Chapter 24 Tessa #2
There was magnesium, which is not a drug but a punishment. It made me feel like I was lying on a beach on the surface of the sun. There were two belts and a monitor. There was a senior doctor who came at eleven at night and looked at the readout a long time without talking.
The numbers would not settle. That is the whole night. They would come down and sit at one fifty-eight for an hour and I would think we had it. Then they would go back up.
Beckett did not leave that room. Somebody offered him a chair at ten and he did not take it for an hour. When he did he pulled it up beside the bed, put his forearms on the mattress and stayed there.
At three in the morning I said, "It’s the twenty-ninth of May. The date’s the twenty-sixth of June. That's four weeks. He's not going to let me get to June."
Beckett put his hand over mine on the mattress.
"No," he said. "I don't think he is."
I have been given information by professionals all my life. Nobody has ever done me the courtesy he did me at three in the morning, which was to not tell me it was going to be fine.
Mateo came at twenty past six with his glasses in his hand, which is his tell. He said it exactly the way he said it in November, which is straight.
"Your protein's up and your platelets are down. I've got a pressure that has not come under one sixty since two o'clock. There's one treatment and you know what it is."
"Today."
"This morning. She's thirty-six and a bit, which is a good place to be. I'd rather do this on a Sunday morning with a full theatre than at midnight because we waited."
"Say it back to me."
"The baby comes out," I said. "That's the only treatment there is."
I knew too much about that operating room and it did me no good at all.
It was cold. They keep it cold on purpose. I have run a surgical suite for nine years. I had never once been on the other side of that drape and never want to be again.
I could not stop shaking. That is the spinal anesthetic and it is a normal effect.
I said that to myself in Mateo's voice over and over and it did not help.
I could hear the suction and I know what the suction means.
Two people at my left hip were having a calm conversation about a retractor, which holds a wound open.
Beckett was gowned and sitting by my head with his hand around mine. At some point I stopped being able to keep hold of it and he took over. When it got bad he leaned over and put his mouth against my forehead. He left it there and did not say anything at all.
"Talk," I said.
"About what."
"Anything. Do the…"
"Brodeur's four eighty," he said, against my hairline. "Mister Tony gained two grams on Thursday and has no opinion about it. Stevie's back on peanut butter."
"She isn't."
"She changed her mind on Wednesday. I didn't tell you because you'd have said the butter was my fault."
"It was your fault."
"It was probably my fault," Beckett said.
There was pressure that was not pain but was the worst thing I have ever felt.
I said something with no words in it. He said, "I'm here, I've got you, I'm right here," over and over in the voice.
I do not know when the pressure stopped, because there was a sound.
It was not a mew or a cry or any of the words people use.
It was an outrage. It came up off that table at a volume that made the anesthetist laugh out loud.
It was one enormous furious complaint, delivered by a person who had been very comfortable and had been interfered with. And it kept not stopping.
Every single number in that room changed meaning at once.
"There she is," Mateo said.
Beckett's forehead came down onto mine and stayed there. His whole body was shaking and he did not make a sound.
"Go with her," I said.
"I'm not leaving you."
"Beckett. Go with her."
He went with her.
Five pounds and eleven ounces. Thirty-six weeks to the day. She had a good cry and good muscle tone. She wanted one night under observation, because that is what they do at thirty-six weeks. She was breathing ordinary air the entire time and never needed one thing.
He stood at that warmer the whole night.
They put a chair beside it. He did not sit in it.
He was six foot four in a paper gown at the side of a plastic box, with his hands on the edges of it.
He stood in the exact stance he takes at the top of his goal crease.
A nurse named Ruthie told me at four in the morning that she had been doing this twenty-two years.
She had never seen a man stand up that long.
They brought her to me at half past two, and then again at half past three. At three in the morning on the thirtieth of May the three of us were in a dark room with a machine going somewhere down the hall.
She was on my chest. He was on the edge of the bed with one hand on her back, because his hand covers her entire back.
"We should do the name," I said.
"We've had five months and you wouldn't discuss it."
"Because every time I tried, you said we'll see her and know. That is not a method, Beckett. That is what people say on television. So."
He looked at her a while.
"Not Roy," he said.
"The second grade will be devastated. Thirty-one votes."
"They can have the cat."
And then neither of us said anything for a bit. There was nothing to say. Both of them had been in that room all night and had been in it for months. I do not know which of us got there first.
"Walt," I said.
"You can't call a girl Walt."
"You can call a girl Willa."
He went completely still.
"Willa," he said.
"Willa June," I said.
And Beckett Douglas has been hit in the face with a puck at a hundred miles an hour on national television and stood up and asked for the faceoff. He put one hand over his eyes and could not speak for about a minute. I lay there with our daughter on my chest and let him have it.
"Willa June," he said, eventually.
"Yes."
"That's her."
He wrote it on the board on the end of the bassinet himself, in block capitals. He wrote it twice because the first one had a letter he did not like.
Then he sat back down on the edge of the bed in the dark.
And he did the thing. His right hand came up off his knee and went flat against the middle of his own chest, palm open.
It was the way it does going out of the tunnel.
It was the way it did in a dark room on Wadsworth in November, when a heart came into it at a hundred and sixty-two. He held it there.
Then he took it off his own chest and put it, very gently, flat over hers.
Her entire self was under one hand.
He did not say anything and neither did I. Nobody in that room needed anybody to.