26. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
Six months later, I stood in the nursery of our new home and watched my husband put the finishing touches on the mural he had been working on for weeks.
The house was small by Fairchild standards.
A stone cottage tucked into the rolling hills of the French countryside, with three bedrooms, a kitchen that opened onto a garden bursting with lavender and rosemary, and a view of the village church steeple from the front windows.
It was nothing like the grand estates I had lived in during my marriage.
No marble floors, no crystal chandeliers, no staff waiting to anticipate our every need.
I loved it more than I had loved any building in my life.
“What do you think?” Heath stepped back, surveying his work with a critical eye.
The mural covered one entire wall of the nursery. Trees with spreading branches and delicate leaves. Birds in flight, their wings spread wide. Flowers in soft colors that caught the afternoon light. And at the center, a crescent moon and scattered stars, watching over everything.
“It’s perfect,” I said. “Absolutely perfect.”
He grinned, paint smudged on his cheek, his hair disheveled from running his hands through it while he worked.
This man who had worn three thousand dollar suits to board meetings now spent his days in old jeans and worn shirts, building furniture and painting walls and learning to cook French cuisine with varying degrees of success.
“You’re biased,” he said, pulling me into a one armed hug.
“Completely. But I’m also right.”
I leaned against him, my hand resting on my enormous belly. The baby kicked in response, strong and insistent, as if agreeing with my assessment.
“Someone else thinks so too,” Heath said, his hand covering mine.
“Someone is ready to come out and see it in person.”
The past six months had been the happiest of my life.
We had left Newport two weeks after Montana’s arrest, packing up our essentials and flying to Paris to start building the European branch.
Heath had thrown himself into the work with an enthusiasm I had not seen from him in years, but he also made sure to leave the office at reasonable hours, to spend weekends exploring the countryside with me, to be present in a way he had never been before.
I had started consulting with local architecture firms, slowly rebuilding the engineering career I had set aside when we married.
The work was different here, more collaborative, less focused on proving myself to people who had already decided I didn’t belong.
I was designing again. Creating again. Remembering who I had been before I became a Fairchild wife.
My parents were in the third bedroom, the one at the end of the hall with the window over the garden.
They had not come with us. I want to be accurate about that, because I fought for it in a hotel room in Newport and I lost nothing in that fight except the thing I actually wanted.
They have a house in Boston and a garden and forty years of the same four men on a Thursday, and they’re sixty-three and sixty-six, and they’re not luggage.
They stayed. That’s the price of this cottage and this lavender and this view of a church steeple, and I paid it, and I would pay it again, and it costs me every single week of my life.
But they had been in that bedroom for two months and showed no sign whatsoever of leaving.
That had been Heath, and he gets the credit in full.
I had been working up to asking, drafting it in my head for two weeks like a woman requesting a loan, and he had beaten me to it over breakfast in the most graceless way imaginable, which was to say he put down his coffee and said, “Your mother should come for the birth. Both of them should come for the birth. They should come now and they should stay as long as they want and I’ll be putting that to them today, so if you have an objection I need it in the next ninety seconds. ”
I did not have an objection. I had a mouthful of toast and a sudden inability to see.
So they came. My mother had spent the past two months knitting baby clothes in every color imaginable and filling our freezer with casseroles and soups, and reorganizing my kitchen twice, and telling me the entire time that she was not interfering.
My father had taken up watercolor and spent his afternoons in the garden failing to capture the church steeple, and had accumulated a following of two local farmers who came by to look at the paintings and say nothing about them.
The house was small and there were four adults in it and it was loud and it smelled permanently of onions.
I’ve never been so happy in my life.
It was the life I had always wanted. The life I had been afraid to hope for.
A cramp rippled across my belly. Stronger than the usual Braxton Hicks contractions I had been having for weeks.
I gasped and grabbed Heath’s arm.
“Del?” His voice was instantly alert, all trace of artistic satisfaction gone. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I just felt...”
Another cramp, more intense this time. I doubled over, my hand pressed to the underside of my belly, my breath catching in my throat.
And then I felt it. A warm gush of fluid, soaking through my dress, pooling on the hardwood floor.
“Oh God.” I looked up at Heath, my eyes wide. “Heath. I think my water just broke.”
He stared at me. Just stared, his face completely blank, his brain apparently unable to process what I had just said. Then everything happened at once.
“Okay. Okay. We practiced this. I know what to do.” He grabbed my arm, steadying me, then seemed to forget what came next. He looked around the nursery frantically, as if the answer might be written on the walls. “The bag. We need the bag. Where’s the bag?”
“By the front door. Where it’s been for three weeks.”
“Right. The front door.” He started toward the hall, then turned back. “Wait, I can’t leave you. What if you fall? What if it starts happening faster?”
“I’m not going to fall. Go get the bag.”
“And the car keys. Where are the car keys?”
“In your pocket. Where they always are.”
He patted his pockets frantically, his hands shaking, and let out a sound of pure relief when he found them. “Okay. Okay. Bag and keys. What else? What else do we need?”
“To call my parents?”
“Yes! Your parents!” He pulled out his phone, then put it back. “No, wait. We should get you to the car first. Then I’ll get them. No, wait. What if they’re still asleep? What if they don’t hear me?”
“Heath.” I grabbed his face between my hands, forcing him to look at me. “Breathe.”
He took a breath. Shallow and quick, barely filling his lungs.
“Again. Deeper this time.”
He tried again. A little better.
“I’m the one in labor,” I said. “You’re supposed to be the calm one.”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry. I just...” He laughed, a slightly hysterical edge to it. “We’re having a baby, Del. We’re actually having a baby. Right now. Today.”
“We are. And we need to go to the hospital so we can do that properly.”
Another contraction hit, this one strong enough to make me cry out. I gripped his shoulders, breathing through it the way the childbirth classes had taught me, counting the seconds until it passed.
“Okay,” Heath said when I could stand straight again. “Okay. I’m calm. I’m focused. I’m going to get you to the hospital.”
He picked me up.
“Heath, I can walk.”
“I don’t care.” He carried me down the stairs, through the living room, out the front door. “You’re not walking anywhere. You’re growing a human being.”
“I’ve been growing a human being for nine months. My legs still work.”
“Humor me.”
He got me settled in the passenger seat of the car, then went back for the bag, and I heard him from the driveway, bellowing up the stairwell of that small stone house like a man calling in a fleet.
“CELESTE. LAURENT. IT’S HAPPENING. IT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.”
There was a crash from somewhere above. My father came out of the front door with one shoe on and his reading glasses still pushed up on his forehead and a paintbrush in his hand. My mother came out behind him carrying, for reasons she’s never been able to explain to anyone, a colander.
“We’re right behind you,” she said through the window, and squeezed my hand, and then dropped the colander into the flower bed and got into my father’s car.
The drive was a blur of contractions and deep breaths and Heath’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. He drove too fast on the winding country roads, muttering apologies every time we hit a bump, his eyes constantly flicking between the road and me.
“You’re doing great,” he kept saying. “You’re doing so great, Del. Just keep breathing.”
“I’m breathing. Stop telling me to breathe.”
“Right. Sorry. I’ll stop talking.”
“Don’t stop talking. Just stop telling me to breathe.”
“What should I tell you instead?”
“I don’t know. Distract me. Tell me about the branch. Tell me about that meeting you had yesterday.”
So he did. He talked about the architects he was working with, the building they were designing, the challenges of navigating French bureaucracy. I barely heard any of it, but his voice was soothing, a steady stream of normalcy in the midst of chaos.
We made it to the hospital in twenty minutes.
They whisked me into a delivery room, got me into a gown, hooked me up to monitors that beeped and whirred reassuringly.
My parents came through the doors ninety seconds behind us, my mother’s face flushed with excitement, my father looking vaguely terrified and still holding the paintbrush.
“How far apart are the contractions?” the midwife asked.
“About four minutes.”
“And how long have you been in labor?”
“I don’t know. An hour? Maybe less?”
She checked me and smiled. “You’re already at seven centimeters. This baby is eager to meet you.”