Chapter 23 Wyatt
My water breaks at three in the morning.
It is not the cinematic gush I have been bracing myself for ever since Donna sat me down on her porch last month and walked me through every stage of what was coming.
It is a small warm release that I feel as a giving way, low and inside, and then a slow trickle down my thighs onto the bathroom mat.
I am standing in the dark with one hand on the edge of the sink and the other flat against the small hard curve of my belly, and I do not move for a long count of three.
I got up to pee in the night, the way I seem to do endlessly now, and instead I have gushed all over the bathroom floor.
Julian’s scent is on the bathmat from earlier, that low pine-and-cedar warmth he leaves everywhere he goes, threaded through the quieter scent of our shared soap.
“Julian,” I whisper. “Julian.”
The lamp comes on in the bedroom before I have finished saying his name a second time, and he is at the bathroom door inside ten seconds.
He has slept in his t-shirt and his boxers.
His eyes find mine in the lamplight. They go from sleep to wide-awake in the time it takes him to register the look on my face.
“It is happening,” I say.
He swallows. He looks at the wet mat and then at my face and then at the wet mat again.
“I’ll call Donna to come look after the boys.”
He goes back into the bedroom to make the call and I sit on the edge of the bath.
The porcelain is cold through the thin cotton of my sleep shorts.
I time the first contraction. The contraction is short and tight and not yet anything I cannot manage.
The next one is shorter. The third is short and longer at the back end of it, with a deep ache that runs all the way around to the small of my back and stays there for a beat after the contraction has eased.
Julian comes back in. He has the phone against his ear still.
“Five minutes out,” he says, to me. Then, to the phone, “Yes. Yes. The bag is by the door. He packed it last week. He is — “ He looks at me. “ — he is fine. He is sitting on the edge of the bath.”
I am not looking at him like he is being slow. I am looking at him because looking at him is the only thing in the room that is making sense.
“All right,” he says, into the phone. “Yes. Thank you, Donna. Yes. We will.”
He hangs up. “She’s on her way. I’ll just go check on the boys then we can go.”
He goes.
I sit on the edge of the bath with my hand flat against the small hard curve of my belly and I breathe.
I stand up. I have to put my hand on the edge of the bath to do it because the contraction has not entirely gone, and when I straighten I feel another one starting at the small of my back, a low slow tightening that builds into the same place the last one was.
I breathe through it. Four in. Four out. By the time it has eased, I am at the bathroom door. Julian is in the hallway with my dressing gown over his arm and a pair of the thick wool socks he bought me in November.
He helps me into clean clothes and then the dressing gown.
I let him kneel on the bathroom mat and put the socks on my feet one at a time, and I put my hand on the top of his head while he does it.
We come down the stairs together. He is behind me with one hand at my elbow, not gripping, just there in case.
I am a man who has driven posts in his own field for eight years and I can come down a flight of stairs in active labor without help, but a hand at the elbow of an omega in labor is something an alpha needs more than the omega does. I am not going to tell him that.
Donna is there moments later. She comes in without knocking, the way Donna comes in. She looks at Julian and the bag over his shoulder. She nods.
“Right,” she says, in the voice she uses when there is no time for niceties. “Off you go, the pair of you. I’ll stay here tonight. If labor goes on too long, I’ll take them over to mine with Biscuit.”
She comes over to me. She puts her hand on my cheek, her palm warm and dry and smelling of the chamomile soap she has used my whole life.
“Good luck, you are going to be fine.”
“I know.”
“You are. Your mother had you in three hours flat and breezed through it. You have her hips. You will be fine.”
Donna pats my cheek and turns me towards the door, and I go.
The truck cab is warm. Julian has been out and started it five minutes ago and the heater is going at full.
The bag is in the back seat with my coat folded on top of it.
He has thought of everything. He has thought of things I had not thought of, including the towel he has spread across my seat and the bottle of water in the cup holder and the small soft pillow from our bed jammed against the door so I can lean my head on it.
He helps me into the seat because I am a waddling whale, then he gets into the driver’s side.
He pulls out of the yard. I look back once, through the side mirror, and I see Donna in the kitchen doorway watching us go.
I face front. I put my hand on the bump.
“Hello,” I say to her, very quietly. “Today is the day.”
She kicks me under the ribs.
The drive to Eastfield is an hour and ten minutes. The roads are dry and the air outside is cold but it is not freezing.
The contractions are getting closer. I time them on the dashboard clock. Six minutes. Five minutes. Four minutes. By the time we are halfway to Eastfield they are at three and the back end of each one is something I have to breathe through.
I lean my forehead against the cold of the window and keep breathing.
Julian’s hand comes off the wheel. He puts it on my thigh, palm up. I put my hand into his and he closes his fingers around mine.
“You are doing well,” he says, eventually, when the contraction has passed.
“Drive, Julian.”
He drives.
We get to the clinic at four forty.
The clinic in Eastfield is a small clean low building set back from the road behind two Douglas firs, with a small maternity wing run by three midwives and an obstetrician who comes in for the cases that need her.
I had a tour two months ago. The midwife on duty is the one I met at the tour. I’d forgotten her name but she has a little badge that tells me that it is Sarah.
“Wyatt, lovely to see you. How far apart are you?”
“Three minutes.”
“How long when your water broke?”
“Okay, looks like we’re going to get you done quickly.”
“All right. Let’s get you in. Julian, grab the bag and follow me.”
The bed in the room she shows us to has been made up with a fresh gown laid out across the foot of it.
The monitor is humming low in the corner. The window faces east and there is a single small pink cloud high up over the ridge.
Sarah checks me. She listens to the baby’s heart through a small handheld doppler and she frowns at it for a half second and then nods, and the nod tells me what I need to know before she has said it out loud.
The baby is fine, and her heart is doing what a baby’s heart is supposed to do at this stage of labor. We are on track.
“You’re at five centimeters,” Sarah says. “Good progress for a first. You walking or staying in bed?”
“Walking.”
“Good answer.”
I walk. The next two hours are slow. The contractions get closer and harder and I get up and walk the short corridor outside the room, leaning on Julian’s shoulders.
I sway through the back end of each one, the way the midwife shows me, and at some point I stop being interested in sentences and the only thing I say is a single low sound through my teeth at the back end of each contraction.
Sarah says it is fine. Julian, who has gone white around the mouth, takes it for what it is.
At seven, Sarah checks me again.
“Eight.”
“How long.”
“Not long. Forty minutes maybe. Could be more, could be less. Your body knows what it is doing.”
“Mm.”
I get back on the bed. I do not remember Julian helping me but he must have, because he is on one side of me and Sarah is at the foot, and the room has gone small and very warm.
Sarah checks me.
“You are ten.”
“Mm.”
“On the next one, you push.”
The next one comes.
I push.
I push the way she tells me to push, which is for as long as the contraction lasts.
Three pushes.
“Stop,” Sarah says. “Wait.”
I wait. The room rings.
“All right, Wyatt. Small one now. Just give me a small one.”
I give her a small one.
Our daughter comes out into the world at eight minutes past eight on the morning of the seventeenth of March. The first sound she makes is a wet outraged shout, half-startled, full-lunged, and the second is a louder one, and Sarah lifts her up onto my chest before I have managed to take a breath.
She is warm.
That is the thing nobody told me. She is warm and heavier than I expected.
“Hello,” I say. It comes out broken.
“Hello,” Julian says, the same way, beside me. His hand is on the back of her small head, splayed wide, his palm covering most of it.
“She has hair.”
Sarah does the cord. I do not watch. Julian does. He cuts it where she tells him to cut it, then he hands the scissors back to her, and he comes back to my head and puts his forehead against my temple.
Our daughter makes a small outraged sound.
“She is doing well,” Sarah says. “Strong lungs. Good color. Apgar in a minute. You did beautifully, Dad.”
I have her on my chest. Julian has his hand on her head. Her small fingers are in a tight fist against my collarbone. She is breathing.
“Have you decided on a name?” Sarah says.
I look at Julian.
We talked about it for two months. We have a name. We have not, until now, told anyone.
“Margaret,” Julian says. “Maggie. After Wyatt’s mother.”
Sarah’s smile widens. She has heard the name before. She is from Parish Ridge after all.
“Maggie. Lovely. Welcome, Maggie.”
I cannot speak.
Julian’s hand moves to my hair. His other hand stays on Maggie’s small wet back. He has his forehead against my temple still, and his breath is coming uneven against my cheek, and he is, very quietly, saying her name into my skin.
“Maggie. Maggie. Hi, Maggie.”
She does not reply. She is busy. She has found my collarbone with her mouth and she is making a small persistent rooting sound against it that I think is the beginning of hunger.
“I am your dad,” I tell her, very quietly. “And the man who is crying on my temple is your dad too. Both of us.”
She makes the sound again.
Sarah says, “Right. Let’s get her latched. Wyatt, love, can you turn on your side a little? Julian, support his shoulder. There. Good. There she goes.”
She goes.
Maggie is good at it. They told me babies sometimes are not, but she is. She finds the place she wants and she begins feeding.
I find myself crying.
Quietly. With my face turned to Julian’s shoulder. He puts his arm around me and around her. Sarah, very quietly, leaves the room and pulls the door to behind her and gives us the privacy.
We are like that for a long time.
The sun comes properly up over the ridge. The window is full of yellow morning light and it lies across the foot of the bed in a long warm bar.
Maggie has fallen asleep on me with her mouth still on my collarbone.
Her small fist is tight on the cotton of the gown.
Her hair is dark and damp and there is more of it than I had let myself imagine, and her eyelashes are long and dark on her small flushed cheeks, and she is breathing through her nose with the small shallow breaths of a newborn.
Julian says, “I’m going to message everyone and give them the good news. They’ll all be waiting.”
“All right. Tell them she has hair. And she’s beautiful.”
Julian grins but he does not move yet. He stays a minute longer with his arm around the two of us, his forehead against my temple still, his cedar steady and round around us. Then he kisses the top of my head, and he kisses the top of Maggie’s head, very carefully, and he stands.
He crosses the room to get his cell, then he sits beside me and sends out the first news of our new arrival.