still in the process of understanding what he is now.
“Girls,” the doctor says, with the warmth of someone delivering good news.
Pavel looks up. Something crosses his face. “Girls.”
“Two,” I confirm, because he looks like he might need the confirmation.
“But…” His eyes go lost. He had been certain of sons. He looks at the two small faces on my chest. “Girls?”
“You’re going to have to update your legacy planning,” I tell him.
I thought he was mystified before. Now, he’s even more confused. “Why would I do that?”
“Because, well, I thought… I mean, I don’t know that girls are going to be welcome in your… business.” Can’t say bratva in front of the medical staff. Just in case.
“My daughters will be. They will be the safest, smartest, most ruthless little girls in the world,” he says, with the absolute conviction of a man stating fact.
I look at our daughters. I look at him. “Ruthless? That’s not the usual thing people say about newborns.”
He reaches out and touches the head of the nearest one, his hand enormous against her, impossibly gentle. “They will lead legions,” he says, quietly but with total conviction. “They are queens. Conquerors. Lions among humanity.”
I thought my heart was too big before. Now, it’s practically bursting. “You’re so sweet.”
The next day is one of those that exists outside of ordinary time. I’m sore in ways that are holistic and bone-deep. The nurses assure me it’s entirely normal, but that doesn’t help with the pain.
Pavel does not sleep. He sits in the chair beside the bassinet arrangement and watches the babies instead, and I can’t bring myself to tell him to sleep. He eats the hospital food without complaint, but the truth is, I think he simply doesn’t notice that it’s bad.
He is occupied.
The drive home is slow and careful and takes twice as long as it should because the driver has been instructed to take no road with a speed bump, which is Pavel’s doing. Again, I find myself grateful.
Igor stands in the entry with contained readiness, and when we come through the door with the carriers, our girls bypass his professional composure entirely.
He looks, for a moment, completely undone.
“May I…?” he says, which is the most uncertain I have ever heard Igor Tabakov sound about anything.
Pavel looks at me. I look at Pavel. And then, I smile at Igor. “Of course.”
He holds one of them carefully and looks at her face for a long moment. “She has your eyes,” he says to Pavel. “The color.”
“Both of them do,” Pavel says.
Igor looks at her for a long time. “Perhaps,” he says, to no one in particular, “I will settle down again, one day. After all.”
Pavel looks as surprised as I feel, but he doesn’t comment on it. Igor deserves to think about what he just said without our input, so we put the girls in the nursery. Rocking chairs are positioned by the window, and the light comes through the curtains, soft and dim.
I sit in one rocking chair. Pavel takes the other.
We sit in the quiet of the nursery in the whole of what we have built and chosen and fought for, and the quiet is the best kind—the kind that has everything in it.
I’m asleep before I am aware of falling asleep.
When I surface, briefly, much later, the room is darker.
Pavel is asleep in the chair beside me, his head tilted back, his mouth slightly open.
One of the girls makes a small sound in the bassinet, and then settles, and the room settles with her, and I close my eyes again, wondering what to name the monumental people who changed everything.