16. Liam
— ? —
Liam
Speed limits don’t exist.
That’s what I tell myself going through every red light between her building and St. Brigid’s, one hand on the wheel, the other holding hers, my foot down hard enough that the engine is making a sound I’ve never heard it make.
“Breathe.” My voice isn’t mine. “Just keep breathing.”
“I’m breathing.” Hers is thin and frightened and about half its usual size. “Liam, it’s too early. It’s five weeks too early, she isn’t supposed to-”
“She’s going to be fine. You’re both going to be fine.”
I have no idea whether that’s true. I don’t know anything except that I have to get her there, and that this is the first useful thing I have done for this woman in the entire time I’ve known her.
Twelve minutes of running lights and taking corners badly and watching her face lose color every time I look over.
The staff are waiting at the doors.
My staff. My hospital. The one she shouted at me about in a parking lot, the one I bought because I didn’t know any other way to say it, and which is currently the single least stupid thing I have ever done.
“She’s early.” I’m out before the car’s stopped, getting her door, getting my arms under her. “Thirty-five weeks. There was fluid, a lot of it, maybe twenty minutes ago-”
“We’ve got her, Mr. Sharpe.”
A chair appears. Hands come for her. Everything in me refuses to let go.
“Sir, we need to take her now.”
“I’m coming.”
“Sir-”
“I’m coming with her.”
Nobody argues. They take her through the double doors and I go with them, her hand in mine, holding it like the grip is the thing keeping her here.
It turns fast.
One minute they’re taking her blood pressure. The next the monitor is making a noise I will hear for the rest of my life, and there are more people in the room than there were, and somebody says a word I don’t know.
Preeclampsia, cascading, emergency section.
“What does that mean?” I’ve got a doctor by the sleeve, which I will apologize for later. “What does that mean, is she all right?”
“Mr. Sharpe, her blood pressure is dangerously high and it’s climbing. We need to deliver now.”
“She’s five weeks early.”
“I know. If we wait, we could lose them both.”
Everything in the world stops for about a second and a half.
Lose them both.
It won’t go in. I have only just worked out how to do this. I have a list in a notebook with forty items still unticked on it and I have not had anywhere close to enough time.
“Do whatever you have to.” My voice arrives from a long way off. “Anything. Whatever it costs. Just get them both out of this.”
They wheel her away. I go to follow and a nurse steps in front of me with a clipboard.
“Sir, I’m going to need you to wait.”
“I’m not waiting anywhere, that’s my-”
“Are you family?”
The question stops me like a wall.
“What?”
“Are you family?” She isn’t being unkind. She’s looking at a form. “The intake paperwork lists her marital status as divorced. Emergency contact is a Tessa Moreno.”
The paperwork.
Filled out by a woman building a life with no room in it for me, in handwriting I’d know anywhere, on a form that is not wrong about a single thing.
“I’m her husband.”
She checks it again. “Sir, it says here-”
“I’m her husband.” Slower. Like the problem is the form and not me.
“I understand, but without documentation I can’t-”
“I own-”
And I stop.
I hear it leaving my mouth and I stop it halfway because I know exactly how that sentence ends and I know exactly what it’s worth.
It’s worth a house she sent back in an envelope. It’s worth a hospital that made her the subject of a gossip column. It’s worth every single thing I have ever tried to hand her instead of standing beside her.
I have a building. I do not have a form.
“Please,” I say instead, which is a word I have used perhaps four times in my adult life. “Please.”
The nurse’s face does something. But she doesn’t move, because she can’t, because the paperwork is the paperwork and she is doing her job correctly.
“Let him through.”
Tessa. Coming down that corridor at a flat run with her coat half off and her keys still in her hand, having driven here in a way I suspect we will never discuss.
“He’s family,” she says, breathing hard. “Whatever that form says. He’s family, I’m the contact, and I’m telling you.”
The nurse looks between us.
“Now,” Tessa says.
They let me through.
Nobody corrects me again all night.
The delivery goes past in pieces. Her hand in mine while she screams. The monitor going up and coming down. Six people talking in numbers.
“Still with me, sweetheart.” My mouth against her hair. “Still with me.”
She can’t hear me. Her eyes are open and not seeing, and every part of her is busy somewhere else.
“Still with me.”
I say it anyway. I say it about forty times.
Then the cord. Then the first cry.
It is the smallest sound I have ever heard in my life. Thin and furious and about two seconds long, and it goes through me like a current, and then they have her across the room under a lamp with three people around her and I can’t see anything at all.
“Is she okay?” Solenn, barely there. “Liam. Is she-”
“She’s beautiful.” I have no idea. I haven’t seen her face. “She’s perfect. You did so well, sweetheart. You did so well.”
Her eyes close. The monitor goes again.
“Pressure’s dropping. Get him out.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Sir, we need the room-”
“I am not leaving her.”
Hands get me anyway. There are more of them than there are of me. Then I’m in the corridor and the door is shut and there is a wall where my wife used to be.
The waiting is the part I’ll dream about.
I walk that corridor until a nurse makes me sit. Then I sit and look at a door.
At some point somebody puts a blood pressure cuff on my arm and tells me I look worse than anyone currently admitted. I let her. She takes the reading, makes a face, and brings me a plastic cup of juice like I’m nine years old.
I drink the juice.
Please.
I have never prayed. I have never believed in one single thing I couldn’t see or buy or hire. And I stand up in the corridor of a hospital with my name on the deed and I bargain with whatever it is, hard, in the ugliest terms available.
Please. Anything you want. Take the rest of it. Just let her be all right.
Let them both be all right.
***
They let me in just after midnight.
She’s gray against the pillow with a line in the back of her hand, and her chest is going up and down, and for a while that’s the entire content of my mind.
“The baby,” she says, thick with whatever they’ve given her. “Where’s-”
“NICU.” I get her hand. “She’s a bit small, Sol. Five weeks early. They want her in there a while. Help with her breathing, keep her warm, get her weight up.”
“But she’s-”
“She’s furious.” I put her hand against my mouth. “Genuinely. Four pounds and she has already pulled a lead off twice. The nurse called her spirited and then apologized for it.”
She laughs, which turns into a cough, which turns into crying.
“I want to see her.”
“Tomorrow, if your numbers hold. They’ll bring you down in a chair.” I brush the hair off her forehead. “And they’ve cleared an hour a day of skin to skin once she’s stable. One hour.”
“One hour.”
“I’ve booked every one.”
She looks at me.
“You’ve booked… baby-holding appointments.”
“There’s a spreadsheet.”
“There is not a spreadsheet.”
“There is a shared spreadsheet, you have edit access, and I’ve color-coded it.” I tuck the blanket back over her hand. “You take mornings, I’ll take evenings, and we’re going to have a serious conversation about two in the afternoon because the NICU nurse let slip that’s the good one.”
“You’re insane.”
“I own the hospital. There’s a lot of latitude.”
She laughs again, and this time it stays a laugh.
***
The first time they let me hold Isla, I forget how to breathe.
She is impossibly small. Her whole hand shuts around the tip of my finger and does not reach the way around it. There’s a tube taped to her cheek and a hat on her that somebody has knitted for a doll. Her face is red and completely, obviously ours.
“Against your chest,” the nurse says. “Skin to skin. She’ll settle to your heartbeat. They do that.”
I hold her the way you’d hold something on loan.
“Hello,” I tell her, very quietly. “I’m your father. I’m going to get a lot of this wrong. I got the first part extremely wrong and your mother will tell you about it when you’re old enough.”
She makes a noise. A snuffle, or a complaint.
“But I’m going to be here,” I say. “That’s the whole plan. That’s the entire strategy. I’m just going to be here.”
She settles.
And that’s it. That’s me finished, for good, for the rest of my life.
***
Day Three
I’m in the chair by Solenn’s bed with Isla asleep on my chest for her sanctioned hour, and the room is quiet except for the monitor and the very small sound of my daughter breathing.
I must have gone under. When I open my eyes, Solenn is watching us.
She’s propped against the pillows with her hair everywhere and her color mostly back, and her eyes are clear for the first time since she gave birth, and there’s something in her face I have never once seen on it.
“Hey.” I keep it low. “How long have you been up?”
“A while.”
“You should have said.”
“I didn’t want to interrupt.” Her voice comes apart in the middle. “You two looked. I didn’t want to interrupt it.”
I start to shift, to bring Isla over.
She shakes her head.
“Stay. Just stay like that another minute.”
I stay.
The quiet goes on. It’s the good kind. It doesn’t need anything doing to it.
Then she says it.
“I love you.”
My eyes come open.
“I love you.” Hoarse and wrecked and completely certain.
“I didn’t know how to say it. I was so scared you’d take it back, or that I’d lose you, or that something would happen and I’d have to survive losing you twice.
” She shakes her head at herself. “I love you. I’ve loved you since you asked if I was still with you at the altar and what I wanted to say was forever. ”
I can’t breathe. I have been hearing myself say it every morning and every night for four months. I said it into the back of her neck at two in the morning and into a phone she didn’t answer and once, stupidly, to a woman at a supermarket checkout who asked how my wife was doing.
I never once let myself expect it back.
“Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you, Liam. I love you. I love you.”
I come apart completely.
My hands won’t work. I can’t say anything at all. I get our daughter into the bassinet with the last functioning part of my brain and then I’m on the edge of that bed with my face in my wife’s neck, and everything I’ve been carrying since the divorce comes out of me at once.
She holds me while it does.
Her fingers in my hair. Her breath at my temple. Her voice going on and on above me, saying it, and saying it, and saying it.
“I love you. I love you. I love you.”
I don’t know how long.
Long enough for the shaking to stop. Long enough to breathe properly. Long enough for it to go all the way in and reach the places that have been empty since before I had the sense to notice they were.
“Forever?” I say into her skin.
Her hand closes in my hair.
“Forever.”