CHAPTER NINETEEN
She comes the way she’s lived, on her own schedule, at the worst possible moment for everyone else’s plans.
New Year’s Eve.
We’re at the table eating Lina’s lentils, because Lina says lentils on New Year’s Eve bring money, and Rae says we have money, and Lina says then they bring more money, eat, when I feel a pop like a water balloon losing an argument, and everything south of my ribs declares independence.
“Either the lentils were a mistake,” I say, “or that’s my waters.”
Three people stand up so fast the table nearly flips.
Lina starts issuing orders in Italian to no one.
Rae produces the hospital bag from nowhere, a thing she has packed and repacked nine times and once, memorably, unpacked to remove a casserole.
And Troy stands frozen in the middle of the kitchen with a fork in his hand, looking like a man whose entire life’s training has just been voided, and does not move, does not issue instructions, does not take charge of the situation, because the situation is me, and he waits.
“Troy,” I say. “Hospital bag, car, hospital.”
“Yes,” he says, with enormous feeling, and moves like a released spring.
The drive to Como takes twelve minutes and one geological era. It’s snowing, fat lazy flakes in the headlights, and the lake is black glass. Somewhere across the water the New Year crowds are gathering with their sparklers and their prosecco.
I’m in the back seat doing the breathing, the stupid breathing, which works as well as a screen door on a submarine, and Troy is driving with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, narrating, calmly, falsely, the way you narrate to a spooked horse.
“Contractions four minutes apart,” he says. “The books say that’s fine. The hospital is eleven minutes away. You’re doing, the books would say, exceptionally.”
“Stop citing the books or I will have this baby in the footwell out of spite.”
“Noted,” he says, and shuts up, and reaches one hand back over the seat without looking, palm up, an offer, not a grab, and I take it, and crush it, and he says nothing at all about his metacarpals.
At one light, braking gently in the snow, he says, eyes on the road, “For the record, I have never been more frightened in my life, and I am not going to do anything about it except drive well.”
The hospital is bright light and efficient Italian, and Dr. Ferretti’s colleague, a brisk woman named Dr. Sala who has clearly been briefed, gets me into a room and takes one look and pronounces me far enough along to skip the paperwork, which is a most beautiful sentence in any language.
Troy fills in the actual paperwork in the corridor, and Rae, who reads it over his shoulder on principle, reports that under birth plan requests he has written, in block capitals: WHATEVER SHE WANTS.
ASK HER. The midwife has never seen a birth plan that short.
She keeps it, Rae reports, to show the other midwives, as a curiosity, like a two-headed calf.
And here is the thing they don’t tell you about labor when you’ve spent a year being handled: it’s the first time all year my body has done something nobody could forge, audit, corroborate, or contest.
Every contraction is mine.
Every decision is mine.
When Dr. Sala asks about pain relief, she asks me.
When the midwife needs consent, she turns to me.
And Troy stands at my shoulder the entire time, in the room because I invited him into it, term two running in reverse, this is a room I’m in, so he belongs here, and he does exactly one job, which is to be present and say nothing that starts with I think or the books or have you considered, and he does it flawlessly, for six hours, like a man defusing the longest bomb of his life.
At hour three, I bite him. Not deliberately.
Well, not entirely undeliberately. He says, “fair,” and offers the other hand.
At hour four I tell him, mid-contraction, that he did this to me and I will never forgive him, and he says, “noted,” in the tone of a man logging a true thing for the Accounting, volume two.
It makes me laugh, and laughing is agony, and I tell him that too, and he logs that as well.
Somewhere around eleven, between contractions, Lina appears in the doorway with her phone and the expression of a woman holding news, and asks if she may, and I nod, and she reads:
“Marcella. Geneva has formally charged Genevieve Hurley, fraud, forgery by proxy, conspiracy. Trial in the spring. Estelle Marsh, same, plus attempted corruption of a medical professional, hers is first, February. Dr. Amler, struck off permanently, criminal referral attached.” Lina lowers the phone.
“Marcella says, and I quote, tell the signora the paperwork has a heartbeat too.”
Consequences.
Actual, dated, documented consequences, arriving on the last night of the year like a clerk delivering the year’s accounts. I laugh, which is a mistake, because laughing at nine centimeters is not a good idea, and then the contraction takes me and everything narrows to the work.
It’s in the last hour, the hard hour, I hit the wall every woman hits, the place where I say it, out loud, to the room, to myself, the sentence that has been said in every delivery room since caves:
“I can’t do this.”
And Troy, who has been silent for six hours, who has not managed, directed, corrected, or cited a single authority, leans down close to my ear and says, quietly, certainly, with the whole weight of a man who finally understands what the words are for:
“I believe you, but better still, I believe in you.”
Words I begged him for in a study in June and got a sentence that let him off the hook instead.
I believe you. And the terrible, perfect thing is that it works both ways at once: he believes I can’t, and his belief holds me anyway, and somewhere inside being believed, fully, no audit, no verification, I find the last floor of the building, and I push.
She is born at twelve minutes past midnight on the first of January, seven pounds nine ounces, furious, flawless, with a right foot already making its presence known.
Outside the window, over the black lake, the New Year fireworks go up all along the shore like the whole coast had been hired for the occasion.
The midwife says something about midnight and luck.
Lina is weeping in the corner with the brick phone pressed to her chest. Rae is laughing and crying in the corridor, loudly, in English, alarming the staff.
They put her on my chest and the world goes down to the size of a damp, outraged face.
“Hi, tenant,” I say. “You got your own place.”
Troy is standing where he’s been standing for six hours, at my shoulder, and he is crying openly, no dignity, no management.
He is not reaching. He is waiting. And I am done making him wait for this, this is hers and his and mine, so I take his hand and put it on her head, her impossibly soft, warm, brand-new head.
His hand covers her entire skull, and he stands there with his hand on his daughter and shakes, and for once nobody in the room tries to say the perfect thing, because there isn’t one, because she is.
Lina and Rae come in one at a time, in the small hours, like visiting a shrine.
Lina holds her first, with the competence of a woman who has raised half of Lombardy, and Renata stops crying instantly, which I choose not to take personally.
Lina looks down at her and says, in Italian, you were fought for, little one, you are the most fought-for child on this lake, and then she hands her back quickly because her eyes are doing something she considers unprofessional.
Rae just holds her and cries and says, “Hi, I’m your aunt with the casserole,” and the tenant, to her credit, looks mildly interested, which Rae declares the best review she’s ever had.
We name her in the small hours, when the fireworks have stopped and the lake has gone quiet and the room is just the three of us and the snow.
“Renata,” I say. I’ve been carrying it since Camogli, waiting to see if it fit. “It means reborn. Renata Boyd Hurley. Your name, my name, and a verb in the middle.”
Troy repeats it, testing it, Renata, and it comes out wrecked and reverent, and he looks at me over the top of her head and says, “Boyd. Are you sure?”
“I decided,” I say. “It’s a theme this year. Ask the notebook.”
Later, much later, when Renata is asleep in the bassinet with one fist against her cheek like a boxer between rounds, and the ward has gone soft and dark, Troy sits down in the chair beside my bed, the guest chair, the visitor’s chair, the east wing of hospital chairs, and he says:
“I made promises in June, in a study, that I broke in the same room I made them. So I’m not going to make big promises now.
The account’s too new.” He looks at the bassinet, then back at me.
“But there are certain words I owe you that I said wrong for a season, and I’m going to say them every day until they’re boring, which is the most romantic thing I know how to offer, boring, reliable, audited-forever belief.
I believe you. In rooms you’re in and rooms you’re not.
First, before evidence, before corroboration, before anyone’s version, mine included.
I believe you. That’s the vow. The ring was never the vow. That’s the vow.”
And somewhere in the middle of it, I think about the ring on the table at home, in its box, waiting, and about a new stone that hasn’t been chosen yet, and about how some things you don’t put back on just because the war is over. You wait until the peace has a shape.
And I am too tired and too full to do anything but tell the truth.
“I know,” I say. “I watched you learn it. Thirty-eight pages, one bench, two countries, and a press conference. It’s a hell of a tuition, Troy.”
“Worth every cent,” he says, and his voice goes. “If this is the graduation.”
In the notebook, which Rae brings to the hospital on New Year’s Day because she knows me better than most governments: January first. Renata Boyd Hurley, seven pounds nine, right foot confirmed.
The vow isn’t a ring, it turns out. It’s three words, said first, said forever, said in rooms I’m not in.
And underneath, the last line of the year: The account is open. The balance is growing. The tenant has taken over the building.
Postscript, written with one hand while a seven-pound landlord sleeps on my chest: they brought me the hospital’s first-footing tradition, some nurse’s idea, a piece of coal for luck, and Troy took one look at it and said, deadpan, “She was born during fireworks. She won’t need coal. She’s brought her own light.”
It is the first joke he has made in my hearing since May that wasn’t self-deprecating, and the notebook records it as a deposit. A small one. They’re all small now. That’s what a balance is, it turns out. A thousand small deposits, and no more withdrawals made in rooms I wasn’t in.
Happy New Year, Renata. Welcome to the story. It’s yours too. You kicked for it.