20
“MILLEN.” IT WASthe first time Mack had spoken since he’d rushed me into the passenger seat of his ancient, wood-paneled Jeep Wagoneer with a gruff, “Come on.” It was a tone I’d initially read as grumpy and then, after watching him drive the twenty minutes to the community hospital with a scowl, I realized that he, like me, was nervous.
We hadn’t said a word to each other in the car, driving in tense silence as James Taylor crooned about flying machines thanks to a cassette tape I’d found at my feet.
“Yeah?”
Nick had assured us that Sam was okay, even if she was possibly in labor, but my anxiety still clung to me like an oil spill.
“You okay?” Mack asked as the car sputtered to a stop in the hospital parking lot with one final crank of the gear shift, and he tilted his head to get a good look at me, hair flopping in his face.
His voice was softer now, reassuring even.
I swallowed and finally said out loud the worry that had been plaguing my thoughts for the entire ride. “What if something’s wrong with her, or the baby?”
“Didn’t Nick say the doctors’ initial reaction was ‘very chill’?”
“Yes, but—” I was interrupted by the clank of the passenger door as I opened it, the sound sending Mack bolting out of his seat and around the car to meet me, shoving the door closed behind me with a heft of his shoulder.
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Gotta add that to my fix-it list. You were saying?”
Streetlights illuminated the pathway to the hospital even though it wasn’t quite dark yet, moths darting in and out of the shadows, getting ready for their night’s work. Somewhere in the quiet, Mack’s fingers laced through mine with a reassuring squeeze that felt intimate in a completely new way. There was nothing sexual about it; it was a gesture entirely intended to be comforting.
“I should have been there to help,” I said finally as we neared the entrance, slowing to a stop underneath the flickering red EMERGENCY sign.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what Sam had said earlier, over coffee. I didn’t want her to be scared—or worse, in pain—and alone.
“Millen, I know you have, like, seventy different superpowers,” he said, chuckling when he caught my eye roll at this. “But I’m pretty sure you’re not a doctor. I know some folks who work here. She’s in good hands.”
I opened my mouth to let the words tumble out—I’d let Sam down by flaking on her, flaking on our friendship, and now what if I’d unintentionally done it all over again?
“Okay,” I said instead, nodding.
Our friends had claimed a corner of the ER waiting room, and were splayed out in dingy, purple armchairs. Nick paced in front of a TV that hung from the ceiling at a precarious angle, showing some sort of home renovation show with the volume off.
“It’s the dream team,” Nick said, forsaking a greeting. “I thought about running down to the boathouse, but I didn’t want to—”
“He was ready to barge in on you naked.” Eloise mustered a tired smile, head nestled on Linus’s shoulder. Her eyes glanced down to where my hand was still locked in Mack’s, before offering up a knowing twitch of her brow at me as I tugged my fingers loose. “We saw you run inside in your underwear.”
“I’d been swimming!” I protested.
“Purely G-rated,” Mack added. He looked down at me, eyes glinting, irises the color of cut grass in the fall. I gave the slightest shake of my head back. An unspoken acknowledgment that things had been much closer to PG-13.
“How is she doing?” I asked, desperate for info about Sam, and also eager to get this conversation away from the topic of Mack and me.
“We were brushing our teeth and talking when all of a sudden she was, like, doubled over,” Trey said matter-of-factly, as even-keeled as ever. “She called her doula, who said she should get checked out by a doctor, just to be safe.”
“So it could be nothing,” I said. I waited for relief to wash over me, but all I felt was nervous tension.
Nick nodded. “Or the baby could be coming tonight. We won’t know anything until she’s been monitored for a bit. So go get some coffee, it’s going to be a long night.”
“You want?” Mack turned to face me, his hand gently coming up to squeeze my forearm. “I’ll go grab some.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, folding my body onto one of the stiff, vinyl chairs next to Eloise with an exhausted sigh.
My mind was too focused on Sam to think about much else, but the sensation of Mack’s calloused finger brushing up against my skin just now was a heated reminder of what we’d just been doing.
Eloise patted me on the arm reassuringly. “She’s going to be okay,” she said.
“I know,” I replied, trying to will the words into reality. “But let’s talk about something lighter for a minute. I need to take my mind off of things.”
She shifted like a cat waking from a nap, stretching an arm in the air as she eyed Mack—now deep in conversation with Nick—speculatively, before turning back to me. “Must have been some swim you guys had. Can we talk about that?”
The digital clock on the wall ticked past 11:59 p.m., and I welcomed Monday with a nervous sigh.
I was the only one in our group still awake, going on my third hour of very intense solitaire gaming on my phone. Mack had lasted alongside me until around eleven, fueled by the late-night caffeine boost, but even he had tapped out and was now slumped over next to me with a sweatshirt on top of his head.
His knee was nestled against mine, a shift in his sleeping body made without intention, but it felt achingly familiar, and something deep inside me wanted him to stay like this forever, close by and casual, touching without thinking.
“Who’s here with Samantha Cohen?”
A masked nurse in pink scrubs shuffled out from around a corner, clipboard in hand, looking around the waiting room.
“Me!” I jumped up, shaking off the stiffness in my bones as I rushed over. “How’s she doing?”
“She’s resting now.” The nurse waved me along behind her, clogs clipping on the linoleum floor with purpose. “The doctor just wants to keep her under observation, but she’s doing just fine.”
“So it was what, a false alarm then? Can that happen?” The relief I’d been hoping for swept through me, like sinking into a hot bath. Sam was fine. Fine.
“Braxton-Hicks,” she said matter-of-factly without looking back at me.
“Who?” I asked, racking my exhausted brain for some mention of a person with that name. Maybe I should have tried to sleep; my eyes felt like they were coated with rubber cement. The nurse stopped in front of a cracked door and pulled down her face mask, revealing a kind smile. “That’s just the name of the contractions. They’re more or less harmless and pretty common. Think of them as like the body giving the pregnant person a preview of the real thing.”
I’d long ago made the choice not to have kids, but I still understood how my reproductive system worked, pregnancy included. However, this whole idea of a baby being like, “Here I come. Wait, never mind!” was new to me, and sounded incredibly stressful.
“Oh.” I nodded, grimacing. “God, being pregnant seems fucking awful.”
I smacked a hand over my mouth.
“Sorry,” I added. “My brain is operating at, like, five percent right now.”
She laughed, a hearty, all-knowing guffaw. “I have three kids, and you’re not wrong. But I wouldn’t share that opinion with your friend tonight.”
“Good advice,” I said, and then peered through the cracked door, hoping to catch a glimpse of Sam.
“She’s getting some more fluids. We’ll start her discharge paperwork in the morning, but she won’t be out of here until after lunchtime, probably. She’s asked for company.”
The nurse gave the door a little nudge and ushered me in with a nod of her head. Sam sat propped up on a giant stack of pillows, remote in hand as she clicked it aggressively, trying to get the TV bolted to the wall to do her bidding.
“Careful, you might break that thing,” I said.
“Clara!” she said with a happy shriek as she tossed the remote and opened her arms for a hug. I leaned in gingerly, careful not to bump into her hand that was connected to an IV, a bag of fluids dangling overhead. “It would serve that fucking thing right, making me watch Shark Week in the middle of the night.”
I settled in on the chair angled next to her bed. “You feeling okay?”
She nodded, curls bobbing, but her brows crinkled with worry. “I seriously thought I was about to have a baby in the back seat of Eloise’s car. The pain was so intense.”
“Did you close your eyes and visualize bagels?” I asked, sliding the chair closer so I could lace her fingers through mine. I hated that I could hear the fear in her voice, no matter how brave she was clearly trying to be.
“Honestly I would have, but it happened so fast.” She paused, fiddled with the buttons on the remote. “Clara?”
“Mmm-hmm?” I said casually, expecting some sort of crack to come out of her mouth. Instead, she looked pained with worry. “Sam, what is it?”
“What if I can’t do this?” She turned her face toward me, eyes glassy. “I could barely handle false labor pains. What if I can’t have this baby? What if I’m not ready to be a mom?”
“Sam.” I scooted as close to her as I could without climbing into bed next to her. “When we were kids, you not only knew that we were supposed to wash our sheets every week, but you made the rest of us do it. I would have happily slept in a stew of sweat and dirt every summer if it wasn’t for you.”
She let out a small laugh as she wiped an errant tear away with the back of her hand. “So you think I’m ready to change this baby’s sheets.”
She’d always been the most self-sufficient person I’d ever known, never homesick or lonely, always so certain in every choice she made. Seeing her so unsure of herself now unnerved me.
“I think you’re going to do great,” I reassured her. “At all of it. And right now, I’m at your service. What do you need? Vending machine run? Pillow fluffing?”
I picked up a small empty can of cranberry juice off her bedside table. “Let me get you another one of these.”
“Clara.” She gave me a hard look. “I don’t need you to wait on me. I just like having you here.”
“Okay, well, that I can do.”
“Tell me what happened with Mack,” she said. “That’ll be a good distraction.”
Of all the things I was prepared to do to try to help, this was not one of them. I kicked off my flip-flops and tucked my knees into my chest, wrapping my arms around my legs. “Mack thinks I’m like a big, sparkly rock.”
His name set off something inside me, like emotional carbonation, every feeling bubbling to the surface.
“Okay, I am not here to kink-shame, but I’m going to need more info.” Sam took a sip from a beige plastic cup, crunching the ice between her teeth.
I cackled at her eloquence, and she gave me a pleased look; I’d forgotten how wicked her sense of humor could be, how well she balanced her steady, serious side with biting wit. It hit me then, like a wave crashing over me, just how very much I’d missed her.
And so I did as she’d requested, and started from the moment I’d last seen her, when I’d bounded off the steps of Sunrise earlier in the afternoon and marched down toward the boathouse to find Mack.
By the time I caught her up to the moment outside the hospital when he grabbed my hand, she’d tucked the blanket up under her chin and was giving me an easy, relaxed smile.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked, and I nodded.
“My mom tried to talk me out of coming this weekend. Long drive, the baby almost being here, blah blah blah. Typical overprotective mom shit. But this is just what I needed.”
“Being in the hospital?” I joked.
“No, though she’s going to have a field day with that.” She gave an exasperated sigh as she waved a hand around the hospital room. “I mean being up here. At camp. Gossiping about crushes and doing stupid shit and laughing to the point of peeing my pants.”
“I haven’t ever seen you pee your pants before.” I jabbed a finger toward her stomach. “It might just be because you’re extremely pregnant. Doesn’t that happen?”
“Oh, I definitely peed my pants laughing before I got pregnant,” she said. “I’m just an under-the-radar pants-peer. Incognito.”
“Don’t you mean ‘incog-pee-to’?” I countered.
“Piss-cognito,” she clarified. And with this, we were both laughing, that kind of stomachache-inducing, chest-clasping laugh that felt like an electric charge running through your body.
It had become familiar by now, this feeling of pure happiness that filled me when I least expected it, with zero planning or force from me to help it along. Nick and I locking pinkies in the car, that loon floating by in the lake, Mack’s face as he watched me, teetering between amused and awestruck.
I wished more than anything that I could bottle this feeling, tuck it into a tote bag, and carry it with me when it came time to leave Pine Lake. I couldn’t take my friends back home to Boston with me, but I could take this: real joy.
Just then something clicked, way back in the dark, dusty corners of my brain. This was what we’d been trying—and failing—to capture for our Alewife pitch.
Bottle the feeling.
The creative angle for their Summer Ale appeared fully formed in an instant, a vision of old friends, gatherings around picnic tables that stretched on from day until night, light cast on lake water, and the rich scent of dew-covered grass. It bowled me over so intensely that I had to give my head a shake, not noticing that Sam had gone quiet and was watching me through drooping eyelids, her lips curled just so.
“I think I need to sleep,” she said through a huge yawn, and I signaled my agreement with a pat of her hand. There would be no sleep for me, though, not right now. Because it was as if the idea had exploded in my head: Alewife Summer Ale wasn’t about the beer, it was about the people you shared it with, the memories you made together.
And that magic was born in the summer: with endless days by the water that stretch on so long it’s as if the sun will never set, and laughter that has no clear beginning and no end in sight. Barbecues that turn into legendary all-night celebrations. If you could bottle that feeling, it would be Alewife’s Summer Ale.
I was so impressed with myself that I let out an actual laugh under my breath. I think I just solved all our problems with the Alewife pitch. I texted Lydia. Going to write it all out and then send it off to Amaya.
It was time to get to work.